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While Africa's elites betray the economically enslaved, the climate crisis's biggest polluters have passed a death sentence on the entire continent, but they still need African resources
Despite public denials, the world's biggest bipartisan polluters do have a plan for Earth's Climate Armageddon, and it seems to involve ensuring Africa and much of the Global South dies, so long as it is outside of their western “garden”…a grounds fundamentally built on the blood, effort and wealth of ma Afrika, the rest of the Global South and all her children.
Based on the inactions, actions, exposed or reported policy descriptions and regulations, climate change reporting, practices, current state brutality and (often economic and violent) imperialism, the biggest polluters of the world are building an ark for the end of days rather than fixating on saving the planet, which seeing that they have led and controlled the global financing and trade system (since modern-day forever) they could have saved by now.
“The most powerful people in the world are preparing for the end of the world, an end they themselves are frenetically accelerating.
That is not so far away from the mass-market vision of fortressed nations that has gripped the hard right globally, from Italy to Israel...”
The accumulative effect of these plans is to,
Extract from the earth (inside and outside your borders).
+
(Continue to) Sanction, Destabilise or Bombard those countries that may limit extraction.
+
Pollute the earth (more than most African countries combined), and
+
Throw them (i.e. affected non-western people) overboard (as the planet disintegrates).
Extract + Sanction, Destabilise or Bombard + Pollute + Throw them overboard
“‘Countries around the world have begun incorporating climate security in their various national security strategies or approaches,’ E3G wrote in a late November blog post.
“We are in a moment where our elites, whether they admit it or not, do understand that our economic model is at war with life on earth,” Naomi Klein, author of The Battle of Paradise.
What we find is a strategy at play. Disturbingly found at the intersection of national and regional policies relating to capitalist extraction, imperialist control and punishment, military spending and immigration laws and practices.
From a bird’s eye view, it would appear that the world’s biggest polluters know they’re killing the planet while crushing the capacity of other countries to build lives of equitable dignity.
They know it, have known it but would rather focus on their grand ‘anti-them’ design:
Extract.
Sanction, Destabilise or Bombard those that may limit extraction.
Pollute, and
Throw them overboard.
"COP26 [of 2021] is the 26th Convention of most global leaders...big competitors like Russia and China are not invited to have a seat at the table, but it is essentially the countries getting together to pat themselves on the back and set these standards for themselves that are impossible because, since the Kyoto Treaty of 1997, the US has lobbied this convening annual body toexclude not only US military (carbon) emissions but all countries' military emissions.
So what it (COP26) was is a giant trade show.
You had all of these countries heralding themselves as pioneers of innovation and alternative energy partners including Qatar, Saudi Arabia, UAE.
Of course, numbers came out from a report from Global Witness that showed 500 Oil and Gas lobbyists were present there, representing the largest delegation of any country.
So going in there I knew it was a farce. I knew no one was going to address the elephant (military carbon emissions) in the room...
And of course, this concept of 'net zero'.
Basically, the main takeaway from the conference was, we are not doing anything really to limit fossil fuel emissions.
Instead we are just going to 'off set', however many emissions we put out on the earth, we are just going to plant a few trees, doing some net zero carbon offset. Its a complete farce...
[Nancy Pelosi, American Congresswoman and Democratic representative] Her answer was, we are going to slap some solar panels on tanks and we need the military for the inevitability of where we know climate change is going. Basically mass refugee crisis and global wars...
A man stood up to answer for her before she did answer my question.
COLONIALISM’S ELDEST CHILD: THE MILITARY (IMPERIALIST) INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX
The largest economy with the largest military in the world, which also heads the largest military alliance in the world (NATO) has known for years that their military spending and resultant activities were fuelling carbon emissions, exacerbating climate change for the entire planet.
“The US Military is speaking about climate change and planning for how it will affect them.
The US Army War College issued a report in August of this year [2020], ‘Implications for Climate Change for the US Army’.
The second paragraph of this 52-page report said ‘The study did not look to ascribe causation to climate change (man-made or natural), as causation is distinct from effects and not pertinent to the approximately 50-year horizon considered for the study’.
Imagine a fire department pointing a number of high-pressure blow torches at a burning house; then imagine that that same department would write a report on how they were going to manage this emergency, without mentioning (or planning) to switch off their blow torches.
I was incensed when I read this. The rest of the report predicts an imminent future of civil unrest, disease and mass migration and describes climate change as a ‘threat multiplier’.
Despite their intention to avoid any self-scrutiny, the report, somewhat cavalierly, describes the Army’s massive carbon spewing, munition poisoning and soil erosion, and summarizes it as follows:
As far back as 2020, the United States government under President Donald Trump knew that the US military, let alone NATO, with its almost 1000 military bases across the world including in Africa, were costing the planet.
This was known years before the financing and weapons support given to Israel to mass bombard a tiny civilian populated region, which bombardment has not been counted in global carbon emissions for 2023-to-2025.
[Omar Zaghloul/Anadolu Agency]
Old reports show that mass military pollution was known, understood and clearly ignored at the highest levels of global economic power and leadership:
“The total carbon footprint of EU15’s militaries and defence industries is 60 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent ― that is the same amount of emission as Ireland and roughly 2% of the total greenhouse gas emissions by EU15 in 2017.
In the EU, direct CO2 emissions from aviation account for about 3% of total emissions. The EU prides themselves to be the world’s first region to address CO2 emissions from international aviation so it is inexcusable for them to neglect the climate impact of their militaries and defence industries when both sectors generate compatible amount of greenhouse gases.
The total GHG emissions of the nine-year Iraq War (between 2003 and 2011) were approximately 254 million tonnes of CO2.
