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EU Crisis Official Warns of 'Climate Breakdown' Amid Deadly Wildfires and Flooding
"These extreme weather events that used to be once in a lifetime are now an almost annual occurrence," said Janez Lenarčič.
Sep 18, 2024
With the Portuguese government declaring a "state of calamity" over wildfires that have killed at least seven people, and the daily lives of hundreds of thousands of people in Central and Eastern Europe upended by deadly flooding, the European Union's top crisis official said the bloc must face the reality made evident by the disasters: "This is fast becoming the norm for our shared future."
A year after Europe was found to be the world's fastest-warming continent in an analysis by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the E.U.'s Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S), crisis management commissioner Janez Lenarčič told the European Parliament on Wednesday that "the global reality of the climate breakdown has moved into the everyday lives of Europeans."
"Make no mistake. This tragedy is not an anomaly," said Lenarčič. "We face a Europe that is simultaneously flooding and burning. These extreme weather events that used to be once in a lifetime are now an almost annual occurrence."
As countries including Poland, Romania, Austria, and the Czech Republic were reeling from flooding caused by Storm Boris in recent days, more than 478 square miles in Portugal's northern region were torched by fast-moving wildfires that started over the weekend.
Dozens of homes have been destroyed by more than 100 separate wildfires as officials deployed 5,000 firefighters to try to control the blazes on Wednesday. Spain, France, and Italy—which is now also preparing for heavy rainfall like the torrential downpour that inundated Central and Eastern Europe—contributed waterbombing aircraft.
Lenarčič focused his address largely on the need to ramp up disaster preparedness, noting that the rise in costs for repairing infrastructure destroyed by storms and fires has ballooned in recent decades.
"The average cost of disasters in the 1980s was 8 billion euros per year," said Lenarčič. "Meanwhile in 2022 alone, the damages surpassed 50 billion euros per year... The cost of inaction is far greater than the cost of action."
Lenarčič called on the European Commission to work closely with E.U. member states to implement the bloc's Floods Directive and a robust water resilience strategy to tackle catastrophic flooding and water shortages.
"Such challenges cannot be tackled solely through the limited portfolio of civil protection," the commissioner said.
The Left in the European Parliament, a coalition of progressive parties, echoed Lenarčič's call to strengthen civil protection, but also emphasized the need to tackle "climate change and its impacts."
Progressives in Parliament have pushed member states to meet the goals set by the European Green Deal, a set of climate policies aimed at ensuring net-zero fossil fuel emissions by 2050 and slashing emissions by at least 55% by 2030.
"Our success will depend on how determined we are to combat climate change together in order to reduce emissions," said Terry Reintke, a German lawmaker who is co-president of the Greens/European Free Alliance (EFA) group in the European Parliament.
With right-wing parties making significant gains in the bloc's parliamentary elections in June, analysts have said passing ambitious climate policies and targets will be more difficult.
Following the implementation of parts of the Green Deal, emissions are down by nearly a third from 1990 across the bloc, and member states are building wind and solar infrastructure. But right-wing leaders have pushed to block a ban on new gas- and diesel-powered cars that was set to take effect in 2035.
Far-right Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni said in June that the proposed ban "was an ideological folly, which absolutely must be corrected."
On Wednesday, Italy's civil protection service issued 50 yellow alerts for the Emilia-Romagna and Marche regions, warning that the areas would face the risk of landslides and flooding as they are expected to see the equivalent of two months of rainfall in the next three days.
The heavy rains have moved across Central Europe from parts of the Czech Republic, Austria, Romania, and other countries, with at least 21 people killed by flooding.
"The E.U. must do everything in its power to help those affected by the devastating floods in many different E.U. countries," said the Greens/EFA. "These floods show that more than ever our fight against climate change is a common social and economic challenge we must tackle together."
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Autocrats Worse Than Trump? Be Afraid. Be Very Afraid
Here's the question to be asking, both in the U.S. and around the world: at what point will the far right achieve a critical mass of support such that it can kick away the ladder that it used to climb to power?
