The Long Ecological Revolution

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Re: The Long Ecological Revolution

Post by blindpig » Sun May 02, 2021 2:03 pm

Worldwide glacier retreat speeds up
April 30, 2021
Glacier thinning rates have doubled over the past two decades

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The most comprehensive and accurate analysis to date shows that almost all the world’s glaciers are becoming thinner and losing mass and that these changes are picking up pace.

Glaciers are a sensitive indicator of climate change – and one that can be easily observed. Regardless of altitude or latitude, glaciers have been melting at a high rate since the mid-​20th century. Until now, however, the full extent of ice loss has only been partially measured and understood. A paper published in Nature this week provides the first comprehensive study of global glacier retreat.

It includes all the world’s glaciers — about 220,000 in total — except for the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets.

Rising sea levels and water scarcity

What was once permanent ice has declined in volume almost everywhere around the globe. Between 2000 and 2019, the world’s glaciers lost a total of 267 billion tonnes of ice per year on average — an amount that could have submerged the entire surface area of Switzerland under six meters of water every year. The loss of glacial mass also accelerated sharply during this period. Between 2000 and 2004, glaciers lost 227 billion tonnes of ice per year, but between 2015 and 2019, the lost mass amounted to 298 billion tonnes annually.

Glacial melt caused up to 21 percent of the observed rise in sea levels during this period – some 0.74 millimeters a year. Nearly half of the rise in sea levels is attributable to the thermal expansion of water as it heats up, with meltwaters from the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets and changes in terrestrial water storage accounting for the remaining third.

Among the fastest melting glaciers are those in Alaska, Iceland and the Alps. The situation is also having a profound effect on mountain glaciers in the Pamir mountains, the Hindu Kush and the Himalayas.

“The situation in the Himalayas is particularly worrying,” explains lead author Romain Hugonnet. “During the dry season, glacial meltwater is an important source that feeds major waterways such as the Ganges, Brahmaputra and Indus rivers. Right now, this increased melting acts as a buffer for people living in the region, but if Himalayan glacier shrinkage keeps accelerating, populous countries like India and Bangladesh could face water or food shortages in a few decades.”

(Adapted from materials provided by ETH Zurich)
Abstract of Romain Hugonnet al., “Accelerated global glacier mass loss in the early twenty-first century,” Nature 592, April 28, 2021
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03436-z

Glaciers distinct from the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets are shrinking rapidly, altering regional hydrology, raising global sea level and elevating natural hazards. Yet, owing to the scarcity of constrained mass loss observations, glacier evolution during the satellite era is known only partially, as a geographic and temporal patchwork.

Here we reveal the accelerated, albeit contrasting, patterns of glacier mass loss during the early twenty-first century. Using largely untapped satellite archives, we chart surface elevation changes at a high spatiotemporal resolution over all of Earth’s glaciers. We extensively validate our estimates against independent, high-precision measurements and present a globally complete and consistent estimate of glacier mass change.

We show that during 2000–2019, glaciers lost a mass of 267±16 gigatonnes per year, equivalent to 21±3 per cent of the observed sea-level rise6. We identify a mass loss acceleration of 48±16 gigatonnes per year per decade, explaining 6 to 19 per cent of the observed acceleration of sea-level rise.

Particularly, thinning rates of glaciers outside ice sheet peripheries doubled over the past two decades.

Glaciers currently lose more mass, and at similar or larger acceleration rates, than the Greenland or Antarctic ice sheets taken separately. By uncovering the patterns of mass change in many regions, we find contrasting glacier fluctuations that agree with the decadal variability in precipitation and temperature. These include a North Atlantic anomaly of decelerated mass loss, a strongly accelerated loss from northwestern American glaciers, and the apparent end of the Karakoram anomaly of mass gain.

We anticipate our highly resolved estimates to advance the understanding of drivers that govern the distribution of glacier change, and to extend our capabilities of predicting these changes at all scales. Predictions robustly benchmarked against observations are critically needed to design adaptive policies for the local- and regional-scale management of water resources and cryospheric risks, as well as for the global-scale mitigation of sea-level rise.
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Re: The Long Ecological Revolution

Post by Allen17 » Sun May 02, 2021 7:08 pm

Waiting for Capital to commodify the melting polar ice caps...perhaps it'll be "climate change chic."

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Re: The Long Ecological Revolution

Post by blindpig » Wed May 12, 2021 2:28 pm

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Strip mined land being recontoured by coal companies, Morristown, Ohio, 1974. Photo: Erik Calonius. via Wikimedia Commons.

In defence of Metabolic Rift Theory
Posted May 12, 2021 by Andreas Malm

Originally published: Verso Books (March 16, 2018) |
Excerpted from The Progress of This Storm: Nature and Society in a Warming World

Since the turn of the millennium, one Marxist line of inquiry into environmental problems has outshone all others in creativity and productivity: the theory of the metabolic rift. Developed by John Bellamy Foster and his colleagues Richard York and Brett Clark, with crucial contributions from Paul Burkett and Marina Fischer-Kowalski and many others, it can be summed up in the following, highly condensed sequence. Nature consists of biophysical processes and cycles. So does society: human bodies must engage in metabolic exchanges with nonhuman nature. That need not be particularly harmful to any of the parties. Over the course of history, however, the relations through which humans have organized their Stoffwechsel might be fractured and forcibly rearranged, so that they not only harm the people disadvantaged by this change, but also, at the very same time, disturb the processes and cycles of nature. A metabolic rift has opened up.

Distilled through Foster’s pioneering exegesis, the theory makes inventive use of Marx’s comments in the third volume of Capital on how capitalist property relations “provoke an irreparable rift in the interdependent process of social metabolism, a metabolism prescribed by the natural laws of life itself”; operationalised in a variety of ways, it has elucidated everything from the imbalances in the global nitrogen cycle to climate change.1 It is a method for tracking disruptive combinations of the natural and the social. In a recent tour de force of metabolic rift analysis, The Tragedy of the Commodity: Oceans, Fisheries, and Aquaculture, Stefano B. Longo, Rebecca Clausen, and Brett Clark start from the self-evident yet so often lost premise that “ecological concerns are not problems derived internally, originating from ecosystems themselves, but are produced externally, by social drivers. For example, the oceans are not polluting themselves; humans are doing it.” That tragedy is possible, however, only because “human society exists within the earthly metabolism.”2 In the case of fishing–a primordial form of Stoffwechsel—a dramatic shift occurred in the middle of the nineteenth century, when companies armed with steamboats could catch hauls at new orders of magnitude; since then, but particularly since the post-war period, global fish stocks have come under lethal pressure. Rifts in the reproductive cycles of fish have opened up everywhere, from the bluefin tuna of the Mediterranean to the salmon of the Pacific Northwest–a result of how the elements of company and commodity mix with water. If this sounds like a theory and a method that abide by all the precepts suggested above, it is because any twenty-first-century ecological Marxism necessarily stands on their shoulders.

Of late, however, the metabolic rift school has come under sustained fire from Jason W. Moore. In a series of essays culminating in Capitalism and the Web of Life, he seeks to demonstrate that Foster and colleagues repeat the original sin of Cartesian dualism. The proof of their guilt lies, first of all, in their choice of conjunctions: they speak of nature and society, of interaction between the spheres, of capital as having an ecological regime. Moore wants the “and” replaced with an “in.” It should be labour-in-nature, capital-in-nature, and so on–never and, the false bridge that betrays a worldview of nature/society as two hemispheres divided by a chasm. Likewise, one must not talk of metabolism between any two things, but always have to say through — and most essential of all: capitalism does not have an ecological regime, it is an ecological regime. By developing these series of conjunction swaps, in effusions of supposedly non-Cartesian language games of hyphenation and formulae, Moore proposes his “world-ecology” as a superior dialectical framework, to great acclaim from parts of the academic radical ecology community.3

What the analytical advantages consist of, beyond a new terminology, is initially unclear. So, for instance, Moore faults Foster and colleagues for using the word “interaction” to describe the relation between nature and society, since this wrongly presupposes that the two can be separated to begin with–for two things to interact, they must first be apart–and proposes that we should instead ask how the two “fit together.”4 But exactly the same critique can of course be levelled against that choice of words. For two pieces to fit together, they must first be two different pieces. Moore himself seems forced to employ the foul conjunction in phrases such as “human and extra-human nature,” “the soil and the worker,” perhaps because a language of permanent in-hyphenation would be unreadable.5 It certainly would not solve any real conceptual problems.

Why all this phraseology? It seems, at a closer look, that Moore has fundamentally misunderstood the requirements for transcending the Cartesian legacy. In a sentence of the kind repeated ad nauseam in Capitalism, he declares: “In place of a Cartesian optic–the ‘exploitation of labor and nature’ [words from Foster et al.]–I would begin with two forms of labor-in-nature.”6 But there is nothing Cartesian about saying “labour and nature.” Foster et al. would be Cartesian if they thought that labour and nature consisted of different substances or inhabited separate spheres, so that the one could be analysed without reference to the other–a very common perception in the history of capitalist modernity but precisely the opposite of what the metabolic rift school teaches. As Foster himself retorts, “there is no contradiction in seeing society as both separate from and irreducible to the Earth system as a whole, and simultaneously as a fundamental part of it. To call that approach ‘dualist'” — in the Cartesian sense–”is comparable to denying that your heart is both an integral part of your body and a distinct organ with unique features and functions.”7 What Moore does here is simply to succumb to the temptation of substance and property monism.

Beneath the arid semantic quibble, then, there is substantial disagreement on whether nature and society should at all be distinguished from one another. It is here that one finds the core of Moore’s theoretical project: an unbridled hybridism in Marxist garb. He has taken on the task of importing “the philosophical victory” of such thinkers as Neil Smith and Bruno Latour into the theory of capitalist development, setting out from a postulate that should by now be familiar: “The old language–Nature/Society–has become obsolete. Reality has overwhelmed the binary’s capacity to help us track the real changes unfolding, accelerating, amplifying before our eyes.”8 The aim of “world-ecology” is to act as a solvent on all related distinctions. “Put in these terms, the apparent solidity of town and country, bourgeois and proletarian, and above all Society and Nature, begins to melt.”9 Moore has found a way to abolish even the opposition between the classes–in language.

Several versions of hybridism are here banded together: much influenced by the production of nature theory, Moore opposes references to “a nature that operates independently of humanity,” and to external limits, and to biophysical flows as having “ontological priority” over social relations, leading him right back into the blind alley: “We can dispense with the notion that something like climate change can be analyzed in its quasi-independent social and natural dimensions.” If so, we can dispense with the notion of analysing it at all. Skidding in the other direction, Moore adopts the terminology of the material turn, defines agency as a “relational property of specific bundles of human and extra-human nature,” dresses up water and oil as “real historical actors,” attributes agency to climate as such, says that capitalism is “‘co-produced by manifold species” and, logically, contends that coal formations were “subjects of historical change” in England. They were not, of course, in any meaningful sense of the word, subjects in what happened in England or anywhere else, and the picture does not become a speck clearer by labelling coal an “actant” possessing “agency.” The singular achievement of Moore turns out to be a double collapse, such as in the following précis of his view: “Capitalism makes nature. Nature makes capitalism.”10 Neither of those propositions is true. Capitalism emphatically does not make nature; nature most definitely does not make capitalism. It is the utter disharmony between the two that needs to be accounted for, and it is that which the theory of the metabolic rift has so consistently foregrounded.

The double collapse partly flows from a view of dialectics as a method not so much for articulating antagonism as for achieving holism. It would be edifying here to keep in mind the admonition of Levins and Lewontin: “There is a one-sidedness in the holism that stresses the connectedness of the world but ignores the relative autonomy of parts.”11 Among the effects of that one-sidedness is that the parts disappear from view. Moore casts doubt on the belief “that such a thing as ‘society’ exists” and suggests that “entropy is reversible and cyclical,” when entropy is defined by the second law of thermodynamics precisely as never being that.12 With no laws of society and no laws of nature–what is there left to study?

On the other hand, there are, symptomatically, passages where Moore seems to accept the need for a binary of the social and the natural. When it comes down to saying something concrete about what capitalism actually does to (or in) the web of life, the explanatory model of historical materialism slips through cracks in the jargon. Now Moore argues that certain societies in the long sixteenth century developed the law of value as a new set of relations between people, which induced a complete shift in how these people related to non-human nature: for the first time in human history, “the law gives priority to labor productivity, and mobilizes uncapitalized natures without regard for their reproduction.” Further, “a civilization premised on money and labor-time called forth a very different kind of time,” based on which capital sought to remake material reality “in its own image, and according to its own rhythms”: again, an impulse at changing nature emanating from property relations. Moore is then able to identify a clash “between the finite character of the biosphere and the infinite character of capital’s demands.” Or: “Nature is finite. Capital is premised on the infinite” — hence ecological crisis.13 And there we have the whole package again: a duality, a separation and conjunction, an attribution of inherent and antithetical properties, an intelligible argument about why capital must go berserk in nature.

