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tomorrowusa · 2 months

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Russia makes money primarily off of fossil fuels. It does have decent agricultural exports but those alone could not pay for Putin's war machine. So disrupting Russia's oil and gas industry is a way of reducing the country's revenue which allows it to conduct an illegal war of aggression.

Hostile drones have been winding their way across the Russian landscape this winter, striking refineries and related oil and gas infrastructure all the way from the Baltic Sea in the northwest to the Black Sea in the southwest. Drones attacked both the Ilsky and Afipsky refineries in Russia's Krasnodar region, east of occupied Crimea, on Feb. 9, less than a week after another refinery in Volgograd, the largest in southern Russia, was hit. Further attacks have struck other refineries and oil depots near the Ukrainian border, as well as much deeper into Russian territory. Though Ukraine does not typically confirm its actions outside its borders and Russia has not officially acknowledged drones were the cause of these incidents, media reports have identified Kyiv's hand in the attacks occurring with regularity as Moscow's invasion of Ukraine nears the two-year mark. Analysts say the drone attacks are demonstrating that oil and gas targets of economic significance are not out of reach, even far from the front lines of the war.

The late Sen. John McCain nailed it.

Late U.S. Senator John McCain once derisively described Russia as being "a gas station masquerading as a country" — a jibe underlining the critical importance of oil and gas products to Moscow. Indeed, Russia draws heavily on its resource reserves to support the state. The International Energy Agency says Russia's oil and gas export revenues accounted for 45 per cent of its federal budget in 2021.

Of course a lot of that fossil fuel money gets siphoned off by corrupt oligarchs who use it to purchase superyachts and expensive real estate in Western countries.

A January attack on a Novatek facility in Ust-Luga halted gas processing operations there for several weeks. The plant processes gas condensate into various fuel products that are exported to customers in Turkey and Asia, according to Reuters. Sergey Vakulenko, a former strategy executive at Gazprom Neft, a subsidiary of the larger Russian energy firm, believes the Ust-Luga episode may illustrate a bigger problem for Russia than a temporary disruption to production at a single facility. In a recent analysis published online, Vakulenko reasoned that if small drones can get all the way to Ust-Luga, which is hundreds of kilometres from the Ukrainian border, there are some 18 Russian refineries at risk of being targeted, and they account for more than half the country's refinery production. He's not the only analyst noticing this concern for Russia's refineries.

And because hundreds of thousands of competent Russians have (wisely) fled the country and others are being used as cannon fodder for Putin's war, it takes longer to repair facilities damaged by Ukraine.

And the fossil fuel industry mostly has to fend for itself.

Maxim Starchak, an independent expert on the Russian defence and nuclear industry, says regulations have been put in place to restrict drones from flying close to "the most significant fuel and energy sector facilities" and operators are using electronic warfare systems to defend against drone threats. But Starchak said Russian energy firms must foot the bill for expenses related to defence of their facilities. "Moscow will not specifically help," he said, noting Russian authorities may hold firms accountable for not putting measures in place to protect their facilities.

So that burden cuts down on revenue as it adds to the cost of doing business.

One thing Ukraine has been innovative at is drone technology. It's become one of the world's leaders at that.

As Ukraine continues to fight to repel Russian forces from its lands, its military leaders have signalled drones and related technology will be needed to win the war that seems to have no end in sight.

And Western countries find it easier to provide additional drones to Ukraine than to send tanks and cruise missiles.

So Russian convict troops can luxuriate in the ruins of Avdiivka while their oil refineries back home get blown up by Ukraine.

EDIT: Speaking of fuel, just saw this at NPR.

Putin's regime is 'running out of fuel,' a Russian opposition activist tells NPR

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know-news-is-good-news · 1 year

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A rather hard call for America's President: Should he let foreign fossil fuel oligarchs control fossil prices in America or should America use the resources they have at home ? ! ?

It's a choice Europe doesn't have ! !

#Biden #hard #choice #oil #at #home #fossil #fuel #oligarchs #gas #prices #control #high #too #but

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probablyasocialecologist · 5 months

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The farmer in Bangladesh or the street vendor in Brazil doesn’t have nearly the impact of the venture capitalist in California or the petroleum oligarchs of Russia and the Middle East. The richest 1% of humanity is responsible for more carbon emissions than the poorest 66%. The rich are bad for the Earth, and the richer they are the bigger their adverse impact (including the impact of money invested in banks, and stocks financing fossil fuels and other forms of climate destruction). In other words, we are not all the same size. Billionaires loom large over our politics and environment in ways that are hard to understand without taking on the shocking scale of their wealth. That impact, both through their climate emissions and their manipulations of politics and public life means they are not at all like the rest of humanity. They are behemoths, and they mostly use their outsize power in ugly ways – both in how much they consume and how much they influence the world’s climate response. Let me put it this way: if you made $10,000 a week – a princely sum by the standards of most people – you would have to work every week from the year of Jesus’s birth until this week to earn over a billion dollars. To earn as much as Elon Musk’s net worth at that rate – currently $180bn, according to Forbes – you’d have to work every week for more than a third of a million years – that is, since before Homo sapiens first emerged in Africa.

[...]

Billionaires are a menace to the rest of us: their sheer political size warps our public life. Disproportionately older, white and male, they function as unelected powers, a sort of freelance global aristocracy who are too often trying to reign over the rest of us. Some critics think that the supergiant tech corporations that have spawned so many modern billionaires operate in ways that resemble feudalism more than capitalism, and, certainly, plenty of billionaires operate like the lords of the Earth while campaigning to protect the economic inequality that made them so rich and makes so many others so poor. They use their power in arbitrary, reckless and often environmentally destructive ways.

#climate change #inequality #billionaires #rebecca solnit #compost the rich

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theriverbeyond · 8 months

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Love your post about Gideon inadvertently breaking John's pattern of lashing out when she can't be used, and it made me wonder- what would John keeping the home fires burning for the Earth have looked like?

omg ty so much! ok so. things John could do to keep the home fires burning:

(tell the world) STOP (the war) the nuclear standoff. put those things away!!! better yet. destroy them.

let the trillionares go. they did it. it's done. your home is still here and can still be saved. let them go!!!!!!

MORE THAN THAT. if all the rich capitalists are the ones who ruined so many things, and now a bunch of them are GONE, then a lot of their influence is also gone!!! the oligarchs are gone baybey!!! John could step into the power vacum they left and force the hands of governments to like, do good things. force them to give everyone food and healthcare and stop fossil fuels. he could be a climate influencer online to dramatically influence the greater culture, instead of just doing that weird necro cult shit on twitch.

John cracked the code with the death of C--, and drank a BUNCH of deaths at the compound, so he Understands now. he wouldn't end up as powerful as he did when he Ate Alecto, but he cracked the code when he saw (& grabbed) the soul. this means he likely could...

BRING BACK HIS FRIENDS!!! The bodies are still there and he is literally holding the souls. bring them back and put the souls inside. they keep him sane and they love him and they have ideas

FEED EVERYONE. a big problem he mentioned was the planet running out of resources, but you're the lifedeath guy now. you cracked the CODE!!! it is time to go full jesus on the world. make wine from water and more bread from just one bread. take a fish and make it 100 fish. take an oil spill and turn it into nutrients for the fish. etc.

USE his new deathlife powers to do other things like, fix the oceans. fix the ozone. transform the big piles of garbage into something more readily taken by the sea. plant new sequioas and giant cacti and then accelerate their growth by 1000 years so they can provide for all their living things. inject biodiversity into endangered species and prevent their deaths by boats and deforestation etc. Yeah some of them might be teeth mutants, but when god sings with his creations, will a tooth mutant not be part of the choir?

to be evil but for the greater good, John could also kill and then puppet other world leaders and then more aggressively force institutional climate change, and end things like overfishing and Shein. i don't know if he is politically smart enough to finesse this but idk if he had his friends it could be a group effort. yeah he would still be one shade of evil dictator but it could NOT be worse than exploding the solar system.

i think the last point especially, like. in general, not exploding the world would be better than exploding the world. he could have done kind of a bad job of keeping the home fires burning and it would have still been way better than what he DID, which was kill everyone else and then himself

#he got better but like. a lot of them did not #nona the ninth #tlt meta #john gaius #ask #miraclesbound #apologies if this sounds like a golden retriever looking at a waving stick. i just woke up.

