Climate Threat to Crops Underestimated: What can we expect as the world warms?

If I could snap my fingers and make one, single change to most improve humanity’s shot of surviving this global warming event, I would move all of our food production indoors. We are vulnerable to climate change in a lot of ways, but one of the biggest is the fact that the vast majority of our food production is tied to historically reliable seasonal weather patterns. Human agriculture has been shaped through history by the regional climates in which we’ve lived – the best times and crops to plant and harvest, the behavior of fish and game to supplement crops and livestock. Growing up, my dad told me that when the goldenrod bloomed, it was 6 weeks till the first frost, and that fireflies and Juneberries mean the mackerel are running. These and other such things are bits of regional “climate wisdom” that once contained vital information for getting enough food to survive the winter, but have been mostly useless for well over a decade.

For the most part, the changes we’ve seen thus far have been manageable, but we’ve always known that there would be a point at which that was no longer the case. Crop failures due to drought and other weather events are not a new thing, but there has never been any question in my mind that we’re very close to a time when there are so many climate-related crop failures at the same time, all around the world, that it causes serious problems. It’s arguable that that has already been happening in the past couple years, to some degree. From last year:

June 28 (Reuters) – Eric Broten had planned to sow about 5,000 acres of corn this year on his farm in North Dakota, but persistent springtime rains limited him to just 3,500 in a state where a quarter or more of the planned corn could remain unsown this year.

The difficulty planting corn, the single largest grain crop in the world, in the northern United States adds to a string of troubled crop harvests worldwide that point to multiple years of tight supplies and high food costs.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, a major agricultural exporter, sent prices of wheat, soy and corn to near records earlier this year. Poor weather has also reduced grain harvests in China, India, South America and parts of Europe. Fertilizer shortages meanwhile are cutting yields of many crops around the globe. read more

The world has perhaps never seen this level of simultaneous agricultural disruption, according to agriculture executives, industry analysts, farmers and economists interviewed by Reuters, meaning it may take years to return to global food security.

“Typically when we’re in a tight supply-demand environment you can rebuild it in a single growing season. Where we are today, and the constraints around boosting production and (war in) Ukraine … it’s two to three years before you get out of the current environment,” said Jason Newton, chief economist for fertilizer producer Nutrien Ltd. (NTR.TO).

United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said last week that the world faces an unprecedented hunger crisis, with a risk of multiple famines this year and a worse situation in 2023.

Ahead of a crucial North American harvest, grain seeding delays from Manitoba to Indiana have sparked worries about lower production. A smaller corn crop in the top-producing United States will ripple through the supply chain and leave consumers paying even more for meat than they already are, as corn is a key source of livestock feed. read more

Global corn supplies have been tight since the pandemic started in 2020, due to transportation problems and strong demand, and are expected to fall further. The U.S. Agriculture Department (USDA) expects end-of-season U.S. corn stocks to be down 33% from pre-pandemic levels in September before this year’s harvest, and down 37% in September 2023.

There are factors at work here that are separate from climate change, but with weather-related harvest reductions all around the world, it’s clearly part of the story. I said the other day that we’re not prepared for what’s coming in the very near future, and a big part of that is the fact that very, very little has been done to climate-proof food production. I’ve been saying (to my tiny readership) that we’ve got to move things indoors, because if we don’t do it now, we’ll be doing it later, after far too many lives are lost to famine. Indoor farming does require spending energy on grow lights, but it is vastly more water-efficient, and the controlled environment means a dependably idea “climate” for the crops, and much, much less of a pest problem. There are other options, like using more of a factory setting to grow algae and edible bacteria, but what matters is that there are options, and we need to be building them up right now.

I am quite certain that hydroponics, and aeroponics, and bacterial cultures, and fungus farms, and any other ways of growing food indoors will have problems that need to be sorted out. Power failures would be a much greater danger for food production, for example, and given that extreme weather tends to mess with the power grid, that means that we’ll need to either improve the grid, have excellent backup for these facilities, or ideally both. That’s just one example, though, and it would be far better for us to figure out those problems now, while we still have plenty of food grown the old-fashioned way.

The question is, how much time do we have?

My answer, as always, is “not enough, so we should get to work now”. I’ve long felt that the possibility of simultaneous crop failures around the globe has been criminally under-reported. I don’t entirely trust mainstream news outlets not to turn potential food shortages into a Malthusian overpopulation thing, but this is something that needs to be addressed, because I believe it’s coming sooner than most people think, and it looks like the science agrees with me:

The risks of harvest failures in multiple global breadbaskets have been underestimated, according to a study Tuesday that researchers said should be a “wake up call” about the threat climate change poses to our food systems.

Food production is both a key source of planet-warming emissions and highly exposed to the effects of climate change, with climate and crop models used to figure out just what the impacts could be as the world warms.

In the new research published in Nature Communications, researchers in the United States and Germany looked at the likelihood that several major food producing regions could simultaneously suffer low yields.

These events can lead to price spikes, food insecurity and even civil unrest, said lead author Kai Kornhuber, a researcher at Columbia University and the German Council on Foreign Relations.

By “increasing the concentration of greenhouse gases, we are entering this uncharted water where we are struggling to really have an accurate idea of what type of extremes we’re going to face,” he told AFP.

“We show that these types of concurring events are really largely underestimated.”

The study looked at observational and climate model data between 1960 and 2014, and then at projections for 2045 to 2099.

Researchers first looked at the impact of the jet stream – the air currents that drive weather patterns in many of the world’s most important crop producing regions.

They found that a “strong meandering” of the jet stream, flowing in big wave shapes, has particularly significant impacts on key agricultural regions in North America, Eastern Europe and East Asia, with a reduction in harvests of up to seven percent.

The researchers also found that this had been linked to simultaneous crop failures in the past.

One example was in 2010, when the fluctuations of the jet stream were linked to both extreme heat in parts of Russia and devastating floods in Pakistan, which both hurt crops, Kornhuber said.

The climate events of 2010 are something I’ve brought up before when making this point. I want to say that when it comes to most climate-related things, I very much want to be proven wrong. Everything I’ve seen indicates that things are going to get worse that most people expect, faster than most people expect. I do feel a small amount of satisfaction when I see things I’ve been saying break into the mainstream more (though I played no role in that), but I’d much rather climate change turn out to be not a serious problem. There are people to whom I’d enjoy saying “I told you so”, but none of them read this blog, and chances are good that many of them will ever know I exist.

At this point, as we consider the possibility of a global food shortage driven by our rapidly warming climate, I want to take a brief moment to use the history of my current home – Ireland – to discuss how those first climate famines are likely to unfold, assuming no major changes to our global agricultural system.