Jun 23, 2024
Poland is supposed to be one of the politically sane places in Europe right now. The far-right Law and Justice Party lost national elections last year to a centrist coalition and exited power after eight long years of democratic repression. Donald Tusk, who’d previously been the president of the European Council, once again became the Polish prime minister. His government immediately set about restoring the rule of law that the Law and Justice Party had been so determined to dismantle.
Sounds good, right?
Yes, but then there’s Grzegorz Braun.
Braun is a member of a party called Konfederacja that stands just to the left of the Nazis. Think that’s an overstatement? Back in December, Braun used a fire extinguisher to put out the candles on a menorah in the Polish parliament, which had been set up to celebrate Hanukah. Just in case anyone might misinterpret the gesture—perhaps he though it was a fire risk?—Braun denounced the Jewish holiday as “satanic” and insisted that “those who take part in acts of satanic worship should be ashamed.” He also favors the criminalization of homosexuality. And he was the only Polish parliamentarian to oppose a resolution in 2022 denouncing the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Is there nothing that far-right politicians can say or do these days that disqualifies them in the minds of voters from holding public office?
And yet, despite these toxic positions, Braun was just elected to represent Poland in the European parliament. And so were five other members of his Konfederacja party, who have equally toxic views. That’s a gain of six seats over their previous showing in the 2019 elections, which had been zero. An astonishing 12 percent of Polish voters endorsed the positions of Braun and his colleagues.
Sure, in those same EU elections, Tusk’s centrist party managed to squeak by Law and Justice, which lost seven of their seats. But it was the party even further to the right that seemed to benefit.
Trump, a crowd surfer without parallel, is riding a wave. Will it crest before November?
Swing to the Right
The big takeaway from the recent European Parliament elections was the success of far-right parties. Marine Le Pen’s National Rally won over 31 percent of the vote in France, prompting French President Emmanuel Macron to make the counter-intuitive decision to dissolve parliament and call new elections. Giorgia Meloni, the far-right leader in Italy, also managed to increase her party’s share of support.
And the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) came in second in Germany with a big boost from the under-30 crowd, who didn’t seem to care about the various scandals involving the far-right party’s leadership. Because of the statements of party member Maximilian Krahl—he said that not all Nazi SS members were war criminals—the AfD was actually kicked out of the Identity and Democracy bloc. And then the AfD kicked Krahl out of the party, not only because of those statements but also because his close ties to Russia and China were attracting unwanted scrutiny. German voters elected him to the European parliament anyway.
Is there nothing that far-right politicians can say or do these days that disqualifies them in the minds of voters from holding public office? Each month, it seems that a new red line is crossed: anti-Semitism, extraordinary corruption, a felony conviction. What’s next, the use of germ warfare?
In the European parliament elections, the far right also took first place in Austria, Hungary, and Slovakia and tied for first in the Netherlands. Indeed, the only places that the far right didn’t do better than their last outing were Sweden, Finland, and Portugal, but even here the results weren’t exactly reassuring. The far-right Sweden Democrats remained steady at 3 seats (as did the Danish People’s Party at one seat). The Portuguese far right Chega party actually made it into the European Parliament for the first time with two seats. Only the True Finns party lost representatives and it was a drop of only one seat.
The good news is that the far-right electoral coalitions—the European Conservatives and Reformists Party (ECR), the Identity and Democracy bloc (ID), and the unaffiliated bloc that includes Fidesz and now the AfD—didn’t win enough votes to take over the leadership of the parliament. The ECR gained 14 seats (thanks largely to Meloni in Italy), the ID gained 9 seats (thanks largely to Le Pen in France), and the now-unaffiliated AfD increased their delegation by six seats. That puts the far right at nearly one-quarter of the total number of seats.
But the center right also did well in the election, increasing their total number of seats to 190. The ECR will not be forced to form a governing coalition with the far right, and that means that the European consensus on the green energy transition will remain more-or-less intact.
