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The big worry for all central banks is a wage-price spiral, where both wages and prices move up in lockstep, forcing rates to move ever higher. That eventually compresses corporate pricing power and hurts profit margins, while banks pull back on lending, tightening credit conditions, Kasman adds. “And that eventually is what kills the economy.”

When the economy is at full employment, however, the JG could increase tendencies toward wage-price spirals. The fear associated with being laid off would be reduced and that would buttress worker bargaining power by just that much more. This certainly adds to the risk of a wage-price spiral. But again, it doesn’t increase the risk all that much. After all, at full employment workers really don’t fear the sack all that much anyway.

The real risk of a wage-price spiral is always and everywhere when exogenous factors increase prices. The two that come to mind are (i) substantial currency depreciations and (ii) increases in input costs, such as oil or other commodities. Wage-price spirals then tend to kick in as workers and capitalists try to use their market power to distribute the resulting inflation. Workers try to fob the price increases onto capitalists through wage hikes, while capitalists try to fob it onto workers and competing capitalists through price increases.

The global economic outlook has improved significantly since the beginning of the year, for completely different reasons in different regions. The labor market remains particularly strong in the U.S. despite aggressive rate hikes; a mild winter mitigated the impact of the energy shock on Europe; and China managed its sudden abandonment of Zero COVID successfully.

Our last outlook in December 2022 forecasted a recession in the U.S. by the middle of this year. We still expect a recession, but not until the end of the year or the beginning of 2024. The U.S. economy has held up shockingly well in the face of over 500 basis points of rate hikes in just over a year. Part of this is policy driven: the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and CHIPS and Science Act have fuelled significant manufacturing construction spending after years of underinvestment. Consumption, which accounts for just over two-thirds of U.S. GDP growth, has remained robust thanks to a significant cash cushion among U.S. households and the strength of the labor market. The labor market has remained robust in part owing to labor hoarding—firms are reticent to lay off workers given how difficult recruitment has been since the pandemic. We do not have a good way to measure labor hoarding, therefore there is no easy way to identify inflection points. As corporate profits dwindle in a tighter rate environment, firms might capitulate and let workers go. A sudden deterioration in the labor market is likely to impact consumption even more than the state of household bank accounts, and we expect this will be the trigger for the recession.

