Protesters at World Bank and IMF meetings, along with new research, are railing against a globalized system that fails to produce enough food and has massive climate impacts.

This month, Friends of the Earth and more than a dozen advocacy groups published a report tracking the profits of the world’s largest food companies. “It is not, in fact, a food system,” Conant said. “It’s an agribusiness financial complex.”

“Debt repayment is actively siphoning off the fiscal space countries need to fund the very transition required to survive climate change,” (...) “The protesters are calling out the architecture that demands austerity in the Global South to maintain liquidity in the North.”

For years, the city has been looking for a way to offload the property after the state stripped away the power of City Council and the mayor to appoint 17 magisterial judges and made those posts elected offices.

Since then, city leaders have argued that because they have so little to do with the operation of any municipal courts, the county — which has far greater involvement — should handle the day-to-day upkeep of the property.

Go home Douglas Adams you are drunk

The collapse of modern techno-industrial civilization is inevitable. William Rees, human ecologist and ecological economist, argues that humanity's nature evolved in simpler times and has left us wholly incapable of understanding the enormously complex and life-destroying global civilization we've created. The worldview of human exceptionalism, fueled by fossil energy and sustained by the myth of limitless growth and human ingenuity, is driving us deeper into ecological overshoot and leading humanity toward a painful contraction in both human population and consumption.

I am waiting at the top of the rollercoaster drop with a grin, am I strapped in? Of course not, none of us are!

looks at AI, Silicon Valley and US big tech companies

DRACARYS Ed Zitron!! DRACARYS!!!

a roaring jet of pure fire arcs overhead

We have documented and quantified the impacts of climate change on our planet's sensitive ice sheets for decades, but a mounting realization gained in recent years of what is happening on the undersides of glaciers like Thwaites is leading to an even greater sense of alarm," said co-author Eric Rignot, UC Irvine professor of Earth system science.

Greater sense of alarm you say ?

"Most projections to date have struggled to match the rapidity of the mass loss because of missing physics; our new model with more complete physics is able to match the record and then produces projections that are twice as large as before.

Powerful waves thrashed communities along California's southern coast Friday, damaging homes and sending water cascading through streets as residents braced for more potential damage wrought by Tropical Storm Rachel.

You kind of get the fingerprints of climate change everywhere you look," Marc Alessi, a climate scientist with the Union of Concerned Scientists, told AFP.

Scientists who believe technology will largely solve the problems caused by the climate crisis are less likely to engage in civic action on the issue, according to a study.

“Technological solutions are often politically attractive because they promise to address climate change without requiring changes to how people live and consume,” said Dablander.

“Strikingly, we see the same tendency at the individual level, with greater faith in technological solutions going hand in hand with less engagement in climate action. Yet technology cannot substitute for the broader societal changes and large-scale shifts in consumption that are also needed.”

Although the Office of Naval Research funded much of the early climate change research, the Defense Department successfully pushed to omit most reporting of military emissions from global climate agreements like the Kyoto Protocol.

The Defense Department knew it was the United States’ largest petroleum user and said so. It also knew that its emissions would come under scrutiny if they were known, and that pursuing preeminence was emissions-intensive and undermined global climate goals.

...

The US national security community’s approach to climate has not only been mirrored by NATO but amplified by private organizations such as the International Military Council on Climate Security, which produces an annual World Climate and Security Report. These doomsday scenarios often ignore the necessity of emissions reductions and capacity building. They are lifeboat and drawbridge approaches to security on the assumption that it is already too late.

The figures below, from the 2022 Department of Defense Climate Risk Analysis, illustrates the assessment that climate change will lead to conflict and increased demand for the military to perform humanitarian missions.

Defense Department views of climate change. Top: Examples of connections between climate hazards, primary and secondary climate impacts, and security implications. Bottom: Selected regional hazards worsened by climate change (key to symbols on the top row above map) and identified security implications (key to symbols on the bottom row below the map). This map illustrates some of the key risks by region, but is not comprehensive of all risk. (2022 Department of Defense Climate Risk Analysis)

...

The national security establishment recognizes the short-term impacts of climate change—the operational challenges, the expenses of adaptation and repair, the race for resources, and the possibility it will cause increased tension and war. This strategic and military policy response to climate change is practical in some tactical respects, but it is shortsighted and potentially counterproductive because it does not attend to Earth systems or the role of the military, military industry, and war as significant contributors to climate change.

I’ve figured out something important about the IRS, Gavin said. He paused for effect.

Oh no, thought Kathleen.

Every agency has a superpower, said Gavin. The IRS’s superpower is data.

Everyone in the agency knew that its data was valuable. That was the reason for the strict laws that prevented it from being exploited for profit or political gain. “He said this in a way that he expected everyone to clap when he was done,” said Kathleen.

“No one said a word.” The people around the table – a group that included a woman who had worked at the IRS for 54 years, or 53 years and 50 weeks longer than Gavin Kliger – looked down, or away. Kathleen felt embarrassed for Gavin Kliger. But now it was clear what the meeting was about. Gavin wanted, in his words, “to explore how we can share our data with other agencies”.

...

And so, roughly two weeks later, on Thursday, 27 March, she was caught completely off guard by an email chain that popped up on her screen. At the bottom was its origin: a note from Melanie, forwarding some document from the IRS legal department, along with what sounded like an innocuous request. “Kathleen, could you help facilitate I won’t be able to join today?” it read, without explaining what she was meant to facilitate or why Melanie wouldn’t be able to join. Scrolling through, Kathleen couldn’t find the document but did see lots of bewildered replies from others who had been included – What is this about? Happy to help but can you tell us what this is?

She called the two young lawyers in the IRS legal office who had authored the document referred to in the chain that had somehow gone missing. They explained that the thing Melanie wanted Kathleen to facilitate was a memorandum of understanding for the IRS to share taxpayer data with DHS. Kathleen was knocked sideways. “I thought that it had been stopped,” she said. “I thought Melanie had been caught with her pants down.” The young lawyers now told her that not only had it not been stopped: they’d been working on it since the end of February. “They told me that they were sorry but Melanie had told them to do it and not to tell me or their boss,” said Kathleen.

...

After the call, Julie, the IRS privacy lawyer, came straight to her office. Julie was usually ice-calm – someone who kept her wits about her. She hadn’t a trace of drama in her. But now Julie was not calm. Kathleen, after that call I’m not working on this thing, she said. I’m not coming in tomorrow. I might not come in Monday. I might not come in ever again.

“I don’t usually deal with life or death stuff,” said Kathleen. “But this was life or death stuff. At that moment I knew I had to quit. Either that or I’m going to get fired, because I can’t facilitate something that will break the law and is going to hurt people. We all have boundaries. That was my boundary.”

The collapse will look like a series of devastating catastrophes happening far away on your phone until one happens directly to you. Here's what to expect when the people witnessing your pain and trauma through their phones move on.

What began as one oil shock has now multiplied into three separate catastrophes – an oil shock, a shipping shock, and a refinery shock – each triggered by a different war in a different part of the world, culminating into a global catastrophe that’s already hitting. This video would not have been possible without reporting by Bloomberg, the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, Reuters, CNN, Defense Express, Marine Link, and others.

Watching an empire collapse is inherently satisfying even when it is almost certainly going to topple ony head as I am trapped in it. Silver linings I guess.

There is no greater treachery than this failure to face up to the climate crisis. How can we now fend off despair?