When we talk about war, we typically rehearse several perspectives—geopolitical tensions and power struggles; military tactics and battlefield outcomes; economic costs and disruptions to markets and supply chains. Violations of the norms of armed conflict and war crimes are approached from the perspective of international law. A crucial humanitarian perspective foregrounds violence and human suffering and reminds us that war is, above all, a human catastrophe.

Yet wars are also profound environmental and climate catastrophes. Military flights and ground operations, bombing, damaged infrastructure and destroyed buildings, burning oil fields, and devastated and polluted forests, water, and farmland generate large volumes of greenhouse gas emissions and toxic pollution. They impair the environment and its ecosystem services—harboring biodiversity, supplying water and food, enabling nutrient cycling, regulating weather, and sequestering carbon. This environmental damage stalls development, increases poverty, vulnerability, and scarcity, and heightens health risks. With their tremendous costs, wars divert public resources away from health, education, and climate change mitigation and adaptation.

Contemporary wars in Ukraine, Gaza, and Iran are not only human but also environmental and climate catastrophes. They demonstrate that war is not external to the environmental crisis but rather its most extreme manifestation. The tragedy of war lies in the destruction of the environment, the acceleration of the climate crisis, and the interruption of efforts to address it.

Ukraine: Energy Terror Warfare

Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, part of his neo-imperial effort to halt the country’s democratization and alignment with the EU, was initially conceived as a rapid offensive aimed at capturing Kyiv, toppling the government, and installing a pro-Russian regime. After this strategy failed, Russia shifted to a war of attrition, combining ground offensives in the East and Southeast with the systematic targeting of critical infrastructure, most notably the energy system.

Since the start of the war, more than 60 large-scale strike campaigns have been documented, targeting power plants, substations, transmission networks, dams, and oil and gas facilities. By early 2026, Ukraine had lost more than three quarters of its pre-war electricity generation capacity, with most thermal power plants damaged or destroyed. According to the IEA, Ukraine is now dependent on its three remaining operational nuclear power plants. Attacks on the energy system have produced cascading effects across water supply, heating, healthcare, transport, and communication, imposing sustained and severe hardship on civilians.

This form of energy terror warfare, which qualifies as a war crime, has been intensified by Russia during the winter months and seeks to destroy the economic and social foundations of Ukrainian society while eroding people’s resilience by making it impossible to meet basic needs. During the harsh winter—when nighttime temperatures in Kyiv in January and February consistently hovered around −10°C or lower—millions of Ukrainians had heating and electricity for only a few hours per day, or in some periods none at all for several consecutive days. This hardship unfolds alongside an enormous human toll and violence documented in countless reports as violations of international humanitarian and human rights law and war crimes—executions, torture, sexual violence on the battlefield; abducted children; and civilians injured, displaced, and stripped of security, community, and belonging.

Adding to these immense harms, the war also carries dramatic climate consequences. Emissions are generated on a vast scale from the burning of diesel and kerosene in tanks and fighter jets; the production and deployment of drones and munitions; detonations; fires at oil depots and refineries; and the dramatic increase in forest fires in war zones. Attacks on energy infrastructure release greenhouse gases, including highly potent sulfur hexafluoride (SF₆), used in high-voltage electrical systems, which persists in the atmosphere for millennia and has an extremely high global warming potential (about 23,500 times that of CO₂ over 100 years). Dysfunctional energy networks force reliance on diesel generators and other carbon-intensive emergency sources, further increasing emissions. An Ecoaction report estimates total war-related emissions in the hundreds of millions of tonnes of CO₂—237 million tonnes, to be precise—equivalent to the annual emissions of Austria, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia combined. Postwar reconstruction of Ukraine, if it occurs in the near term, risks locking the country onto a path of carbon-intensive, extractive development of critical minerals demanded by the USA and the EU.

These climate harms form part of a multi-dimensional and ever-worsening environmental crisis involving widespread contamination of air, agricultural land, forests, and water with heavy metals, toxic chemicals, mines, and particulate matter resulting from bombing, demolitions, and fires. The scale and severity of this environmental destruction have led some to describe the war as ecocide—a concept not yet codified in international law but increasingly used to capture forms of environmental devastation of exceptional magnitude, for example by Darya Tsymbalyuk in her book Ecocide in Ukraine. The catastrophic explosion and subsequent collapse of the Kakhovka Dam in June 2023 exemplify the devastating environmental effects of a single wartime incident. Caused by a deliberate explosion, the collapse submerged more than 620 km² of territory, inundated dozens of settlements, displaced tens of thousands of people, destroyed agricultural land and water and river transport infrastructure, and devastated natural habitats and cultural sites. It deprived over 700,000 people of their primary source of drinking water, disrupted irrigation for tens of thousands of hectares of farmland, and washed toxic sediments, heavy metals, and agrochemicals downstream into the Black Sea. There, these pollutants compounded the deadly impacts of mines, explosions, and acoustic pollution from sonar, contributing to mass mortality among dolphins and porpoises.

Gaza: Total Demolition

The current war in the Gaza Strip is the latest chapter in a recurring cycle of conflict between Israel and Palestinian armed groups, including Hamas. It escalated dramatically after the October 2023 attack by Hamas militants, which killed around 1,200 people and involved the taking of hostages. Israel’s objective of dismantling Hamas has since been pursued through extensive aerial bombardment, ground operations, and a blockade of Gaza that has restricted electricity, water, fuel, and essential supplies. Targeting tunnel networks, weapons depots, and command centers in one of the most densely populated territories in the world—approximately 2.3 million people within 365 km²—has resulted in one of the most destructive urban military campaigns of the 21st century, comparable to the devastation of Aleppo or Raqqa during the Syrian civil war, or Grozny during the Chechen wars.

Israel’s current offensive has turned Gaza into rubble. Satellite monitoring and UN damage assessments indicate that over 80 percent of all structures in Gaza have been damaged or destroyed. Gaza City, Rafah, and Khan Yunis have experienced near-total destruction in some neighborhoods, including homes, schools, hospitals, roads, and other essential infrastructure. Humanitarian reporting by the United Nations OCHA and UNRWA indicates that approximately 1.9 million people—around 90 percent of the population of the Gaza Strip—have been internally displaced, many multiple times, with vast numbers rendered homeless. At least 72,000–75,000 people have been killed in the Gaza war, primarily Palestinians, according to OCHA, and the conflict has produced some of the highest recorded death tolls among children, journalists, and health and humanitarian workers in any recent conflict worldwide. This form of total urban demolition warfare has been criticized by human rights organizations and UN bodies as constituting crimes against humanity and war crimes, including collective punishment and the unlawful deprivation of basic necessities as a method of warfare.

Unsurprisingly, these tactics of total destruction have produced profound and potentially irreversible ecological damage. A UNEP report assessing the environmental impact of the conflict in Gaza estimates that for every square metre of the Gaza Strip there are now over 107 kilograms of debris, totaling approximately 39 million tonnes generated by the conflict. Dust, unexploded ordnance, asbestos, and human remains in the rubble pose severe health risks. Water, sanitation, and hygiene systems are almost entirely defunct, and sewage contaminates beaches, coastal waters, soil, and freshwater with pathogens, microplastics, and hazardous chemicals. The destruction of irrigation infrastructure has accelerated soil degradation and damaged Gaza’s already fragile ecosystems—including the coastal dune strip, marine biodiversity, and the Wadi Gaza wetlands—while heightening the risk of long-term desertification. The destruction of solar panels and shortages of cooking gas have forced families to burn wood, plastic, and waste, generating additional emissions and polluting the air. The atmosphere is further burdened by large volumes of carbon dioxide emissions, driven by military logistics, including cargo flights supplying Israel, as well as aerial bombardment and ground operations. According to available estimates, the carbon footprint of the first fifteen months of the war exceeded 32 million tonnes of CO₂—more than the annual emissions of over one hundred countries worldwide.

Iran: Take the Oil or Burn It

Decades of U.S.–Iran hostility—rooted in the 1979 revolution and hostage crisis, nuclear disputes, and Iran’s regional support for armed groups—erupted into open conflict on 28 February 2026. U.S. and Israeli forces launched coordinated (and widely considered unlawful) strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities, missile and defense systems, and political leadership. Iran responded by moving to obstruct the Strait of Hormuz, launching missiles and drones at Israel and other targets across the Middle East, and attacking commercial shipping.

It remains uncertain how the war will unfold and whether it will end within the timeframe that the Trump administration has at times suggested. Control over, and disruption of, oil infrastructure and trade have become central elements of the conflict. Trump has openly and repeatedly stated his desire to “take the oil in Iran,” including the seizure of key export hubs such as Kharg Island. This echoes U.S. tactics in Venezuela and reflects a broader foreign policy logic that treats energy resources in other countries not as sovereign assets but as entitlements subject to appropriation under conditions of conflict. He has also repeatedly threatened to “completely devastate” and “obliterate” Iran’s critical energy infrastructure—including oil wells, power plants, freshwater facilities, and export terminals—if a deal is not reached swiftly, a strategy of resource destruction reminiscent of Russia’s approach in Ukraine.

Iran’s blockade of the Strait of Hormuz—a chokepoint through which roughly one-fifth of global oil and significant volumes of liquefied natural gas flow—has produced one of the most consequential disruptions to the global energy system in recent history. It has effectively halted maritime traffic, triggered supply shortages, driven sharp price increases, raised insurance and transport costs, and forced the rerouting of shipments along longer and more expensive routes. The resulting shortage of oil and gas has compelled many Asian states, heavily dependent on fossil fuel imports from the Persian Gulf, to turn to alternative energy sources, often including more carbon-intensive fuels such as coal.

