This week marks the beginning of Brazil's presidential campaign, with the two front-runners—current President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Senator Flávio Bolsonaro—officially launching their campaigns. After visiting Brazil and talking with politicians, activists, journalists, and ordinary citizens, I came away with the conviction that this is one of the most consequential presidential elections in Brazil's recent history. The outcome on October 4 will shape not only Brazil's future but also the political direction of Latin America.

President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, now 80 years old, is seeking a fourth presidential term. Brazil's Constitution allows presidents to serve only two consecutive terms, but they may run again after sitting out at least one term. That is how Lula returned to office in 2023 after governing from 2003 to 2010. 

Following the four-year presidency of the far-right Jair Bolsonaro, Lula's supporters say he has rebuilt many of the institutions and policies weakened under Bolsonaro. His government has reduced hunger, expanded social programs, strengthened

The contemporary global strategic landscape is increasingly defined by a deliberate perception cultivated by the United States, one that casts it as a state fundamentally unmoored from the established tenets of Mutually Assured Destruction, and by extension, as a power for whom traditional nuclear fears are anachronistic constraints rather than guiding principles.

This is not merely a failure of strategic communication or a passive evolution of policy, but rather an active, albeit often unspoken, strategic posture that serves to systematically reshape the diplomatic and security calculations of other major international actors, engineering a situation where those other powers are left as the sole custodians of nuclear rationality while the United States sheds all equivalent responsibility for itself.

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By adopting the mantle of a "wild card" that ostensibly disregards the existential logic of nuclear parity and deterrence, Washington compels its allies and adversaries alike

A sharp rise in energy bills due to the war in Iran is expected to push up inflation, signaling a renewed cost-of-living crisis in the United Kingdom, according to The Guardian. The timing of the latest forecasts comes after a period when inflation had been trending in a more favorable direction.

Official data had shown a clearer downward path of the inflation rate earlier in the year, raising hopes that the Bank of England's 2% target was within reach. Those hopes have now evaporated due to higher wholesale energy costs that began to accumulate after the conflict in the Middle East escalated.

"As the Iran war continues to send shock waves through global energy markets, economists predict the surge in UK gas and electricity bills last month will push Britain's headline inflation rate to 2.9%," the British publication states.

That prediction is based on the impact of the July rise in the energy price cap set by the regulator

Environmental thinkers have warned that infinite growth on a finite planet is impossible now for more than half a century. 

Since the publication of The Limits to Growth in 1972, the evidence has only become more confronting.

Climate destabilisation, biodiversity loss, soil degradation, freshwater depletion, ocean acidification, and resource exhaustion all suggest that industrial civilisation has entered a condition of ecological overshoot. 

Sufficiency

In my latest essay, 'Sacred Revolt: Why Reverence Before Restraint Transforms the Limits-to-Growth Predicament', I argue that this predicament cannot be understood adequately as a merely technical or economic problem. 

It is also, and perhaps more fundamentally, a spiritual and existential crisis rooted in the desacralisation of the modern world.

The usual ecological conclusion is that humanity must restrain itself. We must consume less, produce less, travel less, extract less, emit less, and perhaps even desire less.