American capitalism was built on racial exploitation, from the enslavement of Black people to institutionalized discrimination and its structural impact on our nation’s economic and legal systems. Creating an equitable society requires us to examine and understand the history of capitalism and its reliance on racialized oppression, writes Elizabeth Kennedy. In How to Be an Antiracist, Ibram X. Kendi likens capitalism and racism to “conjoined twins,” each dependent on the other for survival. Is racism essential to capitalism? Can they be separated, or are they inextricably bound? Black Americans currently own one-tenth the wealth of white Americans, a racial wealth gap that would take, by some estimates, over 228 years to close. This disparity is mirrored across every metric of lived experience, from to food insecurity, education, air quality, and liberty. These facts force us to interrogate the relationship between racism and capitalism. As the geographer and abolitionist Ruth Wilson Gilmore notes, capitalism Yet, American business history often overlooks what Karl Marx described as the “undisguised looting, enslavement, and murder” that powered the industrial revolution.[1] To build a more just economic system, we must acknowledge the role slavery played in capitalism’s development. And we must recognize that even after emancipation in 1865, racist laws, institutions, and policies reinforced racial inequality, shaping market behavior today. Ultimately, to break the bond between these two systems, we must understand the history of capitalism and its legacy of racialized oppression. Capitalism emerged in Medieval Europe with the decline of feudalism, a social and economic system where the nobility used military power to control labor and land.[2] The Black Death dealt a blow to the feudal order by creating a severe labor shortage, making it costly to raise private armies. Religion had been used to justify a starkly unequal distribution of resources, and race became another. European conquest created classes of “unfree” ethnic populations, such as the Irish, Jews, Roma, and Slavs, whose precarity made them willing to work for meager wages. These migrant populations often settled in urban centers, creating a new class of workers for merchants and manufacturers. Toward the end of the 15th century, capitalism—which treats labor as a commodity supported by a legal system that protects private property rights—began to take shape. As European nations established colonies in the Americas, the drive to extract resources and profits from these lands galvanized one of the largest human migrations in history. Nearly one in five of the 12 million African men, women, and children forced on the harrowing voyage across the Atlantic known as the “Middle Passage” died before reaching shore.[3] Those who survived worked under brutal conditions in Caribbean sugarcane fields or Virginia tobacco plantations, generating profits for European investors. Wealth extracted from slavery fueled the growth of a global capitalist economy, stoking the industrial engines of finance, insurance, shipping, manufacturing, construction, and education. Other unfree Europeans arrived in the Americas under various contracts of servitude and debt bondage. They were also exploited, traded, and forced to work for little or no wages. But fear of white rebellion led the British to terminate many indentured contracts and extend land grants to white laborers, creating a class of white settlers with economic and political fortunes aligned with the ruling regime.[4] This nascent capitalism of 1619 evolved into a highly efficient system capable of powering an industrial revolution. By 1860, cotton—grown on Indigenous lands expropriated using militarized violence—comprised 59% of American exports. It was, as the saying went, “king.” Other countries could not compete with a nation that codified a caste of workers as non-human and legalized violence as a management technique. As the sociologist and ethnographer Matthew Desmond, “Given the choice between modernity and barbarism, prosperity and poverty, lawfulness and cruelty, democracy and totalitarianism, America chose all of the above.” Human bondage was the “beating heart” of this new American economy, pumping wealth to Southern planters, raw materials to Northern mills and British industrialists, and capital to European bankers. “WHETHER CAPITALISM COULD EXIST WITHOUT RACISM IGNORES, AS HISTORIAN WALTER JOHNSON AFFIRMS, THAT ‘THERE WAS NO SUCH THING AS CAPITALISM WITHOUT SLAVERY.’” Whether capitalism could exist without racism ignores, as historian Walter Johnson affirms, that “there was no such thing as capitalism without slavery.” Black bodies were appraised, valued, sold, resold, and used as collateral for loans, bonds, and capital investment by institutions like J.P. Morgan. By 1860, enslaved people were the single largest asset in the American economy, with a combined value. The purchase and sale of enslaved people spurred the creation of new financial products, insurance policies, tax revenues, and notary fees. Children born to enslaved women were sold and separated from their families, which Ta-Nehisi Coates as “the for-profit destruction of the most important asset available to any people, the family.” Caitlin Rosenthal traces the origins of quantitative management practices, recordkeeping, and accounting methods to the plantation.