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climatecalling · 5 months

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When you talk about the climate crisis, sooner or later someone is going to say that population is the issue and fret about the sheer number of humans now living on Earth. But population per se is not the problem, because the farmer in Bangladesh or the street vendor in Brazil doesn’t have nearly the impact of the venture capitalist in California or the petroleum oligarchs of Russia and the Middle East. The richest 1% of humanity is responsible for more carbon emissions than the poorest 66%. The rich are bad for the Earth, and the richer they are the bigger their adverse impact (including the impact of money invested in banks, and stocks financing fossil fuels and other forms of climate destruction). In other words, we are not all the same size. Billionaires loom large over our politics and environment in ways that are hard to understand without taking on the shocking scale of their wealth. That impact, both through their climate emissions and their manipulations of politics and public life means they are not at all like the rest of humanity. They are behemoths, and they mostly use their outsize power in ugly ways – both in how much they consume and how much they influence the world’s climate response.

#climate crisis #climate solutions #inequality #billionaires #consumption emissions

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mariacallous · 1 month

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THROWING KYIV UNDER THE TRACTOR: In a major cave-in to Europe’s farming lobby, EU countries overnight agreed to impose restrictions on Ukrainian agricultural sales, dealing a significant blow to its exports.

Less revenue for Kyiv: This retreat ahead of this week’s EU leaders’ summit (for which farmers are descending on Brussels again) paves the way for a deal with the European Parliament today to partly roll back Kyiv’s trade benefits, officials and diplomats told Playbook. That’s expected to result in a revenue loss of more than €1 billion a year for the war-struck country.

Masks off: At last night’s meeting of the 27 government envoys, France came out in support of Poland, asking for a limit on imports of Ukrainian poultry, eggs, sugar and wheat, according to two people briefed on the discussion.

Strategic yogurt, revisited: Just as Macron stressed France’s no-holds-barred support for Ukraine, the pitchfork-wielding farmers have blown a hole into his “whatever it takes” soufflé.

Signal to Russia: Vladimir Putin can rely on European agri-food groups to do his lobbying for him. Russia’s full supermarket shelves — heaving with EU products — have been one of the regime’s go-to arguments to show Russia is winning the war.

Contradictory policy: This isn’t the first time the EU bowed to its agri sector when it comes to Russia’s war on Ukraine. While Russian-flagged ships are banned from EU ports, there’s an exemption for those carrying Russian fertilizers and pesticides. In previous decisions, the EU also rolled back asset freezes against Russian oligarchs involved in the agri-food trade.

The argument, back then, was that tougher restrictions on Russian fertilizers would lead to higher food prices in Europe. But that’s exactly what restrictions on imports from Ukraine will also do.

HAPPENING TODAY: The Belgian Council presidency and MEPs will meet this evening for negotiations on the new restrictions. Parliament has also asked for a lower ceiling at which the restrictions will kick in, as my colleagues Camille Gijs and Bartosz Brzeziński report in this must-read.

WINNERS AND LOSERS: Take a moment to appreciate the farming lobby’s political feat. Sky-high energy prices, a narrowly averted winter heating crisis, an influx of millions of refugees and Putin’s nuclear saber-rattling didn’t undermine EU will to support Ukraine — but farmers successfully convinced leaders to U-turn on policies aimed at supporting Kyiv’s income.

Winners: EU agricultural groups, who get to have their cake and eat it. After a host of measures meant to lower their production costs (such as derogations from environmental rules and the reintroduction of fossil fuel subsidies), they will now get measures to shield them from competition and increase their sales prices.

Also a winner: Russia. Today’s decision doesn’t just mean a revenue loss for Ukraine; it proves that EU leaders’ support for Ukraine caves under interest group pressure.

Losers: Ukrainian farmers, who look set to forgo some €1.2 billion a year in sales to the EU. And European consumers, who will get even less supply and choice, which could again drive up food price inflation.

BLAME IT ON THE ELECTION YEAR: Asked why they caved in, senior officials blamed their leaders’ fear that the farmers’ protests could fuel new populist parties, such as the BBB in the Netherlands.

But there are other ways to placate them: As some EU officials stressed, countries could help the majority of farmers simply by distributing subsidies more fairly. Some 80 percent of the EU’s direct farm subsidies go to the 20 percent biggest farms, according to the Commission.

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female-malice · 11 months

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Oh shit UFO whistleblower David Grusch

He says the US government has "recovered non-human origin vehicles." And that "space craft is probably not the right word for it...."

I knew it! I knew interdimensional travel is more probable than interstellar travel!

DEMONS DEMONS DEMONS HAHAHA

I really want to meet a demon so bad. But more importantly, we can't let big dumb ass military fossil fuel oligarchs horde this information. They're just going to try to colonize another dimension for resources. The military class 1% can't keep this to themselves. We need the demons to send out another round of obelisks or something to try to communicate with the 99% again.

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qqueenofhades · 2 years

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I'm so fucking tired of these "climate activists" throwing soup onto people. Why do they have to target PUBLIC ART (I know some museums have paid entree but still) instead of you know the actual oil oligarchs they pretend to want to stop :)

Like. Why does their fucking target have to be HISTORICAL ART of all things. The one thing that shows HUMANITY in all ages because above all humans create art for the sake of art and they love art for the sake of art.

Literally I know museums holding important pieces are fucking TERRIFIED of these assholes and it's like... the news articles really aren't about how we need to talk about oil, they're about whether these paintings were or were not damaged during these attacks.

I'm tired. It feels fucking shitty. It makes me want to cry. The world already is so fucking trash, and then people use "activism" to go and make it even fucking worse.

Likewise deeply unsure why these idiots (who, you will notice, are all young white kids relying on said white privilege to protect them from any major consequences) think that this is the way to do anything about anything. As you point out, the focus isn't on climate change or oil usage or whatever else, it's just about the paintings and makes them all look like spoiled insensitive Woke dicks who want to pretend to be doing something and disrupting society etc while, uh. Not doing that at all.

There are plenty of ways to get involved and do real work if your goal is to actually fight climate change, talk about the impact of fossil fuels, or make people care about sustainable environmentalism. None of them are this.

#anonymous #ask

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religion-is-a-mental-illness · 10 months

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By: Joel Kotkin

Published: Jun 21, 2023

In an age of darkness, glimpses of light are rare — but all the brighter for it. As the censorious progressivism embraced by Joe Biden and much of his Democratic party grows into an increasingly pervasive quasi-religion, ordinary people are finding ways to push back. Like democratic Leftists in the Cold War, old-style liberals are becoming a key force in challenging today’s new orthodoxies.

And this rising tide of liberal apostasy, coupled with a growing pushback from grassroots businesses and consumers, represents a far more profound challenge to the established order than the one routinely mounted by conservatives. In the Renaissance, the impetus for change did not come from Jews, Muslims, devil-worshippers or pagans, but devout Christians such as Erasmus, Luther and Calvin.

In our era, the most powerful critics of progressive theology once again tilt to the Left: Andrew Sullivan, Matt Taibbi, Ruy Teixeira, to name but three. Their apostasy rises to uphold the basic principles once central to liberalism — equality of opportunity, free speech, and open inquiry. This battle is also reminiscent of the struggle waged by the Renaissance critics of the all-powerful Catholic Church. Today, it’s not bishops or popes who seek control, but the oligarchs and their media platforms which, with the sometimes exception of Twitter, favour a censorship regime that brands dissidents largely as purveyors of “misinformation”.

Like earlier apostates, religious or scientific, ours face an uphill struggle. They must contend with forces within the C-suite and, particularly, academia, where even the sciences are now constrained by ideological edicts. This is where the money flows, often to a host of non-profits, some secretly funded, that spread the gospels of censorship, police reduction, indoctrination in schools and an apocalyptic environmental agenda. One problem the apostates face is therefore an obvious one: despite often impressive media resumes, their research rarely makes it into the mainstream, their voices being carried no further than Twitter, Substack and the more broad-minded corners of the media.

