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Some climate scientists think that calling climate change an existential threat is misleading. “I don’t think it’s an existential threat to humanity or ‘life on Earth,’” Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, told Grist. “There’s this popular notion that there’s some level of warming after which the warming becomes self-sustaining, which is actually not our understanding as physical scientists of how the climate system works.”

Scientists have long known that climate change may have “tipping points,” levels of warming at which certain parts of the climate system, like ice sheets or coral reefs, will not be able to recover. Though it’s true that passing any of these tipping points would mean a substantial increase in warming, as far as scientists know, none of them will create a situation in which the planet must keep warming forever. (Put another way, Earth isn’t Venus — which famously had a greenhouse effect so strong that it evaporated the planet’s oceans.)

The fourth consultation looked towards the future, while accelerating action to address some of today’s existential challenges. We considered the threat from a changing climate and discussed how better to protect our planet. The climate emergency and unchecked environmental degradation represent an existential threat to the world as we know it.

Just last week, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued an alarming report that showed climate impacts are already devastating every region of the world, but particularly developing countries and small island States. The session considered the irreversible impacts of the climate crisis, which could render some parts of the earth uninhabitable. We cannot allow the territories of some Member States of the United Nations to be diminished or even disappear because of rising sea levels.

College majors come in two flavors: “hard science” and “soft science.” “Hard” science includes the fields of mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, genetics, and, yes, climatology (also called “atmospheric science”). “Soft” science consists of everything else: e.g., literature, the humanities, art, theology, psychology, economics, sociology, politics (also called “political science”), and the emerging field of study known as “environmental science and policy.”

Hard science relies on quantitative data; soft science deals in qualitative opinions. By repetitive experimental findings, the former can be proven (truth, fact). The latter reflects opinions (beliefs, fiction), but nothing is proven with hard data—with the qualification that many questions in psychology, economics, and other social sciences (e.g., measurements of inflation, population demographics, the effects of voting rules on voting behavior) are often studied using statistical methods, including Bayesian analysis and random forest regression.

Varying forms of carbon pricing have been aggressively promoted by advocates in every international climate deliberation from Kyoto to Paris. Much of the voluminous academic literature on climate change has assumed that its widespread adoption was inevitable. However, compelling ideas from economics do not necessarily suspend the laws of politics. Carbon pricing presumes that politicians are willing and able to make the case for sustained increases in the price of commodities that are familiar and essential in everyday life. It further assumes that the public will rally to the cause.

In practice, carbon pricing adoption remains one of the heaviest political lifts anywhere in the world. Since the 1997 Kyoto agreement, the rate of non-symbolic carbon price adoption has been rather modest. And carbon taxes and cap-and-trade are among the most likely climate policies to be reversed after they have been launched.

So in the past few years, advocates have proposed a twist meant to bypass those obstacles and make an uncomfortable idea more acceptable, even popular. Under this new scheme, known as a revenue-neutral carbon price, the government taxes every ton of carbon pollution but, instead of using that money, simply returns it to taxpayers as a payment. In theory, this helps voters see not only the costs (higher prices) but also the benefits (a big juicy check).

In America, this “tax and dividend” idea has become fashionable as a nonideological, theoretically bipartisan salve to climate change, a way to tax carbon without growing the size of the government. It is championed by the Climate Leadership Council, the Citizens Climate Lobby, and … nearly zero sitting Republican politicians (alas). But abroad, some countries have actually gone and implemented the policy. And “there are a good number of hypothetical scenarios that show the idea has some promise,” Matto Mildenberger, a political-science professor at UC Santa Barbara, told me. This week, a team of researchers, including Mildenberger, published the first major study of whether a revenue-neutral carbon price actually increases support for climate policy. The results weren’t as good as the theory.

