Original article by Roger Hallam republished from Roger Hallam. I don’t have permission to republish this article but expect that it will be ok & he’s in prison.
The elites are blind, the media asleep — but the fuse of revolution has been lit, and history is about to turn.
Shortly before I was imprisoned last year, I had the privilege of joining a Zoom call with a man living in the Central American rainforest. He had been the primary fundraiser for the Social Forum, which, as some readers will recall, was the first international organisation of this century to call for a new global social system: “Another world is possible.” He told me, “Roger, when you go to see funders, tell them two things: First, that the money is not theirs, and second, that it will be worth nothing in ten years.”
This week, I recorded a message for one of the most radical Western companies funding climate crisis activism. I spoke to them about these two realities. Five years ago, perhaps even a year ago, they would have politely—or not so politely—shown us the door. But not now. My colleague was told the presentation was “magical,” information about funding a new global movement was shared with over 100 staff members, and a personal letter from me will be delivered by hand to the company’s founder, whose funds run into the hundreds of millions of dollars.
At the same time, Just Stop Oil announced it would no longer engage in civil resistance. The media response has been significant, but none of it has focused on what really matters. I was sent a series of questions by Justin Rowlatt, the BBC environment correspondent. I replied to him with three main points. First, it is the evolution of a deep culture of respect, service, and trust that took us from three people in a room with a few quid to a household name, with thousands of arrests and millions of pounds in financial support, all within a year. Equally significant has been the unprecedented battering we have received, resulting in hundreds of people being imprisoned, many on multi-year sentences, including nearly all the key organisers. Nothing like this has happened to an open, nonviolent organisation in this country since the Napoleonic Wars.
A day or two later, the police battered down the door of Westminster Friends Meeting House in a raid to arrest a group of young people planning a protest. How many centuries would you have to go back to find this kind of treatment of the Quakers? The point, however, is this: it is only in the face of such state violence that the fearless personality is forged, prepared for the enormous sacrifices needed to bring down regimes.
Then there is the third, least important point, that obviously JSO has not been able to stop the metamachine of universal death that is the British carbon regime. Justin, in true neoliberal style, focused only on the third point: our “failure” – the superficial, the short-term, the flat material plane. He and the media cannot see cultural and spiritual depth.
The key determinants of regime change are now coming into place — large-scale funding, service-based culture, and the spirit of fearless sacrifice. There is one more ingredient. Ignored by the media is the “climate news” of the past 12 months, which is a hundred times worse than what provoked the mass mobilisation of Extinction Rebellion back in 2018. Underlying temperatures have jumped 0.2°C in a single year. We are now over 1.6°C and will be hitting 2°C by 2030. The carbon sinks are collapsing, and the feedbacks are triggered. Buried in the Appendix of the recent British Insurance Industry report is its prediction of 2 billion deaths at 2°C, and 4 billion at 3°C. That is half of the world’s population dead. This reality is about to explode upon us and trigger the fusion of the elements of revolutionary transformation.
Chris Hedges, the Pulitzer Prize-winning war correspondent for the New York Times during the 1990s, told me a while ago that the reason why the elites do not see revolutions coming is because they only speak to themselves. They are stuck in their silo. Like Justin Rowlett and the BBC, they can only see what they want to see. The world is falling away beyond our feet. Trump is doing his stuff. They have no alternative but to resort to appeasement. And like in the 1930s, their dream world is about to be swept away.
So are we just going to have ourselves die? The deepest paradox of the present historical moment is that only when we have the courage to answer yes to that question, and so allow ourselves to experience the agonising depths of despair, desolation, and self-contempt, can we come to see and feel reality as it actually is, and so play our part in the coming re-making of the world.
To find out about this new global movement (we’re recruiting!) go to rev21.earth.
Original article by Roger Hallam republished from Roger Hallam. I don’t have permission to republish this article but expect that it will be ok & he’s in prison.
Orcas comment on killer apes destroying the planet by continuing to burn fossil fuels.
Climate activists and supporters displayed placards during a global climate strike rally, part of the Fridays for Future movement, in Dhaka, Bangladesh, on April 11, 2025. (Photo: Mamunur Rashid/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
“If, in fact, a majority of people in your community care about climate change, and yet elected officials aren’t responding to that, that’s a deficit in democracy,” one of the project’s organizers said.
According to a global survey, 89% of people worldwide want their government to do more to address the climate crisis, yet current national policies put the world on track for 3.1°C of warming.
