I’ve written an article for Compact expanding on my recent carbon farming paper written for the think tank MCC Brussels.
I’ve written for UnHerd about the two-day hearing starting today in which the UK High Court will announce its final decision on Assange’s extradition to the US. If the court rules out a further appeal, Assange could be immediately extradited to the United States, where he will almost certainly be incarcerated for the rest of his life on charges of espionage — most likely in extremely punitive conditions that will push his already critical physical and psychological conditions over the brink. “His life is at risk every single day he stays in prison”, his wife Stella Assange said. “If he’s extradited, he will die”.
Would a future Trump presidency represent a threat or an opportunity for Europe? Neither, as I argue in my latest UnHerd column. The notion that Trump would pull the US out of NATO is ridiculous. But even if he were to do so, it wouldn’t make much of a difference considering that Europe’s political elites have internalised America’s geopolitical strategy — have been NATO-ised, one might say — to such an extent that today they are even more Russophobic than their American counterparts. The result is that a “European NATO” would arguably be even more bent on antagonising relations with Russia than the current US-led Alliance is.
In Bong Joon-ho’s 2013 blockbuster Snowpiercer, scientists release aerosols into the sky in a last-ditch attempt to stop global warming. However, the plan catastrophically backfires, plunging Earth into a new ice age and killing most life on the planet. When I first saw the film, I remember thinking: “Thank God no one would be crazy enough to try something like that in real life”.
I was wrong. Over the past six months, several governments and international organisations — including the White House, the EU, the UK’s DARPA-inspired research agency ARIA, the Climate Overshoot Commission, and various UN bodies — have all produced reports that cautiously open the door to that very same idea: releasing aerosols into the atmosphere in order to block sunlight from hitting Earth’s surface. The concept is known as solar engineering, or solar radiation modification (SRM), and it’s a specific type of geoengineering aimed at offsetting climate change by reflecting sunlight (“solar radiation”) back into space.
The idea of solar engineering is not new, but for a long time it was relegated to the fringes of the scientific community — and the realms of science fiction. However, as the very existence of these reports makes clear, that is no longer the case. The concept has been attracting more and more attention in recent years, largely due to the fact that the growing panic over climate change is allowing what what I call the climate power bloc — encompassing liberal-technocratic politicians, climate scientists, environmental NGOs, “green” philanthropists, and Silicon Valley “climate capitalists” — to normalise increasingly extreme techno-dystopian ideas.
I’ve written for Compact about the latest showdown between the EU and Hungary, which resulted in Viktor Orbán finally dropping his veto to the EU’s latest financial aid package for Ukraine.
I’ve written for UnHerd about Germany’s astonishing fall from grace — from economic powerhouse and unquestioned European hegemon to economic basket case and geopolitical laughing stock.
In my latest article for Compact, I look at the violence spreading like wildfire across the Middle East, which took a particularly worrying turn after Sunday’s deadly attack on an American base in Jordan, which claimed the lives of three US soldiers — and brought us one step closer to the terrifying scenario of an all-out war between the US and Iran.
I’ve written for UnHerd about the international bestseller Slow Down: How Degrowth Communism Can Save the Earth by Kohei Saito, the rising star of contemporary Marxist thought. The book was a huge success in his home country Japan, selling over half a million copies, and has now just been published in English.
Saito’s argument is pretty straightforward: capitalism is destroying the planet, and the only way to pull civilisation back from the brink of extinction is for “the entire world, without exception, to become a part of a sustainable, just society”. In other words, to embrace degrowth communism — a radical reorganisation of society based on the elimination of mass production and consumption, the prioritisation of use-value (social utility) over commodity value, and the total decarbonisation of the economy.
My argument is that Saito’s theory is riddled with flaws — first and foremost its inherent Eurocentrism, or Western-centrism, i.e., the idea that every country in the world should simply conform to the worldview of Western middle-class environmentalists — but nonetheless tells us a lot about the growing desperation of young Westerners.
I’ve written for UnHerd about the 25th anniversary of the euro — and how the latter should be understood first and foremost as a political project aimed at consolidating elite power and advancing a neoliberal agenda. Thus, even though, 25 years on, the euro has failed miserably by virtually all economic metrics, it would be a mistake to describe it as a failure. From the perspective of Europe’s financial-political elites, it’s been a huge success. And their greatest success has arguably been to convince everyone that there is no alternative. To paraphrase Mark Fisher, it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of the euro.
I’ve written for UnHerd about the legacy of Jacques Delors, the former President of the European Commission who passed away on Wednesday. Delors is often eulogised as the “founding father of modern Europe” — as if that were a good thing. A more apt description would be “founding father of the techno-authoritarian and anti-democratic juggernaut that is the EU”. Indeed, no single single individual bears a greater responsibility for the neoliberalisation and Maastrichtisation of Europe — and the birth of the euro, the most dysfunctional and upward-wealth-transferring currency ever created — than Delors.
Thomas Fazi 