The climate crisis is not a neutral storm. It is not an unfortunate accident of weather or a tragic twist of fate. It is the latest battlefield of empire — a slow, suffocating siege in which the Global South pays for the pollution of the Global North. Rising seas, burning forests, collapsing harvests, and vanishing species are not the random convulsions of nature. They are the predictable consequences of centuries of extraction, industrial greed, and colonial arrogance.
The atmosphere has become the new frontier of conquest. Climate colonialism is the silent siege of our age — a war without declarations, a violence without bullets, a domination masked as diplomacy.
The story is old, though the terrain has changed.
Once, colonial powers plundered Africa’s gold, Asia’s spices, and the Americas’ silver. They carved continents, enslaved peoples, and extracted wealth with ruthless precision. Today, they plunder the atmosphere with the same entitlement. The industrial revolution — fueled by coal, oil, and the bodies of enslaved labor — enriched Europe and North America while laying the foundations of planetary collapse.
The nations that built empires on slavery, resource extraction, and racial hierarchy now dominate climate negotiations. They dictate the terms of survival while refusing the burden of accountability. Bretton Woods institutions once imposed debt; now climate summits impose delay. The language has changed, but the logic remains: the powerful decide, the powerless endure.
Green rhetoric has become the new imperial dialect — polished, diplomatic, and pr5ofoundly dishonest.6
The climate crisis is global, but its burdens are violently unequal.
Pakistan’s floods displaced millions, though the nation contributes less than 1% of global emissions.7
The Sahel’s droughts devastate farmers who never profited from fossil fuels.8
Pacific island nations face rising seas that threaten their very existence, though they did not ignite the carbon fire.9
Mozambique, Dominica, and the Philippines rebuild again and again after storms intensified by warming oceans.10
Meanwhile, the Global North continues to burn oil, expand pipelines, and subsidize fossil corporations. Promises of “climate finance” remain unfulfilled or repackaged as loans — deepening the very debt that strangles the South.11
The South is told to adapt with crumbs while the North feasts on the profits of destruction.
Behind every statistic is a life, a family, a nation struggling to breathe.
Children in Bangladesh wade through floodwaters that swallow their schools. Mothers in Kenya watch crops wither under relentless drought. Fishermen in the Caribbean return to empty nets as coral reefs bleach and die. Families in the Andes watch glaciers — their ancestral water towers — melt into memory.13
The poor do not emit the carbon that drives catastrophe, yet they inhale its consequences. Climate colonialism ensures that those least responsible suffer the most.
This is not misfortune. It is injustice.
Empire adapts. Its tools evolve, but its intentions remain unchanged.
Carbon markets commodify the atmosphere, turning the sky into a trading floor.Greenwashing disguises destruction as sustainability, allowing corporations to pollute while posing as saviors.
Climate debt forces nations to borrow for disasters they did not cause, deepening dependency.
Geoengineering schemes threaten to weaponize the sky, allowing powerful nations to manipulate weather under the guise of “innovation.”
Land grabs for “green energy” displace Indigenous communities, repeating the oldest colonial script.
The cycle repeats with chilling precision: extraction → pollution → catastrophe → debt → control.
Climate colonialism is not about saving the planet. It is about preserving empire’s privilege.
May the climate crisis be named not as fate but as injustice. May the polluters be held accountable, and the victims restored. May the atmosphere be freed from commodification, and the earth from extraction. May every human breathe clean air, drink pure water, and eat from fertile soil. May the world awaken to the truth that climate justice is not charity — it is reparations, restoration, and the rebirth of global dignity.
Let justice roll down like waters and let the whole earth breathe again.
Source: Mother Jones
During the 2024 presidential campaign, a conservative playbook emerged. Created by the Heritage Foundation, this 900-plus-page document was a roadmap written for a future conservative president. And while some Republicans tried to distance themselves from Project 2025, the authors and the concepts they wrote about have been embraced by President Donald Trump.
Journalist David A. Graham did a deep dive analyzing the pages for his book, The Project: How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America. “I think at the heart of all of this is they want this Christian, conservative vision of society, and the way that they wanna achieve that is by dismantling many of the institutions of government as we know them,” he says.
Source: Salon
None of what we have seen over the past few weeks — not the shooting deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis at the hands of federal officers, the seizure of children by Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol agents, the callous disregard of civil rights and liberties from an increasingly authoritarian administration — is supposed to be happening in America. But it is.
