The Long Ecological Revolution

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Re: The Long Ecological Revolution

Post by blindpig » Wed Jun 07, 2023 2:55 pm

STUDY: ALMOST ALL SAFE LIMITS OF THE PLANET HAVE BEEN BREACHED
June 6, 2023 , 12:00 p.m.

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The study concludes that justice is a necessity for humanity to live within planetary limits (Photo: Getty Images)

a study shows that human action is crossing practically all safe limits of the "Earth system", which endangers biological diversity while compromising the climatic conditions and the availability of water on the planet. We already know that when the scientific community says "human action" it means capitalism.

For years the scientific community has warned about the damage caused by the burning of fossil fuels, the extraction of resources or agro-industry, among others. However, action has not been taken on a scale and speed sufficient to reverse the point of no return that is now being reached.

Now, other more recent scientific work has delved into it with an updated and novel approach by not only focusing on the optimal conditions for the planet to remain stable, but also for life on it to be prosperous and secure.

The study, titled Safe and Fair Earth System Boundaries , has assessed and quantified for the first time the conditions that regulate Earth's life support and stability for a "safe and fair" planet. Likewise, it includes five interconnected areas that must be addressed: the climate emergency, the decline of biodiversity, water scarcity, damage to ecosystems due to the use of fertilizers and damage to health due to air pollution.

The eight boundaries of the "Earth system" proposed in the study are climate, natural ecosystem area; surface water flows, groundwater levels; nutrient cycles for nitrogen; match; and the levels of atmospheric aerosols. On these limits there are red lines that should not be crossed and it is already happening.

The study concludes, after multiple environmental evaluations, that justice is a necessity for humanity to live within planetary limits. "It's not a political choice. There is overwhelming evidence that a fair and just approach is essential for planetary stability," he says.

https://misionverdad.com/estudio-se-han ... el-planeta

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Replying on ecology and entropy
Originally published: Workers’s Liberty on May 31, 2023 by Stuart Jordan (more by Workers’s Liberty) (Posted Jun 05, 2023)

The interesting thing about the ecological economist Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen’s application of the entropy law, for Marxists, is that it explains something about Marx’s theory of metabolic rift.

Metabolic analysis of human society developed alongside ecological economics and is now the established science of material flow analysis. It is due in part to the efforts of these scientists that statistics on CO2 emissions and other wastes are readily available and subject of public debate. Ecologist Marina Fisher-Kowalski credits Marx and Engels as the founders of this school which has produced prolific literature and empirical data since the 1960s (Industrial Metabolism, 1998).

Fisher-Kowalski notes the use of the term metabolism to describe ecosystem-scale or even planetary material flows is not uncontroversial:

whereas the concept of metabolism is widely applied at the interface of biochemistry and biology when referring to cells, organs, and organisms in biology, it appears to be a matter of dispute about whether to use this term further up the biological hierarchy… the contested point is whether there exist any controls, information-mediated feedback cycles, or evolutionary mechanisms working on the systems level as such.

What is not is in dispute and is common ground between energy/ material flow analysis, ecological economics and ecological Marxism is that that “the economic process, like any other life process, is irreversible (and irrevocably so); hence it cannot be explained by dynamics alone. It is thermodynamics, through the Entropy law, that recognises the qualitative distinction which economists should have recognised at the outset between the inputs of valuable resources (low entropy) and the final outputs of valueless waste.” (Energy and Economic Myths, Georgescu-Roegen).

Common Ground
Paul Vernadsky’s claim that there is no common ground here is wrong. The evidence of this common ground can be found throughout the work of Burkett and the other metabolic rift theorists, and in the mature works of Marx and Engels. The common ground exists because it is firmly rooted in material reality.

Paul invokes the sun as proof that “entropy is insignficant for the ecological crisis” as if he has just discovered something that has been overlooked by 50 years of ecological science. Zack Muddle (Solidarity 673) also thinks the existence of the sun was overlooked by the ecological economists.

This is a misunderstanding. Georgescu-Roegen writes on how “the sun radiates annually [a] fantastic flow… only [a small part is] intercepted at the limits of the earth’s atmosphere, with roughly one half of that amount being reflected back into outer space… The total world consumption of energy currently amounts to no more than [a fraction]. From the solar energy that reaches ground level, photosynthesis absorbs only [a fraction].”

The human social metabolism is in open dissipative system situated within the open dissipative system of the biosphere. Solar energy, mostly via green plants and trophic cascade, creates low entropy terrestrial stocks of solar energy on Earth. We also draw directly on low entropy flows of solar radiation.

The stocks we find in our environment are largely products of living organisms that have already fed off low entropy solar energy: food, fossil fuels, mineral deposits, timber. The issue that the ecological economists are concerned with is how human society sustains itself and grows by drawing on the low entropy stocks produced by the biosphere as well as directly tapping the low entropy flows from solar radiation. By squandering low entropy stocks capitalist society has broken “the budget constraint of living on solar income” (Herman Daly).

Georgescu-Roegen’s “gloomy pessimism” is due to the fact that he sees the entropy producing practices of the capitalist social metabolism as something inherent in the human condition.

Green plants store part of the solar radiation which in their absence would immediately go into dissipated heat, into high entropy. That is why we can burn now the solar energy saved from degradation millions of years ago in the form of coal or a few years ago in the form of a tree. All other organisms, on the contrary, speed up the march of entropy. Man [sic] occupies the highest position on this scale, and this is all that environmental issues are about. (Energy and Economic Myths)

While this is no doubt true in the abstract, it is also true that the speed of entropy production could be significantly reduced by a more careful, planned, ecologically sensitive organisation of human labour. Such an approach is precluded by the incessant pursuit of profit. This is the point of departure for Marxists and ecological economics. The secular trend to increase labour productivity means ever increasing material throughput per labour hour. The social metabolism under capitalism is a blind, fossil-fuelled acceleration of the materials of the earth into ecological crisis.

Planetary boundaries
Paul doubts entropy has any significance to ecological crisis. But accelerating entropic degradation is driving us beyond all planetary boundaries. Rising levels of high entropy atmospheric CO2 and other greenhouse gases are driving climate change and ocean acidification. Rising levels of high-entropy fertiliser and sewage run-off are driving hypoxic deadzones. Rising volumes of high-entropy biocidal novel chemicals are causing biodiversity loss and human health problems. The ever-expanding frontier of primary industry is destroying biodiverse wilderness.

Far from being “insignificant”, capitalism’s accelerating entropic degradation is the tap root of all anthropogenic ecological crises, creating an “irreparable rift in the interdependent process between social metabolism and natural metabolism” (Marx).

There are other ways to approach and understand metabolic rift theory that will be explored in further reading groups.

https://mronline.org/2023/06/05/replyin ... d-entropy/

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Industrial farming has killed billions of birds
June 6, 2023

Scientists: Saving birds requires rapid transformative change, especially agricultural reform

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Radical decline in bird populations in U.S. and Canada. Over half a billion more have vanished in Europe. (Living Bird magazine, August 2019)

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“Birds are often highly sensitive to changes in their environment, and can therefore act as early warning systems of threats to nature.”

by Ian Angus

Worldwide, 49 percent of all wild bird species are in steep decline. BirdLife International’s authoritative report, State of the World’s Birds 2022, estimates that there are now nearly three billion fewer wild birds in Canada and the U.S. than a few decades ago, and about 600 million fewer in the European Union. Less comprehensive data is available for the global south, but studies in some South American, African and Asian countries have shown similar declines.

Many accounts of bird population decline simply list multiple possible causes for the decline — wind turbines, urbanization, climate change, logging, wildfires, hunting and even domestic cats. The absence of data on which factors are most important has been a convenient excuse for doing nothing to save the birds.

An important study published in the May 15 issue of PNAS — the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences — takes that excuse away. Its title clearly states its principal finding: Farmland Practices Are Driving Bird Population Decline across Europe. The study “provides strong evidence of a direct and predominant effect of farmland practices at large continental scales.”

This is by far the most extensive study to date of bird population dynamics. Over fifty ornithologists, zoologists, biologists and ecologists analyzed decades of population data for 170 bird species in over 20,000 sites in 28 European countries, measuring them against four known pressures on bird populations: agricultural intensification, change in forest cover, urbanization and temperature change.

Between 1980 and 2016 European bird populations as a whole fell by a quarter, but the number of farmland birds dropped by more than half. Areas dominated by large farms saw bigger declines than areas where most farms are smaller.

The single biggest cause of bird declines is chemical-intensive farming. Some birds are killed by pesticides or herbicides, but the most important impacts are loss of food, especially insects and other invertebrates that most bird species depend on, and the spread of fertilizer-intensive monocultures that eliminate shelter and nesting areas. Insect-eating populations declined more than any others.

In short, the collapse of farmland bird populations is closely related to the Insect Apocalypse in the Anthropocene, discussed here recently. The mass slaughter of insects is killing masses of birds.

Industrial agriculture is not, of course, the only driver. Loss of habitat resulting from urban growth and deforestation caused declines, in those areas, of 27.8% and 17.7% respectively. Climate change had mixed effects — northern, cold-preferring birds fell 39.7%, and southern, warm-preferring bird species dropped 17.1%. Overall, however, the most important bird killer is large-scale capitalist agriculture.

The study concludes:

“Considering both the overwhelming negative impact of agricultural intensification and the homogenization introduced by temperature and land-use changes, our results suggest that the fate of common European bird populations depends on the rapid implementation of transformative change in European societies, and especially in agricultural reform.”

https://climateandcapitalism.com/2023/0 ... -of-birds/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: The Long Ecological Revolution

Post by blindpig » Tue Jun 13, 2023 2:18 pm

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From net zero to glyphosate: Agritech’s greenwashed corporate power grab
Originally published: Countercurrents on June 10, 2023 by Colin Todhunter (more by Countercurrents) | (Posted Jun 12, 2023)

Today, in the mainstream narrative, there is much talk of a ‘food transition’. Big agribusiness and ‘philanthropic’ foundations position themselves as the saviours of humanity due to their much-promoted plans to ‘feed the world’ with ‘precision’ farming’, ‘data-driven’ agriculture and ‘sustainable’ production.

These are the very institutions responsible for the social, ecological and environmental degradation associated with the current food system. The same bodies responsible for spiralling rates of illness due to the toxic food they produce or promote.

In this narrative, there is no space for any mention of the type of power relations that have shaped the prevailing food system and many of the current problems.

Tony Weis from the University of Western Ontario provides useful insight:

World agriculture is marked by extreme imbalances that are among the most durable economic legacies of European imperialism. Many of the world’s poorest countries in the tropics are net food importers despite having large shares of their labor force engaged in agriculture and large amounts of their best arable land devoted to agro-export commodities.

He adds that this commodity dependence has deep roots in waves of dispossession, the establishment of plantations and the subjugation of peasantries to increasing competitive pressures at the same time as they were progressively marginalised.

In the 2018 book The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and its Solutions, Jason Hickel describes the processes involved in Europe’s wealth accumulation over a 150-year period of colonialism that resulted in tens of millions of deaths.

By using other countries’ land, Britain effectively doubled the size of arable land in its control. This made it more practical to then reassign the rural population at home (by stripping people of their productive means) to industrial labour. This too was underpinned by massive violence (burning villages, destroying houses, razing crops).

In more recent times, neoliberalism has further reinforced the power relations that underpin the system, cementing the control of agricultural production by global corporations and facilitated by the policies of the World Trade Organization, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

Corporate food transition
The food transition is couched in the language of climate emergency and sustainability. It envisages a particular future for farming. It is not organic and relatively few farmers have a place in it.

Post-1945, corporate agribusiness, largely backed by the U.S. state, the Rockefeller Foundation and financial institutions, has been promoting and instituting a chemical-dependent system of industrial agriculture. Rural communities, ecological systems, the environment, human health and indigenous systems of food cultivation have been devastated in the process.

Now, the likes of Bayer, Corteva and Syngenta are working with Microsoft, Google and the big-tech giants to facilitate farmerless farms driven by cloud and AI technology. A cartel of data owners and proprietary input suppliers are reinforcing their grip on the global food system while expanding their industrial model of crop cultivation.

One way they are doing this is by driving the ‘climate emergency’ narrative, a contested commentary that has been carefully promoted (see the work of investigative journalist Cory Morningstar), and net-zero ideology and tying this to carbon offsetting and carbon credits.

Many companies from various sectors are securing large areas of land in the Global South to establish tree plantations and claim carbon credits that they can sell on international carbon markets. In the meantime, by supposedly ‘offsetting’ their emissions, they can carry on polluting.

In countries where industrial agriculture dominates, ‘carbon farming’ involves modifying existing practices to claim that carbon is being sequestered in the soil and to then sell carbon credits.

This is explained in a recent presentation by Devlin Kuyek of the non-profit GRAIN who sets out the corporate agenda behind carbon farming.

One of the first major digital agriculture platforms is called Climate FieldView, an app owned by Bayer. It collects data from satellites and sensors in fields and on tractors and then uses algorithms to advise farmers on their farming practices: when and what to plant, how much pesticide to spray, how much fertiliser to apply, etc. FieldView is already being used on farms in the U.S., Canada, Brazil, Argentina and Europe.

To be part of Bayer’s Carbon Program, farmers have to be enrolled in Bayer’s FieldView digital agriculture platform. Bayer then uses the FieldView app to instruct farmers on the implementation of just two practices that are said to sequester carbon in the soils: reduced tillage or no-till farming and the planting of cover crops.

Through the app, the company monitors these two practices and estimates the amount of carbon that the participating farmers have sequestered. Farmers are then supposed to be paid according to Bayer’s calculations, and Bayer uses that information to claim carbon credits and sell these in carbon markets.

In August 2022, Bayer launched a new programme in the U.S. called ForGround. Upstream companies can use the platform to advertise and offer discounts for tilling equipment, forage seeds and other inputs. But Bayer’s big target is the downstream food companies which can use the platform to claim emissions reductions in their supply chains.

Places like India are also laying the groundwork for these types of platforms. In April 2021, the Indian government signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Microsoft, allowing its local partner CropData to leverage a master database of farmers.

Microsoft will ‘help’ farmers with post-harvest management solutions by building a collaborative platform and capturing agriculture datasets such as crop yields, weather data, market demand and prices. In turn, this would create a farmer interface for ‘smart’ agriculture, including post-harvest management and distribution.

CropData will be granted access to a government database of 50 million farmers and their land records. As the database is developed, it will include farmers’ personal details:

Profile of land held—cadastral maps, farm size, land titles, local climatic and geographical conditions.
Production details—crops grown, production history, input history, quality of output, machinery in possession.
Financial details—input costs, average return, credit history.
The stated aim is to use digital technology to improve financing, inputs, cultivation and supply and distribution.

However, this initiative also involves providing data on land holding deeds with the intention of implementing a land market so that investors can buy up land and amalgamate it—global equity funds regard agricultural land as a valuable asset, and global agritech/agribusiness companies prefer industrial-scale farms for rolling out highly mechanised ‘precision’ agriculture.

‘Data-driven agriculture’ mines data to be exploited by the agribusiness/big tech giants who will know more about farmers than farmers know about themselves. The likes of Bayer and Microsoft will gain increasing control over farmers, dictating exactly how they farm and what inputs they use.

And as GRAIN notes, getting more farmers to use reduced tillage or no-till is of huge benefit to Bayer.  The kind of reduced tillage or no-till promoted by Bayer requires dousing fields with its RoundUp (toxic glyphosate) herbicide and planting seeds of its genetically engineered (GE) Roundup resistant soybeans or hybrid maize.

Bayer also intends to profit from the promotion of cover crops. It has taken majority ownership of a seed company developing a gene-edited cover crop, called CoverCress. Seeds of CoverCress will be sold to farmers who are enrolled in ForGround and the crop will be sold as a biofuel.

GE has always been a solution in need of a problem. Along with its associated money-spinning toxic chemicals, it has failed to deliver on its promises (see GMO Myths and Truths, published by Open Earth Source) and has sometimes been disastrous when rolled out, not least for poor farmers in India.

Whereas traditional breeding and on-farm practices have little or no need for GE technologies, under the guise of ‘climate emergency’, the data and agritech giants are commodifying knowledge and making farmers dependent on their platforms and inputs. The commodification of knowledge and compelling farmers to rely on proprietary inputs overseen by algorithms will define what farming is and how it is to be carried out.

The introduction of technology into the sector can benefit farmers. But understanding who owns the technology and how it is being used is crucial for understanding underlying motivations, power dynamics and the quality of food we end up eating.

Net-zero Ponzi scheme
In its article From land grab to soil grab: the new business of carbon farming, GRAIN says control rather than sequestering carbon is at the heart of the matter. More than half of the soil organic matter in the world’s agricultural soils has already been lost. Yet, the main culprits behind this soil catastrophe are now recasting themselves as soil saviours.

Under the guise of Green Revolution practices (application of chemicals, synthetic fertilisers, high water usage, hybrid seeds, intensive mono-cropping, increased mechanisation, etc), what we have seen is an exploitative form of agriculture which has depleted soil of its nutrients. It has also resulted in placing farmers on corporate seed and chemical treadmills.

Similarly, carbon farming draws farmers into the digital platforms that agribusiness corporations and big tech companies are jointly developing to influence farmers on their choice of inputs and farming practices (big tech companies, like Microsoft and IBM, are major buyers of carbon credits). The companies intend to make their digital platforms one-stop shops for carbon credits, seeds, pesticides and fertilisers and agronomic advice, all supplied by the company, which gets the added benefit of control over the data harvested from the participating farms.

Those best placed to benefit from these programmes are the equity funds and the wealthy who have been buying up large farmland areas. Financial managers can now use digital platforms to buy farms in Brazil, sign them up for carbon credits, and run their operations all from their offices on Wall Street.

As for the carbon credit and carbon trading market, this appears to be another profitable Ponzi scheme from which traders will make a financial killing.

Journalist Patrick Greenfield states that research into Verra, the world’s leading carbon standard for the rapidly growing $2bn (£1.6bn) voluntary offsets market, has found that more than 90% of their rainforest offset credits—among the most commonly used by companies—are likely to be ‘phantom credits’ and do not represent genuine carbon reductions.

The analysis raises questions over the credits bought by a number of internationally renowned companies—some of them have labelled their products ‘carbon neutral’ or have told their consumers they can fly, buy new clothes or eat certain foods without making the ‘climate crisis’ worse.

Washington-based Verra operates a number of leading environmental standards for climate action and sustainable development, including its verified carbon standard (VCS) that has issued more than a billion carbon credits. It approves three-quarters of all voluntary offsets. Its rainforest protection programme makes up 40% of the credits it approves.

Although Verra disputes the findings, only a handful of Verra’s rainforest projects showed evidence of deforestation reductions—94% of the credits had no benefit to the climate.

The threat to forests had been overstated by about 400% on average for Verra projects, according to analysis of a 2022 University of Cambridge study.

Barbara Haya, the director of the Berkeley Carbon Trading Project, has been researching carbon credits for 20 years, hoping to find a way to make the system function.

She says that companies are using credits to make claims of reducing emissions when most of these credits don’t represent emissions reductions at all:

Rainforest protection credits are the most common type on the market at the moment. But these problems are not just limited to this credit type. These problems exist with nearly every kind of credit.

Genuine food transition
The ‘food transition involves’ locking farmers further into an exploitative corporate-controlled agriculture that extracts wealth and serves the market needs of global corporations, carbon trading Ponzi schemes and private equity funds. Farmers will be reduced to corporate labourers or profit-extracting agents who bear all of the risks.

The predatory commercialisation of the countryside is symptomatic of a modern-day colonialist mindset that cynically undermines indigenous farming practices and uses flawed premises and fear mongering to legitimise the roll-out of technologies and chemicals to supposedly deliver us all from climate breakdown and Malthusian catastrophe.

A genuine food transition would involve transitioning away from the reductionist yield-output industrial paradigm to a more integrated low-input systems approach to food and agriculture that prioritises local food security, diverse cropping patterns and nutrition production per acre, water table stability, climate resilience, good soil structure and the ability to cope with evolving pests and disease pressures.

It would involve localised, democratic food systems and a concept of food sovereignty based on self-sufficiency, agroecological principles and regenerative agriculture (there are numerous concrete examples of regenerative agriculture, many of which are described on the website of Food Tank).

This would also involve facilitating the right to culturally appropriate food that is nutritionally dense and free from toxic chemicals and ensuring local (communal) ownership and stewardship of common resources, including land, water, soil and seeds.

This is the basis of genuine food security and genuine environmentalism—based on short-line supply chains that keeps wealth within local communities rather than it being siphoned off by profit-seeking entities half a world away.

https://mronline.org/2023/06/12/from-ne ... ower-grab/

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Is the Planet a factory?
Originally published: Negation Magazine on June 2023 by Negation Magazine (more by Negation Magazine) | (Posted Jun 13, 2023)
June 2023

The 2019 Global Climate Strike–in which more than 6 million people from 150 countries partook— is a misnomer. Strikes occur in the context of the workplace; they are a tool for collectively bargaining with the employer. In the climate strikes, there was no work, no place, no employer, and no employees. They were a public spectacle insofar as they appeared in public squares and on media technologies. The direct political object of this spectacular action was the UN Climate Action Summit–a forum where delegates claimed to represent most of the people involved in the protests. The delegates had an interest in heeding the demonstration insofar as their legitimacy as representatives is partly reliant on them aligning with opinions of their constituents. The antagonism between labor and capital, traditionally escalated in a strike by attacking or abandoning the means of production, is nowhere to be seen here. This was a civil demonstration masquerading as a strike. It is akin, but also diametrically opposed, to another masquerade/demonstration–climate mourning, like that done for glaciers and other natural “capitals.” Both the strike and the funeral are united in their techniques and aspiration: they are moments in the history of socializing nature, of articulating and enacting real relations to it in the face of climate change. They differ in affect; while one takes up the loss of an object of desire, the other draws on an antagonism between labor and capital. In order to get us out of what Andreas Malm calls the warming condition, the strikes promised, by metaphorizing political history, to make planetary history. But at the same time, due to that very metaphoricity marking the promise, the revolutionary potential of this strike remains an open question.

It would be nice then to have a literal climate strike–but a planetary factory does not colloquially exist. As in the autonomist critique of post-Fordist capitalism, wherein the factory was shipped off to China, we will have to make do with a factory that has spilled out into society. As Matteo Pasquinelli has pointed out, the use of energy metrics, rooted in the industrial factory, is “no more the precise calculation and modulation of productivity, but the management of its collateral costs (e.g., environmental costs) that expresses a model of the reverse valorization of energy resources and assets. Whereas in the industrial age the metric of energy was a measure of the factory’s productivity (workers’ performance, steam engine output, fuel costs, etc.), today it is used in fact for the calculus of the energetic impact of all sectors and members of society.”2 This generalization of the energy metric and its calculus on one hand genealogically links the climate to the industrial factory, and on the other gives import to a planetary factory known and managed via environmental and climate science. In his essay on “Political Metrology,” Pasquinelli sees the steam engine and the telegraph as means of production that also acted as “mediators” between political-economic and natural scientific categories, becoming the interface between concepts of work, information, energy, and freedom. Moreover, early automata included the cybernetic and informatic element of the “governor.” Literalizing the climate strike for our revolutionary goals entails the objectification of this planetary factory by drawing on this genealogy. This proposed revolutionary objectification must work along and against the dominant objectification of the planet in the hegemonic discourse of earth system sciences, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and speculative finance and philosophy alike. For them, the planet is not a factory to strike against, but a dynamic system to model, predict, measure, and plan.

THE FETISHISM OF THE PLANET AND ITS SECRET
The dominant objectification of the planet works on both a political and theoretical register. For the political register, which coalesces around IPCC’s global governmental assessments of the climate, the planet’s parameters are operationalized as independent of and unmoored from socioeconomic causes. In her discourse analysis of the IPCC’s assessments, Shachi Mokashi analyzes its fifth assessment report (AR5)’s novel introduction of socioeconomic uncertainty alongside uncertainties about the climate system in their methods for constructing future climate scenarios.3 The IPCC uses a scenario planning methodology which, instead of determining future outcomes, projects diverging tendencies known at the present into the future to yield scenarios. Mokashi describes the parallel modeling methodology of AR5: “Unlike the previous scenarios-constructions, where the socioeconomic scenarios predated the radiative forcing levels and climate models, the Fifth Assessment Cycle began with defined levels of radiative forcings.”4 Radiative forcing refers, roughly, to the difference in the energy input and output of the atmospheric system in the form of radiation (it is “forced” by, say, greenhouse gasses). While economic data could be used to predict future emissions to project forcing in the future (as has been done in past assessment reports), AR5 made the Earth Systemic parameters independent of their anthropogenic causes.

The independence of the planetary parameters is consistent with an increasingly popular theorization of the planet. Consider Dipesh Chakrabarty’s planetary thought,5 which points out, rightly so, that the globe of globalization is not the globe of global warming. The former refers to the site of social histories of empires and capital. The latter refers to the geophysical trajectory of the earth system. The globe is made and remade by human beings, while the latter–following Chakrabarty, we will call it “the planet”–is articulated through an ancestral discourse that is not even specific to this planet: earth system science is a set of techniques that can study any terrestrial system.6 As human subjects standing at the intersection of these two histories–the global reckoning with planetary crisis–we find ourselves constituting the globe and only contingently partaking in and effecting the planet. As in AR5, planetary phenomena like emissions, climate change etc. are very easy to conceive without human actions, even if they are caused by humans. They are independent variables now.

