Peter Lipman

Wars of choice murder countless people today—and drown the homes of countless people tomorrow.

—Each 5-year delay in peaking carbon emissions will cause an extra 8 inches of sea-level rise by 2300.

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

"While it should not be extraordinary for states to uphold the minimum prescribed under intl law, today it is"

Francesca Albanese on how its those who oppose Israels genocide who are targeted, smeared, harassed and sanctioned.

Francesca Albanese: "precisely because this darkness is now so visible, the genocide sheds light on something essential. Who are those supporting this system, in govts, in the financial system, in universities, in media?"

Francesca Albanese: "we are witnessing something new.. the globalisation of sumud... systems of domination appear invincible, until they are not"

Sally Rooney reminding us of the role played by Mary Manning & her colleagues in the fight against apartheid South Africa, and how its up to us now to support Palestinians in their struggle for liberation.

Sally Rooney: "By standing in solidarity with Palestine, we are learning how to fight for life on earth"

Sally Rooney: "I would like to ask my fellow writers & artists.. not to dwell too exclusively on what we stand to lose. There is another more important side to the story. To join in something greater than ourselves, to participate in.. a struggle for human liberation"

Restoring mangroves could save $800 million in storm damage, protect 140,000 people from flooding, and remove almost triple the amount of CO2 produced by cars in the U.S. every year. www.livescience.com/planet-earth...

Varsha Gandikota-Nellutla quoting Bobby Sands at the 'End the Nakba' event yesterday: "Our revenge is going to be the laughter of our children"

@jeremycorbyn.bsky.social : "Every euro, dollar or pound that is spent on buying more weapons.. that will end up killing people all around the world, is a dollar, euro or pound not spent on health, not spent on education, not spent on housing" 🎯

Iran’s people were facing a horrible shortage of water before the war began. If we are destroying desalination plants and setting fire to Teheran we are committing unfathomable crimes.

A water desalination plant is presumptively a civilian object & it is an object indispensable to survival.

Targeting a civilian object is a war crime.

Targeting an object indispensable to survival can implicate the starvation war crime.

NB: carnegieendowment.org/emissary/202...

Analysis Suggests School Was Hit Amid U.S. Strikes on Iranian Naval Base

The 1968 My Lai massacre killed at least 347 civilians. It led to congressional hearings and criminal trials. The bombing of the #Minab school, if confirmed to be an American airstrike, is a comparable massacre and scandal. A dark day in American history.

There's something deeply obscene and broken about the fact that Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth are bombing elementary schools in an illegal war of aggression, and there's still a sense among the opposition that it has to be explained in terms of gas prices in order to get American voters to care.

All this may be a bunch of doomerism - I certainly hope it is. Maybe the war against Iran will turn out to be messy but short, or that a lasting and just peace is achieved quickly. But if that's not the case, we are potentially standing at the beginning of some very hard years.

/ends

There are plenty of things we can and should be doing, as fast as humanly possible, to buffer these entirely predictable shocks. But in the absence of that, our entrenched neoliberal dogma is going to take us down a very bad road

We can hope that saner heads might prevail, but Nicola Willis is obviously not one of those saner heads. We could institute a crash programme to electrify the country as quickly as possible and get off fossil fuels, but the policies of this government have been in exactly the opposite direction

It's pretty much certain that the current government with its current policy settings will make the issue of imported inflation vastly worse - if oil does go to US$200 and stay there for any length of time, these people could entirely crater the economy

And, of course, we don't have adults in charge. CPI is going to rocket out of its 0-3% band pretty damn quickly, and the people @musicalchairs.bsky.social aptly describes as ghouls will want to raise interest rates - even though monetary policy will absolutely not work

Because of the way we've constructed our cities and regions, there's not much choice but to drive. But at those prices, someone on the minimum wage might be working 10-15 hours a week just to put petrol in the car, let alone deal with spiralling food costs

There are analysts suggesting that oil prices may run as high as US$200/barrel, which will be catastrophic for our economy. It means petrol prices north of $4.50 a litre - or perhaps $250-$300 to fill the car. Not many people can afford this

From where I'm standing, it looks like Israel wants to do to Tehran and every other Iranian city what they did to Gaza - destroy it. And it Iran fights back and continues to disrupt oil production across the Middle East, then things will stay ugly for a long time

If sanity prevails and peace is negotiated and the Straits of Hormuz reopen sometime in the next month, perhaps we'll just suffer 12 months of major downturn until oil prices drop back to US$70 or so. But if the opposite happens, then I don't even know what we call the result

This is, of course, set against a backdrop of two years of utter economic mismanagement. We already have high prices, wage increases below inflation, and high unemployment - for exactly no structural reason at all. All these things will get much worse with expensive oil

We know from experience that oil at >US$100 barrel automatically causes recession in AoNZ - it's baked into the way we currently run the economy. So if the brutal war against Iran drags on and oil prices stay north of US$100, then we're definitely going to take a hammering

This means that oil price rises always turn up as CPI increases - the price of everything will climb. Which mean we will be spending more on essentials and cutting back on anything and everything else. Which means a deep and brutal recession is just around the corner

So when oil prices rise, the price of everything climbs - it's almost impossible to escape. And fuel is inelastic in demand, which is an expensive way of saying that as prices rise, demand doesn't fall - because it's hard to substitute. So price rises are always passed on

So the price of oil turns up in the price of everything, always to transport it and in many cases to produce it in the first place. The humble loaf of bread depends on diesel to plant and harvest, fossil fuel fertilizers, transport to the supermarket, and every step in between

The first thing to remember is that every product and every supply chain is literally drenched in oil - from the food on our table to everything in the supermarket to the entire transportation sector. Nothing happens in AoNZ without fuel (typically diesel) being burned

Let's talk about what happens when oil prices go through the roof and stay there - because it really isn't pretty, it's going to hit our economy incredibly hard, and it's only peripherally about how much it costs to fill the tank.

A short 🧵

#nzpol