[5] These included scientific production quotas, elegant data dashboards, mark-to-market accounting, depreciation algorithms, and credit instruments. Commercial journals and accounting ledgers helped planters “accelerate the pace of daily labor through calculation and comparison, bonuses and incentives, and, of course, punishment,” a sophisticated human resource management system developed long before Frederick Taylor. The profits extracted from the bodies of enslaved people would be woven everywhere into the American capitalist economy. Abolition presented an opportunity for the US to confront and atone for its “original sin” of slavery. If capitalism did not depend on racial subjugation, we would expect a total reorganization of American society. Instead, what followed was an extension of slavery’s economic, social, physical, and emotional damages. Through terror, disenfranchisement, and exclusion, American capitalism was able to survive the emancipation of the enslaved people upon whose labor it had depended. During the era of “reconstruction,” President Andrew Johnson, a former Tennessee enslaver, condoned the passage of “Black Codes,” which criminalized the refusal to work as “vagrancy.”[6] Convictions resulted in fines that the newly freed could not pay, leading to imprisonment and the “leasing” of convict laborers to planters, railroads, and mining companies. Many Black farmers, lacking capital, were forced into coercive “sharecropping” contracts that required them to pay for using land, tools, and seeds in exchange for a share of harvest proceeds. If they could not repay the debt, they had to work in debt peonage or risk arrest. This “slavery by another name” fueled an explosion of Southern prison populations in a system described in 1949 by historian Fletcher Green as akin to “the persecutions of the Middle Ages” and “prison camps of Nazi Germany.” When Black Americans managed to accumulate wealth, they were met with an organized and violent racial backlash. Racial pogroms, such as the one in which white mobs murdered over 300 Tulsa residents in the neighborhood known as “Black Wall Street, destroyed Black businesses, homes, and civic and cultural institutions. As millions of Black people migrated away from the South between 1919 and 1950, Northern cities enacted Jim Crow laws, which excluded them from parks, restrooms, schools, restaurants, hospitals, nursing homes, public pools, jobs, and transportation. The policies of the New Deal, intended to combat poverty on a national level, further entrenched Jim Crow segregation. Black agricultural and domestic workers were excluded from landmark labor protections, preventing them from saving for retirement, collectively bargaining for raises, or receiving compensation for workplace injuries. While these programs were a critical safety net for white working-class Americans, the NAACP called them “a sieve with holes just big enough for the majority of Negroes to fall through.”[7] Black veterans could not take advantage of the G.I. Bill, as it did not require universities to admit non-white students. At the same time, FHA “redlining” prevented Black potential home buyers from qualifying for federally subsidized mortgages. Notably, people have engaged in collective resistance at every point in the history of capitalism. Black resistance took many forms, from establishing worker-owned cooperatives and credit unions to labor organizing and civil uprisings. Though the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s brought about significant legislative change, it did not eradicate the systemic discrimination that had long kept Black families from accessing integrated neighborhoods and the educational and economic opportunities they provide, as well as basic necessities such as clean air, water, and green space. Even today, those residing in once redlined areas continue to suffer from higher rates of illness, such as cancer and asthma, and elevated risks of Covid-19 and the impacts of climate change. Furthermore, algorithms used in artificial intelligence often perpetuate these disparities, a phenomenon Safiya Umoja Noble calls “technological redlining.”[8] In “The Wealth of Nations,” Adam Smith proposed that the balance of power and distribution of advantages between capital and labor could be maintained in a society where “there was perfect liberty, and where every man was perfectly free both to chuse [sic] what occupation he thought proper and to change it as often as he thought proper.”[9] Such conditions of equality did not exist in 1776, nor do they now. Just as the rise of the automobile was deeply entwined with the use of fossil fuels, the development of capitalism was inextricably linked to the institution of slavery. Transitioning from a carbon-based to a sustainable economy is not as simple as swapping a combustion engine with a rechargeable battery. We must also unwind a century of economic, residential, and workforce policies prioritizing roads over rails, speed over security, and consumption over conservation. Likewise, creating a racially equitable economy requires unraveling and repairing the racialized violence, inequality, and exploitation woven into the fabric of American capitalism.