Mokashi demonstrates that the effect of this independence is to reify a climate capitalist future. In the AR5, certain futures could be projected as “ideal” and desirable, as “levels of radiative forcing that an amalgamation of social, political, and economic structures could aim to achieve.”7 Based on non-catastrophic levels of radiation forcing scenarios, “the IPCC does, in fact, attempt to provide imaginaries of the ideal future wherein mitigation is effectively managed by the unit of the nation-state and the desired levels of radiative forcing;” Mokashi cites the report correlating policy-based stabilization of the atmosphere to “annual changes in investment flows.”8 The IPCC has provided an image not only of what the future might look like, but also how it should look, who might implement it, and how.9

Chakrabarty is less sanguine than the UN about redirecting investment flows. Even though he projects a complementary independence of the globe and the planet, his thought culminates in a reformist critique of hegemonic sustainability as anthropocentric. Insofar as life is so utterly contingent to the planet–and climate change is a crisis that threatens life-as-such, and not simply human life–he offers a biocentric political value of habitability in its stead. But the impasses of politics are not fully overcome in this replacement. The planet/globe wedge raises a whole family of political problems in facing this crisis. Who is the political subject for a truly planetary politics?10 Chakrabarty renders the political aporia at the crossroads of globe and planet in agential terms: “the mode of being in which humans collectively may act as a geological force is not the mode of being in which humans–individually and collectively–can become conscious of being such a force.”11

I want to call this dominant objectification a planetary fetishism. At first sight, the very idea of the existence of a planetary fetishism is a dangerous and reactionary one. Indeed, a revolutionary materialism is itself scientific, and science too needs the revolutionary project for its liberation from the fetters of the profit motive in knowledge production. The claim that the planet is a fetish, on one hand, recapitulates the trope of critical thought as a magician’s trick of defetishizing everything, and on the other, it dovetails with a fossil fascist project of propagating misinformation and climate change denial. However, the aim of a critical or clinical working through ideology or fantasy is not to expose the secret but to do justice to it.12 To cling to some truth underneath it all, is that not yet another fetish? To the contrary, the charge of planetary fetishism, in the terminology of Andreas Malm, is not only climate realist but climate socialist realist. For the liberal hegemonic project of green capitalism, climate realism has been an unsettling force, but it is still potentially compatible. The green capitalist project–to de-correlate emissions and profits, to internalize nature into the economy through natural capital assets and weather derivatives, to sustainably develop during a planetary crisis–is rife with contradictions that both destabilize and nourish it. The gambit of decrying a planetary fetishism serves to politicize climate science fully, and to preclude its assimilation into capitalist realism.

A planetary fetishism is more complicated than the classical case of the commodity. Fetish objects are “sensuous things which are at the same time suprasensible or social.”13 There are two approaches to the suprasensible: scientific and mystical. While the former seeks the essences behind appearances, the latter subjectivizes substances, positing a hidden soul or power or value intrinsic to the fetish object. In Marx’s classical account of the fetishism of the commodity, a form of relations between subjects is taken by the very same subjects as a form of relations between things. Unlike the commodity, the planet necessarily appears indirectly to our bodily senses. Planetary phenomena are technically and scientifically mediated–whether it is the world-picture from a satellite, the moon, or Voyager II, or if it is belabored models, graphs, and simulations. If the planet appears, it appears through already technical, socialized organs–sensing, imaging, and synthesizing machines, protocols, and algorithms–embedded in the circuit of capital. Moreover, fetishism is also trickier in the case of the planet because what needs explaining is not an objective relationality but rather a non-relationality, the independence of the planet from the social. However, the complications of planetary fetishism are not extraneous to the logic of commodity fetishism; on the contrary, they are its perfection. Even our unmediated sense organs have a social history of acculturation and disciplining,14 but in the dynamic of appearance/essence of commodity fetishism this historicity was easily elided. As the frontier of capital expands, however, with the commodification of the body and its organs, and on the other hand with the production and proliferation of vision machines, the society/nature line becomes unsettled and the historicity of perception becomes legible. Planetary fetishism is thus a higher form of fetish into which the fetishism of the commodity evolves concurrently with capitalist development.

Despite all these theoretical difficulties, planetary fetishism is a worthwhile concept insofar as it explains the occlusion of the planetary factory. Chakrabarty’s missing mode of being–where geological agency and political consciousness are coincident–is reminiscent of the theme of marxist political psychology: what are the conditions for class consciousness? How do political subjects come to see themselves as determining and determined, as the subject-object of history? We find this theme recapitulated in Chakrabarty on the planetary level, albeit with a biocentrism that displaces the social contradiction between labor and capital–thus the working class–from the center. I argue that the planetary factory is precisely that same mode of being in which humans are a geological force and become conscious of being such a force. Planetary fetishism is the mechanism through which that factory, as the condition of planetary facts, disappears from consciousness. It arises as a complicated fetish insofar as it is a reconfiguration of our senses in the moment of a real subsumption of labor to capital. This moment, as typified in the confrontation of the worker and the machine, Marx writes, intensifies the fetish and mystery of objects. In the planetary factory, not only are we confronted with capitalist relations ossified in the means of production, but also in our very apparatus of sense and apprehension.

THE PLANETARY FACTORY
As hinted above, Pasquinelli’s planetary factory concept is based on the autonomist concept of the social factory. In Mario Tronti’s Factory and Society, the social factory emerges from the nexus of factory-society-state. The state enshrines labor regulations fought for by the working class against capital, while society tends to the point where the social relation itself comes to be a productive relation. Such a relation is the limit and tendency of the real subsumption of labor to capital. The capitalist responds to the workers’ victory of a limit to the working day, and thus the production of absolute surplus value, by increasing labor productivity through technical (automation) and economic means (cheapening the conditions of reproduction of labor-power, like food).15 In the process, relative surplus value is produced, characterized by the fact that now the surplus is not extensive (the length, labor-time) but intensive (the density, labor-power). Marx calls the production of relative surplus value “a specifically capitalist mode of production” with its own “methods, means and conditions;” real subsumption of labor to capital evokes a world remade in the image of capital, where the machine not only conditions relative surplus value in the factory, but has become the very diagram for society.16

The concept of the social factory comes to the fore in following the consequences of the machine as a concretion of capitalist social relations. First, the machine’s automaticity lies in its fact of having enclosed the social brain and general intellect, the knowledge of the skilled worker into itself.17 As a result, social life in general comes to be imbricated in the production process. Secondly, drawing on Marx’s concept of “social capital” as both the totality of all individual capitals and the socialization of capitalist production, Tronti suggests that the social factory produces capitalism as a mode of production itself, with social capital at its heart. The production of relative surplus value is a necessary moment in the production of capitalism as a mode of production, for without real subsumption in the face of proletarian upheaval, social capital will be unable to reproduce. In these two moments–the enclosure of the intellect and the reproduction of total social capital via the competitive relation of individual capitalists–Tronti’s social factory thesis coalesces: social relations themselves become a relation of production.

The question is whether real subsumption stops at the boundaries of society or whether the factory continues to spill out to the level of planetary nature. This question can be seen as a continuation of Andreas Malm’s ecological autonomism in The Progress of This Storm.18 He defines the autonomy of nature and labor from capital along three lines: 1) ontological priority, 2) struggle for control by the ruling class, and 3) dormancy and upheaval. The first line refers to the fact that labor and nature precede capital both historically and ontologically. The second line refers to the fact that the capitalist seeks to control labor and nature (but is only doomed to do so via a further parasitism on the autonomous forces). The third line refers to the fact that this autonomy does not manifest itself except in a moment of crisis. The autonomous force of nature and capital “strikes back,” either in the form of workers’ upheaval or natural disaster–Malm considers climate change as “the ultimate blowback.” For this reason, Malm suggests that “ecological autonomism, if such a thing could exist, would then primarily be a theory of acute crisis.”19 The autonomy of nature and labor converge on these three fronts, but Malm emphasizes–given his larger polemic against new materialism and posthumanism—that nature has an autonomy without agency, whereas labor has an autonomy with conscious agency. He writes that while the other of labor is capital, the other of nature is society, and thus the blowbacks of nature will create indiscriminate casualties, on the side of labor in the war against capital; he echoes Moore, “Your Wars, Our Dead.”

Malm’s second line of thought suggests the subsumption of nature to capital, but it does not go far enough as an ecological autonomism. While Malm is sober instead of celebratory about ecological crises that are borne of this subsumption, he under-theorizes the recursive character of this subsumption. The turbulent and unpredictable blowbacks of nature–while being indices of its autonomy–are precisely the stuff of the planetary factory. For instance, Melinda Cooper shows that there is a homology between financial markets and climate systems in their tendency for turbulence, resulting in the increasing trade of weather derivatives and natural security bonds.20 John Bellamy Foster sounds the alarm for the financialization of the earth as the climate capitalist program championed by global capital and global governance: to re-read the world as natural capital assets to be traded.21 Sara Holiday Nelson analyzes the emergence of the ecosystem service economy in the post-war west as a moment leading up to post-Fordism, that is to say, as a subsumption of ecological reproduction alongside social reproduction into the valorization process.22 The fantasy of green capitalism pointed out by these thinkers and others like them is that profitability might be decoupled from emissions (which have been linked together in an iron-clad union since at least 1830); speculative finance and environmental science are thus becoming ways for society to internalize nature in hopes of regulating the latter by marketizing it. Ironically, the concepts of society and nature hitherto, and policy practice under the neoclassical paradigm, had been premised on their mutual exclusion. The market was natural in its laws and self-regulation like nature, but only because it was decidedly not nature. The awareness of climate change and the green capitalist project thus marks a rupture: it coincides with a planetary system recursively coming to know and constitute itself, and by extension creating modes of manipulating itself. In the words of Ian Alan Paul: “all of Earth is mediated by climate, capitalism, and control, three assemblages that have come to be entangled with one another at planetary scales;” they are becoming “integrated within a singular planetary logic.”23

We can call this system or logic a planetary factory; it refers to the planetary production of capitalism as a mode of production, and the production of planetary facts–knowledges and events. The popular term for the planetary factory is Earth System, or Planetary Computation. This is because the constitutive (as opposed to casual) role of cyberfossil capital and carbosilicon machines for planetary computation 24 is severely bracketed (as in Chakrabarty), if ever mentioned in planetary analyses.25 Pasquinelli asks, “is the similarity of climate science and control apparatuses just a coincidence, or does it point to a more general form of governance?” It is possible for some to ignore this question because the Earth System–the subject of planetary history–appears without its historiography. Chakrabarty’s commitment to an ancestral and objectified earth divests not only the political histories of the anthropocene (which he somewhat explicitly addresses) but also the very nature of the self-awareness of the Earth System. The geological force of humanity must be taken to its logical conclusion: instead of some kind of unconscious agency, the geological force here is planetary capital.26 To give a history of the planetary factory is to also make it visible–landing a blow becomes possible.27 While such a project is outside the scope of this paper, I offer the following note.

The planetary factory is spread all over the troposphere, built on the skeleton of the imperial organism just like global capital.28 The UN and IPCC are only the most recent iteration in atmospheric and ecological projects of modern empires. From plantations in the West Indies to famines in India, from exotic plants in greenhouses to cholera epidemics, geographical differentials have served as the motor for natural science.29 Specifically, statistical climatology, meteorology, and ecology were pursued at imperial institutions for imperial interests; they make up the basis of climate science today.30 The networks and mutually intelligible data practices of global climate science that make up the “vast machine” of the planetary factory were the result of imperial adventures.31 Even after the world wars, geophysical earth science–as opposed to bioecological earth science–was developed in the Cold War to serve the neoimperial and security interests of the U.S.32 Within the borders of the U.S. during the decolonization wave of the mid-twentieth century, the Cold War came home, and chickens roosted: climate science techniques and technologies began to define the minimum conditions of life in the face of hydrocarbon disasters, producing the environment as a politically and scientifically stable category.33 The control systemic and cybernetic character of climate knowledge and its production processes was preempted by the cybernetic organism of empire–where channels and networks interact and communicate and produce asymmetric effects on each other.34 The society of control that came about from the real subsumption of labor to capital in post-Fordist production is thus homeomorphic to both the thermodynamic machine and the topology of empire. Finally, as the genealogy of planetary metrics lead us to the factory, tracing the genealogy of the factory itself to the colonial plantation as a space of producing world historical social ecological relations through disciplinary and violent practices returns us to empire.35

This is not to expose planetary history, as produced in ESS, as if it were a mere fetish-effect of empire. Instead, the genealogy serves to underscore the belabored reflexivity of the planet–the political exigencies of how it comes to know itself through capitalist machinery (knowledge practices, institutions, technomass).36 That planetary effects (GHG emissions, fossil consumption) are imbricated in planetary knowledge (the logic of control systems, imperial organism) indicates less the capitalist character of geology than the geological force of capital. Chakrabarty understates the capacity of planetary reflexivity because he does not read the Earth System as a real subsumption of nature by cyberfossil capital–“the metabolism of the most archaic biosphere and the most abstract technosphere united by capital.”37 Following Chakrabarty’s famous re-reading of Marx, we might suggest Two Histories of Planetary Capital.38 History 1 was the history of capital as posited by itself as part of its life process, and History 2 was everything that escaped this teleological history. The former is, say, the history of the money-form progressively perfected until the arrival of capital. The latter is then the many lives of money that do not assimilate into the logic of general exchangeability. Along these lines, the planetary factory is the culmination of capital’s History 1 in the ecological aspect–the capitalist perfection of nature.39 There might as well be a History 2 of the planet, moments of interruption which exceed the valorization and expansion of capital at the planetary scale–say, the phenomenological apprehension of climate events without weather balloons, data, and sensor apparatuses (this is the subject of climate realist art). On the side of History 1, however, the planetary factory bridges the theoretical gulf between natural and social history, the globe and the planet. It is the very mode of being in which humanity exerts geological force and becomes aware of being such a force. Why we have not been able to do much about it–say, abruptly ceasing fossil fuel production tout court–is a political question. Who, or what, controls the planetary factory?

FROM POLITICAL METROLOGY TO A REVOLUTIONARY MATHEMATICS OF THE PLANET
How does the industrial genealogy of energy and information bear upon present struggles and politics of the climate? If there is indeed a planetary factory, that is, a capitalist mode of producing planetary facts–climate events, disasters, tendencies, representations, graphs, simulations, etc.–how do we strike against it, and who is this “we”?

The problem of the revolutionary subject recurs for planetary politics. Strike action is a disindentification of labor; in upheavals against and within the factory, the politicized worker simultaneously embraces and refuses the subjection to homogenous work. However, to go looking for a worker at the planetary factory is difficult. While the idea of the working class as a subject-object of history was once a lynchpin of revolutionary thinking, it has come to define a space of problems over the course of the twentieth century. Justin Joque writes:

The struggles of student radicalism in the late ’60s; the emergence of non-class-based liberal movements (e.g., the environmental movement, anti-war movement and human rights organizations); the recognition that this ideal of a universal subject was likely just a Western white male fantasy; the realization of the violent excesses of Stalinism and Maoism; the collapse of the Soviet Union; and the “return” of ethno-national conflict and religious fundamentalism have all served to call into question the viability of a unified political subject who could foment global revolutionary change.40

This problem is only intensified in the context of a revolution in the course of planetary history, where, as Chakrabarty has pointed out, not only the worker, but the human ceases to be the protagonist. Undeniably, animals, plants, forests, fungi, bacteria, corals–the litany is inexhaustible–the entire biosphere is caught in the fray of the planetary factory. On the other hand, besides prognostic issues of finding a political subject, the gap between social subjects and natural objects also suggests a problem for a revolutionary theory of the planet. Are we not indulging in a reification of social relations if we conceptualize natural relations using social concepts like revolution? Rather than locating the social contradiction at the heart of natural science, we end up naturalizing capitalist domination by trafficking society into nature. In trying to undo planetary fetishism, have we wound up developing another?41

As if the exposure of this or that fetish, from the commodity to the planet, is the point of revolutionary thought.42 What is precisely at stake is not subjectivity or objectivity but the point at which one becomes the other: “While the entire production process is social, and hence an agreement between subjects–in essence subjective–it does not matter what we think or desire; if we do not own capital, we must sell our labor on the market at the going rate.”43 As the two poles of the subject and object become indeterminately interspersed in the real subsumption by capital in general, and the planetary factory in particular, we might consider, following Joque, that “the most politically efficacious path forward may be neither a directly hybrid route nor a privileging of one specific pole. Instead, we must work directly on the torsion between the objective and the subjective.”44 Joque calls this torsion, following Marx, objectification–the process by which relations between subjects are reflected as relations between objects. Commodity fetishism, in which the commodity comes to have strange powers and a mind of its own, or alienation, in which the machine seems to have a soul and the working self becomes but an appendage, are but moments of objectification. The social work of objectification–carried out by all social objects to varying degrees, including algorithms, knowledge, commodities, means of production–occurs when these objects are “thinking for us and carrying out our affairs.”45 This is particularly evident in the case of knowledge wherein laws, which are very much constructed (facts, as in a factory), determine us irrespective of our will.

The politics of objectification seizes on this mechanism, and seeks to decouple its relation to capitalist exploitation (in fetish, and in alienation). A revolutionary objectification, like Marx’s discovery of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, makes the revolution inevitable through the force of scientific laws: the necessary dissolution of the fetters and necessities of the proletariat. Joque writes that such a revolutionary thought of objectification “must change the underlying structures of exchange and objectification… This is the task of a revolutionary mathematics: to create new mysteries, rather than simply attempt to repair those that capitalism has left us.”46 A mystery is the engine of objectification, even scientific ones. All mysteries are rooted in an equal inequality, from the Trinity (1=3) to the calculus (something = nothing), for they make contingencies necessary.47 Here are some candidates for new mysteries in the face of the planetary factory: life = death, waste = nutrition, etc.48 Any equivalence relation between real things is mysterious if we take the uniqueness of things for granted 49–this is the very mystery of exchange, whose conditions in an unequal society would be subjective, but under liberalism is the objective value relation.50 Joque points out that the Bayesian epistemology upon which AI and knowledge production are based—including climate knowledge production—is grounded in the metaphysics of speculative exchange. The axioms of probability are defined in terms of avoiding a losing bet.51 On one hand, this discovery ossifies capitalist relations into the very methodology of statistical knowledge production. On the other, Bayesian epistemology marks the limit of capitalist knowledge–it knows the world qua profitable. In Joque’s words, rather than naturalizing capitalism, Bayesian epistemology “denaturalizes nature.” As the protocol of climate knowledge production, it constitutes the very rhythm of the planetary factory.

A literal strike at the planetary factory would amount to a counter-objectification, one that negates the UN’s green capitalist future. This objectification will be buttressed by a new mystery to come out of revolutionary mathematics, but it could also be composed of swathes of data jammed into the vast machine within the planetary factory. Whose data, and who does this jamming? Who makes the new mysteries? Although we are on the very torsion between subject and object, we must, like Joque, defer to the subject again:

The only question that remains is whether statistics is to be managed by plant managers–at pharmaceutical companies, tech companies, university research offices, and so on–or by some form of collective set against and beyond capitalism.
What must be decided politically, and with it metaphysically, is whether these abstractions and knowledges will be founded on deception and the reproduction of social inequality, or instead on some other equality. This decision, if we can correctly call it that, is not simply a decision made by individuals; it must be collectively discovered and constructed, and made into a necessity–just as the commodity has decided how one must survive under capitalism.52

Who could this collective be? And what does their mode of counter-objectification (or striking) look like? Insofar as the planetary factory uses data to accumulate capital, to mitigate the negative externalities of the production, and overall to produce objectifications, so it is safe to say that what might jam this machine will take the form of data. What kind of data? We need indices that make the collapse of capitalism inevitable. If Bayesian epistemology can only know what is profitable, the point at which the revolutionary objectification would be successful is when this machine malfunctions under the weight of the data that refuses to produce a future, where a green capitalist future is impossible. To this end, we need to account for all the injuries, we need to measure what no one wants to measure.

I want to wager two political classes for a climate strike to come: a class of intellectual revolutionary mathematicians (knowledge producers whose struggle is going strong in the form of graduate students striking across the US), and a class of masses, a lumpencognitariat.53 The latter is the pseudo-savant; the consumer of mis/information; lover of content. This is a product of late capitalism itself; a consumer invented by states, telecom companies, and Silicon Valley. For their platform machines, the lumpencognitariat is the fleshy circulating capital.54

While some have lamented the loss of the self-present subject, and saw it as the closure of revolutionary possibility,55 the very erosion and reinscription of the subject at the heart of digital experience in the concept of produser, or prosumer, or autoexploiter, or entrepreneur of self, or human capital, when re-plugged into the matrix of the planetary factory spells its doom. The task of a revolutionary mathematical vanguard is to produce the right climate financial instruments, algorithms, post-Bayesian nootechics–that is to say, to produce new ecological mysteries–to take the planetary computation to its overload, its crisis, its collapse.

The lumpencognitariat–when furnished with pirate platforms, and algorithms, parasitic on consumer devices by revolutionary mathematicians and the ecotechnic vanguard of intellectuals–will become users whose ecological meta-data can be used to objectify the critique of the planetary factory. This meta-data might include the experiences of climate emergencies, toxins, breathing problems, new pathologies and syndromes, neurological and immunological disorders. What would it look like for all this data to reflect in the vast machine plugged into the self-regulating financial market? Market society is attempting to internalize nature, its strategy might continue to remain a selective externalization of humans, especially in the global south. Here, against Chakrabarty’s biocentrism, a universalist humanism becomes strategically important. To be a subject-object of planetary history, the lumpencognitariat must see itself as the planet–as systems of energy and as information–and in becoming readable to itself and the vast machine through the mysteries of a vanguard, it will have struck the planetary factory.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This essay greatly benefitted from Elio Jahaj’s comments and encouragement on an early draft, and from Andrew McWhinney’s careful feedback and editing for bringing that first draft to its present form.

Extensive notes at link.

https://mronline.org/2023/06/13/is-the- ... a-factory/

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Latest data reveals ‘unprecedented’ increase in global warming
June 8, 2023

Update to IPCC report shows record jump in emissions and temperatures

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Annual (thin line) and decadal (thick line) change in mean global surface temperature, compared to 1850-1900 average. Source: Indicators of Global Climate Change 2022.

Human-caused global warming has continued to increase at an “unprecedented rate” since the last report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

That’s a key finding of the Indicators of Global Climate Change Project, which aims to fill the “information gap,” between IPCC reports, which are published every six years or so and are often criticized for being out of date.

Initiated by climate scientists at the University of Leeds, the project will publish “up-to-date estimates of policy-relevant global climate indicators that follow the causal chain from emissions to warming, including greenhouse gas emissions, human induced warming and the remaining global carbon budget.” For consistency, the project uses the same indicators and definitions as the IPCC.

Some fifty climate scientists from around the world contributed to the project’s first “annual update of large-scale indicators of the state of the climate system and human influence,” published on June 8 in the peer-reviewed journal Earth System Science Data.

Among the updated indicators:

Between 2013 and 2022, global warming averaged of 1.14°C above pre-industrial levels. This is up from 1.07°C between 2010 and 2019.
Human-induced warming is now increasing by more than 0.2°C per decade.
Increased temperatures are driving “an intensification of many weather and climate extremes, particularly more frequent and more intense hot extremes, and heavy precipitation across most regions of the world.”
Between 2012 and 2021, greenhouse gas emissions were at an all-time high, adding the equivalent 54 billion metric tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every year. That’s about 1,700 tonnes every second.
The Earth’s “carbon budget” — the emissions that can be released to have a 50% chance of keeping global temperature rise under 1.5°C — is shrinking fast. In 2020, the IPCC calculated the remaining budget at 500 gigatons of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. It is now about 250 gigatons.
Improving the odds to 66% or 80% would cut the budget to 150 gigatons and 100 gigatons, which at present rates will be exhausted in less than three years.

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Key Indicators: Changes since the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) was published in 2021 and 2022. Source: Indicators of Global Climate Change 2022.

https://climateandcapitalism.com/2023/0 ... l-warming/

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IRAN DISCOVERS LITHIUM AT HOME: IT HAS THE SECOND LARGEST WORLD RESERVES
Jun 12, 2023 , 3:44 p.m.

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The authorities of the Islamic Republic of Iran discovered lithium deposits located in the province of Hamedan in the west of their country, and they constitute 10% of the world reserves of "white gold", currently estimated at around 89 million tons.

Let us remember that this mineral is vital for the new technological architectures that are being consolidated in the world. Whoever has it in their territory can consider it a source of resources with great demand in the global market.

Israeli geopolitical expert Anat Hochberg Marom told the Maariv newspaper on Saturday June 10 that the discovery of the Iranian lithium deposit could lead to a shift in the regional balance of power and give Tehran an unprecedented geopolitical and economic position.

Iran's economic position and geopolitical influence is expected to grow even further soon, especially in light of the discovery of a massive lithium field containing 8.5 million tons of the mineral, making it the second largest in the world. world after Chile.

Al Mayadeen reports that Iran's military force and the recent unfreezing of relations with Arab countries, in particular with Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Egypt, as well as its military exercises at sea, even with India and Pakistan represent a major concern for the Israelis.

