Four Years Later

We first ran this excerpt back in 2019, back when we still hoped to hold global temperature rise at 1.5c. Now, with this year's fires, heat waves, and freak storms we're all beginning to get a glimpse of our stark future if we don't get our shit together:

In the journal Nature Climate Change, a team led by Drew Shindell tried to quantify the suffering that would be avoided if global warming was kept to 1.5 degrees, rather than 2 degrees — in other words, how much additional suffering would result from just that additional half-degree of warming.

Their answer: 150 million more people would die from air pollution alone in a 2-degree warmer world than in a 1.5-degree warmer one. Later that year, the IPCC raised the stakes further: in the gap between 1.5 degrees and 2, it said, hundreds of millions of lives were at stake. A hundred and fifty million is the equivalent of twenty-five Holocausts. It is three times the death toll of Mao’s Great Leap Forward, the largest non-military death toll humanity has ever produced. It is more than twice the greatest death toll of any kind, World War II. The numbers don’t begin to climb only when we hit 1.5 degrees, of course. As should not surprise you, they are already accumulating, at a rate of at least seven million deaths, from air pollution alone, each year — an annual Holocaust, pursued and prosecuted by what brand of nihilism? This is what is meant when climate change is called an “existential crisis.” It is a drama we are now haphazardly improvising between two hellish poles, in which our best-case outcome is death and suffering at the scale of twenty-five Holocausts, and the worst-cast outcome puts us on the brink of extinction. The facts are hysterical, and the dimensions of the drama that play out between those poles incomprehensibly large —large enough to enclose not just all of present-day humanity, but all of our possible futures, as well.

— David Wallace-Wells, The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming

Want to do something about it? visit the eco front and demand our leaders declare a global climate emergency while we still have time.

No Longer Human

"Talking benches" or "chat benches" are common in the United Kingdom and Australia, and are now spreading around the world. These specifically designated benches in parks and common areas, often painted a different color, are places where members of the community can take a seat and chat with whoever may be sitting on the bench. No invitation needed.

Can we trust the supreme court?

Samual Alito — smug and immoral song of a bitch — flies around in a billionaire's jet, then judges cases involving him.

Confidence in the Supreme Court is down to 25%. Confidence in the presidency is down to 23%, and trust in Congress is down to a miserable 7%. But there's something much more disturbing going on here: Americans don't even trust each other anymore. There's a deep fissure at the heart of the country that, as the 2024 election fever intensifies, could easily erupt in wholesale violence — even civil war.

Our Jam of the Week is Rueben and MC Gusto's Punk, which features the UK’s Gusto Vicario spitting revolutionary verses on Reuben’s old school drum and bass warble. Shoehorning social commentary onto the dancefloor, this summer jam fuels the mind for a global toneshift.

J. Chaos

Erasing Time

On an average day, a Palestinian who works in Jerusalem and resides in the West Bank must wake up at four in the morning in order to arrive at work by nine. The reason is not the distance between workplace and home. With the construction of the separation wall that began in 2002, and is still underway as of 2022, the Israeli state entered into a new stage of encroachment on Palestinian territory.

The Palestinian worker has to wait in line for hours at checkpoints staffed by soldiers who are incentivized to make the line move as slowly as possible. Most of these border-crossers have a long day ahead of them in various kinds of construction work. After crossing into Israel, they must spend hours every day passing through checkpoints to get to work, even though they often have only a few kilometres to travel.

We want you!

Adbusters is looking for people to fight the good fight.

One of the great epiphanies of my life happened thirty-five years ago in my neighborhood supermarket parking lot. I was plugging a coin into a shopping cart when it suddenly occurred to me just what a dope I was. Here I was putting in my quarter for the privilege of spending money in a store I come to every week but hate, a sterile chain store that rarely offers any locally grown produce and always makes me wait in line to pay. And when I am done shopping, I’d have to take this cart back to the exact spot their efficiency experts have decreed, slide it back in with all the other carts, rehook it, and press a button to get my damn quarter back.

A little internal fuse blew. I stopped moving. I glanced around to make sure no one was watching. Then I reached for that big bent coin I’d been carrying around in my pocket and I rammed it as hard as I could into the coin slot. And then with the lucky Buddha charm on my keyring I banged that coin in tight until it jammed. I didn’t stop to analyze whether this was ethical or not — I just let my anger flow. And then I walked away from the supermarket and headed for the little fruit and vegetable store down the road. I felt more alive than I had in months.

— Excerpt from the prologue of Manifesto for World Revolution

Before there was The Media Foundation there was Psychomedia Productions, an underground film collective that ran its wild dog-and-pony show out of the same Vancouver address that now churns out Adbusters. Just spitting distance from where Greenpeace midwifed the environmental justice movement, and a young Georgia Straight arts editor named Bob Geldof jacked into the electric countercultural scene that was Vancouver in the Seventies, Psychomedia strode the boards like a holy fool.