“The test manipulations are a moral and political disaster for Volkswagen,” Huber continued. “The unlawful behavior of engineers and technicians involved in engine development shocked Volkswagen just as much as it shocked the public.”

Mother Jones political blogger Kevin Drum wrote Saturday that he is not buying the company’s claims.

“This is ridiculous,” Drum argued. “What incentive do low-level engineers and technicians have to do this on their own?”

“Hell, they couldn’t even take on a project like this unless their managers OKed the time to do it, and their managers wouldn’t do it unless they were being pressed by higher-ups,” Drum continued. “Anybody who’s ever worked at a big corporation knows this perfectly well.”

Consumer advocates, meanwhile, are demanding that the company pay for the full environmental and social costs of its fraud, which they say belies broad irresponsibility across the auto industry.

“VW must still pay full penalties under law and grant full rebates to the customers it deceived into buying pollution-spewing cars that led to massive, undeserved profits,” declared Ed Mierzwinski, consumer program director of U.S. PIRG, in a statement issued Wednesday.

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Earlier this year, the democratic socialist from Vermont proposed legislation in the U.S. Senate to cover tuition costs for qualified students at public colleges and universities by imposing a tax on Wall Street transactions by investment houses, hedge funds, and other speculators.

Notably, Vice President Joe Biden appears to be in Sanders’ corner when it comes to the issue of higher education costs.

“We need to commit to 16 years of free public education for all our children,” Biden said in his speech Wednesday announcing he would not run for president. “We all know that 12 years of public education is not enough. As a nation, let’s make the same commitment to a college education today that we made to a high school education a hundred years ago.”

In a statement, Sanders highlighted their overlap, saying of Biden: “He understands the need to rebuild the middle class; and to address income and wealth inequality, a corrupt campaign finance system, climate change, racial justice, immigration reform and the need for publicly-funded higher education.”

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Sanders told Jimmy Kimmel about his plan in an appearance on Wednesday night:

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“These brave kids have worked extremely hard to present Ecology with the most current and best available climate science, all of which the agency has ignored,” Rodgers continued. “It is now time for the court to step in and direct Ecology to initiate a rulemaking process based on the best available science—not the most convenient policy—to protect these youths’ fundamental rights.”

“Ecology’s legal obligations to protect the air and water resources in this state are clear; now it is up to the judge to enforce those laws,” Rodgers said.

The DOE is currently relying on 2008 standards to create its current emission reduction targets of 399ppm. But the agency has also previously admitted that those standards “should be adjusted to better reflect the current science” and “need to be more aggressive in order for Washington to do its part to address climate risks.”

Another plaintiff, 15-year-old Aji Piper, said Tuesday, “It is my future. You know, there’s these things that you just—you lose them and then it’s really hard to get them back.”

Our Children’s Trust filed similar lawsuits and legal actions in a number of states around the country. The group’s executive director, Julia Olsen, said Washington is obligated by law to protect shared natural resources such as fresh air.

“[T]hese young people have the right to a healthful environment…how you protect that right depends on the science and what scientists are telling us is happening to our climate system,” Olsen said.
Click Here: Putters“The young people brought this lawsuit to vindicate this right on behalf of themselves and future generations.”
—Andrea Rodgers, attorney

As Christine Wood, a professor of environmental law and founding director of the University of Oregon’s Environmental and Natural Resources Law Program, explained to Cascadia Weekly, “In Washington, there are very strong public trust cases affirming the public’s right to protect crucial resources.”

Judge Hollis R. Hill is expected to issue a decision before the end of the year.

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Other world leaders used their platforms to call for much bolder action. In his speech to the summit on Monday, Bolivian President Evo Morales unequivocally named capitalism as the most environmentally destructive force and introduced a series of solutions written by many of Latin America’s social movements to save “Mother Earth.”

As Boeve explained, the answers are clear, and they come from the activists and advocacy groups that have demonstrated tirelessly in cities around the world to highlight their message of a clean future.

“We must end the use of fossil fuels and fully transition to 100 [percent] renewable energy by 2050,” she said. “Here in Paris, politicians must agree on that North Star and chart a clear course to get there. The hundreds of thousands who took to the streets over the weekend for the Global Climate March expect nothing less.”

The whole world is watching

Obama acknowledged the U.S.’s part in fueling climate change, as the world’s largest economy and its second-largest emitter, and noted that the 150 leaders attending the summit are under global scrutiny for their decisions in Paris. “Let there be no doubt, the next generation is watching what we do,” he said.