The Not-So-Long March
Let’s face it: the European parliament is not the most powerful institution around. What’s important about the far right’s victories is their apparent abandonment of any desire to destroy the EU or, at least, withdraw from it. The new far-right strategy is borrowed from the left (just like some of its economic program): a “long march through the institutions” in order to control them. Bye-bye Brexit and its heir apparents: Nexit, Grexit, Frexit. The far right wants to conquer Brussels.
Meanwhile, it is continuing its long march through national institutions. In Belgium, in federal elections earlier this month, the far-right, Euroskeptical, Flemish nationalist party Vlaams Belang came in second, behind a right-wing, Euroskeptical, Flemish nationalist party New Flemish Alliance. Traditionally, Belgian parties have agreed not to partner with Vlaams Belang to form governments. But with the New Flemish Alliance moving ever further to the right, the Belgians might be on the verge of breaking with this informal pact. Don’t expect a new government any time soon though: it took 18 months to forge a ruling coalition five years ago.
In Austria, the far-right Freedom Party is on track to win elections in September. Its coalition government with the Christian Democratic People’s Party collapsed in 2019 because of the Ibiza affair, which linked Vice Chancellor Heinz-Christian Strache of the Freedom Party to a corrupt deal involving a woman he thought was a well-connected Russian. The Freedom Party’s adulterously close relationship to Russia has not seemed to diminish its popularity. Another recent spy scandal broke, involving a top intelligence official passing information to Russia in exchange for money, which took place when the Freedom Party was in charge of the Interior Ministry. And yet Austrian voters concluded that this was just the type of party to send to the European parliament.
And then there’s France. Who knows, perhaps the French far right, too, will take over after the snap elections that Macron has called. The French, it seems, now hate Paris as much as they hate Brussels (the seat of the EU). Marine Le Pen is taking advantage of an anti-elitist, anti-globalist, anti-technocrat spirit that is rebranding reactionary as merely rebellious (sound familiar?). That’s bad news for Macron, whose every gesture and remark scream “Paris elite.” Fortunately, a more genuine challenge to the French orthodoxy has emerged on the left, as the Socialist, Communist, France Unbowed, and Ecologists parties have formed a new coalition. It is currently running neck and neck with Le Pen’s National Rally.
In The Netherlands, meanwhile, the far right has finally managed to put together a coalition government after their surprise victory in elections last year. Firebrand Geert Wilders had to give up on his desire to become prime minister, but in exchange his Party for Freedom (PVV) will control five ministries.
The new head of the migration and asylum ministry, Marjolein Faber of the PVV, is perhaps the last person you’d want in charge of a sensitive issue like immigration. She favors the abolition of Islam. She has called migration “repopulation,” a popular word in the far-right lexicon that has roots in the German word umvolkung, which was used by the Nazis and which today has much the same connotation as the “replacement” of majority white populations with non-white immigrants. And she has been guilty of the worst kind of racial profiling when she said that a stabbing suspect looked like a “North African” when witnesses reported otherwise.
Be Afraid, Very Afraid
Faber, Krahl, Braun: these far-right politicians make Donald Trump look like a conservative Democrat (which he used to be before opportunism beckoned). Of course, the Eurocrazies don’t have as much power as Trump might once again have. But the really scary part is how routine it has become for such people—who, a generation ago, would have been just kooks making long-winded speeches from the audience at public forums—to now be in positions of real responsibility.
It’s also frightening because it’s not just Europe that has been affected by this peculiar political disease. Narendra Modi, despite a drop in his party’s support in the latest elections, will continue on as prime minister of India. Nayib Bukele, the telegenic autocrat in El Salvador, won a supermajority in parliament earlier this year for his New Ideas party. And Vladimir Putin, no surprise here, won his election in Russia.
Trump was blocked from doing his worst by the institutions of a democratic society (Congress, state governments, courts, conscientious objectors at all levels). The EU, after this near miss with near fascism, will also be able to prevent the far right from unraveling the rule of law.
But at what point will the far right achieve a critical mass of support such that it can kick away the ladder that it used to climb to power? The far right’s long march through the institutions has only one ultimate destination: autocracy.
