The Saudi Arabia visit represents a 180-degree turn for Biden, who once called Saudi Arabia a “pariah” while campaigning for president. (A side note — “pariah” is an offensive slur directed at Dalits, who are the most oppressed in India’s caste hierarchy, and public figures in the U.S. and worldwide would do well to refrain from using such terms in the future.)

Since 2015, Saudi Arabia has been bombing neighboring Yemen as part of their intervention in an ongoing civil war. Saudi bombs have “indiscriminately killed and injured civilians,” according to Human Rights Watch — more than 18,000 to date.

Upwards of 20 million Yemenis are facing severe hunger because of the conflict. Human Rights Watch calls it “the largest humanitarian crisis in the world.” While the conflict is now on pause because of a UN-mediated truce, that neither provides any assurance that the war won’t resume, nor that Saudi Arabia will face accountability for its war crimes.

At home, the Saudi government jails and tortures dissidents, among other severe human rights violations. Saudi dissidents aren’t safe outside the kingdom either — Saudi agents murdered prominent dissident and journalist Jamal Khashoggi, a resident of the United States, at a Saudi consulate in Turkey.

Fossil Fueled Dictators

By meeting with the Saudi crown prince, Biden is sending a message to dictators worldwide that the U.S. is perfectly happy to turn a blind eye to their atrocities if it suits U.S. business and geopolitical interests. As I have documented elsewhere, Biden has done the same thing with the murderous Modi government in India.

In Saudi Arabia, these business and geopolitical interests include oil. Biden’s discussions with the Saudi government will include “ensuring global energy and food security,” the White House says. Presumably, Biden wants to persuade the kingdom to increase oil production and help lower global oil prices.

The supreme irony in Biden urging Saudi Arabia to increase oil production is that it’s in response to a global oil supply crunch and price surge partly (though not entirely) attributable to the war in Ukraine, started by another petro-dictator, Vladimir Putin.

Russia is the world’s third largest producer of oil (after the U.S. and Saudi Arabia), second largest producer of gas (after the U.S.), and the world’s largest gas exporter and second largest oil exporter. Effectively, oil and gas revenues are funding Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, another global human rights catastrophe that has resulted in almost 4,000 civilian deaths to date.

Continuing to fund the Russian war machine by buying Russian gas is obviously unacceptable. By the same standard, it’s equally unacceptable to fund the Saudi war in Yemen, and reward Saudi human rights violations, by buying Saudi oil.

In fact, the oil and gas industry is tied to violent, repressive governments worldwide.

In Indonesia, Exxon has been implicated in death squad killings and torture by Indonesian military personnel working as private security for the company.

In Nigeria, oil and gas extraction by Shell and other corporations has had horrific environmental justice impacts in the Niger Delt, especially on Indigenous Ogoni peoples. When the Ogoni peoples have resisted peacefully, they have been violently repressed and criminalized. Nine Ogoni leaders, including prominent writer Ken Saro Wiwa, were executed by the Nigerian state in 1995 on trumped-up charges, because they dared to publicly challenge the oil and gas industry.

Fossil Fueled Fascism at Home

If we are to avoid using our oil and gas purchases to enrich repressive governments, or corporations benefiting from their repression, should we ramp up domestic oil and gas production instead?

The short answer is no. The U.S. is already the world’s largest oil and gas producer, and planned expansion of production in the U.S. (or anywhere else) is inconsistent with a safe future for humanity, something even the pro-fossil fuel International Energy Agency acknowledges. And an increase in domestic production, which the Biden administration is pushing for, won’t even help reduce gas prices in the short term.

Not to mention, our own federal and state governments in the U.S. routinely violate human rights in defense of Big Oil.

My former colleague Gabrielle Colchete and I authored a 2020 report documenting the systematic industry-funded effort to pass “critical infrastructure” laws in the states to criminalize peaceful protest against fossil fuel infrastructure. These laws are now on the books in 17 states — the original 13 states with these laws at the time our report was published have since been joined by Arkansas, Kansas, Montana, and Ohio.

However, this isn’t only a problem of “red states” going rogue. Even in the absence of a “critical infrastructure law,” law enforcement in the Democratic-governed state of Minnesota, joined by Federal Customs and Border Protection (CBP), unleashed violent repression against peaceful Indigenous-led protests opposing Enbridge Corporation’s Line 3 tar sands oil pipeline.

The U.S. Justice Department has shown no interest in investigating the proliferation of “critical infrastructure” laws and their threat to First Amendment rights. However, they have been more than eager to charge Jessica Reznicek, a peaceful water protector at Standing Rock, with “terrorism” — charges that weren’t brought against anyone in the violent fascist mob who participated in the coup attempt on January 6, 2021.

Evidently, the Trump-era DOJ felt encouraged to pursue terrorism charges in the Reznicek case because of a congressional letter urging a crackdown on protests against fossil fuels. Signatories to the letter include members of Congress with ties to the fascist January 6 mob, such as Andy Biggs and Paul Gosar from Arizona, Mo Brooks from Alabama, and Louie Gohmert from Texas.

Disgracefully, the Biden-era DOJ under Attorney General Merrick Garland has not reversed course, but has doubled down on pursuing terrorism charges against Reznicek.

Climate Protection is Democracy Protection

Besides being a threat to the planetary climate and to air and water quality in communities adjacent to its operations, the oil and gas industry is closely connected to anti-democratic politics. As we’ve seen from the examples of Saudi Arabia, Russia, Indonesia, Nigeria, and the U.S., one form this takes is support for — and dependence on — authoritarianism, violence, and repression.

An industry that takes advantage of the lack of political power of marginalized communities to turn their homelands into sacrifice zones in its quest for production and profits is, by definition, dependent on repression for its existence. In recent years, growing resistance to fossil fuel infrastructure in the U.S. has prompted the industry to seek further state repression and criminalization of its opponents.

The fossil fuel industry poses serious threats to planetary systems, public health, and democracy. The only way to free ourselves permanently from these threats is to end our dependence on this industry by transitioning to renewable energy — not by legitimizing fossil fuel autocrats overseas.

Via Foreign Policy in Focus

( Inequality.org) – On April 25, Twitter’s board of directors announced an agreement to sell the company to Elon Musk, the world’s wealthiest person, for $44 billion. That sounds like a lot of money. But Musk can afford it. One recent estimate of the Musk fortune puts his wealth at $214 billion, a sum a bit down from the more than quarter trillion he held earlier this year.

Our Institute for Policy Studies colleague Chuck Collins has documented that Musk’s personal wealth, over the first year and a half of the Covid pandemic, grew by an incredible 751 percent at the same time millions of American families were struggling to pay their rent and utility bills.

Unfortunately, we can’t write Musk off as some sort of an anomaly. U.S. billionaires combined increased their wealth by a staggering $2.1 trillion over the first year and half of the pandemic. All those trillions could now be addressing a host of serious crises at home and internationally. Those dollars could be charting the world on a new sustainable course. Instead they’re merely making the already rich phenomenally richer.