What is already evident is that this war constitutes a climate tragedy. According to available estimates (Earth.Org), the first fourteen days of the conflict generated emissions exceeding 5 million tonnes of CO₂—approximately one sixth of Slovakia’s annual emissions in 2024. Airstrikes, missile launches, naval deployments, and the logistics of modern warfare produce vast quantities of direct emissions. For example, a Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II consumes approximately 5,600 to 6,500 liters of kerosene during a single combat sortie, emitting around 15 tonnes of carbon dioxide—roughly equivalent to the lifetime emissions of a conventional passenger car. Attacks on oil and gas infrastructure release large volumes of CO₂, methane, and other pollutants through fires, leaks, and explosions, while also emitting toxic substances that contaminate air, soil, and water.

More broadly, the war reinforces and prolongs global dependence on fossil fuel systems by re-centering oil security as a strategic priority and diverting political and financial resources away from decarbonization and climate adaptation. In this sense, the conflict does not merely generate emissions in the short term; it structurally deepens the conditions driving the climate crisis.

The author is a political scientist currently based at Friedrich Schiller University in Jena. Her research focuses on international political theory, international law, and global justice.

The text was produced with the support of the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, Representation in the Slovak Republic.

Kim Kardashian, a celebrity with whom I am quite fascinated, opined in Interview magazine: “I believe in climate change. But I also believe in being realistic, and I think sometimes there’s so much to worry about on this planet, and it can be really scary to live your life with anxiety. I do what I can. But you have to choose what works for you in your life,” she added.

That same year, in 2022, Kim chose to buy herself a Gulfstream G650ER airplane for $95 million. She upgraded the interior for an additional $55 million, installing extensive cashmere finishes throughout, and unveiled the new design on her reality show. Since then, Kim has been jetting around the world. According to public records, she took thirty flights in 2024, including a round trip to Paris Fashion Week on the same day and five separate trips around California in a single day. Her sister Kylie Jenner also bought herself a private airplane (a Bombardier Global 7500) for $72.8 million. She uses it primarily to fly around California to spend time with fellow celebrities. In 2022, to considerable public outrage, she took a 17-minute flight that would have taken approximately forty minutes by car and cost only a fraction of the emissions.

With an estimated net worth of approximately US$1.9 billion, Kim Kardashian belongs to the richest 0.1 percent of people in the world. Other members of this exclusive club, for example, Taylor Swift, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg, also fly private jets, own multiple sprawling mansions, drive luxury cars, spend time on superyachts, or even travel to space. Their consumption-related emissions can be hundreds of times higher than those of average people like you and me. Combined with emissions linked to their investments and broader wealth portfolios, the carbon footprint of the ultra-rich is now a significant driver of the climate crisis, pushing the planet toward the dangerous threshold of 2 °C of warming and contributing to economic hardship and suffering for millions of vulnerable people worldwide. It is not just a problem of inequality; the rich plunder our common resources and commit a form of systemic violence.

The Polluter Elite

Carbon inequality — the unequal distribution of emissions between countries, regions, and economic groups — has been documented for some time. Oxfam’s 2023 report Climate Equality: A Planet for the 99 Percent revealed that in 2019, the richest 10 percent were responsible for 50 percent of all global emissions. The super-rich 1 percent (77 million individuals) accounted for 16 percent of global carbon emissions, the same share as the poorest 66 percent of humanity (about 5 billion people). The richest 0.1 percent of the world’s population, a small global elite of billionaires and multimillionaires, accounts for 7–8 percent of global emissions.

These ultra-rich individuals are overwhelmingly male, largely based in North America and Europe, and have either inherited family fortunes or amassed their wealth primarily in finance, technology, real estate, or extractive industries. Oxfam refers to them as the polluter elite. The largest share of their emissions stems from private jets, superyachts, and carbon-intensive investment portfolios. In its report Carbon Inequality Kills, Oxfam tracked the private air travel of 23 of the world’s richest billionaires and found that each took an average of 184 flights in a single year, emitting approximately 2,074 tonnes of CO₂ annually from air travel alone. This is equivalent to roughly 300 years of emissions for a person with the global average annual footprint of 6–7 tonnes — or more than 2,000 years for someone in the world’s poorest half, who emits around 1 tonne of CO₂ annually. Large superyachts, which require immense quantities of fuel for propulsion, air conditioning, swimming pools, helicopters, and support vessels for staff, can generate an annual carbon footprint of 5,672 tonnes of CO₂ — equivalent to 860 years of emissions for the average person. Three yachts owned by the Walton family, heirs to the Walmart retail fortune, had a combined annual carbon footprint of 18,000 tonnes — comparable to the yearly emissions of 1,714 Walmart shop workers.

Jeff Bezos is a poster boy of the polluting elite. He owns two private jets and the superyacht Koru, accompanied by its support vessel Abeona, which he uses to travel between multiple residences and luxury destinations worldwide. He also owns Blue Origin, a company that transports wealthy clients to the edge of space for hundreds of thousands of dollars per seat. Although the hydrogen-powered engines of the New Shepard rocket primarily emit water vapor, the overall environmental footprint of each ten-minute flight is reportedly in the hundreds of tonnes of CO₂-equivalent per launch. The Czech Republic also has members of the polluting elite. Many maintain a low public profile while engaging in high-end luxury consumption. Petr Kellner, the richest Czech before his death in 2021, owned a Boeing 737, and billionaire Karel Komárek owns a Gulfstream G550. Coal magnates and dollar billionaires Daniel Křetínský and Pavel Tykač frequently travel by private jet, whether owned by their companies or chartered from private operators.

According to another Oxfam report, Climate Plunder (2025), the average person in the richest 0.1 percent emits approximately 298 tonnes of CO₂ per year from personal consumption alone. Yet conspicuous luxury emissions represent only the tip of the iceberg. A substantial share of the ultra-rich’s climate impact derives from their investments and ownership stakes in polluting industries — oil, gas, mining, cement, steel, aviation, and others. The emissions generated by these companies’ operations must also be attributed to their principal owners. The average investment-related emissions of 50 of the world’s richest billionaires amount to approximately 2.6 million tonnes of CO₂-equivalent each — the equivalent of 2.6 million years of consumption emissions for someone in the poorest half of the global population who emits about 1 tonne of CO₂ annually. In a single year, one billionaire’s total emissions can equal the annual emissions of the Maldives — a country of roughly 500,000 people that is facing existential threats from rising sea levels.

The Rich Are Killing Us

Through extravagant luxury consumption and large ownership stakes in polluting industries, the ultra-rich generate carbon footprints that are thousands to millions of times higher than the emissions of ordinary people arising from the satisfaction of basic needs — heating, mobility, and essential goods. This is not merely extreme wealth inequality; it is a vastly disproportionate appropriation of our shared planetary ecological resources through activities that are often meaningless, obscenely wasteful, and primarily demonstrative of power and status.

The stark inequality in emission-intensive luxury consumption is especially alarming because the remaining carbon budget consistent with limiting global warming to 1.5–2 °C and avoiding dangerous climate change is now small and rapidly shrinking. The 1.1–1.2 °C of warming that has already occurred has produced measurable global impacts: more frequent and severe heatwaves, intensified droughts, heavier rainfall and flooding, more destructive wildfires, Arctic sea-ice loss, accelerating sea-level rise, ocean acidification, and mass coral bleaching. Every additional fraction of a degree increases the frequency and severity of these disruptions. Every billionaire’s excessive emissions further accelerate these impacts. They translate into heightened risks of crop failure, water scarcity, climate-sensitive diseases, displacement, infrastructure damage, and mounting economic losses that fall disproportionately on populations least responsible for the crisis. Oxfam’s Carbon Inequality Kills report demonstrates that emissions attributable to the richest contribute measurably to higher temperatures and to declines in GDP and human development in hotter countries of the Global South, primarily through reduced agricultural yields and excess heat-related mortality.

The luxury emissions of the polluting elite are not abstract numbers; they are directly linked to poverty, hunger, and death. The Maldives, mentioned above, is a case in point. This developing island state has annual emissions of 2–3 million tonnes of CO₂, comparable to those attributed to a single billionaire, such as Virgin Group founder Richard Branson, who is known to visit frequently, or Czech coal baron Daniel Křetínský, who owns a stake in a luxury resort there. More than 80 percent of its land lies less than one meter above sea level and is therefore highly vulnerable to rising seas. Rising seas, coastal flooding, saltwater intrusion, and erosion threaten homes, infrastructure, and livelihoods depending on fishing and tourism. With public debt exceeding 120 percent of GDP, the country has very limited capacity to finance adaptation measures such as seawalls or land reclamation. Despite contributing almost nothing to global emissions, the Maldives stands on the front line of climate change.

Addressing Luxury Emissions: Regulation and Language

The frivolous, decadent, and unnecessary luxury consumption and accumulation of wealth by the ultra-rich are demonstrably contributing to planetary destruction. Emissions generated by excessive wealth intensify ecological degradation, accelerate the climate crisis, and drastically exacerbate unequal exposure to its impacts. Yet luxury emissions continue to rise and remain largely unregulated. Fuel for private aircraft, for example, is largely exempt from taxation. The number of superyachts has more than doubled since 2000, yet they are not subject to binding CO₂ emissions limits. The International Maritime Organization sets emissions standards only for commercial shipping, and while the European Union is moving to include commercial maritime transport in its emissions trading system, it has introduced no carbon pricing mechanism for luxury passenger vessels.