American citizens are being arrested and brutalized for exercising their constitutional rights — recording ICE, standing nearby or simply being the “wrong” color in the wrong place. The Trump administration has labeled these Americans “domestic terrorists,” claiming they posed existential threats to heavily armed federal agents, despite clear video evidence to the contrary. Immigrants are hiding, afraid to go outside. Entire neighborhoods and communities are under siege. Even though it’s only January, at least eight people have died from their encounters with ICE.
The cognitive dissonance is dizzying. Disorientation is one of the authoritarian leader’s most powerful weapons.
The cognitive dissonance is dizzying. Disorientation is one of the authoritarian leader’s most powerful weapons.
Hours after Pretti was killed on Jan. 24, hundreds of people protested near the site in Minneapolis where he died. There, an older white woman told a reporter that “the government is not supposed to be doing these horrible things to the American people. It is unbelievable. This is something like Nazi Germany or Russia.”
I yelled at the television. “What d**n country do you live in?”
But her sentiments are common among people who are gathering at protests, community meetings and town halls all across the country.
Like many other white Americans, and too many Black and brown Americans, she seemed willfully ignorant of her own country’s history, which includes genocide and land theft against First Nations; white-on-Black chattel slavery; Jim and Jane Crow; the Black Codes; the Red Scare; violent social and political repression of LGBTQ Americans; the Palmer Raids; mass incarceration and the War on Drugs, to name just a few examples.
And then there is the language. When many protesters insist that “regular people,” “good people” and “citizens” should not be treated this way, what they often mean — consciously or not — is middle- and upper-class white people like themselves.
Historian Robin D.G. Kelley recently explained why the killings of middle-class white people like Good and Pettri by ICE and Border Patrol have provoked such widespread outrage among white Americans and “even the most seasoned organizers.”
“[Good] was a white woman and a mother — two things you’re not supposed to be when armed agents of the state put you in a body bag,” Kelley wrote. “Of course, the very idea that certain people, by virtue of their characteristics, don’t deserve to be brutalized, caged, or killed by police is the problem… Centering someone’s innocence clouds the case for abolition, which seeks to create a world where no one is caged or gunned down even if they broke the law. No matter who she was, what she looked like, her marital or citizenship status, or what she might have done in the past or even in the moment, Good had the absolute right not to be shot for driving away.”
White racial innocence, in its various forms, is exhausting for those of us on the other side of the color line. But after allowing myself a moment of exasperation with the woman on the television, I turned to the lessons of history.
The leaders of the Civil Rights Movement understood that images of those who were often referred to as “respectable white people” being beaten, arrested and even killed would move white moderates — and, crucially, white elites — to oppose Jim and Jane Crow apartheid.
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“Their simple but straightforward calculation was that Black suffering wasn’t new,” journalist Thomas Ricks wrote in “Waging a Good War,” “but white suffering was, especially when it was inflicted by Mississippi officials on middle-class college students from the North. And so [the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee] decided, John Lewis wrote, to bring ‘an army of Northern college students into Mississippi….If white America would not respond to the deaths of our people, the thinking went, maybe it would react to the deaths of its own children.’”
Now, 60 years later, similar images of “respectable white people” being abused by police and other law enforcement are having a powerful impact on public opinion.
Polls released in the aftermath of Good and Pretti’s killings show that a majority of Americans oppose Donald Trump’s immigration policies. According to a YouGov poll, more Americans (46%) want to abolish ICE than support it (41%). A small but growing number of Republicans also want ICE abolished or reformed with far stricter oversight.
The next step in mobilizing and movement building requires that many more white Americans who oppose the mass deportations and the Trump administration’s assault on democracy to move beyond relatively safe virtue signaling and being “allies” and embrace the role of collaborators. This means, but is not limited to, nonviolent protesting, offering refuge and other forms of aid to their immigrant neighbors, and being citizen observers and human shields like we have seen in Minneapolis and other parts of the country.
The struggle for America’s multiracial democracy needs — and has always needed — everyday white people of conscience who are prepared to make good trouble.