Iran's possession of lithium reserves would imply a potential to circumvent the blockade and unilateral "sanctions" imposed by the United States, since it would be a gateway into global energy and mining markets, as well as the global battery and vehicle industries. electrical.

https://misionverdad.com/iran-descubre- ... -mundiales

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Re: The Long Ecological Revolution

Post by blindpig » Fri Jun 16, 2023 3:20 pm

Japan's plan to discharge toxic water fuels fears
By PRIME SARMIENTO in Hong Kong and LEONARDUS JEGHO in Jakarta | CHINA DAILY | Updated: 2023-06-15 07:34


Experts voice concern over likely harm on humans, marine life in Pacific Ocean

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Tanks containing water from the disabled Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant are seen at the power plant in Okuma town, Fukushima prefecture, Japan, March 8, 2023. [Photo/Agencies]

Environmental experts in Southeast Asia have expressed caution over Japan's plans to release nuclear-contaminated wastewater into the Pacific Ocean, noting the possible harm on human health, fisheries and livelihoods of people living in the Asia-Pacific.

On Monday, the Tokyo Electric Power Company, operator of the crippled Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, started testing the equipment that will discharge radioactive water into the sea amid opposition from domestic experts, civic groups and fishery organizations.

"Japan's behavior is a disgrace and their officials seem determined to offer only 'raw shame' in response to growing concerns over Japanese intentions to turn the ocean into a radioactive sewer," said Renato Redentor Constantino, deputy chair of the Expert Advisory Group of the Climate Vulnerable Forum, a global forum of countries most threatened by climate change.

If Japan wants to continue using nuclear energy, it must figure out a way to dispose of nuclear-contaminated water properly, Constantino said, describing Japan as a neighbor who holds a weekly massive party and dumps everything outside the house, polluting the whole neighborhood.

The current plan of discharge into the sea is the cheapest of five proposals available to the Japanese government, and the most risky for all people and marine life along the West Pacific, Japanese media reported.

Rodhial Huda, a maritime expert and community leader from Natuna Islands, Indonesia, said that if TEPCO dumps wastewater into the Pacific, "it may also affect our (maritime) area if it is toxic".

The Natuna regency lies in the South China Sea, where fishery is the main source of livelihood.

Dwi Sawung, national executive energy and urban campaign manager of the Indonesian Forum for the Environment, or WALHI, said her organization is concerned over the potential long-term effects of contaminated water on the maritime food chain.

"Because we (WALHI) don't know yet what the long-term effects will be on the food chain cycle. That's the worry," Sawung said in an interview with Sinar Daily, a Malaysia-based newspaper.

According to Japan's national broadcaster NHK, the trial operation mixes fresh water and seawater that does not contain radioactive substances to confirm whether the discharge equipment can operate reliably. The test run is expected to last for about two weeks.

'False impression'

Shaun Burnie, a senior nuclear specialist with Greenpeace East Asia, said the Japanese government and TEPCO have been creating a "false impression" on the public that significant progresses have been made in decommissioning the Fukushima plant.

"But the fact is, the source of the problem — the highly radioactive fuel debris in reactor pressure vessels 1, 2 and 3 — continues to contaminate groundwater," Burnie said, adding that about 1,000 cubic meters of water becomes highly contaminated every 10 days.

Huda from Natuna is hopeful that Japan, a maritime country and a member of the International Maritime Organization, "will not carelessly and hurriedly" dump toxic wastewater into the ocean.

He said Indonesia, another maritime country, "should become a leader and not just a follower" in any campaign against the dumping of contaminated water in the Pacific.

http://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/20230 ... bc4a5.html

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WHO POLLUTES MORE: THE RICH OR THE POOR?
Jun 13, 2023 , 12:55 p.m.

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The most developed and industrialized cities contribute to the increase in global temperatures (Photo: File)

The researcher and columnist for Misión Verdad , Éder Peña, shows in an article that the way we organize ourselves in societies and our means of subsistence are being affected by the systemic crisis, which includes the climate. But it has been shown that not everyone will be affected in the same way, since social inequality influences the distribution of burdens and responsibilities.

Below we present some data extracted from scientific research that corroborate that those who pollute the least are the most affected:

The poor are the most vulnerable by extreme rains or droughts that affect agricultural productivity in less developed countries.
Heat waves have an impact on mortality, especially in vulnerable urban centers.
Tropical cyclones and floods will continue to displace millions of people, especially in low-income countries.
The 10% of the world's largest emitters of carbon gases, which cause the greenhouse effect, generate almost half of all emissions.
It has been shown that rich and industrialized countries contribute more to the increase in global average temperature. Therefore they should compensate the rest of the world for the appropriation of the "atmospheric commons". "Countries with excessive emissions owe a total of 192 trillion dollars to the rest of the world by 2050. Most of it is owed by the United States, the United Kingdom and the European Union," Peña collects in her research.

This is not about a political perception of a problem but about scientific data that confirm social inequality in environmental and climate matters.

https://misionverdad.com/quienes-contam ... los-pobres

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CovertAction Bulletin – NYC on fire: How Do We Solve the Global Climate Crisis?
By Rachel Hu and Chris Garaffa - June 15, 2023 1

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https://linktr.ee/CovertActionBulletin

In early June, cities in the Northeast and mid-Atlantic regions of the U.S. were blanketed by smoke from wildfires in Canada, some hundreds of which are still burning. Air Quality Index levels reached nearly 500 in New York City at one point, well into the “hazardous” range. In fact, New York City was briefly the world’s most polluted city during that time. New York does not normally fall in the worst 3,000 global cities for air quality.

Incidents like the wildfire smoke bring attention to the problem of global climate change, but the proposals put forward by the private sector and major industrialized governments don’t solve the issue—and in fact they put the burden on the rest of the world. So what’s happening, and what are some real solutions?

We’re joined by Brandon Wu, Director of Policy and Campaigns at ActionAid USA.


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https://covertactionmagazine.com/2023/0 ... te-crisis/

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Ecology without class struggle is gardening!

Our planet can only be saved by scientific planning of human production and economic activity, taking into account all the consequences for nature.
Alexei Alyokin

Thursday 15 June 2023

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How many people understand that the Soviet Union pioneered many of the ecological measures that are so desperately needed today, precisely because its planned economy was at the service of the people and not impeded by the deadly drive to maximise profits?

This article is reproduced from the Communist Workers Party of Russia website with thanks.

*****

The fifth of June was World Environment Day. This ecological holiday, designed to draw attention to environmental problems, is celebrated every year on 5 June. It was created by the United Nations general assembly in 1972. Since then, the day has become a symbol of the fight for nature conservation and sustainable development.

It may be a discovery for some, but the USSR has been a pioneer in solving many environmental problems. In 1924, the All-Russian Society for the Protection of Nature was created. The idea for such an organisation was approved by the leaders of the People’s Commissariat for Education Anatoly Vasilyevich Lunacharsky and Nadezhda Konstantinovna Krupskaya.

Members of the society planted trees, collected seeds, cleaned springs and small rivers, and created school forests. Thanks to them, many specially protected natural areas were created, many of which still exist today. As far back as 1960, a law on nature protection was passed in the USSR.

The so-called ‘circular economy’, which is only talked about in the west, was widely implemented in the USSR. Everyone who found life in the USSR remembers that they then handed over waste paper, bottles, rags, collected scrap metal and other recyclable materials. Admittedly, in terms of packaging levels, the USSR lost a lot, but there was a lot less waste than there is now.

The same applies to the quality of food products. Yes, the indescribably bluish Soviet chicken looked miserable compared to the juicy hormone-inflated capitalist chicken. Well, the fact that it was environmentally friendly, the understanding of that didn’t come immediately …

Of course, the Soviet Union also had serious environmental problems linked to accelerated industrialisation, without which the country would not have survived. But they would have been solved in a planned economy.

However, the theme of ecology in the late 1980s was also used by the new ‘democrats’ to undermine socialism. However, if Russian capitalism was able to solve some of the existing environmental problems, it was only through the complete collapse of certain industries …

The same can be said of the global situation as a whole. For example, the 100 largest companies alone are responsible for 71 percent of global emissions. Yet bourgeois governments around the world are competing to reduce their taxes. And if you take the plastics industry worldwide, for decades it has been allowed to operate with minimal government regulation.

To sum up: plastic production and consumption are becoming a major driver of the climate crisis. What’s more, plastic waste, particularly single-use waste, is accumulating in landfills, along roadsides and in rivers, which carry huge quantities of plastic into the ocean.

And no wonder. The capitalist will always and everywhere strive to extract the maximum profit, whatever the consequences. Consequently, within the framework of capitalism, it will never be possible to overcome environmental problems.

Our planet can only be saved by scientific planning of human production and economic activity, taking into account all the consequences for nature. In the elements of a market economy, while maintaining private ownership of the means of production, competition and the pursuit of profit, such an organisation of human life is simply not possible.

Or, as the Brazilian trade unionist and ecologist Chico Mendez put it: “Ecology without class struggle is gardening!”

https://thecommunists.org/2023/06/15/ne ... gardening/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: The Long Ecological Revolution

Post by blindpig » Fri Jun 23, 2023 3:05 pm

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The idea of degrowth communism was Marx’s last breakthrough—and perhaps most important
By Peter Boyle (Posted Jun 23, 2023)

Originally published: LINKS International Journal of Socialist Renewal on June 22, 2023 (more by LINKS International Journal of Socialist Renewal) |

Kohei Saito will be speaking at Ecosocialism 2023 over July 1–2 in Naarm/Melbourne, Australia. For more information about the conference, visit ecosocialism.org.au. —LINKS editors

Even if Japanese Marxist Kohei Saito had not written Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism, the left today would still need to take the idea of degrowth seriously. This is because, economist and anthropologist Jason Hickel explains, “while it’s possible to transition to 100 percent renewable energy, we cannot do it fast enough to stay under 1.5°C or 2°C if we continue to grow the global economy at existing rates.”

It’s not just reliance on fossil fuels that imperils the planet, but capitalism’s chronic pursuit of economic growth. Unlimited growth means more demand for energy. And more energy demand makes it more difficult to develop sufficient capacity for generating renewable energy in the short time left to avert catastrophic warming.

This is why Saito’s re-reading of Karl Marx’s life work is crucial for socialists today. As he argues, ecology wasn’t a secondary consideration for Marx but at the core of his analysis of capitalism. And as he neared the end of his life, Marx turned increasingly to the natural sciences and became deeply convinced that the endless growth associated with capitalism could not be harnessed for human or environmental purposes. Rather, as Saito details, Marx understood that communism would deliver both abundance and degrowth.

More than global warming
Today, environmental activists typically focus on global warming. But the problem is deeper than that. Scientists such as James Hansen and Paul Crutzen have identified a number of “planetary boundaries” beyond which disaster is all but certain. Climate change is one of these. However, tipping points also exist when it comes to the loss of biodiversity or forested land, ocean acidification, chemical pollution, ozone depletion, nitrogen and phosphorus loading in water and the depletion of fresh water.

For example, atmospheric carbon concentration should not breach 350 parts per million (ppm) if the climate is to remain stable — and we already crossed that boundary in 1990. Now, it is 420ppm. Similarly, disaster threatens if the proportion of the Earth’s land surface that is forested drops below 25 percent or if the extinction rate exceeds ten species per million per year.

From the deforestation of the Amazon to extinctions caused by climate-change driven bushfires in Australia, the root cause remains the same — unchecked economic expansion.

However much the evidence demands degrowth, the proposal nonetheless raises difficult political questions. For example, socialists in the developed and developing worlds are united in demanding improved living standards. And it’s hard to imagine a mass movement against capitalism gaining traction unless it can offer a better life.

These, however, are not insurmountable problems. As both Saito and Hickel argue, because of imperialism’s role in systematically passing ecological costs to the global South, economic growth needs to fall sharply in the wealthiest countries while continuing to grow in the global South.

But this does not mean that ordinary people in rich countries have to suffer a sharp drop in their quality of life. By radically restructuring the economy to prioritize social needs and ecological sustainability, it’s possible to improve life for the majority even while reducing production.

As Saito argued in Marx in the Anthropocene, later in life, as Marx deepened his research into political economy and natural science, this idea became more crucial to his vision of a post-capitalist society. However, it’s a perspective that was in part lost given that Marx did not live long enough to incorporate the analysis into planned but uncompleted later volumes of Capital. And this is not just conjecture. Saito builds his case on the basis of his deep knowledge of previously unpublished notebooks and writings that have now been published as part of the new complete works of Marx and Frederick Engels, the Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe (MEGA).

Marx, Saito writes, came to realize that the “capitalist development of technologies does not necessarily prepare a material foundation for post-capitalism.” This meant, as he continues, that

Marx not only regarded the “metabolic rifts” under capitalism as the inevitable consequence of the fatal distortion in the relationship between humans and nature but also highlighted the need for a qualitative transformation in social production in order to repair the deep chasm in the universal metabolism of nature.

The productive forces of capitalism
Saito identifies in Marx’s work four reasons why the productive forces developed under capitalism cannot be adopted in a post-capitalist ecosocialist society.

Firstly, because much technology is designed partly to subjugate and control workers, much of it is unfit for a non-exploitative society. Secondly, as Saito explains, “capitalist technologies are not suitable to the socialist requirement of reunifying ‘conception’ and ‘execution’ in the labour process.” This is to say, a socialist society must ensure that the utilization of technology is in accordance with the purpose for which it is designed, and that these work together for human and ecological ends.

Thirdly, according to Saito, Marx noted that “the capitalist development of productive forces undermines and even destroys the universal metabolism of nature.” This is to say, by disrupting and destroying whole ecosystems, capitalist development inhibits nature’s ability to renew itself. And fourthly, Saito argues that Marx predicted the development of technology that separates means and ends, as described above, would necessitate the rise of a “bureaucratic class.” This new class “would rule general social production instead of the capitalist class,” and “the alienated condition of the working class would basically remain the same.”

For these reasons, Saito argues, Marx started to question his earlier view that capitalism plays a progressive role by increasing society’s productive forces. As a result, as Saito contends, Marx was “inevitably compelled to challenge his own earlier progressive view of history.”

This perspective shift guided Marx’s work on planned but unfinished later volumes of Capital — he stepped up his study of both natural science and of pre-capitalist societies. And after 1868, this led Marx to another paradigm shift as he embraced what Saito and others now term degrowth communism.

According to this new perspective, Marx abandoned the idea that a communist society would simply appropriate the ecologically unsustainable abundance that capitalism now offers for a tiny minority. Instead, it would offer a “radical abundance of ‘communal/common wealth’.” According to Saito, Marx clarifies this in the Critique of the Gotha Program, defining it as “a non-consumerist way of life in a post-scarcity economy which realizes a safe and just society in the face of global ecological crisis in the Anthropocene.”

Indeed, if we read Marx’s late work in this light, it helps us understand his famous 1881 letter to Vera Zasulich, a Russian revolutionary. In it, Marx suggests that pre-modern communal land ownership models found in villages across the Russian empire might be transformed into collective, socialist ownership models. According to Saito, this letter ought to be “reinterpreted as the crystallization of his non-productivist and non-Eurocentric view of the future society,” and “should be characterized as degrowth communism.”

Essential work has lower ecological footprint
Saito argues that a socialist society would shift towards essential work that produces basic use-values, and as a consequence, economic growth will slow. An economy refashioned to serve social needs would have a dramatically lower ecological footprint, he adds, and the artificial scarcity that capitalism has manufactured ever since it destroyed the old commons can be overcome.

But is this true? There is research that suggests it is. Hickel’s study of UN data — cited in Less Is More — found that

The relationship between GDP and human welfare plays out on a saturation curve, with sharply diminishing returns: after a certain point, which high-income nations have long surpassed, more GDP does little to improve core social outcomes.

For example, Spain spends only $2,300 per person to deliver high-quality healthcare to everyone as a fundamental right and also boasts a life expectancy of 83.5 years, one of the highest in the world. Indeed Spain’s life expectancy is a full five years longer than that of the United States, where the private, for-profit system “sucks up an eye-watering $9,500 per person, while delivering lower life expectancy and worse health outcomes.” And much poorer Cuba has long enjoyed a higher life expectancy than the US because of its free and universal health care. During the COVID-19 pandemic this gap grew to three years.

Beyond this, Saito argues there are other good reasons why a post-capitalist society needs to radically refashion the economy. For example, under capitalism, more people are forced to do precarious “bullshit jobs,” a term he borrowed from the late anthropologist and anarchist activist David Graeber. Examples include telemarketers, parking and public transport ticket inspectors and most middle management. In addition to being meaningless, because they’re wasteful, the jobs contribute to environmental destruction, deepen inequality and worsen our mental health and quality of life.

On a broader level, degrowth communism would radically shorten the work week and liberate human creativity, sociality and social solidarity in the process. To explain, Saito notes that during the 20th and 21st centuries, rapid technological change led to increased productivity. And yet, work hours did not decline, again because capitalism necessitates constant growth.

Ultimately, however, Saito’s point is that we will only gain the freedom to make choices about what we produce collectively and how we do it by liberating the majority from the “despotism of capital.”

Against deterministic Marxism
These arguments mean that Saito makes common cause with a long line of Marxists — including Rosa Luxemburg, Leon Trotsky, Georg Lukács, Antonio Gramsci and others — who have opposed deterministic versions of Marxism. Although such theories of history run contrary to much of Marx’s work, both early and late, there are doubtless passages that lend support to historical determinism by claiming that capitalism will inevitably destroy itself.

For example, as Marx famously wrote in 1869 in A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy,

At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production … From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure.

As Saito argues, it’s mistaken to read this as narrowly predicting that economic growth will flag, resulting in a big crisis and the necessary end of capitalism. To the contrary, “there is simply no empirical evidence that the pressure on profit rates due to the increasing costs of circulating capital will bring about an ‘epochal crisis’ any time soon.”

Indeed, capitalism may prove resilient to ecological catastrophe. As Saito explains,

it is necessary to realize net zero carbon emissions by 2050 to keep global warming within 1.5°C by 2100. When this line is crossed, various effects might combine, thereby reinforcing their destructive impact on a global scale, especially upon those who live in the Global South. However, capitalist societies in the Global North will not necessarily collapse.

Compared to more optimistic readings of Marx, Saito’s is sober. Arguably, however, the actual course of history since Marx’s time — which includes growing metabolic rifts — supports his outlook. And it’s why Marx’s late vision of degrowth communism may be a source of hope for our era of multiple, accelerating and overlapping crises.

https://mronline.org/2023/06/23/the-ide ... important/

First thing, get rid of the garbage term "de-growth". While it might sound good to we of the fat and sassy 'Golden Billion' it does not and will not fly in the Global South. Indeed, it sounds to many like 'Colonialism 3.0(2.0 being debt). The 'Green Economy' as proposed by the North is likewise seen. And if these folks are not 'with the program' what ya gonna do? Impose eco-fascism? That is unacceptable and untenable.

From what I've read here we are largely talking about re-prioritizing human effort. For a couple of super obvious examples: military expenditure and advertising in all it's forms and aspects(Commercial, propaganda,...). Imagine would what could be done re-directing all that human effort and natural resources. And as said above, the entire productive capacity of our civilization need be re-examined with an eye to meeting human need, not profit. Only after that might de-growth be considered if necessary to meet human need, which of course includes a livable planet.

The New Left crap about 'deterministic Marxism' should be jettisoned, it is but a wedge with which to destroy communism. The association of genuine Marxists like Luxemburg and Gramsci with destructive bullshit artists like Trotsky and Lukács is insulting and obscene. This is the work of the reviewer Boyle and not Saito. Boyle should be flogged for inserting this sectarian jive into serious matters.

I think there a degree of overstatement in the celebration of the 'ecological Marx'. It's definitely there, but even I think too much is read into some statements. Nonetheless, as we pride ourselves on being scientific, and as recent science has revealed the necessities for life on Earth and the contradictions which capitalism has introduced, we are bound to address these issues as a matter of meeting human need.

*****

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Europe – fastest warming continent in world since 1980s, says WMO
Originally published: Countercurrents on June 20, 2023 by Countercurrents Collective (more by Countercurrents) | (Posted Jun 22, 2023)

Temperatures over Europe have warmed significantly over the 1991-2021 period, at an average rate of about +0.5 °C per decade, making it the fastest warming region of all the WMO Regions. This has been said by the State of the Climate in Europe, a new report by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) on Monday.

The report said:

Temperatures in Europe have increased at more than twice the global average over the past 30 years—the highest of any continent in the world. As the warming trend continues, exceptional heat, wildfires, floods and other climate change impacts will affect society, economies and ecosystems.

This State of the Climate in Europe report is produced jointly with the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service, and focuses on 2021. It provides information on rising temperatures, land and marine heatwaves, extreme weather, changing precipitation patterns and retreating ice and snow.

The report said:

As a result of increased temperature, Alpine glaciers lost 30 meters in ice thickness from 1997 to 2021. The Greenland ice sheet is melting and contributing to accelerating sea level rise. In summer 2021, Greenland saw a melt event and the first-ever recorded rainfall at its highest point, Summit station.

The report said:

The temperature close to Earth’s surface has large impacts on both human and natural systems. It affects health, agriculture and energy demand, for example, as well as growth cycles in natural environments. Human health is especially affected by extreme temperatures. Temperatures in Europe have warmed significantly during the industrial era, and during the 1991—2021 period Europe has warmed at a rate (+0.5 °C per decade) that is more than twice the global average, making it the fastest warming region of the WMO regions.

The 2021 annual mean temperature for Europe ranked between sixth and tenth highest on record, with an anomaly of 0.90 °C [0.76 °C—1.00 °C] above the 1981—2010 average, and 1.44 °C [1.30 °C—1.61 °C] above the 1961—1990 average.

The annual temperatures for 2021 were generally above the 1981—2010 average for almost the entire region; only a small area in the north-western Russian Federation saw below-average temperatures.

The largest deviations from the 1981—2010 average were recorded over the European part of the Arctic and south-eastern parts of the region, with temperatures more than 2 °C above average over parts of Greenland, primarily the north and the north-west, and Svalbard, as well over eastern Türkiye, the southern Caucasus and parts of the Middle East.

Key Messages Of The Report

*Temperatures in Europe have warmed significantly over the 1991—2021 period, at an average rate of about +0.5 °C per decade. It is the fastest warming of all the WMO Regions.
*The annual mean temperature in 2021 ranked between sixth and tenth highest on record, depending on the data set used.
*While precipitation in 2021 overall was slightly above normal in Central and Eastern Europe, it still was insufficient to compensate for deficits from the previous three years. In other areas such as the Iberian Peninsula and the Alpine region, it was the second or third consecutive drier-than-normal year.
*Average sea-ice extent in the European Arctic sector in September 2021 was the lowest on record for the month (37% below the 1981—2010 average), slightly below the previous record from September 2013 (36% below average). A significant contributor to these low values was the record low sea-ice conditions in the Greenland Sea from July to September.
*High-impact weather and climate events led to hundreds of fatalities, directly affected around 510,000 people and caused economic damages exceeding US$ 50 billion. About 84% of the events were floods or storms. Exceptionally high temperatures and heatwaves occurred in many parts of *Europe throughout the summer. On 11 August, a location near Syracuse in Sicily, Italy, reached 48.8 °C, a provisional European record.
*Drought and high temperatures fueled significant wildfires in summer, with southern Türkiye, Italy and Greece especially badly affected. Annual burned areas were about three times or more the 2006—2020 average in Cyprus, France, Greece, Israel, Italy, Lebanon, Montenegro and Türkiye.
*An unusual spring cold outbreak affected many parts of Europe in early April, resulting in widespread and severe damage to agriculture, with large losses to vineyards, fruit trees and other crops.
*In France losses exceeded US$ 4.6 billion. European Union (EU) greenhouse gas emissions decreased 31% between 1990 and 2020 (the net reduction target for 2030 is 55%).
*While the cut in 2019 was strongly driven by fossil fuel price effects and policy measures, the decline in 2020 was additionally related to the COVID-19 pandemic, and 2021 emissions in the EU are expected to be higher than in 2020. In other countries of the region, reductions targets for 2030 range in general from 35% to 55% compared with 1990.
*About 75% of people in Europe are covered by early warning systems (EWSs), and many WMO Members in Europe have an above-average capacity to deliver on all their EWS needs. However, 7 Members (out of the 34 providing data) reported having inadequate end-to-end riverine flood forecasting services, and 13 Members reported inadequate end-to-end flash flood forecasting services. This is a concern, considering that in the last 50 years (1970—2019) 38% of the weather, water and climate disasters were related to floods.
*Children are more vulnerable to the impacts of climate change than adults, both physically and psychologically. According to the United Nations *Children’s Fund (UNICEF) Children’s Climate Risk Index (CCRI), nearly 125 million children in Europe live in ‘Medium—High’ risk countries (the third of five levels of classification used globally).
*Comprehensive heat-health action plans have been shown to save lives and strengthen the resilience of communities and people to cope with extreme heat. Several European countries have implemented heat health action plans to prevent ill health and excess mortality from heat. The *European Region is one of the most advanced regions in transboundary cooperation in climate change adaptation. Countries have developed and implemented climate change adaptation strategies and plans and/ or integrated climate change adaptation into their planning documents, in particular across several transnational river basins.