A range of policy instruments exists to curb emissions by the ultra-rich: progressive income and wealth taxation, surcharges on fossil fuel profits, windfall taxes, and targeted luxury taxes on private aviation, superyachts, SUVs, and frequent flying. Such measures have long been advocated not only by scholars and civil society organizations — including Oxfam and, most recently, UN Special Rapporteur Olivier de Schutter — but also by major international financial institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, which recognize carbon pricing, subsidy reform, and progressive fiscal measures as necessary for effective emissions reduction and more equitable distribution of climate costs.

Before such taxes and regulatory reforms are enacted, we could begin by cultivating more precise and morally adequate language to describe the luxury consumption of the ultra-rich. Rather than cautiously framing it as an unreasonable or unequal use of shared ecological capacity, we should recognize it as the plunder of the planetary waste sink and a reckless gamble with humanity’s remaining carbon budget. Instead of merely stating that it accelerates climate change, we should acknowledge that it produces ecological destruction and disaster. Rather than referring abstractly to impacts and costs – drought, crop failure, food insecurity, displacement – we should speak of systematic environmental violence. Luxury emissions are not merely neutral externalities, unintended side effects, or unpriced social costs; they constitute deliberate and foreseeable harm — material damage, injury, and systematic environmental violence inflicted upon vulnerable communities by identifiable actors who knowingly persist in practices that expose others to risk, loss, and the destruction of livelihoods.

The author is a political scientist currently based at Friedrich Schiller University in Jena. Her research focuses on international political theory, international law, and global justice.

The text was produced with the support of the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, Representation in the Czech Republic. The publisher is fully responsible for the content; the positions presented in the text do not necessarily represent the position of the foundation.

Environmental thinkers of the 1960s often reached for the image of Spaceship Earth to capture the unique and fragile environmental conditions on which life on Earth depends. Diplomat Adlai Stevenson, economists Barbara Ward and Kenneth E. Boulding, and the inventor and futurist Richard Buckminster Fuller, who popularized the idea in his Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (1969), invoked this metaphor to envision humanity aboard a single vessel sailing through the void of space. All on one voyage, on one ship. There is no second ship waiting in orbit, no rescue boat for the selected few. The stock of resources on board is finite. No resupply is possible. Survival depends on prudent use of common resources, collective stewardship, and vigilant maintenance of the ship and its life-support systems.

The metaphor of Spaceship Earth conveys a simple truth – there is no backup planet, no alternative habitat, no exit for humans. Regardless of arbitrary political divisions or differences in wealth, we share a destiny as a species. Our well-being and survival hinge on environmental conditions, natural resources, and planetary systems: a stable climate, sufficient amounts of fresh water, healthy oceans, fertile soil, and rich biodiversity. These planetary systems are large, shared across time and space, transcending individual life or generations, yet vulnerable to human harm. Overuse, depletion, and damage do not remain contained; they ultimately rebound upon all.

The message from the Spaceship Earth crew is clear: care for the shared environment. Use resources sustainably, wisely, and with restraint. Act not as plunderers, spoilers, or vandals but as stewards of a common world. Cooperate, make rules, and respect them for the collective good. If you don’t, your only home will become the site of its own undoing.

Pollution sink as a common-pool resource

The thin atmospheric shell that envelops our planet is one of the essential planetary systems that makes Earth habitable, shielding life from radiation, enabling the water cycle, and regulating climate and temperature. The atmosphere serves as a key repository for greenhouse gases, accumulating and retaining them over time, shaping the Earth’s energy balance and climate system. Anyone can deposit greenhouse gases and other pollutants into this global common sink. Because human activities can significantly increase greenhouse gas emissions and release other harmful air pollutants (e.g., ozone layer-depleting hydrofluorocarbons), and because their effects are felt worldwide, regulation is necessary.

To use a term from resource economics, the atmosphere’s capacity to retain greenhouse gases is a common good. As a distinct type of good, different from private, public, or club goods, common goods have two key characteristics: they are non-excludable, and they are finite or rivalrous. Non-excludability means that it is impossible to prevent someone from using it. In the case of the atmospheric sink, it means that it is hard to prevent someone from polluting, and also that no one can be insulated from its impacts. When the USA, China, or Elon Musk put thousands of tons of CO₂ into the air, this gas does not stay in the place where it was emitted or within national borders. It increases the overall concentration of greenhouse gases in our one shared atmosphere.

Finite means that one person’s use of a good reduces the amount or quality available to others. In the case of the atmospheric pollution sink, it means that adding waste by some makes less space for someone else’s waste, and that the pollution sink can be depleted. In the case of greenhouse gases, a political decision was made to define overuse by the concentration of CO₂ that will keep global warming between 1.5°C and 2°C above pre-industrial levels. These thresholds are derived from scientific expertise and climate modeling. They mark the point beyond which climate impacts are expected to become severe, widespread, and potentially irreversible, with dangerous consequences for both nature and human societies. 

Commons Dilemma

Due to the two characteristics – non-excludability and rivalry – common goods can face what has become known as the tragedy of the commons. This phrase was popularized by American ecologist Garret Hardin in a short but influential article, The Tragedy of the Commons, published in 1968. Hardin argued that common resources are bound to be depleted because users tend to act in their own individual, short-term interests, seeking to extract the maximum possible benefit from the shared resource pool. When this strategy is chosen by most, the result is the rapid overuse of the commons. Even when some actors attempt to introduce rules for collective use, the rational choice for a self-interested individual is to ignore such rules, fearing that restraint will merely allow others to capture the benefits. In Hardin’s view, the tragedy of the commons is inevitable unless the commons are privatized or put under state control.

American economist Elinor Ostrom disagreed with Hardin’s parable. In her view, the users of common resources do not face tragedy but a dilemma: they can act independently and take as much as possible for personal gain, thereby overusing the resource in the short run and ending up with a collective tragedy. Alternatively, they can cooperate and devise an effective system of collective use that allows everyone to obtain a fair share while safeguarding the sustainability of the resource for the future. Ostrom’s pathbreaking empirical research, for which she was awarded the Nobel prize in 2009, demonstrated that in many real-world contexts, users do not behave as plunderers. Instead, they are capable of coming together to create effective systems of rules that regulate collective use and secure the equitable and long-term benefits of common resources for all.

Based on studies of Swiss grazing pastures, Japanese forests, Spanish irrigation systems, and other cases, Ostrom outlined an institutional model of commons governance that can successfully avoid the tragedy. Sustainable collective management emerges when it is clear who may use the resource, where its boundaries are, when rules governing use match local circumstances, and when the users have a say in shaping and changing them. Successful arrangements also depend on monitoring that makes misuse visible, on proportionate sanctions that discourage abuse, and on ways to resolve conflicts quickly and fairly.

Climate Change as a Tragedy of the Commons

Sadly, the atmosphere is not governed as a grazing pasture in the Swiss Alps or as a forest in Japan. It remains, by and large, a freely accessible no man’s land, appropriated free of charge and used without binding limits. There is no collective, all-encompassing system of rules and emission limits binding for all that reflects the global commons nature of the atmospheric carbon sink.

There were attempts to create a system that would limit the use by the largest emitters. The Kyoto Protocol, adopted in 1997 under the UNFCCC framework, included obligatory emission reduction targets for 40 developed countries (the goal was to get to 5% below 1990 emission levels). While ambitious and consistent with the historic responsibility of the industrialized Global North for climate change, the Kyoto Protocol did not create a global system. More tragically, many industrialized countries that were bound to reduce emissions chose to defect. Faced with the Ostromian dilemma between individual interests or collectively imposed limits, they opted for Hardin’s “rationality” – self-interested, short-term-oriented, benefit-maximizing behavior that refuses restraint for the sake of others.

The Paris Agreement, the current framework for regulating emissions, departs even further from attempts to establish an effective system of collective governance of our shared atmospheric pollution sink. While most countries are parties to the agreement (with the exception of Iran, Libya, Yemen, and the United States, whose infamous second withdrawal will take effect in 2026), the Paris framework merely asks states to set their own nationally determined contributions to emission reductions. To function as a system of effective global commons governance, it would need to move beyond voluntary pledges toward a regime that clearly defines the available carbon budget, sets overall emission limits, allocates allowances to countries according to principles of fair share, monitors use, enforces compliance, penalizes free-riding, and embeds climate action within a multilevel and participatory governance structure.

The EU’s Green Deal climate policy can be described as a form of commons governance. It includes binding EU-wide emission-reduction goals, nationally binding targets for member states, reporting requirements, and sanctions in case of non-compliance. The EU, however, remains a small club of just over two dozen countries. Its share of global greenhouse gas emissions has fallen to approximately 6 percent in recent years, down from higher levels in previous decades due to consistent reductions. Meanwhile, emissions from the largest emitters, China, the United States, and India, continue to rise. While both China and India plan to reduce emissions after 2030, the United States, under Donald Trump, has effectively cancelled all climate change mitigation policies. At the same time, emissions produced by the world’s richest one percent (responsible for nearly 16 percent of global CO₂ emissions in 2019) are rising, driven by technological inventions and luxury consumption, while remaining largely outside monitoring systems and regulatory control.

Globally, greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise. In 2025, the annual average CO₂ concentration reached 426.6 ppm, the highest level in more than two million years. This concentration places humanity well beyond the safe operating conditions identified by Earth system science, which was set at 350 ppm. With CO₂ emissions still rising, keeping global warming below 1.5°C has become nearly impossible. At current emission rates, the remaining carbon budget for 1.5°C will be exhausted before 2030 (as illustrated by the carbon clock). The 1.5°C threshold has long been regarded as critical for preventing permafrost thaw, large-scale ice-sheet loss, sea-level rise, ocean acidification, and biodiversity collapse. Crossing this threshold substantially increases the likelihood of dangerous climate change marked by extreme, intense, and unpredictable weather events that threaten the health, safety, and well-being of millions of people worldwide.