Hybridism resists any juxtaposition between relations and laws of motion internal to capitalist society, on the one hand, and relations and laws of motion internal to nature on the other. But when Marxists write about the environment, they are pulled to the magnetic opposition between those poles. Take for instance the greatest classic of Marxist ecological feminism, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution(which, contrary to appearances, contains no end-of-nature thesis). In this groundbreaking study from 1980, Carolyn Merchant traces the historical shift from a conception of nature as a mother to be revered and respected, an organic living being, sometimes benevolent and sometimes wrathful, to one of nature as a dead, inert object to be manipulated and controlled with maximum efficiency. The shift pivoted on a transition in social property relations in Europe, England in particular: starting in the fourteenth century, the English ruling class moved towards capitalist arrangements in agriculture, drained the fens, enclosed the fields, cut down the forests, removed the taboos on mining and pitted the peasant as worker against the landlord as capitalist.14 Some priceless things were broken in the process.

The Death of Nature departs from the postulate that “natural and cultural subsystems” develop “in dynamic interaction.” Moore would presumably disapprove of this wording, but it allows Merchant to identify a contradiction appearing at a specific moment in time: “Particularly important is the question of how environmental quality was affected by the transition from peasant control of natural resources for the purpose of subsistence to capitalist control for the purpose of profit.” The latter type of property relations fathered a force that conflicted with environmental quality. “Built into the emerging capitalist market economy was an inexorably accelerating force of expansion and accumulation, achieved, over the long term, at the expense of the environment” — in the fens, for instance, the hitherto abundant wildlife collapsed as the pumps and windmills took over. It was this epochal transition that called forth the abandonment of the old conception of nature, which suited the novel relations and their inbuilt expansionary force poorly; instead, more and more people came to regard nature as a depot of resources to be owned and mastered. Since nature remained widely associated with women, this–the most well-known aspect of Merchant’s argument–translated into more aggressive subordination of the female body under the brute mechanisms of male power. At the end of her book, she turns to the environmental woes of the present and offers a strategic suggestion that has since become the stock of the trade of ecological Marxism: we need “a revolution in economic priorities.”15

Or, to take but one other example: in an excellent, long overdue Marxist intervention into the debate over the biodiversity crisis, Extinction: A Radical History, Ashley Dawson observes that “capital must expand at an ever-increasing rate or go into crisis.” As it does so, “it commodifies more and more of the planet, stripping the world of its diversity and fecundity,” puncturing holes in the web of life with incalculable consequences: “biologists are only just beginning to understand the cascading, ecosystem-wide impact of the destruction of the megafauna.”16 One emergent property comes into conflict with a whole planet of other emergent properties. This is the necessary and fundamental form of a Marxist account of ecological crisis, which does not exclude other drivers but centres on a feature unique for capitalist relations: the compulsion for perpetually expanding absorption of biophysical resources. Such a property cannot be found in nature. Any creature that had it would be fantastically maladaptive and quickly go extinct; capital has been able to maintain it into the twenty-first century only by establishing complete dominion over tellurian nature. But it cannot go on forever.

The ongoing sixth mass extinction looks particularly amenable to the sort of analysis outlined here. Thus we have strong evidence that the long postponement of the crackdown on the bustling London ivory market promised by the Tories has provided continuous incentive to criminal syndicates to slaughter African elephants and smuggle their tusks into Britain, but we have no signs of the elephants jumping off cliffs or otherwise committing mass suicide.17 The biodiversity being torn apart is neither a human creation nor a source of agency in this disaster. On that environmental issue as well as on any other, it is possible to say something of ecological Marxist import only by practising property dualism.

Notes
↩ Karl Marx, Capital: Volume III (London: Penguin, 1991), 949. The two key works in which the theory is formulated and applied are Foster, Marx’s Ecology; John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark and Richard York, The Ecological Rift: Capitalism’s War on the Earth (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2010). Some of the most noteworthy articles on climate change and fossil energy emerging from the metabolic rift school are Brett Clark and Richard York, “Carbon Metabolism: Global Capitalism, Climate Change, and the Biospheric Rift,” Theory and Society 34 (2005): 391–428; Richard York, “Do Alternative Energy Sources Displace Fossil Fuels?,” Nature Climate Change 2 (2012): 441–3; Richard York, “Asymmetric Effects of Economic Growth and Decline on CO2 Emissions,” Nature Climate Change 2 (2012): 762–4; Brett Clark, Andrew K. Jorgenson, Daniel Auerbach, “Up in Smoke: The Human Ecology and Political Economy of Coal Consumption,” Organization and Environment 25 (2012): 452–69; Kelly Austin and Brett Clark, “Tearing Down Mountains: Using Spatial and Metabolic Analysis to Investigate the Socio-Ecological Contradictions of Coal Extraction in Appalachia,” Critical Sociology 38 (2012): 437–57.
↩ Stefano B. Longo, Rebecca Clausen and Brett Clark, The Tragedy of the Commodity: Oceans, Fisheries, and Aquaculture (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2015), x, 23. Emphasis added.
↩ See particularly Jason W. Moore, “Transcending the Metabolic Rift: A Theory of Crisis in the Capitalist World-Ecology,” The Journal of Peasant Studies 38 (2011): 1–46; “Toward a Singular Metabolism: Epistemic Rifts and Environment-Making in the Capitalist World-Ecology,” New Geographies 6 (2014): 10–19; Capitalism in the Web of Life (London: Verso, 2015). The most systematic picking apart of Moore so far is Kamran Nayeri, “‘Capitalism in the Web of Life’ – A Critique,” Climate and Capitalism, climateandcapitalism.com, 19 July 2016.
↩ Moore, Capitalism, 47. Emphasis in original.
↩ Ibid., e.g. 228, 291, 293.
↩ Ibid., 230.
↩ John Bellamy Foster and Ian Angus, “In Defense of Ecological Marxism: John Bellamy Foster Responds to a Critic,” Climate and Capitalism, climateandcapitalism.com, 6 June 2016. See further John Bellamy Foster, “Marxism in the Anthropocene: Dialectical Rifts on the Left,” International Critical Thought 6 (2016): 393–421.
↩ Moore, “Toward,” 14; Moore, Capitalism, 5. White et al. share Moore’s ambition of developing a hybridist eco-Marxism and present a very similar critique of Foster et al. See White et al., Environments, e.g. 104, 152.
↩ Moore, “Toward,” 15.
↩ Moore, Capitalism, 6, 180, 85, 36–8, 4, 179, 196, 8. Emphases in original.
↩ Richard Lewontin and Richard Levins, Biology under the Influence: Dialectical Essays on Ecology, Agriculture and Health (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2007), 107.
↩ Moore, ‘Transcending’, 8; Moore, Capitalism, 97 (cf. 84).
↩ Moore, Capitalism, 60, 234–5, 112, 87.
↩ Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution(San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1980), 43–68. Her superb account owes much to Robert Brenner.
↩ Ibid., 43, 51, 295. Emphasis added.
↩ Ashley Dawson, Extinction: A Radical History (New York: O/R Books, 2016), 12–13, 16, 24. See further e.g. 42–3, 53.
↩ Jamie Doward, “Tories’ Failure to Halt Ivory Trade ‘Risks Extinction of Elephants’,” Guardian, 27 August 2016.

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Re: The Long Ecological Revolution

Post by blindpig » Sat May 15, 2021 11:44 am

UN Food Summit: Cover for an Agribusiness Coup?
May 13, 2021
Peasant and indigenous organizations and civil society groups are organizing a counter-summit

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Reposted with permission from A Growing Culture

Later this year, the United Nations is set to hold a historic Food Systems Summit, recognizing the need for urgent action to disrupt business-as-usual practices in the food system. But far from serving as a meaningful avenue for much-needed change, the summit is shaping up to facilitate increased corporate capture of the food system. So much so, that peasant and indigenous-led organizations and civil society groups are organizing an independent counter-summit in order to have their voices heard.

At the heart of the opposition is the fact that the conference has been co-opted by corporate interests who are pushing towards a highly industrialized style of agriculture promoted by supporters of the Green Revolution, an approach that is meant to eradicate hunger by increasing production through hybrid seeds and other agrochemical inputs. It has been widely discredited for failing to achieve its goals and damaging the environment. The Summit’s concept paper perpetuates the same Green Revolution narrative — it is dominated by topics like AI-controlled farming systems, gene editing, and other high-tech solutions geared towards large-scale agriculture, as well as finance and market mechanisms to address food insecurity, with methods like agroecology notably absent or minimally discussed.

A Crisis of Participation

But the problem is not only the subject matter that the conference has put on the agenda. It’s also the remarkably undemocratic way of choosing who gets to participate, and in what ways. The agenda was set behind closed doors at Davos, the World Economic Forum’s exclusive conference. As Sofia Monsalve, Secretary General of FIAN International puts it, “They have cherry picked representatives of civil society. We don’t know why, or which procedure they used.”

“The multi-stakeholder model of governance is problematic because it sounds very inclusive,” Monsalve continues. “But in fact we are worried about the concealing of power asymmetries, without having a clear rule in terms of accountability. What is the rule here — who decides? And if you don’t decide according to a rule, where can we go to claim you are doing wrong?”

The conference organizers have claimed that they have given peasant-led and civil society groups ample opportunity to participate in the conference, but this is a facade. The UN’s definition of ‘participation’ differs significantly from that of the hundreds of civil society groups that have spoken out against the Summit. The Summit claims that allowing groups to attend virtual sessions and give suggestions amounts to participation. But true participation means being consulted about crucial agenda items that have a massive impact on the communities they represent. This was not done.

“We didn’t have the opportunity to shape the agenda, Monsalve explains.

“The agenda was set. Full stop. And therefore we are asking ‘why is it that we are not discussing how to dismantle corporate power? This is a very urgent issue on the ground for the people. How is it that we are not discussing about COVID and the food crisis related to COVID?’”

Organizations like the People’s Coalition on Food Sovereignty (PCFS), which represents 148 grassroots groups from 28 countries, feel similarly. “It’s just like having a table set,” explains Sylvia Mallari, Global Co-Chairperson of PCFS. “So you have a dinner table set, then the questions would be who set the table, who is invited to the table, who sits beside whom during dinner? And what is the menu? For whom and for what is the food summit? And right now, the way it has been, the agenda they’ve set leaves out crucial peoples and even their own UN nation agencies being left behind.”

Elizabeth Mpofu of La Vía Campesina, the largest peasant-led organization representing over 2 million people worldwide, explains:

“The United Nation food systems summit, from the beginning, was really not inclusive of the peasants’ voices. And if they’re going to talk about the food systems, on behalf of whom? Because the people who are on the ground, who are really working on producing the food should be involved in the planning. Before they even organized this summit, they should have made some consultations and this was not done.”

The concerns are not only coming from outside the UN. Two former UN Special Rapporteurs to the Right to Food — Olivier De Schutter and Hilal Elver — as well as Michael Fakhri, who currently holds the position, wrote a statement to the summit organizers early on in the process. “Having all served as UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food,” they write, “we have witnessed first-hand the importance of improving accountability and democracy in food systems, and the value of people’s local and traditional knowledge.

It is deeply concerning that we had to spend a year persuading the convenors that human rights matter for this UN Secretary General’s Food Systems Summit. It is also highly problematic that issues of power, participation, and accountability (i.e. how and by whom will the outcomes be delivered) remain unresolved.”

Michael Fakhri has also expressed concern about the sidelining of the Committee on Food Security (CFS), a unique civil society organization that allows “people to directly dialogue and debate with governments, holding them to account.” As Fakhri explains, if the CFS is sidelined in this summit (as they have been thus far), there is a real danger that “there will no longer be a place for human rights in food policy, diminishing anyone’s ability to hold powerful actors accountable.”

Gertrude Kenyangi, executive director of Support for Women in Agriculture and Environment (SWAGEN) and PCFS member, stated during a Hunger for Justice Broadcast on April 30th that the problem comes down to one of fundamentally conflicting values:

“Multinational corporations and small-holder farmers have different values. While the former value profit, the latter value the integrity of ecosystems. Meaningful input of small-holder farmers, respect for Indigenous knowledge, consideration for biodiversity… will not be taken into account [at the Summit]. They will not tell the truth: that hunger is political; that food insecurity in Africa is not only as a result of law and agriculture production, but it’s a question of justice, democracy and political will. That’s our concern.”

The Presence of AGRA

The problems with the Summit were compounded further by UN Secretary General António Guterres choosing to appoint Agnes Kalibata, president of the Alliance for a Green Revolution for Africa (AGRA), as Special Envoy to the conference. AGRA is an organization, funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates and Rockefeller Foundations (as well as our governments), that promotes a high-tech, high-cost approach to agriculture, heavily reliant on agrochemical inputs and fertilizers. They have been at the forefront of predatory seed laws and policies that marginalize and disenfranchise peasant farmers on a massive scale.

