Daily Archives: 6 June 2024

Biden Claims Israel Isn’t Starving Gazans. Rights Groups Say ‘It Is Clear as Day’

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Original article by JAKE JOHNSON republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

Palestinians wait in line to receive food distributed by charitable organizations amid Israeli attacks in Deir Al-Balah, Gaza on May 28, 2024. (Photo: Hassan Jedi/Anadolu via Getty Images)

“The fact that Israel is using starvation as a weapon of war in Gaza is not in contention,” said a Human Rights Watch researcher.

U.S. President Joe Biden said in an interview published Tuesday that he does not believe the Israeli government is using starvation as a weapon of warfare in Gaza, contradicting the findings of leading human rights organizations that have documented Israel’s deliberate obstruction of food aid as Palestinians die of malnutrition.

“No, I don’t think that,” Biden said in response to TIME magazine’s Washington bureau chief Massimo Calabresi and editor-in-chief Sam Jacobs, who noted some have “alleged that Israel is intentionally using starvation of civilians as a method of warfare.”

The president, who has approved more than 100 arms sales to Israel during its eight-month assault on the Gaza Strip, acknowledged that Israel’s military has “engaged in activity that is inappropriate” and that “Palestinians have suffered greatly.”

But he stopped well short of the conclusions reached by Oxfam International, Human Rights Watch (HRW), and the International Criminal Court, which recently applied for arrest warrants against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for their role in the “starvation of civilians as a method of warfare” and other war crimes.

The U.S. Agency for International Development has also determined that Israel has unlawfully impeded the delivery of humanitarian assistance to Gaza, leading to a “deterioration of food security and nutrition in Gaza [that] is unprecedented in modern history.”

“The fact that Israel is using starvation as a weapon of war in Gaza is not in contention. It is clear as day,” Hiba Zayadin, a researcher at HRW, wrote in response to Biden’s TIME interview, pointing to her group’s December report that found the Israeli military was “deliberately blocking the delivery of water, food, and fuel, while willfully impeding humanitarian assistance, apparently razing agricultural areas, and depriving the civilian population of objects indispensable to their survival.”

“The evidence is even stronger today,” Zayadin added, citing HRW’s April report that focused specifically on the Israeli military’s starvation of Gaza children. Dozens of Palestinian kids, some just months old, have died of malnutrition since October, a figure that is almost certain to grow as Israel’s bombing campaign and ground offensive in Rafah continue.

The World Food Program said Wednesday that unless Israel’s assault on Gaza ends and desperately needed humanitarian aid is allowed to flow, more than a million people in the occupied enclave “are expected to face death and starvation… by mid-July.”

Humanitarian groups and experts—including an outspoken former U.S. State Department official—have argued that by continuing to arm Israel and provide it with diplomatic cover on the world stage, the Biden administration is complicit in Gaza’s increasingly dire hunger crisis.

“This is not just turning a blind eye to the man-made starvation of an entire population, it is direct complicity,” Josh Paul, who resigned from the State Department in October over the administration’s support for Israel’s assault on Gaza, told The Independent last month.

In a speech on the floor of the U.S. Senate earlier this week, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) displayed photos of emaciated children as he explained his decision to boycott Netanyahu’s upcoming speech to Congress.

“Blocking humanitarian aid and creating the conditions for famine is not only an act of extreme cruelty—using starvation as an act of war—but it is a violation of both American and international law,” Sanders added. “It is a war crime.”

Original article by JAKE JOHNSON republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

Continue ReadingBiden Claims Israel Isn’t Starving Gazans. Rights Groups Say ‘It Is Clear as Day’

Jewish US Army Major Explains Why He Resigned Over Gaza

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Original article by JESSICA CORBETT republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

Harrison Mann, a Jewish U.S. Army major who resigned from the Defense Intelligence Agency over U.S. support for Israel’s war on the Gaza Strip, appeared on Mehdi Hasan’s show on June 5, 2024.  (Photo: Zeteo/screenshot)

“I knew that as long as I stayed, I’d be contributing to this campaign that had already demonstrated basically it was going to be indiscriminately killing civilians at an industrial scale,” said Harrison Mann.