That includes activists on the ground in Paris, who defied a protest ban and, in some cases, faced off with police during a violent crackdown on marches over the weekend. Maxime Combes, an organizer with the advocacy group Attac France, told Common Dreams that the “struggle for climate justice will not stop. We have a duty to stand up and continue to fight for a just and livable planet for all.”

“To be standing in the streets to fight against climate change, whatever is the form, is a resistance against all the fanatical visions of religion that spread terror, against all the scavengers who are propagating hatred and racism, and against all the pseudo democrats who are [undermining] our democracy and who are selling our freedom for nothing,” Combes said.
“We have a duty to stand up and continue to fight for a just and livable planet for all.”
—Maxime Combes, Attac France

Annie Leonard, executive director of Greenpeace U.S., said the president’s remarks “made clear that communities around the world can’t wait any longer for real action on climate. His speech showed that the political leaders and diplomats gathered in Paris need to deliver an ambitious agreement to protect those least responsible yet most affected by climate change.”

“As the world’s second largest emitter and the biggest economy, the U.S. has a key role as a leader in international climate negotiations,” Leonard said. “That leadership entails a huge responsibility to  those most affected by the negative impacts of climate change, not only in America but all over the world.”

Indeed, 350.org communications director Jamie Henn said Monday that Obama’s comments ring hollow in light of his environmental track record.

“After he took four years to reject the Keystone XL pipeline, and waited to really start acting on climate until the final years of his Presidency, it’s a bit ironic to hear President Obama warning us that ‘there is such a thing as being too late.’ The President’s own delays, and his years of promoting an ‘all of the above’ strategy, mean that we have an even larger hole to climb out of when it comes to climate,” Henn said in an email to Common Dreams. “It makes it all the more urgent the President builds on his rhetoric and starts keeping fossil fuels in the ground.”

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At the same time, the Pentagon announced Monday that it had stepped up military strikes against ISIS in Iraq, touting the bombing of a convoy of more than 100 oil tanker trucks it claimed belonged to the group as evidence of a new strategy to defang and defund their operations.

Meanwhile on Tuesday, France became the first European Union country to invoke the 28-nation political bloc’s “mutual-defense clause” which was swiftly adopted by all EU member states.

French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian made the request in Brussels by asking EU members to take a direct role “in France’s operations in Syria or Iraq, or by easing the load or providing support for France in other operations.”

The clause, which has never been used before, says that “if a member state is the victim of armed aggression on its territory, the other member states shall have toward it an obligation of aid and assistance by all the means in their power.” Though all countries swiftly backed the call, it was unclear what kind of specific support each nation would ultimately put on the table.

Additionally, French President François Hollande is now expected to meet with both Putin and Obama next week to discuss the campaign against the Islamic State and urge for a “grand coalition” against the group.

Writing for the foreign policy-focused website The Lobe Log, former CIA analyst Graham Fuller explains that despite great misgivings about the legacy of the western military interventions in the Middle East—ones that have “not only failed, but have vastly exacerbated nearly all regional situations”—there is no longer any denying that ISIS’ recent attacks, against the Russian airliner in Egypt, Beirut last Thursday, and Paris on Friday, have dramatically changed the game.

“Now,” writes Fuller on Tuesday, “ISIS is the single deepest source of immediate Middle East strategic disorder, with global implications.”

Pushing further, independent writer and researcher Nafeez Ahmed explains in an analysis published Tuesday how the simple-minded focus on these latest high-profile attacks and the predictable knee-jerk military response by powerful governments like France, Russia, and the U.S. actually betray what nearly fifteen years of the so-called “War on Terror” have made obvious. Writes Ahmed:

Such arguments are why so many observers are placing a modicum of hope in the progress of diplomatic reproachment between key regional and global actors.

And, while expressing alarm and concern over the many civilians likely dying as a result of the U.S., French, and Russian airstrikes inside Syria, it was journalist Abdel Bari Atwan, appearing on Democracy Now! on Tuesday morning, who offered the latest explanation of why a military solution—whether coordinated between nations or not—simply does not exist for solving the crisis in Syria and Iraq.

“Whenever there is military intervention, whenever there is American intervention in particular, there is failed states,” argued Atwan. “We have more than five failed states in the Middle East. Who will fill the vacuum? The Islamic State. And that’s why they have branches in Egypt, in Sinai, they have branches in Afghanistan, branches in Pakistan, now in a very strong state in Syria.”

It was the “American invasion of the Middle East—Iraq, in particular,” concluded Atwan, that created “the best environment for the Islamic State and for al-Qaeda to continue their savagery, their terrorism, their brutalism against the people of that region.”