A theory propagated since the inception of modern democracy, the basic income is a centuries-old political idea that has, since Andrew Yang’s popular stance in the 2020 Democratic Presidential Primary, only been disseminated further. A universal basic income (UBI) is generally considered a liberal or leftist belief, economically speaking. Liberal proponents like Robert Reich and Tulsi Gabbard have only reinforced this association, but the basic income has deep, unbreakable ties to conservatism and fiscal responsibility. It is easy to call UBI a socialist program, but this has very little backing to it. In fact, it is the antithesis of a leftist economic model. By promoting individual choice, economic stimulus, and more leeway from the federal government, the UBI is a perfect policy for a capitalist society. UBI in a Welfare State The U.S. is a bloated welfare state with large domineering forces in the government lauding their failing welfare programs that consistently increase the federal spending by nearly $1.9 trillion per year (nearly ½ of total tax dollars collected in fiscal year 2021). Social Security, in its current state, will run out of the current level of benefits by the 2030s. Reducing benefits or spending in other budget categories is the only way to prevent this shortcoming in finance, further bloating the Social Security Administration. These expensive programs present a dichotomy, however, being that the government has an obligation to provide these programs and services to the people. With a government elected to represent the people, we give Congress the authority to act on our behalf in our best interests. Providing us with programs that will allow us to live comfortably and survive is clearly within our best interests. While these programs pay-off societally, they cannot achieve their long term goal of providing financial stability because they are the exact programs that will drive us into financial ruin. UBI is based on the idea of providing comfort and stability in life for all. When implemented as policy, this can reflect as either conservative or liberal. Generally, when UBI is proposed, the liberal camp tends to introduce it as a supplement to the already bloated welfare state. Conservatives have generally not come out in support of a basic income, so there aren’t many case studies as to what it would look like in a conservative context. However, the most successful universal basic income program originates from one of the safest Republican states in the U.S. Alaska, a state that voted for Donald Trump by a nearly ten point margin in 2020, currently operates the longest-running UBI program in the world, and has been able to successfully create a positive growth rate for 40 of the 45 years it has operated the Alaskan Permanent Fund program. This fund is a diversified portfolio that is operated by the Alaskan Permanent Fund Corporation, and has only ever seen negative growth rates in years of economic recession, which is entirely expected. How Would the United States Afford it? One might wonder how this in itself would not be expensive to maintain – producing the question how this portfolio gets the capital they need to invest? The answer is simple: taxing corporations their fair share. Surplus revenue taxed off of oil and gas industries in Alaska has been set aside in this fund since 1977, and since then the portfolio has grown to $76.3 billion. Many conservatives also worry about the cost being passed down to consumers if their profits are ‘skimmed’ from the top. The Alaskan Permanent Fund Corporation actually funded research in 1984 that addressed this concern, and found that any cost passed down to Alaskans was absorbed by the annual dividends, by an average annual income increase of 6.3%. If the United States were to eliminate the aforementioned $1.7 trillion figure in the failing Social Security Administration and Medicaid programs, as well as fix tax loopholes in corporate tax law, the U.S. would be taking the appropriate steps towards reallocating tax revenue towards a UBI. If the U.S. had plugged these corporate tax loopholes, the government lost $8.5 billion in tax revenue in fiscal year 2020 after 55 of the most profitable corporations paid zero dollars in corporate tax. As a matter of fact, these loopholes allowed corporations to make money off of the government in the form of $3.5 billion in rebates. By doing away with swollen welfare programs and sealing the cracks in the corporate tax code, the U.S. has the potential to reallocate tax revenue towards a program that could effectively replace 80+ current means tested welfare programs with one UBI. Another solution to the cost of this program, proposed by Andrew Yang in his 2020 run, is a value-added tax (VAT). The VAT is not a new idea–in fact, a majority of economically developed nations have a VAT that is implemented to supplement their budgetary restrictions. This VAT would act similarly to the percent of revenues taken for the Alaskan Permanent Fund, in that, every transaction that a major corporation makes in which revenue is recorded, a flat tax rate would be applied to the profit of this transaction. In fact, many scholars argue that a VAT would not only simplify our tax code, but it may be beneficial to overall gross domestic product (GDP). This VAT, combined with fewer tax cuts on corporations and the reduction of current welfare programs would allow the government to institute a UBI. One issue arises in the cost, however: it really just varies. Depending on how much is given to Americans per year, quarter, or month, UBI could range anywhere from $205 billion to $2.5 trillion in annual federal costs. In the Mathematica Policy Institute’s New Jersey basic income experiment, they calculated the amount of income to give the participating families based on their income rate for 4 week periods, and thus, their proximity to the poverty line. Though this per month amount shifted, this is an experiment of a relatively rudimentary form of a basic income. Looking at a far more established basic income, we see that Alaska does something similar, though on a per annum basis. Each year, the Alaska Permanent Fund Corporation evaluates how much annual income is given per eligible Alaskan by assessing the net earnings of the index fund over the past 5 fiscal years, and then subtracting obligatory costs such as maintenance and overhead, and then dividing it between Alaskans. As of 2022, this amount was $3,284. Although the UBI appears costly at face value, the political and social benefits in the aftermath far outweigh the cost. The UBI is Individualist Higher taxation is traditionally not a stance that many conservatives would take, at least not openly. This has been shifting in recent years, particularly towards corporations of monstrous size (think Amazon, Disney). In fact, conservatives in 2021 polled at starkly similar numbers to their liberal counterparts on their view on how large financial and business institutions negatively affect the nation as a whole. This shifting viewpoint on corporations does not necessarily represent the conservative stance on basic income. Recognizing the reasons are important: the United States has a long history of individualism. Since the Cold War, the sentiment against left wing economics has been rocky at best, and hostile at worst. The UBI is not left wing, though. When discussing the benefits of gutting the current welfare system and replacing it with a UBI that is not funded through individual taxpayer dollars, the conservative fundamentals shine through the cracks of a façade of a distributionist ideal. UBI grants citizens the freedom to spend their additional income how they like, on top of their current incomes. Being able to have a stipend that keeps you afloat also encourages economic activity – the more people are comfortable with their savings and finances, the more they stimulate the current GDP and growth rate of the country. Economic policy is a major player in the U.S.’ current political landscape, and being able to stimulate GDP growth while eliminating one of the biggest governmental spending categories (and having a strong chance of entering a budget surplus for the first time in two decades) is a conservative’s dream.

