Trump has a plan to round up immigrants “on a vast scale and detain them in sprawling camps while they wait to be expelled.”, by preparing an “enormous expansion of a form of removal that does not require due process hearings.”

The plan is to do it so fast, and so drastically, that immigrant rights lawyers will be overwhelmed. Plus, Trump has a much more favorable judiciary, as he appointed many federal judges himself.

He has also vowed revenge against his political opponents, who he calls “vermin.” He and his team “have begun mapping out specific plans for using the federal government to punish critics and opponents should he win a second term”.
Trump claims that because he is being prosecuted for political reasons, it’s perfectly legitimate for him to turn around and conduct political prosecutions against the Democrats.

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2023/11/take-trump-seriously-when-he-vows-to-build-the-camps/

Israeli bombers have attacked mosques, churches, schools, and universities (279 educational facilities have been damaged or destroyed); they have struck ambulances even at the very doors of hospitals, as well as hospitals themselves. On November 9 and 10, five major hospitals came under direct Israeli fire: al-Rantissi children’s hospital, the Turkish hospital, the Indonesian hospital, al-Quds, and al-Shifa Medical Center. On November 10, an Israeli drone operator fired a Hellfire RX9 missile at the courtyard of al-Shifa Hospital, a variant of the missile that instead of carrying an explosive warhead unfolds into an array of massive blades like those of a samurai sword, killing by dismembering anyone in its path, leaving bloody limbs and torsos scattered in the hospital forecourt. By nightfall, all the hospitals in the north of Gaza reported being under Israeli artillery and missile fire: showers of incendiary phosphorus just outside, buildings heaving with successive explosions, showering all within with dust and debris and in some cases shrapnel and shell casings. Medecins sans Frontieres reported Israeli snipers were firing into the hospitals themselves. Tens of thousands of terrified refugees have been sheltering in the hospitals, and those who tried leaving both the Rantissi Hospital and al-Shifa on November 10 were fired at by Israeli troops and had to return under fire. Both hospitals were reporting bodies scattered in the streets outside, beyond the reach of medics, who also came under fire when attempting rescue.

https://www.nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/physical-destruction-in-whole-or-in-part/#fn3-48727

ARTICLE FROM FEBRUARY 2023

An agreement was signed today between the Minister of Defense and the minister in his office, Bezalel Smotrich, for the transfer of governmental powers in the West Bank to the latter. Although the administrative authorities transferred to him do not include some military operational powers, this is a dramatic change in the structure of governance over the occupied territory. Very broad administrative authorities pertaining to the majority of the governing powers in the West Bank are being transferred into hands that are not of the military commander of the occupied territory. From now on, those powers will be held by the minister in the Ministry of Defense, who will de facto serve as the governor of the West Bank.

According to the agreement, the governor will be authorized to appoint officials in the Civil Administration and COGAT who exercise civil authorities, the legal advisors who will advise them, and he will be solely responsible for formulating policy.

The agreement includes two clauses aimed at obfuscating the transfer of powers by presenting the governor's alleged subordination to the Minister of Defense, but according to the document, the cases in which the Minister of Defense can override the governor are extreme cases and even when this is done, the military commander of the West Bank will be bypassed, as he no longer holds authority.

The agreement also states that the governor will work to deepen the powers of the Israeli governmental authorities in the areas of Israeli settlements, a process which will promote the unification of government powers and geographically expand their direct legal authority in the West Bank. Or, in other words: stretching Israeli sovereignty beyond the Green Line.

The agreement also states that the governor will lead a process of expanding the dual legal system so that Israeli legislation by the Knesset will be applied more fully than it is today to the Israelis in the West Bank.

International laws of belligerent occupation state that an occupied territory will be temporarily administered by the occupying force (that is, the army) which, along with security considerations, will be obligated to promote the interests of the occupied people.

Transferring powers to Israeli civilian hands is an act of de jure annexation because it entails removing power from the occupying military and placing it directly in the hands of the government - this is an expression of sovereignty.