Freeriding on a Titanic?

A warmer world and its potentially dangerous weather conditions are a tragedy of the overuse of our common pollution sink. This tragedy arises from uncoordinated and largely unregulated actions by individual states and social groups, the disproportionate use of common resources by some, and the unwillingness of all relevant actors to adopt collective solutions. These choices are not inconsequential – they accumulate into harms that are ultimately borne by all. They represent serious ethical failures by the commoners. As users of the shared atmospheric pollution sink, all actors have duties to prevent the destruction of its utility, to cooperate in establishing collective institutional frameworks for its sustainable and equitable use, and to refrain from free-riding.

Can this tragedy still be averted? According to the IPCC’s latest assessment, limiting global warming to around 2°C requires greenhouse gas emissions to peak immediately, decline by roughly one quarter by 2030, and reach net zero in the early 2070s. Achieving this trajectory demands far stronger international cooperation and effective commons governance. This is now both an ethical and an urgent existential demand. The choice is no longer accidental but conscious and deliberate: to cooperate, or to accelerate collective demise. Either we board Spaceship Earth, transforming ourselves from uncoordinated plunderers into cooperative stewards of a shared world. Or we remain on a Cruiseship Titanic, where some linger on the upper decks, sipping cocktails by heated pools, confident that privilege will secure them access to the lifeboats, and some reject collective rules under the naïve belief that the vessel is unsinkable even as it steams at full speed toward an iceberg.

The author is a political scientist currently based at Friedrich Schiller University in Jena. Her research focuses on international political theory, international law, and global justice.

The text was produced with the support of the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, Representation in the Slovak Republic.

On Saturday, the U.S. military invaded and bombed Venezuela, killing an as-yet-unknown number of people. American forces kidnapped President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, taking them to the United States to stand trial for alleged drug trafficking and narco-terrorism. At a press conference, Donald Trump announced, “We are going to run the country and will designate various people to run the government.” He added pointedly, “We are not afraid of boots on the ground.”

All of this because we say he is a drug dealer. We say. Not the International Criminal Court. Not the United Nations. Not even Congress. The drug allegations are a charade, of course. The real reason for the assault on Venezuela was stated plainly by Trump himself at that same press conference: “We will be strongly involved in Venezuela’s oil industry.”

Fifty years ago, Venezuela nationalized its oil industry, compensating American oil companies in the process. It was entirely legal—an act of national sovereignty. But U.S. capital has never forgiven it. Ever since, presidents—Republican and Democrat alike—have imposed punitive oil and financial sanctions on Venezuela. When it comes to empire, to oil, to keeping the Western Hemisphere “safe” for extraction, there is no opposition party. There is only the party of American business interests, draped in whatever moral justification polls best this decade. The only difference is that Trump says the quiet part out loud. Speaking like a true colonial overlord, he promised that “American dominance in the Western Hemisphere will never be questioned again.”

Opposition leader and 2025 Nobel Peace Prize winner María Corina Machado made the plan even clearer in an interview with Donald Trump Jr.: “We are going to kick out the government from the oil sector and privatize all our industry.” Addressing a room full of American executives, she declared that “Venezuela represents a $1.7 trillion opportunity, and American companies are going to make a lot of money.” Machado, a staunch pro-Israel ally, has become a natural partner in Trump and Netanyahu’s expanding alliance.

The American imperial elephant is now rampaging openly, trampling opposition to its policies both abroad and at home. From sending ICE agents to terrorize immigrant families, to gutting the few remaining programs that serve the poor and working class, to backing Israel’s genocidal extermination of the Palestinian people, to threatening war with Iran, and now to bombing Venezuela atund kidnapping its president—the brutal face of American power has rarely been so naked.

So it has always been, despite moments of brave and principled resistance. The imperial-capitalist colossus remains. Former Marine General Smedley Butler described its workings in his 1935 classic War Is a Racket:

“I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street, and for the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer—a gangster for capitalism. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.”

Butler served under Republican and Democratic presidents alike. The same bipartisan continuity has defined U.S. aggression ever since: Vietnam, Iraq, sanctions on Venezuela, unwavering support for Israeli apartheid—all executed by presidents of both parties.

In every case, these wars and interventions serve capitalism, not democracy. Butler saw it clearly. To end imperial war, we must confront its root: an economy organized not around human needs but corporate interests, and an empire built to defend them.

We must resist Trump’s loud and open aggression against Venezuela—but also the quieter liberal complicity that enables it. Across the United States, thousands have already taken to the streets in protest. From coast to coast, including right here in Flagstaff, Arizona, demonstrators have denounced Washington’s illegal takeover of Venezuela and the kidnapping of its elected president. Ira Allen, a professor of rhetoric at Northern Arizona University and author of Panic Now? Tools for Humanizing, joined the protest, saying:

“The world can no longer afford imperial wars for oil and other resources. Even when they seem militarily cheap, as here, their moral and climate costs are unbearable.”

Americans, more than any people on earth, bear both the moral responsibility and the political obligation to oppose this imperial recklessness. We cannot allow Trump and his band of fascist militarists to send troops into American cities, bankroll genocide in Palestine, or lay waste to Venezuela.

Enough is enough.

Joe Bader is a peace and immigrant rights activist and former labor union negotiator residing in Flagstaff, Arizona. He holds a master’s degree in Modern American and European History from California State University, Long Beach.

I try to live lightly on this planet. In Frankfurt, Germany, to be more precise, the city that has become my home. I don’t own a car, I don’t eat meat, and I travel by train. I bike around the city, often to my urban vegetable garden. I avoid food waste, recycle, and often buy second-hand. Not driving and eating mostly plant-based lowers my footprint. But my old, poorly insulated building is heated by gas, and I also fly for work a few times per year, which pushes my carbon footprint upward.

According to the calculator of the Federal Environmental Agency, my annual carbon footprint—the sum of emissions from energy use, heating, transport, food, and other consumption expressed in tons of carbon dioxide equivalents (tCO₂e)—is 10.23 tons. This mirrors the average footprint of the middle 40 percent (by income) in the EU. It is higher than the average 5-6 tCO₂e emitted by the bottom 10 percent of Europeans,  and vastly above the 0.2–1.0 tCO₂e typical for people living in rural Africa.

My middle-class carbon footprint is lower than that of the American middle class, which can reach 40–50 tCO₂e per year. My footprint also falls below the 23 tCO₂e average of Europe’s richest 10 percent—people who own one or more large homes, drive large SUVs daily, fly frequently for work and leisure, buy new goods at high rates, and hold investment portfolios linked to fossil-fuel or energy-intensive industries. And of course, it is only a fraction of the emissions of the ultra-rich—billionaire entrepreneurs and celebrities with multiple sprawling mansions, pools, private jets, and superyachts. Emissions of people like Kim Kardashian, Jeff Bezos, and Elon Musk can reach 800–1000 tCO₂e per year, an estimated footprint of the global top 0.1 percent.  This extraordinarily high footprint dwarfs global averages and could power hundreds of average homes for a year.

Not All Emissions Are Created Equal

My own footprint, that of average European high and low earners, rural communities in Africa, and celebrities like Kim Kardashian, illustrate the stark reality of carbon inequality. This term is now used to describe differences in greenhouse-gas emissions between income groups within countries and across regions and complements the traditional focus of global climate politics on inequalities between the total emissions of countries.

The idea that wealth and consumption patterns influence environmental impact has long been part of research in ecological economics, environmental sociology, and environmental justice. However, income-based emissions inequality has only started to appear in climate research and debate. In 2020, Oxfam, in collaboration with the Stockholm Environment Institute, published the influential report The Carbon Inequality Era. The report analyzed consumption-based emissions across income groups in 117 countries and found that the richest 10 percent accounted for about 52 percent of all carbon emissions added between 1990 and 2015. The richest 1 percent alone contributed roughly 15 percent—more than twice the emissions of the poorest half of humanity.

Oxfam popularized the term carbon inequality, which is now used as a key analytical and moral lens on climate change. Its findings were confirmed and extended in their recent reports, Climate Equality: A Planet for the 99 percent and Carbon Inequality Kills . The latter showed that the ultra-rich 0.1 percent can emit up to 8,000 tCO₂ annually through private jets, superyachts, and space flights—as much as a poor migrant farm worker in America would emit in 50-70 years or a rural farmer in sub-Saharan Africa would emit in 800–1000 years.

Many subsequent studies (e.g., World Inequality Report from 2022 and others) converge on the conclusion, namely that the top income group produces a disproportionate amount of emissions and that these differences matter in most national contexts. In Germany, according to the Deutsches Institut für Wirtschaftsforschung, the top 10 percent emit roughly twice as much as the bottom 10 percent. In the United States, according to this research, the poorest 50 percent emit around 10–15 tCO₂e per year; the middle 40 percent emit 40–50 tCO₂e; the top 10 percent, 75–90 tCO₂e; and the top 1 percent, a staggering 500–600 tCO₂e annually. In the Czech Republic, a relatively egalitarian country, the two most affluent social classes emit about one ton of CO₂e more than lower-income groups.

The inequality of emissions based on income and wealth—especially the excessive carbon released by the richest—is highly problematic from a moral point of view. Imagine the atmosphere as a shared sewage pit with limited capacity. Most people discharge small, unavoidable amounts of everyday waste, while a wealthy minority flushes enormous volumes of filth from hyper-consumption into this one common hole. The sink starts overflowing, contaminating the air and water and creating health hazards for everyone. A small minority has overused it, discharging more than their fair share.

