El Niño and its (flaming) sea in the era of the Great Acceleration

We are breaking records with an increasingly unnatural naturalness: 40¡C in Siberia, historic fires and the slowing of ocean currents essential for sustaining marine life.

There are moments in a person's life or the world itself when it seems like time speeds up. In just ten days, changes take place, lasting for decades or even centuries. On those days, one feels there is more to tell, yet time is not enough. Not even to understand what is happening. Even less to describe it. Marguerite Duras said that to write is to try to know what we would write if we wrote. So, let's at least try.

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Research and analysis to provoke public awareness and critical thinking

We contribute to the liberalisation of the democratic instituions of society, for they have been captured by the owners of the market. They work in tandem with their market agents, who, posing as public servants, are entrenched in the halls of government. The political class has betrayed its public mandate and instead operates to impose a marketocratic state to maximise the shareholder value of the institutional investors of international financial markets. They own the global corporations and think they own the world on behalf of their very private interest.

Our spheres of action: true democracy – true sustainability – living wage – basic income – inequality – ecological footprint – degrowth – global warming –human development – corporate accountability – civil, political, economic, social, cultural and environmental rights, responsible consumption, sustainable autonomous citizen cells...

Parting from an ethos of true democracy and true sustainability, We, the citizenry, work to advance the paradigm whose only purpose is to go in pursuit of the welfare of People and Planet and NOT the market.

• TJSGA is member of:

• © The Jus Semper Global Alliance

Gaza: On Zionism, Judaism, Racism and Barbarism

I last visited the occupied territories in 2016. The photos accompanying this article are from my visit to Hebron. Knowing I was Jewish (my name is Ariel, like the infamous Ariel Sharon), they opened their homes to me, told their stories, and let me take pictures. The girl in the portrait on the stone wall suffered an assassination attempt by settlers, and the teenagers on the terrace told me about their impossible futures. Hebron is a highly contested city because it is home to the Abraham Mosque, where the tombs of the patriarchs who share a Jewish and Muslim religion are said to be located (in 1994, Goldstein, a fundamentalist Zionist, entered the mosque and murdered 29 people at prayer and wounded more than 100 others). The city is home to fewer than a thousand settlers and more than 200,000 Palestinians. The photos of soldiers and children are from when I witnessed the Israeli army guarding, as it does every Friday, a provocative parade of settlers through the streets of the Palestinian market in Hebron to show them that they not only dominate the Jewish quarter in the heart of their city but that the whole city belongs to them.

In Gaza, the reality is radically worse. Palestinians in the West Bank often excuse themselves from commenting on Hamas's methods in the Strip because they say they cannot know what they would do under that level of oppression. When one considers the systematic attempt at dehumanisation that Israeli colonialism entails, which seeks to drive the Palestinians to their bare minimum, the perseverance of the Palestinian people is simply admirable. Gaza has been under a 16-year blockade by land, air, and sea, with constant bombardment of the civilian population, with cuts in the supply of water, electricity, fuel and essential goods. It is now customary to call Gaza an open-air prison. But it should be added that it is a prison where the most basic human rights are not respected. Gaza is a ghetto, and we are witnessing in real-time and on television the process of annihilation of that ghetto and its population. The Jewish ancestors, whom the Nazis tried to dehumanise in the concentration camps, the victims of the pogroms in Eastern Europe, and the very worthy uprisings in the Warsaw ghetto, today would rise in indignation at the racist colonialism of the State of Israel and its ongoing genocide. Again, not in our name.

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The Disinformation Wars: An Epistemological, Political, and Socio-Historical Interrogation

What really is going on in the current mobilisation against disinformation? Whose interests are being served by it? Could it be that those forces portraying themselves as bulwarks against disinformation are actually the most insidious purveyors of disinformation? Does the focus on disinformation conceal the real deceit? The current wave of interest in disinformation is predicated on a perceived decline in truthfulness, even blatant deception, in public discourse—sometimes called post-truth society. Disinformation studies has emerged in academe as a subdiscipline offering big research funding and fast-track career progression.1 There are many powerful players pushing this agenda.2

I do think that public discourse is full of deceit and self-deception and that there has been a definite rise in this. But the dominant discourse surrounding disinformation and disinformation studies is oblivious to the historical presence of this deception as well as the present pervasiveness of it. Such studies typically focus on social media rather than mainstream media as the source of the problem, but I want to focus on mainstream media as a source.