If I could talk to the older white woman I saw being interviewed — who appears to be what my grandmother and other elders would describe as “good white people” — I would tell her that she was in love with a country that never really existed but that she truly thought was real. Now is the time for her and others like her to broaden their lenses and accept our new reality. What is happening now to white people like her has been the norm for Black, brown and other marginalized communities throughout American history. This is the moment for us to lean into solidarity — to learn from our shared history of struggling for a better society and democracy on both sides of the color line.
A white freedom rider — a real American hero, though he would never use that language — once told me that he decided to join the Civil Rights Movement after asking himself a basic question: What type of white person do I want to be? More importantly, what type of human being do I want to be?
As Trump’s authoritarian vise continues to tighten, Americans on both sides of the color line will be forced to answer that question.
Source: CP
Early on Saturday, January 3rd, Venezuela was attacked on behalf of oil, mineral, tech, and weapons profiteers in a regime change operation. Since then, the Trump administration has threatened Iran, Greenland, Cuba, Colombia, and Mexico. What unites these threats? The U.S.’s quest for endless resource extraction to power its increasingly deadly global empire. And it’s not slowing down. These resource wars and “operations” are emerging as the AI drive also ramps up. In July, Palantir and the Pentagon signed a 10-year, $10 billion agreement. In April 2025, Palantir won a $30 million contract with ICE — a significant development in their decade-plus-long partnership that we are now seeing play out in their increasingly militarized, unrestrained murders and abductions in Minneapolis and around the country. This increasingly inextricable partnership between AI and the war economy is throwing us into a fast track of climate and environmental chaos that threatens us all.
In August, I learned about an AI program created by the U.S.-armed Israeli military called “Where’s Daddy.” The program is designed to track individuals Israel is targeting in order to kill them at home with their families. In October 2023, the AI war giant Palantir entered into a contract with the Israeli military. Since 2021, the Israeli Occupation Forces have been working with tech companies like Google on AI programs such as Project Nimbus, used to surveil and murder Palestinians. “Where’s Daddy” and other overlapping systems represent the newest phase of this. The program characterizes the families of these alleged combatants as “collateral damage” and is often far from accurate, killing entire families without the “intended targets” even being there. The tech companies developing these programs do not have anyone’s “safety” or “security” in mind; they are solely motivated by profit. This cruelty is no surprise— these companies are the same ones building toxic data centers across the U.S., largely in working-class and Black and Brown communities, in the newest phase of environmental injustice.
We’ve been hearing about AI more and more as it enters the commercial market in increasingly pervasive ways. In particular, much has been reported about AI data centers entering communities and the opposition to them. Many of these fights have been taken up by environmental organizations; it’s estimated that data centers could consume approximately 21% of global energy by 2030. In order to sustain this energy use, data centers need cooling. Mid-sized data centers use as much water as a city of 50,000 people. Meta’s Hyperion data center in Louisiana is projected to use as much water as the entire city of New Orleans. Another Meta center in Cheyenne, Wyoming, is projected to use more power than the state of Wyoming itself.
These centers not only increase electricity bills for communities that can’t afford them, but they also generate significant air, water, and noise pollution. Some centers regularly use diesel “emergency” generators to meet increased demand. Each generator is the size of a railcar, and thousands are littered across data center hotspots like Northern Virginia. As a result, toxic chemicals are seeping into the lungs of residents, causing asthma and long-term illness. Data centers are known to create noise pollution, with constant hums that can lead to hearing loss, anxiety, cardiovascular stress, and a host of other long-term issues. Furthermore, equipment is certain to break down and lead to toxic waste and electronic pollution.
“Critical” minerals are required for the operation of these data centers. The process of obtaining these minerals, supposedly also used for green technology, requires the militarization, destabilization, and total plunder of mineral-rich regions. These minerals are supposedly “critical” for energy transitions, and some have advocated more “sustainable” methods for maintaining data centers through “green” technologies.
The use of these minerals is clear: The Pentagon recently became the largest shareholder in MP Minerals, one of the largest mining companies in the Western Hemisphere. Why? Aluminum for fighter jets. Titanium for missiles. And copper, lithium, cobalt, and many others for data center batteries and semiconductors. The more data centers are built, the more minerals are needed. This process of extraction has murdered millions in the Congo, destroying the soil, water, and forest: one of the largest “lungs” of the planet. It has led to the newest phase of imperialist aggression on Venezuela, a mineral-rich country with the largest oil reserves in the world (oil, of course, is also essential for data centers). Additionally, it has led to the attempted subordination of the Philippines to semiconductor production. The U.S. also seeks to use the archipelago as an “unsinkable aircraft carrier” for the U.S.’s looming war with China, its largest competitor in the AI and mineral race.