This pushback comes at a propitious time, extending beyond a few dissident intellectuals to the grassroots and business moguls such as Elon Musk, Ken Griffin and Bernie Marcus. The latter, in particular, understand that the new progressive orthodoxy undermines the entire system by embracing anti-capitalist memes and reducing the role of merit in a system built around it. And so a critical front has been the rebellion against ESG (environmental, social, governance) standards. Many US states have moved to take their pension funds out of firms that embrace this ideology; some investment houses, notably Vanguard and upstart Thrive Asset Management, are eschewing corporate policies that stress climate change and other issues over fiduciary obligation to investors.. The fact that returns to ESG firms have been poor, when compared with those tied to fossil fuels and basic industries, could presage a further awakening among financial and business leaders that the balance sheet, rather than ideological back-slapping, constitutes the primary mission of business.

More important still, apostasy is also rising among the general population. The pressure for reparations, for example, is opposed by upwards of two-thirds of Americans. All major ethnic groups, notes Pew, reject race quotas, including African-Americans; overall, almost three in four oppose this, as do a majority of both Democrats and Republicans.

In the race debate, the role of black apostates is particularly critical. As John McWhorter has long argued, preferential policies encourage “therapeutic alienation” among black people and other minorities — leading some to adopt a mentality of “anger and scapegoating”, instead of doing “the work needed for success”. In the bizarre world of modern progressivism, any opposition to this agenda is “racist”, even if it comes from people who support equal rights and access to opportunity. Critics of race-based discrimination such as McWhorter and Glenn Loury are far from Klansmen incarnate.

Similarly, assaults on European culture have proven unlikely to win over the masses in these countries, the bulk of whom still express some pride in their heritage. The notion that Western societies are eternally oppressive and racist seems a bit of a stretch given that millions of Africans, Middle Easterners, and south Asians continue to flock to these countries, largely to experience higher levels of economic and cultural freedom. The progressive assault on heritage also is likely to stir up far-Right sentiment, as we can see in France, Denmark, and, perhaps most dangerously, Germany.

The ever-more edgy cultural agenda of the Left, particularly its obsession with transgenderism, provides additional fuel for apostasy. People generally believe in the existence of two genders, and are hostile to efforts to impose either sexual or explicitly political curricula on young people. The idea of parental rights, for example — making sure parents are informed if their child decides to transition — has broad support, including nearly four-fifths of Californians, reflecting what appear to be national trends. In defiance of the transgender advocacy from the White House down, the opposition to sporting categories based on gender, rather than sex, has actually grown over the last two years, with even more Democrats now opposed to the practice than in favour.

Critically — and, no doubt, shocking for some — many opposing the progressive agenda are themselves minorities. In Britain and Europe, for example, Muslims tend to be more religious and socially conservative than whites, and Indians, particularly Hindus, have been drifting Right-wards for a generation. In America, surveys show that foreign-born Americans are also more culturally conservative than the native-born.

Perhaps the most economically significant apostasy relates to climate-change policy. Despite growing moves to censor contrary opinions, here the liberal apostates are not classic deniers or oil company executives, but respected scientists such as former Obama advisor Steve Koonin, and climate scientists Roger Pielke and Judith Curry. Even some environmentalists — including Greenpeace co-founder Patrick Moore — openly denounce “Net Zero” and “de-growth” policies as both impractical and deeply flawed. They recognise that these policies are already leading to the immiseration of poorer people, particularly in California and Germany. They are not calling for an end to climate change mitigation, but for policies that are more realistic and less economically damaging for the working and middle classes.

And then there are grassroots protests at European governments’ attempts to impose emission reductions on farmers and ban chemical fertilisers — regulatory moves at a time when food prices are rising throughout the West. Efforts to reduce agricultural output, now being suggested in the United States and Canada, also could have dire consequences for billions in the developing world. It’s hardly surprising, then, that there is growing scepticism about climate policies globally; in surveys, it barely registers as a priority for people either in Africa or the US where, according to Gallup, climate is stated as a primary concern for barely 2% of the population.

Other troubles, notably the loss of industry amid soaring energy costs, are already creating a popular backlash, which has been a boon for the far-Right in Germany and Italy, among others. Some centrist regimes have taken fright, with France’s Emmanuel Macron stepping back from climate extremism. Less than a year ago, Germany signed an EU target to ban the sale of cars with internal combustion engines by 2035, but quickly backtracked.

Overall, for all the talk of ideological polarisation, public opinion may well be tilting more towards the apostates than those of the progressive zealots. Despite the media profile of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her fellow “Squad” members, the majority of Democrat members consider themselves moderate or conservative, while barely one in four sees themselves as “very liberal”.

Of course, even with public support, supporters of traditional liberal values face a number of challenges when it comes to enacting meaningful political change. But there is some good news. Many companies are now rethinking their marketing strategies in the face of negative consumer reaction. There are even glimmers of hope for liberal apostasy in some big cities, as demonstrated by the election of New York’s pro-police Eric Adams and San Francisco’s recall of progressive school board members.

As was the case during the Reformation, the apostate’s course is still not an easy one. But their critique remains critical to undermining the current progressive theology — a far more effective weapon than the reactionary antics of DeSantis, which are focused primarily on Right-leaning GOP voters. In contrast, the apostates speak the same language and share many of the values that once constituted progressive ideals. They are, in other words, both the key to restoring rationality — and to keeping liberalism alive for future generations.

I'm a-Woke for the exact same reasons I'm a-theist.

#Joel Kotkin #classic liberalism #liberal ethics #liberal values #liberalism #illiberalism #woke nonsense #woke #wokeism #wokeness as religion #cult of woke #wokeness #centrism #the sane middle #tribeless #politically homeless #religion is a mental illness

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contemplatingoutlander · 2 months

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Interesting proposal by Nate Loewentheil in a guest column in The New York Times. Not only was his proposal thought provoking, but two of the comments regarding it by readers were also worth contemplating. Below are some excerpts from the column, followed by the two comments.

Here is a proposal for the environmental movement: Pool philanthropic funds for a day, buy a small plot of land in Washington, D.C., and put up a tall marble wall to serve as a climate memorial. Carve on this memorial the names of public figures actively denying the existence of climate change. Carve the names so deep and large, our grandchildren and great-grandchildren need not search the archives. This is not a metaphor. The problem with climate change is the disconnect between action and impact. If politicians vote against construction standards and a school collapses, the next election will be their last. But with climate change, cause and effect are at a vast distance. We are already seeing the consequences of our past and present greenhouse gas emissions. In coming decades, those emissions will wreak their full havoc on the climate, and it will take hundreds, possibly thousands, of years for those pollutants to fully dissipate. But in the short term, the most immediate burdens are borne mostly by the poor in America and distant people in distant lands. Misaligned incentives are at the heart of why some political and business leaders deny and delay. [...] I would first nominate those who have sown confusion over climate science, like Myron Ebell, who recently retired as director of the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Center for Energy and Environment, where he sought to block climate change efforts in Congress, and served as the head of Donald Trump’s transition team for the Environmental Protection Agency. Mr. Ebell has argued that the idea that climate change is “an existential threat or even crisis is preposterous.” Then there are lawmakers who have consistently stood in the way of federal action, like the recently retired senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma, the author of the book “The Greatest Hoax: How the Global Warming Conspiracy Threatens Your Future.” [color emphasis added]

Below is the first thought provoking comment to this article:

There is, in Iceland, a memorial to a dead glacier - the Ok Glacier. It reads: "Ok is the first Icelandic glacier to lose its status as a glacier. In the next 200 years all our glaciers are expected to follow the same path. This monument is to acknowledge that we know what is happening and what needs to be done. Only you know if we did it." [color emphasis added] --Chris D., Colorado

Photo of the plaque at the at the Okjökull (OK Glacier) memorial.