AGRA has devastated small-scale farmers under the mission of “doubling productivity and incomes by 2020 for 30 million small-scale farming households while reducing food insecurity by half in 20 countries.” Their approach has been proven to be markedly unsuccessful. Timothy Wise, a senior adviser at the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, began to research AGRA’s efficacy in the last fourteen years of work. Unlike many nonprofits who are held to strict transparency standards, AGRA refuses to share any information about their performance metrics with researchers. It took a U.S. Freedom of Information Act request to find out what AGRA has to show for their US$1 billion budget. Researchers found that AGRA ‘apparently’ had not been collecting this data until 2017 (eleven years after their founding in 2006).

Food security has not decreased in their target countries. In fact, for the countries in which AGRA operates as a whole, food insecurity has increased by 30% during their years of operation; crop production has fared no better. Yet this narrative continues to be pervasive around the world. It is the backbone of the UN Food Systems Summit and most development agendas. And AGRA’s president is leading the conference.

Attempts to build bridges with civil society organizations have failed. In sessions with civil society groups, Ms. Kalibata has demonstrated a lack of awareness of the growing peasant-led movements that reclaim traditional agricultural methods as promising avenues to a more sustainable food system. Wise explains:

“During the session she held with peasant groups, she basically indicated that she didn’t know about the peasant rights declaration that the UN had passed just two years ago. And she told them, why do you keep calling yourselves peasants? She said that she calls them business people because she thinks they’re needing to learn how to farm as a business.”

“It’s also a pretty significant conflict of interest, which people don’t quite realise,” Wise continues. “AGRA is a nonprofit organization that’s funded by the Gates foundation and a couple other foundations — and our governments. They are about to enter a period where they desperately need to replenish their financing. And so they are going to be undertaking a major fund drive exactly when this conference is happening. And the summit is being positioned to help with that fund drive.”

Since Ms. Kalibata was named special envoy, there has been a public outcry over this clear conflict of interest. 176 civil society organizations from 83 countries sent a letter to the UN Secretary General António Guterres voicing their concerns over Ms. Kalibata’s corporate ties. They never received a response. 500 civil society organizations, academics, and other actors sent the UN an additional statement laying out the growing list of concerns about the Summit. Again, they received no reply.

While 676 total civil society organizations and individuals expressed clear concern over Ms. Kalibata’s appointment, only twelve people signed a letter supporting the nomination. The Community Alliance for Global Justice’s AGRA Watch team found that all but one of these individuals have received funds from the Gates Foundation.

Competing Pathways for Food Systems Change

This summit isn’t just a case of poor planning and a lack of genuine participation for peasant-led organizations. It represents a deeper and more insidious trend in food systems governance: the erosion of democratic decision-making and the rise of powerful, unaccountable, private-sector actors who continue to consolidate power over the food system.

The absence of practices like agroecology from the agenda shows how deeply the private sector has consolidated power — these methods are highly promising, low-input and low-cost solutions for farmers to increase their yields while farming more sustainably. But they are mentioned only in passing. “If you ever look at a situation and see something that looks like the most obvious, sensible solution and it’s not happening, ask who’s making money from it not happening,” explains Timothy Wise. The answer here is clear: high-input agriculture makes many people extraordinarily wealthy. This power allows them to set the agenda for food systems change, at the expense of farmers, and at the expense of the environment.

That’s why this conference is so important: it will set the stage for the approach to food systems change in the coming decades. We the people need to decide who should set the agenda for a food future that affects us all — one that preserves biodiversity and prioritizes human rights and well-being. Are we willing to let the corporations who pursue profits at all cost continue to claim that they know what’s in our best interest? Do we want a future governed by the likes of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, in partnership with the largest agrochemical and seed companies in the world? Or are we ready to demand that those who actually grow our food — peasants, farmers, and Indigenous peoples around the world — be the ones to determine our direction?

This is what’s at stake. Right now, the most powerful players in the food system are poised to set an agenda that will allow them to continue amassing profits at staggering rates, at the expense of farmers, consumers, and the environment.

But there is still time to fight back. Where the conference holds most of its power is in its legitimacy. As groups mobilize, organize, and demand genuine participation, this false legitimacy driven by actors like the Gates Foundation begins to crumble. We must stand in solidarity with the grassroots communities who are telling the truth about this conference and what it represents. We must get to work.

A Growing Culture asks all readers to help raise the dialogue about this upcoming summit. Re-share this article, re-post, tweet and amplify this issue. You can learn more about A Growing Culture here: https://www.agrowingculture.org, on Twitter: @agcconnect or Instagram: @agrowingculture

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Re: The Long Ecological Revolution

Post by blindpig » Wed May 19, 2021 1:53 pm

As China Pursues a Green Future, Bitcoin Miners Feel the Squeeze
Chinese cryptocurrency businesses mine two-thirds of all Bitcoin. But for how long will they remain welcome in the country?

Li You
May 18, 2021 10-min read

Patrick Li’s Bitcoin mine used to be filled with the persistent hum of rows and rows of computers, all busy around the clock solving the complicated mathematical puzzles needed to keep the world’s most popular cryptocurrency operational.

Li, 39, had set up shop in the northern Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, which once welcomed businesses like his to use the abundance of locally produced coal-powered electricity.

But last year, China’s central government admonished Inner Mongolia for missing its electricity consumption reduction targets. As a result, in March, the region decided to show certain energy-intensive industries the door, including cryptocurrency mines like Li’s.
We have no choice but to look for a new location.
- Patrick Li, Bitcoin miner
“It was all of a sudden,” Li says. “We have no choice but to look for a new location.”

The policy reversal has China’s Bitcoin mining community wondering whether its time in the country is running out. Will other regions and provinces follow suit now that President Xi Jinping has made reaching carbon neutrality a major government goal? For now, Bitcoin’s fate is in limbo. Li Bo, vice president of China’s central bank, the People’s Bank of China, told reporters in April that policymakers are currently deciding on what regulations to apply to the virtual currency.

Any outcome will be felt globally. The country’s share of the entire Bitcoin network’s hash rate — a measure of computing power — stood at 65% in April 2020, the most recent available figure at the Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index (CBECI). The global Bitcoin community was reminded of China’s central role when, after a fatal coal mine accident in April, authorities in the northwestern Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region launched safety checks that disrupted power supplies to local Bitcoin mines, and hash rates fell by up to 30%.

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Energy nomads

Like many other blockchain-based currencies, Bitcoin is decentralized, meaning there is no bank or country in control. Instead, miners use computing power to verify transactions, for which they receive bitcoins in return. In 2013, Li smelled a business opportunity. He decided life as a civil servant wasn’t for him, spent a month’s salary on a computer, and began mining Bitcoin, in pursuit, he says, of “financial freedom.”

Back then, he was far from the only one. Given China’s position as a manufacturing hub for electronics, the right equipment was easy to get hold of. Local governments were eager to attract what they saw as “high-tech” industries, and China grew to become the dominant cryptocurrency country it is today. Over the years, Li witnessed bull markets that minted millionaires, as well as collapses that crushed dreams. His only regret is selling Bitcoin he now knows he should have held onto.

Bitcoin is coded to create competition. Whichever miner does the quickest calculations for a particular set of transactions receives the reward. This has set off an arms race, with miners incentivized to use as much top-of-the-line equipment as possible, racking up enormous energy bills. Luckily for them, the price of Bitcoin has risen, too. At the start of 2013, the year Li began, 1 bitcoin was worth $13.40. With the exchange rate above $50,000 for much of 2021, mining remains exceedingly profitable.
Bitcoin is essentially an energy currency.
- Xu Peng, professor
But the environment bears the cost. An article published April in scientific journal Nature Communications concluded China’s Bitcoin-mining industry was on track to be responsible for 130 million tons of carbon emissions by 2024, exceeding the total greenhouse gas emissions of the Czech Republic.

The immense power needs of Bitcoin mining determine where profits can be made. “Like nomads looking for places with water and grass, we miners seek places with cheap and stable power supply,” says Liu Fei, CEO of Bixin Mining, one of China’s largest cryptocurrency companies. Chinese cryptocurrency miners alternate between areas rich in hydropower during the rainy summer, and return to northern areas like Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia that are rich in coal-fired electricity during the dry season. Some go to even greater lengths to cut costs. Last year, authorities discovered a Bitcoin mine disguised as burial tombs stealing electricity from a nearby company.

“The fact that whoever has cheap energy has more Bitcoin mining capacity shows that Bitcoin is essentially an energy currency,” says Xu Peng, a professor of mechanical engineering at Tongji University who specializes in sustainability.

An often proposed solution to Bitcoin’s energy footprint is replacing the current mining mechanism, called “proof of work,” with “proof of stake” — a way to verify transactions that doesn’t require nearly as much computing power. But its decentralized nature makes such fundamental changes difficult, says Xu. Bitcoin miners are unlikely to agree to something that would render their expensive hardware useless. Moreover, Bitcoin’s high valuation is a reflection of its mining costs, which include energy, says Liu: “Like gold, it is scarce because it is difficult and expensive to mine.”

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An exterior view of a bitcoin mine near a hydropower station in rural Sichuan province, 2016. Liu Xingzhe/People Visual

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A manager stands near a wall of fans inside a bitcoin mine in rural Sichuan province, 2016. Liu Xingzhe/People Visual

Policy shifts

For a while, less developed regions eager for investment welcomed the cryptocurrency mines, allowing them to register as data centers and providing discounts on electricity and land fees. Until February, Inner Mongolia used an “inverted price ladder” for energy-intensive industries. The policy, which attracted many Bitcoin mines, lowered the price of electricity the more a business consumed.

But the winds have changed, and the Chinese government now wants to reduce energy use and related greenhouse gas emissions instead. According to 2020’s figures, 85% of Inner Mongolia’s electricity is generated from fossil fuels. In the city Ordos, where Li was located, that figure is 94%. With the central government looking to limit coal consumption, power-hungry Bitcoin mines are an obvious target, says Yang Zhou, China advisor at energy and climate policy think tank Agora Energiewende. “Because (Inner Mongolia) hadn’t adjusted how it supplied power, it could only cut off demand to meet emission-control targets,” she says.
What are the benefits of digital assets to the real economy? We’re approaching this issue with caution.
- Zhou Xiaochuan, official
Guan Dabo, professor at Tsinghua University and co-author of the paper calculating Bitcoin’s carbon footprint, told Sixth Tone that, to him, the drawbacks of cryptocurrencies outweigh their benefits to the country’s prosperity. “This emerging industry does not have much substantial contribution to the future national economy,” Guan says. “As a financial derivative tool, it consumes a lot of energy. It may not be worth the gain.”

China’s policymakers seem to increasingly share Guan’s doubts. In April, the municipal government of Beijing told data centers involved in Bitcoin mining to report their electricity consumption to inform future policy, and announced it would tighten supervision and approval of data centers out of energy saving concerns. An official said the excessive growth of data centers had “put pressure” on the city’s ability to control carbon emissions and meet power demand during peak periods.

China’s central government has long been skeptical of cryptocurrencies. Already in 2013, the central bank banned financial institutions from using and trading in Bitcoin and similar currencies. In 2017, China shut down domestic cryptocurrency trading platforms and outlawed launches of new cryptocurrencies, called initial coin offerings. Chinese people can still trade via foreign exchanges, but at the risk of the policy climate becoming even stricter.

“Chinese policy does not recognize the currency properties of Bitcoin, worrying that it might impact currency management and the financial system,” says Huang Zhen, director of the Institute of Financial Law at Central University of Finance and Economics. “At present, the only virtual currency recognized by China is the digital yuan” — which is backed by the People’s Bank of China.

“What are the benefits of digital assets to the real economy? We’re approaching this issue with caution,” Zhou Xiaochuan, former president of the People’s Bank of China, said at an international conference in April. He compared cryptocurrencies to shadow banking and the speculative trading of derivatives that caused the 2008 financial crisis. “We need to be careful,” he said.

When it comes to cryptocurrency mining, the central government is more ambiguous, neither banning nor supporting such businesses. This lack of clear guidance means local regulations can be unpredictable. Many miners, for example, sign contracts with small-scale hydropower dams and coal-powered plants, both of which have been the subject of mass closure campaigns. As a result, Li says, miners focus on short-term profits, aware it might not be possible to bring long-term plans to fruition.

Li’s own experience is a case in point. Though he never expected Inner Mongolia to ban cryptocurrency mines outright, the move was preceded by an inspection round in 2019 targeting energy-intensive mines taking advantage of electricity discounts, and, in August, the suspension of 21 Bitcoin mines from taking part in electricity trading, meaning they could no longer enjoy preferential prices.

