John Clarke is a longtime organizer in Toronto, as well as an active instructor with the Leo Panitch School for Socialist Education. He will be leading classes on the poor, activism, community/labour organizing, and how to build fighting movements in the Fall of 2026. Check leopanitchschool.ca regularly for these and other event announcements throughout the summer.

As ever more evidence emerges about the devastating and intensifying impacts of global heating, climate scientists are suggesting that the world could experience far more disastrous consequences than previously anticipated if pre-industrial temperatures increase by even 2°C. With increases well beyond this level during this century entirely possible, these findings are enormously worrying, with dire implications for humanity.

World Weather Attribution reports that from “mid April and advancing into May, India and Pakistan experienced extremely high temperatures, including daily maximum temperatures above 46°C in many cities in India.” With such conditions impacting one of the most densely populated parts of the earth, this meant “exposing hundreds of millions of people to dangerous conditions.”

Such brutal heatwaves on the sub-continent are “no longer rare, with a return period of approximately 5 years. In other words, there is a 20% chance in any given April of experiencing temperatures comparable to the hottest 15-day period observed in April 2026.” As recently as 2022, the heat that was experienced this spring would have been considered entirely exceptional.

The article also contends that “climate change approximately tripled the probability of an event like the 2026 heatwave.” Moreover, as to future trends, given “an additional 1.3°C of warming, such events will become more than twice as likely again and another 1.2°C hotter.”

Cascading Impacts

A University of Oxford study that was published in January found that “almost half the world’s population (3.79 billion) will be living with extreme heat by 2050 if the world reaches 2.0°C of global warming above pre-industrial levels – a scenario that climate scientists see as increasingly likely.” This would be a huge increase in exposure to such conditions, given that only 23% of the population faced extreme heat as recently as 2010. Dr. Jesus Lizana, the lead author of the study, stressed that the “study shows most of the changes in cooling- and-heating-demand occur before reaching the 1.5°C threshold, which will require significant adaptation measures to be implemented early on.”

Evidence of the rapid worsening of the climate crisis continues to pile up. This month, the Independent reported on some alarming scientific research that the University of Southampton has conducted into the melting of Antarctic sea ice, which “has plummeted to unprecedented lows.” The researchers found “that vast areas of ice equivalent to the size of Greenland have melted.” They conclude that this “massive loss of sea ice destabilises the world’s ocean current systems, warming the planet ‘far quicker than expected’.”

Perhaps the worst element of these findings, however, is the stark picture of cascading climate impacts that emerges. The researchers point to “three distinct events that disrupted the equilibrium of the surrounding Southern Ocean, triggering rapid ice melt.”

From around 2013, “climate-change intensified winds … began drawing warm, saline water from the deep ocean closer to the surface.” Following this, “in 2015, intense wind mixed the deeper heat directly into the surface layer, rapidly melting sea ice.” Finally, since 2018, “the ice-ocean system has been trapped in a cycle where – with less ice to melt – the surface remains salty and warm so that ice cannot recover.”

This process demonstrates very clearly just how numerous, complex and interwoven the climate effects we face actually are. Global heating creates a vast web of causality in which largely unanticipated effects become the causes of further climate disruption. It is easy to see why, though the general nature of climate disruption has long been understood, the speed and severity of the unfolding planetary disaster have often been underestimated.

Some seven years ago, the Guardian noted that a “four-degree-warmer world is the stuff of nightmares and yet that’s where we’re heading in just decades.” At the same time, it also concluded that “it’s highly unlikely that we will stay below 2°C (above pre-industrial levels) by the end of the century, let alone 1.5°C.” Developments since this was written only reinforce this conclusion.

In this situation, it now becomes clear as the heating process continues to unfold that projections that have been made with regard to the impacts of even a 2°C increase have failed to consider the range of possibilities adequately.

In March, an article in Carbon Brief pointed to a study that found that limiting warming “to 2°C above pre-industrial temperatures may not be enough to prevent ‘extreme global climate outcomes’.” Crucially, it was determined “that the “worst-case” model projections in a 2°C warmer world are often more severe than the ‘average’ scenarios in a 3°C or 4°C warmer world.”

Up until now, most scientific researchers and influential international bodies, including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), have used a “multimodel mean” approach under which they “run simulations using multiple models, then take the average of these results.”

Such an approach, however, may generate a “misleading picture” that fails to take into account the likelihood that “the changes that specific regions may see could be ‘much, much higher’ than the global average.” Moreover, given the crop of findings that consistently point to a widespread underestimation of the severity of climate impacts, we are driven back to the conclusion that “worst-case climate outcomes” are far more likely than had previously been estimated. To continue to operate with unduly optimistic predictions is folly, and it can only undermine effective preparedness and planning.

Disastrous Course

Yet, if those who study and prepare recommendations on climate change may be seriously underestimating the scale and intensity of the unfolding disaster, the harsh reality is that those in positions of economic and political power are charting a disastrous course that simply disregards the readily available evidence.

Donald Trump’s crude brand of climate denial is all too well known. It was he who stood before the United Nations General Assembly last September and, as PBS reported, declared that: “this climate change, it’s the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world, in my opinion.”

No doubt, Trump’s display of wilful ignorance on climate issues has emboldened fossil-fuel capitalists to abandon green pretences and to take an even more reckless and destructive path. However, a look at the political trajectory of Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, a former advocate of environmentally friendly capitalism, is highly instructive.

When he was a UN climate envoy, in 2020, Carney appeared confident that responsible environmental stewardship and the profit motive were entirely reconcilable. He declared: “Companies are recognising that they are not islands, independent of the social system, political system, economic system or climatic system … That’s a very positive development because it can point companies toward making climate and other needed investments.”

Just a few years later, Carney now heads the Canadian government at a time when profits are being squeezed by the impacts of Trump’s trade war measures, and he has certainly outgrown his green phase. His government is forging ahead with unprecedented efforts to grease the wheels of a veritable feeding frenzy of investment in fossil-fuel and mining projects. It is doing so with a shocking disregard for environmental consequences and climate impacts.

West Coast Environmental Law has roundly condemned Carney for advancing “major project deregulation that includes proposals to eviscerate our main tools for making sure that major projects don’t harm the water, nature and climate we rely upon.” It goes on to accuse the government of engaging in “by far the worst evisceration of environmental law in Canadian history.”

There are, of course, significant political differences between Trump and Carney, but they are not fundamental in nature. Drawn from the conservative and liberal wings of their respective political establishments, they share an assumption that the profit needs of the system they represent must be the primary consideration.

With every passing month, the dire nature of the climate crisis becomes clearer and ever more compelling evidence of this emerges. Yet, the fossil-fuel capitalists and their political enablers remain obdurate and continue, very literally, to pour oil on the fire. We can only conclude that the struggle for climate justice must be waged with an anti-capitalist political perspective. •

This article first published on the Counterfire website.

Thirty years ago, Halifax’s YMCA collaborated with partners in Palestine on a bold outreach initiative, but a few months ago, the same Y caved to pro-Israel pressure to demean a peacemaker.

Part 1 tells the shameful story of the Halifax YMCA’s capitulation in 2025. This is Part 2, thirty years earlier: the joint Halifax-East Jerusalem project.

Thirty years ago, we saw a different YMCA. Despite the then miniscule Muslim and Arab presence in Nova Scotia, the Halifax YMCA launched a daring and unique program in the mid-90s. The program was a partnership with the Y’s counterpart in Palestine, something almost unprecedented for the organization at the time.

The project was an exchange of personnel between Halifax’s YMCA and the Y on the Nablus Road in East Jerusalem and its satellites in Beit Sahour (a Christian suburb of Bethlehem), Jericho, and Ramallah. (It also had a branch in Gaza, since closed.)

The exchange project involved several people from the Halifax Y going to East Jerusalem and several from East Jerusalem coming to Halifax to both learn and impart knowledge and experience. The project also included the Ottawa YMCA.

Among the East Jerusalem Y officials who came to Halifax were General Secretary Kamil Nasser (YMCA’s General Committee for Refugees and the Middle East Council of Churches’ Department on Service to Palestine Refugees); Culture Department Head Michel Asfour (also active in the Ma’an Development Centre); and Nidal Abu Zuluf (now director of the Joint Advocacy Initiative of the Palestine YMCA and an author of the renowned Kairos Palestine document).

Halifax – Jerusalem Exchange Program

Abu Zuluf describes his experience thus:

“The purpose of the visit was to get introduced to the Canadian Vocational Evaluation System and check its compatibility to the Palestinian Context, to help unemployed people and people with disabilities find a proper job.

“In Halifax, we had the opportunity to meet Board members of the YMCA and be introduced to the YMCA activities  in Nova Scotia at large. We also gave a presentation on the Palestinian context and the East Jerusalem YMCA Rehabilitation Program. We also had the chance for sightseeing and enjoyed the kindness of people (especially the YMCA staff) and the beauty of the country.

“We were very satisfied with the visit. We learned about and implemented a valuable rehab assessment tool and became the first organization using this system in our region. The EJ YMCA Rehab Program is still using this evaluation system which was proven to be very helpful to our beneficiaries.”

The East Jerusalem YMCA touts the importance of such exchanges:

• “[The goal is] to support justice in Palestine through all possible means;
• “to enhance awareness concerning the Palestinian situation among international YMCA/YWCA movements and other partners and friends through the activities of the Free Palestine Campaign;
• “to build bridges of understanding between Palestinian and foreign youth from various cultures through encouraging young people with potential for leadership from YMCAs and YWCAs to visit Palestine in order to share their experiences of youth development and social justice.”

One focus of the joint project was the similarity between East Jerusalem and Halifax in development among local colonized communities.

Halifax has the largest historic Black community in Canada, with roots going back over 400 years, but with the accompanying racism, discrimination and denial of opportunity one would expect. Urban renewal, like the destruction of Africville in 1964 would in later years be justifiably labeled “ethnic cleansing.” Later that decade, Halifax’s Black youth angrily emulated the civil rights protests of their US cousins. Subsequent remedial community development schemes were not enough to slow the exodus of Black youth in the traditional “going down the road” to Ontario and westward.

Also of interest to the Palestinians, Halifax is also home to a comprehensive physical rehabilitation centre, partnering with the Y in several programs.

In Palestine, an ancient population had for 100 years been subject to Israeli settler colonial violence, punctuated by the “Nakba” of 1948, where three quarters of a million Palestinians, 75% of the population was forcibly displaced and the 1967 “Naksa” with a further 300,000 ousted. Those remaining, both under occupation and Israeli citizens, were subject to repression, a regime called even by some trusted Israeli sources “apartheid.”

Even after the Oslo Accords gave limited autonomy to some parts of Palestine, Israelis controlled many important aspects of locals’ lives, employing surveillance, physical punishment and incarceration.

The “First Intifada” or Palestinian uprising of 1987-1993 in Gaza and the West Bank was an attempt at mass resistance. But the Israeli government cracked down harshly. Israeli soldiers were issued truncheons, and according to reliable Israeli sources, Minister of Defence Yitzhak Rabin gave the infamous order “Go in and break their bones. If they will be beaten, it will hurt them, and the demonstrations will stop… You do the work. I’ll take care of the media.”

Compared to the Second Intifada (2000-2005) the First Intifada is remembered as relatively non-violent. But the impact, (especially on Palestinian youth who were the main protagonists) was grim, with a total of 1,300 killed, 120,000 injured, 15,000 arrested and 1,882 homes demolished. Around 200 Israelis lost their lives as well. The physical, emotional and occupational trauma toll was huge. Shut down by the Israelis during the Intifada, the East Jerusalem YMCA re-opened afterward, developing an impressive program of rehabilitation, including psychosocial counselling, remedial education, vocational training, physical and environmental adaptation, medical assistive aid, community engagement and awareness raising, and capacity development.

Three Factors

Three factors contributed to Halifax’s YMCA decision to link with East Jerusalem in this fortuitous exchange project:

1. A new attitude to international links. YMCA Canada and its affiliates, especially in Halifax, were changing their approach to international relations within the worldwide Y network. According to Halifax Y CEO in the 90s, George Rodger, the old outlook, focusing on what might be called organizational tourism, was shallow and apolitical. He and then Halifax Y Board Chair John Lindsay Jr. had a new perspective that would be more politically engaged.

We tried a real helpful partnership where both groups got to know each other and had things to contribute to the partnership and learning. I did not want a partnership that was patronizing.

2. Said Ayyash. A key catalyst, with links to both localities was Said Ayyash. A native of the embattled Silwan neighbourhood of East Jerusalem, he became a youthful militant and spent four years in Israeli prison in the 1970s; a common story for Palestinians, of whom 40% have been incarcerated since 1967.. He later worked at the YMCA. Founded in 1948, the East Jerusalem YMCA was long run as almost a private club for the comparatively economically-advantaged Christian Palestinians and expatriates. Ayyash set about to open the Y up to greater participation by his Muslim co-religionists and was a key player in the rehabilitation program mentioned above.

Faced with the avalanche of post-First Intifada damaged youth, Ayyash was instrumental in the Y’s program of rehabilitation. The program gained international attention, especially in the worldwide Y network.

One of Ayyash’s sons was deaf and no suitable high school was available for him in Palestine. Through contacts with Canadians he had met at the Y, Ayyash was able to emigrate to Canada in 1993. Rather than a larger city, he chose Halifax as a more intimate place to raise a family. He first tried his hand in the sports equipment business and was active in sports, especially soccer. Ayyash introduced and facilitated the exchange program between the YMCAs of his old and his new city.

3. The Oslo Process. The ravages of the First Intifada spurred a liberal faction of the Israeli power structure, led by the selfsame Yitzhak Rabin, and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, exiled in Tunisia, to seek for their own separate reasons, a rapprochement that would promise an end to hostilities. This was so-called Oslo Process, which resulted in a tenuous accord in 1993, with the Palestine Liberation Organization recognizing Israel, and allowing Arafat to return to Palestine as leader of the “Palestinian Authority,” a miniscule “return” of refugees, and the establishment of some Palestinian autonomy in some parts of the occupied territories.