Here is the second thought provoking comment to this article:

For reference this graph https://i.redd.it/ljifc828iui31.jpg is from the Exxon internal scientific report on climate change, 1982, produced by scientists working for that fossil fuel corporation. Look at what their graph predicted for 2020. Approaching 420 ppm CO2 and a rise of 1.2 C degrees above pre-industrial temperature - very close to what we actually got in 2020. Then look at what the graph shows for later this century, based on not reducing emissions. Very serious temperature rises, that could make agriculture very difficult in many countries. Yes, and then Exxon, having seen this, got involved in PR campaigns to "cast doubt" on climate science, to protect their assets. [color emphasis added] --Erik Frederiksen, Ashville, NC

1982 Exxon graph depicting average global temperature increases over time correlating with increases in atmospheric CO2. NOTE: Graph color was modified for greater clarity.

Fossil fuel companies like Exxon, and fossil fuel oligarchs like the Koch brothers should be included in any "Climate Wall of Shame."

#climate change #disinformation about climate change #climate change deniers #climate wall of shame #myron ebell #james inhofe #koch brothers #exxon #fossil fuel industry #ok glacier memorial #nate loewentheil #the new york times

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tomorrowusa · 1 year

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It might happen next week or it could take two years. But Putin’s bloody fiasco will hasten his demise.

This may seem premature, but, it is not. The Putin regime is dead. It has been killed off because of the folly of the man that has sat at the top of the mafia pyramid for over two decades, Russian dictator Vladimir Putin himself. His barrage of missile strikes across Ukraine on 15 November was, as well as a war crime by depriving civilians of heat and electricity, a sign of desperation not a sign of strength.

Here’s the fundamental problem. There is absolutely nothing attractive about the model of rule that has evolved during the Putin era. It is not an alternative to how democracies, however imperfect, are managed. There is nothing about Russia today that attracts willing adherents. Certainly not in the parts of Ukraine that Putin has attempted to conquer by force this year.

Are there any countries which aspire to be like Russia? Perhaps the 13% of the population of Belarus which doesn’t despise its own pro-Putin puppet leader.

Russia was supposed to have the second most powerful military in the world. That now seems like a sick joke. Russia can’t do any better now than to bomb maternity hospitals.

The corruption in the military extends to selling anything that can possibly be sold. Rations. Fuel. Weapons. Ammunition. All of it is seen as nothing more than the income men of rank feel entitled to. This is a major contributing factor to Russia’s military failures in Ukraine, from which all other failures now stem in a country that had become addicted to war.

How can you run supply lines without adequate quantities of fuel? Newly-mobilised soldiers complain of insufficient practice on the firing range, because of a lack of ammunition. Winter clothing is now being stitched in North Korea (one of the only allies Russia can speak to) because the warehouses have been emptied of supplies that were sold to the black market.

Outside the glitzy big cities, Russia is impoverished. People there now live only slightly better than they did under the last tsar.

The corruption in the military has not only been a major contributing factor to Russia’s inability to secure any military success in the all-out war against Ukraine, it has highlighted also the depth of poverty and inequality that plight the country as a whole.

Poverty is what has been at the heart of the widespread looting that Russian soldiers have infamously become known for. The inequality of where Putin’s forces have been drawn from has shown how the Russian regime is perfectly happy to hoover up men from the poorer parts of Russia, and that these are areas made up of ethnic minorities, who are predominantly being used as expendable bodies who have little value to a country that shows they do not value life.

The enormous profits from fossil fuel production went into the pockets of corrupt oligarchs who spent them on superyachts and prime real estate in London and other Western cities. Now much of the rest of the world is learning how to get by without Russian oil and gas. A large part of its export market is drying up. Poverty will grow and probably spread to the big cities.

Nobody knows who or what will come after Putin. But the country probably won’t get the sort of person it needs. It could use an Atatürk or at least a de Gaulle but will probably end up with somebody who is just slightly less authoritarian and slightly less corrupt than Putin.

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By coincidence, Saturday (November 26th) was Holodomor Memorial Day. The Holodomor is the 1932-1933 starvation genocide of millions of Ukrainians by Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin and his Communist régime.

Holodomor Remembrance Day

Dictators in Moscow may change, but their thinking remains imperialistic and genocidal.

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cozycryptidcorner · 2 months

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Yareph is such a sweet guy and hope one day he got to see the milky way beside reader during a picnic under the stars. Best wife fr

Thank you! He really is, and he will, once venus’ air gets vacuumed to a more appropriate atmosphere. Honestly I don’t think I’ll write a sequel because it would have to be about the political reaction from earth countries about a superpowered alien society deciding to live on Venus (more so that the reader character would be like “here is technology for clean energy to output at the same level as fossil fuels for everyone :)” and that would hurt gas oligarch families’ feelings)

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argyrocratie · 1 year

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Clan capitalism

Ukraine became independent in 1991 following a referendum in which more than 90% of voters voted in favor.[3] Until 2014, Russia accepted this result and recognized Ukraine’s existence in a sort of regime of “limited sovereignty”. Ukraine was tied to its larger neighbor by economic relations[4] and Russia was able to use its local clients to influence internal political development. The latter has long been turbulent.

The period of economic transition in which Ukraine followed, to some extent, the prescriptions of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, quickly created a new capitalist class. At first, it was composed mainly of “red directors” (i.e., the managerial cadres of the Stalinist regime), and later also of broader layers – from the ranks of the technical intelligentsia, various parts of the state apparatus and the criminal underworld. The 1990s were a true Eldorado for this class, though often quite dangerous for its individual members. Using both legal and extralegal methods, it seized key enterprises and banks, which it either stripped of all assets or concentrated into giant holdings and investment groups. Profits were exported to tax havens. At the same time, it began to take control of the media and politics. Unlike its predecessors in the Stalinist nomenklatura, it also managed to integrate itself into the global capitalist class, at least in terms of the use of its consumption fund (yachts and luxury properties abroad, jets, as well as private investments in international financial markets).

Meanwhile, Ukraine’s real GDP per capita was in steady decline– up until 2000. Average life expectancy decreased from 70.5 (in 1989) to 67.7 years. Non-payment of wages,[5] work in the informal economy, and a decline in purchasing power became everyday realities for the Ukrainian working class. Although the numerous strikes, marches, hunger strikes, and blockades have managed to score some local successes (e.g., the payment of wage arrears, postponement of privatization, etc.), they failed to change the overall course or create a broader movement.

The story so far is not that different from the Russian one.[6] However, the centralization and consolidation that Putin implemented after the Asian financial crisis and the collapse of the ruble (1997–98) never took place in Ukraine. Putin gradually nationalized some energy companies, built a “power vertical”, whose backbone was formed by security service cadres and various personal friends, and subordinated the oligarchs to this structure. The latter has since overseen the distribution of rent derived mainly from fossil fuel extraction. Ukraine’s domestic capitalist class, by contrast, has remained divided into competing “clans” that are tied to specific sectors of the economy and geographic regions.[7] The rivalry between these factions of Ukrainian capital has been the basis of political instability.

The numerous movements of political protest which often also voiced social and welfare demands were always co-opted by a political project of one of the groups – either from the very beginning or gradually. The “Ukraine without Kuchma” (2001–2002) and “Arise, Ukraine!” (2002–2003) protests were directed against President Leonid Kuchma, involved in several scandals, including the murder of a journalist. The “Orange Revolution” (2004–2005) was in response to the electoral fraud of the then prime minister and presidential candidate Viktor Yanukovych, as well as the suspicious privatization of Ukraine’s largest steelworks in Kryvyi Rih (Dnipropetrovsk Oblast), in which Kuchma’s brother-in-law was involved along with the former Donetsk gangster, Rinat Akhmetov. The movement “Rise up, Ukraine!” (2013) opposed President Yanukovych and his attempts to consolidate power. Finally, the Euromaidan (2014) was a reaction to his decision not to sign the Association Agreement with the European Union. The most successful of these movements, the Orange Revolution, and the Euromaidan, may have led to a change of political leadership, but they did not significantly shake the position of the clans, let alone the clan system as such. Ultimately, they became a means of bringing another faction of the domestic business class to power.