That’s slightly more CO2 released than the 14th biggest economy in the world, Spain, in 2016, and only a quarter less than the 6th biggest economy, France.
This ongoing emissions burden will be sustained as long as excessive global military spending is used to develop and purchase ever more oil-dependent expensive jets, tanks and missiles, which in turn create destruction and greenhouse gases (all the while generating significant shareholder profits).
The irony, indeed hypocrisy, of the USA and other leading military nations’ spokespeople being among some of the loudest voices calling for action on climate change (summed up by ‘everyone but us’) is not lost on some observers, since it is precisely those same military nations that know their own contribution towards creating the climate crisis in the first place.
And this lack of full accountability and true responsibility extends across multiple years and government administrations that have kept mum on the impact of military carbon emissions on climate change, focussing our attention on:
capitalist extraction methods, which have not changed,
public service delivery methods, which have largely not changed,
the automotive industry, only insofar that we have added electric cars to the mix, and
planting more trees, including in nature reserves that don’t need our help.
And that’s been the work of liberal governments who didn’t deny climate change online, rather preferring to avoid responsibility for fixing the problem:
“The research into Verra, the world’s leading carbon standard for the rapidly growing $2bn (£1.6bn) voluntary [carbon] offsets market, has found that, based on analysis of a significant percentage of the projects, more than 90% of their rainforest offset credits – among the most commonly used by companies – are likely to be ‘phantom credits’ and do not represent genuine carbon reductions…
The investigation found that:
Only a handful of Verra’s rainforest projects showed evidence of deforestation reductions, according to two studies, with further analysis indicating that 94% of the credits had no benefit to the climate.
The threat to forests had been overstated by about 400% on average for Verra projects, according to analysis of a 2022 University of Cambridge study.
Gucci, Salesforce, BHP, Shell, easyJet, Leon and the band Pearl Jam were among dozens of companies and organisations that have bought rainforest offsets approved by Verra for environmental claims.
So when you watch a movie such as Leave the World Behind, produced by former US President, Barack Obama and his wife Michelle and the basis of the movie is societal breakdown and the abandonment of voters by elites, the years of public climate denial while knowing the polluting damage of military investments and use is a clear sign of a ruling class that is both:
bereft of true human compassion; and
shockingly self-focussed and motivated.
Leaders of the largest economies and militaries of the world cannot say that Climate Armageddon crept up on them or they didn’t realise that they were significantly harming the planet.
“President Donald Trump this week [in April 2025] unveiled plans for a $1 trillion defense budget next year, a massive increase that he claimed will provide the country with unmatched military strength for years to come…
Why should military pollution and military investment matter?
Well, Africans appear to be on the chopping block, not because they’ve greatly polluted the earth, led and architected deindustrialisation of NATO countries and therefore created the problem of growing global inequity and climate disaster.
No, they’re on the chopping block because an environment policy of dealing with climate change is both imperialist in substance and scapegoating in its outcomes.
In its essence, these policies propose that African land, minerals, harbours, seas are still needed but Africans need to be exported back to or kept “where they come from” in preparation for the climate change that the largest economies and those of the largest military bloc could more stop.
Yes.
If you feel you’re witnessing a setup, you are beginning to understand what it means to be African.
The role of deliberately subordinated (i.e. colonised and neo-colonised) Africa in the context of these policies would be to:
allow foreign control and/or ownership of African land for as long as possible;
allow the foreign maximising of extraction from African land and her people by agreeing to foreign control of industry development and essential minerals;
allow foreign influence on African legal systems and ignore the application of international legal systemsthat never disturb extraction or imperialism;
remain silent on Anti-Global South immigration policies within major polluting countries, aiming it seems to expel as many people not born of western colonial countries in order to minimise the extent of needs above ground as the world crumbles around us; and
enthusiastically act as the dumping ground (at whatever expense to the continent) for “not-white” people that western countries wish to “get rid of” (including the colonised within Palestine made into refugees by a western colonialism project, “not-white” immigrants or citizens from within western countries):
“Sudanese officials say they have rejected a request from the US to discuss taking in Palestinians displaced from Gaza…according to an Associated Press Report, the US and Israel have contacted officials in Sudan, Somalia and Somaliland about resettling uprooted Palestinians.”—Sudan rejects US request to discuss taking in Palestinians under Trump’s Gaza Plan, Jason Burke and Mark Townsend, 14 Mar 2025, theguardian.com;
“The Trump administration has approached far-flung countries to aid its mass deportation effort, asking nations like Angola and Equatorial Guinea to accept migrants who are not their citizens, according to internal federal government documents obtained by CBS News.”—U.S. seeking deportation deals with far-flung countries like Angola and Equatorial Guinea, Camilo Montoyo-Galvez, 5 May 2025, cbsnews.com
“Rwanda is open to ‘migration cooperation’ with the US so long as key issues such as security are addressed…'The Rwandan government has been engaged with migration deals with the UK as you will remember, but even with the UN and the African Union for the evacuation of the migrants stranded in Libya. We are now in talks with the US on a deal on migration,’ Olivier Nduhungirehe, Rwandan Foreign Affairs Minister.”—Rwanda in talks with the US on accepting deported migrants, 7 May 2025, CGTN Africa.
CAPITALIST EXTRACTION ALWAYS INCLUDED MILITARY BUDGET
The primary question that controllers of the global capitalism—colonialism—system wrestle with is how does saving the planet impact the money-making structures at play?
As it stands, you can’t separate Climate Change from Global Capitalism.
And you can’t separate Global Capitalism from Global Colonialism, Neo-Colonialism and the Imperialism needed to keep it in place.