But if the natives are already agriculturalists, then why not simply incorporate their productivity into the colonial economy? At this point, we begin to get closer to the question of just who it is (or, more to the point, who they are) that settler colonialism strives to eliminate—and, accordingly, closer to an understanding of the relationship between settler colonialism and genocide. To stay with the Cherokee removal: when it came to it, the factor that most antagonized the Georgia state government (with the at-least-tacit support of Andrew Jackson's federal administration) was not actually the recalcitrant savagery of which Indians were routinely accused, but the Cherokee's unmistakable aptitude for civilization. Indeed, they and their Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw and Seminole neighbours, who were also targeted for removal, figured revealingly as the “Five Civilized Tribes” in Euroamerican parlance. In the Cherokee's case, two dimensions of their civility were particularly salient. They had become successful agriculturalists on the White model, with a number of them owning substantial holdings of Black slaves, and they had introduced a written national constitution that bore more than a passing resemblance to the US one.Footnote41 Why should genteel Georgians wish to rid themselves of such cultivated neighbours? The reason why the Cherokee's constitution and their agricultural prowess stood out as such singular provocations to the officials and legislators of the state of Georgia—and this is attested over and over again in their public statements and correspondence—is that the Cherokee's farms, plantations, slaves and written constitution all signified permanence.Footnote42 The first thing the rabble did, let us remember, was burn their houses. Brutal and murderous though the removals of the Five Civilized Tribes generally were, they did not affect each member equally. This was not simply a matter of wealth or status. Principal Cherokee chief John Ross, for example, lost not only his plantation after setting off on the Trail of Tears. On that trail, one deathly cold Little Rock, Arkansas day in February 1839, he also lost his wife, Qatie, who died after giving her blanket to a freezing child.Footnote43 Ross's fortunes differed sharply from those of the principal Choctaw chief Greenwood LeFlore, who, unlike Ross, signed a removal treaty on behalf of his people, only to stay behind himself, accept US citizenship, and go on to a distinguished career in Mississippi politics.Footnote44 But it was not just his chiefly rank that enabled LeFlore to stay behind. Indeed, he was by no means the only one to do so. As Ronald Satz has commented, Andrew Jackson was taken by surprise when “thousands of Choctaws decided to take advantage of the allotment provisions [in the treaty LeFlore had signed] and become homesteaders and American citizens in Mississippi.”Footnote45 In addition to being principal chiefs, Ross and LeFlore both had White fathers and light skin. Both were wealthy, educated and well connected in Euroamerican society. Many of the thousands of compatriots who stayed behind with LeFlore lacked any of these qualifications. There was nothing special about the Choctaw to make them particularly congenial to White society—most of them got removed like Ross and the Cherokee. The reason that the remaining Choctaw were acceptable had nothing to do with their being Choctaw. On the contrary, it had to do with their not (or, at least, no longer) being Choctaw. They had become “homesteaders and American citizens.” In a word, they had become individuals. What distinguished Ross and the removing Choctaw from those who stayed behind was collectivity.Footnote46 Tribal land was tribally owned—tribes and private property did not mix. Indians were the original communist menace. As homesteaders, by contrast, the Choctaw who stayed became individual proprietors, each to his own, of separately allotted fragments of what had previously been the tribal estate, theirs to sell to White people if they chose to. Without the tribe, though, for all practical purposes they were no longer Indians (this is the citizenship part). Here, in essence, is assimilation's Faustian bargain—have our settler world, but lose your Indigenous soul. Beyond any doubt, this is a kind of death. Assimilationists recognized this very clearly. On the face of it, one might not expect there to be much in common between Captain Richard Pratt, founder of the Carlisle boarding school for Indian youth and leading light of the philanthropic “Friends of the Indian” group, and General Phil Sheridan, scourge of the Plains and author of the deathless maxim, “The only good Indian is a dead Indian.” Given the training in individualism that Pratt provided at his school, however, the tribe could disappear while its members stayed behind, a metaphysical variant on the Choctaw scenario. This would offer a solution to reformers' disquiet over the national discredit attaching to the Vanishing Indian. In a paper for the 1892 Charities and Correction Conference held in Denver, Pratt explicitly endorsed Sheridan's maxim, “but only in this: that all the Indian there is in the race should be dead. Kill the Indian in him and save the man.”Footnote47