After Harrison Mann’s resignation from the U.S. military was finalized on Monday, the Jewish U.S. Army major who worked in the Defense Intelligence Agency gave a pair of interviews this week explaining his decision to resign over American support for Israel’s war on the Gaza Strip.

“We saw, even from the first days of the Israeli air campaign, willingness to inflict very high civilian casualties,” Mann toldCBS News chief investigative correspondent Jim Axelrod in a conversation that aired Tuesday.

Even before the Hamas-led October 7 attack prompted the ongoing Israeli bombardment, ground assault, and restrictions on humanitarian assistance deliveries into Gaza, the United States gave Israel billions of dollars in annual military aid. U.S. weapons and diplomatic support for the Middle East ally has increased over the past eight months, as the death toll has topped 36,500.

Journalists and human rights groups have documented Israel’s use of U.S. arms to kill and injure civilians in Gaza. Asked by Axelrod whether Israeli forces were intentionally doing so, the Mann responded, “I don’t know how you kill 35,000 civilians by accident.”

During Mann’s first televised interview, Axelrod also asked, “You felt your work was directly connected to starving children?”

The 13-year Army veteran simply said, “Yes.”

U.S. President Joe Biden, meanwhile, said in an interview this week that he doesn’t think Israel is using starvation as a weapon of war, contradicting conclusions by global human rights organizations and the International Criminal Court.

Bend the Arc: Jewish Action CEO Jamie Beran, whose group has historically stayed out of the decadeslong Israel-Palestine conflict, wrote in a Tuesday letter to Biden that “we, as American Jews, are sounding an alarm: U.S. support for continued violence in Gaza is putting American safety and U.S. democracy in danger.”

In his CBS appearance, Mann read from his resignation letter, in which he notes his experience as a Jewish person, writing that “as the descendant of European Jews, I was raised in a particularly unforgiving moral environment when it came to the topic of bearing responsibility for ethnic cleansing—my grandfather refused to ever purchase products manufactured in Germany—where the paramount importance of ‘never again’ and the inadequacy of ‘just following orders’ were oft repeated.”

Mann addressed his decision to make his letter public on LinkedIn last month after distributing it internally at DIA on April 16. He cited the Biden administration’s May report—which critics called a “Friday news dump”—about Israeli assurances regarding the use of U.S. weapons in Gaza and the delivery of humanitarian aid.

That administration’s report states that although “it is reasonable to assess” that Israeli forces used U.S. arms in Gaza in manners inconsistent with their international law obligations and expresses “deep concerns” about Israel’s action and inaction on humanitarian aid, American support for the Israeli war effort can continue.

Mann also appeared Wednesday on Mehdi Hasan’s new show for Zeteo, the media platform that the journalist launched following the cancellation of his program at MSNBC after he aired content critical of Israel’s assault on Gaza.

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https://zeteo.com/p/jewish-american-soldier-quits-biden

Jewish-American Soldier Quits Biden Administration Over Gaza: “I Feel it’s Appropriate to Invoke ‘Never Again’”

Mehdi speaks to newly-resigned Major Harrison Mann. Plus: the forgotten genocide in Sudan.

While Joe Biden struggles to draw a red line for Israel in its genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, a handful of principled officials within the administration are making their red lines very clear. This week on ‘Mehdi Unfiltered’, Mehdi dives into the ]

Mann told Hasan that he started his resignation process in November but revealed why in April, saying that “the war in Gaza and our role in it and my contribution to that was the straw that broke the camel’s back and the reason I ultimately understood I could not do this work anymore.”

By November, “I knew that as long as I stayed, I’d be contributing to this campaign that had already demonstrated basically it was going to be indiscriminately killing civilians at an industrial scale,” Mann said. He added that it was clear that the U.S. would continue to provide Israel with “unwavering” support.

Others who have quit their jobs over U.S. government support for the Israeli war include Lily Greenberg Call, a special assistant in the Department of the Interior and the first Jewish political appointee to resign in protest; Tariq Habash, a Palestinian American who worked as a policy adviser in the Education Department; and Stacy Gilbert, Josh Paul, Hala Rharrit, and Annelle Sheline, who all left the State Department.

Original article by JESSICA CORBETT republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

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Rate of Global Warming Reaches All-Time High, Report Shows

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Original article by EDWARD CARVER republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

Firefighters set a backfire to protect homes during a wildfire in California in September 2020.  (Photo: David McNew/Getty Images)

“The devastation wrought by wildfires, drought, flooding, and heatwaves the world saw in 2023 must not become the new normal,” the report’s author said.