Global capitalism has not existed without:
ensuring control over someone else’s land, minerals, seas, soil, workforce, airspace, data (colonialism and neo-colonialism), and you can't ensure this without,
imperialism, which of course has to include the visible threat of mass violence, i.e. military force (e.g. bombardment of Libya) or economic mass murdering as punishment (e.g. sanctions placed on Zimbabwe).
CLIMATE DANGER AND IMPERIALISM ARE CLOSE COUSINS
Imperialism that facilitates the control large economies want over others costs money.
Lots and lots of money.
But it also costs the planet. And far more than the rest of us do who are choosing:
paper shopping bags over plastic,
tote shopping bags over paper,
collecting rainwater to water our gardens,
buying recycled or second-hand clothing, or
buying recycled or second-hand books,
and that’s if you’re working class with a home and an equalling-inflation salary.
Imperialism unlike an ordinary people’s good intentions involves bigger costs and bigger impact:
“One B-52 Bomber: If you’re an average American driver—the onus is on us to be better consumers, drive electric cars, keep that in mind—driving [your car for] one hundred years would equate to one single flight mission of one B-52 Bomber.
There are 80 of these planes flying around in circles, day in and day out on these missions just to maintain ‘mission readiness’.
That’s just one vehicle,” Abby Martin, independent American journalist and director of the documentary: Earth’s Greatest Enemy, talking about the real polluters of the world.
So when you think polluting capacity at the top-end of the global pyramid scheme seem fixated on everything except saving the planet.
It’s because saving the planet may risk ending colonialism and neo-colonialism and where would capitalism be without it?
How will capitalism work?
How would you reach corporate sales targets or ensure sufficient energy to power homes if you’re disabling neo-colonialism and colonialism in places like Africa.
How are you going to reinvent capitalism in time? And should you?
Capitalism Requires Imperialist Budget, Imperialist Budget Results in Pollution: EXAMPLE—Democratic Republic of Congo:
In 2024, there was a coup attempt against the DRC government involving dozens of men in military fatigues said to have been led by a former Congolese businessman and military captain based and living in the US. The coup attempt included three Americans, a Briton, a Canadian and a Belgian. Fifty people were arrested and thirty-seven were sentenced to the death penalty.
Concurrently, the DRC saw the all too well-funded M23 rebels grabbing land away from DRC’s working people (including the children being brutalised in mining operations). These rebel invasion forces were coupled with Rwandan military forces acting under the ethnic victim narrative of “protecting Congolese-based Tutsis” and securing Rwanda’s national security interests…through military violence and death apparently.
As well-funded M23 rebels invaded the DRC and made their way through the country (coupled with Rwandan military forces to protect Tutsis and national security apparently), the DRC government suddenly pardoned the three Americans involved in the 2024 coup attempt and began offering the US a mineral rights deal to supposedly convince them to provide military support against the M23 rebels.
Except, this coverage made no mention of the fact that,
And yes, it is a horror show because we all know, children as young as pre-schoolers are forced into Congolese mining pits in order to help their families survive economically in a mineral rich African motherland that provided for her indigenous children a hundred times over.
And yes again, no children of:
the United States of America,
the United Kingdom,
Europe,
Canada,
Australia or New Zealand,
the United Arab Emirates, or
South Africa,
are actively taught or told about this in school.
No one.
So like I said, Africa like the rest of the Global South is being squeezed on both ends:
“As long as any peace process in the DRC does not include justice, this is a temporary solution to a larger problem.
We are talking about thousands of people who have been massacred just this year: the government numbers goes all the way up to 9000, the conservative number is 3000.
Whenever they talk about ceasefire and peace deals, what they are telling the Congolese is that their [human] lives do not matter. They can be massacred, they can be killed and no one will be held to account so that’s really the context.
Another element to think about is: For peace in the DRC [in Africa], it is very strange that Doha, Qatar is the place that will actually negotiate a peace deal. So, every one [in Africa] is very surprised why the Congolese and Rwandans, particularly the Rwandans, are so in love with the Emir of Qatar?
Qatar has billions of dollars invested in the region, in Rwanda and the DRC.
In Rwanda, Qatar owns 49% of Rwanda’s national airline called RwandAir. The new international airport being built in the outskirts of Kigali (the capital of Rwanda) is 60% owned by Qatar.
A capitalist wheel turns, crushing Africa and ordinary African working families with it, while those born of colonial countries that have the largest militaries in the world and budgets to finance extra-territorial “activities” to boot, including to whatever extent Arab countries (and especially those within the colonial identity known as white) are led to believe everything is just peachyor above board because media stories are isolated to,
corrupt African leaders (and not the structures and financing that enable, normalise and/or encourage mutual corruption), and
this (of course, racist) idea of inherently violent or “primitive” Africans as the problem.
In the meantime:
“The World Bank wrote the mining laws for the Congo because ‘it’s a weak country of weak leadership coming out of war’ and they wrote it in the interests of private capital.
The World Bank has a sister wing called the International Finance Corporation. The International Finance Corporation had invested in mines in the Congo.
We cannot pretend that the largest economies and militaries of the world have not invested heavily in their polluting military and those of their allies as a way to further capitalist profiteering:
“Despite overwhelming evidence presented by experts and independent investigators that Rwanda has been arming, funding and training the UN-sanctioned M23 rebels (who are leaving a trail of death and destruction in eastern Congo), Western nations continue to partner with - and fund - Kigali.
In July 2024, the UN reported that there were up to 4,000 Rwandan troops on the ground in the Congo, fighting alongside the M23. The report concluded that Rwanda's forces have ‘de facto control and direction over M23 operations.’
Yet while the West has issued statements condemning Rwanda's role, no meaningful measures have been taken to deter Kigali.
On the contrary, relations have only strengthened.
For example, in 2022, when there was already ample evidence of Rwanda’s destabilising role in DRC, the EU announced it would be providing the Rwandan Defence Forces with 20-million euros to support their military operations in Northern Mozambique.