Today’s accelerating climate change is a version of this problem: since the Industrial Revolution, industrialized nations have been filling the atmospheric sink with man-made greenhouse gases. The remaining space for CO₂ that would keep global warming below 2°C is now being used up by a minority of the wealthiest. They overuse an ecological capacity of the atmosphere to absorb greenhouse gases and regulate climate, the stability of which is key to the basic needs of all, and must therefore be shared fairly and used sustainably to preserve it for future generations. By filling the sink, the richest accelerate global warming and intensify climate risks for everyone else—especially for those less well-off economically and for whom climate change and its impacts bring greater costs, disadvantages, risks, and harms.

Luxury Emissions versus Subsistence Emissions

As the sink example suggests, the moral problem of carbon inequality extends beyond the unequal volume of emissions. It also concerns the nature of the activities that produce them and their consequences for everyone. The emissions of lower- and middle-income groups stem largely from heating and electricity, work-related mobility, food, and basic leisure. These emissions are hard to reduce and often lie outside individual control. A tenant cannot replace the heating system in an old building, and a rural resident cannot forgo driving to work when no bus exists. The richest households generate excessive emissions mainly through private consumption and lifestyle choices—large homes, multiple cars, frequent flying, luxury goods, and carbon-intensive investment portfolios. 

To capture these differences, climate-justice theorists distinguished between subsistence and luxury emissions. In his canonical essay Subsistence Emissions and Luxury Emissions, Henry Shue argued that emissions required to meet basic needs have a fundamentally different moral status from those generated by inessential, high-consumption activities. Across regions, subsistence emissions are integral to daily livelihoods—cooking, heating, earning income, and moving from place to place. Luxury emissions, by contrast, arise from avoidable and status-driven activities that do not serve human needs but rather demonstrate social standing through conspicuous consumption. They are excessive, wasteful, and remain inaccessible to most households worldwide. Unlike subsistence emissions, luxury emissions carry no moral entitlement. Curbing them is a demand of fairness: it prevents a small minority from monopolizing the planet’s limited and diminishing ecological capacity, slows the acceleration of dangerous climate change, and frees space for pollution from activities for essential human needs.

Footing the Bill for the Wealthy

To have a realistic chance of staying below 2 °C of global warming, global CO₂ emissions must fall by roughly one quarter by 2030. The EU has committed to reducing greenhouse gas emissions by at least 55 percent compared to 1990 levels by 2030 and to reaching net-zero emissions by 2050. These goals require complex and far-reaching transformation. Carbon inequality exposes the moral fault lines of this transition: which emissions are politically targeted and whose emissions remain protected? Who is expected to change their behavior and how much? From an ethical standpoint, isn’t the reduction of luxury emissions one of the most compelling pathways for climate mitigation, ensuring that sufficient ecological space remains for necessary and unavoidable emissions?

So far, political choices about whose emissions are treated as negotiable and whose are accepted do not reflect this ethical imperative. As it is widely documented in climate justice scholarship and policy analyses, including those by Oxfam, current regulatory efforts overwhelmingly focus on standard household and industrial emissions while leaving high-emission luxury lifestyles largely untouched. Core EU Green Deal instruments—binding emissions limits, renewable energy targets, energy efficiency standards, and the emissions trading system—target everyday energy use, mass transport, and industry. These reforms are undeniably necessary. But they raise fuel, electricity, and heating costs, increase rents due to building retrofits, and make mobility and basic goods more expensive. These costs fall disproportionately on middle- and lower-income households whose emissions are tied to work, housing, and other basic needs. In contrast, most excessive and socially unnecessary forms of carbon pollution remain untaxed, weakly regulated, and politically insulated, despite producing emissions in unacceptable magnitudes. Aviation fuel for private jets remains tax-exempt, and the massive emissions tied to multiple properties, yachts, and carbon-intensive investment portfolios fall outside EU sectoral standards altogether.

In Europe, the middle and lower classes have been reducing their emissions steadily over the past few decades, while emissions linked to luxury consumption—particularly among the top 1 percent—continue to rise, fueled by technological innovation and expanding forms of ultra-luxury consumption, from private aviation to space tourism. Political choices about whose emissions are treated as negotiable and whose are normalized turn demands of fairness upside down. Those who emit out of necessity absorb the costs of transition, while those whose excessive lifestyles disproportionately drive the crisis remain politically insulated.

The issue of carbon inequality and the unfair distribution of climate policy costs is not merely academic talk. Carbon inequality leads to political conflict. In 2017, France abolished the wealth tax on financial assets, sharply reducing the fiscal burden on the country’s wealthiest households and shrinking public revenues by an estimated €3–4 billion. A year later, when the government sought to advance its climate agenda by raising fuel taxes, mass, confrontational protests of the yellow vests broke out. For months, everyday life was disrupted by demonstrations, road blockades, and clashes with the police. The protests expressed a justified grievance: the costs of climate policy were being shouldered primarily by low-income households through regressive fuel taxes. Under intense public pressure, Emmanuel Macron’s government was forced to suspend the planned fuel tax increase. The lesson is clear: climate policy that ignores carbon inequality erodes trust and undermines the legitimacy of the transition and is a political no-go.

The author is a political scientist currently based at Friedrich Schiller University in Jena. Her research focuses on international political theory, international law, and global justice.

The text was produced with the support of the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, Representation in the Slovak Republic.

In Namibia, where I currently conduct research on wildlife conservation, everyone speaks about climate change because everyone feels its effects. Droughts last longer, water holes dry up, the rains no longer come when they should. Crops fail, livestock die, and food insecurity grows. Climate change also tightens its grip on Namibia’s wildlife—elephants, rhinos, leopards, cheetahs, lions, giraffes, antelopes, zebras, kudus, and other species. As waterholes vanish, wild animals wander ever closer to villages and farms in search of water and prey. The resulting human–wildlife conflicts strike at the heart of Namibia’s unique communal conservation model in which local people tie protection of wildlife to their livelihood.

Namibia has neither caused nor contributed to the crisis now reshaping its land. Its share of global greenhouse gas emissions is vanishingly small—in 2023 its CO₂ emissions were 4.365 million tonnes, about 0.01 percent of the world’s total. Namibia actually absorbs more greenhouse gases than it emits. Still, this beautiful and fragile country must shoulder the burden of adapting to a crisis born of others’ emissions and prosperity.

The Weight of Pollution History

Namibia, like many countries in the Global South, embodies the moral problem at the heart of climate change. It has contributed almost nothing to global warming, yet it bears its heaviest costs. This deep asymmetry lies at the core of what we call global climate justice. Since the term first appeared, it has been mainly used to expose the unequal historical responsibility that nations carry for the climate crisis—and to make a moral claim that the countries which grew wealthy by emitting vast amounts of greenhouse gases have duties to cut their own emissions and to help those most affected by climate change, especially the most vulnerable communities that have no means to adapt.

The issue of historical responsibility is not an abstract notion, nor an academic indulgence. It is a matter of fact and physical reality. CO₂ is a long-lived gas: about half of what is released is absorbed by sinks such as oceans and forests, but the rest remains in the atmosphere for centuries. The accumulated carbon dioxide released since the dawn of the industrial revolution, first through deforestation and land-use change, and later, after 1950, through the burning of fossil fuels, is what drives the 1.2°C of global warming already recorded today. In 1850, the year marking the onset of large-scale industrialization and the first reliable data on fossil-fuel use, atmospheric CO₂ stood at roughly 285 parts per million. Since then, it has risen by about 50 percent, reaching today’s 425 ppm.

Many reliable datasets (e.g., Climate Watch, Carbon Brief, World Resource Institute, or Global Carbon Project) make one fact unmistakably clear: the CO₂ accumulated in the atmosphere over the past 170 years comes from specific countries. Data from the World Resource Institute show that a small group of nations dominated global emissions between 1850 and 1950. They include the United Kingdom, the United States, Germany, France, Belgium, Poland, Austria, Spain, the Netherlands, and Canada, joined by Japan and the Soviet Union in the 1920s. Curiously, the Czech lands, the industrial heart of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, ranked among the world’s top ten emitters between 1863 and 1919. Britain led global emissions until 1887 when the United States took over—and then saw the steepest rise over the following nine decades, together with the UK and Germany. China’s emissions began increasing rapidly in the 1980s and in 2005 China became the world’s top annual emitter.

The United States remains responsible for the largest share of historical emissions—roughly 25 percent of the global total. The European Union follows closely, with about 22 percent of cumulative CO₂ emissions. Together, these two entities are accountable for nearly half of all carbon dioxide currently in the atmosphere. Behind it come China (12.7 percent), Russia (6 percent), Japan (4 percent), India (3 percent), and Canada (2 percent). (See the graphic here.) Both the U.S. and the EU are each roughly twice as responsible as China for the global share of emissions. India, today’s third biggest emitter, accounts for only a small fraction of the world’s historical emissions. There is no escaping the reality that most carbon released to date came from the industrialized countries of the Global North—nations that developed and grew wealthy through fossil fuel-based development and now possess the financial and technological means to adapt to the warming they created.

