In Episode 151 [16] of the CounterVortex podcast [17], Bill Weinberg notes a tellingly ironic juxtaposition of simultaneous news stories: the COP27 [18] global climate summit in Egypt and the World Cup games in Qatar—where mega-scale stadium air-conditioning [19] betrays the fundamental unseriousness of our civilization in addressing the impending climate apocalypse. The COP27 agreement for a "loss and damage" fund stops short of demands for climate reparations [20]—a critical question for island nations [20] that stand to disappear beneath the waves, flood-devastated [21] Pakistan, and indigenous peoples of the fire-ravaged [22] Bolivian Amazon. Petro powers like Russia and Saudi Arabia formed a bloc to bar any progress on limiting further expansion of oil and gas exploitation, while the Ukrainian delegation called for a boycott of Moscow's hydrocarbons, and pointed to the massive ecological toll [23] of Russia's war of aggression. Meanwhile, the world population reached 8 billion [24], providing an excuse for groups like PopulationMatters [25] to proffer the Malthusian fallacy [26] even as the rate of population growth is actually slowing [27]. Worldwide indigenous and peasant resistance [28] to hydrocarbon exploitation points to a revolutionary response to the crisis.
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Production by Chris Rywalt [32]
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