So, as most of you are aware, Ireland had a devastating famine from 1845-1852, during which time around one million people died, and around two million people left the island in desperation. Leading up to that point, British colonial rule had led to the Irish relying heavily on potatoes to survive. They had to grow food to export, for the profit of English landlords, and potatoes can feed more people more easily per acre of crops than grains, so the tenant farmers subsisted on them to maximize land for the cash crops. When the potato blight hit Europe, it specifically took out the primary subsistence crop for the island. All the other food – grains and cow products especially – was grown for money, and so while Ireland starved, more food was exported than was needed to feed the nation. There’s a lot of stuff out there on this, but if you want a brief overview, I recommend this video from the Gravel Institute:

This is not directly analogous to the global situation today, but where Ireland was dependent on potatoes, and forced to keep exporting food “owed” to English capitalists as they starved, a great many nations in the world are dependent on food imports bought with money earned by growing cash crops, almost always for the profit of multinational corporations. Africa, in particular, is extremely dependent on imports – a problem that has been maintained through neocolonial debt traps, and a capitalist system backed up by threat of war or the assassination of any leader that tries to put their country on a new track. What this means is that when (not if) climate change creates major crop failures, it’s probably not going to result starvation for people in rich, white countries, at the beginning.

As with Ireland, the cash crops will continue to be exported, but as food prices rise, African countries will have a harder time importing the food they need to survive, and so starvation will hit there first. There will be people dying of malnutrition in rich countries, of course, but that’s a matter of routine policy to keep workers in line, as I’ve discussed in the past. The same global capitalist system that exploits the former colonies will also act as a buffer between rich countries and certain consequences of climate change. Poor nations, just like poor citizens in rich countries, will be sacrificed for the “greater good” of maintaining the wealth, power, and comfort of the capitalist aristocracy.

I think that the way the English press reported on the famine can also inform what we will hear, as those people starve:

The worst famine in a century was depicted as an extension of normal, recurring events, and the newspaper consistently complained about the financial burdens forced on British workers for the sake of the starving Irish. On 15 September 1846, its editorial declared,

‘It appears to us of the very first importance to all classes of Irish society to impress on them that there is nothing really so peculiar, so exceptional, in the condition which they look upon as the pit of utter despair’.

It continued, ‘Is the English labourer to compensate the Irish peasant for the loss of potatoes, and secure him a regular employer for this next twelvemonth? Why, the English labourer is in just the same case.’

Indolent Irish

The notion that the Irish were leaching off the English taxpayer (often used as a synonym for the British taxpayer) was a view bound up with contemporary debates about politics, culture and the economy, as well as emerging ideas about race.

The Irish did not fare well in such theories. Amongst politicians and in large sections of the public, they were viewed as inferior and antithetical to the English. While pity and sympathy for Ireland’s plight was not uncommon in early newspaper depictions of the Famine, negative stereotypes were just as prevalent, and the Irish were often viewed in opposition to the English labourer, who typified the ‘respectable’ poor whom the indolent Irish were trying to abuse.

The Times argued that Ireland should ‘pay for its own improvement’ (19 August 1846); the apparent unwillingness of its people to do so demonstrated ‘a case of permanent and inveterate national degradation’ (12 October 1847).

‘Their own wickedness and folly’

Nor was The Times alone in its view. Other publications claimed that the Irish were responsible for their own misfortune. The Economist, founded in 1843, declared on 10 October 1846 that Irish distress was ‘brought on by their own wickedness and folly’.

Punch, a new type of illustrated magazine founded in 1841, portrayed these views pictorially. In one cartoon from February 24, 1849,  we can see a smiling, shabbily dressed Irishman (denoted by ape-like features, clothing and a clay pipe) riding the shoulders of England’s respectable poor with a sack of £50,000 slung over his shoulder.

Blaming the Irish

These national views often complemented provincial reportage elsewhere in Britain. In Liverpool, the extensive immigration of the Irish poor had provoked questions about the social ills impacting the city – questions which Victorian society had become increasingly preoccupied with since the early nineteenth century.

Refugees fleeing Ireland were treated much the same as refugees are treated today. They were scapegoated for all the problems of the host countries, and blamed for problems of their home countries, and this is what we can expect from the climate famines that will come later this century. I feel quite comfortable predicting this, because it’s still very much a part of daily life in rich nations. Any online conversation about problems in Africa will inevitably conjure an army of (usually white) people to talk about how it’s all their own fault and why we shouldn’t accept refugees, and some of them will probably bring up the racist drivel of The Bell Curve.

Take the recent sinking of a refugee boat off of Greece, for example. There’s no shortage of people willing to blame the drowning victims for their deaths, even as it looks increasingly as though the Greek coast guard was to blame. Around the world, look at how wealthy nations are handling refugees of all sorts, and you’ll get an idea for how climate change will turn crop failures into mass starvation and death. Over time, those food shortages will do more than just raise prices in rich nations, but the first wave will break hardest on the poorest nations in the world, and that is by design. It is also by design that refugees will face high death rates as they seek safety, and poor treatment from host countries.

As I’ve said before, there are things we could be doing to prevent this gloomy forecast from coming true. Indoor food production has been growing for years, so many problems have already been solved. A massive investment could make a real difference in a pretty short amount of time, at least when it comes to the mechanics of successfully producing enough food. Unfortunately, neocolonialism is a problem that needs to be solved all by itself. If we don’t do that, then as with Ireland in the 1840s, the former colonies will be “left” to a fate forced upon them.

Thank you for reading! If you liked this post, please share it around. If you read this blog regularly, please consider joining my small but wonderful group of patrons. Because of my immigration status, I’m not allowed to get a normal job, so my writing is all I have for the foreseeable future, and I’d love for it to be a viable career long-term. As part of that goal, I’m currently working on a young adult fantasy series, so if supporting this blog isn’t enough inducement by itself, for just $5/month you can work with me to name a place or character in that series!

Video: Israel “Mows Lawn” in Jenin

Over the last couple weeks, Israel has stepped up its use of pogroms and settler/colonial violence in Palestine. Their strategy for somewhat gradual ethnic cleansing seems to be a combination of bulldozing neighborhoods and farms, and evicting Palestinian families to make room for Israeli settlers, who are then “just defending their homes” if the previous occupants complain. The media often frame what’s going on there as a two-sided conflict, but the reality is that one side has one of the most advanced and well-funded armed forces in the world, and the other side has next to nothing. It often seems like the only course of action that would be acceptable to the Zionist movement, would be for Palestinians to all lie down and die. The policy of the Israeli government seems to be one of subjugation without end enforced with the practice of “mowing the lawn” – a dehumanizing euphemism for regularly rounding up and killing people who might form any sort of resistance to their apartheid regime. The Majority Report has more:

Unequal Protection in a White Supremacist Police State

While I haven’t been great about consistently covering the movement to stop cop city (I failed to cover their recent week of action, for example), I think I’ve covered it enough that my regular readers have at least an idea of the general dynamic there. Basically, the police and a number of corporations want to build a huge playground/training facility for cops to practice urban warfare, among other things. The people don’t want it,  and the cost to the city keeps rising, but the cops and their backers are committed to forcing it through, over the bodies of protesters, if necessary.

This morning, my attention was drawn to a very telling juxtaposition, and I wanted to share it with all of you. Police have arrested a wide array of people involved in the movement to stop cop city, from old ladies holding signs at Home Depot, to people legally organizing a bail fund for fellow activists. This is far from the first time we’ve seen police violate civil rights, including the right to freedom of speech – violating rights is honestly something of a hobby for them. Tell me why, then, Atlanta cops suddenly found a deep respect for the first amendment when it came to Nazis, holding Nazi flags, outside of a fucking synagogue during Sabbath prayer?