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Where to next?

Bitcoin mine investors tell Sixth Tone they expect the policy changes in Inner Mongolia to sooner or later be copied by other regions rich in coal and cryptocurrency mines. Their chief concern is Xinjiang, which, according to CBECI, is home to a third of the world’s Bitcoin mining.

On Thursday, the central government gave Bitcoin miners a potential first sign of things to come. Xinjiang was among seven province-level areas it reprimanded for failing to control energy intensity during the first quarter of the year, urging them to “resolutely take down projects that don’t meet standards and that consume a lot of energy and cause a lot of emissions.” It was essentially the same warning given to Inner Mongolia last year.

Wu Jihan, a leading Bitcoin entrepreneur and co-founder of mining-chip giant Bitmain, reminded fellow miners during an industry conference in April that they had to start using clean energy or risk institutions losing interest in “dirty” Bitcoin. “Carbon neutrality has a long-term impact on the industry, and reducing carbon emissions is a global trend,” he said. The conference celebrated the upcoming wet season, a source of cheap electricity. “Hydropower,” Wu said, “is the heirloom of the mining industry” — something to be treasured for generations.

Many miners have placed their hopes — and computers — in two southwestern provinces rich in hydroelectric dams: Sichuan and Yunnan. Because of a lack of infrastructure to send electricity long distances, these dams often curtail their power — in Sichuan, the total stood at over 20 billion kWh for 2020, 5.7% of their total production and about twice the electricity used yearly by Washington D.C. This has historically attracted energy-intensive industries, from chemical and aluminium plants to cryptocurrency mines.

Many miners focus on Sichuan, owing to a provincial policy, in effect since 2020, to support the blockchain industry with over-capacity hydropower for three years. “Sichuan has the most friendly policy toward Bitcoin mining in China,” says Yang Maohua, who runs Bitcoin mining operations in the province.

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Andrey Rudakov/Bloomberg via People Visual

But Sichuan’s Bitcoin mines have also come under scrutiny. Many operators of small dams in the province have made deals to supply cryptocurrency businesses with cheap electricity directly, to the chagrin of state-owned power companies. Zhao Lei, general manager of a local State Grid subsidiary, said in May 2020 that such deals violate electricity market order, constitute tax evasion, and pose safety issues. A crackdown on illicit mines followed.

Another worry for Sichuan’s miners is the rising price of electricity. Despite the ambiguous stance of Chinese authorities, the lure of profits is still pulling people into Bitcoin. Competition has become fierce. “Last year, Aba’s electricity was cheap,” says Liu, the Bixin Mining CEO, referring to a Sichuanese region rich in hydropower. “But this year’s investment has overheated. The electricity price has increased a lot.” This year’s costs are 16% higher than last year, according to the Sichuan Power Exchange Center.

Many in the industry argue cryptocurrency businesses absorbing Sichuan’s excess hydropower are essentially green, using environmentally friendly electricity that nobody would have used otherwise. But the question is how long this argument will remain convincing if more miners are to stay in the province year-round. Four-fifths of Sichuan’s hydropower is of the run-of-the-river type, meaning the dam has no reservoir that can store water for dry spells. To meet power demand in drier winter months, the province generates up to about a quarter of its power from fossil fuels, and purchases electricity from other provinces.

This dynamic means hydropower is ultimately not the solution to the question of how to make Bitcoin environmentally friendly, says Alex de Vries, an economist and creator of website Digiconomist. In an article published 2019 in scientific journal Joule, he points out that seasonal variation of hydropower requires alternative energy sources, which in the worst-case scenario “presents an incentive for the construction of new coal-fired power stations to fulfill this purpose.”

Instabilities in electricity supply and demand, as well as climate change, also affect cryptocurrency mining operations outside winter. In May 2020, a delayed rainy season that reduced power production and caused higher-than-average temperatures that increased air conditioner usage meant electricity was diverted for residential use. Miners had no choice but to shut down temporarily. On Sunday, another power shortage forced the Sichuan government to ration power, again cutting off cryptocurrency mining businesses.
This wet season could be the last good opportunity left for miners in China.
- Patrick Li, Bitcoin miner
Rising electricity costs and policy uncertainties are driving mining operations abroad, Bixin’s Liu says, with investors setting their eyes on North America, Central Asia, and Eastern Europe.

But sentiments toward cryptocurrency mines are souring elsewhere too. Concerned about miners’ power use and carbon footprint, authorities in locales as varied as Iran, New York state, and Abkhazia, an autonomous region north of Georgia, have in recent months cracked down on illegal operations, proposed a moratorium on new mines, or banned the practice altogether, respectively. Citing the emissions caused by every transaction, electric car-maker Tesla said Wednesday it would no longer accept Bitcoin.

Li says he will move his operations to Sichuan for now, but he’s unsure what will happen when the province’s preferential policy expires at the end of next year. In the dry season, limited power resources will make competition fierce, he says.

“We estimated that this wet season would be the last good opportunity left for miners in China, and that afterward there will be more uncertainties,” Li says. “We are also looking for mining farms overseas, seeking a more stable policy environment.”

Editor: Kevin Schoenmakers.

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Re: The Long Ecological Revolution

Post by blindpig » Thu May 20, 2021 1:55 pm

Antarctic melt: tipping point by 2060
May 18, 2021
If emissions continue at current rates, the world will soon be committed to irreversible and catastrophic sea level rise

Image
(Andreas Kambanis via Flickr under CC by SA 2.0)

by Julie Brigham-Grette and Andrea Dutton
The Conversation, May 17, 2021

While U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken draws attention to climate change in the Arctic at meetings with other national officials this week in Iceland, an even greater threat looms on the other side of the planet. New research shows it is Antarctica that may force a reckoning between the choices countries make today about greenhouse gas emissions and the future survival of their coastlines and coastal cities, from New York to Shanghai.

That reckoning may come much sooner than people realize.

The Arctic is losing ice as global temperatures rise, and that is directly affecting lives and triggering feedback loops that fuel more warming. But the big wild card for sea level rise is Antarctica. It holds enough land ice to raise global sea levels by more than 200 feet (60 meters) – roughly 10 times the amount in the Greenland ice sheet – and we’re already seeing signs of trouble.

Scientists have long known that the Antarctic ice sheet has physical tipping points, beyond which ice loss can accelerate out of control. The new study, published in the journal Nature, finds that the Antarctica ice sheet could reach a critical tipping point in a few decades, when today’s elementary school kids are raising their families.

The results mean a common argument for not reducing greenhouse gas emissions now – that future technological advancement can save us later – is likely to fail. The new study shows that if emissions continue at their current pace, by about 2060 the Antarctic ice sheet will have crossed a critical threshold and committed the world to sea level rise that is not reversible on human timescales. Pulling carbon dioxide out of the air at that point won’t stop the ice loss, it shows, and by 2100, sea level could be rising more than 10 times faster than today.

The tipping point

Antarctica has several protective ice shelves that fan out into the ocean ahead of the continent’s constantly flowing glaciers, slowing the land-based glaciers’ flow to the sea. But those shelves can thin and break up as warmer water moves in under them. As ice shelves break up, that can expose towering ice cliffs that may not be able to stand on their own.

There are two potential instabilities at this point. Parts of the Antarctic ice sheet are grounded below sea level on bedrock that slopes inward toward the center of the continent, so warming ocean water can eat around their lower edges, destabilizing them and causing them to retreat downslope rapidly. Above the water, surface melting and rain can open fractures in the ice. When the ice cliffs get too tall to support themselves, they can collapse catastrophically, accelerating the rate of ice flow to the ocean.

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Warmer circumpolar deep water can get under ice shelves and eat away at the base of glaciers. (Scambos et. al. 2017. Global Planetary Change)

The study used computer modeling based on the physics of ice sheets and found that above 2 C (3.6 F) of warming, Antarctica will see a sharp jump in ice loss, triggered by the rapid loss of ice through the massive Thwaites Glacier. This glacier drains an area the size of Florida or Britain and is the focus of intense study by U.S. and U.K. scientists.

To put this in context, the planet is on track to exceed 2 C warming under countries’ current policies. Other projections don’t account for ice cliff instability and generally arrive at lower estimates for the rate of sea level rise. While much of the press coverage that followed the new paper’s release focused on differences between these two approaches, both reach the same fundamental conclusions: The magnitude of sea level rise can be drastically reduced by meeting the Paris Agreement targets, and physical instabilities in the Antarctic ice sheet can lead to rapid acceleration in sea level rise.

The disaster doesn’t stop in 2100

The new study, led by Robert DeConto, David Pollard and Richard Alley, is one of the few that looks beyond this century. One of us is a co-author.

It shows that if today’s high emissions continued unabated through 2100, sea level rise would explode, exceeding 2.3 inches (6 cm) per year by 2150. By 2300, sea level would be 10 times higher than it is expected to be if countries meet the Paris Agreement goals. A warmer and softer ice sheet and a warming ocean holding its heat for centuries all prevent refreezing of Antarctica’s protective ice shelves, leading to a very different world.

The vast majority of the pathways for meeting the Paris Agreement expect emissions will overshoot its goals of keeping warming under 1.5 C (2.7 F) or 2 C (3.6 F), and then count on future advances in technology to remove enough carbon dioxide from the air later to lower the temperature again. The rest require a 50% cut in emissions globally by 2030. Although a majority of countries – including the U.S., U.K. and European Union – have set that as a goal, current policies globally would result in just a 1% reduction by 2030.

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(Climate Analytics and NewClimate Institute)

It’s all about reducing emissions quickly

Some other researchers suggest that ice cliffs in Antarctica might not collapse as quickly as those in Greenland. But given their size and current rates of warming – far faster than in the historic record – what if they instead collapse more quickly?

As countries prepare to increase their Paris Agreement pledges in the runup to a United Nations meeting in November, Antarctica has three important messages that we would like to highlight as polar and ocean scientists.

First, every fraction of a degree matters.

Second, allowing global warming to overshoot 2 C is not a realistic option for coastal communities or the global economy. The comforting prospect of technological fixes allowing a later return to normal is an illusion that will leave coastlines under many feet of water, with devastating economic impacts.

Third, policies today must take the long view, because they can have irreversible impacts for Antarctica’s ice and the world. Over the past decades, much of the focus on rapid climate change has been on the Arctic and its rich tapestry of Indigenous cultures and ecosystems that are under threat.

As scientists learn more about Antarctica, it is becoming clear that it is this continent – with no permanent human presence at all – that will determine the state of the planet where today’s children and their children will live.

Julie Brigham-Grette is Professor of Geosciences, University of Massachusetts Amherst. Andrea Dutton is Professor of Geoscience, University of Wisconsin-Madison. Republished from The Conversation, under a Creative Commons — Attribution/No derivatives license.

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Other than the ever present threat of nuclear annihilation this is the most likely end of civilization scenario, with it's concomitant loss of billions of lives , that humanity faces. Socialism or barbarism!
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Re: The Long Ecological Revolution

Post by blindpig » Mon May 24, 2021 1:29 pm

SHOULD WE BLOW UP PIPELINES?
Once again on sabotage and climate change
May 22, 2021
The choice between well-behaved protests and sabotage is incorrectly posed

Image

Last month, Simon Butler reviewed How to Blow Up a Pipeline for Climate & Capitalism. We don’t normally publish two reviews of the same book, but we think this article makes a substantial contribution to the discussion.

Lars Henriksson is an automobile worker at Volvo Cars in Gothenburg. He is member of the board of Socialistisk Politik, the Swedish section of the Fourth International. He is author of Slutkört (2011) which examined the role of the car industry in the climate transition. “Klimatkamp på ett radikalare spår” (Climate struggle on a radicalized track) was first published in the journal Röda rummet (The Red Room). The English translation is by Åsa Orsa.

Andreas Malm
HOW TO BLOW UP A PIPELINE
Learning to fight in a world on fire
Verso, 2021

reviewed by Lars Henriksson

It isn’t nice to block the doorway
It isn’t nice to go to jail
There are nicer ways to do it
But the nice ways always fail
—Malvina Reynolds

What should we do when airy political promises amount to little more than excuses for business as usual, and when the friendly climate protests have not prevented the world from heading towards a burning inferno? Submissively accept doom or take the climate struggle to a new level?

That Andreas Malm does not preach resignation will come as no surprise to those who know the author — activist and socialist since childhood and today well-known in the radical section of international academia. For those unfamiliar with him, the book’s title should dispel all doubt.

To stoically wait for doom is not an option for most of us, even if some claim to have drawn that conclusion. The book’s final section is a reckoning with intellectuals such as Roy Scranton and Jonathan Franzen who flirt with that standpoint.

For the rest of us, who either try to do something, or wish we knew how to do something, the question is: what do we do now? It is this question to which Malm devotes most of his book.