If Hawai‘i were to adopt a carbon tax at the level of the 2021 federal SCC, Hawai‘i’s cumulative emissions would decline by 10% over twenty years, over and above reductions from other policies already in place. In the absence of a national approach to address the global climate crisis, such state programmes could prove to be valuable demonstration projects that would help catalyze further climate action. This is important because our results strongly suggest that the goal of deep decarbonization is unlikely to be realized solely by the imposition of a carbon tax set at the SCC price by a state government. However, if more states adopt a carbon tax, then the likelihood increases that regional cooperation will emerge and facilitate the adoption of a common carbon price.15 Thus, state and regional actions to enact carbon pricing could pave the way to the adoption of a national programme.

Public support for pricing carbon is highly dependent on how the revenue is used. By far the most popular use – by a ratio of 3 to 1 – is returning the proceeds directly to all citizens in the form of dividends.1 The reason for this popular appeal is obvious: over two-thirds of American households would be financial winners under a carbon dividends plan. Recent polling reveals that a majority of Americans favor a carbon dividends plan, including support by a 3 to 1 margin among Republican voters.2 Among 18-35-year-olds – the cohort that will determine the future of any party – support reaches 4 to 1. No other approach to carbon pricing comes close to this level of popular support.

The Alaska Permanent Fund Dividend illustrates the enduring popularity of dividends. Enacted in 1982 by a Republican Governor in a Republican state, it provides over $1,000 per year to each state resident. This program has consistently proven popular across all income groups, turning it into a “third rail” that has withstood all efforts to tamper with it. The dividend is particularly popular among the 72% of Alaskans who make less than $50,000 per year. But even Alaskans making more than $100,000 per year prefer the dividend to income tax cuts.3 The durability and popularity of the Alaska dividend provides an important lesson for carbon fee advocates.

In Washington state, a circulating petition might be the key to both permanently cutting down on the state’s carbon footprint and also reforming what is widely considered one of the nation’s most regressive tax systems. If enough signatures are secured, the petition will allow the United States’ first-ever carbon tax a spot on the ballot. Carbon Washington is a grassroots carbon tax campaign founded by environmental economist and stand-up comedian Yoram Bauman. The idea of a carbon tax is pretty simple: It’s a form of carbon pricing that aims to drive greenhouse gas emissions down by requiring people to pay a tax or a fee on either the carbon they emit or the fossil fuels they purchase, and then either returning the revenue to the public or using it for new government programs (Washington state would do the former). Carbon Washington’s initiative proposes a starting fee of $15 per ton of carbon, which would gradually increase to a cap of $100 per ton over the next 40 years — the highest price-per-ton of any carbon pricing scheme introduced so far. “I think it’s a relatively new idea for a lot of people,” said Bauman. “When you talk about climate change, they think they’re going to have to spend money on solar panels or stuff like that.” But the idea is catching on. Washington requires citizens’ initiatives to raise 246,372 signatures via petition to qualify for the ballot. So far, Carbon Washington has raised 304,000 signatures, according to Bauman, and is hoping to reach 330,00 before it submits the petition at the end of the year to have a buffer of about 25 percent of the needed number of signers. “Once we qualify, it goes to the legislature in January, and the legislature essentially has two choices,” Bauman said. “Pass it and it goes to law, or it goes on the ballot in 2016.” Washington state isn’t the only one. Citizens and legislators in a handful of other states around the country, including Massachusetts, Vermont, Rhode Island and Oregon, are in various stages of introducing similar proposals to their own state legislatures. Many are inspired by British Columbia’s carbon tax, which was introduced in 2008 and is widely considered by economists a prime example of a successful carbon pricing scheme. Currently the only carbon tax in North America, the tax — which is revenue neutral, meaning funds are returned to the public rather than kept as revenue by the state (in this case, in the form of other tax breaks) — charges $30 per ton of carbon dioxide equivalent emissions and has so far reduced fuel consumption by more than 16 percent without harming the Canadian province’s economy. “I think the experience from BC shows that a climate policy like this, a smart well-designed policy, can work,” Bauman said. But Massachusetts may give Washington state a run for its money. For their part, advocates in Massachusetts are also set on becoming the first state in the country to successfully implement a carbon tax, said Zaurie Zimmerman, president of Zaurie Zimmerman Associates Inc., board member for Climate XChange and co-chair of Business Leaders for Climate Action. Rather than pushing a citizen’s initiative, interested residents, businesses and civic organization have formed a coalition called the Massachusetts Campaign for a Clean Energy Future and rallied behind a bill introduced earlier this year by state Sen. Michael Barrett, a Democrat.

