Topic: Less of What We Don’t Need

Its Ocean Drilling Ship, a deep sea mining (DSM) vessel [is] the size of a battle cruiser set to be operational by 2024. Instead of weaponry, however, the ship is equipped with advanced excavation equipment capable of drilling at depths of 32,000 feet. On land, the Chinese already hold a virtual monopoly on metals considered…

Mindless, blind growth driven by neoliberal capitalism is destroying the Biosphere and the very basis of Humanity’s existence. “The Future is Degrowth. A Guide to a World Beyond Capitalism” by Matthias Schmelzer, Andrea Vetter and Aaron Vansintjan [1] is a highly referenced and documented summary of the views of proponents of economic degrowth as an…

The Biden Administration, along with high ranking democrats including Senate Majority Leader, Charles Schumer, and former House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, as well as a slew of acolytes representing centrist environmental organizations, celebrated the one-year signing of the so-called Inflation Reduction Act (IRA.   66% to 75% of the IRA’s largesse is in the form of tax…

Will there be bananas under socialism?  Ben Burgis in the Promethean-leaning Jacobin aligned with pro-growthers when he wrote that “the instinct by at least some participants in Banana Discourse to trivialize concerns about access to consumer goods as a matter of spoiled Americans not being able to imagine giving up their ‘treats’ is deeply misguided.” …

Founded in 1892, the organization led the creation of the National Park Service, expanding on a legacy of dispossession and genocide of Indigenous peoples by insisting that protecting land meant removing it from Indigenous stewardship. “The Population Bomb,” which the Sierra Club published in 1968, was weaponized against poor people and people of color. It…

About forty miles west of Abilene on Interstate 20, Sweetwater has unwittingly become home to the world’s largest collection of unwanted wind turbine blades. When forklifts deposited the first of these in a field behind the apartment complex where Pamala Meyer lives in 2017, she wasn’t initially bothered. But then the blades—between 150 and 200…

The Norra Karr deposit of rare earth elements is situated in the southern part of Sweden, on the shores of Lake Vattern, one of the largest lakes on the Scandinavian Peninsula.  Vast reserves of fresh water coexist here with equally immense reserves of rare earth elements.  Lake Vattern provides drinking water to 500,000 households. Farms…

A marginalised community in Aberdeen is fighting a green land-grab for Scotland’s “Energy Transition Zone”.  Campaigners from Climate Camp Scotland, This is Rigged, and Scot.E3 demonstrated outside the headquarters of Ironside Farrar in solidarity with residents of Torry. Torry is to be the site of a large-scale industrial development that threatens a precious local park…

The fusion of politics, news, and entertainment has given prominence to comics like Jimmy Kimmel, Stephen Colbert, Seth Meyers, and Bill Maher, who serve as attack dogs for the Democratic Party, which has joined forces with the establishment wing of the old Republican Party against Donald Trump and his supporters. By belittling Trump and his…

Deep sea mining involves removing mineral deposits and metals from the ocean’s seabed. There are three types of such mining: taking deposit-rich polymetallic nodules off the ocean floor, mining massive seafloor sulphide deposits and stripping cobalt crusts from rock.  These nodules, deposits and crusts contain materials, such as nickel, rare earths, cobalt and more, that…