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Will the US Choose Democracy or Extreme Wealth Concentration?
This year’s election will not only decide whether we’re going to let Trump or a similar Republican end American democracy; it will also, if enough of us show up, determine if we can purge our political system of big money.
Jan 17, 2024
So, Donald Trump won Iowa. A crazed billionaire who wants to “suspend the Constitution“ and claims the right to a murder his political enemies. It doesn’t have to be this way.
Imagine.
Fox “News” shuts down (or just decides to only tell the truth), and most of the steam goes out of the right-wing populist MAGA movement which its billionaire owners helped create in the U.S. Insurrectionist members of Congress find themselves in jail facing sedition charges, as the previous leader of the country is under criminal investigation for taking help from Putin’s Russia. The government begins the process of decriminalizing abortion nationwide. The Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision is overturned and, without the flow of billionaire money directing their votes, Congress begins to actually pass laws that reflect the desires of the majority of the people.
Princeton scholars Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page famously found that the odds of average Americans’ political desires being translated into policy are about the same as “random noise.”
Unless you read international newspapers like the Financial Times, odds are you have no idea that same scenario is now playing out in Poland which, for the previous eight years, had been suffering under a Trump-like administration.
Last summer, progressive Polish politician Donald Tusk promised he was going to clean up that country with an “iron broom.” Few took his promise seriously, but after being sworn into office last month, he’s actually doing it. As Maciej Kisilowski writes for the Financial Times, just a few days after Tusk became prime minister:
…Poland’s politicized public television station, notorious for its xenophobic, homophobic, and racist messages, abruptly went dark. Tusk’s culture ministry summarily dismissed the station’s board and stopped broadcasts to prevent the outgoing leadership from inflaming tensions by airing live the takeover of the group’s headquarters.
Last week two of the top right-wing politicians in Poland were arrested for abuse of power during the previous regime, while only a few hundred people showed up to protest the end of right-wing programming on the nation’s main television network.
Last Thursday there was a march to protest the new progressive prime minister, but the reaction was both tepid and nonviolent. As Kisilowski writes for the Financial Times:
These decisive, if heavy-handed, actions come at a time when democrats globally are searching for strategies to deal with populists. In the U.S., for example, there is intense debate about whether the protracted legal cases against Donald Trump are serving to boost his campaign to return to the White House. Perhaps Tusk’s approach offers hope.
Dislodging the death grip the GOP has on American politics will be more difficult than in Poland, in large part because five corrupt Republicans on the U.S. Supreme Court legalized political bribery with their Citizens United decision.
The 2020 election cost over $14 billion. The 2016 election was only $6.5 billion. But in 2008, two years before Citizens United, it hadn’t even hit $1 billion: total spending with a mere $717 million. As the executive director of the money tracking opensecrets.org, Sheila Krumholz, said:
Total outside spending is surprisingly high for this point in the cycle—we’re already at nearly $230 million. That’s more than twice the previous record through this point in the cycle, which was back in 2016. But it’s more than five times as much as was spent by this point in the last presidential cycle in 2020.
Right-wing fascist-adjacent billionaires have used that open door to severely corrupt our political system, leading to massive gridlock when it comes to anything average people want.
Meanwhile, billionaires got tax cuts and deregulation making them vastly richer at the same time the companies that made them rich refuse to even commit to paying their workers a living wage (fewer than 1% of the world’s top companies have made such a commitment).
As a result, Princeton scholars Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page famously found that the odds of average Americans’ political desires being translated into policy are about the same as “random noise.”
On the other hand, the new American system created by Republicans on our Supreme Court works quite well for the morbidly rich. The people Gilens and Page refer to as the “economic elites” frequently get everything they want from the political class.
They wrote that we still have the “features” of democracy, like elections, but ended their paper with this cautionary note:
[W]e believe that if policymaking is dominated by powerful business organizations and a small number of affluent Americans, then America’s claims to being a democratic society are seriously threatened.
So, here we are.