It clearly serves the West’s interests not to resolve the crisis in Congo, whose bountiful resources power the world’s technologies.
Instability enables exploitation.
Which makes you wonder: is Rwanda’s president Paul Kagame actually the West’s foot solider in Africa?”—African Stream, 30 Jan 2025.
While capitalist extraction and colonial imperialism decimates African land and her people, this kind of capitalism design born of centuries of colonialism fails to admit that,
it harms the planet through aiding military intervention or direct intervention, and
fuels the very migration ordinary people fear.
“The Cost of Wars Project found the total emissions from war-related activity in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Syria to be estimated at more than 400 million metric tonnes of carbon dioxide alone.
This too is not news it seems to the largest economies of the world and the leader of the largest military alliance, placing their bets on a “build a wall” mentality that disregards their role as leaders of the global economy that brought us to this point in the first place.
Western domination of global capitalism is opting out of western-led climate damage and disaster. And Africans are meant to watch this latest betrayal of humanity and responsibility with some sort of understanding and sympathy.
Insanity.
CLIMATE DANGER IS REAL: YEARS OF PUBLIC DENIAL (OR MISLEADING THE PUBLIC) HAS SHIFTED TO PUBLIC ADMISSION
And that seems like a much-needed good start until you realise that solving the crisis, i.e. saving the planet we live on, does not seem to be on top of the global agenda.
While we think neoliberal capitalist elites don’t have a plan for global climate change. It seems they always did. They still do:
“When you read all these more serious right-wing pieces or analyses on climate, you don’t come away with denialism.
You come away with a different version of their climate plan…
The first way of understanding right-wing climate realism is folks looking at those same numbers and same data and being, oh fuck though, if we just go a little slower, if we’re not so thorough, yeah, we're going to hit three to four degrees change [increase in temperature] over industrial baseline. Now, climate scientists will say, don’t do that, that sounds horrific, but again, the calculus is pretty straight forward:
So yeah, you’re telling me we’re probably going to lose capacity for a billion people.
There’s going to be several hundred million people who are going to be refugees, you know that kind of stuff, but I don’t have to spend 70 trillion [US] dollars or either destroy that amount of value or redistribute it right now…
Well, I choose that. That’s the beginning of right-wing climate realism.
It is slower and willing to say, fuck off to a whole bunch of people.
The more radical stuff they get to quite quickly is, if you look at the increased attention to, for example, borders in recent years.
That is a realistic right-wing response to increased human migration driven by socio-ecological and socio-economic factors…
If you look at the US military, there’s all this retrofitting for different types of sea levels, for different kinds of salinisation points in the ocean…
The sort of pitch of this stuff [or climate change ideas] is good clean living for good clean people.
In essence, the major polluters of the world who control the global capitalist—colonialism—economy have a plan to:
heat up the planet at a slower rate than now, even though we are supposedly past catastrophic levels of damage;
build up the already biggest polluting military to prepare for the incoming climate doom, which we could lead and change for the better in real time, and
get rid of as many ordinary working people who are below the upper-class as possible, specifically those from “not-white” countries, to manage the damage and needs tended to above-ground.
The political spectrum at the tippy global top are preparing for Armageddon.
What very well seems to already be coming our way is an abandoning of all the people global trade and financing leaders impoverished for centuries and decades by global economic policy and/or military force, leaving them now to likely starve, drown, burn and die…including tens of millions of Africans.
“Africa produced about 1.1 metric tons of climate-warming carbon dioxide emissions per person in 2019, well below the global average of 4.7.
Prepare for war and let’s innovate in preparation for war, which is when we are at our best;
Focus more on physics so we can innovate our way off this planetand travel "the cosmos" (while presumably everyone in and from Africa dies from the climate crisis that our global war machine has and will exacerbate); and
Undercut any countries that do science better, even if it's allies like France.
For the social messaging to swiftly switch from,
“climate change is an exaggerated fiction” (Remember Jordan Peterson telling a school of Nordic children that climate change involves so (too) many variables),
to “climate change is real and let’s prepare for doom”,
the exposed climate change plan (buried it seems in science journals) of allowing the planet to crumble around you until it’s time for some within western countries (like Gayle King I suspect) to get onto their space rockets and head into space needs to be more greatly scrutinised and critiqued.
All you have to do is take a look at this year’s ARC event to notice the chock-full of interesting alliances:
representatives from,
BP,
Koch Industries,
Valero Energy,
Energy Transfer,
QatarEnergy,
Canadian oil sands producer CNRL,
Air Products, a gas and chemicals company which is involved in the liquefied natural gas industry,
AstraZeneca,
Blackstone,
Citadel,
Deloitte,
JP Morgan,
KKR,
Kraft Heinz,
Liberty Steel,
Macquarie,
McKinsey,
Meta,
Neom,
Palantir,
PwC;
Vivek Ramaswamy, who has referred to the “climate agenda” as a “hoax”;
Reform UK leader Nigel Farage, who has called for the UK’s 2050 net-zero emissions policies to be “scrapped” entirely;
Attendees will include elected representatives from:
France (National Rally),
Denmark (Danish People’s Party),
Estonia (Conservative People’s Party),
Hungary (Fidesz),
Iceland (Centre Party),
Netherlands (Forum For Democracy),
Norway (Progress Party),
Poland (Law and Justice), Spain (Vox),
Sweden (Sweden Democrats),
German party Alternative für Deutschland, and a number of think tanks,
Poland (Ordo Iuris),
Bulgaria (Institute of Right Wing Politics),
Mathias Corvinus Collegium (MCC) Brussels, a fossil fuel funded think tank, will be represented by its executive director, and the Budapest-based Danube Institute is planning on sending its president.
