Beyond Nuclear International
Past time to listen to Greta
“We must forget about net zero. We need real zero.”
Last week, Greta Thunberg, the now 17-year old Swedish climate activist, returned to Davos, Switzerland to once again address that meeting of world leaders. And, once again, she quietly urged those leaders — who continue to abdicate responsibility for the climate crisis — to take immediate action. “Let’s be clear. We don’t need a ‘low carbon economy.’ We don’t need to ‘lower emissions.’ Our emissions have to stop if we are to have a chance to stay below the 1.5-degree target,” she told them.
We felt it was worth reproducing her entire speech here, for those who may have missed it — or who want to circulate it — especially to our elected officials. We have also embedded the video of her speech, which you can watch on this page.
Greta Thunberg’s speech:
“One year ago I came to Davos and told you that our house is on fire. I said I wanted you to panic. I’ve been warned that telling people to panic about the climate crisis is a very dangerous thing to do. But don’t worry. It’s fine. Trust me, I’ve done this before and I can assure you it doesn’t lead to anything.
And, for the record, when we children tell you to panic we’re not telling you to go on like before. We’re not telling you to rely on technologies that don’t even exist today at scale and that science says perhaps never will.
We are not telling you to keep talking about reaching “net zero emissions” or ‘carbon neutrality’ by cheating and fiddling around with numbers. We are not telling you to ‘offset your emissions’ by just paying someone else to plant trees in places like Africa while at the same time forests like the Amazon are being slaughtered at an infinitely higher rate.
Planting trees is good, of course, but it’s nowhere near enough of what is needed and it cannot replace real mitigation and rewilding nature.
Planting trees its not enough while fires devastate the Amazon forest. (Photo: Fires in the Amazon rain forest, by ESA astronaut Luca Parmitano during mission to the International Space Station/Creative Commons)
Should women run the world?
Women are marching, but would they lead us to nuclear war?
By Linda Pentz Gunter
There is a widely held view that men have generally screwed up the planet with their wars and imperialism and their corporate malfeasance. Men, it is argued, should step aside and let women run the world. It is, frankly, self-evident, and it’s a view I have articulated myself more than once.
US senator, Elizabeth Warren, is making the case right now that a woman is not only more than capable — but actually ideal — as the next president of the United States. The squabble over whether or not Bernie Sanders told her differently only serves to accentuate that, appallingly, we are still, in the 21st century US, having this debate.
But declaring that it’s our turn to run things and men should step aside is also, I suspect, too simplistic an answer. It is good people who should run the world, not one gender over another. (I welcome the discussion — and dissent — this may provoke. And even as I write this, I am not convinced there is one right answer.)
Indeed, while women may be generally more nurturing and less aggressive than men, we don’t always get it right.
2017 Women’s March in D.C. (Photo by Polly Irungu is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)
There are plenty of stories currently flying around about the implosion of the Women’s March as an organization. Its founding leadership made a series of questionable decisions, including issuing policy decrees and attempting to trademark the name, all of which alienated its base.
The leadership also drew widespread protest — and prompted an exodus of Jewish supporters — when it was slow to distance itself from Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam, designated a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, and whose rally a Women’s March co-chair had attended.
Understanding Iran
Why did US president, Donald Trump, withdraw the US from the Iran nuclear deal? And will he still go to war against Iran? To better understand the implications of where we are now, we provide Vijay Prashad’s illuminating history of US-Iran relations.
When will winter come to an end?
Bu Vijay Prashad
On 17 January, Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, led the Friday prayers for the first time in eight years. He mocked the ‘American clowns’ who threatened Iran and said that Iran’s response to the US assassination of Major General Qassem Soleimani was a ‘slap in the face’ of US power.
Tensions between Washington, DC, and Tehran seem to have gone from a boil to a simmer, but they nonetheless remain. There is reason to believe that US President Donald Trump – reckless by nature – will launch an attack on Iran in the next few months. He might do so to distract from the impeachment trial he faces in the US Senate or to hasten his chances of re-election in November 2020.
In 2015, Iran, China, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States signed the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the nuclear deal that seemed to stop the imperialist rush to war against Iran. At that time, Iranians took to the streets and to twitter to say, ‘winter is over’.
They quoted from an old protest song – Sar Umad Zemestoon, or ‘Winter Has Come to An End’. The song is based on the Armenian love song Sari Siroun Yar and was then re-written in the early 1970s by Saeed Soltanpour, a Marxist radical of the Cherikha-ye-Fadaee Khalq (People’s Devoted Guerrilla). When Iranians take to the streets in anticipation of a new period, this song seems to follow them: it was sung on the streets during the Iranian Revolution of 1979 and it was sung at campaign rallies of the Green Movement in 2009. It became the catchphrase for a new beginning in 2015. But winter never really ended.
