Donald Trump said it plainly, without pause, straight into the cameras that were streaming his words around the world: the move against Nicolás Maduro was an oil grab. And, most often throughout the history of the last two centuries, where there is oil, there is violence. Too often the two are inextricably linked. Above is Death-Pump, a stencil by Bogota street artist DJ Lu.
From a pair of notable climate change and environment journalists, Rebecca Solnit and Bill McKibben:
On her website Meditations in an Emergency, Solnit writes:
The carnage associated with fossil fuel is why speeding the transition to renewables is good for international stability as well as everything else. Fossil fuel is inseparable from violence, and dependence on it it has created a brutal world order in which some states have corrosive outsize power due to their possession of oil and gas while others have corrosive dependency on these often-human-rights-abusing regimes.
And McKibben, who nails it in his newsletter The Crucial Years, on Saturday:
What if we could, simply by supporting an environmentally and economically sound transition to clean energy, remove the reason for the fighting? I don’t know how to stop the bully from beating people up for their lunch money—but what if lunch was free, and no one was carrying lunch money? Not for the first time, and not for the last, I’m going to make the observation that it’s going to be hard to figure out how to fight wars over sunshine.
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Today’s Pic du Jour, the site’s second (!) straight, was snapped on 10 June 2015 in Bogota, Colombia.
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I can’t be hopeful for the future.. This shouldn’t be the view of this time in the World. Makes me so sad… Thank you, Happy New Year for all of us. Love, nia
2025 was a tough year around the world. Sadly, I don’t see 2026 providing any relief.
And now Trump is uncontrolled, threatening Cuba, Colombia, even an supposed alley as Greenland and Denmark. This looks really bad.
His move on Greenland is just a matter of time. Practically speaking, there is nothing anyone can do to stop him. Their aim is to break the European Union.