And still, there has been no mention of heating up the planet by virtue of their own strategies, policies and spending.
No mention of taking responsibility for the mess created by the capitalism and imperialism led by these largest economies.
SCAPEGOATING IMMIGRANTS FOR CLIMATE CHANGE
The biggest polluters of the world are thus far sentencing most of the planet to die.
Following a formula that their “best minds” seem to believe is the best they can come up with:
Extract.
Sanction, Destabilise or Bombard those that may limit extraction.
Pollute.
Throw them overboard (and perhaps fly into space and leave the dead and dying behind).
The last element in this ingeniously irresponsible strategy is arguably already taking place:
“The [US] administration is gearing up to issue a series of travel restrictions for the citizens of 43 countries across the world – including 22 African nations.
Under the red list, whose citizens face a complete ban, three African countries – Libya, Somalia and Sudan...
On the orange list, whose citizens would face additional travel restrictions instead of a complete ban,
Eritrea,
Sierra Leone, and
South Sudan…
Of the countries on the yellow list, whose citizens would be given 60 days to address concerns or risk being moved to another category, 16 are from Africa. They are,
Don’t kid yourself that this is purely if at all about “security” issues when terrorist organisations operating in Africa have been receiving foreign funding, training, cover and/or backing, which the US has been reported as providing or openly admitted of late.
Al Qaeda “jihadis” that were infamously known for fighting to some extent against Russian influence and then of course believed to be responsible for 9/11 that brought about the “global war of terror” (that’s never stopped).
And we cannot forget all the offshoots of Al Qaeda like those of or in ISIS operating in West Asia and North, Central and West Africa, including the newly appointed President of currently Alawite slaughtering Syria who was known as Mohammed Al-Jolani but decided to have an entire name makeover as though he is an actor in 1950s Hollywood, rebranding himself into Ahmed al-Sharaa.
Imperialism to further capitalist agendas never cease:
“I registered under an alias to join a workshop organized by the Syrian American Council (SAC), the leading voice of the lobby that aims to starve and destabilize Syria into submission to the West’s demands…
During the seminar, I was able to witness first hand the impact of the anti-Syria lobby and understand the cynical tactics it employs to condemn the population of Syria to poverty and famine.
Most recently, the lobby successfully ended the life-saving sanctions exemption known as General License 23 (GL 23), which allowed humanitarian aid into Syria following the catastrophic earthquake that struck the country this February. The lobby succeeded in ending GL 23 by pushing a lie that workshop leaders repeated without end: “the sanctions only affect the Syrian government and not the people.”
In truth, the sanctions have done incalculable damage to the Syrian people, as the UN’s Special Rapporteur on sanctions, Alena Douhan, noted in an interview with The Grayzone in 2021…
BEARING THE CONSEQUENCES OF ACTIONS SHOULD BE AVOIDED BUT LET’S BUILD THAT GARDEN WALL
The security built into climate policies revolves around immigration:
Stopping as many people from coming into “the garden” and forcing out as many people as and when the time requires, which seems to be now.
The wheels on this machine have already begun within major economies,
paying debt destitute countries in Africa such as Tunisia and Mauritania to take in or house immigrants that they are far less capable of taking care of long term:
Tunisia:
“The North African country, led by Kaïs Saïed, received a visit from a European delegation in July 2023, which ended with both sides signing an agreement to fight against irregular immigration.
Worth over 100 million euros, the partnership allocated European funds for schools, the revival of the Tunisian economy in difficulty and the development of renewable energies. All in exchange for more controls in the domain of immigration and the facilitation of voluntary returns. The EU also promised the Tunisian authorities eight boats, as well as drones.
“The UN is following up on reports of another mass grave in the desert along the Libyan-Tunisian border. This follows the discovery of the bodies of at least 65 migrants at another site this year in the region in March.
revitalising the settler colonialism tactic of “administrative detention” or prison camps for civilians held without charge or fair trial, all because refugees are “outsiders” and often working class.
THE WHEELS ON AN IMMIGRANT SHOVE-OUT PLAN HAS BROAD SUPPORT
Under the leadership of Trump, the US government, countries allied and/or acting as proxies for the most militarised country are readying themselves to heighten their anti-immigrant policies both internally and in relation to migration toward the region, irrespective of what international law requires.
Collective example:
“According to various sources in Brussels, the EU Commission is planning to propose additional stricter migration measures in 2025 to speed up and increase the number of deportations…
“Under current rules, non-EU citizens who have been living in Sweden with a residence permit for five years, with no breaks, can apply for status as varaktigt bosatt, or long-term residence, which grants them an EU residence permit with at least five years’ validity, and which is automatically renewed when it expires. This is a residence permit which is granted under EU law rather than Swedish law.
For primarily practical reasons, people in this group have previously been granted permanent residency under Swedish law at the same time as long-term residency under EU law.
Under the new rules, people in this group [non-EU citizens] would, instead of being granted permanent residence permits alongside status as varaktigt bosatt, be granted a temporary residence permit with a five year validity. They would also be allowed to apply for and be granted a residence permit without needing to leave Sweden. They would also be allowed to work in Sweden without needing to apply for a work permit, as would their family members, despite not holding permanent residency.
People in this group would still be able to apply for permanent residency under Swedish rules if they qualify, for example as a work permit holder or another form of permit which is still eligible for permanent residency…
Under current rules, citizenship applicants need to either hold a permanent residence permit (under Swedish rules), have permanent right of residence (under EU rules) or permanent residence status (a post-Brexit residence permit).
The new proposal would mean that certain groups of immigrants would not be eligible for any of these permits, which could effectively bar them from being eligible for Swedish citizenship.