Sabbath service ended with a protest outside a synagogue in suburban Atlanta.

About a dozen people waved swastika flags and shouted outside the Chabad of Cobb County during a worship service.

“Exercising our first amendment right,” picketer John Minadeo II told WSB-TV.

“This was the most frightening thing I’ve ever seen in my entire life,” synagogue member Stewart Levy said.

“The police are allowing it because it is ‘free speech’.” Levy added on Facebook.

Some people living nearby came out and shouted back at the protesters.

“You’re a Nazi and you’re an idiot,” one resident said.

Cobb County Police watched over the protest and said it was peaceful.

Georgia State Rep. Esther Panitch said it occurred as the synagogue held a summer camp for Jewish children.

Ok, so on the off chance you need this spelled out, the extermination of all Jewish people in the world has been a core part of Nazi ideology pretty much from the get-go. That has not changed. Their entire worldview revolves around the notion of a grand conflict between the Jewish and “Aryan” races, and victory can only be achieved through the total destruction of the enemy.

Holding up Swastikas outside a synagogue isn’t just a death threat, it’s a declaration of intent to commit genocide.

It’s a form of terrorism, and I seem to remember a “war on terror” occupying the background of most of my life, right up to this day. How could it be that these police, who have been so empowered in the name of fighting terrorism, are willing to allow, and even protect acts of terrorism? Well, it turns out that the call may be coming from inside the house. I’ll let Mr. de la Rocha explain:

 

 

Genocide and Overthrowing Democracy: Biden Appointment Signals Grim Continuance of Bipartisan US Foreign Policy

I’ve written before about the ways in which, on foreign policy in particular, Democrats are often as bad as Republicans. I’m generally not a fan of rhetoric claiming that “both sides are the same”, because in many ways, it’s objectively not true. The problem is that in other ways, it is true, and Biden has just given us a revolting example of that with his appointment of one Elliott Abrams.

For those who don’t know, Abrams is a politician who served in a number of cabinet positions under Ronald Reagan, as Deputy National Security Advisor to George W Bush, and as Special Representative for Venezuela, and then Iran under Trump. His career in US politics has been long and bloody, with involvement in the Guatemalan Genocide (also known as the Mayan Genocide or the Silent Holocaust), atrocities in El Salvador and Nicaragua, and the Iran-Contra affair, among other things. From The Jacobin:

Let’s start with the most obvious point, which is that Abrams’ chief claim to fame is his role in Ronald Reagan’s blood-soaked foreign policy in Central America in the 1980s, for which he earned the nickname, “contra commander-in-chief.” The contras were the brutal right-wing paramilitary groups in Nicaragua who terrorized civilians throughout the decade, cutting a swath of torture, rape, and murder aimed at everyone from the elderly to children. Their methods were similar to those of right-wing paramilitaries in the other countries of the region, including El Salvador and Guatemala, all of which were supported by the Reagan administration. If you have the stomach to read about them, there’s no shortage of sources that outline their barbarity.

To Abrams, however, they were “freedom fighters,” their work in El Salvador was a “fabulous achievement,” and he mocked critics of Reagan as people forced to “run the risk” of arguing that such groups were “doing something wrong and ought to stop it.” He himself had no illusions about what it is that the contras were doing. “The purpose of our aid is to permit people who are fighting on our side to use more violence,” he said in 1985.

How involved was Abrams? “Sure, there was excessive micromanagement [of the contras],” he told Policy Review in 1989; “and I was one of the people who engaged in it. But I’m not going to go around trying to assess blame, because the contras were an enormous success.” The contras would have floundered and faded away were it not for the tens of millions of dollars Abrams helped funnel to them, including personally soliciting $10 million from the Sultan of Brunei for their cause (that money never made it because Abrams gave the Sultan the wrong account number).

This “micromanagement” at one point also involved Abrams secretly delivering military equipment to the contras under the guise of humanitarian aid. As commentators have noted, this is particularly relevant now, when the Trump administration attacks Maduro for refusing to let humanitarian aid from the US into Venezuela.

Abrams is a Cold Warrior of the worst sort. Jacobin describes him as being committed to fighting communism over all other concerns, happily citing human rights as a reason to oppose the USSR, while actively and knowingly supporting some of the worst atrocities in his lifetime. Had he been around for it, he almost certainly would have been one of the many conservative USians who supported the Nazis, at least until the US officially entered the war. Here’s another look at his passion for peace and justice:

From the moment he won the 1980 presidential election, Ronald Reagan began looking for somewhere to fight a proxy war against the Soviet Union. Together with his advisers, he chose the Central American nation of El Salvador, where a civil war was raging between Marxist guerrillas and a military-led dictatorship.

To remain in power, the junta relied on “death squads” to kill not only its opponents but anyone who might even think of supporting its opponents, including nuns, priests, and children. The government claimed the death squads were independent, but in truth, they were just regular government soldiers, often (but not always) out of uniform. In order to justify US involvement in the war, Reagan had to defend the junta in the media. “We are helping the forces that are supporting human rights in El Salvador,” Reagan lied in a 1981 news conference.

Congress, at the time, was much closer to the concerns of the public than now, and war remained deeply unpopular. Many Americans were not only appalled by the junta’s willingness to murder US-based nuns and churchwomen; they also feared US involvement in another anti-guerrilla war in which the country had no clear national interest. The bumper sticker “El Salvador is Spanish for Vietnam” spoke for these Americans as few slogans manage to do.

Although they had the country behind them, few Democrats were willing to risk taking the blame should El Salvador go communist, as Nicaragua appeared to be doing. To avoid responsibility, they devised a face-saving plan to demand that the Reagan administration undergo a process of “certification” to demonstrate that the Salvadorans were making progress in respecting human rights. In January 1982, just as the Reagan administration was preparing to make its very first certification, the White House found itself faced with reports of a massacre in the village of El Mozote, in the tiny, guerrilla-friendly canton of Morazan.

On the day before the first hearing, January 26, 1982, Raymond Bonner of The New York Times and Alma Guillermoprieto of The Washington Post simultaneously reported on an incident in which hundreds of unarmed civilians had been summarily murdered by uniformed Salvadoran soldiers. (Bonner put the number of victims between 722 and 926.) Neither reporter had seen the massacre take place, and both noted that their guides to the site had been associated with the guerrillas. Yet the journalists saw the corpses firsthand, and photographer Susan Meiselas documented many of them as well.

Immediately, the administration and its allies went to war with reporters and their publications to try to prevent the story from mucking up their proxy war. It sent out its own investigators, who never reached the area after they refused a guided tour from the guerrillas. As one of them later admitted to the journalist Mark Danner, “In the end, we went up there and we didn’t want to find that anything horrible had happened.” So they didn’t. The assistant secretary of state for Inter-American Affairs, Thomas Enders, took their tentative conclusions and insisted that there was “no evidence to confirm that government forces systematically massacred civilians in the operations zone, or that the number of civilians remotely approached the seven hundred and thirty-three or nine hundred and twenty-six victims cited in the press.” Without any independent confirmation, Elliott Abrams—who, at 33, was Reagan’s assistant secretary of state for human rights and humanitarian affairs—also took up the cause. The El Mozote case “is a very interesting one in a sense,” he remarked to the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, “because we found, for example, that the numbers, first of all, were not credible, because as Secretary Enders notes, our information was that there were only 300 people in the canton.”