“It shows how Europe has been warming twice as much as the global average since the 1980s, with far-reaching impacts on the region’s socio-economic fabric and ecosystems,” the WMO said in a statement, citing the State of the Climate in Europe report.

In 2022, Europe was approximately 2.3 °C above the pre-industrial (1850-1900) average used as a baseline for the Paris Agreement on climate change.

At the same time, meteorological, hydrological and climate-related hazards in Europe in 2022 resulted in 16,365 reported deaths and directly affected 156,000 people, the organization noted, adding that financial losses in 2022 amounted to at least $2 billion.

“In 2022, many countries in western and south-western Europe had their warmest year on record. Summer was the hottest ever recorded: the high temperatures exacerbated the severe and widespread drought conditions, fuelled violent wildfires that resulted in the second largest burnt area on record, and led to thousands of heat-associated excess deaths,” WMO Secretary-General Petteri Taalas said.

However, the WMO noted that for the first time last year, renewable energy sources in Europe produced more electricity than polluting fossil fuels.

In May, the organization said that global temperatures could reach record highs over the next five years.

https://mronline.org/2023/06/22/europe- ... -says-wmo/

*********

The biggest threat to the environment is the imperialist war machine

While lecturing workers about ‘consumer choices’, western environmental lobbies give a free pass to the planet’s real polluters.
Proletarian writers

Tuesday 20 June 2023

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Colombian President Gustavo Petro (L) & French President Emmanuel Macron (R), Paris, June 22, 2023. | Photo: Twitter/ @EspanolBreaking

Published 22 June 2023 (20 hours 37 minutes ago)

The Colombian leader proposes financing actions against global warming through resources generated by a tax on financial transactions and special debt issues for climate investments.

On Thursday, Colombian President Gustavo Petro demanded the implementation of a "Marshall Plan" to finance the fight against the consequences of global climate change.

"The climate crisis cannot be solved by the market because the market has created it," he said during the Summit for a New Global Financial Pact, currently taking place in Paris.

Directly addressing the European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, Petro assured that Brussels' environmental measures, including the establishment of pollution tariffs, rely too much on the private sector.

"The investment to fight the climate crisis amounts to hundreds of billions... and 'the capital' is guided by profitability," Petro emphasized, casting doubt on the ability of market mechanisms to solve a global public problem such as climate change.


While the Colombian leader acknowledged that "there is no time to wage war on capital," he emphasized that decision-makers must acknowledge that businesses have limitations in providing the necessary resources to address the consequences of climate change.

That's why Petro asked world leaders to establish something similar to a new "Marshall Plan." which would enable financing actions against global warming through resources generated by a tax on financial transactions and special debt issues for climate investments.

"It would be about exchanging debt for climate action," Petro said, pointing out that these new financing options presuppose a profound change in multilateral institutions such as the World Bank (WB) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

"States must reclaim their authority not to decree the end of markets, but to recognize the limitations of markets in the fight against climate change," the Colombian President said, insisting on the need for genuine dialogue between developed and developing countries.

https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/Gus ... -0014.html

The Amazon “Belongs to All Humanity,” Says Lula in Paris

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Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva at the Power Our Planet festival in Paris. Jun. 22, 2023. | Photo: Twitter/@LulaOficial

Published 22 June 2023 (12 hours 39 minutes ago)

The rich nations "must pay the historic debt they have with planet Earth."

On Thursday, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva defended zero deforestation and called for the preservation and protection of the environment during a speech at the Power Our Planet festival in Paris.

On the occasion, Lula made reference to the largest rainforest in the world: "The Amazon is a sovereign territory of Brazil, but at the same time it belongs to all humanity. And, for that reason, we will do everything and make every effort to keep the rainforest standing," said the president.

Lula demanded that rich nations finance developing countries that hold forest reserves as a way of paying their "historical debt" to the planet for environmental damage.

In the last 200 years, since the beginning of the industrial revolution, it has been the rich nations that "have polluted the world" and not the African or Latin American peoples, said Lula. "Therefore they must pay the historical debt they have with the planet Earth."


At Power OurPlanet , in Paris. Artists and leaders from around the world gathered to defend the future of our planet.

During his speech, the Brazilian president raised his commitment "that until 2030 we will have zero deforestation in the Amazon." In this sense, Lula said that his government will make every effort to achieve it.

The leader of the Workers' Party (PT) was invited by the band Coldplay to participate in the Power Our Planet event at the Champ de Mars in the French capital, Paris. The event is being held within the framework of the Summit on the New Global Financial Pact.

At the end of his speech, Lula invited the audience to participate in the United Nations climate conference COP30, to be held in the Amazonian city of Belém in 2025. "You will all have the opportunity to get to know closely the Amazon ecosystem, the richness of biodiversity, and the richness of our rivers," Lula said.

https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/The ... -0022.html
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Re: The Long Ecological Revolution

Post by blindpig » Tue Jun 27, 2023 2:41 pm

Inequality must be “priority” in climate change discussion, says Lula in Paris

The Brazilian President says there is no point in having a “very good climate” while people die of hunger

June 23, 2023 by Julio Adamor

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Lula looks at Macron during a speech in which he called for help from rich countries to fight inequality across the globe—Ricardo Stuckert/PR

President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva made an impromptu speech during the Summit for a New Global Financing Pact, on June 23, in Paris. In addition to discussing the key topics for Brazilian diplomacy, such as deforestation, global warming, and the agreement between the European Union and Mercosur, he defended the importance of fighting inequality.

“It is not possible that in a meeting with so many presidents of important countries, the word inequality does not appear. Inequality in salary, race, gender, education, health,” the president listed, sitting to the right of the president of France, Emmanuel Macron, who is hosting the event.

“We are in an increasingly unequal world. We need to treat this with as much priority as the climate issue, because otherwise we may end up with a planet with a very good climate and people continuing to die of hunger in several countries in the world,” said Lula. According to him, Brazil “went backwards” in the recent past, “like many other countries”, and proof of this is the fact that many Brazilians go hungry today.

The Brazilian president referenced African countries several times in his speech, and strongly criticized the rich nations. He said that the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), a United Nations agency dedicated to eradicating poverty and hunger, has the potential to make infrastructure investments throughout the African continent.

“If the developed world decided to finance companies to build the needs of that plan, Africa would have already made a leap in quality. Yesterday, we heard the president of Congo talking about the Congo River. As far as I know, three Itaipu hydroelectric plants could be built on the Congo River. But there aren’t any,” said Lula, who criticized the way resources are invested in some cases. “We need to stop, on an international level, proselytizing with resources. Ah, I’m going to help this little thing here, this little thing there, when in fact we need to invest in structural things that change the lives of nations.”

Lula dedicated a significant part of his speech to discussing the way resources circulate worldwide, which, after all, was the theme of the summit. He said that the “Bretton Woods institutions no longer work, no longer respond to the aspirations and interests of society,” in reference to the agreements made in the aftermath of World War II, which elaborated rules for the international monetary system. He also criticized the World Bank and the IMF for leaving “much to be desired”.

Argentina
Lula again mentioned the IMF loan to Argentina during the term of President Mauricio Macri (2015-2019). “Many times banks lend money and the money lent causes the state to go bankrupt. That is what we are seeing in Argentina today. In the most irresponsible way, the IMF lent USD 44 billion to a gentleman who was president. No one knows what he did with the money and Argentina is in a very difficult situation because there are no dollars to pay the IMF.”

The president again demanded a reform of the UN Security Council, so that the organization may regain political representation and strength. And he made a connection between global governance and climate change. “If we don’t change these institutions, the climate issue will become a joke. And why? Who is going to comply with the decisions that come out of the forums that we hold? Is it the nation state? Let’s be frank. Who complied with the Kyoto Protocol? Who complied with the Copenhagen decisions, the Paris agreement? There is no compliance with because there is no global governance with the strength to decide things and for us to comply.”

The president maintains that the decisions taken during the COPs, the international conferences on climate change, will never have the power of law in each country if they need to be discussed and ratified internally, by the respective parliaments, because there will always be resistance that will take away the strength of what was decided at the international level.

“If we don’t change the institutions, the world will continue as it is. Those who are rich will continue to be rich, and those who are poor will continue to be poor,” predicted Lula.

Good Signs
The president pointed out what he considers good initiatives in the sense of renewing the institutions and the global financial logic: the creation of the BRICS bank, chaired by former president Dilma Rousseff, and the possibilities of creating the Bank of the South and also of discussing new possibilities for trade currency. “I don’t know why Brazil and Argentina have to trade in dollars; why Brazil and China have to trade in dollars. This is on my agenda and, if it depends on me, we will talk about this at the BRICS Summit. And also at the G20. We need to get more African partners to participate in the G20, as you (addressing President Macron) are doing in the G7. These forums cannot be luxury groups. We need to call the different ones.”

This article was originally published in Portuguese by Brasil de Fato.

https://peoplesdispatch.org/2023/06/23/ ... -in-paris/

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Balancing act urged in achieving green goals

By LEONARDUS JEGHO in Jakarta | China Daily Global | Updated: 2023-06-26 09:40

Developed Western economies should respect the actual needs of developing countries to achieve net-zero emissions in phases while being consistent with their own actions, said officials and experts during a forum in Indonesia.

Efforts to achieve net-zero emissions should not hinder a country's economic growth, especially the growth of developing countries like Indonesia, Coordinating Maritime Affairs and Investment Minister Luhut Binsar Pandjaitan told the Indonesia Net-Zero Summit 2023 on Saturday.

Even in the United States, coal-fired plants are still between 40 and 60 percent of its total power plants, he said, adding that Germany and Poland had recently said they wanted coal imports from Indonesia.

Building a hydropower plant requires at least seven years. So using new energy like these needs to be carried out in phases, step by step continuously, Pandjaitan said. He also urged that climate change knowledge be popularized among the youth.

The Indonesian government has committed to cutting carbon to net zero by 2060, while environmentalists want it to be achieved before 2050. The initial goal was set for 2070 and the country is retiring its coal-fired power plants early.

Alue Dohong, Indonesia's vice-minister of environment and forestry, said that as a country rich in new and renewable energy resources, Indonesia should be able to even export this kind of energy.

Environmental activist Melissa Kowara from Extinction Rebellion Indonesia told the seminar that climate change education should be taught to all people, including those living in villages in remote regions.

She and other activists insisted that with a better understanding of the dangers of climate change, ordinary people would be more active in protecting their environment and will also not easily succumb to pressures from companies, which want to take over their land for business activities.

Mercy Chriesty Barends, a member of the Indonesia House of Representatives, said a "fossil energy regime" remains strong in parliament, which has held back deliberation of the bill on new and renewable energy. She hopes the new law, which they started deliberating early last year, will pass into law in 2024.

Dino Patti Djalal, founder of the Foreign Policy Community of Indonesia, said results from the meeting would be presented to the government before the nation holds presidential and parliamentary elections next year.

"It is our ambition that the elections will raise climate change to become an important and dominant issue," Djalal said.

Takuya Nomoto, first secretary and environment attache of the Japanese embassy in Jakarta, said he agreed with Pandjaitan that educating young people about climate change is an urgent matter. He also found it important to maintain a balance between environmental preservation and economic development.

http://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/20230 ... 6b905.html

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Brazil Announces Plan to Decarbonize the Amazon

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Amazon decarbonization program. Jun. 26, 2023. | Photo: Twitter/@18horasnews

Published 26 June 2023 (11 hours 10 minutes ago)

"In 2026, we will only have 40% of the Amazon with oil energy," said the Minister of Mines and Energy, Alexandre Silveira.


The Brazilian government announced on Monday a plan to decarbonize the Amazon region that seeks to replace thermoelectric power plants in the area with solar panels and biodiesel for power generation.

According to the Minister of Mines and Energy, Alexandre Silveira, the project should involve investments of US$1 billion and will reduce by 40 percent the energy generated by diesel thermoelectric power plants consumed in the region until 2026.

By 2030, oil-fired thermoelectric plants should generate only 20 percent of the energy consumed in the Amazon region.

During a forum with businessmen, Silveira said: "We are going to go one step further; we are going to announce the transition from this energy to solar, others to biodiesel. In 2026, we will only have 40 percent of the Amazon with oil energy."


Minister Alexandre Silveira announces the launch of the national policy for the energy transition, the Amazon decarbonization program and the return of the "Light for All" program, which will bring energy to around 450,000 people who still do not have access.

According to data from the Empresa de Pesquisa Energética (EPE), Brazil has more than 200 isolated systems that are not connected to the national electricity system.

These places are mainly supplied by plants that burn diesel to generate energy. This type of generation is more expensive and polluting than hydroelectric plants. The cost of purchasing fuel to supply these systems is subsidized and is included in the Energy Development Account (EDC), which is paid by all consumers.

The Fuel Consumption Charge (FCA), which pays for fuel used in isolated systems, amounted to some $760 million through June. The forecast for the whole year is about $2.4 billion, according to the National Electric Energy Agency (Aneel).

https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/Bra ... -0022.html

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Critical comments on Kohei Saito’s view of ‘degrowth communism’
June 25, 2023
Schwartzman: It is essential to distinguish good growth from bad growth

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by David Schwartzman


eter Boyle’s review of Kohei Saito’s book Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism (Climate & Capitalism, June 23, 2023) provides an excellent account of its main points.

My critique can be summed up as: “Yes to degrowth communism” but likewise “Yes to good growth ecosocialism” to get there.

In the ecosocialist transition to degrowth communism that Boyle points to, the process of radically shortening the work week and liberating human creativity, sociality and social solidarity would begin to unfold.

Boyle quotes Hickel: “while it’s possible to transition to 100 percent renewable energy, we cannot do it fast enough to stay under 1.5°C or 2°C if we continue to grow the global economy at existing rates.”

A transition of this kind means that fossil fuels should be terminated faster than renewables can be created to replace them. But Hickel does not say what needs to grow — besides renewable energy supplies — and what needs to degrow, in this transition. Deconstructing economic growth into its components is essential to answer this question.

The degrowth brand was challenged by Josef Baum a decade ago:

“Walter Hollitscher, an Austrian materialist philosopher maintained, in discussions occurring in the late 1970s, that the only thing which should definitely grow is the satisfaction of needs. Basically, from a socio-ecological point of view the question of growth or de-growth is simple: there cannot be a yes or no answer. Some flows, stock, and activities should grow; others should not grow but decrease, for example, the production of weapons. It does not seem useful to use “de-growth” without indicating what should decrease, because the general use of the notion “de-growth” easily can easily also be understood as an undifferentiated attack on the standard of living and livelihood of many groups of people, especially broad low-income sectors of society.”[1]

I have critiqued degrowth from a similar position.[2] But Saito opposes any form of economic growth, even in an ecosocialist, post-capitalist regime: “Ecosocialism does not exclude the possibility of pursuing further sustainable economic growth once capitalist production is overcome, but degrowth communism maintains that growth is not sustainable nor desirable even in socialism.” (p. 209)

So it is disappointing since we are still embedded in fossil capitalism that Saito does not systematically deconstruct the degrowth discourse with these distinctions in mind, good versus bad growth in the context of a strategy to reach the goal of degrowth communism..

With the driver being multidimensional class struggle increasingly informed by an ecosocialist agenda under capitalism, ecosocialists commonly support vigorous degrowth of wasteful consumption particularly of the 1%, reliance on cars (even electric), mega-mansions, and especially the military industrial fossil fuel complex, coupled with the growth of renewable energy supplies, free electrified public transit, green affordable housing, agroecologies providing organic food, first rate healthcare and education of all, social governance of the economy. In other words, reaching for the ecosocialist horizon moving to a postcapitalist demilitarized world at peace.

Saito gives us a penetrating exegesis of Marx’s writings, especially of the late Marx, providing profound insights, reinforcing Malm’s critique of hybridism, with a valuable critique of the left “accelerationists” who expect technology by itself to bring the world communism. But Saito neglects to analyze the degrowth literature and its critique from the left.

For example, I am cited: “Many still believe that Marxism and degrowth are incompatible (Schwartzman 1996),” (pp. 209-210), But I don’t even mention degrowth, nor its incompatibility with Marxism in my 1996 paper,[3] and unfortunately Saito passes on any discussion of Georgescu-Roegen’s thermodynamics, which is foundational to degrowth discourse.

I assume that Saito may be referring to my more recent articles and books ­— e.g. our critique of Kallis (2017).[4] He cites Hickel and Kallis,[5] but not our critique.[6]

Instead we find Saito saying: “Technological progress can push limits back to some extent, but entropy increases, available energy decreases and natural resources get exhausted. These are objective facts that are independent of social relations and human will.” (p. 113)

But in a 100 percent global renewable energy world this entropy debt is paid to space as waste heat without contributing to global warming as now with 80 percent of energy derived from fossil fuel consumption. Further this renewable energy supply, greater than present primary energy consumption, can power a global circular economy necessary for degrowth communism, but this energy infrastructure must be created with real growth of this sector in the physical economy.

In this transition, starting under capitalism, the capacity for climate mitigation and adaptation along with elimination of energy poverty afflicting the global South must be created in the form of mainly wind and solar energy supplies.[7] Saito does not confront this challenge.

He quotes John Bellamy Foster:

“Society, particularly in rich countries, must move towards a steady-state economy, which requires a shift to an economy without net capital formation, one that stays within the solar budget. Development, particularly in the rich economies, must assume a new form: qualitative, collective, and cultural — emphasizing sustainable human development in harmony with Marx’s original view of socialism.”(p. 210) [8]

But rich countries, having the historic responsibility for generating dangerous climate change from their consumption of fossil fuels with the greatest impacts on the global South, now must be held accountable to finance and help implement the necessary wind/solar energy infrastructure especially in the global South, as well as converting their own physical economies to green cities, electrified public transit, agroecologies, etc, dismantling the military industrial fossil fuel complex.

Indeed, Saito recognizes the important role of renewable energy: “As a solution to climate crisis, solar panel and EVs are essential, but the associated battery technology is resource intensive, especially with regard to rare metals.” (p. 41)

But he does not recognize that there are solutions to address the serious challenge of extractivism in a robust wind/solar energy transition, namely using this energy supply for recycling metals including the huge supplies now embedded in the fossil fuel and military infrastructures in a circular physical economy, as well as substituting common elements for rarer ones (e.g., sodium for lithium in batteries) for renewable and energy storage technologies.[9]

Degrowth Communism is close in concept to Solar Communism both with a steady-state physical economy, realizing a 21st century update of Marx, “From each according to her ability, to each according to her needs” with her referring to both humans and nature. This corresponds to what I recently labeled as the future epoch of Solarcommunicene.[10] Saito’s book hopefully will help promote this future.

David Schwartzman is Professor Emeritus (Biology) at Howard University, and co-author of The Earth is Not For Sale: A Path Out of Fossil Capitalism to the Other World That is Still Possible (World Scientific, 2019).

Notes

[1] Josef Baum, “In Search for a (New) Compass – How to Measure Social Progress, Wealth and Sustainability?” Transform! European journal for alternative thinking and political dialogue, 2011.

[2] David Schwartzman, “ A Critique of Degrowth and Its Politics,” Capitalism Nature Socialism, 2012.

[3] David Schwartzman, “Solar Communism.”

[4] G. Kallis, “Socialism Without Growth,” Capitalism Nature Socialism (2017); D. Schwartzman and S Engel Di Mauro “A Response to Giorgios Kallis’ Notions of Socialism and Growth,” Capitalism Nature Socialism, (2019)

[5] J. Hickel, ‘Degrowth: A Theory of Radical Abundance’. Real-World Economic Review, (2019); G. Kallis, “Socialism Without Growth.”

[6] David Schwartzman, “Solar Communism.”; D. Schwartzman, “A Critique of Degrowth”; D. Schwartzman, “Degrowth in a renewable energy transition?”

[7] https://climateandcapitalism.com/2022/0 ... -degrowth/; http://theearthisnotforsale.org/dschwar ... r42022.pdf

[8] J.B. Foster, “Marxism and Ecology: Common Fonts of a Great Transformation,” Monthly Review (2015).

[9] climateandcapitalism.com/2022/01/05/a-critique-of-degrowth/

[10] David Schwartzman, “An Ecosocialist Perspective on Gaia 2.0,” Capitalism Nature Socialism (2020).

https://climateandcapitalism.com/2023/0 ... communism/
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Re: The Long Ecological Revolution

Post by blindpig » Mon Jul 10, 2023 3:16 pm

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“Workers at TEPCO’s Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station work among underground water storage pools on 17 April 2013. Two types of above-ground storage tanks rise in the background.” Photo from International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) official Flickr account, edited from original. Photo Credit: Greg Webb / IAEA. Image license: Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0)

Despite warnings, IAEA approves Japan release plan for contaminated Fukushima water
Originally published: Defend Democracy Press on July 4, 2023 by Jon Queally (more by Defend Democracy Press) | (Posted Jul 10, 2023)

Despite years of protest and warnings from environmentalists, the United Nation’s nuclear watchdog on Tuesday approved a plan by Japan to release tens of millions of gallons of water from the destroyed Fukushima nuclear power plant into the ocean.

The massive storage of radioactive water has been ongoing since the 2011 tsunami disaster triggered a meltdown of the plant, but the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said the plan orchestrated by the Japanese government and TEPCO, the plant operator, meets safety standards.

Based on a “comprehensive” two-year assessment, “the IAEA has concluded that the approach and activities to the discharge of ALPS treated water taken by Japan are consistent with relevant international safety standards,” the agency’s director general Rafael Mariano Grossi said in the foreword of a new report released alongside the decision.

“Furthermore,” Grossi continued,

the IAEA notes the controlled, gradual discharges of the treated water to the sea, as currently planned and assessed by TEPCO, would have a negligible radiological impact on people and the environment.

According to the IAEA statement:

The water stored at the FDNPS has been treated through an Advanced Liquid Processing System (ALPS) to remove almost all radioactivity, aside from tritium. Before discharging, Japan will dilute the water to bring the tritium to below regulatory standards.

Despite assurances, nuclear experts have said that concerns about tritium cannot be overstated. In 2020, Greenpeace International released a report warning that the contaminated water risks “potential damage to human DNA” and questioned the government and TEPCO’s push for the release.

As Bloomberg notes,

an assessment of the discharge facility by a domestic nuclear regulator is still required before a timeline is finalized to begin releasing the water—equivalent in volume to about 500 Olympic-size swimming pools. Government officials have indicated the discharges, which could take decades, would begin during the summer.

The IAEA’s assessment flies in the face of scientific warnings, environmentalists, and local residents who have argued that dumping the water into the Pacific Ocean should be “simply Inconceivable.”

“Piping water into the sea is an outrage. The sea is not a garbage dump,” 71-year-old Haruo Ono, who has been fishing off the coast of Fukushima his entire life, told CBS News earlier this year after the IAEA released a preliminary assessment of the plan.

[]]The company says it’s safe, but the consequences could catch up with us 50 years down the road.[/i]

https://mronline.org/2023/07/10/despite ... ima-water/

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IAEA chief 's visit to ROK sparks protests
China Daily | Updated: 2023-07-10 06:56

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South Korean protesters attend a rally against Japan's plans to discharge radioactive wastewater from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant into the Pacific Ocean, on a road near the Japanese embassy in Seoul on Saturday. JUNG YEON-JE/AFP

Opposition party slams govt, UN nuclear agency report over Japan discharge plans

SEOUL — Hundreds of people marched in the Republic of Korea's capital on Saturday demanding Japan scrap its plans to release nuclear-contaminated water from the damaged Fukushima nuclear power plant, as the head of the UN nuclear agency met with senior officials in Seoul.

The protests came a day after the ROK's government formally endorsed the safety of the Japanese plans despite concerns over safety in many countries and signs of a consumer backlash at home. The announcement aligned with the views of the International Atomic Energy Agency, which gave its green light to the Japanese discharge plans last week.

Braving blistering summer heat and closely watched by police, the protesters walked in long lines through a commercial district in downtown Seoul, holding signs reading: "We denounce the sea disposal of Fukushima's nuclear wastewater!" and "We oppose with our lives the sea discharge." The marches proceeded peacefully and there were no immediate reports of major clashes or injuries.

"Other than discharging the water into the sea, there is an option to store the water on their land, and there are other options being suggested," said Han Sang-jin, spokesman of the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions, whose members accounted for many of the marchers.

He said that allowing Japan to discharge the water "is like an international crime".

The protests provided a tense backdrop to a meeting between IAEA Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi and ROK's Foreign Minister Park Jin to discuss the assessment.

Grossi on Sunday met with lawmakers from the opposition Democratic Party, which has harshly criticized the Japanese discharge plans and accused the conservative government of the ROK of putting people's health at risk while desperately trying to improve relations with Tokyo.

Health impacts neglected

The lawmakers harshly criticized IAEA's review, saying the report neglected the long-term environmental and health impacts of the nuclear wastewater release and threatens to set a bad precedent that may encourage other countries to dispose of nuclear waste into sea.

They called for Japan to scrap the discharge plans and work with neighboring countries to find safer ways to handle the nuclear wastewater, including a possible pursuit of long-term storage on land.

The party has also criticized the government of Yoon Suk-yeol, the ROK president, for putting people's health at risk while trying to improve relations with Japan.

