Analysis

By Tom Murphy / Do the Math Whenever I suggest that humans might be better off living in a mode much closer to our original ecological context as small-band immediate-return hunter-gatherers, some heads inevitably explode, inviting a torrent of pushback. I have learned from my own head-exploding experiences that the phenomenon traces to a condition of multiple immediate reactions stumbling over each other as they vie for expression at the same time. The neurological traffic jam leaves us speechless—or stammering—as our brain sorts out who goes first. ...

Editor’s note: This is a difficult concept to understand. The reason is because we have been taught the opposite all our lives. Taxes don’t fund spending. The spending must be done first so that taxes can be paid. So it is not tax and spend, it is spend and tax. Our taxes don’t fund anything. That is why nobody asks how are we going to fund the military. Money is a government issued tax credit. Its value is derived from the violence that may be necessary to collect the tax. The government creates money by giving it to people for goods and/or services(guns or butter). Which then gives those people the ability to pay the tax. People accept the money out of fear of that violence. The tax collector has to be paid or promised to be paid before they perpetuate that violence(police). The money must be created first so that people can pay their taxes with it. It is spent into existence. Taxes create the necessity for money. A “deficit” just keeps score of how much extra money the government paid to people but was not collected as taxes. Much like beyond a certain point, how much money you have is just keeping score. The government cannot run out of its own money. Just like a baseball game has no limit on the score. What a government spends(creates) its money for are political decisions which are only constrained by the physical “resources” of the living planet. ...

Editor’s note: Want to try lab-grown salmon? The US just approved it. Who needs wild salmon. By Colin Todhunter / COUNTERCURRENTS Sainsbury’s is one of the ‘big six’ supermarkets in the UK. In 2019, it released its Future of Food report. It is not merely a misguided attempt at forecasting future trends and habits; it reads more like a manifesto for corporate control and technocratic tyranny disguised as ‘progress’. This document epitomises everything wrong with the industrial food system’s vision for our future. It represents a dystopian roadmap to a world where our most fundamental connection to nature and culture — our food — is hijacked by corporate interests and mediated through a maze of unnecessary and potentially harmful technologies. ...

This lithium company is trying to sue Indigenous land defenders into silence by Maximillian Alvarez, The Real News Network May 9, 2025 https://open.spotify.com/episode/4bT1oQv4m9xpi42O9TU5oH?si=d7db06343fce4142 Vancouver-based Lithium Americas is developing a massive lithium mine in Nevada’s remote Thacker Pass, but for nearly five years several local Indigenous tribes and environmental organizations have tried to block or delay the mine in the courts and through direct action. Six land defenders, known as the “ Thacker Pass 6,” are currently being sued by Lithium Nevada Corporation and have been barred by court injunction from returning to and peacefully protesting and praying at the sacred site on their ancestral homeland. TRNN Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez speaks with two members of the “Thacker Pass 6,” Will Falk and Max Wilbert, about the charges against them and the current state of the struggle over the construction of the Thacker Pass mine. ...

Editor’s note: When you invent nuclear energy (nukes) you invent radioactive waste Some proponents of nuclear energy refuse to give up on the technology. They blame the decline in nuclear energy and the high costs and long construction periods on the characteristics of older reactor designs, arguing that alternative designs will rescue nuclear energy from its woes. In recent years, the alternatives most often advertised are small modular (nuclear) reactors—SMRs for short. These are designed to generate between 10 and 300 megawatts of power, much less than the 1,000–1,600 megawatts that reactors being built today are designed to produce. ...

Editor’s note: The International Day for Biodiversity was celebrated on May 22, which commemorates the adoption of the Convention on Biological Diversity, a global treaty. What lessons have we learned from undoing past harms and conserving biodiversity for our planet’s future? Global efforts to restore forests are gathering pace, driven by promises of combating climate change, conserving biodiversity and improving livelihoods. Yet a recent review published in Nature Reviews Biodiversity warns that the biodiversity gains from these initiatives are often overstated — and sometimes absent altogether. ...

How Electricity was (and is) Sold to America By Elisabeth Robson / RadFemBiophilia’s Newsletter In 1915, General Electric released a silent promotional film titled The Home Electrical offering a glimpse into a gleaming, frictionless future. The film walks viewers through a model electric home: lights flicked on at the wall, meals cooked without fire, laundry cleaned without soap and muscle. A young wife smiles as she moves effortlessly through her day, assisted by gadgets that promised to eliminate drudgery and dirt. This was not a documentary—it was a vision, a fantasy, a sales pitch. At the time, only a small fraction of American households had electricity at all, and nearly 90% of rural families still relied on oil lamps, wood stoves, hand pumps, and washboards. But the message was clear: to be modern was to be electric—and anything less was a kind of failure. ...

Editor’s note: “What if you could save the climate while continuing to pollute it?” If that sounds too good to be true, that’s because it is. But corporations across the globe are increasingly trying to answer this question with the same shady financial tool: carbon offsets. To understand what’s going on with the carbon market, it’s important to know the terms(term-oil), vocabulary and organizations involved. For starters, a carbon credit is different from a carbon offset. A carbon credit represents a metric ton of carbon dioxide or the equivalent of other climate-warming gases kept out of the atmosphere. If a company (or individual, or country) uses that credit to compensate for its emissions — perhaps on the way to a claim of reduced net emissions — it becomes an offset. ...

Editor’s note: “I think we’re in the midst of a collapse of civilization, and we’re definitely in the midst of the end of the American empire. And when empires start to fail, a lot of people get really crazy. In The Culture of Make Believe, I predicted the rise of the Tea Party. I recognized that in a system based on competition and where people identify with the system, when times get tough, they wouldn’t blame the system, but instead, they would indicate it’s the damn Mexicans’ fault or the damn black people’s fault or the damn women’s fault or some other group. The thing that I didn’t predict was that the Left would go insane in its own way. I anticipated the rise of an authoritarian Right, but not authoritarianism more generally, to which the Left is not immune. The collapse of empire results in increased insecurity and the demand for stability. The cliché about Mussolini is that he made the trains run on time, that he brought about stability.” - [Derrick Jensen](http://I think we’re in the midst of a collapse of civilization, and we’re definitely in the midst of the end of the American empire. And when empires start to fail, a lot of people get really crazy. In The Culture of Make Believe, I predicted the rise of the Tea Party. I recognized that in a system based on competition and where people identify with the system, when times get tough, they wouldn’t blame the system, but instead, they would indicate it’s the damn Mexicans’ fault or the damn black people’s fault or the damn women’s fault or some other group. The thing that I didn’t predict was that the Left would go insane in its own way. I anticipated the rise of an authoritarian Right, but not authoritarianism more generally, to which the Left is not immune. The collapse of empire results in increased insecurity and the demand for stability. The cliché about Mussolini is that he made the trains run on time, that he brought about stability.) ...

By Tom Murphy / Do the Math Surfing YouTube, I came across an interview of Ezra Klein by Stephen Colbert. He was promoting a new book called Abundance, basically arguing that scarcity is politically-manufactured by “both sides,” and that if we get our political act together, everybody can have more. Planetary limits need not apply. I’ve often been impressed by Klein’s sharp insights on politics, yet can’t reconcile how someone so smart misses the big-picture perspectives that grab my attention. ...