Abrams’s argument was deliberately misleading. News reports had been clear: The mass killing had taken place in several hamlets. This particular argument was of a piece with the rest of the administration’s McCarthyite strategy to discredit the massacre’s existence. “We find…that it is an event that happened in mid-December [but it] is then publicized when the certification comes forward to the committee,” Abrams continued. “So, it appears to be an incident which is at least being significantly misused, at the very best, by the guerrillas.”

This is, of course, just a taste of the atrocities the US has supported in South and Central America, but it gives you an idea of who Abrams is, and what he stands for. It also gives you an idea of what’s considered “acceptable” by both parties in Washington, because Biden has just announced that he’s appointing Abrams to the United States Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy. From there, he will be involved in “appraising U.S. Government activities intended to understand, inform, and influence foreign publics and to increase the understanding of, and support for, these same activities.”(Wikipedia)

It’s hard to know exactly what’s going through the president’s mind, but I think it’s worth remembering who Biden is. He’s a rich white man, born before World War 2, who supported the disastrous War on Drugs (while protecting his son from it), helped bring about mass incarceration, and worked with segregationists to prevent desegregation busing. He is also a relic of the Cold War, and to me, it seems most likely that he’s bringing Abrams in because when it comes to the left, they’re on the same side.

I imagine it’s been difficult for most of you to not notice the constant Sinophobic fearmongering, but in case you’ve missed it, the US government – both parties – seems to want a new Cold War with China, or something very like it. A lot of discussion about this seems to be mostly focused on economics and trade, but there’s also plenty of attention paid to China’s military capabilities. It’s unlikely that the new Cold War will look just like the last one, given how intertwined the US and Chinese economies are, but I think the anti-communism in the US, and proxy wars in the name of “fighting communism” are both likely to be similar. Why else would Biden seek out someone like Abrams? The political left is rising again in South America, and that threatens to cut into billionaire profits as countries like Bolivia, Chile, and Brazil adjust their economies for the benefit of their people, rather than international corporations.

Everyone is expecting climate change to shake things up. It’s already creating millions of refugees every year, it has already been linked to conflicts like the Syrian civil war. It is also changing what’s valuable, as changing technology increases demand for resources like cobalt and lithium. Both the Democrats and the Republicans want to ensure that the US remains a dominant force in the world, and that countries of global south continue providing cheap materials, no matter the harm done to their own people. That kind of political interference seems to be Elliott Abrams’ specialty, and bringing him on like this signals – to me, at least – that the Biden administration is entirely ok with supporting atrocities in pursuit of those goals. It also signals that environmental concerns will not meaningfully change US foreign policy, at least under its current geriatric leadership, and that is a serious problem for the world.

Thank you for reading! If you liked this post, please share it around. If you read this blog regularly, please consider joining my small but wonderful group of patrons. Because of my immigration status, I’m not allowed to get a normal job, so my writing is all I have for the foreseeable future, and I’d love for it to be a viable career long-term. As part of that goal, I’m currently working on a young adult fantasy series, so if supporting this blog isn’t enough inducement by itself, for just $5/month you can work with me to name a place or character in that series!

Bridge Collapse Sends Traincars of Asphalt and Sulfur into Yellowstone River

Water intakes along the Yellowstone River have been shut off, following the collapse of a rail bridge, which sent several cars full of asphalt and sulfur into the water. Photos show crumpled, steaming tanker cars, and what appears to be bright yellow stuff roiling in the water. Pictures from Rawsalerts on Twitter:

The image is taken from the river banks downstream of the wreckage. Grass and shrubs in the foreground, then muddy, turbulent river water. The bridge and train run across the middle, and in the center, you can see yellow-white froth, where sulfur seems to be leaking into the water. In the background, forested hills under a partly cloudy sky.

The image is taken from the river banks downstream of the wreckage. Grass and shrubs in the foreground, then muddy, turbulent river water. The bridge and train run across the middle, and in the center, you can see yellow-white froth, where sulfur seems to be leaking into the water. In the background, forested hills under a partly cloudy sky.

The image is taken from the riverbank, near one end of the ruined rail bridge. You can see grass and yellow flowers in the foreground, with the river, bridge, and train in the middle. The tanker cars are twisted and crumpled, with steam hovering over them. If you look closely, you can see yellow in the water near the wreckage. In the background, a forested hill, under gray clouds.

The image is taken from the riverbank, near one end of the ruined rail bridge. You can see grass and yellow flowers in the foreground, with the river, bridge, and train in the middle. The tanker cars are twisted and crumpled, with steam hovering over them. If you look closely, you can see yellow in the water near the wreckage. In the background, a forested hill, under gray clouds.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This will keep happening, until the US government can stop kissing capitalist asses long enough to actually do its job, and overhaul the infrastructure of the whole damned country. The rails need to be nationalized, with profits from their use re-invested in maintaining, improving, and expanding the network. It seems that Montana’s had enough rain recently, that the stuff pouring into the river is pretty diluted, so cleanup workers are supposedly not at any risk. I have my doubts, obviously, but that’s what’s being reported:

COLUMBUS, Mont. — A bridge that crosses the Yellowstone River in Montana collapsed early Saturday, plunging portions of a freight train carrying hazardous materials into the rushing water below.

The train cars were carrying asphalt and sulfur, said David Stamey, Stillwater County’s chief of emergency services. Officials shut down drinking water intakes downstream while they evaluated the danger. An Associated Press reporter witnessed a yellow substance coming out of some of the tank cars.

However, Stamey said there was no immediate danger for the crews working at the site, and the hazardous material was being diluted by the swollen river. There were eight rail cars in the river or on the part of the bridge that collapsed.

The train crew was safe and no injuries were reported, Montana Rail Link spokesman Andy Garland said in a statement.

Railroad crews were at the scene in Stillwater County, near the town of Columbus, about 40 miles (about 64 kilometers) west of Billings. The area is in a sparsely populated section of the Yellowstone River Valley, surrounded by ranch and farmland. The river there flows away from Yellowstone National Park, which is about 110 miles (177 kilometers) southwest.

“We are committed to addressing any potential impacts to the area as a result of this incident and working to understand the reasons behind the accident,” Garland said.

In neighboring Yellowstone County, officials said they instituted emergency measures at water treatment plants due to the “potential hazmat spill” and asked residents to conserve water.

The cause of the collapse is under investigation. The river was swollen with recent heavy rains, but it’s unclear whether that was a factor.

Oh yeah, that’s the other thing – unless the US takes this seriously, climate change is going to keep putting more stress on its already-crumbling infrastructure. I don’t think climate change is the biggest factor here, given the overall neglect of the nation’s roads, rails, and bridges, but it’s more of a factor every year, and there’s no good excuse for not working to keep ahead of it.