In order to allow people in the affected groups to still be able to apply for citizenship in the future, the inquiry proposes changing rules on citizenship to allow applicants from these groups to apply if they have either ‘well founded prospects of being granted a long-term residence permit,’ or if they have been living in Sweden for ten years with temporary residence permits…
Just like apartheid South Africa, producing desired societal outcomes requires a building and legalising of a system that produces those outcomes.
In western colonialism of disparate (inequitable) and segregated development on the basis of race and colour, the system legalised for instance:
land theft;
collectively higher salaries and pensions for the colonial identity;
reservation of prime land for the colonial identity;
state subsidies and corporate policies of preference and support for the colonial identity; and
greater police brutality to maintain submission of the colonised.
The cumulative effect of legalising these policies as structures of and approved by the state allowed for apartheid to produce the outcomes of white supremacist capitalism as desired.
So too, a system that scapegoats immigrants for climate change while ignoring the polluting of imperialist extraction within the capitalist system needs wide laws of open interpretation, processes and precedent to produce the desired outcomes.
STARS AND STRIPES LEADS THE WAY ON CLIMATE CHANGE SCAPEGOATING
At the present moment, the US offers the rest of the world the precedent they need to ramp up a redesign of immigration laws to rid themselves of as many “not-white” immigrants from places like Africa as possible.
“Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents, wearing plainclothes and circling neighborhoods in unmarked cars, kidnap legal residents such as Mahmoud Khalil. These abductions replicate those I witnessed on streets of Santiago, Chile under the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, or in San Salvador, El Salvador’s capital, during the military dictatorship.
ICE is swiftly evolving into our homegrown version of the Gestapo or The People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD). It oversees 200 detention facilities. It is a formidable domestic surveillance agency that has amassed data on most Americans, according to a report compiled by The Center of Privacy & Technology at Georgetown…
Those abducted, including the Turkish national and PhD student at Tufts University, Rümeysa Öztürk, are accused of amorphous behaviour such as ‘engaging in activities in support of Hamas.’
But this is a subterfuge, accusations no more real than the invented crimes under Stalinism where people were accused of belonging to the old order — Kulaks or members of the petit bourgeoisie — or were convicted for plotting to overthrow the regime as Trotskyites, Titoites, agents of capitalism or saboteurs, known as ‘wreckers.’
Once a category of people is targeted, the crimes they are charged with, if they are charged at all, are almost always fabrications…
The 250 purported Venezuelan gang members shipped to El Salvador in defiance of a federal court were denied due process. They were summarily herded onto planes, which ignored the judge’s order to turn back, and once they arrived, were stripped, beaten and had their heads shaved…
The slow creep toward the desired “not-white” immigrant-less outcome is a path of cumulative damage on the lived and future stability of immigrant families, including young children who come from countries crushed economically, bombarded and destabilised by the very countries that wish to refuse them entry or permanent stay.
And how does it work?
Law by law, process by process, soon becoming everyone’s normal.
Example A - Laws impacting language (culture) learning:
Example B - Embarking on withdrawal of immigrants’ legal status outside the parameters of specified and fairly tested criminal behaviour:
Example C - Preventing immigrant families from rooting themselves in a country they spend years living in (for example, buying property etc) out of fear that their lives remain unstable and easily disposed of at the drop of a hat:
The cumulative effect of all these laws is the making of a lived reality that is so unpleasant, unstable and uncertain that immigrants will:
leave by choice;
mentally and physically wither from the added stress, which may more motivate them to leave at their own risk; or
be pushed out when it is suitable (irrespective of how much taxes they have paid and the laws they have abided by).
In essence, what the Global South face is a climate change plan protecting,
western colonialism (that is rarely, if ever, called colonialism);
violent and economic mass murdering western imperialism (if ever reported on mainstream news and described as such);
anti-migration shoves out of western colonial countries; and
anti-migration shoves fromentering western colonial countries.
We won’t even mention the current Palestinian Holocaust that is underway in order to maintain, strengthen and further a colonialism project, which conveniently sees (Can anyone say killing two birds with one stone?) protestors of the Global South being rounded up and deported under the guise of being trouble-making “antisemites” for criticising contraventions in international law and support for those contraventions.
And this excludes the many immigrants that are merely being rounded up (kidnapped) and deported to the Global South (including to countries they do not come from) without being charged of any specific and properly assessed crime:
“His name is Merwil Gutiérrez. He was detained by immigration and customs enforcement (ICE agents) outside his apartment, here in New York in the Bronx.
On February 24th [2025], he was sent to El Salvador despite having an open asylum case in the US.
Merwil’s family and lawyers note that he has no criminal history, no tattoos, one of the features Trump officials have used to wrongfully accuse immigrants and others of being gang members and to expel them from the country [the US] without due process under the wartime Alien Enemies Act of 1798…
His [Merwil’s] cousin said authorities were searching for a different person but they forcibly took Merwil away anyway, knowing he was not that person. One of the officers grabbed Merwil by the arm and put him inside the car.”—'They shattered our Dreams’: NY Father recounts how ICE snatched his son and sent him to El Salvador, 1 May 2025, Democracy Now.
CLIMATE CHANGE PLANS AND THE GLOBAL GREENING PROJECTS
If the goings-on of resource extraction and greening capitalist industries in Africa are seen in line with increasing anti—"jungle"—migration attitudes, the approach seems to be one of capitalism first, planet second, “not-white” immigrants last.
And so the days of Africans blindly following top-down bread crumbs back home should be over for the working class.
Whether you consider yourself “middle-class” and are living under the crunch of high prices and/or stagnating wages or of the lower bands in the working class who desperately needs state support and imagination, ordinary plebs, specifically of the Global South, cannot be bikram yogaing, chit-chatting at the pub or resorting to “only my life matters” doomsday prepping when the entire planet is being laid to waste and at their expense first of all.