The attention given to the book ahead of publication has mostly concerned the question of sabotage as a method in the climate struggle. Despite the book’s provocative title, this is far from an anarchist cookbook but a thought-through — albeit impatient — contribution to the debate about strategy and tactics in the climate movement.

Malm raises a question posed by the British author John Lanchester: Why has the climate movement not resorted to violence? Given what is at stake is humanity’s survival, it is strange that nobody has started blowing up petrol stations or at least started scratching the paint on city jeeps, Lanchester states, in what Malm refers to as Lanchester’s paradox.

In the latter case, the effort is very small and would make these gas guzzling monster cars almost impossible to own in a city like London. Malm himself has a past as an SUV-saboteur of the milder kind, when the group The Indians of the Concrete Jungle in the early 2000s let the air out of gas guzzling luxury cars’ tyres in upper class neighborhoods. He takes this paradox — that the climate movement, despite knowing what is at stake, continues to be peaceful and well behaved — as the starting point for his argument.

Extinction Rebellion

At the centre of the book is a critique of the theoretical basis of the UK-based activist group Extinction Rebellion (XR), whose hour-glass symbol has spread around the world through spectacular actions, above all attempts to block traffic in big cities. For XR, the idea of non-violence is central — not just because they, like most of us, are against violence, but because the ideologues of XR claim history shows us that only strictly non-violent movements have succeeded in changing the world for the better.

Malm completely demolishes the historical arguments for a strict adherence to non-violence. On the contrary, he says, there has been a readiness to use violence or armed self-defenses even in the best-known non-violent movements, from Gandhi’s backing of the British war machine when directed towards places other than India to the fact that Martin Luther King Jr had a gun at home for self-defense.

For Malm, violence is a question of tactics, ie which methods are appropriate in a given situation. To exclude, like XR, all tactics that could be denoted as violent, even against inanimate objects, is to do away with potentially useful methods. However, Malm has no illusions that neither small groups nor mass movements could on their own tear down the massive power stations that keep on burning fossil fuels. A reduction of greenhouse gas emissions to the level that scientists say is necessary demands dramatic, rapid, and large-scale interventions of a kind only states can make.

The question then becomes how today’s states can be made to carry out such an intervention into the economic structure, deeply intertwined as they are with capital.

With a 40-year depreciation period, capital practically demands that nothing is done to emissions for decades to come. Every such investment is as ceremonious a promise of increased emissions as the international agreements and conventions that promise to reduce them. The big difference is that the investors are determined to keep their promises.

If it is impossible for the climate movement on its own physically to stop the burning of fossil fuels, it is even more unthinkable that it would be possible to make a fundamental shift in production and mass consumption without transforming society as a whole.

In Malm’s book, climate transition is only possible through bigger and bolder mass actions, to make the movements as strong as possible in order to put pressure on all those in various power positions, where even direct attacks on the physical structures of fossil fuel society have a role to play in increasing the costs, economically and politically, for new fossil investments.

Sabotage as tactics

If there is any conclusion to be drawn from the enormous attention given to Greta Thunberg’s well-articulated appearances in front of the world’s rulers, it is that it is impossible to turn around the disastrous course we are on using only wise words. Change will require different forms of power, where capital is either stripped of its power, or faced with such credible threats that it is forced to adapt, similar to when the right to vote was won or when Europe’s welfare states came into being with the threats of revolution still echoing on the continent.

Malm argues that if the politicians responsible hesitate or refuse to get rid of the fossil fuel plants, the movement must take the lead. As a heroic example he takes two Christian activists, Jessica Reznicek and Ruby Montoya, who in 2017 sabotaged the Dakota Access Pipeline with firebombs and a soldering unit, and who at the time of writing await sentencing, possibly facing decades in — prison.

Of course, no one believes that a few devoted activists can stop a climate catastrophe, either by using cutting torches against pipelines or rusty nails on SUVs. Malm warns sharply against methods that could risk even unintentionally causing personal injury, something that in one blow would destroy the moral capital the climate movement has so painstakingly built up. However, he contends that it is wrong to exclude from the outset sabotage and other illegal methods directed at the material assets of fossil society.

If, when and how direct attacks should take place is a question of tactics, timing and having one’s fingers on the pulse — not a principled decision that applies once and for all.

As a historic example of militant non-peaceful methods, Malm highlights the suffragettes, the British women’s movement who in the beginning of the last century added sabotage and vandalism to its arsenal of mass protests to put pressure on the rulers to introduce female suffrage, without the loss of human life.

It is difficult to argue against this principled approach to physical resistance unless you think that laws must always be obeyed or that private property is sacred, a position that would not have taken the labor movement far. Radical pacifism that also relinquishes the right to self defense can even be harmful. Physical self defense against fascist attacks is literally a matter of survival for the organizations of the labor movement, and they have paid dearly those times when they have not been prepared.

When it comes to the question of tactics today, Malm realises that it would not be a good idea to smash up petrol stations, and in practice does not end up so far from the methods used by the very same XR that he polemicises against: blockades and civil disobedience, possibly taken a step further.

One of the most important mobilizations of the European climate movement, Ende Gelände in Germany, has caused very temporary stops in lignite and coal-fired power plants through civil mass obedience. In Gothenburg, the same thing was done peacefully and on a very small scale in the autumn of 2019 when the entrances to the planned Swedgas terminal in Gothenburg harbour were blocked for a day.

The step from that to physically attacking such installations is quite far, and if it had been done, it would still have been a symbolic act in order to create political pressure — which would probably have backfired on the movement through reduced support in broader circles — and would not in itself reduce emissions.

Malm envisages, however, that support for physical attacks on fossil fuel plants will increase as the manifestations of climate catastrophe become increasingly troublesome.

In a situation where a large part of the population begins to realize that their, and their children’s, futures are literally being set on fire, due to the hunger for profit of a handful of big corporations, it is unlikely that they will be content with words and well-behaved symbolic actions.

It is not unthinkable that riots will be directed against petrol stations, coal transportation or oil company offices: popular anger rarely lets itself be controlled by well-formulated programs and principles. For example, spontaneous and disorganized riots in a number of US cities in 1967-68, often triggered by police provocations, played a major role in winning the demands of the civil rights movement. The looting and destruction that took place was insignificant compared to the oppression, violence and terror black people have been subjected to for hundreds of years. But then we are talking about explosions of popular anger, not theoretically conceived actions by small groups.

There are many compelling reasons for rejecting sabotage as a method — at least the kind mentioned in the book’s title — including the fact that, in reality, it is not possible to make the qualification that Malm is so careful to make: that it must only target inanimate objects and not people.

In a very critical review of the book, the British veteran socialist Alan Thornett recalls that the IRA attack in Northern Ireland that claimed the most lives in the 1970s was not intended to harm anyone but did so due to unforeseen circumstances — something that can never be ignored for those who advocate similar methods.

The radical flank

While he does not directly speak in favor of using sabotage today, Malm posits the need for a “radical flank” of the climate movement. By “radical” he means, prepared to use methods that the rest of the movement are not. The idea of the radical flank was formulated in the 1970s, in discussions about the role that small but militant groups like the Black Panthers should have in relation to the broader black civil rights movement. However, the Panthers were not founded as an organization that used violence to militantly pursue political goals, but as a self-defenses organization.

If a section of a movement begins using more drastic methods, it can produce two conflicting results. Either it pushes people away from the movement, directly because people do not share its standpoint, or indirectly through the repression provoked by such actions. Or it can strengthen the movement, by showing that the opponent is not invulnerable, or by being a threat that can be useful to the broader movement in its relations with the powers that be: “If you do not make peace with us, people will turn to more extreme forces.” And sometimes both at the same time: the riots of 1967-68 in the USA forced reforms but at the same time became a theme in US president Richard Nixon’s successful law-and-order campaign in the coming election.

The term “radical flank” can cover widely differing phenomena. Everything from the ideal type Malm imagines, groups that have good political instinct, deeply rooted in society and a movement that can assess exactly what tactics currently benefit the cause, to self-proclaimed “vanguards” who out of frustration or a need to be seen as the most radical group pursue adventurist politics regardless of the consequences for others. Or for that matter, spontaneous mass revolts where anger boils over.

The difference between these various phenomena makes the concept so broad that its usefulness becomes doubtful. Nevertheless, it can describe how inner breadth in a movement can affect its impact, for better or worse.

For most of my life, I have probably been considered part of a radical flank of sorts within the union at my workplace, and have probably been of some use in that way. The union leadership has — at least during periods when we have had some influence — been able to use us to pressure the company to make concessions: “If we do not get a better offer, you have to deal with worse troublemakers.”

But if we have been a radical flank, it has not been through spectacular actions or rhetoric. We have been a threat because of our focus on winning the majority. We have also spoken to the least interested workers, not just to the most angry or those we perceived as politically the “most conscious” and definitely not by trying to win over small groups so as to do with them what we think the union should do. Our threat lay in our mass orientation.

And here lies my main critique of Malm’s book. The choice between a world that is heating up beyond what is bearable and a few scratched SUVs, broken bank windows or even the occasional ruined pipeline is simple. If only that was the question!

But Malm never really deals with the alleged paradox that is his starting point, the climate movement’s reluctance to use violence.

It is hardly because of XR’s slick theories that most climate activists refrain from violence; they simply do not think it would lead us forward. That I am opposed to sabotage as a tactic in the climate struggle is not due to an exaggerated respect for private property or a principled pacifism.

My issue with these methods is that they do not solve the problem. The question of the choice between well-behaved protests and sabotage is incorrectly posed.

The choice is not between pacifists’ appeals to deaf rulers and small groups of activists “going it alone” to destroy the harmful infrastructure of fossil-fuelled society. Precisely because the task is so vast, a fundamental change of the whole of society, there are no ways around winning the majority — not the 3.5 percent of the population that XR believes can achieve system change, and no the hope that radical minorities will kick-start the mass movement or replace it.

Which methods the organized movement uses or accepts, just as Malm says, needs to be decided in each situation. In some situations, it may be right or even necessary to go beyond what is legal or what today is perceived as reasonable. It is all a question of which means lead to the goal and which are ineffective or do harm.

Critique and debate

Here, Malm also touches on what is usually called diversity of tactics, the idea that many different types of activities and methods can be used by different parts of a movement and that no one should be criticized for their choice of tactics. That different situations require different tactics is uncontroversial. In the South African apartheid state other methods were required than would be in a bourgeois democracy such as today’s Sweden. It becomes more problematic when this idea is used to argue that it is wrong to criticize someone else’s choice of tactics, even when this damages the movement and its alleged common goals.

There are several methods that are harmful in and of themselves, and for that very reason do not lead towards the goal but instead create obstacles that lead the movement astray. When Malcolm X uttered his famous words “by any means necessary,” it was precisely “any means necessary,” not “any conceivable means.”

Terrorist acts can fit into an Islamist or fascist strategy to create tension and damage people’s unity and solidarity, but never in a socialist strategy based on conscious actions and mass organization. If we start emphasizing minority actions, it goes with the territory that there is a danger that groups of frustrated activists get tired of just talking and instead try to take matters into their own hands without understanding the consequences for the broader movement, or because they hope to inspire or lead the movement through “exemplary actions.”

Or perhaps, like the self-proclaimed vanguard of the 1970s, they intend to “awaken the sluggish masses” by “forcing the state to show its true face,” a line that not only led these groups into a political desert, but also hit the broader labor movement hard. The anarchist ideas of the “propaganda of the deed” in which a self-proclaimed vanguard resorts to “radical” means are straightforwardly harmful and stand in opposition to building a mass movement.

There is no such suggestion in Malm’s book — it is the broad climate movement that is the agent and certainly this movement needs to get more leverage than just polite protest meetings. That Malm devotes an entire book to polemicizing against those in the climate movement who advocate strategic pacifism is in itself an example of the importance of debate and criticism, not least when it comes to choosing tactics and methods within the movement.

There is another problem with Malm’s historical parallels. The struggle for women’s suffrage, the civil rights movement in the USA, and the struggle for national independence all had clearly defined demands that were easy to see and identify with for those involved: an end to discrimination, where the status quo could only be maintained through state-sanctioned violence. And it was this violence that the struggle was opposed to.

In these struggles, the enemy was obvious, which is not the case when it comes to climate change, where the solution also questions the functioning of society on a deeper level.

At least as important is that these are all historical situations where the opponent had no democratic legitimacy, and where the struggle mainly concerned democratic rights.

On the climate issue, at least those of us in the rich countries are facing governments with a democratic legitimacy, to a greater or lesser extent, even if the companies and mechanisms that drive global warming exist for the most part outside the democratic arena. No referendums have been held on either mass motoring or fossil fuel emissions.

We are starting from a situation with opponents who are both democratically legitimate and at the same time illegitimate. Neither XR’s idea of civic assemblies nor a movement carrying out violent actions can solve this.