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The findings underscore a grim reality that front-lines communities across the world have long pointed out. In addition to the pressing need to aggressively halt climate change, the wealthy nations and people that are disproportionately responsible for carbon emissions owe a debt to help those most impacted deal with the life-threatening consequences—from storms to crop failure to conflict.

However, the Green Climate Fund established by the UN in 2010, in part to assist countries on the front-lines in adapting to climate catastrophe, remains under-funded by richer nations, including the United States. What’s more, in September New Zealand rejected an asylum application from Ioane Teitiota, a Kiribati national who sought refugee status on the grounds that his home is sinking.

Pacific Islanders have been at the forefront of efforts to press the world into more aggressive action. Last October, “climate warriors” from 12 Pacific Island countries paddled traditional canoes into the sea where they blockaded the massive coal port at Newcastle, Australia. And this September, leaders of the smaller Pacific Island nations most vulnerable to rising oceans demanded a “global moratorium on all new coal mines.”

Marshallese poet Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner made waves last September when she opened the UN climate summit in New York with a poem for her daughter, captured in the following video:

Meanwhile, in the streets of Paris and around the world, people from around the world are holding rallies, summits, and ceremonies to demand aggressive international action, rooted in principles of global justice.

“The voices of Indigenous peoples, youth, women and frontline communities need to provide guidance in these negotiations, now more than ever,” the Grassroots Global Justice Alliance said last month ahead of the talks. “Climate justice seeks to address much more than greenhouse gas emissions, but the root systemic causes of climate change itself.”

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“Just 261 Sanders backers have given the maximum allowable contribution of $2,700, accounting for a mere 1.7 percent of his campaign’s total reported money raised,” said Sanders’ campaign. “That’s a sharp contrast to Hillary Clinton’s 17,575 maxed-out donors, whose donations accounted for almost 62 percent of her money raised, according to Federal Election Commission records for the first three quarters of this year.”

Filings from Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton show that she continues to be the favorite Democratic candidate of Wall Street, Politico noted in October.

“Over 2 million contributions have been made to the only campaign that rejects a corrupt campaign finance system,” Sanders said in an advertisement thanking donors. “You can’t level the playing field with Wall Street banks and billionaires by taking their money.”

Meanwhile, a poll released Thursday by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner for Democracy Corps and Every Voice found that 72 percent of people in the U.S. “favor a plan to address the role of money in politics with a small-donor public financing system combined with disclosure for all political spending by outside groups and strictly enforced election laws,” according to a press statement.

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The launch of the DiEM 25 movement comes amid a growing leftist surge across Europe. 2015 saw the rise of anti-austerity forces in both the United Kingdom, with the election of Jeremy Corbyn to Labour party leader, as well as in Spain, where the Podemos party gained enormous power.

According to the German socialist paper Neues Deutschland, Varoufakis will be appearing at the launch along with “some of his ‘accomplices’ from all over Europe,” though the complete list of speakers has yet to be announced.

Varoufakis said that the while the exact organizational contours of the movement are still unknown, he is hopeful that the grassroots, cross-border structure will embolden and empower progressives across the continent.

“What makes me optimistic about a pan-European movement? That it will be pan-European!” he said.

“We shall exert pressure on every Parliament, every government, every head of state at once,” Varoufakis continued. “That when the troika is squeezing, let’s say the Madrid government, it will know that the electoral process in, say, Germany or France or Portugal will punish any local politician who does the troika’s bidding.”

“It is a truly utopian undertaking,” he added.

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“I think this action will be taken very seriously by Exxon Mobil,” Lieu said.

McKibben echoed Lieu’s hope in a statement on Wednesday. “California’s action means that the world’s eighth largest economy is now probing the world’s richest fossil fuel company for lying about the greatest problem the planet ever faced,” he said. “I’d say this means this scandal isn’t going away.”

“With the climate changing at the pace it is,” he added, “we can’t afford for the Department of Justice and Loretta Lynch to dawdle.”

Meanwhile, earlier this week, a group of ExxonMobil shareholders urged the corporation to detail the resilience of its business model to climate change.

“The unprecedented Paris agreement to rein in global warming may significantly affect Exxon’s operations,” New York State Comptroller Thomas P. DiNapoli, who is Trustee of the New York State Common Retirement Fund, said in a statement.

“As shareholders, we want to know that Exxon is doing what is needed to prepare for a future with lower carbon emissions,” DeNapoli continued. “The future success of the company, and its investors, requires Exxon to assess how it will perform as the world changes.”

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