Michael Sappir

In this piece for Local Call I tackle conscious consumption — the most prominent approach to combating climate change in recent years. I highlight its severe limitations as well as the anti-democratic nature of allowing influence only to those with money to spare.

In this piece for Local Call, I review “green” tendencies in the far-right and other right-wing responses to the climate crisis. However, I argue, the right is already profiting from the destabilization of the climate in the global south by spreading fear of migrants and implementing essentially eco-fascist policies intended to keep the climate crisis from crossing borders in the global north. Meanwhile, the only realistic path to avert total climate catastrophe is the Left’s “Green New Deal” approach, unfairly maligned as “extreme” by the mega-rich who would apparently prefer eco-fascism to such equalizing measures.

In this piece for Local Call, I argue that while despair is quite a reasonable response to the current climate crisis impasse, the future is yet unwritten and the incredible climate movements rising rapidly in the past year give good reason for hope – and practical ways to help make change.

The myth of human overpopulation — that there is some hard limit to the population human society can sustain and we are near it if not past it — is over 3,500 years old but never seems to die. Some in the climate movement are giving it new life even now. But the reality is that every past prediction of overpopulation has turned out to be wrong, that trying to control the population always harms impoverished people and people of color first, and that no matter how quickly you shrink humanity and at what moral cost, so long as the economic system is based on infinite growth, you will run into ecological limits sooner or later. This piece draws heavily on several sources in English which I would recommend:

In this report for Local Call, I reviewed the outlines for climate policy delineated by the 2018 IPCC report and the approach to climate policy put forward by the various parties running in Israel’s September 2019 elections. I found that most parties do not take this issue seriously, and even the few that do, fall short of meeting the IPCC report’s emissions targets.

In this piece for Local Call I cover the political background of the increase in forest fires in the Amazon this summer, as well as the connection to animal agriculture and indigenous rights.