The Air Is Getting Thin

From the Amazon to Washington, a week of institutional sabotage, global humiliation, and a kakistocracy determined to finish the job.

Good morning! As we rub the sleep from our eyes and prepare ourselves for another day of watching institutions buckle under the weight of their own cowardice, let’s begin in the Amazon, where negotiators at COP30 gathered under the canopy of the world’s most vital life-support system and still managed to walk away without the one thing trees actually need: a binding promise not to kill them.

This was supposed to be the “Forest COP,” the one where the world finally put rainforests at the center of climate policy. And on paper, it sort of did: billions in new conservation funding, Germany dropping €1 billion into Brazil’s Tropical Forests Forever Facility, Europe pledging billions more for the Congo Basin, and a historic showing of 3,000 Indigenous leaders who, unlike most of the officials in attendance, actually know how to keep forests standing. Brazil even demarcated ten new Indigenous territories, nearly 1,000 square miles of land that should have been recognized decades ago.

Yet, after all that rainforest humidity, all that moral urgency, all that talk of nature and stewardship, leaders still torpedoed the one concrete measure that mattered: a roadmap requiring countries to demonstrate progress toward their 2030 zero-deforestation pledge. Instead, they issued a voluntary roadmap, which is diplomatic code for “we’ll get to it right after we finish whatever we’re doing for the next several years.” It was as if the Amazon itself had begged for an action plan and the world replied with, “Have you tried journaling?”

But before we leave Belém, it’s worth reminding readers of the thing almost no one says out loud anymore: forests don’t just “store carbon” or “preserve biodiversity.” They manufacture the air we breathe. Fifty percent of atmospheric oxygen comes from terrestrial plants. Calling forests the lungs of the planet isn’t poetic license; it’s biochemistry. A world stripped of forests is a world with thinner air. And this year’s “Forest COP” ended by proving, once again, that humanity is committed to holding its breath indefinitely.

In Sudan, we find another portrait of collapse, this time not ecological but political, though the line separating the two grows blurrier every year. Sudan is a country of 50 million sitting atop vast oil reserves, abundant gold, fertile cropland, and the world’s largest gum arabic forests, yet it has been shattered by a civil war now entering its third year. More than 9.5 million people have been displaced, the largest displacement crisis on Earth, while the army controls the north and the Red Sea corridor, and the Rapid Support Forces rule most of Darfur and the central gold belts.

Sudan’s wealth should feed its people twice over, but instead it bankrolls warlords. Most of the oil fields sit in contested territory; gold exports overwhelmingly flow to the UAE; and the gum arabic belt, the acacia forest strip that props up global food, pharma, and cosmetics, is being divvied up like contraband. Agricultural lands that could prevent famine are caught between factions fighting over pipelines, grazing corridors, and access to the Nile. It is a perfect illustration of the resource curse: when a nation becomes more valuable as a commodity warehouse than as a functioning society, people starve in the shadow of abundance.

And then we come home to the United States, where our own institutions are unraveling at a pace that would make Sudan’s warlords raise an eyebrow. The latest casualty is the CDC, which quietly rewrote its website to suggest that vaccines might cause autism, not because the science changed, but because public health leadership now answers to the conspiracy ecosystem that elevated Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to HHS Secretary. The CDC kept the headline “Vaccines do not cause Autism,” but slapped an asterisk under it that essentially says, “We’re only saying this because someone made us.”

It is effectively medical malpractice in the guise of federal gaslighting. Public-health officials across the country are now forced to walk into clinics, look frightened parents in the eye, and explain why the U.S. government is contradicting decades of research in the middle of flu, RSV, and COVID season. The autism-vaccine myth has been debunked more times than Bigfoot sightings, but Kennedy demanded a federal agency flirt with it anyway, and the CDC complied. It’s one thing for anti-science demagogues to shout into microphones; it’s another for a once-trusted government institution to underwrite their delusions.