Not my fault, says Elon Musk, who loves to claim that he’s doing his part — as the driving force behind the world’s biggest electric-car company — to save our planet.

Should we be giving Musk the applause he feels he so richly deserves? Let’s step back for a moment and take a closer look at where grand fortunes, Elon Musk, and Tesla fit into our menacing big picture.

Let’s start with greenhouse gas emissions. Worldwide, these emissions have grown steadily over the last several decades. They have, to be sure, declined in the United States since their 2007 peak, but their rate of decline comes nowhere close to what we need. At the current decline rate, we’ll still be emitting 3.6 billion metric tons of greenhouse gases annually in 2050. By that year, scientists tell us, we will need to have emissions down to zero.

Newly emitted quantities of carbon dioxide, a chemically stable gas, can last in the atmosphere for generations — and continue heating up our Earth for centuries. So even with declining U.S. emissions, we’re doing the Earth no grand favor. Here in the United States, we already bear the responsibility for one-fifth of all global greenhouse gas emissions since 1850, more emissions than the next two highest cumulative emitters, China and Russia, combined. And we remain today one of our world’s largest per capita emitters.

Overall, the huge emissions disparity between the United States and other wealthy countries and the nations of the Global South has led the United Nations to adopt the principle of “common but differentiated responsibility” as the ethical basis for determining just who needs to pay what to help our world mitigate and adapt to climate change.

This principle hasn’t yet actually translated into the kind of North-South financial flows we need to see, as demonstrated by the intransigence of wealthy countries at the UN climate talks last November, particularly on questions over funding for climate change-related loss and damage. Even so, the UN’s official acceptance of the principle that wealthy countries should fund climate action in the Global South as a matter of basic fairness represents a significant step forward.

This same discussion about responsibility, unfortunately, hasn’t taken place at the national level here in the United States. How should we allocate the cost of climate change mitigation and adaptation among Americans? We Americans need to be addressing this question head on, even if Elon and his fellow deep pockets would rather we not.

The vast bulk of the wealth in the United States today did not exist before the Industrial Revolution. We owe our current affluence to the fossil-fueled economy that has dominated the United States ever since this Revolution began.

The gains from this economic growth have gone to a narrow share of the American people. Our nation’s wealthiest 10 percent now hold nearly 70 percent of our country’s wealth. Our top 1 percent holds over 32 percent of our nation’s $142.18 trillion, mostly fossil fuel-generated fortune, an average of $35 million of wealth per household.

Meanwhile, the poorer half of the U.S. population owns only 2.6 percent of America’s wealth.

Connect all these dots and we have a simple, straightforward story: Fossil fuels fueled the Industrial Revolution. Atmospheric carbon dioxide has increased by 50 percent since that revolution began. The economic gains from that revolution have gone to a small wealthy in-crowd. These wealthy few, from John D. Rockefeller to Elon Musk, have cornered the economic gains from our generations of fossil-fueled economic growth.

Does Elon get a pass because he’s making electric cars? Hardly. For starters, Tesla cars come with an inordinately expensive price-tags. Musk relies upon fossil fuel-generated wealth to even have a market for expensive cars. Tesla, as an auto manufacturer, also benefits mightily from our nation’s elaborate highway system, a key contributor to the outsized emissions our country has historically produced.

Our wealthiest Americans have benefited disproportionately from our fossil-fuel economy. It’s only fair that these wealthy pay for the climate damage they’ve so benefited from. How could we see to it that they pay up?

First, we should close the gaping loopholes in America’s estate and gift tax law. Under current statutes, America’s wealthiest families sit poised to escape estate and gift tax on the coming intergenerational transfer of trillions of dollars in wealth.

According to a recent Americans for Tax Fairness report, the top 0.5 percent of our U.S. population will transfer $21 trillion of wealth to the next generation over the next 24 years. If America’s wealth transfer tax system were working as intended, those wealth transfers would generate upwards of $5 trillion in tax revenue. But existing tax loopholes guarantee that Uncle Sam will realize precious little of that $5 trillion.

Second, we should replace the generation-skipping tax, or “GST” as the tax lawyers call it, with an annual excise tax on large accumulations of trust-held wealth. Lawmakers originally created the GST to keep wealthy families from sidestepping the estate tax, for one or more generations, by gifting their fortunes to their grandchildren or great-grandkids. Unfortunately, this GST is not working to recoup the estate and gift tax revenue lost to the “dynasty trusts” that now hold trillions of ultra-rich family wealth.

Third, we should subject the investment gains of the ultra-wealthy to income tax as these gains accrue — and not let these gains pile up untaxed until the assets that produce them get sold. Two proposals before Congress and a third from the Biden administration would do just that. These proposals differ in detail, but each would make avoiding taxes by holding highly-appreciated assets until death much less lucrative. Each of those proposals would also produce hundreds of billions in new tax revenue.

The revenues generated by these commonsense tax reforms would provide much-needed funding for just climate mitigation and adaptation. And having the vast fortunes created by our fossil-fueled economy become a major funding source for transitioning away from the system that generated these fortunes in the first place would be, by any measure, only fair.

Basav Sen is the climate policy director at the Institute for Policy Studies. Bob Lord is an associate fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies and a senior advisor on tax policy for Patriotic Millionaires.

Via Inequality.org

Featured image: h/t Pixabay.

In early April, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a global scientific body, issued yet another dire report. They warned that we have barely three years to start cutting greenhouse emissions as rapidly as we need to avoid the worst effects of climate disruption.

These scientists put the largest share of the blame on fossil fuels. But they also show that renewable energy is already cost-competitive. “Systems in some countries and regions are already predominantly powered by renewables,” they note.

The report makes clear that the technology to transition from fossil fuels already exists — all that’s lacking is political will. And that’s a particularly big problem in our country, the world’s largest producer of both oil and natural gas.

It’s a problem even for an administration that says it accepts the science of climate change and wants to take action.

For example, on the eve of the IPCC report, the White House announced a plan to deal with high gas prices. Undoubtedly, high gas prices are causing hardship. But the White House plan makes the long-term problem of climate change worse without even solving the short-term problem of gas prices.

The plan centers around “doing everything we can to encourage domestic production” of oil. This is unlikely to bring down prices in the short term, since new drilling sites can take years to become operational. But it will almost certainly make emissions harder to reduce down the line.

This is part of a pattern. So far, the Biden administration has tried to sell its Bipartisan Infrastructure Law as a measure against climate change. That law does some good things, but on balance it may do more harm than good for the climate.

The legislation offers no funding at all for renewable electricity generation. But it sets aside billions in new fossil fuel subsidies dressed up as green technologies.

For instance, it pushes both carbon capture and hydrogen production from fracked gas. There’s no evidence that carbon capture works at scale — it may even cause more emissions than it removes, since it allows fossil fuel companies to continue polluting. And hydrogen from fracked gas has a worse climate impact than coal.