Whatever your racialisation, wherever you are on the political and religious spectrum (call your conservative dad and uncle!) the biggest polluters are not coming to the planet’s rescue, certainly not to your rescue.
And while you may think those, self-described special humans are going to live out their best lives in an abandoned sewage pipe in developed countries, let’s be real, who wants to raise kids underground?
Seeing that they too can’t individually control the planet’s climate crisis, they can’t be certain that their elites’ best laid plans (of wiping out the “surplus humanity” of the world) won’t eventually be a balls up even for them.
Like the elites elected or running things, the working class of the developed arena may well be delaying the inevitable for themselves and their families instead of looking around now and saying, wait, what do we as a global working class to stop this end.
Less elite saviourism and more collective imagination and global change toward global climate stability, enrichment, comfort and peace.
“There is an ancient Chinese fable called ‘The Foolish Old Man Who Removed the Mountains’.
It tells of an old man who lived in northern China long, long ago and was known as the Foolish Old Man of North Mountain.
His house faced south and beyond his doorway stood the two great peaks, Taihang and Wangwu, obstructing the way. With great determination, he led his sons in digging up these mountains hoe in hand.
Another graybeard, known as the Wise Old Man, saw them and said derisively, ‘How silly of you to do this! It is quite impossible for you few to dig up these two huge mountains.’
The Foolish Old Man replied, ‘When I die, my sons will carry on; when they die, there will be my grandsons, and then their sons and grandsons, and so on to infinity. High as they are, the mountains cannot grow any higher and with every bit we dig, they will be that much lower. Why can't we clear them away?’
Having refuted the Wise Old Man's wrong view, he went on digging every day, unshaken in his conviction. This moved God, and he sent down two angels, who carried the mountains away on their backs.
But alas, Africans and the rest of the Global South cannot pretend that anyone other than ourselves value our lives equally.
GREENING AFRICA THROUGH NEO-COLONIAL CAPITALIST ENDEAVOURS
First, we must acknowledge that Africa are not the biggest polluters on earth.
They are certainly not imperialist powers with military bases around the world that produces carbon emissions that are not being counted at present.
“NATO allies in Europe and Canada increased their defense spending in 2024 by 19.4%, according to the Secretary General Annual Report 2024 released on Thursday.
‘In 2024, investments in defence grew significantly across the Alliance. NATO Allies in Europe and Canada invested a total of USD 486 billion in defence, a 19.4% increase in real terms from 2023,’ Secretary General Mark Rutte wrote in the foreword of the report.
The report noted that their defense spending increased for the 10th consecutive year, and it amounted to 2% of their combined GDP, which is a guideline met by 22 allies in 2024.
‘In recent years, NATO European Allies and Canada have added more than USD 700 billion extra for defence. In doing so, these Allies are taking on greater responsibility for the defence and security of the Euro-Atlantic area. We need to dramatically accelerate these efforts in 2025,’ he added.
“Broadly, it occurs when the Global North achieves a high standard of living by exploiting the health, labour and land of the Global South.
Green colonialism can also take place within a country; interestingly, as we invest in more renewable energy and other conservation activities, it oftentimes comes at the expense of marginalised communities, like indigenous groups.”—Explainer: What Is Green Colonialism? Earth.org, 25 May 2021.
In recent years for example, South Africa was issued a World Bank loan that would serve the privatisation of the country’s national energy grid.
This privatisation is apparently at creating renewable energy sources in South Africa.
In a developing country of almost 40% unemployed that has only recently come out of rolling blackouts (lasting years), it came as a bit of a shock to read of this “unbundling of the energy supply” because this was never publicly debated let alone discussed.
Take into account that at present South Africa’s working class face economic (and therefore physical) decimation.
South Africa’s government-of-national-unity (GNU) indebted to the eyeballs despite years of austerity measures have pressed the accelerator once again on neoliberal capitalism’s trickle-down of unending despair, which sees the preliminary sign off of a VAT increase (said to come into effect in May 2025) under a rubber-stamped, continued regime of austerity.
And this is a fine layer on top of many layers of neoliberal capitalist governance that has protected foreign and domestic corporate interests at any cost, ANY cost to the ordinary people of Africa, most of whom are working class and the rightful titleholders of African land and its wealth…mineral wealth included:
“We [the Abahlali baseMjondolo movement of South Africa] were formed in 2005 as a shack-dwellers movement. Shacks are actually shanty towns. They are houses built [by the homeless] out of wood and built out of desperation.
When we were formed it was ten years after the fake democracy, fake freedom that came to South Africa.
We were formed to fight and advance the interests of the poor and marginalised of South Africa. We are living in very inhumane conditions, where there is no water, any form of sanitation, no electricity whatsoever.
Our movement face evictions and these evictions are at gun point at times.
Ever since we were formed in 2005, we have lost 24 activists and leaders who are fighting for land, decent housing and dignity.
The dignity of a black person in South Africa when you are poor is not recognised…
The movement was formed to achieve a just and equal society where human dignity and respect is given regardless of your socioeconomic status…
The people that are after us are members of the ANC [the African National Congress].
High profile ANC politicians who are out there and who see us as a disturbance, in losing land for profits.
We are saying land should be used for social purposes rather than commercial purposes…
In the commune, on March 8th, Ayanda Ngila, Deputy Chairperson of the branch was gunned down in front of the community and kids by hired hitmen hired by the ANC-led government;
On the 5th of May, Nokuthula Mabaso who was the leader of the communal kitchen in that particular area was shot five times, the killers shot her in the back and then turned her over and shot her in the chest two times to ensure she was left for dead;
THE WORLD’S LEAST POLLUTING SUFFER UNDER LOANS, INTEREST, PRIVATISATION, WORSENING POVERTY ALL FOR RENEWABLE ENERGY?