If, in a zoo somewhere, a single chimpanzee had risen up and taken all the food from all the other chimpanzees and was hoarding it without being challenged, scientists from all over the world would be trying to figure out what was wrong with that chimpanzee and why the others tolerated his theft.
As Oxfam International pointed out in a report timed to correspond with the kickoff of the billionaire love-fest at Davos this week, the five richest men in the world—four of them Americans—saw their net worth more than double over the past three years from $405 billion to $869 billion.
Since those five corrupt Republicans on the Court also ruled in Citizens United that corporations are “persons” with nearly-full access to the Bill of Rights—including the right to use money to pay off politicians (the Republicans on the Court call it First Amendment-protected “free speech”)—the corporations that are producing these billionaires are also gouging American consumers as hard and fast as they can.
As Oxfam noted (keep in mind, “profit“ means, essentially, “the money that’s left over after all of our business expenses, including payroll, that we, the owners, get to split up and keep for ourselves”):
Mirroring the fortunes of the super-rich, large firms are set to smash their annual profit records in 2023. 148 of the world’s biggest corporations together raked in $1.8 trillion in total net profits in the year to June 2023, a 52% jump compared to average net profits in 2018-2021. Their windfall profits surged to nearly $700 billion.
That money isn’t going to workers, though, who’ve seen their real, inflation-adjusted wages fall worldwide in the same period. Instead:
The report finds that for every $100 of profit made by 96 major corporations between July 2022 and June 2023, $82 was paid out to rich shareholders… It would take 1,200 years for a woman working in the health and social sector to earn what the average CEO in the biggest 100 Fortune companies earns in a year.
Thanks to Clarence Thomas’ tie-breaking vote in Citizens United, Americas are not getting what they want. Which is another way of saying the morbidly rich and the judges and politicians they’ve bought are actively breaking our democratic republic.
On the eve of the 2016 election of Donald Trump, for example, the Progressive Change Institute did a nationwide survey of likely voters. The results were stark:
— 84% want the government to negotiate drug prices.
— 79% support expanding Social Security (which Haley and DeSantis both just last week promised to cut).
— 78% want “fair trade” that ends shipping our jobs overseas.
— 77% want to tax corporations that have moved jobs overseas.
— 77% want universal free pre-kindergarten.
— 74% want all Americans to be able to buy into Medicare-for-All.
— 71% support a massive infrastructure spending program aimed at rebuilding our broken roads and bridges and putting people back to work.
— 70% want free college at all public universities.
— 68% want a guaranteed minimum income.
— 67% want the government to be the employer of last resort to end unemployment (like FDR did).
— 66% want the morbidly rich to pay at least a 50% income tax (currently the average American billionaire pays around 3%).
— 65% want the big banks broken up and a return to local banking.
— 64% want net neutrality so your billion-dollar corporate internet and email providers can’t monitor everything you do online and sell that information.
— 63% want public financing of elections to get billionaire money out of them.
— 60% want the Post Office to offer inexpensive public banking.
President Joe Biden and Democrats in Congress got some of the infrastructure work done and tried to end much of America’s nearly $2 trillion in student debt (until they were blocked by Republican lawsuits and six Republicans on the Supreme Court), and a small bit of the “Green New Deal” was incorporated into the Inflation Reduction Act, but otherwise there’s a lot that Americans want and deserve that they’re not getting.
Why? Because the morbidly rich control much of our political process right now, and most of our media.
As former Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis famously said:
We must make our choice. We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we cannot have both.
This year’s election will not only decide whether we’re going to let Trump or a similar Republican end American democracy; it will also, if enough of us show up, determine if Citizens United can be legislatively overturned and we can purge our political system of the cancer of big money.
Democrats almost did it in 2022: The For the People Act would have reversed significant parts of Citizens United and provided for public funding of and more transparency around elections. It passed the House and got enough votes to pass the Senate under the Constitution.
Even the Republican filibuster could have been overcome if we hadn’t been betrayed by Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema in the Senate. If we do well this in this year’s elections, next year might be much better legislatively.
Make sure everybody you know is registered to vote. The stakes have never been higher.
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