The bill also continues the harmful American tradition of overfunding highways and underfunding public transportation. Incentivizing more car travel but not cleaner mass transit is a recipe for more transportation emissions, not fewer.

Then there was the notorious incident last year, when President Biden gave a speech at the Glasgow climate talks proclaiming U.S. leadership on the issue. But within days of his return, the administration announced the results of the largest U.S. offshore oil drilling lease sale ever.

Fortunately, a federal district court invalidated the lease sale, and the Interior Department decided not to appeal the decision, bowing to grassroots pressure from affected communities and their allies. But if the sale had gone through, it would have produced as much greenhouse gas as 130 coal-burning power plants.

The Biden administration claims it believes in climate science, but its record shows a gap between these beliefs and the administration’s actions — what you might call a “soft denial” of climate science.

Fortunately, grassroots community members from Los Angeles to the Gulf Coast to West Virginia have won important fights to protect their communities, and our planet, from pollution.

As the planet warms and midterms approach, the administration needs to listen to communities like these — and take real action before it’s too late.

Via Otherwords.org

The Build Back Better program isn’t just inadequate on climate—it may be a disaster. Here’s what movements are demanding next.

This commentary was jointly produced by In These Times and Foreign Policy In Focus.

( Foreign Policy in Focus) – The infrastructure and budget reconciliation bills moving through Congress are a mixed bag when it comes to health care, income support programs, and the care economy.

On climate and environmental issues, however, they are not just inadequate but disastrous. They represent, at best, a huge lost opportunity to tackle the climate crisis at the required scale nationally.

One rogue legislator, Joe Manchin (D‑W.V.), who has deep fossil fuel industry ties and is himself a coal baron, is hell-bent on preserving fossil fuel subsidies and gutting the proposed Clean Electricity Payments Program. That program was flawed to begin with, but thanks to Manchin’s intervention, fossil fueled power plants could end up getting handouts that were supposed to subsidize clean energy.

Not only is there no assurance that the proposed laws will eliminate existing fossil fuel subsidies, but they actually introduce new subsidies for fossil fuels by supporting fictional technologies like carbon capture and ​“clean” hydrogen.

The bipartisan bill also weakens the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), one of the few legal tools available to communities to fight environmentally destructive projects. And it continues the harmful U.S. tradition of overfunding highways and underfunding public transportation.

Critique isn’t enough, though. As a climate justice movement, we need to articulate clear alternatives, even if they’re pronounced ​“politically infeasible” by insiders. Political feasibility is not an immutable law of nature — it can be transformed by visionary movement-building and organizing.

The first step is actually making the demand. So here’s an overview of what the climate legislation we actually need could look like, drawn from existing movement demands.

Building Back Fossil-Free

For starters, Congress should embrace the Hippocratic principle of doing no harm. That would mean ending all fossil fuel subsidies, including subsidies for green-washed fossil fuels such as carbon capture—something more than 500 organizations have signed an open letter calling for.

Next, Congress needs to set an ambitious timetable for transitioning to renewable energy.

It should enact a legally binding renewable energy standard for the electricity sector at the national level, effectively mandating a transition off fossil fuels and onto renewables. That way, we wouldn’t need to rely on today’s patchwork of state Renewable Portfolio Standards—which are strong in some states, weak in others, and expired, voluntary, or non-existent in 23 states.

This standard must define renewable energy carefully to exclude harmful, polluting energy sources such as nuclear energy, waste incineration, and biomass combustion. More than 700 organizations have called for such a federal standard.

A federal renewable energy mandate is also an opportunity to use federal funding to expand community ownership of renewable energy generation capacity, starting with the frontline communities who have borne the disproportionate burden of pollution from our dirty energy system.

Alongside electricity generation, any strong climate policy also needs to tackle transportation.

Federal climate legislation should increase funding for public transit by an order of magnitude to make up for decades of intentional underfunding. The Green New Deal Network calls for $600 billion in transit funding—compared to just $49 billion in the Build Back Better Act and bipartisan infrastructure package combined.

At the same time, it should cut federal highway spending, eliminate funding for expanding highways and major roads, and condition aid to state and local governments for road maintenance and repair on those governments agreeing to freeze all roadway expansion.

It should also provide adequate federal funding for school districts, transit agencies, and other public vehicle fleets nationwide to transition to electric vehicles on an accelerated timeline, prioritizing the most polluted areas first.

This is just a snapshot. A visionary climate bill must also include major investments in safe, healthy, energy-efficient residential and public buildings, water infrastructure that assures clean water for everyone in an age of climate change, federal assistance to farmers to transition to ecologically sound farming methods, and more.

A Just Transition

Importantly, all of these investments must assure a just transition for communities and workers, as articulated with clarity and power by the Climate Justice Alliance. Frontline communities that have borne the brunt of fossil-fuel pollution must be first in line to benefit from the transition.

This would require significant funding flowing to these communities for energy, transportation, housing, and other infrastructure that addresses critical needs identified by community members. The proposed federal Justice40 initiative, which would ensure that 40 percent of federal climate and environmental spending is allocated to frontline communities, is only a small step in this direction.

No federally permitted energy, transportation, or other projects should occur without the consent of the people whose benefit they’re purportedly for, or the people who will be most impacted by the project. For projects on Indigenous lands in particular, the global legal standard of Free, Prior and Informed Consent must be followed.

No visionary climate bill would be complete without requiring that the millions of jobs that will inevitably be created be good jobs that pay livable wages, provide good benefits and safe and healthy working conditions, and assure the right to unionize without employer coercion and intimidation.

The legislation should ensure priority hiring for people from frontline communities, formerly incarcerated people, and displaced fossil fuel workers. The Labor Network for Sustainability makes a compelling case for workers’ rights in an economy-wide transition to address the climate crisis.

From Executive Action to Direct Action

Unfortunately, the prospects for such legislation are slim to nonexistent today. What then are some ways forward for federal climate policy? There are two paths forward, and we must pursue both.

First, the president has a tremendous amount of executive power on climate, especially in the arena of fossil fuel supply.

Executive branch agencies can end leasing for oil and gas drilling on federal lands and in federal waters. They can stop issuing permits for new fossil fuel projects such as pipelines, refineries, petrochemical facilities and export terminals. They can revoke permits that were issued without adequate consideration of their dangers, such as for the Line 3 tar sands pipeline in Minnesota and the Formosa Plastics facility in Louisiana (which the EPA has temporarily halted for further review, but not stopped altogether).

After making a promising beginning by canceling the Keystone XL pipeline, Biden has not demonstrated much willingness to use these powers. So movements will need to press him on it.

That’s why thousands of people converged in Washington, D.C. from October 11 to 15 for the People vs. Fossil Fuels actions to demand that Biden use his executive authority to stop fossil fuel infrastructure, and 655 people were arrested for civil disobedience (including me). The actions were led by the predominantly Indigenous, Black, and brown communities next to fracking fields, in the path of pipelines, and in the shadow of refinery and petrochemical facilities.

