Australia's government has proposed a large additional investment in renewable generation, and batteries.

This will be a big step forward provided Australia takes advantage of it to reduces its extraction and use of fossil fuels.

It makes logical sense to put heavy taxes on using private jets, and on flying in expensive (large) seats.

However, Piketty's suggestion makes economic sense, but it is unjust because it requires total surveillance of everyone's carbon emissions. Taxes are compatible with a free society; higher tax rates for the wealthy are also compatible. But total surveillance destroys freedom.

The UK is trying to sell its democracy for a tiny economic boost, by signing up to the Trance-Pacific Partnership. This is a business-supremacy treaty that contains an ISDS clause that allows businesses to demand "compensation" over any laws or policies that arguably cause the to have lower profits than they might have had. The article reports that the economic boost is likely to be even tinier than was previously forecast, but that side issue is nothing compared to the suffering and injustice that handing foreign businesses increased power over the country will cause. When such clauses block the measures needed to cut down greenhouse emissions, as in the case of the Energy Charter Treaty, they are likely to cause megadeaths or even gigadeaths. A war could easily be less deadly than obeying the treaty, so threatening war against any countries that stand in the way of canceling the treaty could be the moral choice.

In addition to the list of 15,000 Palestinians known to have been killed by Israel's attacks, there is another list of 6,000 Palestinians who were buried under rubble of collapsed buildings. They were almost certainly killed by that, but that is not proof, so they are usually not included in the "number of those killed".

The report that northern Gaza has been reduced to rubble, that there is nothing to return to there except the possibility of digging up corpses of relatives, suggests that the Israeli government intended to achieve permanent ethnic cleansing by demolishing all structures so there is no way for a million people to live there even with aid.

Will it continue by doing the same to southern Gaza? Is this a plan to drive the whole population of Gaza into Egypt as re-refugees?

Douglas Rushkoff: Today's richest billionaires are not richer than their counterparts of 120 years ago, but they think of themselves as above civil society, not part of it.

They believe that *with enough money, one can escape the harms created by earning money in that way. … with enough genius and technology, they can rise above the plane of mere mortals&ellip;*