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Showing posts with label ecological destruction. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ecological destruction. Show all posts

Sunday, June 28, 2026

Super-rich’s assets cause outsized amount of climate harm, study says. Greenpeace calculates that wealthiest contribute nearly $1tn of damage a year with ownership-based emissions... "By contrast, the bottom half of the world by wealth accounts for just 3% of ownership-based emissions."

Greenpeace said a large share of emissions was associated with the ownership of carbon-intensive assets and investments such as property developments. Photograph: A Amsel/Alamy
  in Bonn

Wed 10 Jun 2026 

Ultra-wealthy people zooming across the world on their private jets, lounging on yachts and conspicuous by their Instagrammable consumption are among the most easily identified individual culprits when it comes to the climate crisis – but new research argues that it is not just their heady lifestyles to blame, but also their bank accounts.

Through their ownership of companies and private financial and physical assets, from oil producers to property developments, the super-rich are responsible for an outsized slice of the greenhouse gases that are overheating the planet. The top 1% of people by wealth, through their shareholdings and investments, control about a quarter of global annual emissions in total.

Greenpeace has calculated the “climate debt” of these high net worth individuals, by attributing to them their share of the damage done to the climate by the assets they own. By this reckoning, the world’s richest cause nearly $1tn a year of damage to the climate.

Clara Thompson, the global lead campaigner on socioeconomic systems at Greenpeace International, said: “At a time when people are facing rising energy bills, rising living costs, and growing climate impacts, many are asking why ordinary households should shoulder so much of the burden, while some of the world’s wealthiest people continue to profit from the industries driving the crisis.”

Greenpeace estimates that the top 1% by wealth are responsible for about 40% of all “ownership”-based emissions – that is, the emissions produced by businesses and associated with privately owned financial and physical assets – which themselves make up 60% of global carbon output. Within that group, the top 0.1% account for about 17% of ownership-based emissions, and the top 0.01% about 9%. The top 1% is made up of people with wealth above about $2m, the top 0.1% people with wealth above about $7m, and the top 0.01% is people with wealth above about $38m.

By contrast, the bottom half of the world by wealth accounts for just 3% of ownership-based emissions.... READ MORE https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jun/10/super-rich-assets-outsized-amount-climate-harm-study

  [AS ALWAYS PLEASE GO TO THE LINK TO READ GOOD ARTICLES (or quotes or watch videos) IN FULL: HELP SHAPE ALGORITHMS (and conversations) THAT EMPOWER DECENCY, DIGNITY, JUSTICE & PEACE... and hopefully Palestine] 

Wednesday, May 13, 2026

Abby Martin exposes the media's role in normalizing genocide.... & The Empire Files premiered its highly anticipated film about the devastating impact our environment and planet are experiencing due to the United States military-industrial complex. Titled “Earth’s Greatest Enemy,”

The Empire Files’ Martin Is a Force To Be Reckoned With... 

In a world in which media consolidation has given the average American fewer options to choose from, independent outlets have become all the more important. Without them, the narrative—which is already tilted in the neoliberal order’s favor—would be wildly skewed, giving the government and their corporate allies free rein to abuse an ostensibly democratic system.

Social media and the internet in general, for all its faults, have enabled independent reporters and activists to push back against conventional wisdom, whether they’re correcting the record about an ahistorical narrative or something timely and newsworthy that’s so obviously one-sided.

One such journalist is Abby Martin, the indefatigable, unrelenting, probing, and uncompromising reporter who for more than a decade has helped shine a light on the excesses and wide-ranging abuses of the U.S. empire.

While there are plenty of journalists similarly confronting American hegemony with thought-provoking coverage and analysis, Martin, to her immense credit, takes the time to visit regions systematically crushed by Western influence, such as Palestine and Venezuela.

To say Martin is fearless would be wholly insufficient. Her coverage of colonialism and criticisms of the United States has not won her any favors from a government that often dismisses alternative journalism as enemy-influenced propaganda.... READ MORE  https://www.unftr.com/blog/progressive-spotlight-abby-martin

&

Abby Martin just exposed the media's role in normalizing genocide. 
 
"Palestinians telling their own stories, dictating their own narratives for the first time. That's why we see the urgency to censor their voices and to consolidate these narratives on social media. 
 
Israel's supporters often say Gaza's suffering is quote unquote tragic, but complex. Is complexity the new weapon of obfuscation in genocidal politics? This is the propaganda that's made it so overly difficult to talk about this issue, but it's the most simple issue in the world. It's the most clear cut issue in the world. It's an occupation that is illegal. And this occupying force is besieging a population in a ghetto and committing genocide against them. 
 
In what reality would 2.3 million Jewish people be allowed to be caged inside of an Arab nation, half children, cut off their electricity and water and then indiscriminately bomb them for two years? In what reality in our world would that be allowed to be possible? It is only the nature of anti-Islam, anti-Muslim bigotry that has made this justified. 
 
This is the most documented atrocity of our time. And it is a disgrace that it took a genocide for people to wake up"
 

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=abby+martin


Journalist Abby Martin’s new documentary takes aim at one of the world’s largest polluters: the U.S. military

On Oct. 18 [2025], The Empire Files premiered its highly anticipated film about the devastating impact our environment and planet are experiencing due to the United States military-industrial complex. Titled “Earth’s Greatest Enemy,” it follows journalists Abby Martin and Mike Prysner who spent years researching, studying, and traveling the world to report on the effects of the military's massive carbon footprint.... READ MORE   https://thesouthlander.com/abby-martin-earths-greatest-enemy/

Tuesday, January 6, 2026

Military Industrial Complex Infographics

 




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]  

https://designaction.org/project/military-industrial-complex-infographics/

David Vine, Professor of Anthropology at American University, worked with Design Action Collective to create a series of infographics that illustrate how the Military Industrial Complex functions —showing its impacts on communities within the United States and around the world. As the U.S. war machine continues to enable genocide on a global scale and violent policing in our cities, these graphics are important political education tools for our communities to understand our conditions, and find points of intervention for anti-war campaigns.

Friday, November 14, 2025

"... 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

 

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]