"If you think (the nuclear-contaminated wastewater) is safe, I wonder whether you would be willing to suggest the Japanese government use that water for drinking or for industrial and agricultural purposes, rather than dumping it in the sea," Woo Wonshik, a Democratic Party lawmaker who attended the meeting, told Grossi. The party said Woo has been on a hunger strike for the past 14 days to protest against Japan's discharge plans.

In a statement released by state media on Sunday, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea also criticized the Japanese discharge plans, warning against a "fatal adverse impact on the human lives and security and ecological environment" resulting from the discharge of "nuclear-polluted water".

The statement, which was attributed to an unidentified official in the DPRK's Ministry of Land and Environment Protection, also criticized Washington and Seoul for backing the Japanese plans.

In Japan, several nonprofit organizations announced on Friday the launch of a marine protection project aimed at preventing the government's discharge plan.

The organizations, including the Citizens' Nuclear Information Center and the Japan Congress Against A- and H-Bombs, will start the project titled "Future of the Ocean" on July 17, which is recognized as "Marine Day" in Japan.

Through channels such as collecting signatures, creating websites and producing short videos, organizers hope the project will help spread opposition to the wastewater dumping plan both within and outside Japan, according to Masashi Tani, secretary-general of the Japan Congress Against A- and H-Bombs.

He stated that even if the government proceeds with the discharge into the sea, it will continue for several decades. "It shouldn't be assumed that once the discharge starts, there is no other option and giving up is the only choice," he added.

http://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/20230 ... 6e19a.html

Climate change sparks extreme weather worldwide
chinadaily.com.cn | Updated: 2023-07-10 06:35

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This June 22, 2023 photo, courtesy of the Nova Scotia Government in Canada, shows a doe and fawn walking through a burned forest in Shelburne, Canada. Canada is headed for its worst wildfire season on record, with about 7.8 million hectares (19.2 million acres) burned in 2023, according official data. [Photo/Agencies]

Extreme weather such as droughts, cyclones, wildfires and heat waves are becoming more frequent and intense around the world, as climate change continues to cause a lot of damage. The damage is huge. People are losing their homes, livelihoods and their lives.

Last month was the hottest June on record globally, according to the EU's climate monitoring service, and even higher temperatures are expected in July and August due to the strengthening El Niño weather pattern. The heat has been driven by a combination of the El Niño and greenhouse gas emissions responsible for global warming.

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This June 22, 2023 photo, courtesy of the Nova Scotia Government in Canada, shows wildfire damage in the Tantallon area in Canada. [Photo/Agencies]
Wildfires

The impact of the heat has been particularly severe in North America, where Canada is experiencing its most severe wildfire season on record. The blazes have burned more than 8.1m hectares (20m acres) across the country -- 21 times above the average over the last decade. Over 120 million people across more than a dozen US states are under air quality alerts due to smoke from Canadian wildfires.

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Children play and cool off at a splash park in downtown Houston, Texas, United States, on June 15, 2023. [Photo/Xinhua]
Heat waves

The heat wave that hit southern US was also record-breaking. Forecasters warn that it may be more dangerous than typical heat because the temperatures at night are not cooling down as much as they normally do, and the heat index readings are higher than normal. The heat index is a measure of how hot it feels to the human body when relative humidity is added to the actual air temperature.

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This photo taken on July 1, 2023 shows a part of Paso Severino reservoir in the Florida Department, Uruguay. Paso Severino reservoir, about 70 kilometers away from the Uruguayan capital of Montevideo, serves as an important source of potable water to the capital area. Uruguay is now facing severe drought, according to local meteorologic authority. [Photo/Xinhua]
Droughts

Other regions of the world also face extreme weather. Uruguay in South America is experiencing its most severe drought in 44 years. The reservoir behind Uruguay's largest dam, Paso Severino, is only 2.6 percent filled, and farmers are struggling to keep their crops alive.

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Vehicles move on a road through flooded water after heavy monsoon rain in Lahore, Pakistan, on July 5, 2023. [Photo/Xinhua]
Floods

In South Asia's Pakistan, the eastern city of Lahore recently witnessed a 30-year record-breaking rainfall of 291 millimeters, causing widespread flooding. The heavy rain is a painful reminder of the country's vulnerability to extreme weather events, which are becoming more frequent due to climate change.

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A view shows a flooded street after heavy rains hit Italy's Emilia Romagna region, in Lugo, Italy, May 19, 2023. [Photo/Agencies]
Floods that have engulfed the northern Italian region of Emilia Romagna, killing at least 14 people, are another sign of the accelerating climate crisis, according to researchers. The floods come after years of severe drought in the region, which has compacted the soil, reducing its ability to absorb rainfall. This is a clear example of how climate change can worsen both droughts and floods.

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People gather in an area damaged in floods in Blantyre, Malawi, on March 14, 2023. [Photo/Xinhua]
Cyclones

In southeastern Africa's Malawi, the floods and mudslides caused by Tropical Cyclone Freddy killed over 1,000 people and displaced 660,000 people this year. The situation in Malawi is another reminder of the devastating impact that extreme weather events can have on vulnerable communities.

As the world experiences more warm temperatures, it is probable that these extreme weather conditions will become increasingly common and severe, highlighting the urgent need for action on climate change.

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This aerial photo taken on June 11, 2023 shows villages affected by recent rainstorms in Baisha town of Hepu county, South China's Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region. [Photo/Xinhua]

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A child pours cold water on the body at a summer camp in Plano, Texas, the United States, on June 27, 2023. [Photo/Xinhua]

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An aerial view shows a field of wheat with ears flattened by the heavy rains and gusts of wind from the storms, at Blecourt, France, June 24, 2023. [Photo/Agencies]

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A view of a corn field in Les-Rues-des-Vignes near Cambrai as the risk of drought continues across France, June 26, 2023. [Photo/Agencies]

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A man wearing a face mask takes a walk in a park as the skyline of Manhattan is blanketed in haze from Canadian wildfires, in New York, the United States, on June 30, 2023. [Photo/Xinhua]

http://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/20230 ... 6e190.html

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A man tries to cool off in New Delhi, India on May 23, 2023. (Photo: Kabir Jhangiani/NurPhoto via Getty Images/Common Dreams)

Planet Earth is ‘quite sick’: 7 of 8 boundaries for safe and just world already breached, study says
Originally published: Common Dreams on June 1, 2023 by Kenny Stancil (more by Common Dreams) | (Posted Jul 06, 2023)

If Earth were to get an annual health checkup akin to a person’s physical exam, a doctor would say the planet is “really quite sick right now.”

That’s how Joyeeta Gupta, professor of environment and development at the University of Amsterdam, put it at a Wednesday press conference accompanying the publication of new research in the peer-reviewed journal Nature. Co-authored by Gupta and 50 other scientists from around the world, it warns that nearly every threshold for a “safe and just” planet has already been breached and pleads for swift action to protect “the global commons for all people now and into the future.”

As Carbon Brief reported:

The new study develops the idea of ‘planetary boundaries,’ first set out in an influential 2009 paper. The paper had defined a set of interlinked thresholds that it said would ensure a ‘safe operating space for humanity.’ Its authors had warned that crossing these thresholds ‘could have disastrous consequences.’

The new paper, written by many of the same people, introduces justice considerations into the framework, leading the authors to propose a set of “safe and just” Earth system boundaries (ESBs) at global and sub-global scales, some of which are stricter than the “safe” limits outlined previously.

“For the first time, we present quantifiable numbers and a solid scientific foundation to assess the state of our planetary health not only in terms of Earth system stability and resilience but also in terms of human well-being and equity/justice,” said lead author Johan Rockström, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.

The interdisciplinary team focused on five of the nine planetary systems identified in 2009—climate, biosphere, water, nutrient cycles, and atmosphere. To determine the health of these systems, they relied on the following eight measurable indicators:

1)Global mean surface temperature change since the pre-industrial era (climate);
2)Natural ecosystem area (biosphere);
3)Functional integrity (biosphere);
4)Surface water flows (water);
5)Groundwater levels (water);
6)Nitrogen (nutrient cycles);
7)Phosphorous (nutrient cycles); and
8)Aerosol loading (atmosphere).

As Phys.org reported:

Safe boundaries ensure stable and resilient conditions on Earth, and use an interglacial Holocene-like Earth system functioning as a reference point for a healthy planet. A stable and resilient Earth is dominated by balancing feedbacks that cope with buffer and dampen disturbances. Cutting-edge science on climate tipping points features as one major line of evidence to set safe boundaries.[

To establish “just” boundaries for each indicator, the authors assessed the conditions needed to avert “significant harm,” which they defined as “widespread severe existential or irreversible negative impacts on countries, communities, and individuals from Earth system change, such as loss of lives, livelihoods, or incomes; displacement; loss of food, water, or nutritional security; and chronic disease, injury, or malnutrition.”

As summarized by Carbon Brief, the researchers took into account the following justice criteria:

Interspecies justice: prioritizing other species and ecosystems in addition to humanity.
Intergenerational justice: considering how actions taken today will impact future generations.
Intragenerational justice: accounting for factors including race, class, and gender, which “underpin inequality, vulnerability and the capacity to respond” to changes in planetary systems.
“The results of our health check are quite concerning: Within the five analyzed domains, several boundaries, on a global and local scale, are already transgressed,” Rockström said.

This means that unless a timely transformation occurs, it is most likely that irreversible tipping points and widespread impacts on human well-being will be unavoidable. Avoiding that scenario is crucial if we want to secure a safe and just future for current and future generations.

According to the paper, “Social and economic systems run on unsustainable resource extraction and consumption” have pushed Earth past seven of the eight “safe and just” ESBs.

Image

The paper includes the following image for reference. The Earth icons representing the current state of the planet should be in the green space, which marks where “safe” (red) and “just” (blue) ESBs overlap. Instead, they lie beyond the “safe and just corridor” for every indicator except aerosol loading.

When “safe” ESBs are looked at in isolation, the planet has entered the danger zone for six of the eight indicators. According to the authors, 1.2°C of global warming to date has pushed the world beyond the “just” ESB for climate, which requires mean surface temperature rise to be capped at 1.0°C. For now, the climate still remains in the “safe” threshold, they say, even as the impacts of increasingly frequent and intense extreme weather are already being felt, especially by the poor.

However, Gupta stressed that “justice is a necessity for humanity to live within planetary limits.”

“This is a conclusion seen across the scientific community in multiple heavyweight environmental assessments,” said Gupta.

It is not a political choice. Overwhelming evidence shows that a just and equitable approach is essential to planetary stability.

“We cannot have a biophysically safe planet without justice,” she added.

This includes setting just targets to prevent significant harm and guarantee access to resources to people and for as well as just transformations to achieve those targets.

As Carbon Brief pointed out:

This study is the first to assess Earth-system boundaries at a local scale, rather than analyzing the planet as a whole. This allows the authors to determine which boundaries have been crossed in specific regions and to identify ‘hotspots’ for breached boundaries.

As a result, researchers were able to produce the following map, which shows that more boundaries have been breached in certain areas, including Eastern Europe, the Middle East, South and Southeast Asia, and substantial parts of Africa, Brazil, Mexico, China, and the U.S. West.

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Rockström told reporters that the eight indicators were “carefully chosen” to be “implementable for stakeholders… across the world.”

The researchers hope that the “safe and just” ESBs they have put forth “will underpin the setting of new science-based targets for businesses, cities, and governments to address the polycrises of: increasing human exposure to the climate emergency, biodiversity decline, water shortages, ecosystem damage from fertilizer overuse in some parts of the world coupled with lack of access elsewhere, and health damage from air pollution,” Phys.org reported.

Rockström and Gupta are co-chairs of the Earth Commission, founded in 2019 “to advance the planetary boundaries framework,” Carbon Brief observed.

The concept has been widely used in academia and policy spaces, but has also attracted criticism from scientists who say it oversimplifies a complex system, or could spread political will too thinly.

Earth Commission executive director Wendy Broadgate, for her part, said that “a safe and just transformation to a manageable planet requires urgent, collective action by multiple actors, especially in government and business to act within Earth system boundaries to keep our life support system of the planet intact.”

“Stewardship of the global commons has never been more urgent or important,” she added.

In their conclusion, the authors wrote that “nothing less than a just global transformation across all ESBs is required to ensure human well-being.”

“Such transformations must be systemic across energy, food, urban, and other sectors, addressing the economic, technological, political, and other drivers of Earth system change, and ensure access for the poor through reductions and reallocation of resource use,” they added.

All evidence suggests this will not be a linear journey; it requires a leap in our understanding of how justice, economics, technology, and global cooperation can be furthered in the service of a safe and just future.

https://mronline.org/2023/07/06/planet- ... uite-sick/

(A political solution must be arrived at first, then the technical solutions. Ain't gonna happen no other way.)

*******

Monocrop farming doubles flood areas in South American plains
July 5, 2023

Water cycle disrupted as massive soy and corn plantations replace small farms and native vegetation

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Photo: Ministro de Agroindustria de la Provincia de Buenos Aires]

by Ian Angus
(This article includes material provided by Lancaster University.)

In a previous article, I discussed the role of genetically modified corn and soybean seeds in driving rapid expansion in large scale monocrop agriculture in Argentina and nearby countries, contributing to rapid loss of biodiversity. A new study, published last week in the journal Science, shows that those giant farms have also made the South American plains more vulnerable to destructive flooding.

Extensive areas of grasslands, and forests across South American plains have rapidly been converted to the production of annual crops, such as soybean and maize. This agricultural expansion has been taking place at a staggering rate of 2.1 million hectares a year.

The new study shows how these shifts to annual crop agriculture, which relies on rainfall rather than irrigation, are rapidly disrupting the water table across the large flat regions of the Pampas and Chaco plains and contributing to significantly increased risks of surface flooding.

The researchers used satellite imagery and field observations over the last four decades, as well as statistical modelling and hydrological simulations, to identify trends for groundwater and flooding. They revealed unprecedented evidence on how subtle, but widespread changes to vegetation cover can transform the water cycle across large regions.

The replacement of native vegetation and pastures with rain-fed croplands in South America’s major grain-producing area has resulted in a significant increase in the number of floods, and the area they affect. New flooded areas are expanding at about 700 square kilometers per year in the central plains, a phenomenon unseen elsewhere on the continent.

As short-rooted annual crops replace deeper-rooted native vegetation and pastures, floods are gradually doubling their coverage and becoming more sensitive to changes in precipitation. Groundwater, once deep beneath the surface (12-6 meters), is now rising to shallower levels (around 4 meters).

Replacing deeper rooted trees, plants and grasses with shallow rooted annual crops over such a huge scale has moved the regional water table rise closer to the surface. As the water level rises closer to the surface there is less capacity for the land to absorb heavy rainfall, making flooding more likely.

In addition to flooding, researchers say these human-induced hydrological changes are also risking other issues such as soil erosion, methane emissions and salting of the land through salination.

The authors say the findings underscore the urgent need for smarter land use policies that promote sustainable farming practices and water management strategies.
Science, June 29, 2023
Abstract: Agricultural expansion raises groundwater and increases flooding in the South American plains
Regional effects of farming on hydrology are associated mostly with irrigation. In this work, we show how rainfed agriculture can also leave large-scale imprints.

The extent and speed of farming expansion across the South American plains over the past four decades provide an unprecedented case of the effects of rainfed farming on hydrology.

Remote sensing analysis shows that as annual crops replaced native vegetation and pastures, floods gradually doubled their coverage, increasing their sensitivity to precipitation.

Groundwater shifted from deep (12 to 6 meters) to shallow (4 to 0 meters) states, reducing drawdown levels.

Field studies and simulations suggest that declining rooting depths and evapotranspiration in croplands are the causes of this hydrological transformation.

These findings show the escalating flooding risks associated with rainfed agriculture expansion at subcontinental and decadal scales.
https://climateandcapitalism.com/2023/0 ... an-plains/

Why are so many climate records breaking at once?
July 9, 2023

El Nino’s impact on oceans is combining with greenhouse gas emissions to drive up global temperatures

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Kimberley Reid is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Atmospheric Sciences at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia.

by Kimberley Reid
The Conversation, July 6, 2023

In the past few weeks, climate records have shattered across the globe. July 4 was the hottest global average day on record, breaking the new record set the previous day. Average sea surface temperatures have been the highest ever recorded and Antarctic sea ice extent the lowest on record.

Also on July 4, the World Meteorological Organization declared El Niño had begun, “setting the stage for a likely surge in global temperatures and disruptive weather and climate patterns.”

So what’s going on with the climate, and why are we seeing all these records tumbling at once?

Against the backdrop of global warming, El Niño conditions have an additive effect, pushing temperatures to record highs. This has combined with a reduction in aerosols, which are small particles that can deflect incoming solar radiation. So these two factors are most likely to blame for the record-breaking heat, in the atmosphere and in the oceans.

It’s not just climate change

The extreme warming we are witnessing is in large part due to the El Niño now occurring, which comes on top of the warming trend caused by humans emitting greenhouse gases. El Niño is declared when the sea surface temperature in large parts of the tropical Pacific Ocean warms significantly. These warmer-than-average temperatures at the surface of the ocean contribute to above-average temperatures over land.

The last strong El Niño was in 2016, but we have released 240 billion tonnes of CO₂ into the atmosphere since then.

El Niño doesn’t create extra heat but redistributes the existing heat from the ocean to the atmosphere.

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Moderating the trend in global average surface temperature over time (1985–2022), La Niña (blue) has a cooling influence, while El Niño has a warming influence (red). Volcanic eruptions (orange triangles) can also have cooling effect.

The ocean is massive. Water covers 70% of the planet and is able to store vast amounts of heat due to its high specific heat capacity. This is why your hot water bottle stays warm longer than your wheat pack. And, why 90% of the excess heat from global warming has been absorbed by the ocean.

Ocean currents circulate heat between the Earth’s surface, where we live, and the deep ocean. During an El Niño, the trade winds over the Pacific Ocean weaken, and the upwelling of cold water along the Pacific coast of South America is reduced. This leads to warming of the upper layers of the ocean.

Higher than usual ocean temperatures along the equator were recorded in the first 400m of the Pacific Ocean throughout June 2023. Since cold water is more dense than warm water, this layer of warm water prevents colder ocean waters from penetrating to the surface. Warm ocean waters over the Pacific also lead to increased thunderstorms, which further release more heat into the atmosphere via a process called latent heating.

This means that the build up of heat from global warming that had been hiding in the ocean during the past La Niña years is now rising to the surface and demolishing records in its wake.

An absence of aerosols across the Atlantic

Another factor likely contributing to the unusual warmth is a reduction in aerosols, small particles that can deflect incoming solar radiation. Pumping aerosols into the stratosphere is one of the potential geoengineering methods that humanity could invoke to lessen the impacts of global warming. Although stopping greenhouse gas emissions would be much better.

But the absence of aerosols can also increase temperatures. A 2008 study concluded that 35% of year-to-year sea surface temperature changes over the Atlantic Ocean in Northern Hemisphere summer could be explained by changes in Saharan dust. Saharan dust levels over the Atlantic Ocean have been unusually low lately.

On a similar note, new international regulations of sulphur particles in shipping fuels were introduced in 2020, leading to a global reduction in sulphur dioxide emissions (and aerosols) over the ocean. But the long-term benefits of reducing shipping emissions far outweighs the relatively small warming effect.

This combination of factors is why global average surface temperature records are tumbling.

Are we at the point of no return?

In May this year, the World Meteorological Organization declared a 66% chance of global average temperatures temporarily exceeding 1.5℃ above pre-industrial levels within the next five years.

This prediction reflected the developing El Niño. That probability is likely higher now, since El Niño has developed.

It is worth noting that temporarily exceeding 1.5℃ does not mean we have reached 1.5℃ by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change standards. The latter describes a sustained average global temperature anomaly of 1.5℃, rather than a single year, and is likely to occur in the 2030s.

This temporary exceedance of 1.5℃ will give us an unfortunate preview of what our planet will be like in the coming decades. Although, younger generations may find themselves dreaming of a balmy 1.5℃ given current greenhouse emissions policies put us on track for 2.7℃ warming by the end of the century.

So we are not at the point of no return. But the window of time to avert dangerous climate change is rapidly shrinking, and the only way to avert it is by severing our reliance on fossil fuels.

https://climateandcapitalism.com/2023/0 ... g-at-once/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: The Long Ecological Revolution

Post by blindpig » Fri Jul 14, 2023 5:37 pm

Scientists choose site to mark the start of the Anthropocene
July 11, 2023
Tiny Crawford Lake, near Toronto, holds a detailed record of radical global change

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Crawford Lake is in the traditional territory of the Huron-Wendat, Neutral, and Haudenosaunee peoples.

Ian Angus is the editor of Climate & Capitalism, and the author of Facing the Anthropocene: Fossil Capitalism and the Crisis of the Earth System.

by Ian Angus

In a major step towards formal recognition of the Anthropocene as a new stage in Earth System history, scientists have identified a small lake near Toronto as the best marker of epochal change. The announcement was made at news conferences in Europe on July 11, 2023.

Tiny Crawford Lake covers just 2.4 hectares (6 acres) in a legally protected conservation area. Unusually, it is meromictic — the upper and lower layers of water do not intermix. As a result, centuries of sinking materials have combined with seasonal calcium deposits to form sharply defined annual layers of sediment — comparable to tree rings — a precise year-by-year record of local, regional and global environment change.

Studies of pollens found in Crawford sediments provide detailed information about indigenous communities that farmed corn (maize) near the lake 600 years ago, and about the environmental impacts of later land clearing and logging by European colonists.

In frozen cores pulled from the lake bottom (see video below) more recent layers contain materials that simply didn’t exist before the middle of the 20th century. A multidisciplinary scientific working group that calls itself “Team Crawford” has found carbon particles from high energy power production, nitrates from massive application of chemical fertilizers, and other recent pollutants including indicators of decades of acid rain, all first appearing about 1950, Most important, the first layer to contain radioactive plutonium isotopes was formed in 1952 — that’s when the U.S. military began testing thermonuclear weapons (hydrogen bombs) in the Pacific Ocean.

In short, sediments in the bottom of Crawford Lake contain clear evidence of what scientists have dubbed the Great Acceleration of environmental change that began about 1950.

Interviewed by The Washington Post, British geologist Colin N. Waters, chair of the Anthropocene Working Group (AWG), called the mid-century division “a very precise geochemical boundary that is present across the planet, across all environments.” To ensure that future scientists can study the evidence, a frozen sediment core from Crawford Lake is stored in the Canadian Museum of Nature’s National Biodiversity Cryobank.

Crawford Lake was one of twelve locations submitted by Earth System scientists around the world for consideration by the Anthropocene Working Group as a possible Global boundary Stratotype Section and Point (GSSP), colloquially known as a “golden spike.” As AWG Chair Colin Waters and colleagues wrote recently, the sites were not only all strong GSSP candidates, they clearly showed that a new global epoch began in the mid-20th century.

“All sites examined, from widely varying and globally distributed environments, include or delimit an interval that may be clearly referred to the Anthropocene … usually on the basis of multiple stratigraphic signals. This analytical exercise has hence emphasized the stratigraphic reality of the Anthropocene, as well as providing the factual basis for formal definition.

Most of the site teams identified the presence of plutonium as the primary indicator of the beginning of the Anthropocene.

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Short List: 12 locations were considered as possible “Golden Spikes” to define the beginning of the Anthropocene epoch. (Anthropocene Review, February 2023)

https://climateandcapitalism.com/2023/0 ... hropocene/

The ‘eco’ in ecosocialism must mean climate, or we are lost
July 11, 2023
Jonathan Neale argues for serious changes in ecosocialist activity and policies

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Jonathan Neale is a long-time climate activist in Britain, and an editor of the ecosocialist magazine Fight the Fire. Climate & Capitalism welcomes constructive discussion and debate about the issues he raises in this article.

by Jonathan Neale

We need to make some serious changes in the ecosocialist project.

It’s good that we have the idea of ecosocialism. Because the words stand for a basic idea that ecology and socialism go together. Linked, they are the hope of the world. But we have to make some changes in the way that most of the left have been using the idea of ecosocialism. We need to redefine the ecosocialist project, because now climate changes everything.

We – humanity, not the left – have to stop climate change before we hit horrific consequences. That means a lot of things, but mostly it means we have to replace all use of oil, coal and natural gas with renewable energy instead. So everything runs on electricity, and all of that electricity is produced with renewable energy. There are some other things we need to do too. But stopping burning fossil fuels will make at least 70% of the difference.

It looks like that is not going to happen in the kind of society we have now. So in the next generation we are going to have to build a new kind of society. That’s the only definition of the ecosocialist project that makes any sense now.

Now, the eco in ecosocialism has to mean climate. Or we are all lost.

No more niche ecosocialism

Many socialist or Marxist parties have used the idea of ecosocialism as a sort of niche part of party business. The ecosocialist part of the party is given the task of arguing with the greens and the anarchists. In practice, this means producing propaganda saying nuclear power is not the answer, capitalism is the cause of the environmental crisis, and we are not in favor of growth.

In other words, tokenism and abstract argument. But not trying to build a mass movement to save the world here and now.

There are parties, socialist or Marxist, that do better than this. Many do not. I don’t want to point fingers, but you know who you are. And I understand. I started out like that. In a lot of ways the climate crisis has snuck up on the left, and we are changing. We need to change more, and faster.

Not the general environmental crisis

For some time many environmentalists have been saying that there is a general environmental crisis and we have to solve all of it. Some even say that there is no point in halting climate change if we do not solve all the other crises.