Conclusion: A Uniform Division of Carbon for Tax Purposes Act?

Once one state made substantial progress with the base for a carbon tax, other states could copy the model and, ideally, coordinate their tax. There are some partial models for this. Many taxes, such as the sales tax and the corporate income tax, began with specific states taking the lead. And under federal pressure, the states eventually coordinated their corporate income taxes — at least somewhat. Also, the sales tax represents a major tax base that the states exploit and the federal government does not — in dramatic contrast to any other federal system we are aware of. Thus, the states adopting and coordinating a new and significant tax base would hardly be unprecedented and would not be, we believe, too difficult. Further, as we explained at the outset, such actions by the states can have significant impact.

California’s GHG pricing regime offers a rare opportunity to investigate how a BCA is working in practice. The experience to date highlights important tensions between GHG accounting accuracy, market efficiency, concerns about trade protectionism, and implementation complexity.

A simulation model calibrated to represent the western electricity market—and the most salient features of California’s GHG pricing regime—predicts that the differentiated border adjustment will be ineffective at mitigating emissions leakage regardless of the default GHG intensity chosen. The reason is that out-of-state zero-carbon resources can be preferentially dispatched to California, reducing California’s deemed GHG emissions without changing the system-wide carbon footprint. In practice, however, realized emissions outcomes appear to outperform this worst-case scenario. One interpretation is that the more nuanced compliance requirements, difficult to capture in a market simulation model, are mitigating emissions leakage. More generally, this policy experiment in progress helps elucidate the complexity of implementing a BCA when sources are substitutable and carbon intensity is heterogeneous

High oil and gas prices are giving an unappealing taste of what a global carbon price might be like.

Gas-pump prices reaching $5 a gallon are just the most visible example of the rising cost of using fossil fuels. The war in Ukraine and subsequent worries over shortages have had the knock-on effect of increasing the price of emissions, much like a global carbon price would. Such a tax on pollution has long been an economist’s dream, but the recent squeeze on consumer incomes highlights why it can also be a politician’s nightmare.

When the carbon tax is levied, the product prices of 28 sectors will all rise to varying degrees. Taxes on carbon dioxide result in higher prices and higher costs in energy-intensive sectors. The price rise will be transmitted to other sectors through input–output relationships between production sectors. Thus, it results in cost-driven inflation. With the increase in carbon tax rate from 10 CNY/ton to 200 CNY/ton, the prices of various sectors will also rise. When the carbon tax rate is T* = 200 CNY/ton, the average price of 28 sectors will rise by 2.524%. Among them, the sector of Production and Supply of Electric Power is greatly affected, with the price rising by 17.382%. The sector of Smelting and Pressing of Metals ranked in second place, with the price rising by 5.844%. The sector of Nonmetal Mineral Products ranked third, with the price rising by 5.546%. A total of 7 of the top 10 sectors whose price changes of products are greatly affected after carbon tax is levied are heavy industries in the secondary industry. It is mainly due to the fact that China’s current economy is in the stage of heavy chemical industry. Therefore, the levy of carbon tax has little impact on the prices of the primary industry and the tertiary industry.

The carbon tax leads to the rise in product prices in various sectors, because no matter whether it is levied on producers or consumers, the tax burden is ultimately shared by producers and consumers due to the tax burden shifting. After the carbon tax is levied, the price paid by consumers will be raised, and the production cost of producers will also be raised. Consequently, the increase in production costs will lead to cost-driven inflation, which results in the price rising of all the sectors to varying degrees.

