The basic promise of offsets is that individuals or organizations can balance out their own greenhouse gas pollution by paying others to grow trees, halt logging, or take other steps that may reduce emissions or pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. But a mounting body of studies and investigative reports has found that these projects can dramatically exaggerate the climate benefits in a variety of ways, often amounting to little more than greenwashing.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/11/30/1084104/the-university-of-california-has-all-but-dropped-carbon-offsets-and-thinks-you-should-too/

Jacobin's articles on Kissinger:

Kissinger: to die at the right time

Kissinger and the South American Revolutions

Kissinger in Central America

Kissinger in South Africa

Kissinger in Western Sahara

Kissinger in Argentina

Kissinger in Cambodia

Kissinger in Bangladesh

Kissinger in Angola

Kissinger in Cyprus

Kissinger in Vietnam and China

Kissinger in the Gulf

Kissinger in Central America

A new leaked report suggests the Biden administration is undermining efforts to set standards for a global carbon market. Coupled with Joe Biden’s absence at the global climate summit this week, patience with the US's lack of action is wearing thin.

“The U.S. government has trouble delivering climate finance and now basically sees private investment, including [through] carbon markets, as an opportunity to showcase that they are delivering climate finance,” said Sven Harmeling, international climate policy coordinator for the nonprofit coalition Climate Action Network Europe. “But we know that [money via carbon markets] is not climate finance. Climate finance means public funding.”

https://jacobin.com/2023/12/joe-biden-administration-carbon-reduction-global-climate-cop28/

In June 1967, two years before the start of Nixon’s presidency, Israel had achieved a gigantic military victory in the Six-Day War. Israel attacked Egypt and occupied Gaza and the Sinai Peninsula, and, following modest responses from Jordan and Syria, also took over the West Bank and the Golan Heights. [...] In 1968, the Soviets made what appeared to be quite sincere efforts to collaborate with the U.S. on a peace plan for the region.

The Soviets proposed a solution based on United Nations Security Council Resolution 242. Israel would withdraw from the territory it had conquered. However, there would not be a Palestinian state. Moreover, Palestinian refugees from the 1948 Arab–Israeli War would not return to Israel; rather, they would be resettled with compensation in Arab countries. Most importantly, the Soviets would pressure their Arab client states to accept this.

[...] You can read this in Kissinger’s own words in the records of internal deliberations now available on the State Department website. On October 9, Kissinger told his fellow high-level officials, “My assessment is a costly victory [for Israel] without a disaster is the best.”

The U.S. then did send huge amounts of weaponry to Israel, which it used to beat back Egypt and Syria. Kissinger looked upon the outcome with satisfaction. In another high-level meeting, on October 19, he celebrated that “everyone knows in the Middle East that if they want a peace they have to go through us. Three times they tried through the Soviet Union, and three times they failed.”

https://theintercept.com/2023/11/30/henry-kissinger-israel-egypt-soviet-union/

#TechPolicy

Put simply, the bill requires that commercial websites and mobile apps create summary terms-of-service statements.

https://www.techpolicy.press/the-tldr-act-mandated-infrastructure-for-a-consumer-centric-and-transparent-internet/

What Taylor argues in The Age of Insecurity is that we on the left can (and need to) offer a different, better conception of security. We can speak to people’s fears and anxieties. We can’t promise to keep them safe from all of life’s vicissitudes, but we can certainly eliminate many of the “manufactured” insecurities in our society. We can make it so that you don’t have to be afraid that if you need an ambulance, you’ll get an enormous bill. We can make it so that going to school doesn’t leave you indentured for decades afterwards. We can guarantee a job or a basic income. We can protect people against unexpected rent hikes. We can make it so they don’t have to be afraid that if the police come, they’ll shoot the person who called them.

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2023/11/can-the-left-reclaim-security/

“The financial sector will not be expected to push for market-oriented reforms or even necessarily maximize profit,” he said. “As a program for the financial sector, it is ambitious, disappointing and somewhat ominous.”[...]

“Politics will for sure further dictate China’s finance, effectively moving China even closer to how it was before the reforms started in 1978,” said Chen Zhiwu, a finance professor at the University of Hong Kong.

Some of the policy targets set forth in the essay would not be unusual as regulatory goals in the West. For example, it calls for banks to emphasize financial services for the “real economy,” which the party has long interpreted to include ample financing for the country’s industrial base.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/05/business/china-finance-xi-jinping.html

The (center-) left, by contrast, instinctively and persistently buys into the idea that its raison d’être is to be the steward of good, sensible, reasonable governance and policy, approaching politics more as a pageant of competence and smarts than as a fight against the powerful and entrenched interests of the capitalist economy.

GL-PvdA’s campaign strategy was telling. Initially it was centered on “restoring trust” and, even more so, Timmermans as an individual. As vice president of the European Commission, Timmermans had successfully guided a moderately ambitious climate change bill through the European Parliament. In public appearances and televised debates, he typically excelled when discussing climate change. But in confrontation with the conservative VVD party, he was often put on the defensive about his economic policies — increasing taxation for large corporations and the wealthy. Those defensive moments were also the few times he actually talked about his economic policies in more detail.

In the home stretch of the campaign, when the PVV began to break away in the polls, the GL-PvdA tried to present itself as a last bulwark against the extreme right, not unlike the strategy the Democratic Party pursued against Donald Trump. There was no positive program anymore, just a warning to not make things worse. But in a country that has been trending further and further to the Right for decades, the strategy was doomed to fail.

https://jacobin.com/2023/11/dutch-left-netherlands-pvda-far-right-wilders-timmermans/