The bottom line is that the agreement signed today is simultaneously a giant leap of legal annexation of the West Bank and an act of perpetuating the regime’s apartheid nature.

https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2023-02-23/ty-article/.premium/far-right-minister-gets-most-of-west-bank-authorities-outpost-eviction-left-to-idf/00000186-7e09-d35a-adbf-fe29303a0000

"Perhaps the other most damning piece of evidence to counter the narrative that we must ramp up production to end hunger is that some cities have already ended it — without increasing yield. Belo Horizonte, one of the largest cities in Brazil, managed to virtually eliminate hunger through a network of policies addressing different facets of the issue. They expanded school meal programs; partnered with local small farmers to deliver produce to underserved parts of the city at fixed prices for staples; created subsidized restaurants where people could eat affordable, dignified meals, and a host of other policies. It never took more than 2 percent of their annual budget, and the whole transition took less than 10 years. It didn’t require corporations ‘innovating’ or developing expensive technologies. It required political will, the strengthening of governance systems, declaring food as a right of citizenship, and correcting for hunger as a market failure."

"Let us be clear: the problem does not lie in the masses. The solution does."

https://agrowingculture.medium.com/divide-and-conquer-c61539bc42b

Milei ha dato alle ricette tradizionali – basate sulla libertà del commercio estero, l’eliminazione delle tariffe pubbliche, dei sussidi, la riduzione del deficit, riduzione drastica della spesa pubblica e nuovo programma di privatizzazioni delle aziende statali – una ventata di populismo reazionario, concentrando la sua accusa contro le rendite parassitarie di Stato, lo smantellamento dell’apparato elitario peronista, ma anche la destrutturazione delle lotte sindacali e operaie e la «dollarizzazione» dell’economia. Esattamente come fece, con risultati disastrosi, Menem nel corso degli anni Novanta portando l’Argentina al fallimento del 2001, a una delle crisi più acute della sua storia e alla rinascita di un peronismo «sociale» con Nestor Kirchner e poi con sua moglie Cristina Fernandez, simbolo evidente dell’offensiva scatenata da Milei.

https://jacobinitalia.it/milei-il-quarto-ciclo-liberista/

By allowing existing trees to grow old in healthy ecosystems and restoring degraded areas, scientists say 226 gigatonnes of carbon could be sequestered, equivalent to nearly 50 years of US emissions for 2022. But they caution that mass monoculture tree-planting and offsetting will not help forests realise their potential.

Humans have cleared about half of Earth’s forests and continue to destroy places such as the Amazon rainforest and the Congo basin that play crucial roles in regulating the planet’s atmosphere.

The research, published on Monday in the journal Nature as part of a collaboration between hundreds of leading forest ecologists, estimates that outside of urban agricultural areas in regions with low human footprints where forests naturally exist, they could draw down large amounts of carbon.

About 61% of the potential could be realised by protecting standing forests, allowing them to mature into old growth ecosystems like Białowieża forest in Poland and Belarus or California’s sequoia groves, which survived for thousands of years. The remaining 39% could be achieved by restoring fragmented forests and areas that have already been cleared.

[...]

The research follows a controversial 2019 paper on the potential of forests to mitigate the climate crisis, which was also co-authored by Crowther, that provoked intense scientific debate among forest ecologists. The researcher inspired corporate action on forests and was credited with Donald Trump’s support for tree-planting schemes.

But several scientists felt that potential for nature to help meet climate goals had been overstated and the paper advocated for the creation of mass tree-planting, driving greenwashing concerns.

Simon Lewis, a professor of Global Change Science at University College London who was a leading critic of the 2019 paper, said the new estimate was much more reasonable and conservative.

“There is a lot of spin and bluster about what trees can do for the environment. To cut through this always ask: what is the amount of carbon taken up by a hectare of land, and over what time period, he said. “The spin on what trees can do for the climate will no doubt continue. But there is still only a finite amount of land to dedicate to forests, and ability of trees to sequester carbon is limited. The reality is that we need to slash fossil fuel emissions, end deforestation, and restore ecosystems to stabilise the climate in line with the Paris agreement.”