To explore this disconnect, Covering Climate Now (CCNow) launched the 89% Project on Monday to encourage coverage of “climate change’s silent majority” and ask some key questions.
“If, in fact, a majority of people in your community care about climate change, and yet elected officials aren’t responding to that, that’s a deficit in democracy,” CCNow co-founder Kyle Pope told Common Dreams. “Why is that? What’s to be done about it? Where do we go from here?”
‘A Media Problem’
The 89% Project is designed as a yearlong initiative that kicks off with a joint week of coverage coinciding with Earth Day. Another week of coverage will take place in the fall in the leadup to the United Nations climate conference (COP30) in Belém, Brazil. In between, CCNow will host webinars and gatherings, promote the project on social media, and analyze the coverage to see what newsrooms are focusing on and what support they may need to continue telling climate stories going forward.
Already, major media outlets have signed on to participate, with The Guardian and Agence France-Presse acting as lead partners. Other core partners include The Nation, Rolling Stone, Scientific American, TIME, Canada’s National Observer, Germany’s Deutsche Welle, Italy’s Corriere della Sera, Japan’s Asahi Shimbun, and Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism. However, media outlets don’t need to sign up ahead of time in order to participate. They simply need to publish a story related to the 89% theme during the coverage week, include a logo and tagline with their article, and email their coverage to editors@coveringclimatenow.org.
CCNow encourages stories “focused on the people who comprise the 89%: Who are they? How do their numbers vary across countries, genders, and ages? What kinds of climate action do they want governments to take, and what are the main obstacles to such action?” its website explains.
“It’s also for newsrooms to internalize and newsrooms to say, OK, our audience really cares about this. We can’t silo it. We can’t get distracted by other things.”
The project builds on the work CCNow has been doing since it first broke onto the scene five years ago with a week of climate-focused coverage in September 2019 that generated some 3,400 pieces from over 300 partners. CCNow’s emergence coincided with the apex of Greta Thunberg’s Fridays for Future school strike movement and a growing awareness globally of the climate crisis and its stakes.
In the five years since, Pope said there has been a decline in outright “climate silence” from newsrooms, as well as “both-sidsing” the issue despite an overwhelming scientific consensus that the Earth is heating due to human activity. However, he has noticed a persistent pattern of “leaving climate out of stories where it should be.” For example, the bulk of coverage of January’s catastrophic Los Angeles wildfires did not mention climate.
The impetus for the 89% Project grew partly from frustration over hearing the same refrain from newsrooms.
“They kept telling us, oh, well, this is a topic that’s really divisive. This is a topic that most people want to avoid. This is a topic that is very politically split. And then when we looked at data, surveys from all over the world, we kept seeing that that wasn’t true, that in fact, a majority of the people on the planet care about this,” he told Common Dreams.
The project was also inspired by a “confluence” of studies that emerged in 2024 finding that an “overwhelming majority” of people worldwide wanted climate action. These included the study that the 89% figure is drawn from, which was published in Nature Climate Change in February of 2024 and was based off of a Global Climate Change Survey included in the 2021-22 Gallup World Poll, which was administered to 129,902 people in 125 countries.
Another example CCNow held up was a U.S.-based survey, published in late January by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication and George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication and conducted after the November 2024 election, which found that more than 70% of registered U.S. voters favored climate policies such as regulating carbon dioxide as a pollutant, staying in the Paris agreement, and increasing solar and wind energy.
CCNow first began to discuss the 89% Project in the fall of 2024 and announced it publicly in late January.
The primary goal, according to Pope, is to encourage the mainstream newsrooms to change their thinking around whether or not their audience wants to hear climate stories.
“Our orientation is, we look at everything from a media point of view, and we sort of saw it as a media problem,” Pope said.
He hopes newsrooms will learn the importance of maintaining climate coverage even as other breaking stories demand their attention.
“It’s also for newsrooms to internalize and newsrooms to say, OK, our audience really cares about this. We can’t silo it. We can’t get distracted by other things,” he explained.
Pluralistic Ignorance
While the 89% Project is aimed at convincing media organizations that their audiences want climate coverage, another goal is to make those audiences aware of each other.
“One of the really remarkable things about this polling is the 89% doesn’t think they’re in the majority,” Pope said. “They think that their concern about climate makes them an outlier. That’s not true. You’re not an outlier. You’re just like most people in your community.”
For example, the 89% study also found that 69% of people would be willing to give 1% of their monthly household income to help combat climate change, yet they only thought 43% of their fellow citizens would be willing to do the same.