Climate scientists published a report Wednesday showing that the rate of global warming reached an all-time high in the 10 years up to and including 2023 and that the record-breaking heat of last year was primarily due to that human-caused heating rather than other factors such as El Niño.

The scientists found that from 2014 to 2023, the Earth warmed 0.26°C—higher than any previous 10-year period. The report, published in Earth System Science Data, was completed by 57 scientists who used the methods of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which produces major reports only every five to 10 years, with the next one expected in 2027. The report authors sought to fill the gap and, at least in one case, to galvanize climate action.

“Rapidly reducing emissions of greenhouse gases towards net zero will limit the level of global warming we ultimately experience. At the same time, we need to build more resilient societies,” lead author Piers Forster, a climate physicist at the University of Leeds in the U.K. and an IPCC author, said in a statement. “The devastation wrought by wildfires, drought, flooding, and heatwaves the world saw in 2023 must not become the new normal.”

Over the course of 2023, temperatures were on average 1.43°C above preindustrial levels, Forster and co-authors found, with an estimated 1.31°C of that due to human-caused global warming, and the relatively small remainder due to variability from events such as El Niño and La Niña.

The report also shows that the Earth’s remaining “carbon budget”—how much can be emitted before reaching 1.5°C of warming, the Paris agreement target—is now roughly 200 gigatonnes, which will take only five years or so for the global population to use. This is down from the 500 gigatonnes that the IPCC estimated remained in the budget as of 2020.

Adam Vaughan, environment editor at The Times, a U.K. newspaper, drew attention to the short time period in which humanity has to act, writing on social media that the 1.5°C target could be “blown” if emissions didn’t go down.

In a guest post in Carbon Brief, Forster and another co-author explained that their report was “nothing short of alarming, yet it does contain some encouraging news.”

“Greenhouse gas emissions have not yet risen beyond pre-pandemic levels and there is evidence that the rate of increase in CO2 emissions over the past decade has slowed compared to the 2000s,” they said.

Forster, who also led the annual report in its first iteration last year, spoke to reporters in such a way as to avoid doomsday rhetoric.

“If you look at this world accelerating or going through a big tipping point, things aren’t doing that,” he told TheAssociated Press. “Things are increasing in temperature and getting worse in sort of exactly the way we predicted.”

However, the climate news remains dire: Researchers working with even more up-to-date data—through May—have found that the average temperature increase above preindustrial levels is now 1.6°C, and each of the last 12 months has been the hottest on record for that month. Those findings are from data released by the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service and reported by The Washington Post.

Original article by EDWARD CARVER republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

Continue ReadingRate of Global Warming Reaches All-Time High, Report Shows

Green Party responds to UN Secretary General’s climate speech

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Ellie Chowns, Green Party parliamentary candidate for North Herefordshire. CC image Wikipedia.
Ellie Chowns, Green Party parliamentary candidate for North Herefordshire. CC image Wikipedia.

Responding to UN Secretary General António Guterres speech, Green Party parliamentary candidate for North Herefordshire, Ellie Chowns, said:

“The UN Secretary-General has reiterated today that the climate crisis is here and it’s hitting us hard. He made clear that if we are to have a liveable future we need to act with extreme urgency.

“Yet the Conservatives are in denial, being reckless with our future, pushing to extract more fossil fuels. And Labour are tinkering at the margins, ditching their green investment plan and will leave the UK limping towards its climate targets.

“Only the Green Party is offering real hope and real change when it comes to the climate crisis.

“Green MPs will push the next government to stop all new fossil fuel extraction projects, cancel recently issued fossil fuel licences, including Rosebank, one of the largest undeveloped oil and gas fields in the UK.

“They will also press for significant investment in the green economic transformation – something that will be good not just for our environment, but also the economy, creating thousands of new jobs. This investment makes good economic sense as the cost of inaction far outweighs the cost of climate action.  

“This is an emergency. We don’t have long to act. Only the Green Party are offering the policies for a fairer greener country.”

Continue ReadingGreen Party responds to UN Secretary General’s climate speech

Is Carbon Capture Just Climate Delusion?