International Climate Law and the Struggle for Fairness

The undeniable fact of historical responsibility for global warming and the demand that past polluters bear the costs of addressing it have shaped international climate negotiations from the very beginning. As early as the 1972 UN Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm, developing countries, led by India and its Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, insisted that global environmental protection must not come at the expense of their right to economic development and poverty eradication. When climate change entered the global agenda in the late 1980s, this position solidified. Developing nations consistently argued that industrialized countries should acknowledge their historical responsibility and shoulder the primary burden of mitigation, that is, reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

These debates gave rise to the principle of “common but differentiated responsibilities” (CBDR) that became a cornerstone of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC)—a treaty now ratified by 197 countries plus the European Union. (Such near-universal participation is rivaled only by the UN Charter and the Montreal Protocol on ozone-depleting substances.) Article 3 (1) of the UNFCCC declares that: “Parties should protect the climate system for the benefit of present and future generations… on the basis of equity and in accordance with their common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities.”

The CBDR principle, which recognizes that climate action must reflect both nations’ contributions to the problem and their capacity to address it, became the foundation of the Kyoto Protocol, adopted under the UNFCCC framework in 1997. The Protocol bound industrialized countries (OECD and the former Soviet bloc) to cut their greenhouse gas emissions during the period 2008–2012 to at least 5 percent below 1990 levels. The EU agreed to cut its emissions by 8 percent compared to 1990 levels. The Protocol also required developed nations to provide financial resources and facilitate technology transfer to help developing countries pursue climate action.

Global North’s Broken Promises

The Kyoto Protocol failed to usher in an era of reduced emissions. Many countries chose to ignore their commitments, e.g., Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, and Slovenia. The United States refused to ratify the Protocol because it did not impose binding targets on developing countries. Its defection effectively killed the agreement and marked the beginning of a new era of pragmatism in global climate politics. Under the current treaty, the Paris Agreement, countries make voluntary pledges to reduce emissions. There is no binding differentiation in obligations based on historic responsibility or capacity to act.

Yet the problem of historic responsibility remains a powerful moral principle and political demand to bear the costs of addressing the climate crisis. As Henry Shue argued in his influential essay Global environment and international Inequality, polluting the atmosphere with greenhouse gases by some is fundamentally unfair. Emissions inflict costs and harms on those who do not pollute. It is contrary to their interests, without their consent, and leaves them worse off while the emitters get richer and more advantaged. This asymmetry implies a clear demand for equity and fairness: those who caused the harm must shoulder the burdens of reducing pollution and pay for the damages suffered by those who did not cause it. Simply put: those who make the mess must pay to clean it up and not dump these costs onto others.

Historic responsibility continues to animate international climate politics and remains a central moral demand of the Global South toward the Global North. At COP27 held in 2022 in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt, developing countries (led by the G77 + China and small island states) argued that they face escalating costs from floods, droughts, and sea-level rise caused mainly by emissions from industrialized nations. Their key demand was the establishment of a Loss and Damage Fund to support developing countries most affected by climate impacts. At COP29, held last year in Baku, Azerbaijan, the Loss and Damage Fund was integrated into a broader framework of climate finance (NCQG) designed to support mitigation, adaptation, and resilience globally. Developing countries jointly called for US$1.3 trillion per year in public, grant-equivalent climate finance from the Global North. Developed countries, to the huge disappointment of developing countries, committed to mobilizing only US$300 billion annually.

Unequal Responsibilities, Unequal Choices

Communal conservancies in Namibia are searching for ways to adapt to climate change and mitigate human–wildlife conflict so they can continue protecting the wildlife that draws visitors from around the world—and that the world expects them to safeguard. Speaking at the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP30) in Brazil just days ago, Namibian President Netumbo Nandi-Ndaitwah stated that adapting key sectors vulnerable to climate change, such as agriculture and wildlife conservation, will require over N$ 100.8 billion (USD 5.8 billion). Only about ten percent of this, she noted, can come from domestic sources.

Knowing it will be left to face these challenges largely on its own, Namibia is likely to turn to the mining sector as an economic strategy to finance its development and adaptation efforts. Yet mining, in Namibia as elsewhere, risks worsening climate impacts through deforestation, water depletion, habitat loss, and greenhouse gas emissions.

The contrast with some European countries—such as the Czech Republic—could not be starker. This country continues to obstruct the European Union’s green policies, including measures to phase out coal, accelerate emissions reductions, and support electric mobility. The previous government, led by ODS’s Petr Fiala, sought to undermine EU climate targets, weaken the emissions trading system, and discontinue support for renewable energy sources. The emerging new government is set to deepen this obstructionist, anti-environmental posture. Two of its coalition partners openly reject the EU Green Deal and the goal of carbon neutrality, support the continued operation of coal power plants, and oppose any form of climate taxation or regulation.

This is climate injustice. While a long-time beneficiary of industrialization uses its power to guard its privileges and slow the collective effort, a country that did not cause the climate crisis struggles to find the means to adapt and to protect the world’s natural heritage.

The author is a political scientist currently based at Friedrich Schiller University in Jena. Her research focuses on international political theory, international law, and global justice.

The text was produced with the support of the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, Representation in the Slovak Republic.

I made a mistake on Saturday morning when I logged into my healthcare insurance portal to check my new premium for January.

I expected my rate to rise somewhat due to healthcare inflation, but I was entirely unprepared for what I discovered: my monthly insurance premium would jump from $591 to $961, a staggering 63 percent increase. In any honest accounting, that’s thievery. What infuriates me most is that U.S. political elites always manage to find resources to bomb others around the world, yet they have never delivered universal healthcare where everybody is in and nobody is out. Instead, the healthcare robber barons who purchase our Congress every election cycle ensure that ordinary Americans must ration healthcare, skipping doctor’s visits and postponing preventive care until medical situations often become critical.

The Hidden Costs of American Insurance

Monthly insurance premiums are only part of what Americans pay for healthcare. A visit to my primary care physician (which often means seeing his assistant rather than the physician himself) costs $40. A specialist visit runs $80. The cost of the actual treatment or exam isn’t included; that’s just the co-pay that gets your foot in the door. My insurance doesn’t begin covering healthcare expenses until I have spent $5,900 annually, a threshold known as the deductible. While lower deductibles seem attractive, they simply mean higher monthly premiums. Yet even after paying my deductible, I remain responsible for 40 percent of all healthcare charges that providers bill to the insurance company, a burden known as coinsurance.

Americans pay a larger share of their national income on healthcare than residents of any other developed nation. The current system is fragmented: government programs like Medicare and Medicaid serve specific demographic groups, employer-based insurance covers workers, and the Affordable Care Act created marketplaces where individuals can purchase coverage—with subsidies for those who qualify. However, employer-based insurance, while still the most common coverage source for nonelderly Americans, has declined steadily over the past two decades, both in terms of employers offering plans and the percentage of individuals covered.

The Illusion of Affordability

As a self-employed consultant, I purchase my healthcare through the Affordable Care Act marketplace. Despite its name, there is nothing affordable about it. During the pandemic, Democrats temporarily enhanced subsidies, allowing more people to maintain affordable coverage, but they built in a sunset provision. Those subsidies are now expiring, with Republicans in Congress unwilling to extend them.

Why are my rates skyrocketing when I have never qualified for any subsidies? The answer reveals the fundamental problem: in the United States, healthcare is not a right. It is a commodity within a system deliberately financialized to maximize shareholder dividends. By design, this system is saturated with fraud, lack of transparency, complexity, and waste.

Insurance companies are preemptively raising monthly premiums for all customers, including those who never received subsidies, because they anticipate that subsidy expirations will prompt generally healthy people to abandon insurance entirely when they see their new rates. The companies understand that their remaining pool of insured individuals will be sicker and more expensive to cover. But we would be naive to think that the insurance sector, in their new pricing policy, is only accounting for its expected increased costs, and that it is not also taking this opportunity to “improve” their profit margin. Their objective is cynical and clear: collect as much revenue as possible while denying as many claims as they can justify.

Healthcare Insurance as a Fundamentally Flawed System

When examined carefully, healthcare insurance is a massive scam. Healthcare should be understood as a service that every person will need from birth until death—not as a contingency we hope never occurs. Even in that context, solidarity should never be commodified. Healthcare insurance provides absolutely no value; it merely redistributes funds while siphoning a substantial portion to investors. What we need, in the United States and everywhere, is a single-payer system where everyone contributes according to their means and receives care according to their needs, with no additional out-of-pocket expenses.

But insurance is only part of the problem. Unregulated drug pricing represents another systemic rot. When I recently contracted COVID-19 for the first time in late August, my physician’s assistant prescribed Paxlovid, a medication proven to reduce hospitalization risk, shorten illness duration, and protect vulnerable populations from severe disease. He also delivered unexpected news: commercial insurance does not cover Paxlovid, and I should go to find a manufacturer discount card on their website.

When I called my pharmacy, they confirmed the reality: my soon-to-be $1,000-per-month insurance would not pay for this treatment. My out-of-pocket cost would be $1,400. After struggling to locate the correct discount card, my pharmacist informed me my copay would be $10. You need not be a healthcare policy expert to recognize the absurdity: the same medication costs either $1,400 or $10 depending on whether you navigate the pharmaceutical company’s website successfully.

A System in Crisis with Lessons for the Rest of the World

The failures extend far beyond insurance and drug pricing. Even privileged populations in the United States have health outcomes that fall below the average for comparable developed nations. While medical bankruptcies are virtually nonexistent in Europe, two-thirds of all bankruptcies in the United States involve medical bills.

I am sharing my experience because I see a deeply troubling erosion of universal healthcare in Slovakia. Market deregulation is advancing commodification and financialization across the Slovak healthcare sector. In the United States, healthcare has become a commodity increasingly out of reach for ordinary people. The system actively incentivizes individuals to forgo or delay necessary care. Let my story serve as a warning for Slovakia and all nations tempted to follow the American path.