This was followed by 13 members of Congress sending a letter to Biden reinforcing the demands of the People vs. Fossil Fuels mobilization. Our movements need to keep up the pressure on Biden — in the streets, in the media, and with allies in Congress — to deliver on these demands.

Second, we need to keep up the national visibility of our demands, setting the stage for actual legislative wins on climate in subsequent years.

The later it gets, the more dire our climate emergency becomes. Defeat isn’t an option — we must escalate political pressure on Congress and the administration to compel them to act next year. And this must include undoing the damage done by the legislation that passes this year, such as carbon capture subsidies and highway expansion funding.

This may sound easier said than done.

But social movements led by the most affected people have shaped the course of human history, and can win again. If that wasn’t the case, we would still be living in a world of Jim Crow segregation in the U.S. South, apartheid in South Africa, and British Empire in India. With the right vision, social movements can transform our fossil fuel economy, too.

——

Bonus Video added by Informed Comment:

Democracy Now! “Hunger Striker Out of Hospital Demands Biden Keep All Climate Provisions in Build Back Better Plan”

As climate change intensifies and countries turn to clean energies, Big Oil will take increasingly desperate measures to survive.

( Foreign Policy in Focus) – This March, the leading global consulting firm IHS Markit held its CERAWeek conference, billed as the ​“world’s premier energy event” bringing together the ​“Who’s Who list of the global energy industry.” The conference’s keynote speaker and recipient of the Global Energy and Environment Leadership Award was Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

You can’t make this stuff up.

Recently, I wrote an article titled ​“Fossil-Fueled Fascism,” on the fossil fuel industry’s financial and political support for the far-right wing of U.S. politics. But the industry’s open support for these dangerous politics is clearly not confined to one country.

The fascist movement in India

Modi belongs to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which is openly acknowledged—including by BJP officials — as the political arm of an organization called the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS).

The ideological ties between the RSS and European fascism go all the way back to the early days of the RSS in the 1920s and 30s, as I’ve documented in detail earlier. This isn’t just a historical footnote — it took almost 70 years for the RSS to distance itself from the openly fascist views of its early leadership.

Even if one were to give IHS Markit the benefit of the doubt for not knowing Indian history from almost a century ago, there are plenty of recent developments they should have been aware of — or else were perfectly willing to overlook.

In the year and a half since being reelected in 2019, the Modi government has moved with terrifying speed to turn India into a theocratic, ethnonationalist Hindu nation. In the northeastern state of Assam, it has started a citizenship register to determine who is a ​“legitimate” Indian citizen that pointedly excludes Muslims and the transgender community. The people who’ve been made stateless in their own land are being held in concentration camps.

Elsewhere, in the strife-torn Muslim-majority region of Kashmir, the BJP government has unilaterally escalated an ongoing conflict by scrapping Article 370 of the Indian Constitution and unleashing horrific human rights abuses under cover of the longest internet shutdown ever in a nominally democratic country.

The systematic exclusion of Muslims from equal rights in India became much more blatant with the passage of the Citizenship Amendment Bill, which gave selective naturalization rights to non-Muslim migrants from neighboring Muslim-majority countries.

This assault on human rights in BJP-ruled India has also extended to Dalits and Adivasis (people from the lowest Hindu castes and Indigenous peoples, respectively), political activists, and journalists whose reporting questions the government’s version of truth. Particularly horrifying is the impunity with which predominantly upper-caste Hindus have raped and murdered Dalit women — acts of violence that have grown unnervingly common in India.

The Indian farmers’ revolt

Shutterstock

All of this was before the Indian farmers’ revolt.

Indian farmers are protesting against three laws that change the agricultural procurement system in India, giving corporate agribusiness greater power to depress prices and impose unfavorable terms. This is especially concerning because of the very close political ties between the ruling BJP and large corporations.

As much as 43 percent of India’s labor force works in the agricultural sector — enough to make the farmers’ movement the largest protest movement in human history.

The BJP government’s response to the farmers’ protest is consistent with their approach to all protest and dissent: persecution of activists working in solidarity with the farmers, attacks on journalists covering the demonstrations and violent repression of the protests themselves.

None of this could possibly be unknown to CERAWeek organizers. Why then did they choose to honor the leader of a totalitarian state who’s tightening his grip on a country home to one sixth of the world’s population?

India as an extractivist, fascist state

To understand the possible motives for a fossil-fuel consulting firm to fête the head of a fascist régime at its annual energy industry event, we need to examine the corporate ties of the BJP.

Key among these are the close relationship the BJP (and Prime Minister Modi personally) has with Gautam Adani, founder and head of a huge business conglomerate with interests in a wide array of industries that include coal, natural gas, and fossil-fueled utilities. His company has a very questionable human rights and environmental record of its own, in India and internationally.

The company’s planned Carmichael mine in Australia has become very controversial. It is an assault on traditional sacred lands of the Indigenous Wangan and Jagalingou peoples, and will be disastrous for the earth’s climate and for access to scarce water in drought-affected Queensland.

This isn’t just about the tight-knit relationship between the BJP government and one powerful billionaire. The BJP government is pursuing a supremacist political project that includes a ​“nationalist” claim on land and resources, to the detriment of Adivasi peoples and other traditional communities. Political and policy support for fossil fuel extractivism is a core part of this agenda.

As an illustrative example, the government announced an auction of blocks of land for expanded coal mining in 2020, without the consent of the Adivasis and other local populations. More than 60 percent of the blocks have a majority Adivasi population. Unsurprisingly, the Adani Group is a leading bidder in this auction.

The government claims that expanded coal production resulting from the auction will boost ​“self-reliance” — a possible prelude to characterizing opposition from the Adivasis and other impacted communities as acts of sedition. The Modi government is adept at labeling opposition to their agenda seditious, as their recent attacks on journalists and activists show.

What’s more, the government has already engaged in a systematic smear campaign to link Adivasi-led protests against resource extraction to ​“terrorism.”

Fossil-fueled fascism is global

The fossil fuel industry’s reliance on governmental subsidies and bailouts on one hand — and on ruthless state power to overcome opposition to their polluting activities on the other — is a longstanding, worldwide phenomenon.

This is true of the United States, where the industry has provided financial and political backing to extremist right-wing politics, and has benefited from (or stood to benefit from) crony capitalism in the form of deregulation, bailouts, and draconian laws criminalizing peaceful protest.

In India, we’ve seen how a fossil fuel billionaire has helped Modi’s rise to power, and how the industry as a whole has gained from his government’s policies. And in countries like Saudi Arabia, the separation between big oil and authoritarian government doesn’t exist at akk. They’re one and the same.

As climate change intensifies and global opinion turns more and more against fossil fuels, the industry will resort to increasingly desperate measures to survive, including backing outright fascists who support their agenda. We need to dismantle this industry — with a just transition for the workers it employs and communities it buttresses — not just for the survival of our planet but global democracy as well.

This article was jointly published by In These Times and Foreign Policy In Focus.