Carbon taxes, and their functional equivalent disguised in the form of energy taxes, have faced political obstacles and serial failures to take effect ever since the debacle of the 1993 Clinton–Gore “BTU” tax. Now a bipartisan group of American lawmakers has proposed a “border carbon adjustment” tariff intended to reduce society’s use of hydrocarbons and usher in energy innovation. But carbon taxes have failed, so far, for good reason: they’re a bad idea and would do little to cut hydrocarbon use or stimulate productive innovations. And whether framed as a border adjustment or as the broad-based levy that Congress toyed with enacting three years ago, any carbon tax would be inflationary—meaning this latest proposal couldn’t come at a worse time.

It’s easy to ignore the benefits of cheap energy when, well, it’s cheap. Energy is needed for everything that is fabricated, grown, operated, or moved. Since hydrocarbons directly supply 84 percent of the world’s energy and are indirectly embodied in all the rest, the inflationary potential of any carbon tax is clear. In normal times, energy typically accounts for only about 10 percent of the cost of most products and services. But double the spending on energy, and the average overall final price tag for a product or service rises at inflationary levels. With today’s energy prices already doubled, or more, the consequences are apparent. Over half of wheat’s inflation, for example, is a direct result of higher prices for natural gas, the fuel needed to make fertilizer.

Second, the history of U.S. tariff policy raises serious concerns that a carbon tariff would not be administered in a sound and impartial manner. Instead, these tariffs would simply be a vehicle for rote protectionism. A prime example of such protectionism is the steel tariffs imposed or maintained under the Bush II, Trump, and Biden administrations, which had political motivations far exceeding any economic ones. At the same time, U.S. trade remedies (antidumping and countervailing duties (AD/​CVDs)) law utilizes a process to calculate dumping or subsidization of imports that “injures” domestic industry but can be “remedied” by imposing duties (tariffs). Similar calculations are likely to be used for carbon intensity. However, AD/​CVDs law is notorious for being strongly biased against imports and American consumers. Even worse, in reality, the law is used as a way to deliver protectionist rents to a handful of well‐​connected companies (including, again, steel).

Indeed, some already propose that the CVD law—the remedy for U.S. industry alleged to be injured by unfairly subsidized imports—could be used to impose carbon tariffs and thus avoid the need for new legislation. Doing so, however, would subject carbon tariffs to the same problems—regulatory capture, rent‐​seeking, etc.—that already afflict U.S. trade remedies proceedings, and worse, invite abuse in similar proceedings determining carbon tariffs. For example, one major problem with AD/CVDs law is the discretion they give to the government when data is missing: if the Commerce Department deems information provided by a foreign company during an investigation to be unreliable or insufficient during an AD/CVD investigation, the agency will use various methodologies to fill it in, inevitably resulting in import duties that unreasonably favor the U.S. companies who lobbied for relief. If Commerce followed similar procedures for carbon intensity, similarly biased results are sure to emerge. In other words, the U.S. government could easily make foreign businesses look like they emit more carbon or GHGs than they truly emit, resulting in high tariffs on foreign products in the name of climate change that really serves to protect American businesses from competition.

First and most obviously, a carbon tariff would impose significant new costs on American consumers, companies, and workers. For example, recent U.S. tariffs on more than $350 billion worth of imports have been found to cost Americans over $50 billion per year. The PROVE IT Act targets over $600 billion worth of imports, suggesting the cost of carbon tariffs could be even higher than the Trump‐​Biden tariffs. Import taxes hurt Americans by increasing prices, particularly those in the lowest income brackets, and U.S. companies’ competitiveness by raising their production costs or insulating protected firms from market competition. For example, President Trump’s imposition of tariffs on imported steel inflicted significant damage on steel‐​consuming U.S. companies (like nail manufacturers)—the new taxes cost their workers directly through layoffs and the companies became less competitive as they were forced to either share the costs with their customers by raising prices, reduce production, or decrease investment. As a result, the tariffs did little to “level the playing field,” instead the President surrendered home‐​field advantage and gave the edge to foreign competition, who faced no such taxes.