I now turn to an exposition of settler colonialism as an alternative starting point for a framework that can generate a more historically and structurally grounded analysis of racial inequality in the United States, one that pays attention to variation across time and place while also being attentive to structures that link these differing cases. It is a framework that is amenable to intersectional understanding because it is widely understood that colonial projects simultaneously structure race, gender, class, and sexual relations within and between colonists and the colonized. Moreover, since settler colonial projects are transnational in scope, a settler colonialism framework invites investigation of cross-national connections and comparisons.

The concept of settler colonialism has been most clearly elaborated by scholars of indigenous studies, especially in Australia, Canada, and the United States. It is a framework that highlights commonalities in the history and contemporary situation of indigenous peoples in many parts of the world. However, although it may seem to be best suited to explain the racialization and treatment of indigenous peoples, I agree with Patrick Wolfe (1999) that settler colonialism should be seen not as an event but as an ongoing structure. The logic, tenets, and identities engendered by settler colonialism persist and continue to shape race, gender, class, and sexual formations into the present.

The current historical conjuncture is not simply the most recent moment in the continuous procession of Indigenous dispossession by U.S. empire and settler colonialism. Just as neoliberalism is not simply an extension of classical liberalism but is instead a reactive formation that aims to dismantle the conciliatory regulatory mechanisms of mid-twentieth century liberal capitalism in pursuit of the upward redistribution of wealth in the “ Global North, ” Indigenous dispossession assumes specific tactical forms in response to present-day practices of and possibilities for indigenous self-determination. The intensified redeployment of colonial predation and necropolitical inclusion takes many forms, some of which manifestly accentuate the constitutive contradictions of neoliberal multiculturalism. As a way of marking this continuance and its impact on Indigenous youth, one need only to consider the recent 2013 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Adoptive Couple v Baby Girl . The highly controversial case effectively undermined key provisions of the Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978 and used a reactionary post– civil rights era discourse of racial preference and alleged “ special rights ” of tribal nations to undermine protective gains made by the 1978 law. Indeed, much like the recent U.S. legislation that discarded core aspects of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 by claiming that the racist practices that necessitated the law were now resolved, commentary in support of the 2013 Supreme Court ruling suggested that Indian Child Welfare Act was outdated, emphasizing that the legislation was “ more than thirty years old. ” In the context of the ruling, efforts by organizations such as the National Indian Child Welfare Association and the Lakota People ’ s Law Project to stop the ongoing theft and abuse of Indigenous children have shifted to address the particularities of contemporary U.S. colonial governmentality, specifically, “ post-racial ” assertions of white entitlement and retooled ideologies of anti-tribalism that aim to justify further erosion of Indigenous sovereignty. In the neoliberal offensive of the past forty years, the uneasy historical entwining of Indigenous education, a particular version of self-determination, and the reduction of life to the calculus of market relations appear in at least two modes of containment and hegemonic realignment. On the one hand, neoliberal multiculturalism extends the simultaneous promise of autonomy and inclusion. On the other hand, an insistence on accountability for the conditions of colonial and racialized dispossession has been diverted to support standardized testing and assessment that accelerates inequities and devaluations under the aegis of settler normativity. For instance, the anti-colonial movement for control of schooling by and for Native peoples — from the Navajo Nation ’ s Rough Rock Demonstration School established in 1966 to the Red Power community survival schools to the Coalition of Indian Controlled School Boards to Deganawidah-Quetzalcoatl University — helped compel the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act of 1975. Yet, although the 1975 legislation established significant changes in federal Indian policy, its mandate for Indigenous self governance devolved administrative authority to tribes in ways that did not fundamentally challenge the ultimate plenary power of congress. Likewise, the U.S. settler state responded to grassroots pressure for more adequate investment in education for both impoverished communities of color and Indigenous peoples with the rhetoric of accountability set out in the means-tested disciplinary regime of No Child Left Behind — a regime that has only intensified since the original publication of Red Pedagogy . 4 As intimated by Grande, both trajectories partially build from and work to dismember preceding strategies for Indigenous liberation and sovereignty. Nevertheless, the colonial norms of recognition that seek, as Audra Simpson argues, to instantiate an Indigenous autonomy that “ is exercisable only because recognition is conferred ” are always also symptomatic of the pernicious “ ambivalences of exigencies of settlement itself ” and “ the needs and desires of states that are new, that are in process, that are complicated, and struggling always not to fissure. ” 5 Similarly, in response to the student movements of the 1970s and 1980s for ethnic studies and Native American self-determination, the U.S. educational system responded with inclusive pedagogies for minoritization and neoliberal multiculturalism. Indeed, the notion of “ minority ” here is precisely a consequence of the colonial attrition that has in fact minoritized peoples through circuits of conquest, displacement, and slavery. Roderick Ferguson points out that during this moment state and capital began to adopt a simultaneously affirmative and preemptory discourse of anti-racist diversity “ through the regulated incorporation of minorities and minoritized intellectual and cultural production ” so as “ to forestall the redistribution of resources to economically and racially disfranchised communities. ” 6 Although such forms of minoritization operate primarily through a logic of race that concertedly disavows colonial difference and Indigenous sovereignty, it is imperative nonetheless to attend to the tensions, entanglements, and disjunctures — what Jodi Byrd describes as “ cacophony ” — between subalternized racialized groups and Indigenous peoples that remain more complex than the normative lens of the U.S. state, educational system, and neoliberal multiculturalism allows. 7 Since the 1970s, U.S. Indian policy affirming recognition of Indian self-determination has operated in tandem with new forms of economic disposability, social abandonment, and environmental plunder. As Grande observes, “ Indian education was never simply about the desire to ‘ civilize ’ or even deculturalize a people, but rather, from its very inception, it was a project designed to colonize Indian minds as a means of gaining access to Indian labor, land, and resources ” (p. 19). She makes clear that both contesting the possessive and extractive logics of colonization and creating the possibilities for a “ new Red pedagogy ” demand grappling with how Indigenous ways of being and knowing cannot be reduced to these conditions of material expropriation. At the same time, neither Euro-American forms of knowledge nor Indigenous forms of knowledge are thoroughly discrete 8 ; instead, each are heterogeneous and — to various degrees — unevenly entwined, even if the arrogance of Euro-American knowledge production continues to disclaim its debts and culpability for the death worlds of logocentricism. As settler colonialism and decolonization are increasingly invoked by non-Indigenous scholars and activists, it becomes especially important to engage the specificity, social etymology, and complex genealogies of each term. Decolonization is not an analogy for struggles against domination in general. 9 Decolonization is least helpful when used to suggest a binary relation to colonialism or the retrieval of a more authentic prior to colonial rule. Yet, as much as international law has codified decolonization as a series of mandates and protocols susceptible to the ongoing maintenance of neocolonial and imperial formations, it nevertheless serves to evoke other possible relations and refusals. As Grande contends, “ ‘ decolonization ’ (like democracy) is neither achievable nor definable, rendering it ephemeral as a goal, but perpetual as a process ” (p. 166). Decolonization is thus a shifting configuration of strategies and actions, not an event, even as it is nonetheless eventful. Decolonization is a means without end. It is a creative response that necessarily exceeds legibility and reconciliation from the perspective of the conditions from which it arises. The terrain of struggle mapped by Red Pedagogy a decade ago continues to exceed the political boundaries, militarized borders, and knowledge regimes of imperial nation-states. Scholars and activists have grounded their work in ways that both confront the imposed limitations and elisions of the state form and build anti-colonial alliances born of shared conditions of colonial possibility. 10 The practice of “ red pedagogy ” so forcefully charted by Grande entails the sustained and difficult labor of discerning and enacting these multiple forms of struggle in relation to one another without losing sight of their mutual frictions, tensions, and incommensurabilities. 11 In this sense, the ethics of being accountable to one another as living radical relationality is itself the possibility of contesting and further disrupting the colonial conditions that continue to be undone. A declaration of radical hope and potentiality, Red Pedagogy theorizes with the insurgent forms of knowledge that arise from and sustain decolonization as a collective overcoming and becoming in perpetuity by Indigenous peoples. The urgency of this declaration only intensified in the ten years since Red Pedagogy was first published.