Via Foreign Policy in Focus

Featured Photo: White House Archives. Public Domain.

A few years ago, massive protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline at Standing Rock changed the popular narrative about what climate activism looked like. The protests made clear that ramming dangerous pipelines through vulnerable communities wasn’t going to be easy anymore.

But since then, rather than scaling back their attacks on these communities, the fossil fuel industry decided to attack them even more fiercely.

Indigenous water protectors at Standing Rock were subject to a violent law enforcement response. They were blasted with water cannons in the freezing cold and faced down by heavily armed police in military vehicles.

Now the industry wants to criminalize anti-fossil fuel protests altogether, pushing new laws that turn routine acts of civil disobedience into serious felonies. They’ve found willing partners in the American Legislative Action Council (ALEC). Industry and ALEC efforts have passed such laws in 13 states.

My colleague Gabrielle Colchete and I studied these anti-protest laws in our recent report, “Muzzling Dissent: How Corporate Influence Over Politics Has Fueled Anti-Protest Laws.”

We focused on three states: Louisiana and West Virginia, where these laws have been passed, and Minnesota, where bills have been introduced numerous times (one even passed the legislature, but was vetoed by the governor).

In all three states, controversial fossil fuel infrastructure has faced significant resistance from affected communities. And in every case, the fossil fuel industry has been a major source of campaign money for the legislators who introduced these bills.

For example, in Louisiana, the lead sponsor of the anti-protest bill received $6,600 from oil and gas interests, the third highest of 40 industry sectors he received campaign contributions from. And in West Virginia, the lead sponsor of the anti-protest bill received substantial contributions from Dominion Energy, owner of the failed Atlantic Coast Pipeline project that passed through the state.

All three states had something else in common, too: Their controversial infrastructure projects have a disproportionate impact on marginalized communities.

Black communities in the path of the Bayou Bridge Pipeline in Louisiana, for example, suffer a poverty rate twice the national average. For Indigenous communities in the path of the Line 3 pipeline in Minnesota, the poverty rate is three times the national average.

Many of the poorer white communities in the path of the Mountain Valley Pipeline in West Virginia have a life expectancy below the national average. The same is true of the majority-Black communities at the end of the Bayou Bridge Pipeline in Louisiana, especially in the “Cancer Alley” area.

The underlying story? Corporate interests fund the campaigns of elected officials, who return the favor — often at the expense of their most vulnerable constituents. In this case, politicians are criminalizing efforts by their own voters to roll back the harms fossil fuel interests are doing to their communities.

There is much work to be done to reverse these unjust laws — and the systemic inequalities that drive them.

We need to push for “Protesters’ Bills of Rights” in state legislatures to codify the right to protest without fear of criminalization and repression, a core democratic right that’s particularly relevant today.

We also need to restore key provisions of the National Environmental Policy Act that protect communities and ecosystems from harmful projects. We should also add another layer of review, a National Environmental Justice Assessment, to evaluate the impacts of new infrastructure projects on marginalized communities.

Finally, we need to clean up systemic corruption. We must push for a ban on hiring or appointing industry lobbyists in regulatory agencies and set up a robust system of public financing of elections as an alternative to our current system of legalized bribery.

These will all be hard political fights, but they’re fights worth having. Our health, our democracy, and our planet depend on it.

Via Otherwords.org

—-

The Years Project: “Harsh New Laws Are Protecting Fossil Fuel Companies”

How to get the Democrats’ climate policy from “better than the Republicans” to “sufficient to save the planet.”

By Basav Sen | –

( Foreign Policy in Focus) – From dere­chos in Iowa to duel­ing hur­ri­canes in the Gulf Coast, 2020 is promis­ing to be an elec­tion year shot through with cli­mate dis­as­ters. Even now, rag­ing wild­fires have spawned apoc­a­lyp­tic land­scapes from Wash­ing­ton State on down to the Bay Area.

In style and sub­stance, there are few issues on which the two major par­ties are as far apart as cli­mate change.

The Repub­li­cans have become the offi­cial par­ty of cli­mate denial­ism. The Trump admin­is­tra­tion has rou­tine­ly cen­sored cli­mate sci­ence and gut­ted com­mon sense, often life-sav­ing reg­u­la­tions to ben­e­fit the fos­sil fuel indus­try. Under Repub­li­can lead­er­ship, the U.S. has become the only coun­try to quit the flawed but essen­tial Paris cli­mate accord.

The Democ­rats are dis­tinct­ly bet­ter. They’ve rolled out a raft of dif­fer­ent cli­mate plat­forms and promi­nent­ly cam­paigned on the issue. Grass­roots move­ments have pushed the Biden cam­paign in par­tic­u­lar to sig­nif­i­cant­ly increase the ambi­tion of its com­mit­ments on climate.

But the real test of even a ​“bet­ter” plat­form is whether it keeps glob­al warm­ing to with­in 1.5 degrees Cel­sius above pre-indus­tri­al lev­els. The answer is a mat­ter of life and death for bil­lions, par­tic­u­lar­ly the world’s most vul­ner­a­ble peo­ple.

To go from mere­ly ​“bet­ter than the Repub­li­cans” to ​“suf­fi­cient to save the plan­et,” the par­ty needs to shift its think­ing in sev­er­al areas. Key among these are end­ing fos­sil fuel pro­duc­tion, tak­ing respon­si­bil­i­ty for U.S. emis­sions inter­na­tion­al­ly, and humane­ly wel­com­ing refugees impact­ed by cli­mate change.

Fos­sil Fuel Blinders

The Democ­rats’ com­mit­ments are spelled out in a range of doc­u­ments, includ­ing the House Select Com­mit­tee on the Cli­mate Cri­sis report, the Biden-Sanders Uni­ty Task Force plan, the Biden cam­paign plat­form, the offi­cial Demo­c­ra­t­ic par­ty plat­form, and most recent­ly, the Sen­ate Democ­rats’ cli­mate plan.

Broad­ly speak­ing, there’s a lot to com­mend in these platforms.

To start, it’s encour­ag­ing to see cli­mate rec­og­nized as a major issue at all — and not just cli­mate change, but cli­mate jus­tice. All of these plat­forms call for undo­ing lega­cies of envi­ron­men­tal racism and injus­tice and cen­ter­ing front­line com­mu­ni­ties in solu­tions. This is a major step for­ward, won by decades of envi­ron­men­tal jus­tice organizing.

But the first big stum­ble is their fail­ure to take on fos­sil fuel pro­duc­tion. There’s grow­ing sci­en­tif­ic evi­dence that cut­ting fos­sil fuel con­sump­tion alone won’t be enough to avert cli­mate cat­a­stro­phe — we also need to phase out their pro­duc­tion. That’s espe­cial­ly true for the U.S., the world’s largest pro­duc­er of both petro­le­um and nat­ur­al gas, and the third largest pro­duc­er of coal.