This is not true. From the point of view of humanity, the threat of climate change dwarfs the other environmental threats. To deny this is a form of climate denial for environmentalists. You can only say it if you have not taken on board what climate change will mean.

Halting climate change means stopping greenhouse gas emissions

The only way we can halt climate change is to bring greenhouse gas emissions to a halt. That means we stop almost all use of fossil fuels. It means destroying no new forests and covering the world with new forests. It means cutting emissions from agriculture, about 14% of the total, in half. It means cutting emissions from sewage and landfill by about half, and banning the use of CFC gases entirely.

I have written a book, Fight the Fire, showing in relentless detail how all this can be done. Many other studies confirm the same thing. It is not perfect, not 100% cuts, not net-zero, which is a fantasy, but it is good enough. That is what ecosocialists have to fight for, because that is what all humanity needs.

We cannot do stop emissions without replacing all fossil fuel with electricity made from renewable sources.

That is a real world task. The only way that will happen is if mass movements put people into power who will hire the many millions of workers we need to rewire the world, and do all the other work that is needed to stop greenhouse gas emissions. That is the eco part of ecosocialism now.

Stop worrying about Marx

A lot of the intellectual work of the ecosocialist movement has been devoted to arguing that Marx understood a great deal about the environment. Much of this work is interesting to people interested in Marx and the development of his thought. It is useful in defending Marx against the charge that he did not understand the limits to society posed by nature. But that work is not useful in building a movement to save the world.

I will put this very strongly. I don’t care what Marx said about the environment. This does not mean I don’t care what Marx said. One of the two most important things he ever said was in the Communist Manifesto: “The history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggles.” We won’t be able to stop climate change without the mother of all class struggles. What Marx had to say about class struggle was his life’s work, and is very useful in understanding the task ahead of us.

The other really important thing he said was, “Philosophers have only interpreted the world. The point is to change it.” That means ecosocialist organizing – and writing – about the environment should now focus how to stop climate change. Not just in theory, but where we are now.

It’s no good proving that capitalism causes climate change. The important question is not about the origins of the problem. Instead, start with the question of who stands in the way of climate action, why, and how do they do it. Start asking those questions and you get into the mechanism of how capitalism works in these situations, and which capitalists do what.

Growth

We also have to change how we think about growth, degrowth and ecosocialism.

Let’s go back twenty years, to 2002, when Joel Kovel published The Enemy of Nature, and Kovel and Michael Lowy published a shorter Ecosocialist Manifesto.

Kovel was a longstanding Marxist and anti-racist intellectual, one of the generation of 1968. By the end of the century, with the fall of the Soviet Union and peak neoliberalism in the United States, Kovel felt the dreams of his youth turning into ashes. But then Kovel began reading about the environmental crisis, and about climate change. As he read, one strand of ecological thought began to seize his imagination. This strand said that the environment for living things on Earth could not tolerate endless growth. And in particular, stopping climate change necessitates a reversal of economic growth.

But Joel understood Marxist economics. He knew that competition and growth are the lifeblood of capitalism. Reversing the logic of growth is incompatible with capitalism. That’s just basic to the Marxist understanding of capitalism. It’s actually basic to the understandings of most right-wing economists too. The incompatibility of capitalism and degrowth is not a long-term matter. It kicks in almost immediately.

If a government decided to limit growth to a steady state, then in fact the country will go into recession, and stay there forever. Employment and incomes will fall – which is the point of degrowth. But so will investment. That national economy will be unable to compete with other national economies on the world market. Quite rapidly, the stock market and the job market will go into free fall.

On the surface it looks like most degrowth environmentalists don’t know this. But on some level they sense it. That is why there are no political parties or candidates anywhere, in any country, campaigning for government to cut total national income and employment by 3% next year, or 4%, or 5%.

But Joel Kovel understood the issue very clearly. If the ecologists were right, and an end to growth was necessary, then there had to be a socialist revolution to end capitalism before we could stop growth. So he proposed an ecosocialist movement to stop growth and stop environmental crisis. The idea appealed to many Marxists.

The way it caught on reminds me of the way Marxists talked about the falling rate of profit more than a century ago. Way back then, many Marxists used to say that there was a law of the falling rate of profit. And that law meant that capitalism was bound to enter terminal crisis and be replaced by socialism.

So the future was on our side. Capitalism would eventually collapse. Socialists just had to wait and clean up the morning after. The argument about growth and capitalism is like that. It says we are bound to win, and you don’t need to fight now.

But the problem with Kovel’s argument about growth is the same as the problem with the people who were waiting for the collapse of capitalism. It tells people nothing about what do, or worse, it tells people not to do anything. This is important. There are no detailed plans for stopping growth among degrowthers.

By contrast, there is now a very large literature on exactly what an almost 100% cut in greenhouse gases would look like. I have been associated with some of these studies, but there are thousands of people now working on them, and hundreds of studies.

These studies are really detailed, for dozens of countries. They say which industries will have to be closed down, where, in how many years. They say how many new jobs will have to be created how quickly and where, doing what. They estimate how much cuts in greenhouse gases will result from their different proposals. Of course the different experts disagree about their numbers. But the numbers are what they are arguing about. They are arguing about what can be done, and what has to be done.

There is a very large literature on degrowth. None of it deals with such numbers. There is no argument over which industries should be closed. Golf courses? Yachts? All sailing? Car manufacture? Jewelry? Fast fashion? More than one set of clothes per person per year? Trainers? Boots? Psychiatric medications? Graduate school? Personal laptops? Streaming videos? Table service? Fast food? Slow food? Bottled water? Social workers? All plastics? Weapons?

And where? How do we achieve 3% cuts in Britain each year for ten years? Which jobs go? Where? How do we do it in China, where per person emissions are higher than in Britain. What about South Africa, or Brazil, or Russia? No cuts in employment? Stand still?

There is no detailed debate about these numbers anywhere in the literature, not even the beginnings of an agreement on what has to be cut, much less a more general and international plan. This is because everyone involved actually knows that no political party bigger then a tiny sect is going to fight for such detailed proposals. Because everyone actually knows that no one can win an election on such a basis.

And no one can create a revolution on such a basis either.

No one can win an election in Britain. Or Canada. Or Brazil. Bolivia. Nigeria, France, Poland, India, Bangladesh. Or anywhere. No majority will vote for this. That’s why plans for degrowth remain abstract, and no one fights to make them happen in the real world.

And also, degrowth will not halt climate change. If you reduce the gross product of the world by 50% in the next twenty years, and you don’t stop burning fossil fuels, we are all utterly lost. If the gross product of the world grows by 50% in the next twenty years and we stop all burning of fossil fuels, we will have stopped climate change.

I have been harsh in this article. But reality is harsh. We must change.

https://climateandcapitalism.com/2023/0 ... -are-lost/

Not what I expected...I anticipated railing against this article but turns out pretty much spot on concerning de-growth. It's a losing game for us and should be consigned to feasibility studies until we have the revolution necessary to get us off the capitalist track.

It seems a congenital fault of scientists in capitalist society that they insist upon prioritizing technical solutions when nothing happens without social solutions, First things first.

******

‘The UN’s Report Laid Bare How Little Time Was Left’
CounterSpin interviews on climate resistance
JANINE JACKSON

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The July 7, 2023, episode of CounterSpin included portions of two archival interviews Janine Jackson conducted on resisting climate disrupters. This is a lightly edited transcript.


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HuffPost (3/4/21)
Janine Jackson: We think of pipelines and coal mines as arenas of the fight over climate policy, but another battlefield, rarely in the spotlight, is buildings. Buildings account for 40% of all energy consumed in the US, and about the same proportion of greenhouse gasses produced.

There’s an obvious social gain in adapting buildings to climate realities, making them not just energy efficient, but future-proofed against predictable weather events.

Many cities were working on building codes to reflect that need, until industry groups said, “Not so fast.”

CounterSpin heard about this largely under-the-radar story in March 2021 from Alexander Kaufman, senior reporter at HuffPost and co-founder of the nonprofit environmental news collaborative Floodlight.

After explaining that the International Code Council, or ICC, is a not-especially international consortium of industry and government groups that sets baseline model codes for different buildings, Kaufman moved on to what was going on in cities like Minneapolis.

Alexander Kaufman: Every three years, there is a vote on what is known as a “model energy code,” the International Energy Conservation Code. And this is a broad set of requirements and mandates around how thick insulation needs to be in certain zones, and what kind of windows are best to preserve energy within the building. And every year, there was a relatively low turnout of government voters who would have the final say on what made it into that model code. It was a pretty wonky topic; few governments were fully aware of their ability to participate.

And what happened is that in 2018, two things converged: Both there was this growing frustration with the fact that the last two rounds of codes had made really meager improvements on energy efficiency overall, about 1% each time, and there was the UN’s IPCC report, which really laid bare just how little time was left to dramatically slash planet-heating emissions and keep climate change within a relatively safe range.

And, as a result, you had groups like the US Conference of Mayors, and other campaign organizations that try to push a lot of sustainability policies through cities, organize their members, which include virtually every city over 30,000 residents in the US, to get together and register eligible city officials to vote in the process that took place in late 2019, which would set the codes that are set to come into effect for 2021.

And it was a huge success; they had record voter turnout. They had hundreds of new government officials voting in the process, and overwhelmingly voting for more aggressive measures to increase energy efficiency. Some of the improvements, going up from that 1% improvement the last time around, went as high as 14% for some residential buildings.

Likewise, they approved new measures that would essentially bring this entire national building code in line with what many cities across the country are already doing to prepare for a low-carbon future: requiring the circuitry for electric appliances, or electric vehicle chargers, be included automatically in buildings, because it’s much more expensive to add those things after the fact.

What ended up happening, once the votes were tallied and it became clear that these city officials had successfully improved on the climate-readiness of the code, industry groups pushed back. And those industry groups include the National Association of Home Builders, one of the largest trade groups in the country, representing developers and construction companies, and the American Gas Association, which represents gas utilities, which has a lot at stake in the potential transition away from gas heating and cooking.

They rallied, and first questioned the eligibility of the voters to cast ballots in this election at all. And when it became clear that the voters who did vote were totally eligible under the ICC’s rules, they decided instead that they wanted to stem this from ever happening again, and proposed that, instead, this code, the energy code, is put through a separate process, known as a “standards” process, whereby there is no government vote at the end. It’s done entirely through these bureaucratic channels, where there’s no risk that government voters are going to buck with what the industry is comfortable with. And this is ultimately what they succeeded in making happen.

JJ: That was reporter Alexander Kaufman recounting an at once inspiring and very frustrating story of how far fossil fuel companies will go to thwart the public will in the effort to harm public health.

***

Of course, at the root, fights over responding to the climate emergency are fights over power, and accountability, and power. Resistance includes new visions, new models of how we run energy systems.

In the fall of 2019, the word “unlivable” was being used to describe California in the midst of wildfires and power outages. Our guest, and others, saw, at the core, not just climate crisis, but a private utility system that’s not incentivized to address it.

Johanna Bozuwa, co-manager of the Climate and Energy Program at the Democracy Collaborative, filled us in on some relevant history of Pacific Gas & Electric.

Johanna Bozuwa: There’s a lot of history that’s here, in terms of PG&E not investing in its grid for so many years, and really putting shareholder profits ahead of the infrastructure that we now have, which has created this concept of the “new normal.” But it also doesn’t have to be. I mean, having these power shutoffs come on again and again? Governor Newsom has even said, these are incredibly not surgical. They are doing blanket shut-offs, because they’re afraid of liability.

But they’re also not providing the infrastructure that communities need to actually make it through these. So their phone lines are off, you can’t get on to their website, and there’s only a generator station for every county. And so that’s just showing that this is not just them taking precautions, this is them severely mismanaging a situation in which people are losing their power, and losing access to maybe life-sustaining medical apparatuses as well.

JJ: And you point to history. They aren’t just any utility that is being forced to deal with climate disruption; there’s more that we should know about the role they’ve played vis-à-vis climate change, isn’t there?

JB: Oh, yes, definitely. And the Energy and Policy Institute had a really important exposé. We hear a lot about “Exxon knew” and “Shell knew” on the news. But utilities knew too; they were part and parcel to the climate disinformation campaigns that have happened in the past and have sowed disinformation. And PG&E was a part of that as well.

So PG&E is not a good actor in this situation; they are the ones that were able to make money off of fossil fuels for so many years, and stopping action on climate change for years as well. And now they are paying the price, with their own infrastructure that they failed to invest in, so that it was ready for the new climate that they had, in part, given us.

JJ: Alternatives are not just possible; they are, as you write, “waiting.” So let’s talk about that. Let’s talk about the idea of public utilities.

JB: Yeah, absolutely. So I advocate that PG&E should be transitioned into public ownership, because it can eliminate some of those warped incentives that are associated with monopoly, investor-owned utilities that operate our energy systems. And we can move towards a situation in which a public good is provided by a public service. So by moving to a public institution, we are going to have, hopefully, a more accountable utility, whose shareholders and stockholders are us. It is the people who are living in California, and not the shareholders who are hundreds of miles away.

You talk a lot about the media; it’s been really interesting for me to look at some of the coverage that’s been happening around the investors that are circling PG&E right now. They’re saying, “Oh, we’ll take it over,” these venture capitalists like Paul Singer, who has been in bed with the Koch brothers for years, investing in anti-climate sentiments. And we see the same thing with Berkshire Hathaway, which is another major utility company that has been trying to stop distributed solar across the United States, just the type of resiliency we need for California.

But there are other options that are on the table right now, and they’re in action. San Francisco just put in a bid to municipalize their area, so that they could take back the grid, so that they could be in charge of their own destiny.

And similarly, San Jose, one of the biggest cities that PG&E provides service to, is saying, actually, you know what we should do? We should create a cooperative utility so that it is beholden to the people of California, and we’re taking over PG&E at the statewide level.
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CounterSpin (10/18/19)
JJ: As we discussed when we talked about public banks on this show with Trinity Tran a few weeks ago, the word “public” isn’t like pixie dust; it doesn’t automatically make things work in a better way. But public utilities would have certain criteria about being democratized, about being decentralized, about being equitable. It’s not just a goal, in other words, but a way to get there, and who is involved in the process.

JB: Absolutely. It’s not a silver bullet, but it does provide us this opportunity to have more recourse. There is a history of public ownership in the energy sector. But we have the ability to design into that institution things like decentralization, things like equity, things like a democratized system, and build upon what we’ve seen work in the past, and also where we’ve seen public utilities historically fail.

This is a huge opportunity for California to create an energy system that’s rooted in climate justice, that’s rooted in the realities of the changing climate, and how they’re going to ensure that they actually are creating a resilient California.

JJ: That was Johanna Bozuwa. We’ll end with that idea, of not only fighting climate disrupters, but visioning past them as well. We can call on news media to support that effort, but we can’t wait for them.

https://fair.org/home/the-uns-report-la ... -was-left/

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THE CRITICAL MINERALS THAT THE US HAS IN ITS SIGHTS
Jul 12, 2023 , 5:13 p.m.

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Lithium mines in Argentina (Photo: Shutterstock)

Jake Sullivan, White House National Security Adviser, outlined the Joe Biden administration's international economics agenda at an event with the think tank Brookings Institution last April , with China and critical minerals being the main focus of his talk. . There were three comments that stood out:

"The People's Republic of China continued to subsidize traditional industrial sectors on a large scale (…) The United States not only lost manufacturing: we eroded our competitiveness in critical technologies that would define the future."
"The United States now makes only about 10% of the world's semiconductors, and production, in general and especially when it comes to the most advanced chips, is geographically concentrated elsewhere (...) this creates critical economic risk and a national security vulnerability.
"Today, the United States produces just 4% of the lithium, 13% of the cobalt, 0% of the nickel and 0% of the graphite needed to meet current demand for electric vehicles. Meanwhile, more than 80% of critical minerals are processed by one country: China.

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Jake Sullivan, White House National Security Adviser (Photo: Patrick Semansky/A)

Given this, Sullivan exposes the progress in the broad agenda of control of extraterritorial resources that the US political class is committed to, regardless of the political party, because it is a state policy under the umbrella of maintaining national security.

Since 2020, the United States has a new Energy Act , which has important sections aimed at the development of critical minerals necessary for "renewable" energy technologies. This bipartisan law mutated the energy policy of the United States after 13 years of that impulse to exploit shale crude through fracking , now intensifying the development of new energy technologies, which leads to expanding the agenda of obtaining mineral resources.

In fact, the new edition of the Energy Act defines a "critical mineral" as a non-combustible mineral or a material essential to the economic or national security of the United States, which has a supply chain vulnerable to interruptions.

"This bipartisan package will foster innovation across the board in a variety of technologies that are critical to our energy and national security, our long-term economic competitiveness, and the protection of our environment," Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski said at the time of the the promulgation of the law.

That Sullivan announces and confirms the very low percentages in US production of critical minerals shows the political line to preserve and guarantee US energy security. By pointing to China as the largest producer of these minerals, he sets off the alarm to justify any action against that country.

In 2022, the United States Department of the Interior, based on the aforementioned law, updated the list of critical minerals . Any mineral that feeds that list serves as a reason to guide the use of funds from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act , both for the United States Geological Survey (USGS, its acronym in English) and for other agencies.

Minerals such as lithium, cobalt, nickel and aluminum are part of the 50 new inclusions in the list. It is known, and it has been indicated, in the case of lithium, that the large reservoirs are found in Latin America . But it must also be taken into account that the largest reserves of nickel and cobalt are held by the Democratic Republic of Congo; China, for its part, is the largest producer of aluminum . Both countries, for these and other reasons, have been the victims of unilateral US coercive measures.

These minerals are crucial for the telephony and entertainment technology market, as the communication spectrum constantly reports, but above all they are crucial for the sphere of military technology development.

When a natural resource -which it does not have- becomes part of the rhetoric around the national security of the United States, it dedicates itself to planning its policy to try to control the global market and supply chains, and thus decrease the ranges of dependence on those resources.

According to a USGS report , in 2018, the United States imported almost all of the rare earth elements it used in 2018; 80% came from China. In that report it was also indicated that the United States depended on more than 50% of 51 minerals, 12 of which are considered critical.

The United States badly needs the critical minerals. But it is increasingly dependent on foreign sources for many of these resources, particularly from China. This creates a vulnerability in the US economy and military, so the White House creates a macro strategy to revive its struggling domestic industry and minimize dependency.

Let's hope in the near future that the coercive agenda against China and other countries with large reservoirs of the raw materials reviewed here will gain more and more strength.

https://misionverdad.com/globalistan/lo ... en-la-mira.

Google Translator

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Big Oil’s Radical Proposal: Curtail Consumption, Not Production
Posted on July 11, 2023 by Yves Smith

Yves here. Your humble blogger may be unduly cynical, but it is hard not to wonder about what looks like sound climate policy ideas from the very industry that benefits most from things not changing much. So why does Big Oil recommending what we regard as the only viable approach to averting climate disaster, radical conservation, a Trojan horse?

First and most important, the majors and their allies know that there’s a lack of political will to take the full-bore measures needed to make a serious dent in energy use, particularly since it’s the wealthiest who would have to make the biggest lifestyle changes. Second, and as a result, pushing an energy diet that few will follow seems aimed to shift priorities away from green energy, which is intended to and does eat away at fossil fuel use.

By Irina Slav, a writer for Oilprice.com with over a decade of experience writing on the oil and gas industry. Originally published at OilPrice

Big Oil companies have urged governments to focus on reducing demand for energy rather than limiting supply, suggesting it is more beneficial for the long-term goal of a net-zero world.
OPEC officials disagree with the notion of reducing production and investments in oil and gas, and emphasize reducing emissions instead.
While some perceive this stance as Big Oil’s attempt to preserve its focus on oil and gas during a period of record profits, others see it as a pragmatic response to the realities of energy demand and security
Last year, in the middle of an energy crunch, European governments called on their citizens to consume less energy. They also lashed out at Big Oil for making billions from the squeeze.

Now, Big Oil is the one calling for a reduction in energy consumption. Essentially, supermajors have suggested that people should use less of their products. But they don’t want to slash production.

The seemingly paradoxical message came out earlier this week from a conference in Vienna, where OPEC leaders met with their Big Oil counterparts from BP, Shell, and other oil companies to discuss the future of global energy.

As might have been expected in this day and age, the message to come out of the gathering was that everyone is committed to a net-zero world in the future but that right now, everyone was committed to ensuring there is enough energy for those who need it, regardless of the source.

What was, perhaps, less expected was the reported call from Big Oil for governments to focus on demand reduction rather than supply limitation as a means of enabling that net-zero world. OPEC officials, meanwhile, focused on the importance of energy security as they have done before.

“We must do everything we can to reduce emissions, not to reduce energy,” OPEC secretary-general, Haitham al Ghais said, as quoted by Euronews. “There is a misconception going around about reducing production and reducing investment in oil and gas, we do not agree with that message.”

One would assume the reason OPEC disagrees with this message is that it would lead to lower profits for its members. But according to Big Oil, the motive for switching from a focus on supply to one on demand will avoid even higher profits for oil producers. Not that the executives put it quite this way.

The report on that call comes from Reuters, which was once again refused access to the conference but quoted sources present there. And that call follows statements made by Big Oil executives that they will slow down with their pivot away from their core business.

From an activist perspective, Big Oil is trying to justify its renewed focus on oil and gas at a time when oil and gas are making record profits. From an energy security perspective, it is difficult to argue that reducing the supply of a commodity while leaving demand unchanged could only have one result: a sharp rise in the price of that commodity.

Of course, there is a case to be made that right now, despite stable and growing demand for oil, prices are depressed—but this is because factors different from oil’s fundamentals are running the show, as it were. These factors include GDP growth in big consumers, inflation, and central bank monetary policy. But there is also the perception that there is an abundant supply of oil that has contributed to the pressure on prices.

So, what Big Oil executives are basically saying is that governments—and activists—have got the wrong end of the stick: they are trying to reduce the supply of oil and gas without addressing demand. And that is an approach that is doomed to failure, as we saw last year when the same governments that berated Big Oil for its profits subsidized the consumption of Big Oil’s products to avoid riots on their hands.

Meanwhile, at another recent event, other Big Oil executives dared speak a truth that few leaders in the West would even acknowledge in private. That truth amounts to the fact that oil and gas are going nowhere in the next few decades, no matter what green transition plans governments are making.

“We think the biggest realization that should come out of this conference … is oil and gas are needed for decades to come,” is how Hess Corp.’s John Hess put it. “Energy transition is going to take a lot longer, it’s going to cost a lot more money and need new technologies that don’t even exist today.”

Naturally, this would be a welcome opportunity for a climate advocate to argue that Big Oil is trying to save its bacon when the world is turning vegan, but even that climate advocate would be hard-pressed to explain why, if the world’s moving away from hydrocarbons, China is building coal plants and India is building refineries.

The truth is that the world is not moving away from hydrocarbons. Demand for oil has hit 102 million barrels daily. Demand for gas is soaring, too, notably from transition poster continent Europe. U.S. oil consumption is also growing after a drop in 2020—the lockdown year.

There may be something, then, in a call for addressing demand for oil and gas instead of calling for less production. But addressing demand with a view to essentially discouraging it will be tricky—and also highly unpopular among voters. Germany is a good example worth studying by other transition-minded countries. It shows that forcing the transition down people’s throats does not usually yield the expected results.


https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2023/07 ... ction.html

Devious bastards. As in each and every case the onus is thrown on the consumers. And while there is certainly sense in that the fact remains that people consume what the capitalist offer. We didn't ask for all this bullshit.Conservation must start at the point of production or we're just spinning our wheels, engaging in feel good practices which have no meaningful effect.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Post by blindpig » Sat Jul 15, 2023 2:05 pm

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They must think we’re stupid
Originally published: Red Flag on July 11, 2023 by Jerome Small (more by Red Flag) | (Posted Jul 14, 2023)

The fox is in charge of the chook house. Dracula is guarding the blood bank. And the CEO of one of the biggest oil and gas companies in the world will preside over the big United Nations climate conference at the end of this year.

Yep. Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber is the CEO of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC), reported to be the eleventh biggest oil and gas producer in the world. And he’s been appointed president of the next conference of the parties to the United Nations climate agreements, or COP 28, to be held in the oil-rich United Arab Emirates from 30 November.

So the main international mechanism we’re told will guide us to a safe climate is now in the expert hands of … a CEO who would get a podium finish if trashing the climate were an Olympic sport. In 2021, the International Energy Agency warned that no new oil or gas projects can be approved if the world is to have a chance of reaching the (inadequate) target of “net zero” by 2050. On the enormously long list of companies ignoring this warning, ADNOC’s expansion plans rank as the third-most ambitious, according to a recent Guardian report.

Al Jaber’s defenders point to the $30 billion that ADNOC subsidiaries have invested in renewables since 2006. They’re a little more coy about the $150 billion the company is set to invest in a new oil and gas “megaproject” in Abu Dhabi in just the next five years.

One of the few things as ludicrous as an oil company CEO presiding over the world’s major official climate conference is that this same conference could soon be hosted by Australia, following a push from the Labor government over the past year.

Like the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, Australia likes to spruik its green credentials and invest in renewables, while signing off on record-breaking gas projects. Australia still dominates global coal exports and runs neck and neck with Qatar as the world’s biggest gas exporter. With (for instance) 84 percent of the Northern Territory’s land mass under application for gas exploration permits, there will be plenty more to come.