ACCORDING TO A new report this week by the Pew Research Center, Americans have finally come to an agreement about how to solve the climate crisis: by planting trees. A trillion of them. In theory, those trees will suck so much carbon out of the air that we won’t have to worry about installing solar panels or ditching the SUV for an electric car. According to the Pew report, the trillion trees solution is supported by 90 percent of both Democrats and Republicans. Contrast this, for example, with support for tougher limits on carbon emissions from power plants, which is backed by 93 percent of Democrats, but only 64 percent of Republicans.

On one hand, this near-universal support for tree-planting as a solution to the climate crisis is not surprising. Who doesn’t love trees? They are our ancient partners on this planet, and they may be far more intelligent than we know (Read Richard Powers’ magnificent novel The Overstory). And yes, the 3 trillion or so trees that already grow on the planet suck up about a third of the CO2 we dump into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels. But the idea that we’re going to solve the climate crisis by planting a trillion trees is a particular kind of lunacy, and a great example of what happens when bad science hooks up with do-gooderism and they sleep together in a bed of political expediency.

ONLY A MONSTER would say no to this pitch: The best way to beat climate change—the warming of Earth caused by gases like carbon dioxide emitted by human industry, leading to rising sea levels, worsening fires and storms, drought, and disease—is simple. Plant a trillion trees. It’d be “one of the most effective carbon drawdowns to date,” said an article on the idea in the journal Science this past summer. And who doesn’t love trees, right?

Except the math turned out to be a little shady. Last month a bunch of climate scientists and ecologists piled onto that tree research in the same journal, calling out numerous errors in the first team’s calculations. At about the same time, a whole other bunch of ecologists started pushing back on the agriculture-tech startup Indigo for pitching a similar land-based carbon sequestration strategy, the “Terraton Initiative,” paying farmers to use new methods that could suck down a trillion metric tons (a teraton) of carbon. These goals are critical and the ideals are noble—who doesn’t want to stop climate change? Pretty much everyone except the US government agrees on that. It’s the numbers that are the problem.

