A study from the World Bank showed that the pandemic had halted poverty reduction schemes. Photograph: Friedrich Stark/Alamy
The world’s 3,000 billionaires should pay a minimum 2% tax on their fast-growing wealth to raise £250bn a year for the global fight against poverty, inequality and global heating, ministers from four leading economies have suggested.
In a sign of growing international support for a levy on the super-rich, Brazil, Germany, South Africa and Spain say a 2% tax would reduce inequality and raise much-needed public funds after the economic shocks of the pandemic, the climate crisis and military conflicts in Europe and the Middle East.
They are calling for more countries to join their campaign, saying the annual sum raised would be enough to cover the estimated cost of damage caused by all of last year’s extreme weather events.
“It is time that the international community gets serious about tackling inequality and financing global public goods,” the ministers say in a Guardian comment piece.
“One of the key instruments that governments have for promoting more equality is tax policy. Not only does it have the potential to increase the fiscal space governments have to invest in social protection, education and climate protection. Designed in a progressive way, it also ensures that everyone in society contributes to the common good in line with their ability to pay. A fair share contribution enhances social welfare.”
Brazil chairs the G20 group of leading developed and developing countries and put a billionaire tax on the agenda at a meeting of finance ministers earlier this year.
“We can’t go beyond the laws of a country,” Musk has said (Wall Street Journal, 4/8/24)—unless, of course, he doesn’t like the government making the laws.
Elon Musk, the right-wing anti-union billionaire owner of Twitter (recently rebranded as X), has cast his defiance of a Brazilian judicial ruling as a free speech crusade against censorship. Such framing is, of course, bullshit. It is instead a political campaign by a capitalist to use social media to reshape global politics in favor of the right. And it’s important that we all understand why that is.
As Reuters (4/7/24) reported, Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes ordered “the blocking of certain accounts” on Twitter, prompting Musk to announce that Twitter would defy the judge’s orders “because they were unconstitutional.” He went on to call for Moraes’ resignation.
It isn’t clear which accounts are being targeted, but the judge is investigating “‘digital militias’ that have been accused of spreading fake news and hate messages during the government of former far-right President Jair Bolsonaro.” He’s also probing “an alleged coup attempt by Bolsonaro.”
The AP (4/8/24) then reported that the judge opened up an inquest into Musk directly, saying the media mogul “began waging a public ‘disinformation campaign’ regarding the top court’s actions.”
Musk claimed that he’s doing this in the name of free speech at the expense of profit, saying “we will probably lose all revenue in Brazil and have to shut down our office there” (Wall Street Journal, 4/8/24). He added that “principles matter more than profit.”
Michael Shellenberger (Public, 4/8/24), an enthusiastic pro-Musk pundit, was less restrained, saying the judge “has taken Brazil one step closer to being a dictatorship.” To Shellenberger, it’s “clear that Elon Musk is the only thing standing in the way of global totalitarianism.”
‘Par for the course’
Verge (1/25/23): “The documentary’s ban isn’t an example of Musk violating a vocal ‘free speech absolutist’ ethos. It’s a reminder that Musk has always been fine with government censorship.”
Anyone with a memory better than Shellenberger’s will recall that Musk’s Twitter has been all too eager to censor content at the request of the Indian government, including a BBC documentary that was critical of Prime Minister Narendra Modi (Verge, 1/25/23). India under Modi, who heads the right-wing Hindu nationalist BJP party, has seen a steep decline in press freedom, worrying journalists and free speech advocates (New York Times, 3/8/23; NPR, 4/3/23; Bloomberg, 2/25/24). At the same time Musk was pretending to defend free speech in Brazil, he was bragging about traveling to India to meet with Modi (Twitter, 4/10/24).
Musk suppressed Twitter content in the Turkish election in response to a request from Turkish President Recep Erdoğan, saying the “choice is have Twitter throttled in its entirety or limit access to some tweets. Which one do you want?” This move, he insisted, was “par for the course for all Internet companies” (Vanity Fair, 5/14/23). Turkey, with its laws against insulting the Turkish identity (Guardian, 11/16/21), is a country that is almost synonymous with the suppression of free speech—it ranks 165 out of 180 on Reporters Without Borders’ press freedom index. Yet Musk didn’t seem to feel the need to intervene to save democracy through his social media network.
The impact of Musk’s decision to censor Twitter when it comes to Turkey and India isn’t just that it exposes his duplicity when it comes to free speech, but it robs the global public of vital points of view when it comes to these geopolitically important countries. In essence, the crime is not so much that Musk is hypocritical, but that his administration of the social media site has kept readers in the dark rather than expanding their worldview.
Grappling with balance
AP (10/25/22) reported that Brazilian social media posts claimed that Lula “plan[ned] to close down churches if elected” and that Bolsonaro “confess[ed] to cannibalism and pedophilia.”