None of the plat­forms make a hard com­mit­ment to do this. They call instead for baby steps, such as elim­i­nat­ing fos­sil fuel sub­si­dies and cut­ting methane leaks. That’s nec­es­sary but far from suf­fi­cient, and they may already be back­track­ing. Dur­ing the con­ven­tion, the DNC qui­et­ly removed a plank call­ing for an end to fos­sil fuel sub­si­dies, though the Biden cam­paign insists it remains com­mit­ted to end­ing them.

Fail­ing to address fos­sil fuel pro­duc­tion seri­ous­ly dilutes the com­mit­ment all the plat­forms make to envi­ron­men­tal jus­tice. Fos­sil fuel extrac­tion, trans­porta­tion, pro­cess­ing and burn­ing have seri­ous envi­ron­men­tal, safe­ty, and health impacts, par­tic­u­lar­ly on mar­gin­al­ized com­mu­ni­ties. And even if we end­ed domes­tic con­sump­tion, these fuels could still be export­ed — and burned — abroad. That would allow the envi­ron­men­tal jus­tice impacts to con­tin­ue, whether in extrac­tion-affect­ed com­mu­ni­ties at home or com­mu­ni­ties next to pow­er plants and indus­tri­al facil­i­ties in oth­er countries.

Instead of address­ing this direct­ly, the Demo­c­ra­t­ic plans wish away emis­sions by invok­ing Car­bon Cap­ture and Stor­age (CCS), a large­ly unproven tech­nol­o­gy to ​“cap­ture” car­bon emis­sions from ongo­ing fos­sil fuel oper­a­tions. The Biden plat­form, for exam­ple, calls to ​“accel­er­ate the devel­op­ment and deploy­ment” of the technology.

This is a dan­ger­ous delu­sion. CCS isn’t proven to work at scale — after years of research and devel­op­ment, there’s only one oper­a­tional CCS facil­i­ty in the Unit­ed States. It’s also inor­di­nate­ly expen­sive, which could take resources away from scal­ing up proven solu­tions such as solar and wind ener­gy, which are already cost-com­pet­i­tive with fos­sil fuels.

Even if one could cap­ture car­bon diox­ide from smoke­stacks eco­nom­i­cal­ly and at scale, those same smoke­stacks will still emit par­tic­u­late mat­ter and oth­er dan­ger­ous pol­lu­tants. Com­mu­ni­ties exposed to these pol­lu­tants — dis­pro­por­tion­ate­ly low-income peo­ple and com­mu­ni­ties of col­or — would con­tin­ue being treat­ed as sac­ri­fice zones.

Of course, craft­ing a just plan to wind down fos­sil fuel pro­duc­tion is hard work. It will need exten­sive input from impact­ed work­ers depen­dent on the indus­try for their liveli­hoods, and impact­ed com­mu­ni­ties depen­dent on tax rev­enues from the indus­try, to ensure a thriv­ing future for them. But there’s no excuse not to do it.

Show­ing Respon­si­bil­i­ty, Not ​“Lead­er­ship”

The oth­er major blind spot in these plat­forms is their nar­row nationalism.

Green­house gas­es emit­ted by any one coun­try effec­tive­ly warm the entire plan­et. That’s why we have a U.N. Frame­work Con­ven­tion on Cli­mate Change (UNFC­CC) process to deal with cli­mate action as the inher­ent­ly mul­ti­lat­er­al issue that it is. That’s why it was so irre­spon­si­ble for Trump to walk away from the UNFCCC.

But rejoin­ing the Paris accord isn’t near­ly enough.

Green­house gas reduc­tion tar­gets under the Paris Cli­mate Agree­ment are non­bind­ing, with coun­tries mak­ing only vol­un­tary pledges. The pledges made by all coun­tries under the Paris accord would result in a 3.2 degree Cel­sius glob­al aver­age tem­per­a­ture increase, well over the 1.5 degrees upper lim­it sci­en­tists have shown we must stay with­in to pre­serve a liv­able planet.

At the 2020 Demo­c­ra­t­ic con­ven­tion, for­mer Sec­re­tary of State John Ker­ry cast the Paris agree­ment as evi­dence of Barack Oba­ma and Joe Biden’s glob­al lead­er­ship. But it was the Oba­ma admin­is­tra­tion itself that pres­sured the Paris sig­na­to­ries to make their com­mit­ments non-binding.

To their cred­it, the cur­rent crop of Demo­c­ra­t­ic plans go beyond promis­ing to rejoin the Paris Cli­mate Agree­ment. But their con­tin­ued insis­tence on putting the U.S. ​“back in the posi­tion of glob­al lead­er­ship where we belong,” as the par­ty plat­form promis­es, isn’t just hubris­tic nation­al­ist rhetoric — it results in sub­stan­tive shortcomings.

To start, none of the plans rec­og­nize that the U.S. has among the high­est per capi­ta emis­sions of any coun­try, and an aston­ish­ing one quar­ter of cumu­la­tive emis­sions since rough­ly the start of the Indus­tri­al Rev­o­lu­tion. Cumu­la­tive emis­sions mat­ter, because car­bon diox­ide can per­sist in the atmos­phere for cen­turies.

A more hon­est approach would be to speak not of America’s lead­er­ship but its respon­si­bil­i­ty to reduce its own emis­sions rapid­ly on a scale that match­es its out­sized con­tri­bu­tion to glob­al emissions.

Unfor­tu­nate­ly, the U.S vol­un­tary tar­get bare­ly exceeds a quar­ter of the most con­ser­v­a­tive esti­mate of what a fair share of emis­sions reduc­tions by the U.S. should be. So when the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty plat­form says the U.S. will ​“seek high­er ambi­tion from nations around the world,” it’s fair to ask: Why not increase our own com­mit­ment first?

Instead, the par­ty appears to blame oth­er coun­tries for the cri­sis. The Biden cam­paign plat­form claims that coun­tries like Chi­na ​“game the sys­tem by becom­ing des­ti­na­tion economies for pol­luters.” But China’s sta­tus as the world’s fac­to­ry is in sig­nif­i­cant part attrib­ut­able to the cor­po­rate-friend­ly glob­al trade régime that the U.S. has con­sis­tent­ly pushed for. Chi­na is our third largest trad­ing part­ner, and U.S. com­pa­nies are respon­si­ble for much of the pol­lu­tion in China.

Then there’s the mat­ter of the U.S. debt to coun­tries impact­ed by our emissions.

The Demo­c­ra­t­ic plans do com­mit the U.S. to the Green Cli­mate Fund, which funds cli­mate action in less wealthy coun­tries. But absent spe­cif­ic mon­e­tary com­mit­ments, it’s an emp­ty promise.