As we now know, and as some Palestinians, like Edward Said, warned at the time, the Oslo Accords vastly favoured the Israelis and were designed never to lead to a true Palestinian state. As well, even amid the Oslo process, Israelis were busy enhancing their occupation with scores of new settlements and hundreds of thousands of Israeli settlers, many of them fanatically inimical to their Palestinian neighbours.

Nonetheless, the “Oslo Period,” in Palestine, in Israel, and in most of the world, was a time of fervent hope and optimism, an ardent, if misguided, belief that the Palestine/Israel conflict was on its way to resolution.

It was upon this feeling of political buoyancy that the Halifax-East Jerusalem project floated.

Spirited by that aura of exuberance, those who took part in the project found it transformative. Not only did the Palestinian visitors commune with Y members and volunteers, they also visited local churches and synagogues.

Then Halifax YMCA CEO George Rodger and Board Chair John Lindsay Jr. were two of the leaders who traveled to Palestine. Amid the Oslo Process, they were in Gaza on July 1, 1994, when PLO leader Yasser Arafat arrived celebrating the return to his homeland after 27 years in exile.

As the BBC reported it: “In Gaza City Mr. Arafat gave a triumphant address from the balcony of the former headquarters of the Israeli military governor to a Parliament Square packed with 200,000 Palestinians. Says Rodger:

“[Arafat] was saying, I will make peace and the Israeli prime minister was saying, we will make peace.”

Rodger says the whole exercise of exchanging personnel fulfilled their dreams:

“It wasn’t patronizing to them; it wasn’t dependent upon gifts of money. And it was based on a mutual respect and mutual power and had some depth to it, because I believe there is no Y in the world that can survive without this kind of outreach. It kind of gives hope that this is a big enough thing. If we join it, we can change society. And all people in Canada, it becomes a dignified and safe place where everybody lives in peace.”

One of the other Haligonian YMCAers to go to the East Jerusalem Y was Scott MacMillan, then working as a manager in the Y system and later a professor of business administration at Halifax’s Mount Saint Vincent University. MacMillan helped the Palestinian Y in expansion of its mission. He says of his experience:

“When I first went to the East Jerusalem YMCA, I was a naive young man with very little experience of the world at large. Reading or watching the news about Palestine and Palestinians, Israel and Israelis is one thing. Actually working and living there is quite another. I met Palestinians; I worked with Palestinians; I made life-long friends; I saw all around me the impact of the Israeli occupation. It forever changed my life.”

A Great Disappointment

Indeed, MacMillan attended the December 2025 rally outside the Halifax YMCA protesting the cancellation of Rana Zaman’s award. He noted the irony of that disappointment in light of his experience three decades earlier.

When Said Ayyash learned of the Y’s revocation, thirty years later, of Rana Zaman’s Peace Medal, he insisted on a meeting with CEO Posavad and other Y officials. He reminded them of the Y’s project of the 1990s and warned them that they were currently dealing with a very different Halifax.

“The Muslim population of Halifax is growing very fast; it is one of the most important features of the city. It is the future of the YMCA. The Y’s decision [re: Zaman] was so shortsighted. I see it and other Muslims see the Y’s treatment of Rana Zaman as a huge insult. If the Y’s goal is to serve the community, it must serve the whole community.”

In many ways, the issue of Palestine is two steps forward, one step back. After two plus years of Israel’s brutal rampage in Gaza and the West Bank, for the first time ever, more Canadians now support the Palestinians than the Israelis. Even among Canadian Jews, only half now self-identify as Zionist and that falls to 37 percent among American Jews, especially those between 18 and 36.

The privacy of a polling questionnaire is one thing. Public opinion has changed, probably forever. But the public relations and political battleground is another. The issue is more divisive than ever, particularly due to the scorched-earth strategy of Israel’s supporters weaponizing the accusation of antisemitism and the price that any individual or group pays for criticizing that country. Despite the surge in public opinion, would organizations like the YMCA be able to repeat the spirit of adventurous enterprise they followed thirty years ago? The Rana Zaman story tells one tale. But perhaps not for much longer.

What is needed? How about a campaign urging the Halifax YMCA to repeat its old initiative of thirty years ago? The East Jerusalem Y is open to new (or old) partnerships. Now, more than ever.

As Rifat Odeh Kassis, a distinguished Palestinian Christian leader, with a long career at the Palestine YMCA and also with the ecumenical group Kairos and Defence for Children International Palestine, says:

“These exchanges are vital in breaking the isolation imposed by the Israeli occupation on Palestinian society and civil institutions.

“They create spaces for genuine human connection, mutual learning, and solidarity. They also allow Palestinians to share their own narrative directly, beyond political distortions and stereotypes, while helping international partners better understand the daily realities on the ground. Such relationships strengthen global advocacy for justice, human rights, dignity, and peace, and help mobilize people of conscience around the world.”

Let’s do it. •

Part one of this article is available here.

Building upon more than a half century of sustained analysis of the evolving political economy of contemporary capitalism – and in particular the challenges it poses to the left – Socialist Register 2026: Late-Stage Capitalism? Accumulation in the Ruins puzzles through the rubble left behind after decades of rampant neoliberalism.

• What kind of world order is now emerging?
• Is capitalism entering a terminal crisis, or being violently reconstituted?
• How is American empire being reshaped from Palestine to New York?
• And what possibilities remain for socialist politics in an age of ecological breakdown, geopolitical fracture, and resurgent authoritarianism?

Ibrahim Shikaki, Costas Lapavitsas and Paul Heideman, three contributors to this year’s Socialist Register volume, consider these and other questions in conversation with co-editor Steve Maher and the new editor of Monthly Review Press, Arun Kundnani.

0:00 Introductions
0:45 Arun Kundnani
2:26 Steve Maher
15:38 Ibrahim Shikaki
28:19 Costas Lapavitsas
51:42 Paul Heideman
1:02:57 Questions

Recorded 28 May, 2026, in New York.

Fernwood Publishing | Monthly Review Press

Thirty years ago, Halifax’s YMCA collaborated with partners in Palestine on a bold outreach initiative, but a few months ago, the same Y caved to pro-Israel pressure to demean a peacemaker.

This is a tale of two YMCAs in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Actually, it’s the same YMCA, but divided by time. One in 2025, failing in its community outreach by succumbing to pressure groups; the other, thirty years before, establishing a gallant stand on the same issue. Unfortunately, that 1995 project has been all but forgotten. That story begs to be told.

What was the Y’s shameful act in 2025? We’ll deal with that first and then turn to a very different Y three decades earlier. The tale of that thirty-year-old venture can be found in Monday’s article.

Y Awards, then rescinds “Peace Medal”

Like Ys across Canada, during Peace Week every November, Halifax awards “Peace Medals” to local individuals making significant contributions in three areas: Empowering Youth; Health and Wellness; and Equity, Diversity and Inclusion.

On November 19, 2025, the Y’s 2025 Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Award went to well-known Halifax activist Rana Zaman. The announcement had run for several weeks on the Y’s video monitors (see below).

But the pro-Israel lobby in Halifax and nation-wide launched a powerful campaign against her, and within a few days of the ceremony, the Y had rescinded that award.

Rana Zaman: Humanitarian Superstar

What had Ms. Zaman done to deserve the Peace Medal in the first place? The record of her accomplishments is enormous. As the website of the organization Canadian Immigrant said seven years ago:

“Rana Zaman arrived in Canada [from Pakistan] as a child in 1971, and tried hard to fit in. ‘Canada was lacking diversity at the time we arrived, let alone embracing it [as it does now],’ Zaman says. ‘It was a struggle to hold on to my identity and as a child I just wanted to fit in. As an adult, I tried to reclaim my identity and became more confident in myself. Fortunately, the environment had become more receptive to diversity…’

“…Zaman has put that belief into action. She co-ordinates events and speaks on topics of racism, feminism, bullying, poverty and Islamophobia to create awareness in her community of Halifax, Nova Scotia.

• Zaman is an active member of a score of organizations dedicated to social inclusion and fellowship. A Muslim herself, in the 2010s, she helped found a Halifax group of Jewish and Muslim women that met regularly to discuss peace.
• A tireless humanitarian, Rana is the go-to person for not only immigrants, but anyone in need. Winter coats for the newly-arrived? A hot meal? Bereaved? Call Rana Zaman.
• In one act of courage and empathy, Rana confronted a Halifax police officer who had made Islamophobic social media posts. Rather than denounce him from afar, Zaman arranged to meet with him and noted that his action ‘[was] coming out of pure anger, and there’s something behind it, there’s pain and anger behind that comment’.”

Even some who lobbied hard against Zaman acknowledge her impressive humanitarian credentials.

The fact that the 2025 campaign against Zaman succeeded despite her manifold accomplishments tells a lot about ethnic and religious politics in Canada today.

So, what was it that led to the voiding of her award? Palestine.

Rana’s compassionate instincts have led her into the forbidden zone, the third rail of Canadian politics, the exception to the humanitarian principles: she has distinguished herself as a vigorous organizer and spokesperson for the cause of Palestinian human rights. Week by week, her high-pitched voice rings out at rallies with “Greetings Humanity!”

Rana’s Palestine advocacy has led pro-Israel organizations to paint a bullseye on her back. And they have robbed her of honours several times.

After she won the NDP federal riding nomination in 2019, that party “discovered” (thanks to some active trolls) some social media posts denouncing the Israeli army’s shooting of unarmed Gazans in the 2018-19 “Great March of Return” and the NDP national office kicked her off the ticket. Later that year, after Rana won a coveted Human Rights Award from the Nova Scotia Human Rights Commission, the Atlantic Jewish Council (AJC) launched a lobbying campaign against her, claiming she was antisemitic. No matter the Muslim-Jewish peace organization she helped to found. No matter that two local rabbis, Raysh Weiss and Jonah Rank, vouched for her. Weiss called the affair a “shanda” (Yiddish for shame or disgrace) “the critique from the AJC etc. regarding Israel-rhetoric is irrelevant to honouring Rana for her incredible loving work on the ground in Nova Scotia.”

Nonetheless, the Commission capitulated to the pressure, just as the YMCA did six years later.

This is par for the course for pro-Israel organizations, like CIJA, B’nai Brith, Friends of Simon Wiesenthal and Canary Mission. Having lost Canadian hearts and minds over Israel’s Gaza genocide, they now engage in relentless shut-down campaigns against critics of Israel, including attempts at prohibiting protests, firing from jobs, dismissal from schools, denial of awards like Rana’s, criminal charges, doxxing, slander and abuse. As I have explained it, using Hebrew terms, “Hasbara” (the famed pro-Israel propaganda) has given way to “Hashtakah” (or outright silencing.)

Particularly vulnerable are organizations that survive through public and government fundraising. Just last year, for example, the Girl Guides of Canada was targeted when girls in one of its Saskatoon units produced fabric art showing a baby wrapped in a keffiyeh (the Palestinian scarf.) No sooner had the accusation of antisemitism been hurled than the offending graphic disappeared from social media.

B’nai Brith Plays Spoiler

Another, personal, example: A year ago, B’nai Brith Canada launched a public shaming campaign to stop the Atlantic School of Theology (AST) from awarding honorary degrees to my wife, Judy Haiven, and me for our work, as Jews, on Palestinian human rights. Fortunately, AST refused to succumb.

Sometimes the silencing effort is a quiet whisper campaign; more often it is loud and raucous, and always full of wild accusations and distortions. B’nai Brith Canada was the culprit behind the campaign to get the YMCA to revoke Zaman’s Peace Medal. B’nai Brith publicly chided the Y for honouring “a radical who has peddled antisemitic conspiracy theories,” and “[called on] the YMCA of Greater Halifax and Dartmouth to withdraw Zaman’s name and take a firm stance against antisemitism, racism, and hatred in all its forms.”

The Halifax Y was not taken by surprise. When first informed of the Y’s intention to honour her, Ms. Zaman warned Executive Director Brian Posavad that his organization would suffer bullying and abuse if the Y honoured her. Zaman was also frank and forthcoming about her political activities.

In the midst of the controversy, Judy and I met with Mr. Posavad and the Halifax Y’s chief development officer. We supported Zaman and denounced the malicious campaign against her. At that meeting, both Y officials insisted that they would hold firm and disregard the threats.

But those promises came to naught as the menacing mounted. We are told that YMCA National and several government officials intervened, cautioning that YMCA’s funding could be in jeopardy.

Halifax journalism professor and columnist Stephen Kimber, who has followed and opposed  Rana Zaman’s vilification for years, wrote an “Open Letter” in the Halifax Examiner to the Y and Posavad, asking pertinent questions about the Y’s surrender:

“Who did you speak to? Did your review include speaking to members of the local Muslim and Pakistani communities? The Atlantic Canada Palestinian Society? How about Independent Jewish Voices? The ‘United for One Association,’ through which Ms. Zaman helped raise $200,000 to support Syrian refugees? How about ‘Diverse Voices for Change Halifax’…” 

“Were any of the 13 non-profit volunteer organizations Ms. Zaman has worked with – like the Caring Human Association, which she founded and which provided ‘freshly home-cooked meals to organizations like Shelter NS, Out of the Cold, and Hope Cottage, as well as collecting items for care packages for organizations like Bryony House and Adsum House’ – consulted?”

The local Palestine human rights community also protested loudly. Several rallies in front of the Y denounced its capitulation, singing a mocking version (click to watch video) of the Village People song “YMCA.”

They tried everything
To muzzle Rana Zaman
So, let’s show up on their front lawn
It’s a disgrace to them; Y-M-C-A
You have no place at the Y-M-C-A
They tried everything to embarrass us all, but
it’s clear that they dropped the ball.