And just when you thought the week’s performative sabotage was over, Mitch McConnell reminded us that corporatocracy never sleeps. In the final hours before the government shutdown ended, he quietly inserted a nationwide ban on most hemp products into the must-pass spending bill, a political booby trap aimed squarely at an industry that threatens Big Pharma’s sleep aids, Big Alcohol’s profits, and the donor class’s eternal war on cannabis. Hemp, that ancient and sustainable miracle plant capable of producing everything from biodegradable plastics to building materials, suddenly finds itself regulated more harshly than fentanyl precursors.

Under McConnell’s stealth ban, any product with more than 0.4 milligrams of THC per package, a microscopic threshold, becomes illegal. Not high-THC cannabis. Not Delta-8 products. CBD. The stuff sold in grocery stores and traded by soccer moms like gluten-free communion wafers. A $28 billion industry employing 300,000 Americans is now hanging by a string because one senator from Kentucky decided his friends in the pharmaceutical and liquor industries deserved a little early Christmas present.

Hemp is a sustainability powerhouse. It restores soil, requires minimal water, replaces petroplastics, and produces everything from building materials to sustainable textiles. But it also produces cannabinoids, harmless, non-intoxicating, but competitive with products that actually do pose risks and rake in profit margins. So instead of regulating hemp sensibly, Congress is preparing to kneecap it.

Industry leaders are scrambling. Some hope states will be allowed autonomy, much like the patchwork around cannabis dispensaries. Others, more realistic, see the writing on the wall: a total ban, shredded supply chains, shuttered small businesses, and the acceleration of a war on cannabis markets that McConnell and the Heritage Foundation have been telegraphing for years.

And the kicker? The ban may not even stand. Backlash has been immediate and furious. Members of Congress who’d barely glanced at the issue before, like Rep. Maxwell Frost and Sen. Tina Smith, are suddenly sounding alarms as voters figure out that Washington just criminalized their sleepytime gummy.

But the damage is done. Once again, policy shaped by lobbyists is being dressed up as public safety. Once again, sustainability is sacrificed on the altar of profitability. Once again, the U.S. government is making sure the only industries allowed to sell psychoactive or pain-relief substances are the ones with the most expensive lobbyists.

McConnell didn’t ban hemp because it’s dangerous. He banned it because it’s useful, and because useful things that ordinary people can grow, make, or use without corporate permission have always been the first to go.

And while the planet was busy trying to salvage coherent climate policy in Belém, the United States managed to humiliate itself on yet another global stage. Trump officially boycotted this year’s G20 summit in South Africa, citing “human-rights abuses” against white Afrikaner farmers, an accusation lifted directly from Elon Musk’s long-debunked conspiracy theory about a supposed genocide of white farmers. The claim has been repeatedly disproven by South African authorities, human-rights monitors, and even conservative think tanks, but it continues to serve Trump and Musk as an all-purpose bludgeon against any non-Western government they find inconvenient.

The result was predictable: the U.S. shunned the summit, allies rolled their eyes, and middle-power democracies like Canada and South Korea quietly filled the void. South African officials publicly contradicted the White House’s shifting explanations; the U.S. ended up sending only a low-level chargé d’affaires to the closing session, which host officials treated about as seriously as a late RSVP to a wedding you weren’t really invited to in the first place. The message from Washington was that global cooperation is optional. The message from the rest of the world was that U.S. participation is no longer essential. In the vacuum left by American abdication, other nations are moving forward, and increasingly, they’re doing it without us.

And that may be the most sobering lesson of the week. Whether in the Amazon, Sudan, Washington, or the G20, the pattern is the same: institutions once depended upon to uphold global stability are now guided by grievance, conspiracy, and the profit margins of the already-powerful. In their place rises a coalition of nations, communities, and movements trying to stave off a century defined by ecological collapse, authoritarian rot, and the slow suffocation of public trust.

But for today, at least we can name it plainly. This isn’t drift, it’s sabotage. And it’s being carried out by people who believe expertise is optional, sustainability is a threat, and truth is whatever their donors or delusions demand.