These are the impacts we already know to be devastating. But this is also new technology, which means there’s a lot we don’t know and a lot that’s being intentionally hidden. Lack of transparency is the norm in this industry. As data centers rapidly expand and buy up land around the country, the actual companies behind them hide behind non-disclosure agreements. This is not dissimilar to the intentional concealment of the military’s role in global emissions, enacted through U.S. pressure at the third U.N. Climate Change Conference in 1997. Decades later, the issue of militarism is still left out of climate conversations.
The parallel makes sense, considering how the AI industry has fused with the war machine. The U.S. military is one of the most environmentally destructive forces on the planet. In its oil consumption alone, the U.S. military is the world’s largest institutional polluter. The U.S.’s 800+ bases in 80 countries globally are known to regularly leak jet fuel and cancer-causing PFAS chemicals, along with a toxic cocktail of hundreds of other chemicals. While training exercises like RIMPAC in the Asia-Pacific region authorize the deaths of thousands of sea creatures, in environmental sacrifice zones like Camp Lejeune in North Carolina, toxic waste from military facilities has killed infants hours after birth. In bomb testing sites like Vieques, off the coast of mainland Puerto Rico, lung cancer and bronchitis rates have been shown to be 200% higher than on the mainland for men, and 280% for women. And the oil-motivated “war on terror” emitted 1.2 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide from 2001-2017.
Now we are entering a new era of resource wars that will further destroy the planet as the AI race with China accelerates. The relationship between AI and the U.S. military goes beyond the Pentagon’s contracts with Palantir, Meta, and Microsoft: last June, executives Shyam Sankar (Palantir), Andrew Bosworth (Meta), Kevin Well (OpenAI), and Bob McGrew (Thinking Machines Lab, previously OpenAI) were sworn into the U.S. Army as lieutenant colonels. Michael Obadal, executive of the AI-war manufacturing company Anduril, is now the Under Secretary of the U.S. Army, still with hundreds of thousands in Anduril stock. Peter Thiel, co-founder of Palantir, is himself a major funder of Anduril. In June 2025, OpenAI, Google, xAI, and Anthropic entered into $200 million contracts with the Department of War. The more you look at the partnerships between such companies and their executives, the Pentagon, governmental departments, and other entities, the more tangled this military-tech-industrial complex all becomes.
Many organizing groups are rightfully building power against the data centers that literally fuel it all, pushing for increased regulation and transparency. At the same time as Palantir makes new deals with the Pentagon, regulations in sacrifice zones are being thrown out the window. On December 18th, the House of Representatives passed a bill backed by Microsoft, Micron, and OpenAI to fast-track data centers. The bill significantly reduces the number of environmental and financial factors that can be considered in permitting processes. It’s simple. These communities are becoming the Camp Lejeunes of a new age: the new toxic waste dumps in the belly of the beast used to power the war machine. They must be fought against at all costs.
Regulation is crucial. It’s also far from a long-term solution. There is a lot that we don’t know, because a lot is hidden: just how much of these companies are tied up with weapons manufacturers, the Pentagon, and proxies like Israel; the environmental destruction caused by military usage of AI; the specific usage of all of these data centers. But it is obvious that AI is becoming inseparable from war-making, that increased AI means increased war-making, and that increased war-making is resulting in new and increased forms of unfathomable environmental destruction to communities around the world and here within the belly of the beast.
AI has been creeping up our necks. The horrific “Where’s Daddy” program existed long before I heard of it. It seems like these products are popping up in every corner of the market before we can even start discussing them. Their emergence has been intentionally designed to not only conceal their role in environmental destruction, but also their role in the militarism destroying communities from Virginia to Gaza.
No part of this is sustainable — not the war economy, not unending extraction, regardless of how much “green tech” it produces, and not an AI-driven speculative economy. We cannot afford to have splintered conversations either; these AI and tech companies are war profiteers. The new Cold War on China drives this. The genocide in Palestine drives this. The war on Venezuela, Latin America, and the Caribbean drives this. And so our organizing must be unified against the impacts, mechanisms, and causes. Against data centers and the wars that drive them. We need to stop the blood. But we can’t lose sight of why and how the bullets are fired.