The U.S. pledge under the Oba­ma admin­is­tra­tion, for exam­ple, was only $3 bil­lion (Trump lat­er reneged on $2 bil­lion of this). This com­pares to an esti­mat­ed need for world­wide cap­i­tal invest­ment of 810 bil­lion Euros ($956 bil­lion) by 2030 annu­al­ly for bring­ing emis­sions down (“mit­i­ga­tion”), and anoth­er $500 bil­lion by 2050 annu­al­ly for adjust­ing to cli­mate change impacts (“adap­ta­tion”). Giv­en the out­sized U.S. role in caus­ing the cli­mate cri­sis, it’s only fair that the U.S. con­tri­bu­tion to glob­al mit­i­ga­tion and adap­ta­tion costs should be orders of mag­ni­tude larger.

“Fortress Amer­i­ca”

Final­ly, there’s the issue of migra­tion. More than 140 mil­lion peo­ple are expect­ed to be dis­placed by cli­mate change in the com­ing decades. Any seri­ous cli­mate plan demands a humane approach to this wrench­ing cri­sis, which is already begin­ning to unfold.

To its cred­it, the offi­cial par­ty plat­form com­mits to address­ing ​“the root caus­es of migra­tion,” includ­ing ​“the impacts of cli­mate change.” But the Biden cam­paign, House Select Com­mit­tee, and Sen­ate Democ­rats’ plans, with their empha­sis on ​“nation­al secu­ri­ty” and ​“prepar­ing” at the bor­der, hint vague­ly at what’s some­times called ​“Fortress America.”

Biden promis­es to ​“ele­vate cli­mate change as a nation­al secu­ri­ty pri­or­i­ty” in response to ​“defense and intel­li­gence lead­ers’ warn­ings about the threats cli­mate change pos­es to glob­al sta­bil­i­ty.” He plans to make ​“secu­ri­ty impli­ca­tions of result­ing large-scale migra­tions” dri­ven by cli­mate change a sub­ject of intel­li­gence gathering.

Sim­i­lar­ly, the House Select Com­mit­tee wants fed­er­al agen­cies to ​“pre­pare for cli­mate-dri­ven inter­nal and cross-bor­der migra­tion” in response to cli­mate risks to nation­al secu­ri­ty, while the Sen­ate plan warns that cli­mate-dri­ven migra­tion will ​“strain state capac­i­ty, fur­ther frac­ture soci­eties, and could cre­ate breed­ing grounds for radicalization.”

Almost as an after­thought, the Sen­ate plan does rec­og­nize that ​“indi­vid­u­als whose lives are immi­nent­ly threat­ened by cli­mate change may have a legal basis for refugee pro­tec­tion,” though it stops short of affirm­ing one itself. The Biden and House plans say noth­ing about cli­mate-dri­ven migra­tion as a human rights issue.

With­out a firm com­mit­ment to the human rights of cli­mate refugees, these vague approach­es could eas­i­ly presage a mil­i­ta­rized response to a cri­sis for which the U.S. is dis­pro­por­tion­ate­ly respon­si­ble. The mes­sage to the rest of the world is: ​“We don’t care if our emis­sions parched your crops and dis­placed you — we’ll pre­serve our gat­ed community.”

A more humane response would neces­si­tate the U.S. open­ing its bor­ders to peo­ple flee­ing cli­mate dev­as­ta­tion, a core part of tak­ing respon­si­bil­i­ty for the effects of its his­tor­i­cal emissions.

The Strength of Our Movements

The Democ­rats have got­ten a good deal stronger on cli­mate jus­tice in recent years. Still, their offi­cial posi­tions often remain stuck in the Oba­ma years, leav­ing the door open for an ​“all of the above” ener­gy agen­da at home, under­min­ing more mean­ing­ful action in glob­al cli­mate talks, and bar­ring the door to impact­ed refugees.

What they haven’t reck­oned with is the strength of our move­ments for cli­mate jus­tice. It’s the strength of our move­ments that has forced the Democ­rats to acknowl­edge the pri­ma­cy of envi­ron­men­tal jus­tice — and to dif­fer­en­ti­ate the par­ty more clear­ly from the denial­ist Republicans.

And it’s the strength of our move­ments that has deci­sive­ly shift­ed the cen­ter of grav­i­ty of cli­mate pol­i­cy from a neolib­er­al ​“car­bon pric­ing” approach to a focus on reg­u­la­tion, gov­ern­ment spend­ing, and social justice.

If a Demo­c­ra­t­ic admin­is­tra­tion takes office in 2021, they can expect mas­sive resis­tance to fos­sil fuels at home, and unre­lent­ing pres­sure to aban­don hubris­tic notions of ​“Amer­i­can lead­er­ship” and engage in good-faith in glob­al cli­mate action.

This article is a joint publication of Foreign Policy In Focus and InTheseTimes.com.

Basav Sen directs the Climate Policy Project at the Institute for Policy Studies.

Via Foreign Policy in Focus

Featured Photo: Shutterstock

If you think the result was only about political ideology in a highly polarized country, you’d only be partly right – a narrow majority of 51 percent of Republicans surveyed support phasing out fossil fuels, albeit at a slower pace.

In other words, a solid seven-eighths of U.S. adults — including half of the supporters of the unabashedly pro-fossil fuel Republican Party — support a phase-out of fossil fuels. And that population is based in the world’s largest oil and gas producer, third largest coal producer, and the only country to leave the universally-adopted Paris Climate Agreement.

You’d expect a media outlet to treat this as the immensely newsworthy (and headline-worthy) finding that it is – especially if that media outlet commissioned the poll! Yet, The Washington Post buried these numbers in the 14^th and 15^th paragraphs of the story about the poll’s findings on attitudes around fiscal policy and national climate action, one of the multiple articles they published around their survey.

How did the Post headline actually read? “Americans like Green New Deal’s goals, but they reject paying trillions to reach them.”

This assertion, while not outright false, certainly is misleading.

The poll had a single vaguely-worded question about the price tag for a national climate action plan, which asked whether respondents supported raising federal spending by unspecified “trillions.” Sixty-seven percent of respondents said they were opposed.

But the poll provided no context on how much the government spends on the military, or fossil fuel subsidies, or corporate subsidies more broadly. Pollsters gave respondents no specifics on the amount of “trillions” we’re talking about, or how they compare to the overall federal budget or the country’s GDP. They didn’t ask respondents whether they would support such a spending increase if it were paid for entirely by revenue increases.

What else did the poll find? More than two-thirds of Americans — 68 percent — support raising taxes on the wealthy to pay for climate action. Sixty percent support raising taxes on fossil fuel burning companies “even if that may lead to increased electricity and transportation prices.” The Post chose to ignore both findings entirely in the article.

Unsurprisingly, only 47 percent support a monthly $2 tax increase on residential utility bills, and only 35 percent support an increase in the gas tax 10 cents per gallon.

A more accurate portrayal of the poll results might say that U.S. adults support paying for climate action by raising taxes on corporations and the wealthy, but they don’t want to raise taxes for working people. They might be uncomfortable spending “trillions” without any context or specifics.

American adults support fairness. But there’s little evidence that they support austerity, despite what the the headline of the Post may say.

Why, then, did the Post bury some of the most significant findings of their own poll, and highlight the most misleading finding instead?