“Almost everybody dramatically underestimates the level of concern and support for action on climate change.”
Anthony Leiserowitz, who directs the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, told Common Dreams that the academic term for this is “pluralistic ignorance.”
“It basically refers to the fact that most of us don’t know what’s in other people’s heads,” he said, whether this is family members, strangers we’ve just met, or the larger groups of people with whom we share a country and planet.
“What we see consistently,” he continued, “and this is true across the board, of the general public as well as people in Congress, and news editors, and corporate leaders, and on and on, is that almost everybody dramatically underestimates the level of concern and support for action on climate change.”
What the 89% Project has the chance to do, Leiserowitz said, “‘is to actually help hold a mirror up to society and help them see themselves.”
In a way, the project is fulfilling a hope laid out by the paper’s authors.
“Importantly, these systematic perception gaps can form an obstacle to climate action,” the study authors wrote. “The prevailing pessimism regarding others’ support for climate action can deter individuals from engaging in climate action, thereby confirming the negative beliefs held by others. Therefore, our results suggest a potentially powerful intervention, that is, a concerted political and communicative effort to correct these misperceptions.”
And Leiserowitz said he thought it was important that the media step up to make this effort.
“The media is one of the primary ways that anybody who knows about, learns about, becomes engaged with this issue,” he said. “Most people are not going out and reading the [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] report on their own or conducting climate science experiments in their backyard. That’s not how they’re going to learn about it.”
Therefore, he said, CCNow’s effort to “really encourage and build a community of practice around reporting on climate change is super, super important. The world cannot deal with this issue unless we’re talking about it.”
Democracy Deficit
Another potential consequence of making the 89% aware of each other is making them aware of the extent to which their political leaders are failing to represent them.
Pope anticipated the coverage might prompt readers to think: “Maybe we should all start questioning our elected officials more. Why aren’t you taking climate into account? If we all believe in this, why aren’t you doing this?”
The 89% Project is global in scope—and Pope said it was not motivated by the victory of climate-denying President Donald Trump in the November 2024 U.S. election.
“Americans have been growing increasingly concerned and even alarmed about climate change over the past decade. So nobody was voting for this.”
However, Pope said, the project did become “more urgent as this new administration has taken a hold and has really gone on the attack on climate policy.”
One thing coverage may bring out is the gap between U.S. public opinion and Trump actions such as withdrawing from the Paris agreement, declaring an energy emergency to encourage more oil and gas drilling, gutting environmental regulations, and defunding climate science.
Pointing to Yale’s post-election survey cited by CCNow, Leiserowitz said, “This is not what people want.”
“It’s pretty clear this election was not a referendum on climate change,” he added. “Americans have been growing increasingly concerned and even alarmed about climate change over the past decade. So nobody was voting for this.”
While Pope acknowledged that “U.S. politics right now toward climate are particularly odious,” about half CCNow’s collaborators are based in other countries, and they also report a false assumption that climate action is more controversial than the data suggests.
“This general idea that this is a divisive issue, that it’s a hot-button topic, that it’s something that our audience finds political, those themes you see over and over again,” he said.
In the U.S. under Trump, but in other countries as well, the democracy deficit between public opinion and government action goes hand-in-hand with a government attack on democratic freedoms to call for climate action. Trump has also targeted members of the press for their reporting decisions, such as banningThe Associated Press from White House briefings over its refusal to refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America in its style guide.
Pope said that running joint coverage weeks was a good way to encourage newsroom collaboration amid tight resources. Could there also be safety in numbers against government repression?
Pope said that a unified front was harder to attack, though he noted that climate journalists have faced threats and social media trolling for years, and that the Trump administration was likely to continue those attacks regardless. However, he urged against panic.
“I think one of the reasons that the 89% framing is appealing to us is it’s not a fear-based idea,” he said. “In fact, it’s the opposite. It’s like we’re all in this together, and a lot of us, not just people in the climate movement, not just people who work in this area, but a lot of just our neighbors really care about this. So let’s not cower.”
This story is part of The 89 Percent Project, an initiative of the global journalism collaboration Covering Climate Now.
Neo-Fascist Climate Science Denier Donald Trump says Burn, Baby, Burn.Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.Orcas discuss Donald Trump and the killer apes’ concept of democracy. Front Orca warns that Trump is crashing his country’s economy and that everything he does he does for the fantastically wealthy.