I’m glad Yellowstone National Park won’t be directly affected, but while it’s a lovely place, all the other ecosystems along the river, including the river itself, also merit our concern. Obviously, there will be some human costs associated with this spill, but it’s hard for me to predict those at this stage. If you live downstream from this, along the Yellowstone river, or the Missouri river downstream of where the Yellowstone joins it, it’s probably a good idea to stock up on water, if you haven’t already.

Defeat By Small Victories

We all dwell on missed opportunities from time to time. Maybe there was a job you almost took, or a trip you almost went on. Maybe you regret going somewhere or doing something when you just wanted to have a little time to yourself. Maybe there was a company you should have invested in, or an investment you shouldn’t have made. For me, the one that nags me the most isn’t one from my own life, but the time that’s been wasted on climate change. What would the world be like if governments had acted when scientists and corporations all knew what was going on, back in the late 1970s, early 1980s? I think it’s entirely possible that we couldn’t have “solved” the problem, but there’s no question that we had a chance for a drastically different future. If we’d been making the kind of steady, deliberate change that was being called for, the planet would be a cooler and less chaotic place, today.

We had a chance, and it was squandered before I was born. Worse than that, the same choice has been made every damned day since then, and so now big changes are all that’s left. Either we change our entire society in a major way, or it will be “changed” for us by the rapidly warming climate. The oceans are doing scary shit right now, and it seems like the powers that be are moving ahead with their plans to use violent repression to deal with the crisis they’ve created.

But hey – fossil fuel lobbyists will have to identify themselves at the next conference that’s supposedly about responding to climate change:

The move by the UN to require anyone registering for the summit to declare their affiliation was heralded as a victory for transparency by campaigners who have been increasingly concerned at the growing presence of oil and gas lobbyists at climate talks.

Scott Kirby, a campaigner from Youngo, which represents youth campaigners at the UN climate talks, said: “When young people see the number of fossil fuel lobbyists present at UN Framework Convention on Climate Change conferences, it makes us question the ability this process has to solve the biggest challenge threatening our futures. This is why we welcome the step to increase transparency of observer interests in the talks.”

Many campaigners said the change to make potential conflicts of interest more apparent should be only a first step towards excluding fossil fuel companies from the talks, or from key parts of them.

Hwei Mian Lim, of the Women and Gender Constituency, said: “We can only meaningfully tackle the climate crisis when we kick big polluters out. Fortunately, we have the real solutions, including gender-just climate solutions, and have the power in collective feminist movements to prevent untold suffering, in particular among women and girls in the global south.

“This is strengthened with weeding out the undue influence of big polluters that seek to undermine climate action. Cop28 is our best chance to start implementing them and we must do so in the most gender responsive, and effective and impactful way.”

Hey, we did it guys! We won!

In all seriousness, this is a good thing. It’s good that they will have to identify themselves, and it’s even possible that most of them will do it. My problem, in case it wasn’t clear, is that this is the kind of change that should have been made, once again, before I was born. We’ve gotten to the point where global warming is already displacing millions of people every year, and it’s worth a headline that fossil fuel lobbyists have to identify themselves as such at a conference that should be about eliminating their entire industry? At this rate, we’ll be celebrating their ban from the conference some time after the flooded ruins of Miami are finally abandoned.

I want to be clear – I have no problem with the people who fought for this rule change, and it’s clear from the article that they also view this as a very small victory, compared to the scale of what needs doing. If nothing else, their efforts are needed to show why it’s so important for people to organize and take direct action, rather than relying on a political and economic system that might as well be designed to drive us to extinction.

And hey, at least the conference will be limiting the influence of oil interests, right? That’s progress!

The change came as nations wrapped up nearly two weeks of talks in Bonn, where officials tried to lay the groundwork for Cop28, which starts on 30 November.

The event will be held in the United Arab Emirates, a major oil and gas producer, and chaired by Sultan Al Jaber, who is head of the UAE national oil company, Adnoc. The company is planning a large expansion of its production capacity, and last year it sent scores of executives to the Cop27 climate summit in Egypt.

Al Jaber attended the Bonn talks for two days last week and spoke only briefly in public. He said: “The phase-down of fossil fuels is inevitable. The speed at which this happens depends on how quickly we can phase up zero-carbon alternatives, while ensuring energy security, accessibility and affordability.”

He failed to give an assurance that a phase-out of fossil fuels would be on the official agenda at Cop28, despite a concerted push by many developed and developing countries for its inclusion. The UAE Cop28 presidency has insisted it is up to all the countries represented at the talks to make decisions on the agenda.

Anyway, remember what I said about organizing? I feel like it would be good if we didn’t have to rely corrupt governments to solve our problems. Having an organized and empowered working class won’t fix everything, but it seems pretty clear that it can’t be worse than giving power to people based on how good they are at exploiting others.

I feel as though I’ve spent my entire life hearing about small victories in one area or another, and each one will help us a whole lot, at some point in the future. They never seem to deliver on that promise. Some of those victories did pay off, by reducing emissions, but they’re hard to notice because they weren’t enough to stop overall emissions from continuing to rise. The majority seem to just be empty promises, or doomed half-measures like trying to offset CO2 emissions with forests, which definitely never catch fire or anything.

It’s frustrating, and discouraging. It reminds me of the many years now that I’ve seen articles and research reports promising revolutionary new batteries, or new ways to harvest power, or new, safer nuclear designs. Just a few more adjustments, and then everything will be fine! It reminds me of the fallacious incrementalism promised by centrist politicians over the years.

We have an abundance of small victories, and they will never be enough if we don’t demand big ones, and fight for them whether or not the people in power want us to. It says everything bad about our political leaders that fossil fuel companies and their lobbyists aren’t treated as pariahs for their decades of destruction, corruption, and misinformation. Until we have the power to actually bring things to a halt, and force change, these small “victories” are likely to be the best we get, as the world continues to burn. I used to like reading about things like this but these days, it just feels like a reminder of how little progress we’ve made.

Thank you for reading! If you liked this post, please share it around. If you read this blog regularly, please consider joining my small but wonderful group of patrons. Because of my immigration status, I’m not allowed to get a normal job, so my writing is all I have for the foreseeable future, and I’d love for it to be a viable career long-term. As part of that goal, I’m currently working on a young adult fantasy series, so if supporting this blog isn’t enough inducement by itself, for just $5/month you can work with me to name a place or character in that series!

Police State: Atlanta Cops Arrest Organizers for Legal Activity

Tomorrow is a day of action for those working to stop Cop City, in Atlanta, Georgia.

For any who need to catch-up, “Cop City” is a police training facility that the city government of Atlanta wants to build. The planned location is currently forested, but it used to be a prison plantation, and a dumping ground. The facility will include firing ranges, explosives training, a helicopter landing pad, and a mock city, all for cops to train in urban warfare and suppressing political demonstrations. The local community does not want this. Part of it is because they use the forest as a park, part is the importance of opposing deforestation, and part of it is not wanting a massive police training facility in their community. Even leaving aside the problems that police cause wherever they go, who wants the soundtrack of their home life to be gunfire and explosions?