I won’t speculate too much — that’s for The Washington Post to answer. But neoliberal political biases that equate government spending with waste, while evading or ignoring issues of tax fairness, run deep.

A more objective – and hopeful – reading might instead emphasize that the vast majority of Americans support phasing out fossil fuels. Large majorities also support other climate action and social justice objectives, like reaching 100 percent renewable electricity in 10 years (69 percent support), a job guarantee with good wages for all workers (78 percent support), energy efficiency upgrades for all buildings in the country (70 percent support), and major new regulations on businesses (61 percent support). A majority (55 percent) support a reduction of coal mining jobs, even though the poll failed to provide context about transition programs for displaced workers.

Two poll findings complicate the premise of the Post’s headline. Two-thirds of respondents support increased government infrastructure spending on climate resilience for communities who are vulnerable to disasters, and two-thirds also support a government program for universal health care.

Polls aren’t always trustworthy. But to the extent that they reveal public opinions, this one shows large majorities of Americans want serious governmental action on climate change that incorporates social justice and workers’ rights, all paid for by progressive taxation. They want more regulation of corporations and more government spending on community resilience. And they support a government program for universal health care.

This is great news for those of us who are organizing for a just transition from our extractive fossil-fuel driven economy to a safe, healthy future for all, Washington Post headlines be damned.

Via Inequality.org

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Bonus Video added by Informed Comment:

CBS New York: “Climate Change Protesters Disrupt Football Game”

The world’s burgeoning far-right movements are far-flung and diverse, but in government they share a few core tendencies: They attack minority populations. They criminalize dissent. And they’re horrible for the planet.

The slide into extractivist authoritarianism in the U.S. is part of a worldwide trend, exemplified by the parallels between the U.S. and Brazil, where far-right president Jair Bolsonaro is presiding over an accelerated destruction of the Amazon, attacks on Indigenous Brazilians, and brazen profiteering by aligned corporate interests.

Another striking international parallel was on display recently in Houston, Texas, where Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi shared the stage with Trump at an event that felt like a fascist rally.

I’m not using the term “fascist” lightly. Here’s a brief explanation for readers unfamiliar with Indian history.

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), Modi’s political party, is rooted in a much older organization called the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a connection the BJP doesn’t deny — Modi himself is a long-time RSS member.

Early RSS ideologues were inspired by European fascism. B.S. Moonje, a mentor of RSS founder K.B. Hegdewar, visited Italy, met with Mussolini, toured fascist youth indoctrination camps, and was inspired to popularize an Indian version of these camps through the RSS.

M.S. Golwalkar, another early RSS leader, openly praised Nazism in his writings. He wanted to create a Hindu nationalist India based on the ethnonationalist, militaristic vision of fascism. Golwalkar never apologized for or retracted these views during his lifetime, and the RSS waited 67 years to publicly repudiate them, making the repudiation not particularly credible.

But this isn’t just an ancient skeleton in the BJP’s closet. The violent ethnonationalism that RSS leadership admired and espoused in the 1930s is very much alive in the agenda of today’s BJP. This ideology views Muslims as the enemy of India’s national identity, and Muslims have been the main target of the Modi government’s politics of violence and repression.

The best-known example is the BJP government’s escalation of the decades-long conflict in Muslim-majority Kashmir.

Article 370 of the Indian Constitution provided for a certain measure of autonomy for the state of Jammu and Kashmir. Article 35A, a provision of Article 370, restricted acquisition of land in the state by persons from outside it.

In August, the Modi government unilaterally scrapped Article 370 using questionable means. This was a prelude to the further militarization of an already heavily militarized territory, a communications blockade that eliminated all internet, mobile phone, and landline service, and worsening violence against Kashmiris, with reports of deaths, torture, and detention (including detention of children).

Eliminating Article 35A opens the door to changing the demographics of Muslim-majority Kashmir through settlement, much like Israel’s practice in occupied Palestine. Doing so would be completely consistent with the BJP’s ethnonationalism.

A lesser known example of the Modi government’s Islamophobia is its campaign to strip Muslims of alleged Bangladeshi descent in the state of Assam of their Indian citizenship unless they can prove their citizenship — in a country where most people, especially the rural poor, don’t have birth certificates.

Also excluded from the “citizens’ list” created by the Modi government are transgender people.

The Indian government is now building camps to detain people who are stripped of their citizenship. Mass detention of a civilian population, usually based on their ethnic, religious, or other identity, fits the definition of concentration camps.

There are obvious parallels with the U.S. here. The Trump administration’s horrific border policies include detaining children and families in concentration camps, as experts who’ve studied the history of concentration camps agree, regardless of what right-wing apologists say. And The Trump administration is engaged in a legal assault of its own against the basic rights of transgender people and LGBTQ people more broadly.

Then, there’s the Modi and Trump regimes’ deep-seated hatred of Muslims. The U.S. government has gone to the extent of banning people from specific Muslim-majority countries from entering the U.S. altogether. While courts have upheld this policy on the grounds that its stated intent is to keep out nationals from countries with ties to “terrorism,” Trump’s own statements point to the intent to exclude Muslims from the U.S.

Other parallels between the far-right political projects in India and the U.S. include their ties to extractive industries and their shared objective of criminalizing opposition to extractivism, particularly by Indigenous peoples.

In the United States, a recent investigative news report revealed that oil and gas companies have been lobbying Congress to insert provisions criminalizing protests against fossil fuel infrastructure into a pipeline safety bill. Similar laws are already on the books in states such as Louisiana and North Dakota. Besides being an attack on the right to protest, these laws are outright assaults against Indigenous peoples who have been in the forefront of struggles against fossil fuel infrastructure in the U.S.

These laws are being pushed by the fossil fuel industry — along with regulatory changes rolling back automobile fuel efficiency standards, making it easier for coal power plants to pollute, and more. The U.S. government increasingly acts like a tool of fossil fuel companies and oligarchs.

Similarly, Modi has direct ties with Indian billionaire Gautam Adani, who has benefited from public subsidies and deregulation for his fossil fuel, mining, and other business interests. Adani has also been a vocal supporter of Modi, including when the latter faced scrutiny for his role in covering up an anti-Muslim pogrom when he led the state of Gujarat. Adani’s company has a sordid record of destroying ecosystems and violating Indigenous rights, from Gujarat to Australia.

And like the U.S. government, the Modi government is also criminalizing Indigenous resistance to extractivism by equating it with “terrorism.”

Exploring these parallels isn’t an academic exercise. For cross-border movements for justice to successfully dismantle far-right ethnonationalism backed by fossil fuel and other corporate interests, in the U.S., India, Brazil, and elsewhere, we must start with a shared understanding of the common material and ideological foundations of the global far right. Sharper understanding can make our resistance more effective.

Via Foreign Policy in Focus

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Bonus Video added by Informed Comment:

India Today: “”Don’t Inaugurate Birbhum Coal Block” Rajya Sabha MP Shoots Letter To PM Modi”