U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) attends a Senate hearing on January 29, 2025 in Washington, D.C. (Photo: Win McNamee/Getty Images)
“Does anyone really think that the oligarchs give a damn about ordinary Americans?” the senator asked. “Trust me, they don’t.”
As U.S. President Donald Trump and billionaire Elon Musk on Tuesday continued their effort to gut the federal government, Sen. Bernie Sanders warned that “the oligarchs, with their unlimited amounts of money, are waging a war on the working class of our country, and it is a war that they are intent on winning.”
A week after delivering a speech that sounded the alarm about “America’s dangerous movement toward oligarchy, authoritarianism, and kleptocracy,” Sanders (I-Vt.) took the Senate floor again to target the world’s three richest people—Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg—and the politicians who serve them.
“We are living in an extremely dangerous time,” the seantor said Tuesday. “Future generations will look back at this moment—what we do right now—and remember whether we had the courage to defend our democracy against the growing threats of oligarchy and authoritarianism.”
“As we speak, right now, Elon Musk, the wealthiest man on the planet, is attempting to dismantle major agencies of the federal government which are designed to protect the needs of working families and the disadvantaged,” said Sanders. “These agencies were created by the U.S. Congress and it is Congress’ responsibility to maintain them, to reform them, or to end them. It is not Mr. Musk’s responsibility. What Mr. Musk is doing is patently illegal and unconstitutional—and must be ended.”
Sanders also detailed Trump and his allies’ attacks on the federal judiciary, which has delivered a series of blows to the Republican president’s agenda since he took office last month.
“Mr. Trump and his friends are not just trying to undermine two of the three pillars of our constitutional government—Congress and the courts—they are also going after the media, in a way that we have never seen in the modern history of this country,” the senator said. While recognizing that the media “makes mistakes every day,” he added that “I do hope that every member of Congress understands that you cannot have a functioning democracy, you cannot have a free flow of information, you cannot have the pursuit of truth, without an independent press.”
The senator also how the top three billionaires impact what information reaches people by buying news outlets and social media platforms—as Musk did with Twitter, which he rebranded X, and Bezos did with The Washington Post and Twitch. Zuckerberg, meanwhile, has made his money through Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram.
“They will use the enormous media operations they own to deflect attention away from the impact of their policies while they ‘entertain us to death,’” Sanders warns. “They and their fellow oligarchs will continue within our corrupt campaign finance system to spend huge amounts of money to buy politicians in both major political parties.”
“Does anyone really think that the oligarchs give a damn about ordinary Americans?” he asked. “Trust me, they don’t.”
Sanders warned that “if we do not stop them, they will soon be going after the healthcare, nutrition, housing, and educational programs that protect the most vulnerable people in our country—all so that they can raise they money they need to provide huge tax breaks for themselves and for others billionaires. As modern-day kings who believe they have the absolute right to rule, they will sacrifice, without hesitation, the well-being of working people in order to protect their power and their privileges.”
However, he also stressed that “the worst fear of the ruling class of our country is that the American people—whether they are Black or white or Latino, whether they are urban or rural, whether they are young or old, gay or straight, whatever—the fear of the ruling class is that the American people come together to demand a government that represents all of us, not just the people on top.”
“The oligarch’s nightmare is that we will not allow ourselves to be divided up by race, religion, sexual orientation, or country of origin and will come together and have the courage to take them on,” he declared. “If we stand together, we’re gonna win this fight, and not only will we save American democracy, we’re gonna create the kind of nation that I think most of us know we should become.”
Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.Climate Science Denier Donald Trump says Burn, Baby, Burn.
Palestinian journalists protest against the Israeli attacks on the media workers across the Gaza Strip outside al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al-Balah on January 8, 2025. (Photo: Rizek Abdeljawad/Xinhua via Getty Images)
“We have been let down by the international community, particularly the international media organizations,” said Abubaker Abed, sharing a message from Palestinian journalists.
Palestinian journalists gathered outside al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al-Balah this week to call attention to Israeli forces’ genocidal assault on the Gaza Strip, their slaughter of those reporting on the ground, and the global community’s failure to hold Israel accountable for the bloodshed.
On Thursday, the day after the event, Abubaker Abed, a Palestinian sports journalist now covering Israel’s war on Gaza, shared on social media a short video of his remarks in English, which he said were delivered on behalf of all the reporters in blue vests who surrounded him and the podium.
Since the Hamas-led October 7, 2023 attack on Israel, Palestinian reporters across Gaza have covered what Abed called “the most well-documented and first livestreamed genocide in history,” as Israel—armed by the United States—has launched airstrikes and ground raids, and stopped humanitarian aid and international media from entering the coastal enclave.