Most of the city opposes this, as has been demonstrated every time there’s an opportunity for public comment. It seems like there will be an attempt to have city employees show up to speak in favor of the facility tomorrow, which seems fitting, since the only people who want this thing seem to be the mayors office, the cops, and the corporations helping to fund this. On that note – the supposed cost of this facility was originally slated at $90 million, with $30 million coming from Atlanta taxpayers, and $60 million from an assortment of corporations. It has now come out that the city will have to pay more than double what was originally announced, at $67 million, and I think it would be foolish to assume that that cost won’t keep rising. I guarantee there are better uses for that money.

But wait! It gets worse!

In addition to murdering a forest protector, the cops have arrested dozens of other activists on trumped up domestic terrorism charges. In response, the movement arranged a bail fund, so that people wouldn’t just be locked up prior to their trial. This is an entirely legal thing to do, despite the fact that cops and other conservatives don’t seem to like it. Apparently, however, the cops don’t care about whether it’s legal. They don’t like it when people stand up to them, and they want to keep the activists locked up, so they arrested the people organizing the bail fund, on charges of money laundering and charity fraud:

Under the direction of the Republican state attorney general, Christopher Carr, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation and the Atlanta Police Department carried out the arrests of Marlon Scott Kautz, Savannah Patterson, and Adele Maclean of the Atlanta Solidarity Fund (ASF).

The group offers financial support to people who have been arrested for protesting, including the dozens of people who have been detained for resisting the development of the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center, also known by critics as Cop City—a $90 million police training facility that would take up 85 acres of publicly-owned forest.

The three board members were charged with money laundering and charity fraud, leading state Rep. Saira Draper (D-90) to question the state’s use of SWAT teams and helicopters to conduct the raid in a residential neighborhood.

“Peaceful protest is as American as apple pie,” said Draper. “Using heavy handed tactics to suppress peaceful protest is shameful.”

Writer and historian William Horne denounced the arrests as “the behavior of a fascist police state.”

Lauren Regan, executive director of the Civil Liberties Defense Center, told The Intercept on Wednesday that the ASF is “the first bail fund to be attacked in this way.” The funds have been used for at least a century to pool together communities’ financial resources to help bail people, including civil rights protesters, out of jail.

“There is absolutely not a scintilla of fact or evidence that anything illegal has ever transpired with regard to Atlanta fundraising for bail support,” Regan said.

She added in a press statement that “bailing out protestors who exercise their constitutionally protected rights is simply not a crime.”

“In fact, it is a historically grounded tradition in the very same social and political movements that the city of Atlanta prides itself on,” she said. “Someone had to bail out civil rights activists in the 60’s—I think we can all agree that community support isn’t a crime.”

And yet, I can almost guarantee that the cops who decided to do this will not face any serious repercussions. Police abuse of power is one of the biggest reasons people oppose Cop City, and look how they respond. In 2020, when there were protests against police brutality, the cops amped up the brutality, even shooting out people’s eyes. Now, in response to a community wanting a say over how public resources are used, they’re flagrantly violating peoples’ rights.

 

If you’re in the Atlanta area, consider showing up to city hall tomorrow. If you’re further out, and you have the resources, you can help by supporting the Atlanta Solidarity Fund, by signing on to the statement of solidarity with the movement, and by doing what you can to raise public awareness of what’s going on in Atlanta. Even if people don’t care about that city or the people in it, they should understand that everything happening there will happen everywhere else in the US as well, if they’re allowed to get away with it. I keep saying that those in power will use violence to keep that power, and this is part of that process. They are setting up to make cops more dangerous to USians, and they are flagrantly abusing their power to make sure that this goes through, no matter what the people of Atlanta want.

This is part of the climate fight, and it’s a battle we can ill afford to lose. A facility like Cop City is designed to make cops better at crushing movements for change, and in case you hadn’t noticed, we urgently need movements for change. Look into the issue if you haven’t, and try to find at least some way to help out. If you can’t do anything tomorrow, but you want to do something, there’s a week of action from June 24th to July 1st, and I believe actions outside of Atlanta, like demonstrations, are welcome as part of that. If you have questions, ask in the comments, and I’ll do what I can to provide answers.

 

Video: Supreme Court Guts Clean Water Act

I may dig into this more later, but the Supreme Court has launched another attack in their war on humanity. They’ve gutted the clean water act, in a move that puts a huge portion of US wetlands at risk, at a time when we need them more than ever. I’ve been expecting this shoe to drop for a while now, but what I did not expect was that Brett Kavanaugh, of all people, would be on the right side of this, and would be the one to correctly warn of the damage this ruling will do. Credit where it’s due, I guess, but that doesn’t do anything to limit the harm. The common saying is, “it’s going to get worse before it gets better” applies here, but I can’t help but feel that we’re running out of time for things to do anything but keep getting worse.

Murdered for defending a forest: Official autopsy undermines cop justification

This past January, I wrote briefly about the police killing of a forest defender named Manuel “Tortuguita” Terán . When I posted that, we didn’t know much, including who the victim was, but I pointed out that the story given by the cops – that Tortuguita had fired on them first – was probably a lie. The primary reason for that assumption was the simple fact that cops lie all the time, about pretty much everything. The secondary reason is that while there probably are activists out there who would feel justified in attacking police, I cannot believe that they’d go about it by facing an advancing wall of armed cops head-on, without any cover. My assumption seems to be well-founded, and I think I should provide a content warning for descriptions of gunshot wounds going forward.

The people who knew Tortuguita said that they were a pacifist, and as far as anyone knew, they were unarmed. Then came the body cam footage from cops who were nearby, saying that the gunfire they heard sounded suppressed (some of the cops’ weapons had silencers) and responding to someone on the radio implying that the cop who did get shot was the victim of “friendly fire”. Then came the autopsy commissioned by Tortuguita’s family, which indicated that they’d been hit by dozens of bullets – so many that their paths through their body frequently intersected.

And now, we have the official autopsy, revealing, in addition to the horrifying damage to their body, zero gunpowder residue on Tortuguita’s hands, meaning zero evidence that they had fired a gun.

DeKalb county’s autopsy, released to the media through open records requests on Wednesday, offers no support for the notion that Paez Terán fired a weapon, stating that “gunpowder residue is not seen on the hands” or clothes of Paez Terán. Residue on the hands might indicate that a person fired a gun, but neither this analysis nor a test known as the GSR kit is foolproof, according to experts.

Patrick Bailey, director of the DeKalb county medical examiner’s office, told the Guardian that the county forwarded evidence to the GBI for them to perform the GSR kit, or gunshot residue test.

Nonetheless, the autopsy report does little to clarify what actually happened that day, except for noting in 19 pages of clinical detail the 57 gunshot wounds that Paez Terán received, employing every letter of the alphabet more than once to label the injuries.

“I tried to read the whole thing – in the end it was a little too much,” said Daniel Paez, Manuel’s older brother, reached at his home in Texas. “The very fact that they’re talking about Manny, and how they died – I didn’t even want to share it with our mother, since the pain of losing Manny continues to haunt us; it doesn’t seem to get better.”

“It’s just brutal,” said Wingo Smith, one of the team of attorneys representing the Paez Terán family. “It’s just gruesome, the effect of the shots on their body, the actual devastation.” Smith and his colleagues received the autopsy results and met with staff at the DeKalb medical examiner’s office last week, and shared the report with the Paez Terán family.