The lumpen-capitalist competition, in which one or the other faction gained control of the state (and thus preferential access to loans, subsidies and contracts), explains, at least in part, why the state has failed to impose a long-term, viable development plan on the country. On the other hand, this unstable environment also left some room for the development of a resistant civil society, including independent trade unions, activist organizations, and the radical left.[8]

Russia maintained an influence over Ukraine through those sections of the local capitalist class that were materially interested in maintaining close relations – for example, in the interests of their own sales, favorable prices for inputs (especially, but not exclusively, energy inputs), or gas transfer fees. The capital base of this faction was mainly concentrated in the Donbas, the former industrial heartland of the Soviet Union, home to a large Russian-speaking population and the birthplace of the Stakhanovite “movement”. In the 1990s it was the scene of the bloodiest conflicts within the capitalist class, a center of organized crime – but also the epicenter of the tragedy of the “old” working class, especially the miners. Their mass strikes in the late 1980s and early 1990s helped destroy the Soviet regime and win Ukraine’s independence,[9] but after a wave of privatizations, asset stripping and bankruptcies, many found themselves with no jobs or prospects. Between 1992 and 2013, the population of Donetsk and Luhansk Oblasts fell by 1.7 million, declining at twice the rate of the rest of the country.[10]

- karmína,“the tragedy of the ukrainian working class” (2022)

_ _ _

[3] This was about 76% of all eligible voters. In Crimea, support for independence was the weakest, at around 54% of the vote. Similarly in Crimea’s Sevastopol, which was a separate constituency – 57%. In Donetsk and Luhansk Oblasts, however, almost 84% of those who voted were in favor of independence. Wikipedia summarizes the results in detail.

[4] As recently as 2013, imports from Russia accounted for 29% of total imports of goods; exports to Russia accounted for almost 23% of Ukrainian exports of goods. By 2020, both indicators had dropped to 11% and 6%, respectively (see oec.world). On the other hand, exports to the EU15 already accounted for a larger share of total Ukrainian exports than exports to Russia in 2002. Thus, the dependence of Ukrainian industry on Russian gas and oil has played a decisive role.

[5] A specific feature of the Ukrainian (as well as Russian) transition was that official unemployment never reached a level close to twenty percent, such as in Poland (2002) or Slovakia (2001). Workers in enterprises that ran into trouble remained formally employed but were not paid – although in many cases they continued to work. Sometimes they received payments in kind instead of cash.

[6] Of course, in many respects it is also reminiscent of the history of other former Eastern Bloc countries, including Slovakia.

[7] The history and structure of the “clans” is described in “The Oligarchic Democracy” by Sławomir Matuszak. See also “The Consolidation of Ukrainian Business Clans” by Viatcheslav Avioutskii.

[8] A peculiar phenomenon of political life in Ukraine was the emergence of a seriesof fake left-wing groups founded around 2000 by the same circle of people. These pseudo-organizations established contacts with foreign “internationals”, mainly of the Trotskyist variety, and lured material aid or money from them. It was enough to write that they identified with their political program and wanted to become a Ukrainian or Russian section. Despite personal meetings, it took three or four years for the foreign donors – delighted by the unexpected growth of the workers’ movement in the former Eastern Bloc – to discover that their “partners” were in fact political hucksters. The scandal had seriously damaged the international reputation of the Ukrainian left, though one may also pause at the credulity of Western leftists.

[9] On earlier strikes by Donbas miners for economic demands and democratization, see the documentary Perestroika from Below (1989). Later strikes had more explicit political demands, including national independence. See the interviews with strike leaders in Donetsk, as well as a brief documentary (with English subtitles). The history of miners’ protest from perestroika to 2000 is summarized in an essay by Vlad Mykhnenko subtitled “Ukrainian miners and their defeat”. See also the recollections of the Dnipro working-class militant, Oleg Dubrovsky, in a 1996 interview (in English), as well as his analysis of the process of privatization of the mining industry (in Russian).

[10] One of the consequences of the disintegration of the mining industry in the Donbas has been the growth of illegal mining in the so-called kopanki. A section of the 2005 documentary, Workingman’s Death, focuses on the phenomenon. The post-apocalyptic landscape of the Donetsk Oblast is depicted in the short documentary, Life After the Mine (2013).

#ukraine #capitalism #communism

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thenuclearmallard · 2 years

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In Russia, Indigenous land defenders face intimidation and exile

Pressure on communities comes as regional elites and big companies look to develop resource-rich Indigenous lands.

Yana Tannagasheva, an Indigenous Shor activist who protested against coal mining on her people's ancestral lands in western Siberia, holds a banner that says: 'We don't want to live in moonscapes' [Courtesy: Nelly Slupachik]

By Mansur Mirovalev

Published On 23 Jan 2022

The police officers could have planted drugs in his backpack, Andrey Danilov says.

So he refused to show its contents to the officers who did not identify themselves or say why they approached him in late August 2021 in the Arctic town of Monchegorsk in northwestern Russia.

Drugs planted by police have become a routine part of a crackdown on liberal opposition, independent journalists and human rights activists.

But Danilov is none of the above.

He is a community leader of some 1,600 Saami living in Russia’s Murmansk region near Norway. They are a fraction of the Saami Indigenous nation that primarily lives in Arctic Scandinavia in the region which the Saami call Sapmi, a place also known as Lapland and advertised to tourists as Santa’s home.

Danilov says the search and subsequent detention were part of perennial official pressure on him, payback for leading a campaign against platinum and palladium mining on Saami lands, and for his victory in July in the Constitutional Courtwhich ruled that unlicensed hunting is the birthright of any Indigenous person as part of their traditional way of life.

Russian law suggests that only Indigenous people living in the wilderness and not in urban centres can hunt without a licence, but Danilov, who lives in the town of Severstal, proved that hunting is part of his culture and beliefs.

Danilov was released hours after the news of his detention reached other activists and independent media. But he knows the pressure is far from over.

“Their main goal is to either push me to flee abroad or to force me to shut up,” Danilov, 51, who is head of the grassroots group the Saami Heritage and Development Foundation, tells Al Jazeera.

In early November, 116 human and Indigenous rights groups and dozens of individuals signed an open letterto Russian President Vladimir Putin detailing the persecution of Danilov and other Indigenous activists across Russia. So far, the Kremlin has not replied.

A truck loaded with coal in the town of Kazas, western Siberia, where the Indigenous Shor people fought against the development of new coal mines [Courtesy of Nelly Slupachik]

A gold rush

Most of Russia’s Indigenous nations, as Indigenous groups are referred to in Russia, still rely on hunting and gathering, fishing and reindeer husbandry. But their lands – like those of other Indigenous communities from Papua New Guinea to Alaska – are treasure troves of fossil fuels, gold and other minerals as well as timber, game and fish.

And they are falling victim to a nationwide gold rush for these resources.

A warming Arctic, modern technologies and growing demand are opening up deposits previously deemed unavailable or too expensive to develop. As resources open up, the Kremlin, regional elites and big businesses including those owned by Putin’s former colleagues and neighbours or Kremlin-friendly oligarchs are eager to develop them.

“The development should be conducted in accordance with high ecological standards and with respect to the specifics of the local populations’ traditional lifestyle,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said in May addressing the Arctic Council, an intergovernmental forum of eight countries including Russia.

But the development disrupts migration routes of wild animals or deer herds, spawning routes of fish, and destroys nesting grounds, sacred sites and burial grounds, Indigenous activists and observers say.

“For the Indigenous nations, their land is something sacred, they can’t live without the land, the fish, the forest, the tundra,” Danilov says.

Meanwhile, the developers increasingly ignore the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) that prescribe their informed collective consent before any use of their land.

There is a scramble to develop the land for its resources, Danilov says. “And the Indigenous nations have simply become pawns in the big politics.”

As commercial interest grows, Indigenous activists fight the encroachment with the very limited means they have – protest rallies, lawsuits mostly lost in Kremlin-controlled courts, social media posts and appeals to independent media, rights groups and the UN.

