By Paul Gordon Collier, Editor
Originally published April 11, 2025 for our Mid-Month Issue of Mindful Intelligence Advisor. Subscribe to get semi-monthly issues.
“The current international order is based on the presumption that our physical geography is fixed and unchanging. However, climate change – in the form of sea level rise and inundation – is shifting international boundaries. The world’s changing geography will force policymakers and legal experts to adapt the concepts of sovereignty, statehood, and citizenship to address the new global environment.” –from Reconsidering Sovereignty Amid the Climate Crisis – Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
ED.NOTE: The nation-state model is relatively new to the human experience. It may or may not continue to be the dominant model of human governance, be that for good or for ill. The critique offered here is not fundamentally against the notion that there aren’t viable non-nation-state models of human governance, but that this “paper” is not about an authentic exploration of those possibilities but rather agit prop intended to nudge humanity towards something approaching a one-world government.
The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace issued a “paper” called “Reconsidering Sovereignty Amid the Climate Crisis” that makes the case for surrendering national sovereignty to save the people and the planet from the impending climate change apocalypse.
The paper uses the unique circumstances of the Pacific Islands to justify the claim that the concept of national sovereignty itself is an impediment to saving the people from the disaster coming our way.
The paper was written by Nitya Labh, who Carnegie credits as being “a nonresident research assistant for the South Asia Program and for the Tata Chair for Strategic Affairs at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace…” A LinkedIn profile claims, “Nitya Labh (W&M ‘22) is the runner-up in the undergraduate category of an international essay contest sponsored by the journal International Security and Girl Security.”
Labh is a UN-approved girl, through and through, a content marketer disguised as a journalist, in this writer’s opinion.
Labh claims, “Policymakers should consider new legal options to address climate-induced boundary changes. These may include the creation of fictitious boundaries, collective sovereignty, hybrid citizenship, and corridors for climate displacement.
This paper does not seek to suggest that these new ideas for sovereignty are the only path to resolving the nexus of legal-climate challenges that exist today. Instead, this paper attempts to raise new questions and ideas about how policymakers should think about the international system at a time when anthropogenic climate and environmental change is rearranging its geophysical foundations.”
After a series of scientific claims justifying the climate apocalypse predictions, Labh doubles down on her “gentle” suggestion we reconsider sovereignty, writing, “With only a few exceptions, solely states and intergovernmental organizations obtain rights and face obligations in international law; the individual does not take part in this privileged community.
Sovereignty is also the basis for restrictions on international law; with only a few exceptions, it is the sovereign right of every state that no other state or organization interferes with its internal matters. Consequently, what happens within a state’s borders traditionally has little relevance for the international legal order.”
Here, she’s going far beyond suggesting sovereignty is interfering with saving the people and the planet; it’s just bad for the individual, a very Marxist worldview if ever there was one.
Her logic seems to be this: because sovereign states have avenues of exchange that don’t cater directly to the individual, the individual is somehow diminished because they’re not simply subject to an international order; they’re subject to the nation-state order. If they were subject to an international order, they would have direct representation, like they maybe do at the nation-state level.
Ask yourself if you’d rather face the consequences of a worldwide “election” or an election in the nation-state you’re currently in. If you really think about it, you’ll understand how much further your already diminished voice would be in a world where the prize is control of the entire world.
How much money do you think would go into those campaigns? How many people would die interfering with some faction’s plans to be the one to take power and always attempt to close the door behind them?
Her whole presentation presumes the world would be better off ceding its sovereignty to leftist thinkers, people who can’t understand the basic reality of power, where blood and bone and sinew meet forced habits of being delivered from on-high by “experts” such as this young woman must fancy herself to be.
They can’t even define what a woman is or allow for true value to be measured in their unrealistic “utopian” black-and-white schemes.
She rightly points out what could be considered the birth of the modern political world, the birth of the nation-state, in the Treaty of Westphalia, seeming to suggest that the “newness” of the concept of the sovereignty of the nation-state should cause you to be suspicious of it for that reason alone.
Let us remember, though, that leftists will more often argue that tradition is oppression and wisdom is in progress, the new, what is becoming, NOT what has been. Yet on this issue, this Marxist essentially appeals to tradition to justify rejecting the more progressive governance model, the sovereign nation-state.
This headline in Labh’s “paper” makes it plain, “Climate Change and Sovereignty Are at Odds.”
Here, Labh reveals more than perhaps her presumed handlers would have wanted her to, claiming, “Climate change challenges the presumption that a sovereign state will have ‘a permanent population,’ in the sense that while the individuals living there may change, a territory will be continuously inhabited. It can be a driving factor in human migration by creating climate refugees or internally displaced persons, or by incentivizing voluntary relocations.”
Herein lies the heart of the SOLUTION to save the planet, by nearly any means necessary: Dissolve local identity and geographical heritage in a people and prevent them from occupying any land for generations. It is not a reality, but rather a desire, smuggled in as a matter of fact.