The Canadian BDS Coalition has put the YMCA on its boycott list.

When the Y surrendered to the B’nai Brith Canada campaign, the organization loudly proclaimed victory: “B’nai Brith Canada thanks the YMCA’s leadership for their openness, their willingness to engage, and their principled decision-making.” More ominously, it promised to play a role in further Peace Medals. “We look forward to continued cooperation to ensure that future Peace Medal recipients truly embody the compassion, integrity, and hope that the award is intended to honour.” Some wags have suggested that all organizations employ B’nai Brith’s services to vet decisions.

Many in Halifax’s Muslim community saw the Y’s action in stripping Zaman, a Muslim, of her honour as nothing less than a slap in the face. Zaman had been nominated for the medal by a group of Muslim women. Many of the Y staff and volunteers are themselves Muslim, and some are newcomers to the country. They told us that Y management warned them not to speak to members about the Zaman situation, and to ignore the demonstrations, as they were “divisive.”

The NDP’s, the NS Human Rights Commission’s and the YMCA’s actions in caving to the pro-Israel lobby are sharpened by the prodigious ten-fold growth of the Muslim population in Nova Scotia in the past thirty years, many of whom share Rana Zaman’s horror at the massacre and destruction in Gaza.

To compare this story with a very different Halifax YMCA and its bold initiative on Palestine thirty years ago, see Part 2 on Monday. •

The People’s Summit for a Fossil Free Future is the civil society counterpart to the historic First International Conference on Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels, taking place in Santa Marta from 24-29 April 2026.

The People’s Summit was held from the 24 to 26 of April and serves as a critical space for self-organized civil society to unify our demands and build collective power from the ground up. It is based on a global process for deepening and widening broad movement consensus on a more comprehensive agenda for a rapid, equitable, and just energy transition, culminating in the adoption of three key papers: the Principles; the Demands; the People’s Roadmap.

These unified positions will then be delivered directly into the official process through the Assembly of the People (April 27), a formal space convened by the Colombian government to facilitate direct dialogue between civil society representatives and state delegates. While the Summit is where we forge our shared vision, the Assembly is where we ensure that it shapes the official outcomes.

Five major sections:

1. The Global Context
2. Historical and Systemic Roots
3. Principles for the Just Transition
4. Our Demands
5. Conclusion

I. The Global Context

A. Geopolitics of Aggression and Destruction, Fossil Dependence, and the Oil, Gas, and Energy Crisis

1. All acts of invasion, aggression and occupation are profoundly reprehensible and condemnable for the resulting massive loss of lives, displacement of people, intensification of human suffering and precarity, extreme disregard for human rights, devastation of vital infrastructures, eco-cide, the systematic flouting of international law, and the violation of national sovereignty.
2. We are issuing this declaration in the midst of US-Israel geopolitics of destruction, supported and enabled by other Global North countries. While the US and Israeli governments are not the only ones that are guilty of acts of war and aggression against other nations and peoples, theirs are primarily defining the global situation today. The US and Israel are responsible for military attacks against Iran, Venezuela, Lebanon, the illegal blockade of Cuba and the ongoing and devastating genocide against Palestine. They are responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths, needless climate and environmental pollution, and the destruction of civilian infrastructure – schools, hospitals, homes and cultural sites. The multilateral system is being heavily undermined, and the erosion of multilateralism poses a grave threat to the rights of peoples everywhere. All to maintain a world order where a US-led imperial alliance can maintain global control of resources and the world economy. A world order which maintains the impunity and profits of billionaires and corporations while the peoples of the world pay the price.
3. The US-Israel-led conflicts have also both catalyzed and exacerbated a global oil, gas and energy crisis. The resulting volatility in oil and gas prices reverberates through the global economy, inflating the costs of energy, fertilisers, food, transport, and essential services. These systemic shocks are borne disproportionately by the working class, impoverished communities, and the nations of the Global South. The US-led imperialist alliance is also attempting to lock in control of critical minerals for military and artificial intelligence, combat the control of China over mineral processing and maintain the current inequity in consumption of energy and resources.
4. The global oil, gas and energy crisis further exposes the inherent structural perils of fossil fuel dependency spanning energy, food systems, petrochemicals, and land use. Not only are fossil fuels the primary drivers of ecological collapse, they are fundamentally volatile, subject to geopolitical manipulation, and economically destabilizing. The crisis decisively deconstructs the persistent myth of fossil gas as a “transition fuel,” revealing it instead as a perennial source of insecurity and conflict. The crisis also illuminates the profound injustices embedded in fossil fuel dependency, within the Global South and among marginalized peoples and communities in the Global North. Nations, peoples, and communities which have contributed minimally to global emissions, are now besieged by escalating living costs, climate-induced disasters, and energy insecurity.
5. The crisis is being exploited to justify the retrenchment of climate, energy, environmental and related fiscal and financial policies, including the expansion of coal and gas infrastructure and the suspension of phase-out commitments. This strategic backsliding deepens the climate emergency and ensures long-term ecological harm.
6. Many Global South nations remain trapped in post-colonial patterns: import dependency while producing specialty crops for export, fossil fuel dependency, and petrodollar exposure via policy regimes backed by International Financial Institutions (IFIs), export credit agencies, and bilateral development finance institutions, as well as private financial institutions and free trade agreements. These regimes are anchored in dollarized legacy contracts, sovereign guarantees, maximizing short term profits and shareholder returns and rigid capacity payments that externalize risk to the public while guaranteeing fossil fuel industry profits. These arrangements entrench costly fossil generation, exacerbate balance-of-payments pressures, and incentivize domestic fossil expansion, while austerity-driven frameworks systematically crowd out investment in distributed, alternative energy pathways.
7. There is a profound convergence between the corporations driving the climate catastrophe and those fueling global militarism. Imperialist powers operate in concert with fossil fuel giants to consolidate resource control and geopolitical influence; corporations such as Chevron, Total Energies, British Petroleum and Shell not only sustain the global war machine but also extract record profits from the resulting devastation.
8. Fossil fuel supply chains function essentially as warfare supply chains: commodity traders, refiners, insurers, and shipping firms profit from and facilitate military aggression, operating within a governance vacuum devoid of multilateral oversight. This phenomenon even extends beyond hydrocarbons. The escalating race for critical minerals demonstrates that unchecked corporate power – across both traditional and “green” extractivist industries – is increasingly fueling conflict and dispossession. The transition cannot be considered “just” if supply chains continue to sustain genocide, ecocide, and illegal occupation with undue impunity. Transnational corporations across all sectors are deeply complicit in the maintenance of militarism, colonialism, occupation, and imperialist wars.
9. State-level energy embargoes are systematically circumvented through corporate intermediaries, “flag-hopping,” AIS (Automatic Identification System) manipulation, and third-country refining. These evasive tactics flourish because no binding international instrument currently exists to enforce such sanctions or hold corporate actors accountable.
10. We are in a period of massive transition, upheaval, and instability in the global capitalist system and the economic order. The economic, social, and environmental crisis is worsening people’s living conditions and frustrating expectations of social improvements. In this period of instability and contestation, we are also seeing a rise of far-right, xenophobic, patriarchal forces mobilizing a politics of hate and fear around the world, many with neo-fascist characteristics. The advance of the extreme right, fascism and wars around the world exacerbates the climate crisis and the exploitation of peoples and nature.

B. Intensifying Climate Crisis and Escalating Impacts

1. The climate crisis continues to intensify, manifesting in escalating and compounding impacts across all global regions. These consequences are fundamentally unevenly distributed, exceedingly burdening rural areas, forest-dependent communities, coastal zones, migrants (including displaced, stateless, undocumented, asylee, and refugee people), Indigenous peoples’ territories, and ethnic or collective territories. In these locales, climate risks intersect with legacies of historical marginalization, racism and coloniality of power, sparse institutional presence, and constrained access to resources. The severity of these impacts is not uniform; within specific territories and among certain social sectors, the resulting loss and damage are significantly more acute, reflecting deep-seated structural inequities and vulnerabilities.
2. The frequency and severity of extreme weather events – including heatwaves, floods, droughts, storms, and wildfires – are accelerating at an alarming rate. Concurrently, eustatic sea-level rise poses an existential threat to entire communities and low-lying nations. These environmental shocks place unprecedented stress on agricultural systems, triggering widespread food insecurity and destabilizing hydrological cycles. As livelihoods are decimated, climate-induced displacements and migration continue to rise, accelerating the breakdown in regional stability.
3. The care economy absorbs much of this instability invisibly: as public services collapse and livelihoods are lost, women, girls and diversities are expected to act as shock absorbers through intensified unpaid labor in the home and community. This gendered division of labor must be eliminated, and care work, which remains unrecognized, unremunerated, and unsupported, must be rendered visible, valued and invested on and redistributed.
4. The Global South, alongside marginalized populations in the Global North, bears the primary brunt of the climate emergency despite having contributed nominally to its origins and its intensification today. This highlights systemic inequality at the core: the wealthiest 10% of the global population is responsible for nearly half of all emissions, while the poorest contribute a negligible share. This chasm between responsibility and vulnerability underscores the necessity of a justice-oriented approach to climate policy.
5. The intensification of cyclones, flooding, and salinity intrusion is actively eroding livelihoods, food and water systems, and social cohesion. Because workers, farmers and fishers, children and youth, women, migrants, Indigenous Peoples, Afrodescendants and marginalized groups are disproportionately impacted, any viable global response must prioritize their frontline experiences, ensuring that adaptation, resilience, loss-and-damage and just transition programs mechanisms are equitably and adequately financed and locally governed.
6. This crisis extends beyond economic metrics. It also drives irreversible non-economic losses – including the loss and displacement of lives and the erosion of culture, identity, traditional knowledge, and territorial ties which remain largely ignored in contemporary policy frameworks.
7. Air pollution from fossil fuels is one of the world’s leading causes of premature death and ill health, which places an enormous health economic burden. Moreover, the full picture of health harms from fossil fuels is probably underestimated due to lack of research on many relevant topics including: health harms from non-combustion aspects of the fossil fuel lifecycle (exploration, extraction, processing, transportation, and disposal, including offshore exploration, drilling, flaring, and oil spills as well as petrochemicals) with the largest impacts in Global South.
8. The IPCC’s Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C and the Sixth Assessment Working Group reports provide an undeniable scientific consensus regarding the urgency of the climate crisis and the irreversible harm associated with “overshoot” – the surpassing of the 1.5°C threshold. Current global policies are projected to result in a temperature increase of approximately 2.9°C, while existing Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), even if fully implemented, would only limit warming to 2.5–2.6°C. This trajectory exceeds the 1.5°C limit, highlighting a catastrophic gap between current commitments and the transformative action needed to prevent ecological collapse.
9. Furthermore, global climate strategies continue to ignore the massive emissions of industrial and animal agriculture. Driven by heavy fossil fuel dependency and standing as the single largest anthropogenic source of methane, this sector actively destabilizes the very hydrological cycles and food systems vulnerable communities rely upon.

II. Historical and Systemic Roots

A. Rooted in Capitalism, Colonialism, Racism, Patriarchy, Class and Caste Systems, Imperial Domination, and white “Supremacy”

1. The climate crisis, with fossil fuel dependence at its core, is fundamentally rooted in a global system rooted in Capitalism, Colonialism, Racism, Patriarchy, Class and Caste Systems, Imperial Domination, and white “Supremacy”which are characterized by inequality, exploitation, extraction, expropriation and extermination. The ascent of capitalism and settler colonialism in the Global North and subsequent colonial conquest and occupation of the Global South led to a global system defined by the relentless extraction of natural resources, cycles of overproduction and overconsumption, the perpetual expansion of markets, the fabrication of artificial, unsustainable demand, and the hegemony of fossil fuel-powered militaries and the paradigm of infinite economic growth on a finite planet.
2. The historical roots of this extractivism trace back to the first colonial conquests of peoples and the establishment of the first multinational corporations, such as the Dutch East India Company. The blueprint for merging militarization with global extraction was established, which the fossil fuel industry follows today. Extractivism and global imperialism are also rooted in the Transatlantic Slave Trade, and have elevated countries responsible for the ongoing effects of colonialism and colonization. These countries utilized global imperialism to establish and foster fossil fuel dependence. Acknowledging this specific historical continuity is crucial for demanding reparations for all peoples, communities and nations whose lives, resources and economies have been subjugated and continue to be exploited for profit accumulation.
3. Fossil fuels served, and continue to serve, as the primary engine for this system, facilitating rapid industrialization and the concentration of wealth within the Global North. This process imposed ecological degradation, systemic dispossession, and forced underdevelopment upon the Global South, ultimately precipitating the excessive and accelerated accumulation of atmospheric greenhouse gases.
4. Extractivism has long been associated with gender-based violence, sexual exploitation and trafficking, as well as devastating health impacts, including in particular reproductive health impacts. The systematic exclusion of women and gender-diverse people, in particular rural and Indigenous women from land rights, resource governance, and decision-making processes has perpetuated their dispossession while rendering invisible their essential role as stewards of territories and ecosystems.
5. These neocolonial, extractivist relations endure to this day through contemporary mechanisms, including:
   • Unequal trade and investment regimes
   • Land grabbing, pollution, and resource plundering of the South to satiate the consumption demands of the Global North elites, corporations, and governments.
   • Financial architectures designed to siphon wealth from the Global South – including supply driven lending and, conditional lending by institutions like the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, the centrality of the US dollar in the global monetary system, and pervasive profit repatriation, tax avoidance, and illicit financial flows – resulting in a massive net outflow of capital from the South to the North
   • Exploitation of people and their environments and natural resources by Global North elites, corporations, and governments, often with complicity of Global South elites, corporations and governments
   • Export-oriented agriculture and food production undermining indigenous food systems and sustainable agriculture that priorities domestic needs especially food staples
   • Onerous legal and investment protection frameworks that entrench legacy fossil fuel contracts, such as ISDS, thereby curtailing the sovereignty of Global South nations and restricting their capacity to renegotiate or terminate long-term agreements with multinational corporations
   • Increased militarism and presence of Global North military forces in and proximate to the Global South
6. Colonial energy infrastructures – including mining operations, pipelines, grids, and refineries established through occupation – function to lock in political control over populations.
7. Energy dependency on occupying powers is not merely a vestigial legacy of colonialism; rather, it remains an active and ongoing instrument of domination and death.
8. The climate crisis transcends the question of what type of energy is produced and consumed; it is also a question of how energy and related resources are extracted and utilized, and how economies are structured and governed.