Grand Canyon under “nuclear” attack
Water is life. Uranium will poison both
By Patricia J. Kelly and Robert Arnberger
Arizonans know that water is life; it is vital to us all and sustains our livelihoods. We cannot afford to let powerful industry interests sacrifice our water to pollution or depletion. We also cannot let those same interests destroy a landscape that supports an unparalleled regional economy and the livelihood of citizens who depend on it. But our water and our Grand Canyon is under attack by these very interests that see profit in the ground and downplay the risk of negative health impacts for generations to come.
In Arizona, we are concerned by the increasing number of calls to open areas around the Grand Canyon to uranium mining, a dangerous practice that risks destruction of groundwater, seeps and springs, and could impact the Colorado River — the drinking water supply for nearly 40 million people. Local government and tribal leadership have opposed the reckless potential destruction of our internationally cherished monument. But now, corporate polluters have a powerful ally on their side: President Trump.
The Colorado River supplies drinking water for 40 million people. (Photo: Jeff Hollett, Creative Commons/Flickr)
The Trump administration has taken steps that could lead to destruction around and within one of the world’s most iconic landscapes, including newly prioritizing uranium as a “critical mineral” and exploring ways to boost its production domestically. An administration working group is contemplating calls to lift a temporary, but important ban on mining around the Grand Canyon and taxpayer subsidies to make uranium mining profitable. These threats ignore health risks and put our communities and sacred sites at risk. They merge the need to protect not only our iconic natural landscapes but also our citizen’s health.
Our apocalypse now
The horror of climate change brings Martin Sheen to Washington
By Linda Pentz Gunter
Martin Sheen has seen the apocalypse at close range and has been president of the United States. But all of that was in his theatrical career.
On Friday, Sheen, 79, showed up in Washington, DC to protest the most apocalyptical event of our times — the climate crisis.
Sheen is best known for his lead role in the 1979 Francis Ford Coppola Vietnam War epic, Apocalypse Now, and for playing the US president in the popular television series, The West Wing, which ran from 1999-2006.
On Friday, he joined fellow actors Joaquin Phoenix and Susan Sarandon in handcuffs on the steps of the US Capitol where they were arrested on the last of Jane Fonda’s weekly climate protests in DC. Sheen co-stars in Fonda’s Netflix series, Grace and Frankie.
As we walked together to the rally, Sheen, spoke quietly of his commitment to non-violence and civil disobedience that has included more than 80 arrests, mainly in opposition to nuclear weapons and war, although he has embraced numerous causes, including the rights of farm workers, saving the oceans, youth empowerment and immigration.
But he’s unsure if those decades of protest really make a difference.
“I don’t have any illusions about changing anyone’s mind one way or another, in Congress or anywhere else,” he said. “I do it for myself because I cannot not do it and know myself. If anyone else is affected by it, why then that’s a residual effect, but it’s not going to happen here today at this time with this group. It’s a worldwide organized effort that has to demand leadership that first of all recognizes the situation and then resolves to attend to it.”
Martin Sheen (center) talks to Art Laffin of DC’s Dorothy Day House before the climate rally. (Photo courtesy of Fire Drill Fridays.)
Things just got worse, again
Trump’s reckless acts make a nuclear Iran more likely
By Linda Pentz Gunter
If one was to sum up 2019 in a phrase, it would probably be “just when you thought things couldn’t get any worse.”
On second thoughts, it’s probably been a daily refrain ever since Donald Trump took office as President of the United States. In those early days we still held out hope that his tenure could not last. It seemed incredible then that such an incompetent and unqualified man could enter, let alone remain, in the White House.
Now here we are at the start of 2020, Trump is still in the White House, and with sickening predictability, things just got worse once again.
This time it’s the tense situation with Iran, a story that is by no means over, whether or not violent reprisals cease or resume. The Pandora’s Box got opened by Trump with his rash and reckless decision to assassinate Iran’s top general. One might call the act ill-advised, except it’s likely no one advised him. Or if they did, he didn’t listen. Trump is an oligarch basking in autocracy. Like the petulant child he is, he shall do as he pleases. And the rest of us will pay the price.
Although, lest we forget, we have been here before. On February 4, 2012, under the Obama administration, a rally was held at the White House — simultaneously with others around the world — to call for “No War on Iran, No Sanctions, No Intervention, No Assassinations.” Instead, all of these things have continued to happen.
National Day of Action ANSWER Coalition NO WAR ON IRAN Protest in front of the White House, February 4, 2012. (Photo: Elvert Barnes Protest Photography/Wikimedia Commons)
At the time of the 2012 protests, the Answer coalition stated:
“The U.S.-led campaign to bring about regime change is escalating. The European Union has announced a complete embargo of Iranian oil. Taken together with the other economic sanctions imposed by the U.S. and its allies, this is a campaign meant to impose maximum suffering on the people of Iran by destabilizing and destroying the country’s economy. At the same time, covert action inside the country, including assassinations, sabotage and drone over flights, is intensifying. U.S. military bases surround Iran, while nuclear-armed U.S. aircraft carriers and Trident submarines sit right off its cost.”
No lessons learned, then.
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