In the midst of global policies that leave Africans to die trying and die eventually, I am trying to understand why South Africa needs an international loan that requires repayment (in US Dollars) with interest?
And to be used for the purpose of privatising a national energy supply into renewable energy sources.
So let’s sum this up:
An African (very much poor and inequitable) country (born of western direct colonialism) must take out an interest bearing loan (which must be paid back of course),
To privatise its national energy supply,
To create renewable energy sources held by private (for-profit) entities,
When the biggest polluters are maintaining and even investing more in much-greater carbon-emitting military.
Am I getting this right?
No, really, am I?
In the meantime, Africans are being:
threatened at every turn with upending of their lives and/or deportation, or
blocked from migrating away from both the poverty and the climate change they’re contributing the least to.
Am I getting that right too?
“Many of Europe’s most carbon-intensive industries have relocated outside the EU, while still supplying products to European consumers.
This ‘emissions outsourcing’ has allowed European countries to appear virtuous, even as they simply move emissions around in a global shell game. France, Italy, and Germany are among the world’s top importers of embodied carbon in the form of cars, industrial machinery, and domestic appliances shipped from countries like China and India.
The EU has also been able to cut emissions by shifting to clean energy technologies like wind and solar. But these renewable sources require critical minerals — many of which come from the Global South. A great deal of the lithium for lithium-ion batteries is dug up in Argentina, Bolivia, and Chile, while much of the cobalt in the magnets used for wind turbines is extracted in Congo.
At the same time, the rush for balsa wood, used for the construction of wind turbine blades, is having terrible consequences for the Ecuadorian Amazon and the indigenous communities that inhabit it. Additionally, some of the dirtiest processing of these minerals takes place in the Global South, like the world’s largest single rare earth element refinery in Malaysia.
Because of these forms of Green colonialism, Europe’s carbon footprint is far greater than its stated emissions…
The Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) is supposed to reduce the ‘carbon leakage’ associated with the offshoring of carbon-heavy industry and agriculture by imposing a tax on imports that fail to meet strict EU regulations on carbon content. On the face of it, this seems like a sensible way to prevent polluting companies from setting up shop overseas.
But CBAM hits the Global South with a double whammy. Exporting countries dependent on European markets — like Senegal’s fertilizer producers — will suddenly find that their carbon-heavy products are no longer competitive.
Moreover, the money raised by the border tax will go to help European industries — not industries in the Global South — to reduce their carbon footprint.
The second piece of legislation is the Critical Raw Materials Act. Here, the EU wants to secure access to the inputs that make its high-tech, clean energy transition possible.
The sad truth of the matter, however, is that there’s simply not enough accessible lithium for all cars to shift to EVs or enough indium and neodymium for all the solar panels and wind turbines needed to replace oil. This competition among countries and regions to mine, process, and purchase critical raw materials resembles the colonial-era rush to secure gold, silver, and copper in the Global South.
Some aspects of the Act are commendable — particularly the emphasis on recycling and home-shoring the mining and processing in a way that reduces extractivism in the Global South. But when combined with provisions in new EU trade agreements to ensure access to critical minerals, the European approach becomes more ominous.
What’s happening at a global level is yet another reminder that the working class of Africa are on their own.
IMPROVING THE WORLD AS A PLANET DOES NOT SEEM TO GET MAINTSTREAM AIRTIME
“Our planet is a highly complex ecosystem where human beings are just one component. The COVID-19 pandemic has clearly illustrated the consequences of prioritizing national or corporate interests over systemic solutions that cater to all.
At the same time, we must transcend individualistic and hyper-localist approaches to embrace justice in all its dimensions: social, racial, gender, ecological, interethnic, and interspecies.
This entails exploring a spectrum of alternative approaches, ranging from ecofeminism to ecological economics, and from ecosocialism to understandings of the pluriverse.
A second premise is that ecosocial transformation demands an urgent reduction in human consumption of energy and matter in absolute terms, which implies planned and profound changes in our modes of production and appropriation.
I understand the pressure of neoliberal capitalism’s deindustrialisation, poor redistribution of wealth, lack of innovation and invention and job losses.
I understand it because the neoliberal system exists and dominates most of the world, including developing countries such as South Africa that suffers under neo-colonialism and imperialism.
What is happening to those of the Global South is beyond horrendous though.
It is beyond words like fascism and imperialism, racism and cruelty, which do not do justice to the very much constructed devaluing of their human lives and those of their children.
THE HATE IS IN THE SYSTEM’S STRUCTURES AND ITS DESIRED, CUMULATIVE OUTCOMES
Vijay Prashad, Indian historian and author of Struggle Makes us Human, said recently that structures that rank humanity such as a global white supremacist or racialised capitalism are actually hateful of humanity.
Whether these structures involve race, gender, sexual orientation, nationality, religion or non-religion and/or class etc, the hate is found within the structures. It exists in their
design, and
operational effect,
as it churns out the outcomes of inequity and disregard of responsibility.
Don’t tell me structures are not personal, if you’re comfortable with my little boy dying to maintain your material comfort a little longer.
Contempt for humanity is infused in policies, processes, regulations, ideas, actions and chosen inactions that declare who is worthy to live and who isn’t.
Who deserves a safe, lush and sustainable lived experience and those that don’t.
Ordinary Africans should not accept blame for what they didn’t do to this planet.
Native workers washing for diamonds, supervised by their colonial masters, in South America. Etching after J Boilly. Created 1836. Precious stones. Contributors: Julien Léopold Boilly (1796–1874)
Although, ordinary African families can only watch as everyone in power betrays their equal humanity, once again, never-ending…
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