B. Ecological debt, Climate debt, and Common but Differentiated Responsibility

1. The primary historical responsibility for the climate crisis lies with Global North elites, corporations, and governments. It is the consequence of centuries of unbridled and rapid fossil fuel use for overproduction, settler colonialism, economic conquest, land extraction, cultural and political domination, and high-consumption patterns. This has resulted in excessive concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, causing global warming and climate change.
2. The Global North’s elites, corporations, and governments owe a huge climate debt to the Global South. More massive than the financial debts being claimed from the South. Climate debt represents the Global North’s moral and financial obligation for its disproportionate exploitation of the global atmospheric commons. This debt includes the liability incurred from the historical over-appropriation of the planetary carbon budget to fuel Northern industrialization and the responsibility to fund the survival and resilience of vulnerable communities currently facing the catastrophic consequences of a climate crisis they did not create.

   This obligation is no longer merely a moral claim. It is increasingly bolstered by emerging international legal standards, such as the ICJ Advisory Opinion, that affirm States’ duty to prevent climate harm and to provide comprehensive reparations. Codified through the principle of Common But Differentiated Responsibilities (CBDR) under the UN climate regime, climate justice necessitates the explicit recognition of this historical and ongoing debt, the delivery of reparations, and a mandate for high-emitting nations to lead in rapid emissions reductions, technology transfer, and the provision of climate finance to cover the costs of mitigation, adaptation, loss and damage and just transition in the Global South.

3. The climate debt is part of a much larger and more encompassing economic, social, political, and ecological debt that is rooted in colonialism and capitalist conquest, patriarchy, and slavery, that are characterized by intensive exploitation of both humanity and nature for centuries. Ecological debt is the cumulative liability for the historical and continuing systematic plundering of natural resources, environmental degradation, the loss of nature, biopiracy, and the appropriation of Indigenous knowledge. It encompasses the use of lands in the South for production of crops for global markets with heavy use of harmful agrochemicals, for waste disposal and the exploitation of resources far beyond their regenerative capacity. This debt captures a fundamental structural imbalance: a paradigm in which the Global North consumes more than its territory can sustain, leaving a legacy of environmental ruin for future generations to inherit.
4. It is imperative that a just transition addresses climate and ecological debt by ensuring the delivery of reparations, equitable energy access for sustainable development and the fulfillment of human rights, and the individual and collective rights of all communities and peoples, within planetary boundaries.
5. A just transition must also rectify the care debt owed to women, LGBTQI + people, and those who have historically performed the undervalued and unpaid reproductive labor that sustains neoliberal economies.
6. It must also ensure that migrants and displaced peoples, who have been displaced by climate changes and the same systems fueling our climate crisis, receive cross-border political and funding support to ensure their human rights, wellbeing, and right to work.
7. Deep structural asymmetries between the Global North and the Global South continue to shape the international financial architecture, with financial flows moving from South to North through debt service while ecological and climate debts owed by the North remain unpaid. Debt burdens systematically pressure countries of the South to expand oil, gas, coal, and mineral extraction to generate foreign exchange, reinforcing the very dynamics that drive the climate crisis. The Platform’s relevance will depend on its ability to challenge this structural imbalance and help countries reclaim fiscal and policy space for a just, sovereign, and people-centered transition, rather than reinforcing mechanisms that perpetuate ecological debt, extractivism, and dependence.

III. Principles for the Just Transition and Vision for a Fossil Free Future Integration and Summary of Principles from 2 twin documents

1. Principles for the Rapid, Equitable and Just Phase-out of Fossil Fuels – link provided here

Principle One: Rapid, transformative, and science-based, while drawing from ancestral and popular knowledge and wisdom

1. This principle recognizes that the transition must be a rapid systemic overhaul guided by rigorous climate science and drawing from Indigenous, ancestral, multicultural, and collective wisdom to ensure that solutions are ecologically sound and socially grounded.
2. The transition must be conducted at the scale and speed necessary to limit global warming to 1.5°C and reach real zero emissions by 2050. The transition must be fundamentally transformative and systemic, moving beyond incremental, market-driven adjustments to address the structural roots of the ecological crisis.

Principle Two: Fair and Equitable – Based on Historical and Continuing Responsibility

1. The transition should acknowledge the Global North’s elites, corporations and governments’ share of historical and ongoing responsibility for the climate crisis, as well as the Common but Differentiated Responsibilities (CBDR) of nations. This means that the Global North must take on a much larger share of the effort, proportionate to its share of accumulated historical and continuing emissions, and a faster phase-out. Equity must be operationalized through clear targets, indicators, and accountability mechanisms to ensure differentiated responsibilities are effectively implemented. These should include the delivery of new, additional, grant-based, predictable and adequate public climate finance by Global North countries for the Global South, consistent with their obligations under Article 9.1 of the Paris Agreement, as part of their fair shares of climate actions and reparations for their climate debt.
2. The benefits of the transition should also be shared equitably. The transition must be a systemic transformation of global production, trade, and consumption patterns so that resources and essential services are distributed based on human and ecological needs rather than market power, and centered on the sovereignty and rights of those most impacted by the climate crisis, such as workers, women, trans, and non-binary peoples, fishers and farmers, migrants, Indigenous Peoples, and Afro-descendant peoples and their communities, youth, people with disabilities, rural and urban poor communities and marginalized territories and sectors.

Principle Three: Addressing Energy Poverty and the Universal Right to Gender-Just, Non-Racist, and Just and Equitable Access to Sufficient Sustainable Energy

1. At the core of the transition should be a commitment to eliminating energy poverty, ensuring that energy systems are designed to serve the collective well-being of people and the planet. Energy should be treated as a public good and as a collective right. Every community and individual has the basic right to access renewable, safe, affordable, sufficient, and reliable energy for dignified, empowering, and fulfilling lives.
2. While many governments, financial institutions, and corporations use energy poverty as an excuse to delay the phase-out of fossil fuels or to continue their expansion, the real solution to energy poverty is the rapid, equitable and just transition to renewable energy and the prioritization of decentralized, distributed community and publicly owned and managed energy systems at the core. The construction of power generation infrastructure takes less time; and the production of renewable energy sources is far less costly than that of fossil fuels. Moreover, renewable energy systems are more flexible in scale and modalities, and thus, harder-to-reach areas can be better served. With sufficient support and enabling conditions, renewable energy technologies can and should be made universally available to meet popular needs. Countries can end dependence on importing energy.
3. For renewable energy systems to be gender-just and non-racist, Indigenous Peoples, Afro-descendants, marginalized communities, vulnerable groups, and underserved populations must be involved and prioritized in renewable energy ownership, planning and implementation.

Principle Four: Efficiency, Sufficiency, Sovereignty and Responsible Use

1. The transition should be built on the pillars of efficiency, sufficiency, and responsible use, ensuring that energy and material systems are designed to minimize waste and resource extraction while upholding human rights, the rights of Indigenous Peoples, and supporting sustainable, equitable, and inclusive development.
2. A just transition cannot simply replace a fossil fuel system with another extractivist model that continues to fuel the excessive consumption of elites, corporations, data centers, and AI. Instead, it mandates a radical shift toward a new paradigm that is not just efficient use of energy and material sufficiency and responsible use, which means curbing excessive consumption – especially in the industrial and commercial sectors and among the elites – prioritizing human well-being within planetary boundaries over capital accumulation.

Principle Five: Energy Democracy and Sovereignty

1. The transition should be a profound shift toward energy democracy and sovereignty. It should recognize people’s self-determination, promote democratic ownership and control of their own energy system and their rights to make decisions in building fossil-free and renewable energy systems and in shifting from corporate-dominated models toward more democratic systems. Community and public ownership should be expanded and strengthened through deep co-programming and co-design with the communities that inhabit the territories, including Indigenous Peoples, Afro-descendants, youth, women, frontline communities and workers, and respecting local cultures, traditions, and Indigenous knowledge.
2. This principle seeks to strengthen democratic and popular participation at all levels of governance, ensuring that the transition is guided by the voices of the people rather than the influence of extractive industries. Planning, decision-making, and implementation should be rooted in continuous participation mechanisms. Energy development should not be imposed from above but should be grounded in social and grassroots realities, and protected by rigorous social, economic, and environmental safeguards. It should align transition plans with local governance and territorial development strategies.

Principle Six: Rooted in People(s)-Centered Human Rights, Justice, and Inclusion, especially of workers, women, migrants, Indigenous Peoples, Afro-descendants, Youth and marginalized sectors, communities, and territories

1. The transition and phase-out of fossil fuels should be centered on the protection of universal human rights, encompassing civil, political, cultural, economic, and social rights and including rights to clean air and water, land, food, and safe and renewable energy, while actively dismantling systems of discrimination based on gender, race, and class.
2. The transition should protect, respect, and promote the distinct, internationally and legally recognized individual and collective rights of Indigenous Peoples, including the right to free, prior, and informed consent (FPIC), and end exploitative mining and labor practices. The rights, health, and safety of workers, displaced populations, migrants, frontline and affected communities, children, future generations, and human rights defenders must also be safeguarded. Rather than simply providing a replacement source of income, the just transition must uphold the rights of workers to decent and dignified working conditions, health, education, and housing.
3. The transition must include recognition of peoplehood for Afro-descendant populations, which includes affirmation of their rights to self-determination, agency, self-organization, and self-governance, as well as unequivocally recognize the Trans Atlantic Slave Trade as a crime against humanity that is largely responsible for the affluent economies of the Global North, and include reparations for stolen bodies, land, and labor.

Principle Seven: Democratic and Sustainable Governance of Land, Water, Ocean, and Natural Resources

1. The rapid transition from fossil fuels will entail an increase in demand for land, water, ocean, and other natural resources for renewable energy systems. The transition should be committed to the equitable, inclusive, and democratic governance of the Earth’s natural heritage, including the ocean as a vital climate regulator and source of livelihoods, ensuring that the management of these resources is respecting the Earth’s vital cycles and social justice. This principle requires integrating energy transition planning with robust territorial and land-use instruments, coastal and marine spatial planning, moving away from extractive models that prioritize industrial expansion over the health of ecosystems and perpetuating harms to the planet, such as deforestation, land and water contamination, biodiversity loss, and earthquakes. This requires reclaiming the commons, decommodification of lands, forests, seas and oceans; land and agrarian reform; respect or communal rights over territories of peasants, fishers and IPs.
2. Central to the transition is participatory land-use planning that protects the livelihoods of those most connected to the earth, including farmers, fisherfolk, and Indigenous Peoples, and ensures that energy development remains in balance with resilient food systems and local community needs.
3. A vital pillar of this principle is the restoration and protection of water security, recognizing that fossil fuel extraction has historically depleted and contaminated vital water sources and the shift to renewable energy serves to regenerate hydrological systems, ensuring that water remains a preserved public commons for present and future generations
4. The transition is incomplete without transforming global agriculture and agro-industrial food systems which includes industrial animal husbandry, which are a major driver of fossil fuel dependence and greenhouse gas emissions. This transformation is also essential to reclaim vast territories for ecosystem restoration, afforestation, and rewilding – our most vital carbon sinks. By shifting toward localized, animal-free ecofarming models, we can secure food sovereignty, promote youth-oriented agricultural initiatives, and create dignified rural livelihoods.

Principle Eight: Sustainable and Equitable Management of Transition Minerals

1. This principle requires that transition minerals – across extraction, processing, trade, use, and disposal – are governed with strong transparency and accountability, guided by the highest social, environmental, labor, gender, financial, and human rights standards throughout the value chain. Grounded in ecological limits, it mandates strict protection of biodiversity-rich areas, water-stressed areas, transboundary watersheds and their tributaries, and sacred territories through clearly defined “no-go zones.”
2. It also advances a circular economy that rejects extractivist models, prioritizes sufficiency, reduces material demand, promotes re-use, repurposing and recycling of materials, and curbs overconsumption.
3. At the same time, the transition transforms international trade rules to support domestic value addition in producing countries and establishes community benefit-sharing models that recognize Indigenous sovereignty over resources. It ensures transparency and traceability, including public access to contracts and impacts, while institutionalizing inclusive participation such as youth leadership in climate governance. Investments in research and innovation aim to reduce reliance on transition minerals through alternative materials and technologies, ensuring that mineral use is ultimately directed toward a just transition from fossil fuel-based economies centered on human rights and rights of nature rather than profit.
4. Minerals should not be used for war and militarism.

Principle Nine: Ecological justice, Integrity, and Regeneration

1. A just phase-out is not about eliminating fossil fuels alone – it is about regenerative development. The transition should be grounded in ecological justice, notably rights of nature, and embedded in a broader economic transformation strategy that charts the trajectory from an extractive economy to a regenerative economy that is inclusive, resilient, and equitable. In this framework, energy access is not just a right, but a restorative act that remains in balance with the ecosystems that sustain all life.
2. To uphold this principle, the transition commits to protecting biodiversity and preventing further ecosystem degradation, while intentionally integrating restoration and regeneration measures in planning, design, implementation, and management, including through robust social, climate, environmental and where applicable transboundary impact assessments and compliance with environmental standards and safeguards. By avoiding development in high-risk or high-biodiversity areas entirely and prioritizing the preservation of these critical zones, the transition ensures that the pursuit of renewable energy does not inadvertently dismantle the very biological foundations required to sustain life on Earth. This includes preventing new offshore oil and gas development in ecologically sensitive marine areas.