This leads us to the connection between the movements and institutional politics, something that Malm does not address. A reasonable way forward is to give the movements political expression in forms that can affect state policy.

Malm does not go deeper into how the process of change should take place other than imagining a negotiating situation where a broad climate movement — with millions backing it and threats from the radical flank up its sleeve — drives reluctant politicians in front of it.

It is hardly possible to request a mapped route from here to a fossil-free world from a small pamphlet, but the questions about state power and politics need to be asked, not least because the left and the labor movement have often stumbled up on them. “Politics” in our society is almost synonymous with handing over the issues at hand to bureaucratically controlled parties that conduct their activities in elected congregations. The relationship between the stable — and at its core bourgeois — state and popular but fleeting movements is complicated.

In the book A New Politics From the Left (2018), Hilary Wainwright made an attempt to solve this dilemma, distinguishing between “power over” or “power-as-domination” — i.e. the state power that the labor movement often aimed to conquer — and the “power to,” or “power-as-transformative-capacity” that exists in strong popular movements, those that are always the real driving force behind major societal transformations.

The problem with popular power is its temporary nature — strikes and demonstrations are outbreaks that subside and are difficult to make permanent. The machineries of the state and politics, on the other hand, tend to make activists adapt themselves and their organizations to the society these institutions have been built to preserve. There are countless examples of parties and activists brought forward by popular movements but quickly integrated into the existing machinery and then becoming part of the problem.

The road forward outlined by Wainwright is a collaboration between political movements in elected assemblies and popular movements that need the backing of institutions to develop their power. This is something that must be based on strong movements with a high level of political confidence, internal democracy, and their own ability to produce and exchange knowledge. And, I would like to add, an understanding of the problems and mechanisms of bureaucratization, including the experience gained by previous movements to keep this in check.

The climate movement of today is what, without implying any value judgment, could be called an “unrooted” movement, made up of people who come together around a single issue based on their own conviction, without having had much in common beforehand.

There are strengths in such movements, precisely in their ability to draw together people from different sections of society, but also weaknesses, above all that they have no means of exercising power beyond possibly their size and ability to exert political pressure. The opposite would be a “rooted” movement which arises from common interests that already exist, where the typical example is trade unions. The “rooted” parts of the climate movement have mainly been those that have a common relationship to certain places: indigenous peoples, farmers, residents who end up on a collision course with states or large companies and so on. Based on these shared interests, they have fought to defend their lives and lands, often by extra-parliamentary means, the movements that Naomi Klein in This Changes Everything, calls “Blockadia.”

What is missing in Malm’s book is a strong agent who could develop the climate movement into becoming more rooted within an existing potential power, an agent whose power is based on its very existence — what he is seeking to find in the radical flank’s physical attacks on fossil fuels. I am referring, of course, to the working class in the broadest sense, the class that keeps production going and produces the value that is the driving force of the economy.

It is hardly the author’s fault that working class power is missing from the book. It is not only here that the working class is not present as a class — it has been missing from the climate movement, with some brilliant exceptions, and for several decades to a large extent also from society at large.

Yet it is in this direction we must look to find a counterforce. No matter how much the capitalists dislike people who smash bank windows, sabotage pipelines or damage their luxury cars, there is nothing that can harm them as much as the organized working class.

The youthful Fridays For Future have with their climate strikes raised the issue to a higher level, and the mere fact that someone put together the words “strike” and “climate” is a step in the right direction. But it is not a real strike, where employees collectively leave their jobs. A strike means a direct blow against capital when workers collectively pull their value-creating work out from their grasp. This is exactly the kind of exercise of power that is needed.

Real climate strikes and political manifestations, where unions join climate demonstrations, would be an incredible step forward if it were to happen on a larger scale. But they are still symbolic acts. The power of the working class lies in production, both in terms of the knowledge of how to run it, something we do in practice daily, albeit under the command of capital, and in the ability to stop it. “Alle Räder stehen still, wenn dein starker Arm es will” (“All the wheels will stop turning, if your strong arm wants it”), as the old German battle song typical of its time put it. No one can stop fossil fuel burning more effectively than those who work with it.

The problem, of course, is the consequences: no one is going to strike to make themselves unemployed. A strike is not something that is taken lightly, whether it is over traditional trade union issues or political demands. It is difficult to imagine “we will strike until we win” strikes around the climate. It is more reasonable to see such strikes as pressure, similar to the warning strikes that German unions sometimes use to “warm up” before contract negotiations — but also as a permanent threat, politically and financially, of what awaits if the requirements for change are not met.

In the historical arsenal of the labor movement there are also more far-reaching methods of struggle which the capitalists fear even more, such as when the workers do not leave the factories but remain and take physical ownership of them — like the famous sit-down strikes in the US car industry in the 1930s, which forced companies to recognize the car workers’ union, or the waves of factory occupations in France and Italy in 1968-70 and in Argentina in the early 2000s.

Is a labor movement on the warpath for the climate a realistic idea, or just a Marxist pipe dream? So far, we don’t have many examples to go on. In a handful of countries — the United Kingdom, South Africa, Denmark — trade unions have developed ambitious plans for climate adaptation and jobs. Most of these plans, however, have remained on paper and not become part of any union struggle.

The trade union movement needs to be challenged on all levels, from within by those of us who are involved in the issue and from the outside by the climate movement.

I have long argued that the adaptation of production can become the link between the workplace and the climate movement. If we can make this adaptation into a way of saving threatened jobs, for example, it would create a strong and immediate reason for unions to get involved in climate issues in an age of permanent mass unemployment.

The climate issue could be transformed from something enormous, where both the problems and the “solutions” are things going on over our heads, to something that both affects and can be affected by what we do in our everyday lives, not least what we do collectively in our workplaces.

Today, consumption is at the forefront of the climate debate, but it is only between the covers of fundamentalist liberal textbooks that consumers are in control. The root of the problem lies in production, the one driven by the never-ending pursuit of profit. A focus on climate transition would put the spotlight on this.

Focusing climate actions on the very richest is a theme in Malm’s book that demands attention, partly because their consumption accounts for such an absurd proportion of CO2 emissions — their luxury yachts, helicopters, private planes and so on.

Malm cites a report from Oxfam which states that the richest one percent is responsible for 175 times more emissions than the poorest 10 percent of humanity. But since it is these people who also own a large part of the assets that are the physical cause of the emissions, we can link the owners and their ownership to the system. In Malm’s apt words, their consumption is “crime marketed as a lifestyle ideal.”

By targeting the luxury consumption of the rich, the climate movement can also make it a matter of justice, the extreme emissions of the rich following from the equally skewed distribution of wealth and assets, both internationally and within every country.

This skewed distribution has its roots in who controls production and capital. A fair redistribution that drastically cuts the consumption of the rich is necessary to win support for a climate transition. Conversely, a neoliberal climate policy that blames the people while the rich can buy their way out is a guarantee of right-wing populist counter-reactions.

Time

What speaks against my traditional mass movement argument is the difficult question of time that Malm emphasizes. The time factor is crucial in the climate issue, and this distinguishes it from many others.

That women (and men, for that matter) had been without the right to vote since the dawn of history, that black people in the USA had been oppressed since being transported there in slave ships, and that black people in South Africa had been enslaved since they were colonized could rightly be used as an argument that it was high time for change by the suffragettes, the civil rights activists and liberation movements. But no matter how impatient they were, there was no time limit.

They could think that history was on their side — if they lose today, they will win tomorrow, and every battle, even those that end in defeat, is just a skirmish before the coming victory.

With the climate it is different. Methods that today would repel people could be perceived as legitimate in a world that is boiling after six degrees of warming. But by then it is too late. The time horizon is narrower and a defeat — a lack of radical change — risks destroying any hope for the future.

It is therefore not surprising that there is a great deal of desperation among everyone who takes the issue seriously, not least among activists in the movement.

Desperation is understandable. Only those who are completely aloof can avoid feeling despair, when an unfettered capitalism is allowed to push humanity towards the abyss.

It is certainly true that this is urgent. There seems to be no time to build popular movements with decades- or centuries-long perspectives as the labour movement once did: movements that step by step, almost by the force of a natural law, built themselves up and acquired positions of strength in all areas of life to be able to revolutionise society.

Instead, the development is going at a horrific speed in the wrong direction, every day more greenhouse gases are emitted and we are driven ever closer to the abyss. Time is too short not to use all the methods at hand.

But the risk of this understandable sense of urgency is that we will think that it is not possible to use some of the experiences of the labor movement and other popular movements over the past 200 years.

Every event and social situation is unique and must be analyzed concretely, we can never just repeat what someone else has done. But some experiences have proven to hold up so well over time that it would take a lot for them not to be valid even today.

If we are to have any prospect of winning and not just fighting heroically, the climate movement needs to be a popular movement of a kind rarely seen. A movement that has allies in and is a part of other movements and which, through some points of strong support in the state, drives structural changes in the economy, changes the driving forces, expropriates the fossil fuel sector and reorganizes the economy on a sustainable basis.

I do not advocate any “first/then” strategy, where we first win a majority for a socialist transformation and then deal with the climate. On the contrary, the climate needs to be both the single most important political issue and at the same time take its place within other battles and movements.

Symbolic actions can, properly chosen and used, be part of creating political pressure that builds that movement, even if they are confrontational and illegal.

For example, blocking the private luxury yachts that occasionally anchor at Masthuggskajen in Gothenburg could be such an idea. It would link fossil emissions from billionaires’ luxury consumption with the power over production from which their fortunes flow.

The impact on emissions would be non-existent in the short term, but it would make it a little harder to continue with that type of conspicuous consumption, and it is this layer of billionaires that sets the norm for those directly beneath them of what to dream of and strive for. But above all, it links the rich with emissions.

It could also for example receive the broad support that a blockade of oil tankers would perhaps not get today, not to mention the reaction to a blown-up pipeline in a local oil terminal.

Such actions against the rich would chime well with a class-oriented climate movement. With unions and workplace groups as with the radical flank, this would be significantly more of a threat than broken windows or sabotaged pipelines. Such a movement could question and challenge the power of capital at its productive and destructive roots.

https://climateandcapitalism.com/2021/0 ... te-change/

First of all, I chafe at the phrase "well-behaved", just rubs me the wrong way.

Lars does make the paramount point, that truly effective action can only come from a mass movement. But I don't think that necessarily need be 'well-behaved' all the time, sometimes a sharp slap concentrates attention. Local conditions will dictate tactics. And I question the value of symbolic actions, do not see the advantage of giving the booj amusement.

As to the rejection of 'first then', I seriously question that capitalist society is capable of taking measures which will have more than fleeting effect upon the fortunes of the rich. That anarchy of self-interests cannot escape it's Social-Darwinian logic, none will be willing to 'take a hit' if they think their peers might get advantage simply by not being afflicted by any said measure less than they.

Like Malcolm said, "by any means necessary."
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: The Long Ecological Revolution

Post by blindpig » Fri May 28, 2021 2:17 pm

World may reach 1.5°C warming by 2025
May 27, 2021
WMO Head: The earth is ‘getting measurably and inexorably closer’ to the Paris limit

by Ian Angus

There is a 40% chance that the annual average global temperature in at least one of the next five years will temporarily reach 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels, and a 90% likelihood that at least one year in the five-year period will be the warmest on record, passing the previous record set in 2016.

This does not mean that the world will have definitively passed the Paris Agreement’s 1.5°C limit, but as the Secretary General of the World Meteorological Organization says, “we are getting measurably and inexorably closer.”

The latest Global Annual to Decadal Climate Update, prepared by the UK Met Office and issued on May 27 by the World Meteorological Organization, includes these projections for 2021-2025:

Annual mean global (land and sea) mean near-surface temperature is likely to be at least 1°C warmer than pre-industrial levels (defined as the average over the years 1850-1900) in each of the coming 5 years and is very likely to be within the range 0.9 – 1.8°C.
It is about as likely as not (40% chance) that at least one of the next 5 years will be 1.5°C warmer than pre-industrial levels and the chance is increasing with time.
It is very unlikely (10% chance) that the five-year mean global near-surface temperature for 2021-2025 will be 1.5°C warmer than pre-industrial levels.
The chance of at least one year exceeding the current warmest year, 2016, in the next five years is 90%.
Over 2021-2025, almost all regions, except parts of the southern oceans and the North Atlantic are likely to be warmer than the recent past (defined as the 1981-2010 average).
Over 2021-2025, high latitude regions and the Sahel are likely to be wetter than the recent past.
Over 2021-2025 there is an increased chance of more tropical cyclones in the Atlantic compared to the recent past.
In 2021, large land areas in the Northern Hemisphere are likely to be over 0.8°C warmer than the recent past.
In 2021, the Arctic (north of 60°N) is likely to have warmed by more than twice as much as the global mean compared to the recent past.
In 2021, southwestern North America is likely to be drier whereas the Sahel region and Australia are likely to be wetter than the recent past.
In 2020 – one of the three warmest years on record – the global average temperature was 1.2 °C above the pre-industrial baseline, according to the WMO’s State of the Global Climate 2020, released last month. It highlighted the acceleration in climate change indicators like rising sea levels, melting sea ice, and extreme weather, as well as worsening impacts on socio-economic development.