In return, the activists face harassment, intimidation, arrests and surveillance by police and intelligence services, smear campaigns, destruction of property, accusations of “separatism” and exile, according to rights groups, the UN, independent media and court papers.

“Those who see the injustice towards their people, their nations, who simply discuss it, automatically get listed as people’s enemies,” Pavel Sulyandziga, an exiled community leader of the Udege, an Indigenous nation of some 1,500 that lives near the Chinese border, tells Al Jazeera.

Members of the Udege Indigenous nation stand next to a large plush toy of a Siberian tiger, a protected animal [Courtesy of Pavel Sulyandziga]

Tigers and jade

Sulyandziga, 59, is a bearded, bespectacled former maths teacher who rose to become one of Russia’s top Indigenous rights officials in several government bodies and Indigenous groups in the 1990s.

His community’s land in Russia’s Far East is home to the Siberian tiger, the world’s largest cat. In the early 2000s, the black market price for one poached animal – whose body parts and even faeces are prized in Chinese medicine – exceeded $50,000, and they numbered several hundred.

But Putin took a shine to them and made headlines in 2008 after shooting a tigress with a tranquiliser to place a tracking device around her neck and creating a national reserve for the felines in the cedar forests where the Udege live, hunt and fish.

The reserve became a boon to the community that enjoys an uninterrupted electricity supply for the first time in their history and no longer has to worry about illegal logging and clandestine cannabis plantations because the preserve is protected by federal officials.

“They’ve never been better off,” Sulyandziga says.

But not him.

Pressure on Sulyandziga began after he organised public hearings on pressure on an Evenki Indigenous community that developed a jade mine on their ancestral lands in the taiga forest of the southeastern Buryatia region near Mongolia. Jade has been prized in China for millennia, and by 2010, the price of the semitranslucent stone exceeded that of gold.

In 2012, the mine was taken over by the Rostec state-run corporation focusing on defence and hi-tech.

That year, criminal charges were brought against community leaders, leading to confiscation of jade and land, activists say.

“Within months, the community was disbanded, some of its members were jailed, some were forced to leave Russia,” Dmitry Berezhkov, an Indigenous rights activist from the Itelmen nation that lives on the Pacific Peninsula of Kamchatka, tells Al Jazeera.

Since then, the community has faced expulsion from their land, community leaders said in a video appeal to Putin in 2019.

Sulyandziga claimed he was accused by state officials of “separatism”, “espionage” and embezzlement. His sons and brother, also an Indigenous rights activist, faced pressure too.

In 2016, Sulyandziga left for New York to deliver a speech at a UN session about Russia’s Indigenous rights situation. He says he never returned because a high-ranking security official told him that intelligence services planned to kill him and present his death as “suicide”.

Today he is an associate researcher at Bowdoin College in Maine and heads the Batani Foundation, an Indigenous rights group.

He says that since he left, pressure on Indigenous communities “rose dramatically”.

“If in the past intelligence services tried to at least pretend to make their actions look legitimate, now they simply don’t need to do that,” he says. “If in the past they tried to pressure leaders, now they pressure everyone who simply tries to tell the truth.”

Activist Dmitry Berezhkov, second from right, of the Itelmen nation at the 2002 Alaska Federation of Natives conference now lives in Norway where he was granted asylum [Courtesy of Dmitry Berezhkov]

Living on the edge

Russia’s 46 Indigenous groups are known officially as the “small nations of the North, Siberia and the Far East”.

They amount to less than 300,000 people, or 0.2 percent of Russia’s population of 144 million, but live in autonomies that are often larger than some European nations.

Some of these autonomies live on land covered by permafrost and tundra; some are nestled in the world’s largest forest, the Siberian taiga.

Their remoteness from urban centres and agricultural areas saved them from assimilation – even though since the Soviet era, the children of taiga nomads and hunters were often educated in Russian-language boarding schools where they were punished for speaking their mother tongues.

Putin has lauded the “small nations” for making Russia a diverse, multiethnic country and has on many occasions said the Kremlin promotes their legacy by funding the festivals of their culture and music, documentaries and cartoons based on their folklore.

“The unique diversity of [Russia’s] traditions and tongues is our common, priceless property that we value and take pride in, and the original culture of the people of North, Siberia and the Far East occupies a special place on this palette,” he said in April, addressing a forum of Indigenous people.

Even so, development on Indigenous lands and the subsequent environmental damage threatens the way of life, identity and spiritual beliefs of Indigenous groups.

The inevitable development-versus-preservation conundrum seen worldwide is exacerbated by the innate oddity of Russia’s economy, in which extraction and export of oil and natural gas resources play an outsized role, accounting for 36 percent of Russia’s budget revenues.

“Extraction of natural resources is Russia’s key business, and Indigenous people are its competitors, unwanted witnesses, they stall it,” says activist Berezhkov, who was granted asylum in Norway in 2013 after years of threats, surveillance, interrogations and alleged fraud charges.

A sacred place for the Khanty people in the Khanty-Mansi autonomous region in western Siberia has been polluted by drilling for crude oil [File: Alexander Demianchuk/Reuters]

Way of life under threat

In northwestern Russia, the inkblot-shaped Imlor Lake is for Khanty reindeer herders the burial place of the divine bear, a deity in their beliefs. But the Surgutneftegaz oil company drills crude oil from the lake, and the pollution forces Khanty to drive their herds elsewhere.

In 2017, a court in Surgut, the largest city of the Khanty autonomy, convicted Khanty shaman Sergey Kechimov of “murder threats” to the company’s security guards and sentenced him to community service. Kechimov, an activist who resisted the drilling for more than 10 years, said the guard dogs attacked his reindeer and he shot one of the dogs.

Some communities have lost their property and homes.

Yana Tannagasheva, a public school teacher and activist of the Shor Indigenous nation in southwestern Siberia protested against the expansion of coal and magnesium mining in her region of Kemerovo.

She wrote complaints to regional authorities and the Kremlin, and told a UN session on Indigenous rights in 2016 about an “ethnocide” of Shors.

Some residents of Kazas, a Shor village that once consisted of three dozen wooden houses by a pristine stream and nestled in the bright-green taiga forest full of berries and game, refused to sell their property to the mining company Sibuglemet.

In 2013, Tannagasheva says five houses were burned down and one was bulldozed, an ancestral burial ground was destroyed, and the nearby Karagay-Lyash mountain was blown up, where, according to Shor beliefs, a powerful spirit lived.

It also cordoned off what remained of the village that now stands empty in a “moonscape” of treeless land choked with coaldust that pollutes the rivulet, she says.

“They don’t see us as humans at all,” says Tannagasheva, 36.

She fled Russia in 2018 with her husband and two sons after years of surveillance by Center E, the anti-extremism police department, and interrogations by FSB, Russia’s main intelligence service.

“Authorities call us freaks and enemies although we simply wanted them to follow the law. We didn’t commit any crimes, and simply asked for access to our hometown, to save the graveyard where our forefathers are buried,” she says with indignation.

Sibuglemet’s press service did not reply to Al Jazeera’s request for comment.

In the Kemerovo region, Siberia, Russia, the Shor Indigenous people protested against the expansion of coal mining [File: Ilya Naymushin/Reuters]

Controlling activists

Officials and businesses easily dismiss the concerns and needs of the Indigenous nations citing efforts of Western NGOs advocating for communities to harm Russia’s “national interests” and strategic security.

“Foreign NGOs boost inter-ethnic tensions and extremism by promoting pro-Western liberal values, separatist sentiments, and fake information about the alleged abuse of rights of small Indigenous nations,” Nikolay Patrushev, head of Russia’s Security Council, said in May.

Boris Nevzorov, a former top official in Kamchatka, proposed in 2014 to restrict the fishing rights of the peninsula’s six Indigenous nations and claimed that they use “American funds” to stoke separatism.

“But the real reason is simple – Boris Nevzorov has a large fishing business, he accumulates fishing quotas and areas, wants to take them away from the Indigenous communities,” says activist Berezhkov.