Principle Ten: Mobilizing adequate and just finance and the removal of financial and fiscal barriers

1. This principle asserts that the global transition must be fully and fairly resourced. The Global North must provide reparations for climate harm, including fulfilling its obligations to provide climate finance to the Global South that is adequate, public, inclusively and autonomously governed, predictable, and non-debt-creating. Direct access without policy conditionalities by countries, communities and peoples should be provided. There should be no harmful intermediation that creates new dependencies, opacity or dispossession.
2. The transition from fossil fuels should involve removing all financial and fiscal barriers that undermine the capacity of people and countries, especially those in the Global South, to phase out fossil fuels and build renewable energy systems. It should not exacerbate inequitable financial relations and further entrench financial instability.A key problem is the macroeconomic lock-in represented by fiscal dependence on fossil fuels, which blocks energy diversification and threatens national sovereignty when combined with high levels of external debt. This dependence limits fiscal space, reinforces debt cycles, and reduces states’ capacity to finance a just energy transition. Hence, the fundamental transformation of the international financial architecture is required.
3. Central to this shift is the cancellation of unsustainable and illegitimate debts, the transformation of lending and borrowing policies and practices, the pursuit of tax and trade justice, including efforts to eliminate illicit financial flows. Public financing and subsidies for fossil fuel industries and “false solutions” should be redirected toward a rapid, equitable, and just transition.
4. It also includes transforming investment frameworks, relations, and policies to align with equity and justice. This mandates the immediate removal of systemic barriers that protect the fossil fuel industry, most notably the Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) mechanism, which allows foreign investors to sue governments over policies to curb fossil fuel production, consumption, licensing, or subsidies.
5. The energy transition requires various forms of finance – public and private, international and domestic. The private sector bears its share of responsibility for the transformation of energy systems to renewables and must finance and invest in its own renewable energy needs. The private sector including commercial and private banks, insurers, private retirement funds, asset managers, private equity firms, and venture capital are massive enablers of current fossil fuel production and usage and fossil fuel expansion. Private investments in energy systems must be regulated and directed to move away from fossil fuels toward a just transition. and ensure that they serve the collective well-being of people and the planet, while treating energy as a public good.

Principle Eleven: No False Solutions

1. A genuine transition focuses on the immediate phase-out of fossil fuels and should not be compromised by false solutions and distractions that delay and undermine the phase-out, inflict vast ecological and social harms, threaten and violate human rights, deepen structural dependency and injustices through interconnected systems of oppression, undermine food sovereignty, financialize nature, and shift attention away from the structural roots of the climate crisis and barriers to the transition.
2. Transitions that centre false solutions such as carbon trading and markets, carbon capture and storage (CCS), carbon dioxide removal (CDR), co-firing ammonia and hydrogen with fossil fuels, nuclear energy, nature-based solutions, large-scale bioenergy, “regenerative grazing,” hydropower, enhanced oil recovery, geoengineering, and nuclear energy – among others – are often shaped by corporate interests rather than public planning, labor rights, and social protection and reinforce racism, casteism, patriarchy, colonialism, and class inequality by concentrating the costs of transition on those already marginalised.
3. Transition pathways must instead centre Indigenous Peoples, afro-descendants, farmers, peasants, fisherfolk, workers, youth, women and gender diverse peoples, and frontline communities, ensuring land rights, labour protections, participation, and self-determination.

Principle Twelve: Sovereignty, Peace, And Global Justice

1. Wars of aggression, occupation, and militarization are not only humanitarian and political crises; they are also major drivers of the climate emergency that also stand as profound barriers to the rapid and equitable phase-out of fossil fuels. Although modern warfare is intensely fossil fuel-dependent at every stage, consuming vast quantities of oil and gas, generating enormous greenhouse gas emissions, military emissions are often underreported, exempted, or hidden from climate accounting frameworks. Wars also trigger fires, toxic releases, destruction of ecosystems, and damage to energy and water systems, further compounding environmental harm. In this sense, militarism is not peripheral to the climate crisis – it is deeply embedded in the fossil-fuel economy that is driving planetary breakdown. Military institutions are structurally incompatible with meaningful decarbonisation, and the concept of “sustainable warfare” is inherently contradictory.
2. Militarism diverts a massive amount of public resources – $2.7-trillion (USD) in 2024 and increasing every year for the last decade – away from renewable energy, public transport, climate adaptation, health, housing, and social protection, and redirects them into military budgets and arms industries. Governments facing insecurity often double down on domestic fossil fuel extraction, strategic reserves, and new oil and gas deals in the name of “energy security,” locking in carbon-intensive infrastructure for decades. Conflict zones make long-term planning, democratic participation, and just transition policies far more difficult to implement. Militarized competition among states also undermines the international cooperation, technology sharing, finance transfers, and trust that are essential for a fair global energy transition.
3. A world committed to a rapid, equitable phase-out of fossil fuels must therefore also be committed to peace, demilitarization, national sovereignty and self-determination, reparative justice, and the redirection of resources from war-making toward life-sustaining systems powered by renewable energy. Phasing out fossil fuels will remove a driver of war, conflict, and repression at a time of growing geopolitical tension and conflict.

Principle Thirteen: Reparative and Transformative Justice

1. This principle requires the transition to dismantle historical and ongoing structures and relations of inequality, exploitation, injustices, domination, and discrimination (in all dimensions – class, gender, race, caste, and others – ensure restorative justice and provide reparations for peoples, communities, and nations.
2. It must address the structural harms caused by the Global North’s fossil fuel extraction and use at the expense of the Global South, while centering Global South leadership, knowledge, and lived experience. It also requires full recognition of all peoples’ individual and collective rights so that the transition does not repeat past dispossession, central to the foundation of many Global North economies, but advances decolonization and self-determination. This includes ending colonial energy dispossession, which involves resource extraction in occupied territories, denial of renewable energy development, and the use of energy dependency for collective punishment.
3. Global North governments must recognize climate debt and historical responsibility through restitution, compensation, guarantees of non-repetition, decolonization, the transfer of resource rights to dispossessed and displaced peoples, the decommissioning of colonial energy infrastructure, and dedicated finance for renewable transitions under occupation. Reparative action must be central to building a just and equitable future.

Principle Fourteen: International Solidarity and Cooperation

1. The climate crisis is global and cannot be solved merely through unilateral national action. All peoples share a common stake in a livable planet, but responsibilities differ. A rapid, equitable, and just transition requires countries to act in accordance with their differentiated responsibilities and capacities. The Global North, whose wealth was built on centuries of colonization, imperialism, and subsequent fossil fuel use, must rapidly phase out fossil fuels at home and deliver the rest of its fair share through climate finance for mitigation, adaptation, loss and damage, and just transitions in the Global South. This finance is an obligation, not aid.
2. International cooperation must include large-scale public finance, technology sharing, capacity building, and policy support to help the Global South leapfrog fossil-fuel dependence and build renewable systems that expand access and reduce inequality. It also requires transforming global financial trade rules that trap countries in debt, austerity, and fossil dependence. The ICJ’s Advisory Opinion from July 2025 confirmed that states have a legal obligation for climate action, including the duty to cooperate and the obligation to regulate private actors. Cooperation should strengthen public institutions, community-led energy systems, resilient grids, and just transition plans that protect workers and communities. States must support a viable pathway toward future negotiation of a Fossil Fuel Treaty – a binding international agreement that enables States to meet their existing legal obligations to phase out fossil fuels.
3. This principle also calls for peace, democratic multilateralism, and people-centered partnerships over geopolitical rivalry. Renewable energy supply chains, critical minerals, technology, and climate finance must be governed by fairness, labor rights, ecological safeguards, and respect for sovereignty. It means rejecting green colonialism, corporate capture, and polluter influence in decision-making, while protecting environmental and human rights defenders and civic space. A just transition depends on cooperation that shares resources, knowledge, and power so all countries and communities can participate.

Principle Fifteen: System Change

1. The climate crisis transcends the question of what type of energy is produced and consumed; it is also a question of how energy and related resources are extracted and utilized, and how economies are structured and governed. A rapid, equitable, and just transition away from fossil fuels covers energy and other fossil fuel dependent sectors such as petrochemicals and industrial food systems, particularly fertilizers. It requires dismantling the systemic and institutional drivers of fossil fuel extraction production and consumption and the barriers to the shift toward sovereign, decentralized, sustainable and democratic systems of renewable energy, food, agriculture and industries. It demands dismantling of corporate power and impunity, including their hold over politics.
2. Solutions to the climate crisis require more than incremental change. We must ensure that the solutions we implement do not inadvertently perpetuate existing inequalities and rights violations, engender new forms of green extraction, or shift the burden of transition onto the world’s most vulnerable communities. Solutions must be people-centered and restore agency to the marginalized.
3. Climate action is inextricably linked to broader goals of equity, justice, liberation and development. We need a comprehensive restructuring of the entire economic, political, and social system. The rapid, equitable, and just transition away from fossil fuel-based economies that is grounded in the reality of planetary boundaries should serve as the catalyst for and a core part of system-wide change. It should acknowledge and overcome fundamental inequalities and exploitative relations across countries and within countries, and of class, gender, race and, caste. It should offer a definitive opportunity to challenge the status quo, dismantle the systems of oppression and dispossession. We need to build new systems and relationships that are not capitalist, patriarchal, racist, extractivist, supremacist and hegemonic.

IV. Our Demands

A. Complete Equitable and Just Phase-Out of Fossil Fuels aligned with meeting the goal of keeping warming below 1.5°C and reach global REAL ZERO Emissions by 2050

1. Immediate stop to the expansion of the fossil fuel industry (exploration, extraction, production, distribution). This means
   • No new coal, gas, or oil projects
   • No public and private financing of fossil fuel industries and other harmful industries; Redirect finance toward renewable energy systems with priority to decentralized and community-based energy, and developing sustainable industries and economic diversification
2. Immediate halt to fossil fuel extraction in territories and countries under colonial occupation. Cease fossil fuel transfers that materially sustain genocide, war crimes, illegal occupation, or other grave violations of international humanitarian law.
3. Commitment, adoption and implementation by all governments (including sub-national governments) of global and national roadmaps with clear and measurable targets, trajectories and timelines for rapid, equitable, and just fossil fuel phase-out and emissions reductions including methane, aligned with the goal of keeping warming below 1.5°C and reaching global zero emissions by 2050.
   • For the Global North
     • Complete Coal Phase-Out before or by 2030
     • Phase out of Gas and Oil extraction by the early 2030s
     • Phase out to Gas in the power sector by early 2030
     • End Oil and Gas consumption before or by 2040
     • Fulfill their obligations to provide climate finance (as part of their fair shares of climate action) for the Global South
   • For the Global South
     • Complete Coal Phase-Out before or by 2035
     • Complete Gas Phase-out before or by 2040
     • Complete Phase-out of Oil before or by 2050
4. The roadmaps should cover energy and all industries, including aviation, shipping, industrial food systems, petrochemicals, and land-use sectors that are structurally dependent on fossil fuels. Roadmaps should include peak use years and decline rates, reallocation of public financing and subsidies, delivery of climate finance, corresponding targets for the building of renewable energy systems to replace fossil fuels and ensure universal access, just transition mechanisms and plans, removal of financial and economic barriers, tackling fossil fuel overconsumption by Global North countries and all elites and corporations.
5. The fossil fuel phase-out roadmaps and plans must be integrated into existing climate policy frameworks, including NDCs, to avoid fragmented and non-implementable approaches.
6. Adoption and implementation of policies and mechanisms for the strong and active participation of communities, Indigenous Peoples, Afrodescendants, workers, farmers and fishers, women, youth, and other sectors in the planning and implementation of fossil fuel phase-out.
7. Adopt and implement policies and mechanisms to guarantee the internationally recognized collective rights of Indigenous Peoples to self-determination and free, prior, and informed consent, in accordance with the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, and in accordance with paragraph 12(i) of the Work Program on Just Transition adopted at COP30, including the rights of Indigenous Peoples in Voluntary Isolation and Initial Contact.
8. Ensure that fossil fuel phase-out involves immediate provision of alternative sustainable jobs and livelihoods for workers and communities affected by the phase-out, with targeted measures to offer equal employment opportunities to all, regardless of gender; guarantee decent, dignified, fairly paid, unionized work and livelihoods with adequate incomes to support quality of life for families and communities; and provide retraining and reskilling programs
9. Ensure governments and corporations fulfill their obligations in providing social protection, compensation packages, pension support, re-skilling and retraining, repair, ecological restoration and rehabilitation.
10. Ensure that fossil fuel companies cover the huge costs linked to asset retirement and decommissioning obligations (ARO), and deliver effective ecological restoration in areas ravaged by coal, oil, and gas extraction, transportation, processing, power production and distribution Restoration and rehabilitation processes must be done with the leadership and participation of Indigenous Peoples and local communities.
11. Governments must ensure protection and resilience of critical ecosystems.
12. Global North to do its Fair Share. This includes, but is not limited to: delivering on their climate finance obligations to the Global South – trillions, not billions – sourced equitably within the Global North – for mitigation, adaptation, loss and damage and just transition. Part of this will be needed for the fossil fuel phase out in the South; Climate finance must be adequate, predictable, public, and non-debt creating; Climate Finance obligations are legal (UNFCCC Article 4 Paris Agreement Article 9.1) and part of the ethical and historic responsibility to provide reparations based on responsibility for past and continuing harms.