The context in Brazil is that in the last presidential election, in 2022, the leftist challenger Lula da Silva ousted the incumbent, Bolsonaro (NPR, 10/30/22), who has since been implicated in a failed coup attempt that closely resembled the January 6, 2021, riot at the US Capitol (Reuters, 3/15/24). Ever since, tech companies have bristled at Brazil’s attempt to curb the influence of fake news, such as a bill that would put “the onus on the internet companies, search engines and social messaging services to find and report illegal material” (Guardian, 5/3/23).
Brazil experienced a flurry of disinformation about the candidates in the run-up to the election, inspiring the country’s top electoral court to ban “false or seriously decontextualized” content that “affects the integrity of the electoral process” (AP, 10/25/22).
The Washington Post (1/9/23) reported that social media were “flooded with disinformation, along with calls in Portuguese to ‘Stop the Steal,’” and demands for “a military coup” in response to a possible Lula victory. And while these problems existed in various online media, a source told the Post that this occurred after Musk fired people in Brazil “who moderated content on the platform to catch posts that broke its rules against incitement to violence and misinformation.”
While Turkey and India are brazenly attempting to suppress opinions the government doesn’t like, a democratic Brazil is grappling with how to balance maintaining a free internet while protecting elections from malicious interference (openDemocracy, 1/3/23).
Despotic future
Brazilian Report (4/9/24): “Billionaire Elon Musk joined this week a campaign led by the Brazilian far-right to characterize Brazil as a dictatorship.”
Lula’s victory, in addition to being a source of hope for Brazil’s poor and working class (Bloomberg, 4/25/23), was seen as a blow to the kind of right-wing despotism espoused by people like Bolsonaro, who represents a past of US-aligned terror-states that use military force to protect US interests and suppress egalitarian movements in the Western Hemisphere (Human Rights Watch, 3/27/19). As Brazilian Report (4/9/24) put it, Musk has joined a “campaign led by the Brazilian far right.”
Indeed, the Wall Street Journal (4/10/24) noted that Musk’s tussle in the Brazilian judiciary was an extension of his alignment with the Brazilian right:
Supporters of former right-wing President Jair Bolsonaro, who gave Musk a medal during his visit in 2022 to announce plans to install satellites over the Amazon rainforest, have reveled in Musk’s defiance, declaring him a “hero,” as the dividing lines in Brazil’s culture wars deepen.
Erdoğan and Modi represent more successful iterations of neo-fascist ideology over liberal democracy. The dystopian societies they oversee make up the political model that the MAGA movement would like to impose in the United States, where a caudillo is unchecked by independent courts, the press and other civil institutions, while rights for workers and marginalized groups are eviscerated.
Musk isn’t simply displaying hypocrisy when he pretends to fight for free speech in Brazil while Twitter censors speech when it comes to India and Turkey. If anything, he is being consistent in his quest to use his corporate wealth to alter the political landscape against liberal democracy and toward a dark, despotic future.
Rupert Murdoch leaving his London flat at the height of the phone-hacking scandal in 2011. Photograph: Oli Scarff/Getty Images
High court hears allegations media mogul oversaw ‘culture of impunity’ at the Sun and News of the World
Rupert Murdoch “turned a blind eye” to an extensive cover-up of wrongdoing at his newspapers, Prince Harry’s lawyers have alleged at the high court in London.
The direct allegations against the 93-year-old billionaire about activity at his publications are the latest stage in Harry’s war against the tabloid media, with lawyers for the Duke of Sussex and others accusing the media mogul of overseeing a “culture of impunity” at News Group Newspapers, the publisher of the Sun and the now defunct News of the World.
Court papers, which cover a period from the mid-1990s until 2016, also allege that Sir Will Lewis, the newly appointed publisher of Jeff Bezos’s Washington Post, played a key role in deleting millions of potentially incriminating emails, when he was tasked with managing the fallout from phone hacking.
Saudi Aramco CEO Amin Nasser speaks during the CERAWeek oil summit in Houston, Texas on March 18, 2024. (Photo: Mark Felix/AFP via Getty Images)
“The fossil fuel industry has always pursued a strategy of delay when it comes to the climate crisis,” said one campaigner. “First, it was focused on casting doubt on the science. Now, it’s all about casting doubt on the solutions.”
The CEO of the world’s largest oil company said Monday that calls to phase out fossil fuels are a “fantasy” that policymakers should abandon, a remark that drew applause from energy elites gathered in Houston, Texas for a major industry conference.
“We should abandon the fantasy of phasing out oil and gas and instead invest in them adequately reflecting realistic demand assumptions,” Saudi Aramco chief executive Amin Nasser told CERAWeek attendees, dismissing the International Energy Agency’s projection that global fossil fuel demand will peak by 2030.
“Peak oil and gas is unlikely for some time to come, let alone 2030,” Nasser said, suggesting oil consumption could continue growing through 2045. That scenario would serve the interests of Saudi Aramco, which in 2022 posted the largest-ever annual profit for a fossil fuel company.
Power Shift Africa, a climate think tank, called Nasser’s comments “outrageous.”
Jamie Henn, director of Fossil Free Media, noted that “the fossil fuel industry has always pursued a strategy of delay when it comes to the climate crisis.”
“First, it was focused on casting doubt on the science,” he observed. “Now, it’s all about casting doubt on the solutions.”