Truly global environmental norms are rare, emerging only when a clear danger exists or when they are consistent with the liberal order. They have universal or near-universal acceptance. Holdouts are to be expected, as with the anti-whaling norm, but writ large, a global environmental norm is one in which a broad consensus has emerged around the appropriate way to address an environmental problem. Unequal implementation is also common as these norms globalize. A global consensus on the dangers of leaded gasoline, for instance, did not prevent sales from rising in sub-Saharan Africa in the 1990s and early 2000s before a global phaseout occurred. These sales did not reflect, however, a challenge to the appropriateness of using leaded gas, but was a result of economic exploitation of unequal regulatory standards between the global North and global South. Importantly, the meaning and consequences of global environmental norms do not end up coopted or altered significantly in different locales as the norm spreads. The translocal politics of these norms, rather than fragmenting them, ends up supporting a relatively uniform understanding of what they mean and how they should be implemented. Examples of “taken-for-granted” global norms include environmental stewardship, sustainable development, anti-leaded gasoline, anti-CFCs, anti-whaling, and common but differentiated responsibilities. Environmental stewardship and sustainable development were both responses to the threat that capitalist enterprise could pose to the environment if left entirely unregulated and unmitigated. The 1992 Earth Summit led to what Bernstein (2001) calls “the compromise of liberal environmentalism,” in which states committed to environmental protection as long as it did not infringe on economic growth and development. This compromise has meant that, to succeed globally, environmental norms have tended to need conditions of weak industry opposition, high scientific certainty, easy commercial solutions, low consumer cost, and significant business opportunities. Norms that fit these criteria tend to serve the interests of wealthy countries in the global North, but there are exceptions. The common but differentiated responsibilities norm is one, emerging out of the global South to push advanced economies to consider the economic needs of developing countries when addressing environmental degradation arising primarily from the global North (Stalley, 2018). There are relatively few global environmental norms in part because the political economy of environmental problems is rarely conducive to strong support from the most powerful segments of industry, as eventually was the case with eliminating CFCs and leaded gasoline. The challenge is not just that many environmental ideas challenge the growth model, but that, even when this is not the case, there are often established industries that block reforms. Consider the “green energy revolution.” The advent of low-cost solar and wind energy makes a transition to green energy both technically and economically viable, without sacrificing growth. Yet such a transition has consequences for oil and gas firms, their workers, and for governments that rely on the sector for economic stability and growth. What could (and should) be a revolution has instead been a (too-) gradual transition. Many environmental ideas and norms by their very nature call for an end to (or restrictions on) certain economic activities. And they inevitably face an uphill battle to attain global norm status given the current paradigm of liberal environmentalism.