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Marine plastic pollution as a planetary boundary threat – The drifting piece in the sustainability puzzle

The exponential increase in the use of plastic in modern society and the inadequate management of the resulting waste have led to its accumulation in the marine environment. There is increasing evidence of numerous mechanisms by which marine plastic pollution is causing effects across successive levels of biological organisation. This will unavoidably impact ecological communities and ecosystem functions. A remaining question to be answered is if the concentration of plastic in the ocean, today or in the future, will reach levels above a critical threshold leading to global effects in vitalEarth-system processes, thus granting theconsideration of marine plastic pollution as a keycomponent of the planetary boundary threat associated with chemical pollutants. Possible answers to this question are explored by reviewing and evaluating existing knowledge of the effects of plastic pollution in marine ecosystems and the ‘core planetary boundaries’, biosphere integrity and climate change. The irreversibility and global ubiquity of marine plastic pollution mean that two essential conditions for a planetary boundary threat are already met. The Earth system consequences of plastic pollution are still uncertain, but pathways and mechanisms for thresholds and global systemic change are identified. Irrespective of the recognition of plastic as a novel entity in the planetary boundaries framework, it is certain that marine plastic pollution is closely intertwined with global processes to a point that deserves careful management and prevention.

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“Not growing but thriving”: The Beginning of a Paradigm Shift

What if we understood the economy not as some abstract construct at once shaping society but separated from the living planet that we all call home? What if the European Union transformed itself to meet the people’s needs without pushing beyond planetary boundaries? The Green European Journal sat down with Kate Raworth, the renegade thinker and author of Doughnut Economics, to talk prosperity beyond growth.

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Controversial Demographic Projections Under Climate Collapse in 2050 - South and Mesoamerica in a Global Context

Agri-food production, consumerism, waste and food waste

The corporate sector is building another aggressive re-engineering of global agrifood systems in South America and Mesoamerica. The region represents a pillar for global food security, warns the UN in the New Mission. Capitalist euphoria assumes 10 billion inhabitants by 2050. This is forging higher agricultural productivity, innovation, digitalisation and the expansion of standardised agriculture. Thus, they produce and market food destined for populations with some or enough consumption capacity, overconsumption and waste of food with equivalent carbon footprints.

In contrast, global overpopulation predictions based on empirical data analysis by Vienna Applied Systems analysts have declined over the last decade. From this perspective, the UN replicates another unsustainable pressure on fertile land in productive decline, under unreturnable alterations of soil properties, following ecological fractures in the Earth's biogeochemical and hydrological cycles. Among the consequences, meteorological collapse spreads through fires, high temperatures, droughts and water shortages. From the South, internal displacement, border crossings and migration to the North of thousands of people are escalating, driven by hunger, undernourishment, loss of food security and family livelihoods. At the same time, from different parts of the world, a variety of livelihood solutions are being developed outside of consumerism, with other political options for change and transformation.

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The Ecological Collapse We Were Warned About Has Begun

Raging fires rage across Canada, an unprecedented drought is raging in Uruguay and global temperatures have broken all records. An urgent people's plan to adapt and mitigate the situation is still possible.

In 2023, different climatic anomalies have been recorded that set new historical records in the tragic progression of climate change at the global level.

Thus, in June, the surface temperature in the North Atlantic reached the maximum increase of 1.3 degrees Celsius with respect to preindustrial values. In a similar direction—although in lower values—the average temperature of the seas at the global level increased. On the other hand, the retraction of Antarctic ice reached a new limit, reaching the historical decrease of 2016, but several months earlier in the middle of the cold season.