    Access to Climate Finance should not be accompanied by policy conditionalities. Direct community access must be provided as one of the mechanisms.

13. Global North governments must have political will to provide for climate finance. direct community access
14. Pursue the transformation and strengthening of domestic economies – including economic diversification, expansion and strengthening of sustainable and vital industries and agriculture, shifting away from prioritizing cheap exports and giving primacy to production for domestic needs, moving away from extractive models that prioritize industrial expansion over the health of ecosystems – as vital requirements to providing alternative jobs and livelihoods, moving away from dependence on fossil fuel industries for public revenues, building resilient, sustainable and fossil free economies
15. Stop criminalization of defenders of human rights and the environment; Make accountable and prosecute all those guilty of human rights violations, end impunity, ensure strong and binding international regulation of corporations and state actors, and guarantee protection, safety, and enabling conditions for defenders and affected communities.
16. Stop false Solutions in the fossil fuel phase-out process
    • Immediate end to public and private promotion and financing of false solutions
    • End promotion and build up of abatement technologies that delay the fossil fuel phase out. No to CCUS, BECCS,
    • No to ammonia and hydrogen co-firing of fossil fuel projects
    • No to offsets and carbon trading
    • Direct shift from fossil fuels to renewables – no to gas as transition fuel

B. Rapid, Direct, Equitable, and Just Transition to 100% Renewable Energy; Ensure Equitable and Universal Access to Renewable Energy

1. Rapid ethical people-centred, gender-just, rights-based and participative expansion of renewable energy, especially solar and wind, not only to provide for new demands but also to replace fossil fuels and address energy poverty; to be accompanied by adoption and strong enforcement of policies and mechanisms for implementation of robust social, economic, financial/fiscal, gender, environmental, safety and accountability standard, safeguards, regulations
2. Ensure universal access to sufficient, affordable, and reliable energy, which includes adopting policies that recognize, address, and redress structural and social barriers to access by women, youth, people of color, Afrodescendants, Indigenous Peoples, workers, farmers and fishers, low-income and disadvantaged groups, urban and rural poor communities,
3. Prioritize the expansion of community and publicly owned, democratically managed, decentralized, and distributed renewable energy systems that give primacy to people and the environment above profit generation; Ensure the equitable sharing of the benefits of renewable energy
4. Adoption and implementation of policies and mechanisms which ensure strong, active and meaningful participation of communities, Indigenous Peoples, Afrodescendants, workers, women, fishers and farmers, youth, in the planning, implementation and management of renewable energy systems, and acknowledges, respects, and protects the knowledge, identities, and rights of local communities.
5. Institutionalize regionally differentiated and participatory just transition planning processes that are grounded in local contexts and socio-economic conditions, ensuring that affected workers and communities play a central role in shaping transition pathways, priorities, and development trajectories.
6. Ensure the respect and protection of human rights in the scale up and establishment of renewable energy systems including the free, prior, and informed consent (FPIC) for Indigenous Peoples, Afrodescendants, and affected communities
7. Adopt land and natural resource policies that
   • Proactively address and resolve possible conflict and competition of land and resource use between renewable energy, staple food production, habitat, and other basic needs toward ensuring that all rights and needs are met
   • Restore and respect territorial rights, inherent sovereignty, and self-determination of Indigenous Peoples, Afrodescendants, peoples and countries
   • Protect integrity of ecological systems, biodiversity-sensitive areas, water-stressed regions and sacred territories
   • End extractivist relations and operations, ecological plunder, human rights violations and labor exploitation
   • Promote re-use, re-purposing and materials recycling programs including minerals, that reduce the need for extracting transition minerals
8. Global North to fulfill climate finance obligations to the Global South including fully funding the Green Climate Fund, the Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage (FRLD), the Adaptation Fund, and Just Transition Programs which are needed for the building of renewable energy systems in the South.
9. Mobilize finance and investment in grids, storage, and distributed systems, with the public sector in the lead, and not leaving it primarily to market actors; Promote technology sharing and knowledge exchange
10. Under the path of socioecological transformation, electrify sectors, especially transport, buildings, and industry to ensure replacement of fossil fuel utilization by these sectors. Electrification needs to be done systematically in an organized manner so that vulnerable populations do not get left out of electrification.
11. Adopt policies to ensure that corporations play a central role in providing for their own renewable energy needs in private commercial and industrial areas
12. Adopt and enforce policies to stop excessive and wasteful energy use especially by elites, corporations and governments; Promote and enforce policies on Energy Efficiency and Sufficiency; Design renewable energy systems that minimize waste and resource extraction while meeting the needs of all
13. Stop promotion of false “clean energy” solutions in the in the shift to renewable energy, including
    • Nuclear
    • Waste incineration or project related to waste to energy, refused derived fuel and pyrolysis
    • Industrial-level production of agro and bio-fuels, palm-oil, forest-based energy, woody biofuels and others derived from monoculture which undermine food sovereignty and production of staple food, damage ecosystems, and result in other social and environmental harm;
    • Dams and hydro power and geothermal power which destroy the environment and displace communities
    • Renewable energy projects which unnecessarily and without procedural, restorative and distributive justice destroy the environment, biodiversity and have negative impacts on Indigenous Peoples and communities including displacement from land, loss of livelihoods and loss of cultural practices.

C. End Barriers to the Transition and Pursue Solutions

• Financial Barriers and Solutions
  • End supply-driven lending and loan conditionalities; End debt burdens that undermine the Global South’s capacity for public spending on essential services and climate action
    • Cancel unsustainable and illegitimate debts, starting with debts from fossil fuel development;
    • Transform lending and borrowing policies that perpetuate debt injustices
    • Establish UN Framework Convention on Sovereign Debt to ensure democratic, equitable, transparent and accountable global mechanism to address unsustainable and illegitimate debt
  • Global and National Tax Justice to end corporate and elite tax abuses, illicit financial flows, incentives and bias for the fossil fuel industries; and to ensure mobilization of Global North public resources and increase Global South’s capacity for public financing for essential services and climate action including the just energy transition
    • Adopt progressive tax policies to fund the transition, including:
      • Wealth taxes
      • Windfall profit taxes
      • Higher corporate tax rates especially for multinational corporations
      • Ending producer fossil fuel subsidies
      • Polluter Pays taxes including the Climate Damages Tax and surtax on fossil fuel industries’ profits
    • End tax avoidance and illicit financial flows, including:
      • use of tax havens
      • profit shifting by multinational corporations
  • Advance global tax justice through UN Framework Convention on Tax Cooperation and the international and fair allocation of taxing rights to Global South countries
  • Shift public spending away from militarism, military operations, arms, wars and acts of aggression – activities that are in violation of human rights and international law, intergenerational justice, sovereignty and self-determination of peoples and nations, result in massive loss of lives and vital infrastructures, and drive some of the highest levels of fossil fuel consumption and greenhouse gas emissions through weapons production, military logistics, and war itself.
  • Transform the international financial architecture; Overhaul or replace inequitable global financial institutions (e.g. IMF, WB) that promote neoliberal policies, perpetuate economic and financial exploitation, deepen debt bondage of the Global South, and promote false climate solutions
• Trade and Investment Barriers and Solutions
  • Countries should officially commit to cancel Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) agreements and mechanisms; Exclude ISDS from future agreements; Create a coalition of states committed to working toward collective withdrawal from ISDS as an ISDS-free alliance; Stop granting any exceptional rights to foreign investors in contracts that contains arbitration clauses superior to national law, and to stop enforcing and executing ISDS awards in favor of fossil fuels.
  • Transform or suspend global trade rules to explicitly protect countries’ policy space to pursue green industrial development and economic diversification (via export restrictions, domestic processing and local content requirements, subsidies etc.)
  • Treat climate technologies as global public goods by reforming intellectual property trade rules to enable technology transfer, including through public ownership of the IP that results from publicly funded research and development.
  • Ensure international agreements provisions on the trade of and investment in transition minerals – from extraction and processing to trade, use, and disposal – for the adoption and enforcement of the highest environmental, labour, and human rights standards across the entire value chain, and add value and local benefit in “transition mineral” sectors.
  • Transform and reform WTO agreements and rules toward more equitable, mutually beneficial arrangements, including:
    • precluding parties from challenging each other’s climate policies,
    • ensuring transparency and public access to contracts, information on beneficiaries, and impacts across global value chains;
    • ensuring accountability through mandatory supply-chain transparency and strict compliance with International Humanitarian Law
• Adoption and replication of binding international instruments with climate targets currently under negotiation outside the UNFCCC, such as the amendment to Annex VI of MARPOL to decarbonize international shipping.

  This framework is the first of its kind in seeking to decarbonize an entire global economic sector, and includes mechanisms to reduce the power of the fossil fuel industry and discourage LNG (on both the supply and demand sides), as well as just and equitable transition mechanisms to address North–South inequalities and vulnerabilities.

• Radical Reform of UNFCCC COP Structures and Processes and related Institutions through:
  • Adoption and enforcement of accountability policies and framework including UNFCCC conflict of interest (COI) definition and policy
  • Full transparency and public disclosure for all COP participants covering affiliations, funding sources, and requirement to disclose agreement with Paris Agreement goals
  • Integrity standards for COP Presidencies – Establishing and implementing lobbying registries for COP Presidencies and setting up and oversight body overseeing the implementation of these integrity standards
  • Prohibition of fossil fuel, Big Tech, and Geoengineering sponsorships, partnerships and consultancies
  • Ensure that Climate finance funds should not flow to entities complicit in occupation, settlement expansion, or resource extraction from occupied territories
  • Strengthened climate transparency systems, including open data and tracking of finance, emissions, and implementation
  • Exclude fossil fuel lobbyists and other industry delegates from polluting sectors from the UNFCCC-processes, TAFF conference and subsequent conferences on a just phase-out of fossil fuels.
• Operationalize and Enforce International Court of Justice Advisory Opinion on States’ legal obligations to address the drivers of climate change, including fossil fuel production, use, licensing and subsidies, and to cooperate in good faith toward that end. Operationalize and enforce the legal obligations of both states and corporations under international law, global climate agreements, and international human rights.

  Law, such as the ICJ Advisory Opinion and the IACtHR Advisory Opinion, as well as all other relevant international, domestic and subnational relevant case-law on the matter.

• Adopt an International Treaty on Fossil Fuels to create a legally binding framework addressing all major drivers of emissions, including fossil fuel use across food systems and land-use sectors, and focused on stopping expansion, managing a fair phase-out, and ensuring a just transition.
• End Corporate Impunity, Immunity and Capture of economies, states and global governance structures and processes, this includes adopting a binding Treaty on Transnational Corporations.
• Create new legal institutions to protect all living beings, to ensure fulfillment of obligations for reparations and ecological restoration.

Change Narratives, Paradigms, and Culture

• Move away from the culture of consumerism
• Build values and cultures of solidarity, justice, ecological stewardship, respect and defense of biodiversity and bioreproductive spaces, communities of life, health, and dignity
• Create international news agencies that address ecological conversion and combat the hegemony of lobbies in communications; Ban fossil fuel advertising
• Develop training programs for workers to: explain that conversion guarantees high-intensity, safe, and dignified work; demonstrate how the relationship between the right to work and the right to health is possible with conversion and contradicts the fossil fuel model.
• Restructure educational programs in schools to build a culture of ecological awareness and justice and banning fossil fuel sponsorships.
• Maintain healthy information ecosystems unpolluted by disinformation. This necessitates holding news media at a high standard so that climate change is sufficiently covered and false narratives are not spread and legitimized.

D. Achieve A Comprehensive Just Transition

• End authoritarian rule, political repression, imperialism, militarization, and corruption and establish democratic and accountable governments.
• End Wars of aggression and the geopolitics of destruction, conquest and occupation by US, Israel and other aggressors; End colonial occupation and post-colonial economic and political domination; Full recognition and respect for the self-determination and sovereignty of peoples and nations; Pursuit of International solidarity and cooperation.
• Immediate ceasefires and peaceful resolution of conflicts based on justice, including in Palestine, Lebanon, broader Southwest Asia and North Africa, Sudan, Ukraine and others.
• Dismantle systems of discrimination and oppression based on class, race, caste, gender, sexual identity and choice, religion, and beliefs;
• Uphold universal human rights, including the rights to clean air and water, land, food, and safe and renewable energy; Safeguard the civil, political, cultural, economic, and social rights of all people, while actively dismantling systems of discrimination based on gender, race, and class; Protect, respect, and promote the rights of Indigenous Peoples, workers, farmers and fishers, women, LGBQTI+, displaced populations, migrants, frontline and affected communities, children, and human rights defenders;
• Recognize the Trans Atlantic Slave Trade as a crime against humanity that is largely responsible for the affluent economies of the Global North, and include reparations and repair for stolen bodies, land, and labor of Afro-descendant peoples.
• Pursue care-centred transition policies that deliver transformative solutions to recognize, revalue and equitably redistribute care work – ending the gendered division of labor, guaranteeing universal quality services for health, education and care and placing social protections and community wellbeing at the heart of regenerative economies – to advance gender equality and women’s rights in every dimension of the transition.
• Protect biodiversity; prevent ecosystem degradation; integrate ecological restoration into the heart of all development.
• Build equitable, regenerative, resilient and circular economies that include:
  • Ending extractivism
  • Democratizing and socializing control and management of economic resources and pursuing redistribution; Reclaiming the commons
  • Strengthening localized, sustainable and biodiverse staple food production and distribution, expanding agroecology and ending export oriented agro-industries, prioritizing food sovereignty and transitioning away from fossil-fuel-dependent industrial animal agriculture, including the phase-out of associated subsidies and inputs
  • Expanding and decorporatizing public services (health, education, water, housing, transport, access to affordable and sufficient electricity and energy)
  • prioritizing sufficiency and the reduction of material demand by addressing excessive consumption by elites, corporations and governments
  • scaling climate adaptation and resilience programs
  • freeing land from industrial livestock production to enable large-scale ecosystem restoration and rewilding
  • implementing territorially differentiated just transition – across countries and within countries – reflecting national and local socio-economic and environmental conditions and common but differentiated responsibilities (CBDR). This requires the institutionalisation of place-based, bottom-up planning processes at subnational and regional levels. These processes should center affected workers and communities in articulating transition pathways and priorities, ensuring that strategies reflect diverse socio-economic realities within and across regions rather than relying on one-size-fits-all approaches.
• Provide reparations for historical and continuing harms inflicted on communities, people, and ecosystems.