“It’s clear that not only are they not committed to reducing emissions, they’ve actually come to CERAWeek to continue promoting fossil fuel production and extraction and delaying the transition to a just, clean energy future.”
Climate scientists say that a rapid, global transition away from fossil fuel production and toward renewable energy is necessary to avert the worst of the planetary emergency, which is driving increasingly destructive and deadly extreme weather events, sea-level rise, ocean warming, and other alarming phenomena.
But Nasser claimed technologies such as carbon capture—which has repeatedly proven to be ineffective and even harmful—are better at lowering emissions than “alternative energies,” Reutersreported. Nasser specifically criticized wind, solar, and electric vehicles and said that “we should phase in new energy sources and technologies when they are genuinely ready, economically competitive, and with the right infrastructure.”
Just one day after Nasser’s remarks, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) released a report showing that “renewable energy generation, primarily driven by the dynamic forces of solar radiation, wind, and the water cycle, has surged to the forefront of climate action for its potential to achieve decarbonization targets.”
The WMO said Tuesday that renewable energy capacity increased nearly 50% last year compared to 2022.
But the continued production and burning of fossil fuels is wreaking global havoc, the WMO found, pushing planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions and temperatures to all-time highs.
In the face of such alarming findings, the major oil and gas industry players have rolled back their own weak emissions commitments and—in the case of ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods—blamed the public for fueling the climate crisis.
“For years we’ve demanded action, not empty words, from Big Oil,” Josh Eisenfeld, campaign manager of corporate accountability, said in a statement before the Houston conference kicked off on Monday. “If you look at their actions, it’s clear that not only are they not committed to reducing emissions, they’ve actually come to CERAWeek to continue promoting fossil fuel production and extraction and delaying the transition to a just, clean energy future.”
In recent years, Antarctica has experienced a series of unprecedented heatwaves. On 6 February 2020, temperatures of 18.3C were recorded, the highest ever seen on the continent, beating the previous record of 17.5C which had only been set a few years earlier.
Record-breaking temperatures during the heatwave on 6 February 2020. González-Herrero et al. (2022)
Events in recent years have bordered on the unbelievable, and it is difficult not to link them to climate change. In fact, studies have already emerged that clearly attribute some of these heatwaves to global warming: one of our investigations strongly suggests that without the influence of climate change, 2020’s record-breaking temperatures would not have occurred.
In our more recent study, published in February 2024, we adapted this measurement of speed and applied it to the edges of Antarctica. To do this, we tracked the southward migration of the zero-degree isotherm.
The zero-degree isotherm is an imaginary line that encloses the areas that are at zero degrees or lower. Its southward movement means that the area with temperatures below zero Celsius in Antarctica is getting smaller and smaller. Given that water freezes at zero degrees, this movement will have serious consequences for ecosystems and for the cryosphere (areas of the Earth where water is frozen).
Our calculations show that the zero-degree isotherm has moved at a speed of 15.8km per decade since 1957 in the area surrounding the Antarctic, while on the Antarctic peninsula itself it has moved at 23.9km per decade. As a result, it now sits over 100km south of where it was in the mid 20th century.
These measurements show that the speed of climate change on the edge of Antarctica is four times faster than the average of other ecosystems.
Evolution of the annual and seasonal position of the zero-degree isotherm in Antarctica between 1957 and 2020. The initials indicate the seasons for each measurement. MAM: autumn, JJA: winter, SON: spring, DJF: summer. González-Herrero et al. (2024)
The effects of emissions
To predict the consequences of the southward migration of the zero-degree isotherm, we ran our data through twenty different climate models. Although there is some variation in the shift of the isotherm among the models, all agree that it will move significantly further southward over the next few decades.
The models also predict that, over the coming decades, the isotherm’s movement will accelerate regardless of emissions. However, the extent of its southward movement in the second half of the 21st century will depend on how much carbon we emit.
If we continue at our current rate of emissions, the zero-degree isotherm will continue to advance at a similar rate before slowing down during the second half of the 21st century. However, if emissions are higher, the isotherm’s migration will accelerate continuing its southward movement until the end of the century.
Change in the summertime position of the zero-degree isotherm over the course of the 21st century. Based on IPCC climate scenario SSP5-8.5, whereby current emission levels are approximately doubled by 2050. Adapted by González-Herrero et al. (2024)
Impacts on the cryoshpere and ecosystems
The zero-degree isotherm’s southward movement will not remain solely in the atmosphere, it will also affect the cryosphere (all of the frozen areas of Antarctica) and the biosphere (the species that live there).
Changes in the isotherm’s position will mean more liquid rain instead of snow in the outermost regions of the continent, though it may in fact cause increased snowfall in other areas.
Reduced snowfall on the frozen sea – which acts as insulation – may lead to accelerated loss of sea ice during summer thaw periods.
Although the effects on permafrost, ice shelves and continental ice are still uncertain, it will undoubtedly affect the peripheral glaciers of the Antarctic Peninsula. These constitute one of the largest potential sources of sea level rise in the coming decades.