Nevzorov, who currently serves as Kamchatka senator in Moscow, could not be reached for comment.

Indigenous nations face depleting fish resources and growing competition with the fishing company, Ustkamchatskryba, that Nevzorov still owns, and poachers protected by corrupt officials, Berezhkov says.

“Kamchatka’s Indigenous people are in a sad situation when it comes to fishing,” he says.

In 2020, the FSB started an online registry of each Indigenous person to monitor their rights to hunt and fish based on whether they live in the tundra or in urban centres.

The registry is also designed to identify and prevent “extremism”, which is punishable by up to 20 years in jail. Community leaders claim this step is aimed at intimidating and threatening activism.

“It is created to fully control the activists,” Danilov says.

Leaders have lambasted the registry because Indigenous people must prove their ethnic background and often cannot use the registry’s online services because they lack internet access or do not know how to use computers.

“With this registry, you will divide our people – [urban] intellectuals from the tundra people, children from parents, retirees from their grandchildren, wives from husbands,” Gennady Shchukin of the Arctic community of Turkic-speaking Dolgans told the Novaya Gazeta newspaper in 2020.

In 2020, the Nenets autonomous region, home to some 40,000 Nenets reindeer herders whose lands face the Arctic Ocean, was the only district in Russia to vote against a constitutional reform that would allow Putin to stay in power until 2036 [File: Sefa Karacan/Anadolu Agency]

Small victories

At times, collective Indigenous dissent has been able to stand up to the Kremlin’s well-oiled propaganda machine.

The 40,000-strong Nenets reindeer herders form the largest of the “small nations” whose lands face the Arctic Ocean and contain nine-tenths of Russia’s natural gas.

After the Kremlin announced plans to merge their autonomy with the neighbouring Arkhangelsk region, it became Russia’s only federal district that voted against the 2020 nullification of Putin’s presidential terms that lets him stay in power until 2036.

The Kremlin scrapped the plans.

In November, dozens of community leaders and activists wrote an open letter to Elon Musk, who has said his Tesla company needs more nickel for electric car batteries.

“We are respectfully requesting that you do not buy any nickel, copper or other products of Norilsk Nickel” until it accesses the damage caused by its mining operations and a giant diesel fuel spill in the northern peninsula of Taymyr, the lettersaid.

Saami activist Danilov, who co-signed the letter, says it forced Norilsk Nickel to declare that it would go “green” by modernising their equipment to reduce environmental impact and emissions.

But Danilov believes the declaration is nothing but greenwashing.

The taiga, the largest forest in the world, is home to Indigenous communities who have faced pressure from various development interests [File: Ilya Naymushin/Reuters]

Continued resistance

In its pursuit of resources and profits, the Kremlin and its business allies follow the logic of czarist-era colonisers whose conquest of Siberia, Alaska and a chunk of California (both sold to the United States in the 1800s) were driven by their quest for the fur of sables, foxes, ermines, otters and other animals, says Johannes Rohr, an expert on Indigenous affairs in Russia and project coordinator for the Institute for Ecology and Action Anthropology, a German NGO.

Known as “soft gold”, fur played a role in Russia’s exports and economy similar to today’s fossil fuels, he says. Cossacks, fur traders and czarist troops conquered Indigenous lands in ways that resemble the European colonisation of the Americas.

They crushed the resistance with firearms – while the Indigenous people had nothing but bows and arrows and spears. They imposed taxes on fur and introduced Orthodox Christianity – along with infectious diseases and alcoholism.

These days, the Kremlin sees any resistance to the development of resources on Indigenous lands as an existential threat, Rohr says.

“Back then, fur was collected from Indigenous peoples as tribute, and today, most oil is extracted in ancestral territories of Indigenous peoples. So, I guess, there is the idea that this [resistance] threatens Russia’s economic backbone,” says Rohr, who was barred in 2018 from visiting Russia for 50 years after a series of critical reports.

Communist Moscow gave Indigenous people university quotas and created collective cooperatives that specialised in fishing, hunting and animal husbandry that often destroyed traditional ways of life, annihilated property rights and restructured their communities.

They also purged or executed Indigenous elites such as shamans or wealthy reindeer owners, and the new elites were educated in “state-oriented” universities, Rohr says.

“Most of the Indigenous elites existing today, including the opposition-minded ones, are entirely state-oriented, their primary identity is that of Russian citizens, and there is no stable collective identity of Indigenous peoples” seen in countries like Peru or the US, Rohr says.

Despite this mindset, Indigenous activists confront the Kremlin in a David-versus-Goliath way – and some believe to improve the situation, Russia will have to live up to international standards of observing Indigenous rights.

“We will need to strive to build a system that will make possible the observation of Indigenous rights,” says Sulyandziga.

SOURCE: AL JAZEERA

#indigenous #indigenous russian #indigenous russia #russia #culture #important #colonization #nenet #turkic #Indigenous #landback #land back #Crimes #decolonize #fypシ #greenwashing

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nicklloydnow · 2 years

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“It is not as if we were not warned. It is not as if we lacked scientific evidence. It is not as if we could not see the steady ecological degeneration and species extinction. And yet, we did not act. The result will be mass death with victims dwarfing the murderous rampages of fascism, Stalinism and Mao Zedong’s China combined. The desperate response is to burn more coal, especially with the soaring cost of natural gas and oil, and extend the life of nuclear power plants to sustain the economy and produce cool air. It is a self-defeating response. Joe Biden has approved more new oil drilling permits than Donald Trump. Once the power outages begin, as in India, the heat waves will exact a grim toll.

(…)

The Anthropocene Age – the age of humans, which has caused extinctions of plant and animal species and the pollution of the soil, air and oceans – is accelerating. Sea levels are rising three times faster than predicted. The arctic ice is vanishing at rates that were unforeseen. Even if we stop carbon emissions today – we have already reached 419 parts per million – carbon dioxide concentrations will continue to climb to as high as 550 ppm because of heat trapped in the oceans. Global temperatures, even in the most optimistic of scenarios, will rise for at least another century. This assumes we confront this crisis. The earth is becoming inhospitable to most life.

The average global temperature has risen by about 1.1 Celsius (1.9 degrees Fahrenheit) since 1880. We are approaching a tipping point of 2 degrees Celsius when the biosphere will become so degraded nothing can save us.

(…)

Social coercion and the rule of law will disintegrate. This is taking place in many parts of the global south. A ruthless security and surveillance apparatus, along with heavily militarized police, will turn industrial nations into climate fortresses to keep out refugees and prevent uprisings by an increasingly desperate public. The ruling oligarchs will retreat to protected compounds where they will have access to services and amenities, including food, water and medical care, denied to the rest of us.

Voting, lobbying, petitioning, donating to environmental lobby groups, divestment campaigns and protesting to force the global ruling class to address the climate catastrophe proved no more effective than scrofula victims’ superstitious appeals to Henry VIII to cure them with a royal touch. In 1900 the burning of fossil fuel – mostly coal – produced about 2 billion tons of carbon dioxide a year. That number had risen threefold by 1950. Today the level is 20 times higher than the 1900 figure. During the last 60 years the increase in CO2 was an estimated 100 times faster than what the earth experienced during the transition from the last ice age.

(…)

There are three mathematical models for the future: a massive die-off of perhaps 70 percent of the human population and then an uneasy stabilization; extinction of humans and most other species; an immediate and radical reconfiguration of human society to protect the biosphere. This third scenario is dependent on an immediate halt to the production and consumption of fossil fuels, converting to a plant-based diet to end the animal agriculture industry – almost as large a contributor to greenhouse gasses as the fossil fuel industry – greening the deserts and restoring rainforests.

We knew for decades what harnessing a hundred million years of sunlight stored in the form of coal and petroleum would do to the climate. As early as the 1930s British engineer Guy Stewart Callendar suggested that increased CO2 was warming the planet. In the late 1970s into the 1980s, scientists at companies such as Exxon and Shell determined that the burning of fossil fuels was contributing to rising global temperature.

(…)

Clive Hamilton in his Requiem for a Species: Why We Resist the Truth About Climate Change describes a dark relief that comes from accepting that “catastrophic climate change is virtually certain.”