V. Conclusion

The ever-growing threats to humanity of the geopolitics of destruction, impoverishment, inequality and climate collapse underscore with greater urgency the need to rapidly and equitably transition away from fossil fuels and the broader system of fossil-fuel-dependent energy, food, and material production. Never before has the path to a sustainable future been laid out more clearly – true security of communities and peoples lies in the fast, fair, publicly funded, and feminist shift to 100% renewable energy systems, specifically rejecting false solutions like carbon capture and fossil gas.

This is a historical challenge that requires a fundamental and comprehensive rethinking of the status quo that a handful of North governments, corporations and elites today desperately seek to maintain at the expense of the Global South. These are structures and systems created and driven by profit and greed, characterized by the relentless dispossession and exploitation of working peoples and the unhampered pillaging and plunder of nature in the name of consumption-fueled, neoliberal growth.

The ICJ Advisory Opinion affirms that existing international law – including treaty law, customary international law, and human rights law – imposes binding obligations on States to address the climate crisis. These include exercise due diligence in regulating emissions and preventing harm. These obligations are not aspirational, they are enforceable. Every year of delays deepens injustice and magnifies the suffering of those least responsible for the crisis.

Fossil fuels and the systems they sustain, including industrial food systems, petrochemicals, and extractive land use, are the engines driving these structures, under which peoples and the planet face a dark and bleak future of escalating chaos. We will not allow their continued domination to define generations to come.

The longer the hesitation of shifting to renewables, the closer we are pushed into such a future. Crises in multiple fronts are already upon us, and the tipping point is terrifyingly close. Every year of continued reliance on coal, oil, and gas moves us closer to the brink of climate and socio-economic collapse, with the harshest impacts inflicted on the dispossessed, impoverished and discriminated.

We must therefore will the present and future we want through our power as movements, mobilizing people in their millions to demand the changes needed to build just and sustainable societies and economies. Transitioning to renewable energy sources must happen at a pace that matches the scale of the crisis, requiring decisive action. Hesitation is costly economically, and deadly for people and the planet.

The First Conference on Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels is already taking an important step in this direction, committing to initiate “a concrete process through which a coalition of committed countries, subnational governments, and relevant stakeholders can…implement a progressive transition away from fossil fuels creating sustainable societies and economies.”

But we must also ensure that we go beyond inspiration, pronouncements of intent and lofty aspirations. Let the Santa Marta Conference be a defining point for decisive action!

The hour is upon us to expose the blockers and deniers and their false solutions, from carbon capture and carbon offsets to “clean” coal and natural gas as a transition fuel. The time is nigh for bold and concrete action to dismantle the central cogs of the machinery – fossil fuels – which run the very structures and systems that brought us in the first place to this point of planetary emergency. The moment is NOW for a real advance in phasing out fossil fuels and embarking on a just and equitable transition to renewable energy systems.

This requires no less than deep and far-reaching system change. Forged in struggle, our movements must stay the course and advance the bigger and strategic fight for the systemic transformation of societies, economies and political systems – at all levels – global, regional, national and local. This is the path toward true climate justice and the liberation of all peoples from dispossession, exploitation, discrimination, ecological devastation and the inequities and human rights violations that oppress us all. •

I noted there that “the voices we hear today from parts of the left are tragically reactionary. Siding with religious fundamentalists on the wrong assumptions that they are anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist is aligning with the most reactionary forces in history. This is a reactionary left, different from the progressive left, which has always been on the side of the forces of progress.”

“Which Side Are You On?”

Now, seventeen years later – following the December/January massacre of tens of thousands of demonstrators across Iranian cities by the Islamic regime, and the joint US/Israeli military attack on Iran – we are witnessing the same responses. I will not address the “leftist axis of resistance” within Iran here – those who, oblivious to their own historical errors and those of the former socialist camp, continue to repeat lines from nearly half a century ago that dealt the greatest blow to the credibility of the Iranian left. The position of right-wing and non-left analysts who openly defend the US and Israeli stance and blame all problems on the Islamic regime is equally clear. For instance, Jack Cunningham, writing in an article titled “Is War with Iran ‘Legal’? And How Much Does It Matter?” in Open Canada, argues that “Iran has been effectively waging aggressive war with both the US and Israel at least since the mid-1980s, and their actions, including the current attacks on Iranian targets, are best understood as acts of self-defense, not aggression.”

In an earlier article on the same site, he had declared that “Iran has been the greatest threat to Israel and the most disruptive regional actor in the Middle East.” Regardless of how familiar such analysts are with Middle Eastern and Iranian affairs – or whether they know but conceal it – this reflects the binary worldview prevailing in the West: that America and Israel are champions of peace and democracy fighting warmongering elements in the region. Right-wing currents among the Iranian diaspora, especially the monarchist circles around Reza Pahlavi – with their extensive media networks built with foreign support and their skillful exploitation of Iran’s cultural, political, economic, and environmental disarray under clerical rule – advance exactly these positions.

We witness a similar one-sided view in the camp of critics of US policy: it is solely American imperialism and global Zionism that are responsible, and the Islamic Republic is being attacked without cause. Here we have, on one hand, staunch supporters of the Islamic Republic’s positions, figures like Trita Parsi. The internet is also full of interviews and analyses by prominent figures such as John Mearsheimer, who – despite his extensive knowledge and rightly addressing imperialist aggression – makes not the slightest mention of the Islamic Republic’s destructive policies. The same is true of numerous talks by Ben Norton, Jeffrey Sachs, and others.

The focus here is on the socialist left, which also addresses only one side of the conflict – American imperialism. Gary Wilson, in the article “Iran Today, China Tomorrow: The Strategy Behind the War” in Monthly Review Online, correctly describes the war with Iran as “…the outcome of global class war – the drive of monopoly capital to maintain control over the world’s resources, markets, and labour at any cost,” and addresses various issues including the killing of schoolgirls in Minab, the confrontation between low-tech resistance and high-tech military force, and the role of finance capital in the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. Yet he makes not the slightest mention of the Islamic Republic’s role and destructive policies. Part of the article addresses the damage this war has inflicted on the working class across different continents. Still, there is no mention of the misery of Iranian workers – including the majority of oil and petrochemical workers who, due to Islamic Republic policies, worked without any security in contractor companies and, with the outbreak of war, lost even those precarious, unstable jobs. Around a hundred thousand workers at various tiers of oil contracting companies – companies created and sold to the cronies of the regime, subject to no oversight – have been left without protection. The National Iranian Oil Company has outsourced most of its operations to these companies to avoid responsibility for workers’ conditions. The regime even invented the term “third-pillar workers” to make clear it bears no responsibility for these workers’ conditions.

Wilson concludes his article: “The war was planned. The suffering was predictable. Which side are you on?” The real question, however, is this: if we rightly condemn American imperialism (and, of course, the Israeli right-wing coalition’s aggression), must we therefore stand on the side of the obscurantist fundamentalists ruling Iran?

An example of more direct left support for the Islamic Republic is Radhika Desai of Geopolitical Economy’s interview with Dimitri Lascaris, a journalist with the Reason2Resist channel. Returning from a ten-day trip to Iran, Lascaris claims that of approximately a hundred people he interviewed in various Iranian cities, he “…didn’t find a single person criticizing the government,” and that he was deeply impressed by the “near unanimity” of anti-war sentiment and support for the regime. Regarding war damage, he says that, contrary to Western propaganda claiming the war caused widespread destruction, he saw very little ruin. In a situation where not only independent foreign journalists but even non-regime-affiliated domestic journalists cannot report freely from Iran – and where many young people have been arrested, tortured, and in some cases, executed merely for forwarding a photograph on social media – Lascaris may have not realized he was conducting his reporting on a regime-guided tour. He needed only to have glanced at Iranian news and asked himself: why, just before the war, did the regime gun down tens of thousands of Iranians in the streets of various cities? Why are there so many political prisoners, including prominent women such as Narges Mohammadi, Nobel Peace Prize laureate, and Nasrin Sotoudeh, and many others, still behind bars? Why, according to the UN Human Rights Office, has the Islamic regime already executed 21 people and arrested more than four thousand during this very war?

As for not seeing much destruction, did his guides take him to Mobarakeh Steel in Isfahan, the largest steel plant in the Middle East, where around 20,000 workers are directly employed and around 100,000 indirectly through supply and value chains, which Israel forced into shutdown through repeated attacks? Did he visit the massive chemical and petrochemical plants bombed by Israel? Did he see the results of the bombardment of the Pasteur Institute, one of the oldest and globally recognized pharmaceutical research institutions? Instead of confronting these realities, he concludes that the war produced results for Iran that were the opposite of what the US and Israel expected, and actually elevated Iran’s standing in the world. Desai also conducts an interview with Mohammad Marandi, a staunch pro-regime academic and effectively a regime spokesperson, on “Iran’s Historical Role in the Decline of Imperialism,” which requires no further comment.

Most important of all, however, is Yanis Varoufakis – the prominent theorist and founder of Greece’s radical socialist party SYRIZA and the European Realistic Disobedience Front, and author of the influential book Techno-feudalism: What Killed Capitalism – who announced on his X account that he and another leader of the party had visited the Iranian embassy in Greece. This news came as a great surprise to Iranian leftists who respect Varoufakis and whose works have been widely translated into Persian. In this post, Varoufakis states, among other things, that “We are here because of the 180 girls whom the United States and Israel killed in Minab. We are here because the US president has declared a cultural war against one of the oldest civilizations of humanity.” By doing so, Varoufakis – regardless of his stated opposition to a theocratic system – has, unfortunately, taken the side of the Islamic Republic. Expressing solidarity with the crime of killing innocent girls by imperialist and Zionist forces is certainly a worthy act. But when the government that this ambassador represents gunned down protesters in the streets of Iranian cities, did Varoufakis protest at the Iranian embassy?

It is also true that Trump made those absurd remarks about Iranian civilization – but is the Islamic Republic really the representative of “one of humanity’s oldest civilizations”? The truth is that through its reactionary and destructive policies, this regime has been one of the greatest enemies of that very civilization. I am aware of the polemical nature of the title I have chosen for this piece, and perhaps it is unfair to Yanis Varoufakis, for whom I have genuine respect. But what he did was also unfair to the left and to Iran’s progressive forces.

Background to the Three-Sided War

In contrast to these one-sided approaches and the tendency to take sides in this terrible war – which has set back and continues to set back Iran, the region, and the world – one must attend to its roots and to the role of each of the main actors. This war has three interrelated dimensions, and without entering into historical detail, a brief overview is in order.

With the Iranian Revolution of February 1979, the US and Israel lost their most important regional ally: Iran. Although the Shah of Iran lacked the nerve to maintain a formal ambassadorial relationship with Israel, Israel’s unofficial “embassy without a nameplate” in Iran was highly active; the Mossad and CIA were the primary supporters of the regime’s apparatus of repression, and Iran was the largest purchaser of military equipment from both countries. Even when the Shah tried to create some distance in this dependent relationship – as when he attacked the Israeli lobby in America in a 1976 interview with Mike Wallace – he had no choice but to submit to those who had restored him to power through the 1953 CIA coup against Mossadegh’s democratically elected government.

Washington’s primary focus in the Middle East during the Cold War was directed against the Soviet Union and left-wing movements, and toward strengthening Islamist currents and creating a “Green Belt.” SAVAK, the Shah’s brutal security apparatus, with help from the Mossad and CIA, was mainly focused on leftist and nationalist progressive movements and paid little attention to the growth of Islamism. The 1979 Revolution and the subsequent hostage-taking at the US Embassy occurred in this anti-American/Israeli atmosphere. Khomeini, in line with his reactionary beliefs and the hope of bringing the Palestinian movement under control, raised the slogan of Israel’s destruction from the very beginning.

Then, during the Iran-Iraq War, the United States – especially after Ronald Reagan came to power – provided extensive financial, technical, intelligence, and military support to Saddam’s regime. Israel, however, which at that time feared the Arabs more, secretly provided Iran with arms and intelligence in various ways during this war. American sources have estimated Israel’s arms sales to Iran during the 1980s at close to two billion dollars per year, part of which was paid through the delivery of Iranian oil to Israel.

Then, in 1982, when Israel had occupied southern Lebanon, the Iranian regime established Hezbollah in Lebanon with the help of part of the Shia population there. In 1983, Iranian regime agents in Lebanon bombed the US Marines headquarters in retaliation for American support of Iraq, killing more than 240 Americans and wounding over a hundred. During the Lebanese civil war, especially after 1982, the Islamic Republic, through its agents, carried out numerous hostage-takings – primarily of Americans – which led to arms-for-hostages exchanges and the notorious Iran-Contra affair.

Over the years, Iran was subjected to the most severe economic sanctions. The Islamic Republic, in pursuit of its ideological and expansionist goals and the dream of leading the Shia and Islamic world, adopted a three-pronged strategy: building proxy forces in the region, developing missile capability, and pursuing nuclear capacity. It simultaneously continued its anti-Israeli and anti-American rhetoric and its financial and military support to its proxies.