The author is the founder of the Catch Fire Movement, a political consultant, and a former member of the Flagstaff City Council.

In Freedom House rankings, North Korea is listed among the “worst of the worst” in terms of political rights and civil liberties. In the sphere of greenhouse gas emissions, the United States occupies a similarly dismal position. In 2023, it released roughly 4.8 billion metric tons of CO₂, making it the world’s second-largest emitter after China. In cumulative terms since the Industrial Revolution, the U.S. alone accounts for about a quarter of all global CO₂ emissions—the single largest national share.

This historical ‘leadership’ should mean one thing—the United States should be the engine of decarbonization, the driver of green transformation, and the powerhouse of international climate policy. Instead, its current president performs one of the most consequential acts of climate denialism in the world.

During his first term, Trump mocked climate science as a Chinese hoax, ridiculed global warming during cold spells, suggested that wind turbines cause cancer, and denied that climate change poses security risks. His administration withdrew from the Paris Agreement, rolled back more than a hundred environmental protections, and filled key regulatory agencies with fossil fuel lobbyists.

Trump’s second term has been far more radical. Within hours of returning to office in January 2025, he withdrew from the Paris Agreement for the second time and pulled the U.S. out of the UN Loss and Damage Fund, the central mechanism meant to help vulnerable countries cope with the devastation caused by climate change. He rescinded National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) review requirements, eliminated climate-monitoring satellites, froze federal support for electric vehicle infrastructure, canceled billions of dollars in EPA climate grants, and imposed automatic sunset clauses on environmental regulations to speed fossil fuel expansion.

These steps are not mere policy adjustments but acts of institutional vandalism—the deliberate destruction of an institutional framework painstakingly built to serve the public interest. Within the span of just a few weeks, Trump dismantled the foundations of climate governance, effectively halting the domestic process of decarbonization and withdrawing the United States from global climate leadership.

Trumps, Thiels, and Their Clones

Trump is the most prominent face of climate denialism. It is an attitude that rejects, downplays, or distorts the reality and risks of climate change. Denialists variously claim that the science is uncertain or inconclusive, that climate change is not primarily driven by human activity, that its risks are exaggerated or nonexistent, and that policy responses are unnecessary and harmful.

Trump is far from alone in this. The Republican Party has cultivated climate denial for decades, its leading figures openly dismissing the scientific consensus, obstructing regulation, and championing the expansion of oil, coal, and gas. The Koch brothers—billionaire industrialists and longtime GOP mega-donors—have poured hundreds of millions into lobbying, think tanks, and campaigns designed to undermine climate science and block regulation. Trump’s key financial backer, Peter Thiel, proclaimed on the popular Joe Rogan Experience podcast that climate scientists are “bluffing” and “exaggerating” and dismissed climate policies as misguided regulatory overreach, advocating instead for technological fixes.

This ecosystem is not uniquely American. Similar networks of denialism thrive across Europe. In Germany, the far-right AfD (now polling near the top nationwide) has become the central political vehicle for climate denial. Its leaders reject scientific consensus, question human responsibility for warming, and depict climate policies as elitist and economically ruinous. They openly call for Germany to exit the Paris Agreement, halt the phase-out of coal, and reverse the transition to renewable energy.

The Czech Republic, too, has been fertile ground for climate denialism. Former president Václav Klaus does not miss an opportunity to rail against what he calls the “fraud” and “hysteria” of global warming, branding EU climate policy as a new form of “totalitarianism.” The party he founded, ODS, echoes this rhetoric, undermining the European Green Deal and other efforts to mitigate climate change. Billionaire coal tycoon Daniel Křetínský, Europe’s largest coal producer and one of its biggest emitters, regularly portrays climate policies as ideological and dangerous. Another Czech coal magnate, Pavel Tykač, recently urged “national disobedience” against EU climate laws, insisting that fossil fuel infrastructure must be preserved for our grandsons.

The Machinery of Doubt

Climate denialism is intellectually unfounded. It runs against the grain of overwhelming scientific evidence and consensus regarding the causes, consequences, and urgency of climate change. The reality of anthropogenic climate change has been established through vast scientific research and IPCC reports. Denial cannot be excused by the lack of access to information: the knowledge base on the causes, dynamics, and dangers of climate change is vast, publicly available, and widely disseminated through reports, books, and media.

Denialism does not represent a legitimate alternative perspective but rather an ideologically and economically motivated distortion of reality. As such, it is not merely reactionary or uninformed—it is manipulative, irresponsible, and reckless. It does not arise in a vacuum but takes shape within specific ideological frameworks and material interests that provide its scaffolding.

The first strand is tied to the economic interests of the fossil fuel industry. Coal, oil, and gas companies seek to maintain enormous profits from the extraction and consumption of fossil fuels and secure the shareholder value of their companies. Decarbonization climate policy—pricing emissions, phasing out fossil fuels, and investing in renewable alternatives—threatens this business model. To stall the move towards decarbonization, the companies promote narratives of scientific uncertainty, economic doom, and the supposed indispensability of fossil fuels for growth and prosperity. Their strategies are not subtle: lobbying governments, funding pseudoscience, and spreading disinformation. ExxonMobil is a well-known example: despite knowing internally about the dangers of greenhouse gas emissions since the 1970s, it funded think tanks and campaigns designed to cast doubt on climate models and delay regulation. Czech energy magnates Daniel Křetínský and Pavel Tykač frequently deploy the rhetoric of economic ruin to attack renewable energy transitions. Their warnings that climate policy is ideological and destructive are not analytical judgments but calculated defenses of their coal extraction and fossil fuel-based power businesses.

The second strand is rooted in neoliberal and libertarian ideologies that reject state regulation, international coordination, or any form of collective restraint on markets. In this view, unregulated freedom, competition, and individual choice are presented as the only legitimate solutions to social problems, including climate change. What these arguments target most fiercely are government interventions—such as carbon taxes, emissions caps, regulated trading schemes, and environmental protection rules. While dismissing these regulations as economically destructive and politically illegitimate, neoliberal denialism insists that voluntary corporate commitments or consumer choices are sufficient and that future technological innovation will provide solutions. At its core lies an ideological dogmatism: the belief that markets, left free, will always outperform regulatory interventions in the name of public interest. This position ignores that climate change is a market failure driven by unpriced externalities (emissions, warming) that primarily affect those who did not produce them, such as future generations, negatively.

A third and increasingly influential form of denialism arises from right-wing populism. This ideology mobilizes resentment against elites, migrants, minorities, and progressive social causes, while appealing to notions of tradition, common sense, national sovereignty, and the interests of “ordinary people.” In this framework, climate science and green policies are portrayed as part of an elitist conspiracy designed to suppress and impoverish the majority. International institutions such as the UN, the EU, or the Paris Agreement are framed as illegitimate impositions on national sovereignty and the livelihoods of workers, farmers, or motorists. Populist strategies combine conspiracy narratives (“climate change is exaggerated by globalists”), nationalist slogans (“our country first”), and delegitimize regulations as undemocratic or “totalitarian”. They frame decarbonization as ideological, bureaucratic, and green totality, using anti-climate rhetoric to fortify cultural identity and redefine democracy as the rule of the majority unconstrained by minorities, experts, and elites.

Denialism Blocks Climate Justice

Climate denialism is politically dishonest and corrosive – its purpose is not to produce truth or a serious solution to the problem of climate change but to sow doubt, distrust, block cooperation, and delay reform. Delaying reforms towards a carbon-neutral future is irresponsible, harmful, and unjust.

In my previous post, I argued that accepting the facts of climate change is both a democratic civic duty and an epistemic responsibility to accept knowledge grounded in evidence, reason, and expertise that we cannot generate on our own. These ethical imperatives are especially urgent in contexts where refusal has direct, harmful consequences for others. Climate change is precisely such a case. To deny it and to obstruct institutions designed to mitigate it are not inconsequential personal choices; it is an active boycott of solutions to a problem that has concrete and measurable costs for real people.

In the context of Trump’s retreat from the UN Loss and Damage fund, we can, for example, mention Pakistan, which has been this Fund’s staunch supporter. Pakistan emits only about 0.9% of global CO₂ annually and has contributed less than 0.4% of cumulative emissions since the Industrial Revolution. Despite its negligible responsibility, it is among the most climate-vulnerable countries in the world, facing intensifying floods, glacial melt, and extreme heat. In 2022, catastrophic floods caused by monsoon rains intensified by climate change displaced more than 20 million people and caused damages exceeding US$30 billion.

There are many similar examples—small island states like Tuvalu, Kiribati, and the Maldives are threatened by rising sea levels, erosion, and soil contamination by salt water, sub-Saharan African countries are threatened by desertification, drought, and heat, and countries such as Mozambique and the Philippines now face the risk of super cyclones and typhoons. Refusing to address global warming and take responsibility for its impacts, especially on those who did not cause climate change, is a typical example of global injustice. Unfortunately, Trumps, Thiels, and their clones couldn’t care less about Pakistanis and Maldivians. But they also couldn’t care less about their own descendants, for whom every year of boycotting climate action means severe economic, political, and security risks.

The author is a political scientist currently based at Friedrich Schiller University in Jena. Her research focuses on international political theory, international law, and global justice.

The text was produced with the support of the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, Representation in the Slovak Republic.

The flotilla made global news last week when they were detained by the Israeli Navy in international waters in the Eastern Mediterranean. Among them were Greta Thunberg, Slovak Peter Švestka and Kata Ite, a Finn who had lived in Bratislava for several years. Reports had come through on the day before they started releasing prisoners that Thunberg had been given especially rough treatment. 