“But accepting intellectually is not the same as accepting emotionally the possibility that the world as we know it is headed for a horrible end,” Hamilton writes. “It’s the same with our own deaths; we all ‘accept’ that we will die, but it is only when death is imminent that we confront the true meaning of our mortality.”

(…)

Humans have inhabited cities and states for 6,000 years, “a mere 0.2 percent of the two and a half million years since our first ancestor sharpened a stone,” the anthropologist Ronald Wright notes in A Short History of Progress. The myriad of civilizations built over these 6,000 years have all decayed and collapsed, most through a thoughtless depletion of the natural resources that sustained them.

The latest iteration of global civilization was dominated by Europeans, who used industrial warfare and genocide to control much of the planet. Europeans and Euro-Americans launched a 500-year-long global rampage of conquering, plundering, looting, exploiting and polluting the earth – as well as killing the indigenous communities, the caretakers of the environment for thousands of years – that stood in the way. The mania for ceaseless economic expansion and exploitation, accelerated by the Industrial Revolution two and a half centuries ago, has become a curse, a death sentence.

Anthropologists, including Joseph Tainter in The Collapse of Complex Societies, Charles L. Redman in Human Impact on Ancient Environments and Ronald Wright in A Short History of Progress, have laid out the familiar patterns that lead to systems breakdown. Civilizations, as Tainter writes, are “fragile, impermanent things.” Collapse, he writes, “is a recurrent feature of human societies.”

This time the whole planet will go down. There will, with this final collapse, be no new lands left to exploit, no new peoples to subjugate or new civilizations to replace the old. We will have used up the world’s resources, leaving the planet as desolate as the final days of a denuded Easter Island.

Collapse comes throughout human history to complex societies not long after they reach their period of greatest magnificence and prosperity.

“One of the most pathetic aspects of human history is that every civilization expresses itself most pretentiously, compounds its partial and universal values most convincingly, and claims immortality for its finite existence at the very moment when the decay which leads to death has already begun,” the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr writes in Beyond Tragedy: Essays on the Christian Interpretation of Tragedy.”

“This great city, perhaps the greatest in North America, rose, flourished, fell into decline and was ultimately abandoned. Civilizations die in familiar patterns. They exhaust natural resources. They spawn parasitic elites who plunder and loot the institutions and systems that make a complex society possible. They engage in futile and self-defeating wars. And then the rot sets in. The great urban centers die first, falling into irreversible decay. Central authority unravels. Artistic expression and intellectual inquiry are replaced by a new dark age, the triumph of tawdry spectacle and the celebration of crowd-pleasing imbecility.

“Collapse occurs, and can only occur, in a power vacuum,” anthropologist Joseph Tainter writes in The Collapse of Complex Societies. “Collapse is possible only where there is no competitor strong enough to fill the political vacuum of disintegration.”

(…)

The poet Paul Valéry noted, “a civilization has the same fragility as a life.”

Across the Mississippi River from Monks Mound, the city skyline of St. Louis is visible. It is hard not to see our own collapse in that of Cahokia. In 1950, St. Louis was the eighth-largest city in the United States, with a population of 856,796. Today, that number has fallen to below 300,000, a drop of some 65 percent. Major employers — Anheuser-Busch, McDonnell-Douglas, TWA, Southwestern Bell and Ralston Purina —have dramatically reduced their presence or left altogether. St. Louis is consistently ranked one of the most dangerous cities in the country. One in five people live in poverty. The St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department has the highest rate of police killings per capita, of the 100 largest police departments in the nation, according to a 2021 report. Prisoners in the city’s squalid jails, where 47 people died in custody between 2009 and 2019, complain of water being shut off from their cells for hours and guards routinely pepper spraying inmates, including those on suicide watch. The city’s crumbling infrastructure, hundreds of gutted and abandoned buildings, empty factories, vacant warehouses and impoverished neighborhoods replicate the ruins of other post-industrial American cities, the classic signposts of a civilization in terminal decline.

“Just as in the past, countries that are environmentally stressed, overpopulated, or both, become at risk of getting politically stressed, and of their governments collapsing,” Jared Diamond argues in Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. “When people are desperate, undernourished and without hope, they blame their governments, which they see as responsible for or unable to solve their problems. They try to emigrate at any cost. They fight each other over land. They kill each other. They start civil wars. They figure that they have nothing to lose, so they become terrorists, or they support or tolerate terrorism.”

Pre-industrial civilizations were dependent on the limits of solar energy and constrained by roads and waterways, impediments that were obliterated when fossil fuel became an energy source. As industrial empires became global, their increase in size meant an increase in complexity. Ironically, this complexity makes us more vulnerable to catastrophic collapse, not less. Soaring temperatures (Iraq is enduring 120 degree heat that has fried the country’s electrical grid), the depletion of natural resources, flooding, droughts, (the worst drought in 500 years is devastating Western, Central and Southern Europe and is expected to see a decline in crop yields of 8 or 9 percent), power outages, wars, pandemics, a rise in zoonotic diseases and breakdowns in supply chains combine to shake the foundations of industrial society. The Arctic has been heating up four times faster than the global average, resulting in an accelerated melting of the Greenland ice sheet and freakish weather patterns. The Barents Sea north of Norway and Russia are warming up to seven times faster. Climate scientists did not expect this extreme weather until 2050.

“Each time history repeats itself, the price goes up,” the anthropologist Ronald Wright warns, calling industrial society “a suicide machine.”

In A Short History of Progress, he writes:

Civilization is an experiment, a very recent way of life in the human career, and it has a habit of walking into what I am calling progress traps. A small village on good land beside a river is a good idea; but when the village grows into a city and paves over the good land, it becomes a bad idea. While prevention might have been easy, a cure may be impossible: a city isn’t easily moved. This human inability to foresee — or to watch out for — long-range consequences may be inherent to our kind, shaped by the millions of years when we lived from hand to mouth by hunting and gathering. It may also be little more than a mix of inertia, greed, and foolishness encouraged by the shape of the social pyramid. The concentration of power at the top of large-scale societies gives the elite a vested interest in the status quo; they continue to prosper in darkening times long after the environment and general populace begin to suffer.

Wright also reflects upon what will be left behind:

The archaeologists who dig us up will need to wear hazmat suits. Humankind will leave a telltale layer in the fossil record composed of everything we produce, from mounds of chicken bones, wet-wipes, tires, mattresses and other household waste to metals, concrete, plastics, industrial chemicals, and the nuclear residue of power plants and weaponry. We are cheating our children, handing them tawdry luxuries and addictive gadgets while we take away what’s left of the wealth, wonder and possibility of the pristine Earth.

Calculations of humanity’s footprint suggest we have been in ‘ecological deficit,’ taking more than Earth’s biological systems can withstand, for at least 30 years. Topsoil is being lost far faster than nature can replenish it; 30 percent of arable land has been exhausted since the mid-20th century.

We have financed this monstrous debt by colonizing both past and future, drawing energy, chemical fertilizer and pesticides from the planet’s fossil carbon, and throwing the consequences onto coming generations of our species and all others. Some of those species have already been bankrupted: they are extinct. Others will follow.

(…)

This time the collapse will be global. It will not be possible, as in ancient societies, to migrate to new ecosystems rich in natural resources. The steady rise in heat will devastate crop yields and make much of the planet uninhabitable. Climate scientists warn that once temperatures rise by 4℃, the earth, at best, will be able to sustain a billion people.

The more insurmountable the crisis becomes, the more we, like our prehistoric ancestors, will retreat into self-defeating responses, violence, magical thinking and denial.

The historian Arnold Toynbee, who singled out unchecked militarism as the fatal blow to past empires, argued that civilizations are not murdered, but commit suicide. They fail to adapt to a crisis, ensuring their own obliteration. Our civilization’s collapse will be unique in size, magnified by the destructive force of our fossil fuel-driven industrial society. But it will replicate the familiar patterns of collapse that toppled civilizations of the past. The difference will be in scale, and this time there will be no exit.”

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