As I argued in Chapter 1, much of international theory is predicated upon an understanding of certain boundaries, both conceptual and practical. International theorists typically attempt to differentiate the international from the set of intra-state interactions. Here we have the reification of a particular image of the bounded nineteenth-century European sovereign, each master of its own territory, projected back and forward in time – an aspect of what R. B. J. Walker calls the discourse of eternity. The domestic condition of hierarchy is contrasted with an international ahistorical condition of anarchy between states. Lately, there is an opposing attempt in international theory to theorize the hierarchical stratification of the international system. This attempt includes aspects of the English School and social constructivism, but especially observed in the work of David Lake or John Ikenberry. Each of these approaches emphasizes the specific diffusion of social norms or the emergence of authority relationships that call into question the pristine construction of the hierarchy/anarchy dichotomy so prevalent in realist/neorealist theories. Nonetheless, these approaches typically remain Western-centric. They assume that norm diffusion is a one-way street: specifically, they assume that the periphery remains a passive receptor of norms that have historically emerged in the West. In other words, such approaches to the theorization of international hierarchy do not take into account the historical and contemporary imbrications, feedbacks, reverberations of political, social and institutional norms and practices that were experimented on in what were/are the (neo)imperial laboratories that make up the significant parts of the global order. What I have attempted to show in the preceding chapters is that we need to be much more attuned to the multidirectional reverberations that result from conditions of domination (particular historical forms of formal and informal imperialism) that have profound effects on domestic institutions and practices. To return to Hoffmann’s point made in 1959, international theory must be attentive to what “cuts across” states and not simply the interactions between states. By tracing the ways in which imperial governance resulted in experiments and innovations of violence, social control and new forms of socioeconomics, we can observe the extent to which such subordinated spaces have historically possessed forms of agency that “cut across” and into the “inside” of great powers. The previous three chapters examined the conjunction between historical changes in the international system and the effects that occurred throughout not only the global periphery but also the center. While I have stressed three different themes that remain crucial for international theory – namely violence, social control or security and political economy – my focus has been on demonstrating the links between international changes (i.e. imperial or hegemonic periods of crisis beginning in the nineteenth century) and the “management” of subaltern and Western populations. Instead of emphasizing the effects that such international changes have on systemic configurations, the number of poles in the international system, for example, or, more generally, on statecraft or foreign policy, I have shown how the materialization of the camp, the colonial surveillance state and neoliberalization were significantly affected by the transnational diffusions taking place across shifting imperial or hegemonic networks. The nineteenth-century experimentation with violence in imperial Africa, the colonization of the American West, and the tectonic shifts in imperial geopolitics during the latter part of the nineteenth century have had fateful implications for the materialization of the concentration camp and the violence perpetuated within Europe during the Second World War; concerns about internal threats in newly industrialized European nation-states provoked the emergence of a modern surveillance state that adapted techniques and technologies developed in imperial domains; the neoliberalization of the global South during the course of the 1970s proved significant for the reassertion of American hegemony, a political project that would be pushed forward by the adoption of a similar neoliberalization in the United States and the United Kingdom. Subordinated peripheries are not passive receptors of norms devised in the imperial West; historically they have proved to be significant “laboratories of modernity” where imperial agents could experiment, innovate and “discover” novel modes and technologies of governing that would undoubtedly prove problematic, at least initially, to implement directly within the metropole. As I have argued in Chapter 1, we should understand the metaphor of the laboratory in the Latourian sense. According to Latour, by forcing the social world to conform to its requirements, the laboratory becomes the vector for defining the parameters of legitimate political and social action. In an analogous way, the (neo)imperial laboratory defines the contours of valid social and political governance. What gets developed, innovated and experimented on in the crucibles of imperial domains becomes perceived as “tried and true” practice, especially in response to conditions of political, social or economic crisis. In this way, the imperial laboratory normalizes new forms of violence, social control, and the reorganization of domestic politico-economic institutions. Thus the linkages between the international, the domestic, the peripheral and the metropole are much deeper and intense than international theorists usually accept. They involve processes of horizontal as well as vertical diffusion of norms and practices, of material assemblages that connect hierarchical relations between periphery and metropole. However, the relevance of uncovering these processes of co-constitution between metropole and periphery is not just for a deeper awareness of the historical implications of imperial international relations. As I started off describing in the Introduction, the Global War on Terror is itself an intensified contemporary moment of neoimperial experimentation with significant reverberations not only for the United States itself but also across a wide array of Western states. This is not to say that the processes of militarization of the domestic space underway are novel or specific to the United States. As the epigraphs to this chapter show, the militarization of policing is a long-term process that can be traced back to the American involvement in the Philippines (as McCoy has shown) and is something that is also occurring beyond the United States, for example in France (as Mathieu Rigouste has also shown). What is perhaps novel about our contemporary period, however, is that our traditional spatial definitions that delineate the applicability of specific forms of violence are becoming increasingly difficult to maintain. As Carlos Galli argues, the very notions of internal and external vis-à-vis state control over territory have essentially lost their meaning.3 “In the global age,” Galli argues: modern political spatiality – the State, with all its right and its ability to enclose an internal sphere with order and security, creating a space where “not everything can happen” – has ceased to be fully in effect, challenged as it is by the power of economic flows and the needs of capital, which demand a new politics and which no longer allow the State to be the operative center of political reality and its interpretation.4 Threats can no longer be properly demarcated (if they ever were completely) according to a fixed spatial configuration (i.e. the traditional cartography of the Westphalian order of states). What we end up with is a global form of “Empire” possessing neither “interiority” nor “external” edges, laced with a shifting multiplicity of borders, center-less and unstable. What emerges is a planetary condition in which this: global Empire [is] locked in a struggle against itself, against anomalous functions that exist within it. In short, it is an Empire whose inner discontinuity produces conflicts that, no matter where or how they are generated, all have local status, and all of which also fall immediately – with unforeseeable effects – into the Whole.5 An effect of this effacement of any notions of inside and outside – something, for example, Carl Schmitt recognized long ago – is that, as Galli puts it, “the Enemy today presents himself as the Disturber, the specter of all that is internal and domestic – as our own wicked caricature, our Double, our Shadow.”6 It is the persistent fear that an amorphous enemy infiltrates the polity, undermining it through persistent and ubiquitous subversion that conditions a specific governmental response. This concluding chapter thus explores some of the nascent consequences of these (neo)imperial experiences during the better part of a decade of the Global War on Terror, in light of a novel form of spatiality that progressively effaces distinctions between internal and external, metropole and periphery. Experimentation may well occur in Iraq or Afghanistan and reverberate back into the US; but urban American environments may also become laboratories for testing different techniques and technologies by a state that no longer entirely differentiates inside from outside. What defines the intensified proliferation of military techniques and technologies at “home” and “abroad” is a concern with the long-term maintenance of American authority.7 What this results in is a consistent hollowing out of liberal-democratic institutions and the decaying civic participation of the population largely perceived as being a threat to state authority. As Sheldon Wolin puts it, “the superimposition of empire and democracy, the corruption of representative government, the declining status of the citizen, the hegemonic status of American power in the world – suggest that the traditional categories of citizen, democracy, state and power desperately need reformulation.”8