I want to note, here, that we don’t seem to have any body cam footage from the officers that killed Tortuguita. It’s almost like there’s either something to hide so they won’t release it, or the cops went in with an intent to kill, and so turned of the cameras. I have no evidence for this, of course, other than the fact that they apparently lied about what happened, and the fact that, once again, body cam footage of the event is either being held back, or doesn’t exist. According to the Intercept article I linked earlier, the cops initially lied by saying there wasn’t any footage at all, then walked that back partially, saying there was footage of the aftermath (which they’re not releasing).

I’ve felt this way for a while, but I think there’s ample reason to view this killing as an extrajudicial execution for the crime of opposing them. They went in ready to kill, and that’s exactly what they did. That would explain the inconsistencies in the story, it would fit what everyone around Tortuguita had to say about who they were, and it would explain why there’s no footage of the shooting – because the cops didn’t want there to be.

This is exactly the shit that the movement to defend the Atlanta forest is trying to stop. A huge facility for cops to train in urban warfare is just another level of militarization, on top of the harm done to the community by destroying the forest. Tortuguita was killed for trying to stop that. Crimethinc goes into more detail in their post Atlanta Police and Georgia State Patrol are Guilty of Murder: The Evidence and the Motive:

Gunshot residue tests are held to be reliable indicators of whether a person has fired a gun, scientifically and legally speaking. Gunshot residue can wear off over a period of four to six hours, but as mentioned in the autopsy, Tortuguita’s hands were bagged shortly after the murder, in order that if there was any gunshot residue on their hands, it would be preserved. According to the “Investigator Narrative” included in the autopsy, the official who prepared that narrative reported to the scene of the murder within two and a half hours and “covered the hands with white handbags to preserve any trace evidence.”

We can be sure that Atlanta authorities missed no opportunity to secure and publicize any evidence that could corroborate their narrative that Tortuguita shot first. Instead, because the autopsy showed that Tortuguita did not fire a gun at all, the results of the Dekalb County autopsy were suppressed for months.

Is it possible that Tortuguita somehow fired a gun while wearing gloves, or fired a gun and then cleaned their hands? According to the Dekalb County autopsy, Tortuguita experienced at least 57 gunshot wounds; this video shows that all of the gunfire occurred in less than eleven seconds.1 That means that Tortuguita died within a few seconds of the first shot, whoever fired it. In the instants between the first couple shots and their death, there was no time for Tortuguita to remove and conceal gloves, nor to clean gunshot residue off their hands.

To all that evidence, we must add the findings of the second autopsy, the one that Tortuguita’s family commissioned, which found that Tortuguita was “likely sitting cross-legged with their hands up” when they were killed.

This is consistent with the gunshot wounds described in the autopsy conducted by the Dekalb County Medical Examiner:

• Right Forearm and Hand—fractures of the index finger and thumb metacarpal. […]

• Left Forearm and Hand—fracture of the middle finger proximal phalange.

The image is a diagram of the locations of gunshot wounds on Tortuguita’s body. A majority of them seem to be on their legs, with several on their hands and arms, two in their gut, two in the collarbone region, and one through the eye.

As can be seen in the diagram included in the Dekalb County autopsy, bullets struck Tortuguita in both their left hand and their right hand. If they had been holding a gun in either of those hands, the gun would have been struck by a bullet, leaving evidence that Tortuguita had been holding the gun when police opened fire. Atlanta authorities would have eagerly released that evidence in order to corroborate their narrative.

They have done no such thing. They did release a photograph of the gun that they allege was in Tortuguita’s possession—but in the photograph, the gun does not show any sign of having been struck by a bullet.

It follows that Tortuguita did not fire a gun on the morning of January 18, 2023.2

In that case, how did it occur that an officer was shot that day, and with a bullet allegedly matching a handgun registered to Tortuguita that was found on the scene?

According to an early Georgia Bureau of Investigation press release,

The handgun is described as a Smith & Wesson M&P Shield 9mm. Forensic ballistic analysis has confirmed that the projectile recovered from the trooper’s wound matches Teran’s handgun.

In fact, Georgia State Patrol—the officers who murdered Tortuguita—are all standard-issued firearms that use 9mm ammunition. According to the “Investigator Narrative” included in the Dekalb County autopsy, during the killing of Tortuguita,

“The uniformed officers reportedly discharged their service weapons, to include a .223 caliber rifle and 9mm handguns.”

So the fact that the gun apparently registered to Tortuguita used 9mm ammunition proves nothing, considering that Georgia State Patrol officers were shooting 9mm ammunition that day.

If exculpatory “forensic ballistic analysis” existed confirming that the bullet that struck the officer was fired from the specific handgun registered to Tortuguita, the authorities would surely have released that by now. The fact that they have not done so suggests that the GBI statement that “the projectile recovered from the trooper’s wound matches Teran’s handgun” means simply that it was 9mm ammunition, like all the bullets that the Georgia State Patrol officers were firing.

Tortuguita experienced at least 57 gunshot woulds within a period of eleven seconds. That offers a hint of how many bullets were in the air during the murder. We don’t know how many rounds Georgia State Patrol officers fired off, but it may have been considerably more than that.

I would say it’s almost guaranteed that there were more bullets than that. It’s been shown that cops tend to miss more often than they hit their targets, so there were probably at least 100 9mm bullets in the air during those 11 seconds. The article goes on to discuss the body cam footage I mentioned earlier, with an officer apparently believing the police shot one of their own. More than that, the police “evidence” doesn’t fit with the video footage we do have:

One more detail remains to be accounted for. According to the “Investigator Narrative” included in the Dekalb County autopsy, “Two empty 9mm shell casings were located under the decedent’s body” by the investigator who arrived on the scene after the shooting. Did Tortuguita fire those shells?

Video footage distinctly shows that the first three shots were fired in a steady, practiced rhythm, followed an instant later by a fourth shot, after which all the other shots began. It seems most likely that an edgy officer—not Tortuguita—fired those four shots, after which all the other officers began firing. If Tortuguita had fired those first shots, there would presumably have been three or four shell casings around Tortuguita’s body—and more to the point, there would have been gunshot residue on Tortuguita’s hands.

  Have I mentioned that cops lie, yet? I feel like I might have forgotten to mention that. Cops lie a lot, which makes it hard to believe anything they say, especially since they also have a habit of planting evidence. The Crimethinc article goes on to discuss motive, and some other factors – it’s worth a read.

Environmental activists are murdered with shocking regularity around the world, where activists – often Indigenous people – are pushing back against environmental destruction that is almost universally driven by greed. According to The Guardian, Tortuguita was the first such killing in the US. The biggest driving factor in Atlanta, while greed is certainly involved in the Cop City project, seems to be the degree to which USian cops hate being told “no”. They want their new playground, they want unchallenged authority, and they are clearly willing to kill to get their way.

I believe I’ve said before that I have a great deal of respect for the people on the front lines of this fight, and I hope it’s clear to all of you that using that “military” terminology is important. These activists are not trying to wage war, but a a war is being waged against them, and their lives are very much in danger.