That “fact”claim is this: Humans will, because of the climate change-triggered rising sea levels and food disasters (that human ingenuity will fail to overcome, not by stopping it but by redesigning and rebuilding to accommodate it), no longer desire to be tied to a land of their forefathers.
Certainly, if rising sea levels happen (presuming their climate apocalypse is real) then the micro national islands in the Pacific this writer conveniently focuses on will have major sovereignty issues, with whole island micro-nations being sent to the bottom of the rising seas.
Furthermore, their national sovereignty is relatively newer in these regions, with less allegiance placed on the nation-state than with the families, the larger communities they live with.
One interesting “solution” is not entirely without merit, even if it is intended to wholly replace the nation-state model, which this writer imagines it would not. Here, she writes of “collective sovereignty,” claiming it “could provide a legitimate basis for hybrid citizenship that spans multiple jurisdictions.”
Such collective sovereignties, in this writer’s mind, could come from nations that join in some form of league or confederal pact, but even then, primary citizenship would most likely not only be required, but preferred by the citizens themselves. Their ability to vote in non-primary nation-states would most likely be diminished in some capacity.
In that same section, she writes, “In the absence of international law or institutional frameworks that allocate human rights responsibilities in hybrid arrangements, states will have to establish bilateral or regional agreements to divide, reestablish, and share human rights duties. Regardless of the form citizenship and migration pathways take, it is clear that climate response policies must center around the interests of human security.”
The key phrases here are “human rights,” “human rights DUTIES,” “climate response policies,” and “human security.”
“Climate response policies” is a particularly interesting phrase in that it contains within it the very thing President Trump is at least severely disrupting, the administrative state. A legislative, democratic response to the climate apocalypse would hardly be adequate.
These changes must be made by scientists, experts, and human rights advocates, on the fly, as the crisis demands. In other words, these changes need to be made by the administrative state.
Imagine keeping a whole world captive to the lie that the planet was going to die, and people were going to perish by the billions if they didn’t hand their lives and sovereignty over to people with the same worldview as this woman.
Imagine if that was really the only thing that held them, the fear that the end might be near. Year after year the state would have to find reasons the climate apocalypse hadn’t happened yet or why it wasn’t making a difference, or maybe it was making things worse, in the “fight to save the planet” so far.
Any dissenting voice would be labeled a saboteur, or worse, a climate denier, a charge that could, in that world, be even worse than being called a racist or a homophobe in today’s leftist-controlled cultural reality.
Imagine a world where the statement “homosexuality is a sin” will get you imprisoned because climate change experts determined that statement was a human rights violation, which could accelerate the habits of being that made man-made climate change happen in the first place.
In case you’re interested, that would be white supremacism; everything goes back to white supremacism, right before it halts for a time at “muh patriarchy,” though this agit prop piece doesn’t pull any “social justice” trump card other than saving the planet and human rights (which is a dog whistle for a forced socio-cultural value system at existential odds with Christian and Americanist values).
The mere introduction of the notion that surrendering nation-state sovereignty is NECESSARY to save the planet AND the people is a hard enough blow on conventional thought as it is, so perhaps she wisely chose to lay off the white devil and toxic male tropes.
The piece itself is a test of the spirit of the land, or at least how the “opposition” might choose to react or not react to what appears to this writer to be a severe shot across the bow of sovereign rights.
But it is also a nudge, an attempt to both stigmatize nation-state sovereignty and normalize more collective sovereignty identities. Don’t be fooled, however, the collective sovereignty stop is just that – a stop, a stop on a journey that ends in a one world socialist government run by the few enlightened for the “benefit” of the vast many.
Finally, it is a signal to lower-thought-serving agit prop information terror machines, like CBS News, CNN, etc., to start running stories that make nation-state sovereignty sound evil (even if you must make them up) and collective sovereignty look great.
If this writer is right, expect more stories from the DNC-CCP media on the plight of the island nations of the Pacific over the coming months and years as they prepare their low-informed, partisan-identified de facto sycophants to accept a world “without borders” that really becomes, as Alex Jones warned us, nothing more than a prison planet.
The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace isn’t interested in saving the people or the planet; it’s interested in making humans in their inhuman “image,” an image that sees humanity as needing one unified society to truly be the human they were born to choose to be.
That society must be created from on high, from experts who understand what human rights are, experts who understand what social justice is, experts who can use science and math and logic and reason to redesign the human experience from top to bottom, towards a new shared whole.
Those that don’t choose what they SHOULD HAVE CHOSEN will be culled from the social human tribe.
This “paper” is nothing short of a declaration of war against the whole planet by the “globalist” powers that be; the race to secure power is on, and Nitya Labh is ready to do her part to assure the rest of her network knows, it’s time to make war on sovereignty.
By Bill Collier, Publisher