One mayor-elect sees an opportunity to help people of color in his city, using a tax on a substance that has placed a criminal record on many of them.

Malik Evans — who will take office as mayor of Rochester, New York, in January — told Insider that when the sale of cannabis is legalized in his state, taxes on those sales should be used to fund a guaranteed basic income program that gives eligible participants monthly cash with no strings attached. Though the city has already approved an income program, it's funded using federal dollars, and Evans believes a cannabis tax will be a more sustainable source of revenue to help disadvantaged folks in the community.

Despite historically having a carte blanche for resource extraction, Western European nations are now economically profited off of disciplining economic protectionism to ensure “free and fair markets” that work in their favour (Nelson & Bigger, 2021). Moreover, the EU requires new strategies to (re)assert its hegemony in the face of growing competitors. "Greening" precisely serves this role; it permits protectionism to be jointly justified in the name of acting on a global climate emergency while simultaneously maintaining control over new and emerging markets by disadvantaging emerging economies for their incapacity to be as "green" as the EU is (Mehling et al., 2019; Pasgaard et al., 2017; Zachmann & McWilliams, 2020).

The provisions negotiated in the FTAs, together with carbon tariffs such as the CBAM, illustrate how the empire of carbon-neutrality is reinforced through technical mechanisms of trade imposition. While EU-FTAs get pegged to the condition of primary producers being restricted from adding value to materials exported to Europe and to capitulate to the unfair historical advantage of Europe's industrializing capacities, the CBAM directly punishes non-EU nations due to its carbon-intensive extractive economies in the name of decarbonizing production and “going green”. The dependency on cheap labour and raw material as the very foundation of what ‘green’ technological development requires becomes inconsequential under the terms and conditions of trade demanded by Europe.

NASA's Mars Sample Return mission is facing some tough scrutiny.

The Senate Appropriations Committee offered their recommendations on the spending bill for fiscal year 2024, and they do not provide all NASA was hoping for. The Commerce, Justice and Science (CJS) spending bill, which allocates funds for NASA and a few other government agencies, was reviewed by the committee in a 28 to 1 vote on July 13. The bill secures funding for NASA's ongoing Artemis program to the moon and other exploration initiatives, but cuts the space agency's budget for planetary science by over half a billion dollars.