Your point is key about how U.S. attempts to manage climate bills at home is reflective of its maneuvering to deal with its declining power in the international arena, as talks like Copenhagen will and have put on display. As you put it, “No one is willing to foot the bill, and no one is obliging to the threats, promises or leadership of US Empire.”

Part of this decline is rooted in the dynamism of capitalist competition and the inability of U.S. capitalists in the last couple decades or so to exploit the growing emphasis on “green” capitalism to maintain their own dominance in the global market. I know the anti-capitalist left doesn’t often like to attribute any even remotely positive sounding attributes to capitalism, but it seems important to recognize that the ingenuity of some capitalists to deal with climate change on capitalist terms is changing the playing field of US imperialism and capital, as well as shaping many of the ways in which progressive environmentalist groups conceptualize organizing against environmental devastation.

There’s a PBS Frontline special called “Heat” that shows this well in the context of the decline of U.S. auto. One thing it exposes, I think unintentionally, is how U.S. auto capitalists & the government have failed to have a long-term vision with regards to “green” economic growth. There’s a chapter that discusses how the Big 3 automakers missed the boat on the hybrid and electric car, which they didn’t want to make because making the big trucks & SUVs was more profitable at the time (late 90s or so).

In the last couple years, after gas prices have spiked, while the idea of green capitalism has been gaining in popularity because of a growing recognition that real ecological crisis is already upon us, and since the economic crisis has hit, people don’t want to buy those big ass cars (as much) anymore and U.S. auto clearly made the wrong decision. They have lost huge portions of the market to makers like Toyota who decided to make a hybrid because they actually feared being left behind by the U.S. makers on this front. Now U.S. automakers are 10 years behind Japanese capitalists on this technology & market. There’s no getting around that the Japanese capitalists have simply been much more innovative than U.S. capitalists with the green capitalism stuff (and in general) and we’re seeing the consequences of that now with the defeat of U.S. auto.

I’m curious to hear more about the ways in which you think that “a people-to-people democratic eco-solidarity campaigns here in the U.S.” could be built. Are there examples you know of where this has been built? The population control talk could be a key target of such, especially given its racist character as you point out but also its patriarchal character since any population control measures always invariably mean repression of women’s reproductive freedom.