If you want to help, Defend the Atlanta Forest has a few suggestions, most of which don’t involve putting your body on the line:

There are many ways to get involved. You can support online, help organize your community, show up for actions, or any other number of activities depending on your availability and comfort level. The movement appreciates the need for diverse tactics, meaning many forms of struggle that move towards a common goal. Here’s some more ideas:

  • You can sign up for sporadic text alerts here: 470.606.1212
  • You can Visit the forest at 3251 W Side Place, Atlanta GA 30316.
  • You can organize protests, send phone calls or emails, or help with direct actions of different kinds to encourage contractors of the various projects to stop the destruction. You can find some of the contractors here: stopreevesyoung.com
  • Call Brasfield & Gorrie (678.581.6400), the Atlanta Police Foundation (770.354.3392), and the City of Atlanta (404.330.6100) and ask them to cancel the project and to remain peaceful with tree-sitters and other on-the-ground protesters.
  •  You can form an Action Group in your community, neighborhood, town, city, college, or scene. Together, you can host information nights, movie screenings, potluck dinners, and protests at the offices of contractors, at the homes of the board members, on campus, or elsewhere. You can post and pass out fliers at public places and shows, knock on doors to talk to neighbors and sign them up for text alerts, fundraisers, or actions, or you can innovate new activities altogether.
  • You can conduct independent research about the destruction of the forest, construction projects, their funders, their contractors, or lesser-known details about the project using public records searches or other open source investigation techniques and send your findings to us at defendtheatlantaforest[at]protonmail[dot]com.
  • You can organize to join or create a camp in the South River/Weelaunee Forest. Respect people’s space and try to be friendly.
  • Finally, you and friends or your group could organize to caravan down to the forest from near or far during weeks of action.

Obviously, this fight is ongoing. The twitter account associated with this list has announced a week of action from June 24th to July 1st of this year (2023, for people reading this in the future). As they said, how you go about helping is up to you. Any help is better than none, and it takes a village to raze and empire. Tortuguita’s cause was just, and it’s one that we should carry on, be it in their name, or just because it is necessary. Climate change, bigotry, capitalism, authoritarianism – they’re all different fronts on the same war, and sitting out the fight simply isn’t an option.

Thank you for reading! If you liked this post, please share it around. If you read this blog regularly, please consider joining my small but wonderful group of patrons. Because of my immigration status, I’m not allowed to get a normal job, so my writing is all I have for the foreseeable future, and I’d love for it to be a viable career long-term. As part of that goal, I’m currently working on a young adult fantasy series, so if supporting this blog isn’t enough inducement by itself, for just $5/month you can work with me to name a place or character in that series!

Furious Friday: NYPD Stole Money from New Yorkers, Spent It on Robots.

At what point does a country become a police state?

I think a case can be made that the US has always been one for people with darker skin, especially with programs like Stop and Frisk in NYC, but there’s a long history of government power being used to suppress left-wing political power, sometimes pretty explicitly. It’s a policy that pairs well with the foreign policy of violently crushing attempts at left-wing governance in the so-called “Global South”, and it makes me worry about what would happen if a left-wing political movement actually got real power in the United States. Conservative wingnuts have poisoned the concept, but the “Deep State” originally referred to official and unofficial policies within the State Department, the CIA, the FBI, and other parts of the US government working to suppress the left. This is not just conjecture, either. Leaving aside the obvious stuff like the McCarthy Era, the FBI ran counterintelligence operations to keep progressives out of power, and they spied on Quaker activists (among others) during the time when I was both a Quaker and an anti-war activist.

There’s also ICE, who in addition to terrorizing all sorts of people across the US, also decided to intimidate a comedian for making an edgy joke about the organization. ICE needs to be abolished.

And then, of course, there’s civil asset forfeiture. I’ve mentioned this before, but it’s a policy that allows police in the United States to just take stuff from people. If you have something that they decide is “suspicious”, they can just take it. Your money, your car, your house – anything. All they have to do is say that the something in question was somehow involved in a crime (usually drug-related), and then it’s on you to prove that it’s not. They also get to keep that money. It doesn’t go to the general city budget, or the justice department or anything like that, it goes to the department where the cop who sto- sorry, “seized” your stuff works. They use it for all sorts of things, like margarita machines. If you need a refresher, to get yourself good and revved up for what this post is actually about, watch John Oliver’s video on the subject:

At what point does a country become a police state?

If it’s not when the police are literally allowed to just steal from people, how about when they use that stolen money, directly, to buy the latest technology with which to harass and surveil the victims of their theft? Cops legally take billions from people in the US every year, and the NYPD just spent $750,000 of the money they stole from New Yorkers on some fucking robots, to help them oppress and steal from New Yorkers:

Great. No way this could go wro- oh wait, it was already wrong, because they stole the money to buy this shit!

I don’t think it’s possible to exaggerate how fucked up this is, and you’d better believe that if anything happens to the robots, they’ll try to charge anyone even tangentially involved with assaulting a police officer. A large portion of USian policing seems to involve around looking for excuses to harass, assault, or rob people, and there is zero question in my mind that every new toy they get will be used for those ends. It won’t be long before some poor New Yorker has their life turned upside down by a robot bought with money stolen from them.

I also don’t think it’ll be long before the cops are putting guns on their robots, given that the concept has already been pioneered. Cops are out of control in the United States, and I think it’s fair to say that in some ways, the NYPD is the most out of control, when you consider that its budget is bigger than those of the armies of many nations. And now they’re using fucking robots.

I honestly have no idea how useful these things will end up being for the cops, but this is very much just the beginning. These robots will keep getting better, because the military-industrial complex loves death robots, and wants more of them. Make no mistake – these are weapons intended to be used against the people, and they will be used in the effort to crush any movement for systemic change. One of the themes of this blog is that climate change is progressing at a frightening speed, and that our governments aren’t doing nearly enough to deal with that. There’s one flaw in that premise, though, and it’s a big one. It assumes some degree of good intent from the ruling class. It’s quite possible – even likely – that they are taking action on climate change.

They’re pouring more money into police and the military, both of which serve them and their interests. A cynical man might conclude that they’re not planning on doing anything to slow climate change or to help society adapt, but rather that they are planning to use force to keep us in line as the world falls apart, trusting climate change to kill enough of us that we won’t be able to get into their luxury bunkers. They’ll keep using human enforcers if they have to, but there’s always a risk that they’ll side with the peasantry. Robots, on the other hand, just do as they’re programmed, and don’t have any of those pesky thoughts and opinions that makes humans so unreliable. As I said, I’m not sure how dangerous the NYPD’s new toys actually are, but at minimum, they represent another step in a very dangerous direction.

It’d be a real shame if the robots somehow ended up in a body of water somewhere, you know, by accident.

Thank you for reading! If you liked this post, please share it around. If you read this blog regularly, please consider joining my small but wonderful group of patrons. Because of my immigration status, I’m not allowed to get a normal job, so my writing is all I have for the foreseeable future, and I’d love for it to be a viable career long-term. As part of that goal, I’m currently working on a young adult fantasy series, so if supporting this blog isn’t enough inducement by itself, for just $5/month you can work with me to name a place or character in that series!