The combination of these records has led scientists who follow these processes to warn of the danger of a profound change in the currents that regulate temperature and life in the oceans and globally. The heat waves recorded on the coasts of a large part of the world—in Ireland, Mexico, Ecuador, Japan, Mauritania, and Iceland—may, in turn, be proof of this. These phenomena, of course, are not limited to the seas. On Thursday, July 6, the global air temperature (measured at two meters above the ground) reached 17.23 degrees Celsius for the first time in the history of the last centuries, 1.68 degrees Celsius higher than preindustrial values; last June was already the warmest month in history. Meanwhile, temperatures on the continents, particularly in the North, also broke records: 40 degrees Celsius in Siberia, 50 degrees Celsius in Mexico, the warmest June in England in the historical series that began in 1884.

And its counterpart, droughts, such as the one plaguing Uruguay, where the shortage of fresh water since May has forced the increasing use of brackish water sources, making tap water undrinkable for the inhabitants of the Montevideo metropolitan area, where 60 percent of the country’s population is concentrated. This is a drought that, if it continues, could leave this region of the country without drinking water, making it the first city in the world to suffer such a catastrophe. But the stifling heat and the droughts also bring with them voracious fires, such as the boreal forest fire that has been raging across Canada for weeks, with more than 500 outbreaks scattered in different regions of the country, many of them uncontrollable, and the widespread images of an apocalyptic New York darkened and stained red under a blanket of ashes.

This accumulation of tragic evidence, against all the denialist narratives, makes it undeniable that the climate crisis is already here, among us. It also indicates the absolute failure of the policies and initiatives adopted to reduce the emission or presence of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

The banners of a change inspired by social and climate justice and the effective paths of this socio-ecological transition raised by popular movements are becoming more imperative and urgent today. It is possible to propose an emergency popular mitigation and adaptation plan. But to make these alternatives socially audible, to break with the ecological blindness that wants to impose itself, it is first necessary to break the epistemological construction that wants to inscribe these catastrophes, repeatedly and persistently, in a world of supposedly pure nature, in a presumably external field, alien and outside human social control.

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The Progressively Accelerated Degradation of the Environment COP28

–Eighteen years after the Paris Agreement and on the eve of COP 28

The explanation for the progressively accelerating degradation of the environment is complex because it is due to several factors. But the root causes lie, on the one hand, in the systematic plundering and destruction of nature - particularly deforestation - carried out on a global scale by colonial powers for centuries and, on the other, in the superfluous and uncontrolled production and consumption of all kinds of objects and products, some necessary and some not. This is the result of what is known in economics as extended reproduction.

Extended reproduction is inherent to the capitalist system. Understanding how it works is essential tounderstanding and explaining the ecological catastrophe.

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Prioritising U.S. Imperialism in Evaluating Latin America’s Pink Tide

Two conflicting leftist positions on Latin America’s wave of progressive governments known as the Pink Tide have become increasingly well-defined over the last two decades. One position is favorable, while the other highly critical, to the extent that Pink Tide presidents—including Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro, Ecuador’s Rafael Correa, Bolivia’s Evo Morales, and Brazil’s Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (Lula)—are sometimes put in the same category as conservative and right-wing leaders.

At the heart of these differences is the issue of imperialism. The key question that emerges from the debate has paramount implications: Is the struggle against U.S. imperialism the left’s foremost priority worldwide, no matter what view is taken on the Ukraine war? If the answer is yes, then steadfast support for Pink Tide governments, which have been subjected to and resisted U.S. interventionism, is particularly compelling.

Or has globalisation set in motion other contradictions that needto be prioritised since the principal target must be global capital, and not Washington’s political machinations? Furthermore, the environment, Indigenous rights, gender equality, and participatory democracy—all banners of what some call the “anti-globalisation movement”—have to be foremost in the formulation of leftist strategies and goals in the twenty-first century.1 The Pink Tide’s performance on these fronts has been far from exemplary, thus explaining the line of reasoning of those on the left staunchly critical of those governments.

I.A.