Over the past six months, major food companies, like General Mills, Danone North America, Kellogg, and others, have launched efforts to cut their carbon footprint, in part by expanding the use of regenerative agriculture (also called carbon farming) practices. Regenerative agriculture refers to an array of management practices — such as cover cropping, compost amendment, or grazing management — that sequester carbon in agricultural soils.

While these practices have positive soil health benefits, efforts to increase agricultural soil carbon sequestration likely don’t have nearly the level of expected climate benefits. Such poor carbon accounting means that corporations, governments, or individuals seeking to offset their greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions through regenerative agriculture are fooling themselves and the general public.

With the emphasis on carbon sequestration, big business can buy carbon credits and tick that off the risk register. Green consumers can clear their conscience and sleep better at night by ordering carbon “neutral” produce. But there are three problems with that scenario.

The first and biggest problem is technical.

It’s a beguiling proposition: pulling carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere by supercharging populations of microscopic, carbon-munching marine phytoplankton through the relatively simple and inexpensive process of adding iron to the ocean.

But a new study by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) suggests that iron fertilization, as the process is called, is unlikely to help mitigate climate change.

If scientists were to widely fertilize the Southern Ocean or any other iron-depleted waters with iron, the effort would temporarily stimulate phytoplankton to grow and take up all the macronutrients available in that region. But eventually there would be no macronutrients left to circulate to other regions like the North Atlantic, which depends on these macronutrients, along with iron from dust deposits, for phytoplankton growth. The net result would be an eventual decrease in phytoplankton in the North Atlantic and no significant increase in carbon dioxide draw-down globally.

Lauderdale points out there may also be other unintended effects to fertilizing the Southern Ocean with iron.

Historically, the oceans have done much of the planet’s heavy lifting when it comes to sequestering carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Microscopic organisms known collectively as phytoplankton, which grow throughout the sunlit surface oceans and absorb carbon dioxide through photosynthesis, are a key player.

To help stem escalating carbon dioxide emissions produced by the burning of fossil fuels, some scientists have proposed seeding the oceans with iron — an essential ingredient that can stimulate phytoplankton growth. Such “iron fertilization” would cultivate vast new fields of phytoplankton, particularly in areas normally bereft of marine life.

However, speeding up or changing the course of nature can have disastrous effects. Scientists suggest that rapid uncontrolled changes in pH, carbonate saturation state, and dissolved aqueous CO2 can affect ocean ecosystems. While this process mimics a natural one, it is not natural; the substance would be delivered to ecosystems at rates far higher than normal which could create ‘dead zones’, areas where oxygen levels are too low to support life. Additionally, the amount of olivine necessary for these applications is extremely large and is comparable to present-day global coal mining, a counterintuitive proposition as the planet looks to turn away from mining. In the case of basalt, to sequester one billion tonnes of CO2, more than 3 billion tonnes of basalt would have to be spread, an amount equal to almost half of the current global coal production.

Additionally, at such a large scale, enhanced weathering could change the ecology of the water, leading to an increase in the microbial organisms that produce greenhouse gases such as methane and nitrous oxide.

Solar radiation management is not a solution to the climate problem

Solar radiation management does not address the drivers of human-induced climate change, nor does it address the full range of climate and other impacts of anthropogenic greenhouse gas and air pollutant emissions. Solar radiation management [SRM] aims at limiting temperature increase by deflecting sunlight, mostly through injection of particles into the atmosphere. At best, SRM would mask warming temporarily, but more fundamentally is itself a potentially dangerous interference with the climate system.

The reflective power of clouds may be less effective at counteracting global warming than previously thought, according to new research.

Scientists behind the new research looked at clouds that contain both liquid and ice water, known as mixed-phase clouds. Most climate models suggest that clouds will better be able to reflect light into space as global warming speeds up the melting of ice water into a liquid in coming decades. Liquid water tends to reflect more light back into space than ice.

According to the IPCC’s Working Group III report, carbon capture is one of the least-effective, most-expensive climate change mitigation options on Earth.

This week, oil and gas lobbyists are gearing up for a busy few days. Today, the IPCC — the UN experts on climate science — is publishing a new report on the impact of global warming and our best options to slow it down.

Carbon capture is having a moment, and it’s not hard to see why: As Texas Monthly reports, “the worldwide carbon-capture market is expected to grow from about $2 billion this year to about $7 billion in 2028.”

Last year’s bipartisan infrastructure law devotes billions to advancing the technology, and the new Senator Joe Manchin-approved climate compromise bill would do more to bolster the industry. Meanwhile, atmospheric CO2 levels have now reached their highest levels in human history, and the Supreme Court’s recent ruling, which limits the federal government’s power to reduce climate pollution, is making techno-fixes all the more appealing.