Saddam’s folly in invading Kuwait in 1991, and more importantly, the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, strengthened the Islamic Republic’s regional position. Later, the JCPOA agreement in 2015, while severely limiting Iranian nuclear program, placed vast financial resources at the regime’s disposal, and the Islamic Republic continued its adventurist regional policies.

Israel, throughout this process, greatly benefited from the Islamic Republic’s adventurism. The Israeli right, to advance Zionist policies – which can be summarized in two main objectives: territorial expansion and population displacement – has always claimed to be faced with existential danger. After neutralizing neighboring Arab states – Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon – the Islamic Republic of Iran and its affiliated proxies provided the best pretext for advancing Israel’s right-wing policies while simultaneously striking at the Palestinian movement.

A very important turning point was Hamas’s brutal attack on Israel on October 7, 2023. Although it was a blind radical reaction to 75 years of displacement, 56 years of occupation, and 17 years of complete land and sea blockade, it provided the greatest opportunity to Israel’s extreme right, which proceeded recklessly and with American backing to launch broad regional offensives. After the destruction of Gaza and the genocide of Gaza’s Palestinians, and increased assault on the West Bank, Israel dealt its greatest blows to Lebanon’s Hezbollah.

With the proxies weakened, Israel moved directly against the Islamic Republic itself. To provoke the Iranian regime, Israel attacked Iran’s consulate in Damascus in April 2024 (exactly two years ago) and killed several senior IRGC commanders. In response, the Islamic Republic launched a barrage of missiles and drones against Israel. This was what Israel was looking for, preparing for the war against Iran. There was also a bitter irony: Iran had built its proxies to protect itself, and now it was the regime itself trying to protect them in return. The fall of Assad’s regime in Syria deprived the Iranian regime of its last serious support base.

With the proxies lost or severely weakened, Israel found itself in a position – coinciding with the rise to power of one of America’s most reactionary presidents – to conclude that it could eliminate the Iranian regime. Netanyahu and his religious right-wing coterie’s first hope was regime change in Iran; together with their Iranian monarchist allies, they hoped that within days the people would take to the streets and topple the regime. When they realized this was not achievable, they decided to turn Iran’s regime into a failed state, dreaming of reducing it to the fate of Somalia, Yemen, and Ethiopia, which I have discussed elsewhere. The attacks on infrastructure, and especially on intermediate industries such as steel and petrochemicals, on research institutions and the scientific departments of major Iranian universities, were carried out for exactly this reason. Had it not been for pressure and threats from the Trump administration – in hopes of imposing some sort of agreement with the Islamic regime – Israel would have destroyed the main electricity grid, water networks and refineries as well, and even now it awaits the resumption of war to advance this savage policy.

Unlike Netanyahu, Trump, who has dispensed with the customary niceties of international relations and is openly advancing an imperialist domination agenda in the region and the world, harbored the illusion that he could pursue a “leader change” similar to Venezuela, rather than a “regime change” policy in Iran, which I have discussed elsewhere. But he and his advisors failed to account for two factors: first, Iran’s ability to regionalize and globalize the conflict by closing the Strait of Hormuz; second, the regime’s resilience, which itself has several dimensions. One is its ideological/religious structure, which, despite losing several tiers of its most important leaders, did not collapse. A second factor in this resilience is its prioritization of self-preservation at any cost – even at the expense of Iran and its people. Like Hamas in Gaza, the regime is less concerned with whatever damage the country sustains in this war. A related factor is that in the event of defeat, the clerical/military/economic oligarchy, with its vast webs of family and marital connections, has nowhere to flee, and thus has no choice but to fight on.

Meanwhile, the conflict increasingly took on religious and fundamentalist dimensions: American Christian Zionist evangelicals – seeking to hasten the return of the Christian messiah – joined with Jewish fundamentalists awaiting the coming of the Jewish messiah, in confrontation with Shia fundamentalists awaiting the Shia messiah, the Mahdi.

In summary, the 12-day and 39-day wars against Iran, and whatever further military confrontations may lie ahead, are the product of three interrelated historical currents, each bearing a degree of responsibility: American imperialism in its drive to maintain and extend global hegemony; Israel and global Zionism in its pursuit of a Greater Israel; and the clerical/military/economic oligarchy of the Islamic Republic in its drive to maintain and expand its own religious dominance.

This war has not been, in any respect, a just war. The aggression by the US and Israel is clear: they had no “right” to go to war, and they showed no “just conduct” in war – their war crimes require no elaboration. But though the US and Israel have not been fighting a just war, this doesn’t mean that Iran has justice on its side, for the regime bore its own responsibility for bringing it about, and its conduct – both toward the Iranian people and toward neighbouring countries – has not been righteous. More importantly, despite the nature of the imperialist aggression, the Iranian people do not see this as a patriotic or liberatory war; they see it as the war of a governing apparatus that does not belong to them. Some analysts of Iranian affairs in the West, and the overt or closeted supporters of the regime, have mistakenly attributed the absence of a large anti-regime movement during the war to patriotism and popular support for the regime. As was mentioned earlier, this is a government that gunned down its own people to terrorize them and prevent another mass uprising. Some have wrongly compared this war to the Vietnam War as a war of liberation. In the Vietnam War, American (and before them, French) soldiers were baffled by how ordinary Vietnamese people fought the invaders with great determination. In the war against Iran, a genuine portion of the population actually hoped for further blows to be dealt against the regime.

In contrast to the reactionary left – which, by solely condemning US/Israeli military aggression, took the side of the backward-looking and anti-popular Islamic Republic regime – Iran’s progressive left, along with many progressive lefts from different countries, have both condemned the Islamic Republic, not only for its adventurist and expansionist policies but also for its anti-popular policies and political and cultural repression, and at the same time, categorically condemned imperialist and Zionist aggression. One example is an open letter signed by more than one hundred prominent left-wing figures, from around the world, following a letter signed by over three hundred Iranian academics, lawyers, journalists, and artists.

The Islamic Regime vs. the Iranian People

Setting aside those segments of the population that support the regime for religious reasons or financial dependency upon it, and the confused so-called “leftist axis of resistance” who defend it; and setting aside the monarchists who dream of an Israeli/American victory in this war to bring Reza Pahlavi to power – the majority of the people of Iran see this war as a devastating blow to their own authentic movement, and are searching for a path to overthrow this regime and transition beyond it.

One of the most critical issues facing the regime is the ever-widening gap between civil society and the political society, where neither has the slightest trust in the other. The situation within the power bloc is also uncertain: will the more hardline fundamentalists maintain the upper hand, or the oligarchs who have discovered paradise on earth? In any case, one can predict that in the first instance that civil society and social movements will not consciously enter the arena because the wounded regime will not hesitate to intensify repression. One can see the regime’s fear and terror in the fact that during the war, it filled the streets with armed Basiji and Hezbollahi thugs, and at night, they continue their religious gatherings in different neighbourhoods to prevent any anti-regime demonstration. Simultaneously, it continues its mass arrests and executions, and despite the catastrophic economic cost, continues its devastating internet blackout out of fear of the people.

Economic problems will be among the regime’s greatest challenges: inflation, unemployment, the costs of rebuilding damaged infrastructure and industries, shortfalls in foreign currency and export revenues, and so on. If sanctions continue, the ability to circumvent them – which had primarily been done through various shell companies in the UAE, especially in Dubai – will be vastly more difficult, due to the souring of that relationship after drone and missile strikes on UAE installations. Rebuilding infrastructure, industries, and residential units in cities will require billions of dollars that the regime does not have. Moreover, since the regime will certainly prioritize the restoration of its military capacity, it will allocate even fewer resources to improving citizens’ living conditions, resulting in even greater anger and discontent.

As noted earlier, one of the greatest economic damages of the war has been to industry. Contrary to various theories that either deny that Iran’s economic system is capitalist or qualify it with various adjectives, or characterize it solely by plunder and destruction, Iran is a relatively advanced industrial capitalist country. No one disputes the corruption, theft, and oligarchic control of these industries, but whatever they are, they are capitalist industries based on the exploitation of labour, combining neoliberalism with state intervention. The industrial sector accounts for roughly 35% of GDP, and 33% of the labour force works in industry. Iran’s top 100 companies (of which roughly 10% are banks) account for 11% of GDP and 91% of non-oil exports. Iran’s non-oil exports in 2025 were approximately $32-billion, while oil exports for that year were projected at around $43-billion.

Rising unemployment will be a major burden for the regime. Tens of thousands of insured workers have become unemployed. The Social Security Organization, which was already facing serious problems before the war, will have lower revenues with more workers unemployed while simultaneously facing higher expenses, including unemployment insurance. Approximately 14 million households are covered by this organization, and it has had and will continue to have difficulty. The government also has large unpaid debts to the organization. And these are only the workers covered by social security. All employees of workplaces with fewer than ten workers – which account for more than 80% of industrial units – are excluded from this coverage. The fifty-plus-day internet blackout has bankrupted tens of thousands of small businesses. The Deputy Minister of Labour has referred to the loss of more than one million jobs, though precise figures are not yet available. Added to this, we also have the drastic situation of the so-called “third-pillar workers,” mentioned earlier.

The war has dealt a severe blow to Iran’s working class and impoverished. In addition to unemployment and rising prices, the work environment during and immediately after the war has become far more securitized, making it much harder to advance even trade union demands, let alone political ones. Organizing in the workplace – always among the most difficult tasks – has become vastly more difficult. However, one must hope that organizing at the neighborhood level in working-class areas can proceed with the necessary precautions.

The most important blow has fallen on popular movements. Without doubt, had the war not occurred – and had the neo-fascist monarchist intervention, with the open support of Israel and Mossad, not driven the regime into a panic and provided it the pretext for savage repression and mass killing – the continuation of the Woman, Life, Freedom movement in 2023 and the December 2025 and January 2026 movements would have been certain. Under current conditions, it is entirely understandable that the movements have retreated sharply. Yet there is no doubt that if Iran is not destroyed, the Islamic Republic and the problems and crises that lie ahead of it will face further major movements from civil society. It is true that the Iranian people and the toiling classes are the greatest losers of this war. But the Islamic Republic will no longer be the same, and civil society will be able, by linking together the quadripartite arenas of social movement – the street, the workplace, the place of education, and the marketplace – to ultimately bring down the regime. No regime devoid of legitimacy can long endure. •

Petition: Stop the War Immediately!

Stop the War Immediately!

Under the long-standing and mutual tensions between the Islamic Republic of Iran, the United States, and Israel, Iran once again became the target of the heaviest military strikes by Israel and the United States amidst negotiations. These strikes, violating established principles of international law, are claimed to aim at weakening, coercing, or overthrowing the government. However, their fallout has been extensive destruction, damage to the country’s vital infrastructure, and an increase in civilian casualties.

From our perspective of “No to war and no to the Islamic Republic,” this conflict is an absolute evil. It neither brings democracy nor security and well-being for the people. It has been launched in accordance with the interests of the United States and Israel. Humanity lies buried beneath the rubble of bombings, and the lives of millions of innocent people – who were already suffering under the repression and violence of the Islamic Republic – are now subjected to even greater destruction. The killing of children in a school in Minab and attacks on hospitals, medical centres, refineries, and other civilian sites show that the claim of “precision targeting” and purely military objectives is just a lie; it largely results in the deaths of those who have no role in these conflicts.

Alongside these aggressions, the policies of the Islamic Republic – from the very beginning until now – through the suppression of citizens’ rights, the killing of protesters, anti-Western rhetoric, slogans calling for the elimination of Israel, regional adventurism, and support for proxy forces that have no connection to the national interests of Iranians, have become one of the main sources of instability in the region. A government that, even in the midst of war and after the horrific killings in January, continues to threaten its own people cannot claim to defend them or pursue a just and lasting peace.

The clash of these two conflicting policies has ultimately resulted in a conflict that has expanded through attacks by the Islamic Republic on neighbouring countries, spreading across the region and threatening the security of both the people of Iran and the wider area. However, we should not forget that the primary responsibility for starting this war lies with the United States and Israel.

We, the signatories of this statement advocating for a democratic transition in Iran, firmly reject war as a means of resolving international disputes. We highlight the Iranian people’s right to shape their own future and achieve political change within Iran, rather than through foreign intervention. We urge everyone to become independent voices for peace and democracy. This voice does not support aggression, occupation, repression, or authoritarianism, but instead stands with the people suffering under the rubble of war and destructive government policies.

We call on the global community, international peace and human rights organizations, media outlets, governments, and progressive political groups, not to stay silent, and to condemn any form of providing direct or indirect support for war. Instead, they should back peace initiatives and utilize all political and diplomatic tools to promptly halt the war, prevent its spread, and stop military assaults. Protecting human lives – especially those of children and vulnerable groups – must come before any political or military interests. Hospitals, schools, and homes must become safe sanctuaries. It is also vital to ramp up international pressure for the release of political prisoners whose lives are at risk and who may be the first to fall victim to government retaliation.

Only through the immediate cessation of war from both sides, adherence to international rules, a return to diplomacy and political solutions, and the adoption of humane approaches can the current deadly cycle be overcome. Such a solution would make possible a future in which security, peace, freedom, and human dignity are not sacrificed to power rivalries. In this regard, the formation of the broadest possible global will against war is an urgent necessity. •

Signatories:

• Angela Y. Davis, scholar and activist, USA
• Ervand Abrahamian, Professor Emeritus, Baruch College, CUNY, USA
• Gilbert Achcar, Professor of Development Studies and International Relations SOAS, University of London, UK
• Stephen R. Shalom, Professor Emeritus of Political Science, William Paterson University, USA
• Robin D.G. Kelley, Distinguished Professor of History, UCLA, USA
• Greg Albo, Associate Professor of Political Science, York University, Canada
• Sam Gindin, Professor Emeritus of Political Science, York University, Canada
• Kevin Anderson, Distinguished Professor of Sociology, University of California, Santa Barbara, USA
• for a complete list, see here.