I rocked up and met someone from Včera bolo neskoro (Yesterday was already too late), a local activist group. We went to and fro from one end of the airport to the other, following crowds of journalists. We watched the plane touchdown then ran to the other end to the General Aviation Terminal (the VIP entrance). We saw the plane sitting on the tarmac and a mass of police cars surrounding it. At the fence I spoke to a few other local activists from the organisation Front.

I was feeling somewhat jealous of all the other journalists with their awesome cameras and microphones, and myself there armed only with my eyes, ears and my Honor 200 Lite budget smartphone. My own news org, The Slovak Spectator (which shares a publisher with SME) doesn’t quite have the budget to send me with a cameraman.

No phones, money, shower or insulin

We piled into the GAT to meet the first two people through the gate – Miriam from Amsterdam and a man who I immediately recognised as podcaster and journalist Greg J. Stoker. Both of them – along with the other detainees – were clothed in simple prison garb – a white t-shirt, too-small sweatpants and flip-flops.

I have been following Greg for about a year now. He’s a former US Marine and sharp as a tack. He elucidates his points with an ease and clarity that I can only hope to ape in my own endeavours. His willingness to name and break down and describe in detail the workings of American neo-colonialism and imperialism are inspiring. None of the other journalists knew who he was.

I called out “Greg!” and asked him for an interview. His account laid bare their capture and conditions in Ketziot prison:

“Over the past five days, we were kidnapped in international waters, taken to a terrorist detention camp in the middle of the Negev Desert. No one knew where we were. All our medications were confiscated, clothes, personal effects. The only thing we have left to our name is passports and the clothes we were given in detention.”

Stoker said that they had had no contact with his embassy and described the process as “extralegal”:

“Our consulates weren’t informed where we are until yesterday, which was Sunday. We were just randomly put on a flight to Slovakia and brought to Bratislava. Our embassies don’t know we’re here. I’m effectively a stateless citizens right now. We’re just trying to figure it out. I think the Israeli government wanted us out before Tuesday for obvious messaging reasons that we don’t need to go into right now. […] They stole all our personal effects, so we’re without phones, money, or ability to contact anybody.”

Their personal hygiene had been affected, as no showers were made available to them over the five days of their detention. Food and water were scarce, and sleep was “challenging” as “raid squads” entered their room every few hours. In his party there were 13 people in a cell equipped for 8 people. Some members went on hunger strike, as insulin was being denied to diabetic people.

“I think one of our favourite quotes was, “We don’t have doctors for animals.” We complained to our consulates about the lack of medicine. Our consulates said there’s nothing we can do, so again, one of the more egregious things was the withholding of medication from people with pre-established medical conditions.”

Then arrived the man of the hour, Peter Švestka. The main reason Slovak media was there, he was mobbed immediately and debriefed. I am not fantastic in Slovak and couldn’t hear what he was saying. So I settled with getting some shaky video of him speaking to the press. Afterwards, he went and sat with his parents who had come to meet him. Later he emphasized that he wasn’t important. Gaza was, and that they were all just tools to show people about the genocide going on there.

They beat me up because I didn’t want to take off my hijab

Amidst all this, there were six Dutch citizens, greeted at the airport by the Dutch ambassador to Slovakia. I didn’t get all of their names, but I spoke briefly with Miriam from Amsterdam. Her experience echoed the chaos and violence others described:

“I think we had quite an intense experience, but we all know that we had a light version of what they go through every day, but it was still very different from what we’re used to.”

“We were all in the terrorist prison based in Israel,” she said. “We were all taken in the same night and then they brought us to port. They searched us, they beat some people up, and then they took us in buses, blindfolded, to the prison.”

Inside the facility, she said conditions were grim: “We didn’t get water, people were on a hunger strike, there were no hospital medicines, we didn’t get to speak to a lawyer. And well, this is the light version, so it’s probably worse.”

Miriam confirmed that she had briefly met the Dutch ambassador while still in detention but that the transfer to Slovakia came without warning. “We were put on a flight, we didn’t know where we were going,” she said. “We didn’t expect if there was someone waiting for us or not. But the Slovakian comrades gave us some information.”

Despite the ordeal, she expressed relief at being received by supporters upon arrival. “It’s been quite some time, so it’s nice to have people around you,” she said. “And there was a Palestinian person, they are the people that were doing this first, so that was great.”

She also described being assaulted for refusing to remove her hijab. “They took my hijab off. They beat me up because I didn’t want to,” she said. “Then I said I’m not going out without, so I took a t-shirt and I used it.”

Her message after release was clear and defiant: “It’s power to the people, and it will always be power to the people. This is our moment. We did this not for ourselves but for Palestine, and we need all of us to speak up, to pressure our governments because the governments are complicit. Make sure you do anything in your power to break this siege, because it’s now or never.”

Members of the activist group Včera bolo neskoro were on hand to provide support to the detainees. They arranged clothing, coffee, food and cigarettes, and eventually places to stay overnight. Watching them bond and render assistance was an object lesson in solidarity, aid and camaraderie. 

The interviews I recorded with Stoker and Miriam have gone viral overnight, drawing attention from the likes of Eurythmics singer Annie Lennox and thousands of others. The message is clear: all eyes on Gaza, and a free Palestine.

Author is a freelance journalist from Ireland, residing in Slovakia. He is a teacher, comedian and publican.

Text je súčasťou projektu PERSPECTIVES – novej značky pre nezávislú, konštruktívnu a multiperspektívnu žurnalistiku. Projekt je financovaný Európskou úniou. Vyjadrené názory a postoje sú názormi a vyhláseniami autora(-ov) a nemusia nevyhnutne odrážať názory a stanoviská Európskej únie alebo Európskej výkonnej agentúry pre vzdelávanie a kultúru (EACEA). Európska únia ani EACEA za ne nepreberajú žiadnu zodpovednosť.

Shortly after Donald Trump was elected president in 2016, I attended a panel on fascism at Northern Arizona University, gathering scholars from diverse disciplines. Members of the local Turning Point USA chapter were present, recording both panelists and attendees. Afterwards, they published footage and an article via Campus Reform, a conservative outlet closely aligned with Turning Point USA. This exposure led to harassment and death threats directed at panel faculty—a chilling glimpse into the weaponization of right-wing outrage.

Fast forward: On Wednesday, September 10, Charlie Kirk—founder of Turning Point USA and one of the nation’s most influential far-right organizers—was shot and killed while addressing questions on transgender rights and gun violence at Utah Valley University. No suspect has yet been identified; investigations remain underway.

Kirk’s career was defined by sharp attacks on marginalized communities. He was a prominent critic of gay and transgender rights, a climate change denialist, and an outspoken opponent of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. He trafficked in antisemitic conspiracies alleging that Jews sought to “replace” white Americans through immigration, and he belittled Black women as intellectually inferior, only legitimized by affirmative action. Kirk was also an unwavering supporter of Israeli militarism against Palestinians.

Turning Point USA, under his leadership, maintained a „Professor Watchlist“ targeting women, Black, and queer scholars challenging white supremacy, Christian nationalism, and gun culture. The Watchlist functioned not as a mere database, but as an instrument of harassment—threatening jobs, inviting doxxing and death threats, and fostering a climate of professional intimidation. Kirk profited from this engineered culture of contempt and violence.

Kirk’s influence extended well beyond campus activism. As a close Trump ally, he played a leading role in mobilizing grassroots conservative support for Trump’s successful 2024 campaign. In the immediate aftermath of Kirk’s death, Trump ordered flags at public buildings nationwide flown at half-staff, “as a mark of respect” to Kirk’s memory. He then blamed the “radical left” for the killing, despite the lack of any concrete evidence or identified suspect—further deepening political polarization. For Trump and for those shaped by Kirk’s rhetoric, opposition is synonymous with extremism, and every critic becomes an alleged enemy.

Yet the most devastating forms of political violence are often hidden from headlines, affecting millions whose suffering rarely reaches public attention. Far beyond the spectacle of an assassination or televised tragedy, true political violence manifests in silent policies that cost lives: millions dying prematurely because of inadequate healthcare or generational poverty, immigrants perishing in ICE detention centers, communities shattered by famine, and global acts of genocide enabled or overlooked by powerful governments. The victims of these injustices are numerous and mostly anonymous, their deaths the direct outcome of legislative decisions, budget cuts, and intentionally cruel systems. The destructive impact of these policies far exceeds the violence inflicted on any single prominent figure, revealing the deadly consequences of politics that treat entire populations as disposable.

This moment invites introspection. Charlie Kirk was not simply a figure we “disagreed with,” to be countered by a better op-ed or firmer letter. He was a product and architect of a billionaire-funded far-right movement that is actively rolling back civil rights, targeting reproductive and transgender healthcare, dispatching armed forces to U.S. cities, and systematically eroding democratic safeguards. These actions cannot be dismissed as politics as usual—they are attempts to consolidate authoritarian power.

Kirk’s assassination—regardless of motive—underscores a growing fear across the political spectrum: that America teeters on the brink of renewed civic violence, echoing the national trauma of the 1960s when assassinations fractured the fabric of democracy. Today, right-wing calls for vengeance, paired with consolidated political power and a weak resistance from labor, Democrats, and grassroots movements, threaten an even more rapid descent into authoritarianism.

In times like these, it’s vital to resist the normalization of this violence and the notion that democratic decline is inevitable. The stakes are existential, and the question remains whether citizens and institutions will confront the far-right machinery Kirk helped build—or allow the arc of American history to bend toward repression. 

The author is the founder of the Catch Fire Movement, a political consultant, and a former member of the Flagstaff City Council.