Of course, our oh-so-progressive prime minister, Anthony Albanese, will never be seen fondling lumps of coal in the parliament like former PM Morrison. Instead, the government provides a valuable service to fossil fuel profiteers through expanding production and world-class deceptions that enable continued, and indeed accelerated, climate destruction.

It’s a crowded field, but the winner in this category for June must be Labor’s declaration that the country will soon be open for business as an importer of carbon pollution, part of the dangerous fantasy of “carbon capture and storage”. Never mind that the world’s biggest and most sophisticated CCS scheme, at Chevron’s lucrative Gorgon gas field off the Western Australian coast, is currently emitting four tonnes of gas for every tonne stored. Don’t worry about that minor detail, says Labor, just let the gas companies keep stacking the cash while the planet burns.

All this closely parallels the official position of Abu Dhabi, whose climate change minister recently argued that fossil fuel production could continue and even expand, thanks to the alleged miracles of CCS. The bullshit piles up along with fossil fuel profits, atmospheric CO2 and methane—and the catastrophic consequences.

Perhaps our rulers think we’re stupid. They definitely rely on us being disengaged. But it’s a little difficult to hide forever a worldwide unravelling.

People in North America have never choked on as much smoke, residents of Beijing have never felt so much heat. We’ve never had more CO2 in the atmosphere. We’ve never had such a heat surge in the North Atlantic. We’ve never seen such a jaw-dropping fall in sea ice formation.

So, for anyone who’s looking, the decision of the world’s rulers and their representatives at the COP to choose this very moment to appoint an oil and gas CEO to oversee their annual jamboree of bullshit is clarifying.

We’re at least now free to face our circumstances with sober senses. It’s clear our struggle will have to continue across the increasingly hot, unstable and terrifying world that our rulers—from oil CEOs to smooth-talking UN functionaries to smiling Labor politicians—are intent on imposing on us.

We need many things for that struggle. We need the power of numbers. We need the strength of organised workers. We need righteous rage against a system of worldwide competition and profit that is crashing us through every known limit on global heating. And we need 100 percent clarity that no-one is coming to save us, except ourselves.

https://mronline.org/2023/07/14/they-mu ... re-stupid/

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What’s driving Europe’s record-busting heatwave?
July 15, 2023
Blistering heat harms human health, has dangerous social and economic consequences

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July 10 2023: land surface temperatures across Europe. ESA/Copernicus Sentinel data. CC BY-NC-SA)

by Emma Hill and Ben Vivian
The Conversation, July 14, 2023

Europe is currently in the midst of a heatwave. Italy, in particular, is expected to face blistering heat, with temperatures projected to reach 40℃ to 45℃. There’s even a chance that the current European temperature record of 48.8℃, set in Sicily in 2021, could be surpassed.

Searing temperatures have spread to other countries in southern and eastern Europe, including France, Spain, Poland and Greece. The heat will complicate the travel plans of those heading to popular holiday destinations across the region.

Heatwaves, which are defined as prolonged periods of exceptionally hot weather in a specific location, can be extremely dangerous. Europe has experienced its fair share of devastating heatwaves in the past.

In 2003, a heatwave swept across Europe, claiming the lives of over 70,000 people. Then, in 2022, another heatwave hit Europe, resulting in the deaths of almost 62,000 people.

The current heatwave is being caused by an anticyclone named Cerberus after the three-headed monster-dog that guards the gates of the underworld in Greek mythology. An anticyclone – or high-pressure system – is a normal meteorological phenomenon in which sinking air from the upper atmosphere brings about a period of dry and settled weather with limited cloud formation and little wind.

High-pressure systems tend to be slow moving, which is why they persist for days, or even weeks at a time. They often become semi-permanent features over large areas of land. When high pressure systems form over hot land, in regions like the Sahara, the stability of the system generates even hotter temperatures because the already warm air is heated even more.

Eventually, the anticyclone will weaken or break down and the heatwave will come to an end. According to the Italian Meteorological Society, the Cerberus heatwave is expected to persist for around two weeks.

What role does climate change play?

High pressure systems, like the one currently affecting Europe, have been expanding northwards in recent years. It’s difficult to ascribe a single event, such as a heatwave, directly to climate change. But as temperatures continue to warm, we are seeing changes in atmospheric circulation patterns that can lead to increased occurrences of extreme temperatures and drought in Europe.

Research by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change confirms this trend. Its data shows an increase in the frequency and magnitude of extreme weather events since the 1950s. A separate analysis of European heatwaves revealed an increasing severity of such events over the past two decades.

In the summer of 2022, southern Europe experienced higher temperatures than usual for that time of the year. Spain, France and Italy saw daily maximum temperatures exceed 40°C. The EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service attributed these unusually hot conditions to climate change and suggested that such events are likely to become more frequent, intense and last longer in the future – indicating a concerning trend that may continue this year.

The dangers of extreme heat

Heatwaves and extreme temperatures impact human health in a number of ways. These conditions can cause heatstroke, leading to symptoms like headaches and dizziness. Dehydration resulting from the heat can also affect respiratory and cardiovascular performance.

There have already been reports of heat-related health incidents in Europe during the ongoing heatwave. An Italian road worker died, and there have been numerous cases of heatstroke reported across Spain and Italy.

The Italian Ministry of Health has advised residents and visitors in affected areas to take precautions like staying out of the sun during the hottest part of the day, remaining hydrated and to avoid alcohol consumption.

But the effects of heatwaves go beyond individual health. They have broader social and economic consequences too. Extreme heat can damage road surfaces and even cause railway tracks to buckle.

Heatwaves can also lead to reduced water availability, affecting electricity production, crop irrigation and drinking water supply. In 2022, scorching heat meant French nuclear plants were unable to run at full capacity as higher river temperatures and low water levels affected their cooling ability. Research indicates that extreme heat has already had a negative impact on economic growth in Europe, lowering it by up to 0.5% over the past decade.

As temperatures continue to rise, heatwaves will become more severe. It’s crucial that governments worldwide take swift and decisive action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions immediately.

However, it’s important to note that even if we were to completely halt global greenhouse gas emissions today, the climate would still continue to warm. This is due to the heat that is already absorbed and retained by the oceans. While we can slow down the rate of global warming, the effects of climate change will continue to be experienced in the future.

https://climateandcapitalism.com/2023/0 ... -heatwave/

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Profit-Driven Systems Are Driving Us To Our Doom
JULY 15, 2023

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Business executive wearing a mask and holding cash banknotes. Photo: Getty Images.

By Caitlin Johnstone – Jul 13, 2023

I just read a disturbing paragraph in a New Yorker article about the Instant Pot, a popular electronic pressure cooker whose parent company recently filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy:

“So what doomed the Instant Pot? How could something that was so beloved sputter? Is the arc of kitchen goods long but bends toward obsolescence? Business schools may someday make a case study of one of Instant Pot’s vulnerabilities, namely, that it was simply too well made. Once you slapped down your ninety dollars for the Instant Pot Duo 7-in-1, you were set for life: it didn’t break, it didn’t wear out, and the company hasn’t introduced major innovations that make you want to level up. As a customer, you were one-and-done, which might make you a happy customer, but is hell on profit-and-growth performance metrics.”

Just think about that for a second. Under our current systems for profit generation, which is the primary driver of human behavior on this planet, making a quality product that lasts a long time instead of quickly going obsolete or turning into landfill will actually drive you into bankruptcy.

An article in The Atlantic about the bankruptcy filing similarly illustrated this point last month:

“From the point of view of the consumer, this makes the Instant Pot a dream product: It does what it says, and it doesn’t cost you much or any additional money after that first purchase. It doesn’t appear to have any planned obsolescence built into it, which would prompt you to replace it at a regular clip. But from the point of view of owners and investors trying to maximize value, that makes the Instant Pot a problem. A company can’t just tootle along in perpetuity, debuting new products according to the actual pace of its good ideas, and otherwise manufacturing and selling a few versions of a durable, beloved device and its accessories, updated every few years with new features. A company needs to grow.”

This just says such dysmal things about why our planet is facing the existential crises it’s now facing. Corporations will die if they don’t continually grow, and they can’t grow without things like inbuilt planned obsolescence or continued additional purchases, which in a sane society would just be regarded as shoddy craftsmanship. Our entire civilization is driven by the pursuit of profit, and to keep turning large profits your corporation needs to continually grow, and your corporation can’t continually grow unless you’re manufacturing a crappy product that needs to be continually replaced or supplemented, and you can’t manufacture those replacements and supplementations without harvesting them from the flesh of a dying world.

As writer Robert Moor recently observed on Twitter, “The fact that Instant Pot is already being framed as a corporate cautionary tale — the company that went bankrupt because they made a product so durable and versatile that its customers had little need to buy another one — instead of as a critique of capitalism is deeply, deeply depressing.”


It’s really heartbreaking to think about all the ways human potential is being starved and constricted by these ridiculous limitations we’ve placed on the way we operate as a collective. Resources being allocated based on how well they can turn a profit stymies technological innovation, because the most profitable model will always win out over less profitable ones that are more beneficial to people and our environment. Someone could invent a free energy machine that lasts forever and costs next to nothing, and even though it would save the world you can be certain it would never see the light of day under our current systems, because it couldn’t yield huge and continuous profits and it would destroy many current means of profit generation.

Science should be the most collaborative endeavor in the world; every scientist on earth should be collaborating and communicating. Instead, because of our competition-based models, it’s the exact opposite: scientific exploration is divided up into innovators competing against other innovators, corporations competing against other corporations, nations competing against other nations.

If we could see how much we are losing to these competition-based models, how much innovation is going unrealized, how much human thriving is being sacrificed, how we’re losing almost all of our brainpower potential to these models, we’d fall to our knees and scream with rage. If science had been a fully collaborative worldwide hive mind endeavor instead of divided and turned against itself for profit and military power, our civilization would be unimaginably more advanced than it is.

This is doubtless. We gave up paradise to make a few bastards rich.

Our competition-based, profit-motivated systems limit scientific innovation, and they also greatly limit the scope of solutions we can avail ourselves of. There’s a whole vast spectrum of potential solutions to the troubles we face as a species, and we’re limiting ourselves to a very small, very inferior fraction of it. By limiting solutions to ones that are profitable, we’re omitting any which involve using less, consuming less, leaving resources in the ground, and leaving nature the hell alone. We’re also shrinking the incentive to cure sicknesses and eliminate problems rather than offer expensive, ongoing treatments and services for them.

Or even a project as fundamental to our survival as getting all the pollution out of our oceans. The profit motive offers no solution to this problem because there’s no way to make a surplus of money from doing so, and in fact it would be very costly. So the pollution stays in our seas, year after year. People have come up with plenty of solutions for removing pollution from the sea, but they never get rolled out at the necessary scale because there’s no way to make it profitable. And people would come up with far more solutions if they knew those solutions could be implemented.

How many times have you had an awesome idea and gotten all excited about it, only to do the math and figure out that it’s unfeasible because wouldn’t be profitable? This is a very common experience, and it’s happening to ideas for potential solutions to our problems every day.

The profit motive system assumes the ecocidal premise of infinite growth on a finite world. Without that, the entire system collapses. So there are no solutions which involve not growing, manufacturing less, consuming less, not artificially driving up demand with advertising, etc.

It’s hard to appreciate the significance of this artificial limitation when you’re inside it and lived your whole life under its rules. It’s like if we were only allowed to make things out of wood; if our whole civilization banned the entire spectrum of non-woodcraft innovation. Sure such a civilization would get very good at making wooden things, and would probably have some woodcrafting innovations that our civilization doesn’t have. But it would also be greatly developmentally stunted. That’s how badly we’re handicapping ourselves with the profit motive model from the pursuit of viable solutions.


And some solutions would be really great right now. This planet just had its warmest week in recorded history, and Antarctic sea ice is now failing to form in what for the southern hemisphere is the dead of winter. Even if you still want to pretend global warming isn’t real, this planet’s biosphere is giving us plenty of other signs of looming collapse, including plummeting insect populations, a loss of two-thirds of Earth’s wildlife over the last 50 years, ecosystems dying off, forests disappearing, soil becoming rapidly less fertile, mass extinctions, and oceans gasping for oxygen and becoming lifeless deserts while continents of plastic form in their waters. So our need for immediate solutions to our environmental crisis is not seriously debatable.

But we’re not getting solutions, we’re getting a world ruled by corporations whose leaders are required to place growth above all other other concerns, even concerns about whether the future will contain an ecosystem which corporations can exist in or a human species for them to sell goods and services to. Corporations function as giant, world-eating sociopaths, because our current models let their leaders and lawyers wash their hands of all the consequences of the damage their monsters inflict in the name of growth and the duty to maximize shareholder profits.

People worry about the world getting destroyed by machines driven by a heartless artificial intelligence, but we might end up destroying it with a kind of artificial mind we invented long before microchips: the corporation. So much of humanity’s dysfunction can be explained by the fact that corporations (A) pretty much run the world and (B) are required to act like sociopaths by placing profit above all other concerns.


As long as human behavior remains driven by profit, ecocide will continue, because ecocide is profitable.

As long as human behavior remains driven by profit, wars will continue, because war is profitable.

As long as human behavior remains driven by profit, exploitation will continue, because exploitation is profitable.

As long as human behavior remains driven by profit, corruption will continue, because corruption is profitable.

There is no “good” model in which human behavior can remain driven by profit without these destructive behaviors continuing, because so many kinds of destructive behavior will always necessarily be profitable. No proponents of any iteration of capitalism have ever been able to provide any satisfactory answers to this.

The call then is to move from competition-based, profit-driven systems to systems which are based on collaboration toward the common good of all. We’re a long way off from that, but a long way can be cleared in a short time under the right conditions. Our species is at adapt-or-die time, and the adaptation that must be made is clear.

https://orinocotribune.com/profit-drive ... -our-doom/

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I despair of these people.. Do they not understand that politics will always come first and the term 'de-growth' is a poison pill to most people on this planet. Without the necessary political groundwork nothing of real consequence can be accomplished. Or are they eco-fascists?

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Needed: Either degrowth or two Earths
Originally published: City Lights on June 14, 2023 by Stan Cox (more by City Lights) | (Posted Jul 17, 2023)

“In Real Time” is a monthly series on our blog by Stan Cox, author of The Path to a Livable Future and The Green New Deal and Beyond. The series follows the climate, voting rights, and justice movements as they navigate America’s unfolding crisis of democracy.

Read previous “In Real Time” dispatches here. Listen to the “In Real Time” podcast for audio editions of all dispatches, and hear monthly conversations with Stan on the Anti-Empire Project podcast (scroll down). Also see the evolving “In Real Time” visual work in the illustrated archive.


In a May 30 essay for the New York Times titled “The New Climate Law Is Working. Clean Energy Investments Are Soaring,” one of the architects of last year’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), Brian Deese, wrote,

Nine months since that law was passed in Congress, the private sector has mobilized well beyond our initial expectations to generate clean energy, build battery factories and develop other technologies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

There’s just one problem. Those technologies aren’t going to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The only way to reduce emissions fast enough to prevent climate catastrophe is to phase out the burning of oil, gas, and coal by law, directly and deliberately. If, against all odds, the United States does that, we certainly will need wind- and solar-power installations, batteries, and new technologies to compensate for the decline of energy from fossil fuels. There is no reason, however, to expect that the process would work in reverse; a “clean-energy” mobilization alone won’t cause a steep reduction in use of fossil fuels.


I think top leaders in Washington are using green-energy pipe dreams to distract us from the reality that they have given up altogether on reducing U.S. fossil fuel use. They’ve caved. This month’s bipartisan deal on the debt limit included a provision that would ease the permitting of energy infrastructure, including oil and gas pipelines like the ecologically destructive Mountain Valley fossil-gas pipeline so dear to the heart of West Virginia’s Democratic senator Joe Manchin. Meanwhile, the Biden administration has issued new rules allowing old coal and fossil gas power plants to continue operating if they capture their carbon dioxide emissions and inject them into old oil wells. And under the IRA, those plants that capture emissions will receive federal climate subsidies, even if they use the carbon dioxide that’s pumped into the old wells to push out residual oil that has evaded conventional methods of extraction. And the IRA did not even end federal subsidies to fossil-fuel companies, which could have saved somewhere between $10 and $50 billion annually. Taken together, these policies could extend the operation of existing coal and gas power plants much further into the future.

GDP Growth? . . . I’m Sorry, That’s Not Available in Green
The 20th century’s fossil-fuel bonanza, with its extension well into this century, has enabled an explosion of economic growth that dwarfs anything humanity had previously achieved. Not coincidentally, it has also empowered our species to cause ecological degradation on an unprecedented scale. Humanity’s industrial and agricultural activities have an impact on the Earth that now exceeds, by a whopping 75 percent, nature’s ability to endure them without lasting damage. In other words, we would need almost two Earths to sustain a world economy this size over the long term—more than two, if it continues growing.

This is an old story, long ignored. But no more. The enormous resource requirements of the “green” energy rush are drawing a lot of public attention to a disturbing phenomenon discussed in last month’s installment of “In Real Time”: the insupportable damage that will be done to humanity and Earth in the quest for the mineral resources needed to build new energy infrastructure.

The unfathomable quantities of ores that will be mined to manufacture batteries required by electric vehicles and vast new power grids, and the damage and suffering that will result, have been the subject of many recent headlines. But if countries keep pushing for new energy systems big enough to fully support 100 percent of the economic activity now made possible by oil, gas, and coal, they will not only fail to stop greenhouse gas emissions but will fail to prevent the violation of other critical planetary boundaries, including biodiversity loss, nitrogen and phosphorus pollution, and soil degradation. We’ve already crossed those red lines, and we’ve kept going. Nothing can grow forever. But the mere attempt to keep the world’s big, rich economies growing into the long future will crush any hopes we may have for that very future.

At the heart of industry’s claim that the world’s economies can expand without limit is the idea of “green growth.” Like the fabled economist’s can opener, the green-growth assumption allows us to believe that the impossible can be made possible. In this case, that means generating greater aggregate wealth year by year while emitting fewer tons of greenhouse gases, extracting fewer tons of resources, and causing less ecosystem destruction, biodiversity loss, and other damage to the Earth and our fellow humans.

Here’s one of the many research papers from recent years finding that economic growth has never been achieved over large geographical areas for extended time periods without having serious environmental impacts. The authors further find that “there are no realistic scenarios” for sustaining a 2 percent annual growth rate without excessive resource extraction and greenhouse-gas emissions, even with a “maximal increase in efficiency of material use.”

To hear a less technical takedown of green growth, one that even politicians can understand, enjoy this presentation by social scientist Timothée Parrique to the European Parliament’s recent “Beyond Growth” conference. Much has been made of the fact that in recent decades, Europe’s GDP has grown steadily without increasing carbon dioxide emissions. This has prompted giddy claims that “decarbonization” of economic growth is finally happening. But producing more wealth with the same quantity of climate-altering emissions is not the same as reducing emissions.

One of Parrique’s slides at the conference showed that over the past 30 years, as wealth accumulated on the Earth’s surface while carbon dioxide accumulated in the atmosphere and oceans, the European Union achieved no significant reductions in the rate of carbon dioxide emissions—except from 2008 to 2014, the Great Recession years. The EU managed to reduce emissions only when their economy didn’t grow!

Societies must decide: do we want a growing GDP or a livable future? We can’t have both.

Let’s assume for the sake of argument that the U.S. makes the right decision and pulls back within ecological limits. For starters, that would require rapidly phasing out fossil fuels and building a modest renewable energy system that would only partially compensate for the diminishing supply of fossil energy. Under those conditions, the economy would shrink, and it would need to keep shrinking until it’s small enough to stop transgressing ecological limits. At that point, we would have achieved, in the late ecological economist Herman Daly’s words, a steady-state economy.

That period of shrinkage would not be a recession. A reversal of growth induced by a deliberate, well-planned reduction in the supply of energy and material resources available to the economy would have effects wholly different from the misery caused by recessions—if we establish policies to guarantee material sufficiency and equity throughout society. That is to say, if we ensure that everyone has enough while preventing excessive production and consumption.

“A Planned, Selective, and Equitable Downscaling”
Last month, The Economist expended 1,400 words belittling the EU’s Beyond Growth conference and treating its attendees as recession-loving misanthropes. Alluding to recent GDP stagnation in some European nations, The Economist asked, “For what is Europe, if not a post-growth continent already?” Parrique took on their rhetorical question with this pithy response:

In reality, degrowth differs fundamentally from a recession. A recession is a reduction in GDP, one that happens accidentally, often with undesirable social outcomes like unemployment, austerity, and poverty. Degrowth, on the other hand, is a planned, selective and equitable downscaling of economic activities. . . . Associating degrowth with a recession just because the two involve a reduction of GDP is absurd; it would be like arguing that an amputation and a diet are the very same thing just because they both lead to weight loss.

This distinction between the reductions in economic activity that happen during recessions and those that would occur in degrowth economies is important. But to gain popular support for degrowth, still more elaboration is going to be required. Those of us who’ve grown up in industrial societies have been taught our whole lives that GDP growth is essential to everyone’s well-being and quality of life. This quasi-religious belief in the goodness of growth persists despite numerous studies published over the past three decades demonstrating that once people’s essential needs have been met, further GDP growth does not increase life satisfaction.

This disconnect between a nation’s overall economic growth and its residents’ quality of life is hardly surprising when we look at the United States, where the bulk of the wealth generated in recent decades has been captured and accumulated by only a tiny minority. As of last year, the wealthiest 1 percent owned one-third of the nation’s total household wealth, while 50 percent of households in the lower half of the wealth scale held only about 3 percent. Many of those households had no net wealth at all, and growth is doing nothing to help them. Of the new wealth that’s been generated since the depths of the Great Recession in 2009, the richest 10 percent have accumulated 75 times as much per household as have those at the bottom 50 percent. (In this graph on the Federal Reserve’s website, you really have to squint to see the bottom 50 percent’s share, in pink.)

To restate the above more succinctly: in an affluent country, money can’t buy you happiness, but having a lot of money does help you acquire even more. And that’s always to the detriment of humanity, ecosystems, and our collective future.

Despite the fact that economic growth has plunged us into an ecological emergency, and even though half the U.S. population does not share meaningfully in the wealth that it produces, almost anyone you ask will express a positive view of economic growth, and most people will recoil at even the mildest suggestion that the time has come for degrowth. To help dispel the ingrained perception that growth is good and degrowth bad, the economic anthropologist Jason Hickel has invoked an apt analogy:

Take the words colonization and decolonization, for example. We know that those who engaged in colonization felt it was a good thing. From their perspective—which was the dominant perspective in Europe for most of the past 500 years—decolonization would therefore seem negative. But the point is precisely to challenge the dominant perspective, because the dominant perspective is wrong. Indeed, today we can agree that this stance—a stance against colonization—is correct and valuable: we stand against colonization and believe that the world would be better without it. That is not a negative vision, but positive; one that’s worth rallying around. Similarly, we can and should aspire to an economy without growth just as we aspire to a world without colonization.

Hickel, Parrique, and other degrowth scholars stress that it is wealthy countries that need to undergo degrowth. What the rich nations are calling “growth,” he writes, is in reality “a process of elite accumulation, the commodification of commons, and the appropriation of human labor and natural resources—a process that is quite often colonial in character.” Those are the aspects of today’s economy that need to degrow, along with wasteful and superfluous production, not the essential goods and services that can ensure a decent life for all.

The obligation to reduce material production and ecological degradation rests with the rich nations, and with rich populations in the rest of the world. Parrique showed another graphic at the conference illustrating how economies with “unsustainable prosperity,” like that of the U.S., must shrink, while economically deprived economies should be guaranteed the means and opportunity to build and transform.

A degrowing society’s goals would not be just reverse images of growth goals. One would not see, for example, a degrowth counterpart to the Federal Reserve aiming for a 2 percent annual decline in GDP. The goal in a degrowing society, presumably, would be a good quality of life for everyone, within ecologically necessary limits. And just as the owning and investing classes saw the biggest increases in wealth and consumption in the age of growth, they would experience steep decreases in the age of degrowth. The economy could instead be dedicated to providing good quality of life for all, which would mean a big improvement for the estimated 140 million poor and low-income people in the U.S.

The most effective strategies for how to accomplish degrowth would doubtless differ from country to country, as would the intensity of political opposition to the very idea of degrowth. Bipartisan elite resistance would be especially strong in the U.S., I expect, but that would be no reason to drop the subject. In fact, it’s a good reason to get even louder.

I remain convinced that a phaseout of fossil fuels is a small but urgently needed first step that could lead to degrowth and eventually a steady-state society that lives within ecological limits. That, along with ecologically necessary restraints on renewable energy development, would trigger what many would see as a national crisis. But we can make it a fruitful crisis, one in which we’re all obliged to find our collective way into a new, equitable, society—based on an inalienable right to a good life and inalienable limits on material production and consumption.

https://mronline.org/2023/07/17/needed- ... wo-earths/

Yes, we might aspire to 'de-growth' but will you impose it upon the underprivileged? If such a thing is to come to be it must be lead and largely practiced by the 'Golden Billion'. Which will never happen without a political revolution.