The Global Annual to Decadal Climate Update confirms that trend. In the coming five years, the annual mean global temperature is likely to be between 0.9°C and 1.8°C above pre-industrial levels.

Adapted from materials provided by the UK Met Office and the World Meteorological Organization.

https://climateandcapitalism.com/2021/0 ... ive-years/

*****************************************

Covid, Climate, and ‘Dual Metabolic Rupture’
May 26, 2021
A second titan of destruction now stands alongside the mega-threat of climate change

Image
(Credit: CDC, NASA EPIC Team)

by Neil Faulkner

“Pathogens, a great and terrible global threat to human and many a non-human alike, [are] as much a Sword of Damocles hovering above civilization as climate change.”

Evolutionary epidemiologist Rob Wallace wrote this in 2015. But he and many colleagues have been issuing increasingly urgent warnings since the 1990s that globalized agribusiness is breeding and spreading new, deadly, fast-transmission viruses.

The urgency around pandemics began to ramp up around the same time calls for climate action became mainstream. Many of us have been focused on the climate emergency — and nothing here should be taken to imply we were wrong — but the last year has taught a sharp lesson: deadly pathogens pose an equally menacing threat to human civilization.

Catastrophe

Since the first United Nations COP conference on global warming in 1995, the climate emergency has got much worse. Carbon emissions have accelerated from 26 billion tonnes in 1995 to 37 billion tonnes in 2018. Atmospheric concentrations have risen from 350ppm in 1990 to 410ppm today. Half the increase in average global temperatures since the Industrial Revolution has occurred since 1995. The average volume of Arctic sea-ice has roughly halved in the last 40 years. Whatever the metric, the same story.

The effects are all around us. More frequent and more intense heat-waves are causing increases in wildfires, droughts, and desertification. Rising and warming seas are causing heavier rainfall, more serious flooding, more frequent mega-storms, and the inundation of coastal areas. These changes are driving the world’s sixth mass extinction, with species loss running at 1,000 times the normal rate. Climate change is destroying livelihoods, increasing disease, displacing people.

We stand on the brink of critical tipping-points when incremental shifts lead to sudden and irreversible lurches in the Earth’s ecosystem. Among the potential tipping-points are: abrupt collapse of the West Antarctic ice-sheet; abrupt collapse of the East Antarctic ice-sheet; abrupt collapse of the Greenland ice-sheet; thawing of Arctic permafrost and release of methane gas; rapid deforestation of the Amazon; and failure of the Atlantic Gulf Stream. Some scientists fear a ‘global cascade’ of interacting tipping-points.

The failure of the global political elite is systemic. It is not that we do not know what to do. It is not that the wrong policies have been adopted. It is that the economic and geopolitical system — the current world order — cannot deliver the radical action necessary.

The OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development), representing the world’s leading industrial economies, considered the pre-pandemic global growth rate of three percent to have been too low. Yet such annual growth rate means a doubling in the size of the world economy every quarter century.

The fossil-fuel corporations plan to extract twice the amount of coal, oil, and gas between now and 2030 than can be burned if we are to restrict global temperature rise to the 1.5ºC ‘aim’ of the Paris Agreement.

This ‘aim’ is not ambitious enough: most climate scientists predict severe damage to the Earth’s eco-system with this level of warming. But even this ‘aim’ falls well below the ‘pledges’ of the COP participants, which, even if implemented, are expected to result in a disastrous 3ºC of global warming. Many leading scientists think we are heading for at least 4ºC of global warming.

Metabolic

The term metabolic rift has been used by some radical commentators, like John Bellamy Foster, to describe what is happening. I prefer rupture because it better captures the violence of a corporate capitalist system that is out of control and tearing apart human societies and natural ecosystems.

Metabolism is a scientific word to do with how chemical changes reconfigure energy and sustain life. All of us need to get science-wise, to understand what is happening to our planet, to get a handle on what I am calling the “Dual Metabolic Rupture.”

Humans are part of Nature. On the one hand, we are animals with material needs and organic form. On the other, our actions impact upon the rest of Nature, sometimes degrading it, sometimes remodeling it, always having an effect.

All the products of human labor are therefore part of Nature. Everything we do to provide ourselves with a livelihood involves drawing upon the resources of Nature and refashioning them into new forms.

These processes are not reversible, but they may be repeatable. If a glacier melts because the temperature rises, the water of which it is formed flows away. If a new glacier forms in the same place when the temperature falls again, it must be comprised of another body of water. In Nature, as in Society, everything is process and motion.

The energy involved in natural processes is a constant: it can be endlessly recycled, but it cannot be destroyed, so whatever you do, it will still be there in one form or another. This is one of the basic laws of physics (known as ‘the First Law of Thermodynamics’).

It follows that human beings may interact with Nature in ways that are ‘renewable’ or ‘sustainable’–where energy is recycled in essentially repetitive ways–or in other ways that cause a metabolic ‘rupture’ or ‘rift’–where energy is reconstituted as a destructive force.

Let us take two contrasting examples. A hoe-cultivator who harvests a garden plot of cassava, feeds the tubers and leaves to her pigs, and then lets them roam to manure the plot, is engaged in a recycling of energy that is ecologically sustainable.

Corporations that extract oil, refine it into petroleum, and then sell it to other corporations to burn in jet engines are doing something quite different: theirs is not a renewable process, but a release of carbon waste into the atmosphere and a permanent remodeling of the Earth’s metabolism.

The basic rhythms of pre-capitalist societies were determined by the cycle of the seasons. But capitalism is a system of competitive capital accumulation hard-wired by the profit motive for exponential growth.

The former were always essentially local or regional, so that what happened in one place had limited impact in others: the latter is now a fully globalized system which has the whole of humanity and the entire global environment in its grasp.

In the end, it is simple: it is the profit machine that is polluting our atmosphere, warming our planet, and destroying our ecosystems.

But that’s not all it’s doing.

Anthropocene

The system — let’s define it: globalized, financialized monopoly-capitalism — is blind to everything except the balance sheet, the bottom line, the annual profit.

The lords of capital have turned the Earth — its lands, its waters, its minerals — into private property. They have commodified its ecosystems and appropriated its bounty. And in their wake they spew waste and pollution that become ‘externalities’ for which others must pay.

Where to start? The catalogue of devastation is so long. Forests are cut down, wetlands drained, soils eroded. Water extraction turns farmland into desert. Chemicals are dumped in oceans, lakes, and rivers. Toxins leak into groundwater. Fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides contaminate food supplies.

Landfills overflow with synthetic waste. Nuclear power plants melt down and fill air, land, and sea with carcinogenic particles. A chemical smog fills urban streets and poisons children on the way to school. Plastic waste degrades into trillions of microscopic specks that infect every living organism.

Now, from deep within this mayhem, a second titan of destruction has emerged to stand alongside the mega-threat of climate change: pandemic disease.

Both titans are formed of trillions of tiny particles. Climate change is driven by atoms of carbon dioxide–tiny particles of dead organic matter pumped into the atmosphere when fossil fuels are burned. Pandemic disease is driven by microscopic parasites — tiny particles of living organic matter that breed, spread, and evolve by infecting the bodies of animals.

But that does not mean COVID-19 is a natural disaster, any more than carbon pollution. Nor is it an Act of God or a “Chinese conspiracy.” Covid is a human-made catastrophe, as much an artefact of the Anthropocene as global warming.

I agree with colleagues who argue that the Holocene is over. This is the term we have used to describe the last 11,700 years of Earth history, since the end of the last Ice Age — until now. From around 1950, and at an accelerating rate since, the Earth system has been undergoing radical change as a result of human action. We have entered a new geological era in which Anthropos (the Greek word for human) is the primary agent of change. The primary form of change is metabolic rupture.

COVID-19 is a pandemic disease of the Anthropocene’s metabolic rupture.

Pandemic

Mainstream commentary on the pandemic is refracted through a neoliberal prism. Attention focuses on immediate problems and proximate causes. I am not talking about serial liars like Johnson and his third-rate cabinet of public-school toffs and corporate spivs. I am talking about more honest commentators keen to see through the spin and smoke-cloud that shields a corrupt and incompetent political class.

But it is not enough to expose the negligence, crony capitalism, and eugenicist experiments of the Tories–the failure of test-and-trace, the lack of PPE, the locking down too late and lifting too early, the discharging of the sick into care homes, the spreading of the virus in schools and universities, and so much more.

It is necessary, but not enough. The narcissistic charlatan who runs the government might eventually be thrown out. But so what? There is a much bigger issue: the metabolic rupture between corporate agribusiness and natural ecology that has created the multiple global incubators of new deadly diseases.

In 1950, a large proportion of the Earth’s people were peasant farmers, predominantly in the Global South. As recently as 1980, only 20 percent of China’s population was urban; the proportion today is 60 percent. A growing number of those who remain in the villages, moreover, have been transformed into wage-laborers.

The advance of corporate agribusiness is relentless. As I write, the Hindu-chauvinist regime of Narendra Modi is facing an uprising of small farmers whose livelihoods are threatened with destruction by neoliberal “reform.” So desperate is their plight that record numbers of India’s small farmers have been committing suicide.

As well as destroying traditional communities, agribusiness is expanding into the wilderness, uprooting forests, destroying the diversity and balance of natural ecologies, and replacing them with vast monocultures. Half the habitable surface of the Earth is now devoted to agriculture, with millions of acres added every year.

Much of the crop-land produces animal feed for the hundreds of millions of cattle, sheep, pigs, and poultry being fast-fattened for the global supply-chains that loop the world. The mega-complexes of Big Farm’s industrialised animal production are laced around and between the mega-slums of the Global South’s ever-growing urban proletariat.

This is what links a remote bat-cave in hinterland China with the morgues of New York and London. Big Farm batters down natural ecology, destroying diversity and firebreaks. Viruses that would have burnt themselves out in the forest for lack of carriers adapt to a new ecology of monoculture, animal factories, and slum cities; they mutate and evolve and then achieve fast-track transmission through mass concentrations of the same species.

The global supply-chains of giant transnationals with operations in half a dozen countries and markets in a thousand cities do the rest.

Once a new variant is established, it replicates by the trillion at hyper-speed, throwing up chance mutations, testing new ways of spreading. The disease becomes endemic and chronic — embedded in human society — and continues to evolve, waging a relentless life-or-death struggle against lockdowns and vaccines by constant shape-sifting in its efforts to breach the defenses.

Warning

This–the pandemic diseases created and spread by corporate agribusiness–is then layered over societies mired in poverty and stripped of public health-provision by neoliberal ‘structural adjustment programs’, privatization, and austerity cuts.

The epidemiologists have been warning of the dangers for a quarter of a century. There have been dozens of outbreaks of different viruses or variants, all involving a similar basic mechanism: the introduction of a wild-animal virus, its transmission and evolution through factory-farm complexes, a jump from animal to human, often in mutant form, and rapid global spread through transnational supply-chains.

The warning, endlessly repeated, was that, sooner or later, one of the new diseases created by neoliberal capitalism would take off. But there is no profit in pandemic precaution.

The improvised plague cemeteries; the body-bags in the morgues; the patients breathing through ventilators; the traumatised and exhausted health workers; the everyday folk left grieving; the jobs lost, businesses gone bust, homes lost to the bailiffs; the swelling toll of mental breakdowns; the loneliness, the shriveled lives, the sense of desolation and despair: all this and more amount to so many ‘externalities’ for the profit machine.

The machine carries on. It is being recalibrated. Some businesses may be shutting down, but big capital is highly mobile. The money moves at click-key speed. It flows from a place where profits are down to another where they are up.

America’s 660 billionaires, for example, are doing just fine right now. Since March last year, their wealth has increased 39 percent, from just under $3 trillion to more than $4 trillion today. It is the rest of us, of course, who pay for the system’s ‘externalities’.

Those ‘externalities’ now take the form of a Dual Metabolic Rupture between humanity and the planet, as industrial pollution destroys our ecosystem, and agribusiness generates wave after wave of killer pathogen. We are the inhabitants of a new geological age — the Anthropocene — in which globalized, financialized monopoly-capitalism has become an existential threat to life on Earth.