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Original article by BASAV SEN | JIM WALSH republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

Officials pose with shovels for a photo opportunity for the groundbreaking ceremony for Oxys Direct Air Capture facility called Stratos in West Texas on Friday, April 28, 2023.  (Photo: Elizabeth Conley/Houston Chronicle via Getty Images)

Direct air capture and similar technologies come with glossy brochures and lofty promises but we must not be fooled. They are a distraction and a scam orchestrated by the fossil fuel industry.

A newly opened facility in Iceland that will remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere has been heralded as a hopeful turning point in the urgent fight to stop climate catastrophe. In reality, it is further evidence of a new type of techno-optimism that is not quite old-fashioned climate denial, but something you might call climate delusion.

On its face, the technology known as direct air capture (DAC) seems like a plausible, painless solution to the climate crisis: Giant machines pull greenhouse gasses out of the air, and they are either injected underground or integrated into consumer products.

For years, we have been hearing that a massive breakthrough is just around the corner. The clamor grew much louder when the Climeworks facility in Iceland came online. It is the world’s largest DAC facility—and yet is designed to capture just 36,000 tons of CO2 annually—which is, for the sake of comparison, just one percent of the pollution generated by a single coal power plant. There are much larger DAC plans in the works: Occidental Petroleum is part of a group building a facility in Texas that they claim will capture 500,000 tons of CO2 per year.

Handing out free money to polluters is not only broadly unpopular, it is also terrible public policy. Congress must stop the public funding and support for these climate scams.

And while that theoretical capability sounds impressive, it is still less than 0.01 percent of annual U.S. carbon emissions. And these projections become even less impressive when we consider the track record of carbon removal so far. Another recent Occidental project, the Century carbon capture facility, failed to capture more than a third of its capacity before they liquidated this asset.

There is another more fundamental problem with most of these carbon removal technologies: When the captured carbon is used to squeeze out oil from existing wells (a process known as enhanced oil recovery), is it of any climate benefit at all? There is no doubt that Occidental sees direct air capture as a tool to help it continue extracting fossil fuels; when they are touting ‘net zero oil,’ one cannot escape the conclusion that the goal is to greenwash oil extraction as a climate solution.

Breaking ground on the world’s largest DAC facility

www.youtube.com

To hear proponents of DAC explain it, science tells us this technology is a necessity at this stage in the race to stop climate catastrophe. This is misleading; there is a wide range of modeled pathways for slowing down the rate of global temperature increase, and they do not all rely on carbon removal that have not been shown to work.

Even if DAC was shown to be effective, its costs are astronomical. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) estimates that the cost range of early-stage DAC plants is $600-$1,000/ton of carbon dioxide; and operating DAC at a meaningful scale would consume an estimated one-sixth of the world’s energy output.

By promoting the adoption of technologies they insist will eventually work as advertised, fossil fuel giants can delay the transition away from fossil fuels.

Instead of viewing techno fixes like DAC as a necessity, many in the scientific community warn that reliance on DAC is a risky move that could “obstruct near-term emissions reduction efforts.” This is exactly what makes DAC and carbon capture so appealing to major polluters: By promoting the adoption of technologies they insist will eventually work as advertised, fossil fuel giants can delay the transition away from fossil fuels.

Unfortunately, U.S. taxpayers are funding these false climate solutions; billions of dollars in subsidies are available through the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, and similarly lucrative corporate tax credits are a major part of the Inflation Reduction Act. There is ample evidence that this is a poor investment. A 2020 Treasury Department Inspector General investigation found that nearly 90 percent of tax credits claimed for carbon capture operations were done so with no accompanying verification that any carbon was actually being captured.

Instead of taking corrective action, Congress massively expanded these tax credits, making this scam even more lucrative than before. To make matters worse, the IRS will not release information about which companies are benefiting from this billion dollar taxpayer-funded boondoggle.Handing out free money to polluters is not only broadly unpopular, it is also terrible public policy. Congress must stop the public funding and support for these climate scams. Continuing to encourage the expansion of direct air capture will waste precious money and time and perpetuate further harms on communities most affected by fossil fuel pollution.

Original article by BASAV SEN | JIM WALSH republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

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Continue ReadingIs Carbon Capture Just Climate Delusion?