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/nov/13/conserving-restoring-forests-sequester-carbon-study-trees

"For Tol, Anthoff, and Estrada, however, collapse of one of the Earth systems that undergirds the climatic stability of the Holocene might be a good thing. “If the [AMOC] slows down a little, the global impact is a positive 0.2-0.3 percent of income,” they concluded. “This goes up to 1.3 percent for a more pronounced slowdown.” They argued that while climate heating cooks the rest of the world, European countries will benefit from a cooling effect of the current’s collapse.

This sunny assessment comes as a surprise to James Hansen, father of climate science, who has calculated that a massive temperature differential between the poles and the equator would occur with an AMOC shutdown, producing superstorms of immense fury across the Atlantic Ocean. According to Hansen, the last time Earth experienced those kinds of temperature differentials, during the interglacial Eemian era roughly 120,000 years ago, raging tempests deposited house-sized boulders on coastlines in Europe and the Caribbean. Waves from the storms were estimated to have surged inland to 40 meters above sea level."

"It gets worse. Simon Dietz, at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and his fellow economists James Rising, Thomas Stoerk, and Gernot Wagner have offered some of the most ignorant visions of our climate future, using Nordhausian math models. They examined the consequences to GDP of hitting eight Earth system tipping points that climate scientists have identified as existential threats to industrial civilization. The tipping points are as familiar as a funeral litany to anybody schooled in climate literature: loss of Arctic summer ice; loss of the Amazon rainforest; loss of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets; release of ocean methane hydrates; release of carbon in permafrost; collapse of the AMOC; and collapse of the Indian monsoon.

Dietz and friends came to the astounding conclusion that if all eight were tipped, the economic cost by 2100 would amount to an additional 1.4 percent of lost GDP on top of the roughly 8 to 12 percent that Nordhaus projected.

Think of this projection in commonsense terms: A negligible effect on world affairs when the Arctic during summer is deep blue rather than white; when the jungle of the Amazon is no longer green but brown savannah or desert; when in Greenland and the West Antarctic, white ice is barren rock. A transformation of immense proportions on the Earth’s surface, in the atmosphere, and in terrestrial biotic communities. Ocean methane hydrates have an energy content that exceeds that of all other fossil fuel deposits. Permafrost holds an amount of carbon roughly twice the current carbon content of the atmosphere. With the weakening or collapse of the AMOC, Europe could be plunged into conditions akin to the Little Ice Age, with drastic reduction of the land area suitable for wheat and corn farming. Increased variability of the Indian monsoon would jeopardize the lives of over a billion people."

https://theintercept.com/2023/10/29/william-nordhaus-climate-economics/

- Production of Fossil Fuel Far Outpaces Global Goals: In 2030, if current projections hold, the United States will drill for more oil and gas than at any point in its history. Russia and Saudi Arabia plan to do the same. They’re among the world’s fossil fuel giants that, together, are on course this decade to produce twice the amount of fossil fuels than a critical global warming threshold allows, according to a United Nations-backed report issued on Wednesday. The report, which looked at 20 major fossil fuel producing countries, underscores the wide gap between world leaders’ lofty promises to take stronger action on climate change and their nations’ actual production plans
- Wind power projects are running into trouble
- The U.K.’s Conservative government is ditching climate commitments and pretending oil and gas are fine
- Clean energy stocks are suffering while the fossil fuel industry is thriving, because destroying the planet remains (for now) extremely profitable. The Times tells us:

[T]he shares of a broad range of clean energy companies have been crushed lately, in a rout that encompasses just about every alternative energy sector, including solar, wind and geothermal power. At the same time, rather than weaning themselves off oil, Exxon Mobil and Chevron, the two biggest U.S. oil companies, are doubling down. They have announced acquisitions that will vastly increase their oil reserves. Exxon intends to buy Pioneer Natural Resources, a major shale drilling company, for $59.5 billion. Chevron plans a $53 billion purchase of Hess, a big integrated oil company. These are enormous bets on oil for years to come.

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2023/11/the-climate-crisis-is-slipping-from-the-news-right-when-it-needs-our-attention-most/