"... It didn’t happen by accident. It’s the product of a deliberate and systematic assault on knowledge by some of the richest people on Earth. Preventing climate breakdown means protecting ourselves from the storm of lies."

If "you have the money to fund a junktank, it will produce whatever opinion you request, then papers such as the New York Times will balance that opinion against decades of academic study, as if the two things are of equal weight." 

Illustration: Thomas Pullin/The Guardian

Dark forces are preventing us fighting the climate crisis – by taking knowledge hostage

The fundamental problem is this: that most of the means of communication are owned or influenced by the very rich

George Monbiot 

If this were just a climate crisis, we would fix it. The technology, money and strategies have all been at hand for years. What stifles effective action is a deadly conjunction: the climate crisis running headlong into the epistemic crisis.

An epistemic crisis is a crisis in the production and delivery of knowledge. It’s about what we know and how we know it, what we agree to be true and what we identify as false. We face, alongside a global threat to our life-support systems, a global threat to our knowledge-support systems.

Let’s start by recognising that they were never robust. There was no golden age of public knowledge, no moment at which the information most people received was largely unbiased and accurate. Throughout modern history, European societies have formed a broad consensus around blatant falsehoods: such as the view that the monarch embodied all the interests of the nation, that women were unsuited to public life, that Black and Brown people were inferior beings, that empire was a force for good. A vast infrastructure of persuasion was built around these beliefs. Public knowledge is always shaped by power.

The promise of democracy was that the lives of all would steadily improve as knowledge spread: we would turn our gathering understanding of the world into social progress. For a while, in some places, we did. But that era now seems to be coming to an end.

The fundamental problem is this: that most of the means of communication are owned or influenced by the very rich. If democracy is the problem capital is always trying to solve, propaganda is part of the solution. Like the ... READ MORE   https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/nov/14/climate-crisis-communication-super-rich

AS ALWAYS PLEASE GO TO THE LINK TO READ GOOD ARTICLES & QUOTES IN FULL: HELP SHAPE ALGORITHMS (and conversations) THAT EMPOWER DECENCY, DIGNITY, JUSTICE & PEACE... and hopefully Palestine, or at least fair and just laws and policies]  

Israel’s ecocide in Gaza sends this message: even if we stopped dropping bombs, you couldn’t live here... Consider the annihilation of agricultural land alongside the genocide – and grasp the chilling totality of this attempt to eliminate all life.

An Israeli tank on the northern border of Gaza, 28 May 2024. Photograph: Mostafa Alkharouf/Anadolu/Getty Images

by George Monbiot in The Guardian  Sat 27 Sep 2025

A landless people and a peopleless land: these, it appears, are the aims of the Israeli government in Gaza. There are two means by which they are achieved. The first is the mass killing and expulsion of the Palestinians. The second is rendering the land uninhabitable. Alongside the crime of genocide, another great horror unfolds: ecocide.

While the destruction of buildings and infrastructure in Gaza is visible in every video we see, less visible is the parallel destruction of ecosystems and means of subsistence. Before the 7 October atrocity that triggered the current assault on Gaza, about 40% of its land was farmed. Despite its extreme population density, Gaza was mostly self-sufficient in vegetables and poultry, and met much of the population’s demand for olives, fruit and milk. But last month the UN reported that just 1.5% of its agricultural land now remains both accessible and undamaged. That’s roughly 200 hectares – the only remaining area directly available to feed more than 2 million people.

Part of the reason is the systematic destruction of farmland by the Israeli military. Ground troops have demolished greenhouses; bulldozers have toppled orchards, ploughed out crops and crushed the soil; and planes have sprayed herbicides over the fields.

What is ecocide and could it become a crime under international law?

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) justify these attacks by claiming that “Hamas often operates from within orchards, fields, and agricultural land.” And apparently from hospitals, schools, universities, industrial estates and any other resources on which the Palestinians depend. All the IDF needs to do in order to rationalise destruction is to suggest that Hamas has operated or might operate from the thing it wants to destroy. And if there’s no evidence – sorry, too late.

The IDF is steadily expanding the “buffer zone” along Gaza’s eastern border, which happens to contain much of the Strip’s agricultural land. As the human rights specialist Hamza Hamouchene points out, rather than “making the desert bloom” – a mainstay of Israeli state propaganda – it is turning fertile and productive land into desert.

The Israeli government has been felling Palestinians’ ancient olive trees for decades to deprive them of subsistence, demoralise them and break their connection with the land. Olives are both materially crucial, accounting for 14% of the Palestinian economy, and symbolically powerful: if there are no olive trees, there can be no olive branch. Israel’s scorched-earth policy, in conjunction with its blockade of food supplies, guarantees famine... READ MORE  https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/sep/27/israel-ecocide-gaza-bombs-agricultural-land-genocide

AS ALWAYS PLEASE GO TO THE LINK TO READ GOOD ARTICLES (or quotes) IN FULL: HELP SHAPE ALGORITHMS (and conversations) THAT EMPOWER DECENCY, DIGNITY, JUSTICE & PEACE... and hopefully Palestine, or at least fair and just laws and policies]