Abed said that “we’ve been reporting tirelessly, extensively, and thoroughly on this genocide. It’s indeed a genocide against us, which we’ve been documenting in makeshift tented camps and workplaces… You’ve seen us shedding tears over our loved ones, colleagues, friends, and family members. You’ve seen us killed in every possible way. We’ve been immolated, incinerated, dismembered, and disemboweled—and recently, we’ve been freezing to death.”
“What more ways should you be seeing us killed, then, so that you can move and act and stop the hell inflicted upon us? There are no words to describe what we’ve been going through, because you’ve seen our bodies, how they’ve become fragile, skinny, and fatigued, but we never stopped,” he continued, highlighting how Palestinian journalists have worked “to help the population that has seen every sort of torture and tasted every type of death,” while the world has refused to “stop Israel’s impunity against us.”
“Our message is very clear: We are journalists, and we are Palestinian journalists. We have been let down by the international community, particularly the international media organizations,” Abed declared. “We haven’t seen any sort of support—a single word of support. Even the press vests we’re wearing right now mark us as a target. They do not protect us at all, because we are Palestinians. Maybe if we were Ukrainians or of any other citizenship, with blond hair and blue eyes, the world would rage and rant for us. But because we are Palestinians, we have only one right, which is to die and be maimed.”
“We are just documenting a genocide against us,” he concluded. “After almost a year and a half, we want you to stand foot-by-foot with us, because we are like any other journalists, reporters, and media workers all across the globe—no matter the origin, the color, or the race. Journalism is not a crime. We are not a target.”
Some journalists around the world reposted Abed’s video and called out their colleagues for ignoring Israel’s decimation of Gaza or reporting on it in ways favorable to the far-right Israeli government and its supporters, including the United States.
“The past 15+ months have been one of the most shameful periods in the history of Western journalism,” said Jeremy Scahill, co-founder of Drop Site News, which has published Abed’s reporting from Gaza. “The refusal of so many journalists to speak out in defense of our Palestinian colleagues in Gaza as they and their families have been hunted down and killed is a bloody stain.”
The New Yorker editor Erin Overbey similarly said that “the staggering silence of Western journalists this past year as their Palestinian colleagues have been targeted, intimidated, and killed by Israeli forces during the genocide in Gaza will go down as one of the most shameful periods in media/journalism and human rights history.”
British writer Owen Jones said: “How to describe the refusal of Western journalists to speak out about the biggest slaughter of journalists in the history of human civilization? Damning. Racist. Nauseating. You will never be forgiven. History will damn those who stayed silent—every last fucking one.”
Hamza Yusuf, a London-based British Palestinian writer, said that “we will never forget that whilst Palestinian journalists in Gaza were being systematically slaughtered by Israel, their industry peers at best looked on with indifference and at worst used their positions and their coverage to whitewash Israel’s crimes. Blood on their hands.”
Journalists gather in front of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir el-Balah to condemn the ongoing atrocities of the Israeli occupation, which have claimed the lives of dozens of their colleagues since the start of the genocide. pic.twitter.com/iDsACXLTPV
As of Thursday, health officials in Gaza put the death toll from Israel’s 15-month assault at 46,006, with at least 109,378 other Palestinians wounded, the vast majority of the enclave’s population displaced, and civilian infrastructure in ruins. Israel faces global accusations of genocide, including in a case at the International Court of Justice.
Figures for press deaths have varied. The International Federation of Journalists—which works with its affiliate, the Palestinian Journalists’ Syndicate, to verify information—has documented the killings of 148 Palestinian media workers while the Committee to Protect Journalists has a list of 152 confirmed fatalities, at least 13 of which the group classifies as murders by Israeli forces.
At the end of last year, Al Jazeera published a long-form article titled “Know Their Names” and reported that “from October 7, 2023, to December 25, 2024, at least 217 journalists and media workers had been killed in Gaza. Five more were killed on December 26 when an Israeli airstrike targeted a news van near al-Awda Hospital.”
“Eighty percent of the journalists and media workers killed were between the ages of 20 and 40, a stark statistic that captures the young age of those who risk their lives to document the conflict,” according to Al Jazeera. “They were reporters and writers, photographers and video directors, analysts and editors, sound engineers and voiceover artists, and even founders of media outlets. Their stories remind us of the heavy price paid by those who strive to document humanity’s darkest moments.”