Source: The Marginalian
Few things in life cause us more suffering than the confusions of love, all the wrong destinations at which we arrive by following a broken compass, having mistaken myriad things for love: admiration, desire, intellectual affinity, common ground.
This is why knowing whether you actually love somebody can be so difficult, why it requires the rigor of a theorem, the definitional precision of a dictionary, and the courage to weather the depredations of time.
In On the Calculation of Volume (public library) — her startlingly original reckoning with the bewilderments of time and love, partway between Einstein’s Dreams and Ulysses — Danish author Solvej Balle offers the best definition of love I’ve encountered since Iris Murdoch’s half a century ago:
The sudden feeling of sharing something inexplicable, a sense of wonder at the existence of the other — the one person who makes everything simple — a feeling of being calmed down and thrown into turmoil at one and the same time.
Describing a couple united by this kind of love, Balle captures the essential qualities of a lasting relationship:
They had a closeness which I could not help but notice. Not the sort of unspoken awareness that shuts other people out, the self-absorption of a couple in the first throes of love who need constantly to make contact by look or touch, nor the fragile intimacy which makes an outsider feel like a disruptive element and gives you the urge to simply leave the lovers alone with their delicate alliance. They had an air of peace about them… [They] had clearly decided to spend the rest of their lives together, it was as simple as that, so what could they do but see what the future would bring.
The future, however, can bring what the present can’t foresee, can’t bear to consider. People die. Lovers stop loving. Sudden and mysterious phase transitions of feeling take place without warning or explanation, they way the lava of one person’s passion can turn to stone overnight, leaving the other entombed in painful and lonely confusion. Because of this, to live with the fundamental fear of loss and love anyway may be the purest measure of our aliveness. What makes it possible — the only thing that makes it possible — is to refuse the glass-half-empty view of life, to see that death is a token of the luck of having lived and every loss a token of the luck of having had, that these are miracles that weren’t owed us but nonetheless prevailed over the laws of probability so we may live and love.
There are moments we remember this, moments that stagger us into this primal perspective — moments Balle describes as ones when “the ground under one’s feet falls away and all at once it feels as though all predictability can be suspended, as though an existential red alert has suddenly been triggered.” She writes:
It is as if this emergency response mechanism is there on standby at the back of the mind, like an undertone, not normally audible, but kicking in the moment one is confronted with the unpredictability of life, the knowledge that everything can change in an instant, that something which cannot happen and which we absolutely do not expect, is nonetheless a possibility… That the logic of the world and the laws of nature break down. That we are forced to acknowledge that our expectations about the constancy of the world are on shaky ground. There are no guarantees and behind all that we ordinarily regard as certain lie improbable exceptions, sudden cracks and inconceivable breaches of the usual laws.
It seems so odd to me now, how one can be so unsettled by the improbable. When we know that our entire existence is founded on freak occurrences and improbable coincidences. That we wouldn’t be here at all if it weren’t for these curious twists of fate. That there are human beings on what we call our planet, that we can move around on a rotating sphere in a vast universe full of inconceivably large bodies comprised of elements so small that the mind simply cannot comprehend how small and how many there are. That in this unfathomable vastness, these infinitesimal elements are still able to hold themselves together. That we manage to stay afloat. That we exist at all. That each of us has come into being as only one of untold possibilities. The unthinkable is something we carry with us always. It has already happened: we are improbable, we have emerged from a cloud of unbelievable coincidences… We have grown accustomed to living with that knowledge without feeling dizzy every morning, and instead of moving around warily and tentatively, in constant amazement, we behave as if nothing has happened, take the strangeness of it all for granted and get dizzy if life shows itself as it truly is: improbable, unpredictable, remarkable.
This, of course, is why to live is a probable impossibility and to love is to live against probability; it is why our moral obligation to the universe is to love one another while we are and because we are alive.
Source: Daily Beast
The greatest trick white supremacy ever pulled was positioning racism as only a belief system and not a power structure. This racist system is designed to make you believe that if you just act right, you’ll reach the safety of rarefied air; then they remind you not to breathe. Now is not the time to be more tolerant about race; rather, it’s time to be more intolerant about racism.
By August 2024, 40,000 self-proclaimed vigilante vote-fraud hunters had already challenged the rights of 852,381 voters — with a tar...