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Methane gas is flared off during a drilling operation in the Permian Basin oil field on March 12, 2022 in Stanton, Texas. (Photo: Joe Raedle/Getty Images/CommonDreams.org)

Study shows methane leaks put climate risk from gas ‘on par with coal’
Originally published: Common Dreams on July 13, 2023 by Kenny Stancil (more by Common Dreams) | (Posted Jul 15, 2023)

The fossil fuel industry has long argued that fracked gas can serve as a “bridge” to a renewable-powered future, but a new study confirms that uncontrolled leaks make it as dangerous for the climate as coal.

So-called natural gas is derived from hydraulic fracturing (fracking) and composed mostly of methane—a planet-heating gas 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide over its first 20 years in the atmosphere. A methane leakage rate of as little as 0.2% is enough to render gas equivalent to coal in driving global warming, according to a peer-reviewed manuscript accepted last week in Environmental Research Letters.

The paper is set is be published next week. According to its abstract:

Global gas systems that leak over 4.7% of their methane (when considering a 20-year timeframe) or 7.6% (when considering a 100-year timeframe) are on par with lifecycle coal emissions from methane-leaking coal mines.

The net climate impact from coal is also influenced by SO2 [sulfur dioxide] emissions, which react to form sulfate aerosols that mask warming. We run scenarios that combine varying methane leakage rates from coal and gas with low to high SO2 emissions based on coal sulfur content, flue gas scrubber efficiency, and sulfate aerosol global warming potentials.

The methane and SO2 co-emitted with CO2 alter the emissions parity between gas and coal. We estimate that a gas system leakage rate as low as 0.2% is on par with coal, assuming 1.5% sulfur coal that is scrubbed at a 90% efficiency with no coal mine methane when considering climate effects over a 20-year timeframe.


Recent aerial measurement surveys of oil and gas production in the United States show methane leakage rates ranging from “0.65% to 66.2%, with similar leakage rates detected worldwide,” the abstract states.

These numerous super-emitting gas systems being detected globally underscore the need to accelerate methane emissions detection, accounting, and management practices.

Lead author Deborah Gordon, an environmental policy expert at Brown University and the Rocky Mountain Institute, told The New York Timeson Thursday that if fossil gas leaks, even a little,

it’s as bad as coal.

“It can’t be considered a good bridge, or substitute,” Gordon emphasized.

What the world requires is to move away from all fossil fuels as soon as possible, to a 100% renewable energy future.

As the Times noted, the study “adds to a substantial body of research that has poked holes in the idea that natural gas is a suitable transitional fuel to a future powered entirely by renewables, like solar and wind.”

Despite mounting evidence that expanding fossil fuel extraction and combustion is incompatible with averting the worst consequences of the climate emergency, the Inflation Reduction Act passed last year by congressional Democrats “includes credits that would apply to some forms of natural gas,” the Times reported.

“When power companies generate electricity by burning natural gas instead of coal, they emit only about half the amount of planet-warming carbon dioxide,” the newspaper observed.

In the United States, the shift from coal to gas, driven by a boom in oil and gas fracking, has helped reduce carbon emissions from power plants by nearly 40% since 2005.

But that ignores the dangers posed by methane, the primary component of fossil gas. Emissions and atmospheric concentrations of methane continued to climb in 2022, thanks in large part to massive leaks from fossil fuel infrastructure. A study published in October found that pipelines transporting fracked gas in the Permian Basin oil field of the U.S. Southwest are leaking at least 14 times more methane than previously thought.


Another recent study found that more than 1,000 “super-emitter” incidents—human-caused methane leaks of at least one tonne per hour—were detected worldwide last year, mostly at oil and gas facilities, including in Louisiana and Pennsylvania. In addition, it identified 112 global “methane bombs,” which are defined as fossil fuel extraction sites where gas leaks alone from future production would release what amounts to 30 years of U.S. greenhouse gas pollution.

Methane is responsible for an estimated 30% of global temperature rise today, and scientists have made clear that policymakers must prioritize cutting this short-lived heat-trapping gas to avoid climate chaos. Even a temporary breach of the 1.5°C threshold—something experts warn has a 50% chance of happening by 2026—could trigger irreversible harm from multiple tipping points.

Robert Howarth, an earth systems scientist at Cornell University who sounded the alarm about methane leaks more than a decade ago, praised the forthcoming study.

“Their conclusion is to once again point out that natural gas may not be any better at all for the climate than is coal, particularly when viewed through the lens of warming over the next 20 years or so, which of course is a critical time” for meeting climate targets, he told the Times.

“I do hope the policy world and the political leaders of the world pay attention to this, as I fear too many remain too fixated at simply reducing coal use, even if it results in more gas consumption,” Howarth added.

What the world requires is to move away from all fossil fuels as soon as possible, to a 100% renewable energy future.

https://mronline.org/2023/07/15/study-s ... with-coal/

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Xi's statements on ecological conservation
chinadaily.com.cn | Updated: 2023-07-18 08:30

President Xi Jinping has on many occasions emphasized the concept that "lucid waters and lush mountains are invaluable assets". Here are some of his remarks on the concept.

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http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202307/1 ... e87_1.html

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COOPERATION IN THE FACE OF THE GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CRISIS
THE AMAZON: BETWEEN SOVEREIGNTY AND INTERNATIONALIZATION
eder pena

Jul 17, 2023 , 9:36 a.m.

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Global capitalism is concerned with the degradation of the Amazon on the one hand and on the other is designed to degrade the region (Photo: Getty images)

Until last Friday, July 7, more than 4,000 people had been evacuated by military authorities fighting against illegal mining in the Venezuelan Amazon. This was reported via Twitter by the operational strategic commander of the Bolivarian National Armed Forces (FANB), General Domingo Hernández Lárez.

As part of the Autana Operation that has been carried out recently in the border area with Brazil and Colombia, particularly in the Yapacana National Park in the Venezuelan Amazonas state, a humanitarian channel was established for voluntary evacuation that adds "to the duty and constitutional right of environmental protection," said the senior military official.


" CLEAR THE AMAZON OF ILLEGAL MINING"
The following Monday in the "Con Maduro+" program, President Nicolás Maduro instructed the FANB to continue the fight against this activity that causes serious social and ecological damage in the area. He stated that:

"The first thing to do is cleanse the Amazon of illegal mining, prohibit deforestation, (...) go for soil regeneration, total reforestation, supported by the divine, spiritual and ancestral power of the indigenous peoples who live in the Amazon."

The president confirmed that he receives daily reports from the FANB Strategic Operational Command (Ceofanb) to follow the progress of the protection of the Amazon in Venezuela and explained that illegal miners in the country, Colombia and Brazil have caused serious damage to national parks .

He pointed out that the humanitarian evacuation has been carried out in two weeks by means of an air and river bridge, and that Operation Autana includes personalized attention to the miners who voluntarily abandon the illegal deposits, medical check-ups, relocation to other states of the country and a registry, which which involves complex but effective logistics.

Maduro expressed his full support for the revitalization of a specific agenda to preserve the Amazon, which respects the sovereignty of the States of the region and the rights of the indigenous communities, for which the Venezuelan State will support the development of the plans that are designed together in the Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization (OTCA), which unites all Amazonian nations, including Venezuela.

LOOKING TOWARDS AMAZON COOPERATION
A key in the President's statement was that the protection of the Amazon will also depend on the unity of "all South American institutions." His words are given in the framework of the preparation of the ACTO summit that will take place next August in the Brazilian city of Belén do Pará.

This body, created in 1995 under the parameters of the Amazon Cooperation Treaty (1978), has not met since 2009. Since then there has been no activity by the entity and, therefore, no joint actions by the eight member countries. Its relaunch arises from the initiative of the president of Brazil, Luiz Inácio Lula Da Silva, and his meetings with different presidents of South America, including Maduro.

The preparatory meeting held in the city of Leticia, capital of the Colombian department of Amazonas, was attended by the presidents of Colombia and Brazil, Gustavo Petro and Lula, who discussed the regional coordination of countries with Amazon territory to preserve the largest tropical forest of the world.

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Lula and Petro lead the regional coordination of the Amazon countries to preserve the largest tropical forest in the world (Photo: Twitter)

A Venezuelan delegation headed by the Minister of Ecosocialism, Josué Lorca, along with their counterparts from Colombia, Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador, Guyana, Peru and Suriname also attended. The head of the Venezuelan environmental authority pointed out in the presidential program that the Amazonian countries have developed an agenda for the "revitalization" of ACTO.

In Leticia, they sought to generate inputs, create strategic conservation actions, establish joint works and languages ​​to strengthen the cooperation treaty that has been created for 40 years and analyze the issue of sustained financing that allows the forest to become a climatic pillar for the humanity.

In this regard, Lula da Silva assured that:

" Talking about the Amazon is talking about superlatives: it is the largest tropical forest in the world, home to 10% of all animal and plant species on the planet; it has 50 million inhabitants with 400 indigenous peoples who speak 300 languages, has the largest freshwater reserves on the planet, including a true subterranean ocean".

SOVEREIGNTY OR INTERNATIONALIZATION?

Last November Petro was visited by the head of the United States Southern Command, General Laura J. Richardson, with whom he discussed anti-drug policy as a matter of primary progress for both countries.

In addition, the Colombian president proposed creating a military force that would focus on the "protection" of the Amazon rainforest. The objective of said force with military scope would be to address the fires that are increasingly frequent in the area and that, according to Petro, represent a security problem that involves all of humanity. The president of Colombia, a country that is a global partner of NATO, said:

" I proposed to the general the construction of a force, which she already told me had a plan in Brazil, a military force with helicopters, etc., but destined to put out the fires in the Amazon jungle, which is the main security problem of humanity today".

On the other hand, during his visit to Washington last February, Lula said that he believes that the United States will help protect the Amazon, although he did not specify how: "We are not talking specifically about the Amazon Fund," he added.

In recent decades, a debate has been installed regarding the claim to internationalize the Amazon by the so-called "international community." The argument, which at first sight seems laudable, is that the region is considered essential for the preservation of the quality of life on the planet because its high forest mass would allow the purification of excess greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide ( CO 2 ), would contribute enormous amounts of oxygen to the atmosphere and would regulate the cycles and climatic patterns of the planet.

In addition, the largest basin in the world, which represents 20% of the Earth's fresh water, has large mineral deposits such as iron, copper, manganese, cassiterite, bauxite, nickel, kaolin, titanium, vanadium, gold, diamonds, gypsum, limestone, rock salt.

Also a wide biocultural diversity expressed in its more than 400 indigenous peoples and a significant number of biological species on the planet in 7 million square kilometers of forests and savannahs. There is a consensus that these characteristics provide "wealth" to the region, but also "salvation" to humanity, and therein lies the bipolarity of our imaginary.

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It is said that the Amazon possesses "wealth" and that it also means "salvation" to humanity (Photo: AFP)

The discussion about its status as "international heritage" was revived in 2019 when French President Emmanuel Macron declared that the idea of ​​conferring international status "is a real question that would be imposed if a sovereign State took concrete measures that clearly oppose the interest of the planet".

The European president added that installing this quality "is a path that will remain open in the coming months and years," since the challenge of climate change affects everyone and no one can say: "This is just my problem."

These expressions were rejected by then Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, who demanded that Macron retract as a condition for accepting $22 million in aid from the G7 to Brazil to fight the fires in the Amazon.

Some background :

*The captain of the United States Navy, Mathew Fawry, suggested in 1817 that the United States take the initiative to stimulate the creation of the "Sovereign State of the Amazon."
*The Bolivian Syndicate of New York consortium, whose director was the nephew of then US President Theodore Roosevelt, determined in 1902 that it would have sovereignty over part of the territory that was in dispute between Brazil and Bolivia, which was stopped by local elites and ultimately annexed the province of Acre to Brazil (Treaty of Petrópolis, November 17, 1903).
*In 1989 Al Gore, then Vice President of the United States, stated before the Senate of his country that "contrary to what Brazilians think, the Amazon does not belong to them but to all of us."
*That same year François Mitterrand, then president of France, created the doctrines of "relative sovereignty" and the "right of interference", with which he pointed out that "Brazil needs to accept relative sovereignty over the Amazon."

This notion that the region "belongs to the world" is not new, the incursions after its natural assets date back to the European colonial invasion that began in 1492. What does seem new is the position of both left-wing presidents and the strange detail that makes Bolsonaro look more nationalist than Lula.

WHO PROTECTS WHAT?
The response of the former Governor of the Federal District and former Minister of Education of Brazil, Cristovam Buarque, to the question about what he thought of the internationalization of the Amazon, in the year 2000, became famous on the web. His presentation focused on what it is " important for humanity" such as the Amazon.

The politician referred to the fact that oil reserves, the financial capital of rich countries, museums such as the Louvre, the nuclear arsenals of the United States or the Manhattan area, the town where the main headquarters of the Organization of United Nations (UN) because they are also important for humanity.

Initiatives to intervene in countries to ensure that nature is "well managed" arise from the colonialist logic that infantilizes the countries of the Global South. This colonialist logic arises from countries like France, the United Kingdom or the United States, which are the same ones that refuse to reduce capitalist accumulation, the real cause of global greenhouse gas emissions and deforestation (also called "change of land use"). land"), which has reached 17% of the Amazon.

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The Amazon already emits more CO2 than it absorbs due to a combination of deforestation, climate change and fires (Photo: BBC)

The global environmental crisis has internationalized the effects of a civilizing model that, on the one hand, is concerned with the degradation of the Amazon and, on the other, is designed to degrade the region. A study published by the journal Nature in 2021 revealed that the region already emits more CO 2 than it absorbs due to a positive feedback between deforestation, climate change and fires.

Due to the "butterfly effect", the Amazon supports much of the global food system by regulating rainfall patterns around the world. Scientific models published by the Journal of Climate show how its continued deforestation could significantly reduce rainfall, which is vital for food production in the United States and Brazil itself, which today generates 66% of the world's soybeans, 42% of corn and 30% of your poultry, for example.

DISPUTES, NEGOTIATIONS AND DECISIONS
It is clear that the Amazon region is of interest to the United States, but it is even more so for Brazil, whose military doctrine assumes that:

" National Defense, in addition to being an important vector for the preservation of National Sovereignty, also allows the maintenance of territorial integrity, the achievement of national objectives, the protection of the people and the guarantee of external non-interference in the national territory. and its jurisdictional waters, including the overlying airspace, the river beds and the sea, the river bed and the marine subsoil".

Geopolitically, Brazil, which is part of the G20 at the same time as the BRICS, maintains its strategic depth in non-interference. However, it is understood that, in the face of the global crisis in process, there is a risk of a militarization of environmentalism , namely: using the excuse of the crisis to intervene and advance in the takeover of territories in which capitalism already decides. globalized through its corporations.

It should be noted that in the Macron-Bolsonaro episode, he did not appeal to a sovereign nationalism but rather defended the "right" to plunder by the landed oligarchy that brought him to power. On the other hand, an intervention such as the one proposed by Macron or eventual support from Biden would not be based on mere environmental concern, but on tackling disturbances that could alter the existing but declining world order.

Lula aspires to global leadership within the climate agenda, while Petro does the same regarding his "debt-for-nature" initiatives, his efforts look to "green" agendas in which global elites refuse to cede their benefits economic and geostrategic. In this sense, there is a risk of a foreignization of the cause of the protection of the Amazon that translates into a reinvigoration of Western influence on the continent.

In addition, these green transition agendas have as a material strategic base the same minerals that are under the jungles they claim to defend.

Latin America is shaping up to be the arena of battle between declining and emerging powers. Venezuela requires a vision, sovereign and at the same time regional that supports mechanisms such as the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) and ACTO itself that balance the power of the initiatives of Western countries, with a regional bloc that has bargaining power and decision of the countries of the Amazon basin in favor of sovereignty.

https://misionverdad.com/globalistan/la ... nalizacion

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Re: The Long Ecological Revolution

Post by blindpig » Thu Jul 20, 2023 3:06 pm

THE COUNTRIES THAT HAVE EMITTED THE MOST CARBON DIOXIDE (1850-2021)
Jul 19, 2023 , 10:33 a.m.

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The United States has emitted more carbon dioxide than any other country in almost two centuries (Photo: Getty Images)

It has been shown that the cumulative amount of carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) emitted since the start of the industrial revolution in Europe is closely related to the global warming that the planet is experiencing today.

Capitalist industry has released some 2.5 trillion tons of CO 2 (GtCO 2 ) into the atmosphere since 1850, according to a Carbon Brief study published in 2021 .

The environmental organization examined national responsibility for historical CO 2 emissions between 1850 and 2021.

The United States is first in the ranking with more than 509 GtCO 2 since 1850, and is responsible for most of the historical emissions, according to the Carbon Brief analysis, with around 20% of the world total.

China is in second place with 11%, followed by Russia (7%), Brazil (5%) and Indonesia (4%).

Germany and the United Kingdom represent respectively 4% and 3% of the world total, not including overseas effluvia under colonial rule.

But if you look at the numbers in relation to population (per capita), China and India drop down the rankings. Carbon Brief takes a country's cumulative emissions in each year and divides it by the number of people living in that space at the time, implicitly assigning responsibility for the past to those living today.

The table shows the top 20 countries according to this criteria, up to 2021. The top 5 is made up of Canada, the United States, Estonia, Australia, and Trinidad and Tobago.

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https://misionverdad.com/los-paises-que ... -1850-2021

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By embracing degrowth, America’s “left” has discarded the lessons from existing socialism

BY RAINER SHEA
JULY 18, 2023

“With the great support of the Soviet Union, and our own greatest strength, we will realize the industrialization of our nation step by step!”—Chinese poster from 1953

To find how a people who’ve been economically dispossessed by international capital can defeat it, and eliminate the poverty that it’s created within their society, look to what the People’s Republic of China and its surrounding socialist countries have done: implement a program of industrial growth. Even the DPRK, which unlike China hasn’t undergone free market reforms and is the furthest along towards making the bourgeoisie nonexistent, has had to make industrialization a part of its development.

This has been only logical when China, the DPRK, Vietnam, and Laos all came out of eras in which their economies had been “degrown” by imperialist powers; whether with the brutal occupations and opium-facilitated destruction the imperialists subjected China to, or the bombings the imperialists subjected these other countries to with the aim of continuing to similarly subjugate them. Industry was indispensable for them to be able to rebuild and to thrive; Pol Pot’s non-Marxist peasant revolt in Cambodia, with its reactionary “socialism” where historical development got set backward, proved there wasn’t a sustainable alternative to this path which Asia’s socialist republics have taken.

The conditions of the modern United States are obviously different from those of these countries right after they started on their recovery from imperialism; yet they have something big in common, that being a situation where the population has been profoundly damaged by the effects of international capital. We can’t ignore this harm when it comes to the USA’s people; to do so is to reinforce the absurd assertions from the anti-Marxist “third worldists” about how the majority of Americans supposedly belong to the aristocracy of labor. To justify their anti-Marxist stance, these third worldists point to how the USA’s workers overwhelmingly lack the role of producers. This portrays the situation of these workers out of context; they’re not lacking in productive jobs because of how high they rank within the socioeconomic hierarchy, but because of how low they rank within this hierarchy.

The U.S. communities that have seen their industrial bases relocated haven’t had their workers simply move to the metropolitan areas and find high-paying jobs; to suggest this, as the third worldists appear to be suggesting, is to deny both the reality that these communities are now poor, and the reality that poverty makes it much more difficult for people to leave where they live. What’s happened to these communities is a slow-motion economic collapse, furthered by the great economic shocks of the 21st century such as the 2008 crisis and the pandemic’s mismanagement.

Within this paradigm of collapse, many have taken jobs that don’t make them able to regularly pay for rent, food, bills, or transportation without going further into debt; many others have simply become homeless, with there even being overlap between those who can’t get housing and those who have jobs. These are the effects that letting our economy be defined by the preferences of international capital have had: pushing a large fraction of the population out of the functioning part of the economy, with the inflation exacerbated by Biden’s Ukraine proxy war recently having grown this fraction even more.

How can we eliminate this poverty that capital has made so prevalent within our society? Not by doing what the reactionary socialists want, and degrowing the economy; instead, by implementing a program of green re-industrialization, where the developmental outcomes required for abolishing poverty get reached at the same time that we bring down emissions.

When I say the “reactionary socialists,” I’m referring to a particular element within a broader category of the American “left;” one that’s fundamentally unserious about doing what’s necessary for a successful socialist revolution. What we now call the “left” in America is based not in actual class struggle, but in a series of critical theories that the three-letter agencies have propagated across academia through agents like Herbert Marcuse. Theories that don’t compliment Marxism, but act as a substitute for Marxism. Henry Winston described how this co-optation has gone along with the rise of the Maoist strain of ultra-left thought:

It was especially under the influence of Marcuse and Maoism that the New Left radicals began to be attracted to one or another pseudo-revolutionary theory, including the concept of an “’internal colony” of Black people in the U.S. While Marcuse’s ideas are not identical with “the thought of Mao,” the views of both stimulated anti-Marxist misconceptions of the world revolutionary process, the historic role of the working class and its relationship to the liberation struggles of oppressed people, and the imperative need for strategies based on the specific features and historic development of each country, each working class and each national liberation movement.

Essentially all of today’s U.S. “left” is informed by these supposedly subversive theories. They’re what’s so far kept a serious communist movement from re-emerging since McCarthyism, and since the subsequent destruction of the Panthers; because the predominant mentality within modern “radical” spaces is not oriented around what we can do to win against the state, but around how to appeal to the others within the “left” niche. Our tasks of fighting the information war against NATO, building a united anti-imperialist front, and uniting the workers around their common interests are viewed with apathy; instead, says the New Left, focusing on identity is most important.

What makes this mentality so easy to become assimilated into is that the struggles of Native, Black, LGBT, and other especially oppressed peoples are indeed crucial; Parenti recognized this. What Parenti also said in the the same essay is that an “anything but class” left exists, one which lets identity hinder the revolutionary cause by refusing to come to a synthesis between identity and class.

It’s this way of thinking, defined by a phobia of focusing on class too much for fear of being “class reductionist,” that’s conducive to reactionary socialism as we primarily see it today. That being the type of “socialism” which developing radicals come to embrace when their notion of what things should look like after the revolution is informed by uncritical acceptance of degrowth.

To be a degrowther, you have to lack a serious class analysis. Even though degrowth, this vague, broad call to shrink the economy, has been accepted and promoted by the most powerful elements of global capital, these radical liberals see nothing suspicious about it; they appear to assume that even though degrowth is an idea shared everywhere from Davos to the our media outlets, it can still be implemented in a socialist form. The truth is that whatever ways we’ll need to shrink the economy to save the planet, these reductions won’t be as big as the expansions which will also be necessary; necessary for lifting the people out of poverty. For building nuclear plants to replace fossil fuels; for building high-speed rails to replace cars; for building localized means of making our society more independent in its consumption of food, and of everyday goods.

To frame our needs via the “degrowth” label is to do nothing besides reinforce the control of the Democratic Party over radical spaces, thereby making revolution less possible and ensuring that the climate austerity plans of the capitalists get realized. There’s a reason why EU vs. Disinfo, the site dedicated to “debunking” supposedly false accusations made against the NATO countries, has felt it worthwhile to respond to the statements pointing out how austerity is at the core of capitalism’s “solution” to the climate crisis:

“Malthusianism” is a concept that stems from 18-century British priest Thomas Robert Malthus. Malthus described how a growth in the production of food led to a population growth. This growth would eventually lead to a shortage of food. Malthus feared that improvement of living conditions would increase the population and provoke famine. Hence, population must be kept low. Helping the poor meant, according to Malthus, only creating more poverty as more people survive and need to share the limited resources. If poor people die off, the rest of us can remain well fed…Some pro-Kremlin disinformation outlets suggest that this idea – “let the poor die” – is a master plan of shadowy rulers.The Straw Man is a formidable instrument for dishonest argumentation, similar to the loaded question: “Have you stopped beating your spouse?” The coronavirus pandemic is allowing the pro-Kremlin disinformation outlets to master their talents in constructing Straw Men…neither Bill Gates, nor the Brits, Greta Thunberg, or Barack Obama has ever suggested mass murder. These claims are classical “Straw Men” arguments. “Attack your opponent with claims never made!”

You only need a basic understanding of how capitalism treats the lower classes during times of crisis; of the history of the rich sacrificing the poor to preserve the existing economic order; to see that these pro-hegemonic figures (who include Thunberg) are in effect calling to sacrifice the poor when they vilify growth. Growth is not an intrinsically bad thing, it’s a tool that can be used for ill or for good depending on which class is utilizing it. To blankedly reject it is to in practice advance the eco-fascist designs of the ruling class.

Imperialism-compatible leftists take the degrowth stance for the same reason they either oppose existing socialism; or at the least oppose multipolarity, and actions that advance multipolarity such as Russia’s special operation. They take these stances because their goal is not to win, it’s to build a movement for its own sake. The “Marxists” who’ve broken from the struggle for multipolarity have handicapped their ability to gain power; a “socialist” movement that prioritizes tailing the Democratic Party over being principled on anti-imperialism is destined to remain inert. And if they were to gain power, the reactionary socialists among them who’ve aggressively embraced degrowth will sabotage the socialist project like Pol Pot did. We need to take example from the existing socialist countries, and back pro-multipolar actions while recognizing the value of industry.

https://newswiththeory.com/by-embracing ... socialism/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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