What happens next depends on what we do. The imperative to get active has never been greater.

https://climateandcapitalism.com/2021/0 ... c-rupture/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: The Long Ecological Revolution

Post by blindpig » Fri Jun 04, 2021 2:12 pm

Red Alert: Only One Earth
JUNE 2, 2021
Español Português


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A new report from the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), Making Peace with Nature (2021), highlights the ‘gravity of the Earth’s triple environmental emergencies: climate, biodiversity loss, and pollution’. These three ‘self-inflicted planetary crises’, the UNEP says, put ‘the well-being of current and future generations at unacceptable risk’. This Red Alert, released for World Environment Day (5 June), is produced with the International Week of Anti-Imperialist Struggle.



What is the scale of the destruction?
Ecosystems have degraded at an alarming rate. The Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) report from 2019 provides stunning examples of the scale of the destruction:

One million of the estimated eight million species of plants and animals are threatened with extinction.
Human actions have driven at least 680 vertebrate species to extinction since 1500, with global vertebrate species populations dropping by 68% in around the last 50 years.
The abundance of wild insects has fallen by 50%.
Over 9% of all domesticated mammal breeds used for food and agriculture had become extinct by 2016, with another thousand breeds currently facing extinction.
Ecosystem degradation is accelerated by capitalism, which intensifies pollution and waste, deforestation, land-use change and exploitation, and carbon-driven energy systems. For example, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s report, Climate Change and Land (January 2020), notes that only 15% of known wetlands remain, most having been degraded beyond the possibility of recovery. In 2020, the UNEP documented that, from 2014 to 2017, coral reefs suffered from the longest severe bleaching event on record. Coral reefs are projected to decline dramatically as temperatures rise; if global warming rises to 1.5°C, only 10-30% of reefs will remain, and if global warming rises to 2°C, then less than 1% of reefs will remain.

As things stand, there is a good chance that the Arctic Ocean may be ice-free by 2035, which will disrupt both the Arctic ecosystem and the circulation of ocean currents, possibly transforming global and regional climate and weather. These changes in the Arctic ice cover have already triggered a race among major powers for military domination in the region and for control over valuable energy and mineral resources, opening the door even further for devastating ecological destruction; in January 2021, in a paper titled Regaining Arctic Dominance, the US military characterised the Arctic as ‘simultaneously an arena of competition, a line of attack in conflict, a vital area holding many of our nation’s natural resources, and a platform for global power projection’.

The warming of the ocean comes alongside the annual dumping of up to 400 million tonnes of heavy metals, solvents, and toxic sludge (among other industrial wastes) – not accounting for radioactive wastes. This is the most dangerous waste, but it is only a tiny proportion of the total waste thrown into the ocean, including millions of tonnes of plastic waste. One study from 2016 finds that, by 2050, it is likely that there will be more plastic by weight in the ocean than fish. In the ocean, plastic accumulates in swirling gyres, one of which is the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, an estimated mass of 79,000 tonnes of ocean plastic floating inside a concentrated area of 1.6 million km 2 (roughly the size of Iran). Ultraviolet light from the sun degrades the debris into ‘microplastics’, which cannot be cleaned up, and which disrupts food chains and ruins habitats. The dumping of industrial waste into the waters, including in rivers and other freshwater bodies, generates at least 1.4 million deaths annually from preventable diseases that are associated with pathogen-polluted drinking water.

The waste in the waters is only a fraction of the waste produced by human beings, which is estimated to be 2.01 billion tonnes per year. Only 13.5% of this waste is recycled, while only 5.5% is composted; the remaining 81% is discarded in landfills, incinerated (which releases greenhouse and other toxic gases), or finds its way into the ocean. At the current rate of waste production, it is estimated that this figure will rise by 70% to 3.4 billion tonnes by 2050.

No study shows a decrease in pollution, including the generation of waste, or a slowing down of the rise in temperature. For instance, the UNEP’s Emissions Gap Report (December 2020) shows that the world at the present rate of emissions is on track for warming by at least 3.2°C above pre-industrial levels by 2100. This is far above the limits set by the Paris Agreement of 1.5°-2.0°C. Planetary warming and environmental degradation feed into each other: between 2010 and 2019, land degradation and transformation – including deforestation and the loss of soil carbon in cultivated land – contributed a quarter of greenhouse gas emissions, with climate change further worsening desertification and the disruption of soil nutrition cycles.



What are common and differentiated responsibilities?
In the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development declaration, the seventh principle of ‘common but differentiated responsibilities’ – agreed upon by the international community – establishes that all nations need to take on some ‘common’ responsibilities to reduce emissions, but that the developed countries bear the greater ‘differentiated’ responsibility due to the historical fact of their far greater contribution to cumulative global emissions causing climate change. A look at the data from Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Centre’s Global Carbon Project shows that the United States of America – by itself – has been the largest source of carbon dioxide emissions since 1750. The main historical carbon emitters were all industrial and colonial powers, mainly European states and the United States of America. From the 18th century, these countries have not only emitted the bulk of the carbon into the atmosphere, but they also continue to exceed their fair share of the Global Carbon Budget in proportion to their populations. The countries with the least responsibility for creating the climate catastrophe – such as small island states – are the ones hardest hit by its disastrous consequences.

Cheap energy based on coal and hydrocarbons, along with the looting and plundering of natural resources by colonial powers, enabled the countries of Europe and North America to enhance the well-being of their populations at the expense of the colonised world. Today, the extreme inequality between the standard of living for the average European (747 million people) and the average Indian (1.38 billion people) is as stark as it was a century ago. The reliance by China, India, and other developing countries on carbon – particularly coal – is indeed high; but even this recent use of carbon by China and India is well below that of the United States. The 2019 figures for per capita carbon emissions of Australia (16.3 tonnes) and the US (16 tonnes) are more than twice that of China (7.1 tonnes) and India (1.9 tonnes).

Every country in the world has to make advances to transition from reliance upon carbon-based energy and to prevent the large-scale degradation of the environment, but the developed countries must be held accountable for two key urgent actions:

Reducing harmful emissions. Developed countries must urgently bring about drastic emission cuts of at least 70-80% of 1990 levels by 2030 and commit to a pathway to further deepen these cuts by 2050.
Capacitating mitigation and adaption. Developed countries must assist developing countries by transferring technology for renewable energy sources as well as by providing financing to mitigate and adapt to the impacts of climate change. The 1992 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change recognised the importance of the geographical divide of industrial capitalism between the Global North and South and its impact on respective inequitable shares of the global carbon budget.
That is why all of the countries at the numerous Climate Conferences agreed to create a Green Climate Fund at the Cancun Conference in 2016. The current target is $100 billion annually by 2020. The United States under the new Biden administration has pledged to double its international finance contributions by 2024 and triple its contributions for adaptation, but, given the very low baseline, this is highly inadequate. The International Energy Agency suggests each year in its World Energy Outlook that the actual figure for international climate finance should be in the trillions. None of the Western powers have intimated anything like a commitment of that scale to the Fund.



What can be done?
1.Shift to zero carbon emissions. The world’s nations as a whole, led by the G20 (which accounts for 78% of all global carbon emissions), must enact realistic plans to shift to zero net carbon emissions. Practically speaking, this means zero carbon emissions by 2050.
2.Reduce the US military footprint. Currently, the US military is the single largest institutional emitter of greenhouse gases. The reduction of the US military footprint would considerably reduce political and environmental problems.
3.Provide climate compensation for developing countries. Ensure that developed countries provide climate compensation for loss and damages caused by their climate emissions. Demand that the countries that polluted the waters, soil, and air with toxic and hazardous wastes – including nuclear waste – bear the costs of clean-up; demand the cessation of the production and use of toxic waste.
4.Provide finance and technology to developing countries for mitigation and adaption. Additionally, developed countries must provide $100 billion per year to address the needs of developing countries, including for adaptation and resilience to the real and disastrous impact of climate change. These impacts are already borne by developing countries (particularly the low-lying countries and small island states). Technology must also be transferred to developing countries for mitigation and adaptation.

https://thetricontinental.org/red-alert-11-environment/

Those numbers on the losses of biodiversity ain't no joke and reflect the observations and experience of this amateur naturalist over that 50 year period.There ain't 'nothin' out there no more, as much as I miss the presence of so many amphibians & reptiles and birds it is the reduction of insect numbers and diversity, as monitored by those attracted to lights at evening in the countryside, that is particularly scary.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: The Long Ecological Revolution

Post by blindpig » Mon Jun 07, 2021 2:10 pm

Ecosocialist Alliance Statement on G7 Meeting
June 7, 2021
For a just ecosocialist transition from capitalism’s unsustainable chaos

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Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the UK and the US (and the EU) have a great part of the immense wealth of the richest countries in the world in 2021. This wealth is more than sufficient to provide for the needs for food, water, health, housing and education of the global population.

We face multiple interlinked and inseparable crises. Climate, environment, mass extinctions, emergent infectious diseases and economic. Oligarchic ownership of industry and the transnational corporations are key contributors to environmental degradation and to emergent infectious diseases crises. They are inimical and a core barrier to the urgent measures needed to address the nested crises we face.

The world and its population need system change, a just ecosocialist transition from the unsustainable chaos of neo-liberal capitalism.

We call upon the G7 nations to agree a plan in preparation for the COP26 meeting in November this year:

On the Covid-19 pandemic and emergent infectious disease crisis to:

Immediately introduce a patent waiver for Covid-19 vaccines that would allow countries to manufacture treatments locally, fully fund COVAX, and set up an aid fund to help with vaccine manufacturing, research and development.
Increase funding to the WHO.
On the climate crisis:

Agree that fossil fuels must stay in the ground – (no new coal mine in west Cumbria, UK) – We need a massive global program of green public works investing in green jobs to develop renewable energy, replace harmful technology reliant on fossil fuel energy in homes, industry and agriculture, with free technology transfer for developing countries.
Agree and implement a significant cut in greenhouse gas emissions of 70% by 2030, from a 1990 baseline. We need honest and transparent accounting in measurement of emissions, taking account of outsourcing, exposing the dishonesty of offsetting calculations, and including military greenhouse gas emissions in calculations of the reductions needed.
End emissions trading schemes and make genuine reductions in harmful emissions.
Recognise the particular impacts of the long-term global crisis and the knock-on effects on the localised catastrophic events on women, children, elders and disabled people – catastrophe climate events and sea level rises produce the casualties of the event, but the victims are the result of systematic abuse, discrimination, and failure of governmental and corporate responsibility.
On the environment and mass extinction crises:

Move away from massive factory farms and large scale monoculture agribusiness as a method of producing food and support small farmers and eco-friendly farming methods, and invest in green agricultural technology to reduce synthetic fertiliser and pesticide use in agriculture, replacing these with organic methods.
End deforestation in the tropical and boreal forests by reducing demand in G7 countries for food, timber and biofuel imports.
End food and nutrition insecurity for small farmers in the global south by promoting an agricultural system based on human rights and food sovereignty through giving local control over natural resources, seeds, land, water, forests and knowledge and technology.
Commit to a massive increase in protected areas for biodiversity conservation, both in the G7 countries and make funding and support available to do this in the global south.
To recognise that migration is already and will increasingly be driven by long term environmental change and degradation resulting from climate change, driven primarily by the historic emissions of the metropolitan countries of the global north – accommodating and supporting free movement of people must be a core policy and necessary part of planning for the future.
On the Economic Crisis:

Increase wages and cut working hours for all G7 workers and involve trade unions in the economic transition without any loss of living standards, and to allow for greater worker involvement in workplace safety and resilience.
Adopt ‘Just Transition’ principles, creating well paid jobs in the new economy.
Outlaw tax havens, so wealthy corporations and individuals pay their fair share to the economic recovery. The economic costs of the pandemic should not be borne by those least able to do so.
Cancel all international debt of the global south.
Support urgent development of sustainable and affordable public transport.
Provide resources for popular education and involvement in implementing and enhancing a just transition.
To add your signature to this Statement, email
mike.shaughnessy@btinternet.com or eco-socialist-action@proton.com

Supporters

Groups

Green Left (UK)
Left Unity (UK)
Climate & Capitalism (International)
RISE (Ireland)
Anti Capitalist Resistance (UK)
Ecosocialist Independent Group (UK) Lancaster City Council
Global Ecosocialist Network (International)
Anti-Fracking Nanas (UK)
Green Eco-Socialist Network (USA)
Socialist Project (Canada)
System Change Not Climate Change (USA/Canada)
Pittsburgh Green Left (USA)
Individuals

Beatrix Campbell (UK) (OBE, writer and broadcaster)
Romayne Phoenix (UK)
Victor Wallis (USA) (ecosocialist author)
Professor Krista Cowman (UK), historian
Dee Searle (UK)
Lucy Early (UK)
Patrick Bond (South Africa)
Derek Wall (UK) ecosocialist author, Lecturer in Political Economy, former Green Party of England and Wales International Co-ordinator
John Foran (USA)
Felicity Dowling (UK)
Steve Masters (UK) (Green Party of England and Wales activist & West Berkshire District Councillor)
Dr. Henry Adams (UK) (ecologist & environmental activist)
Charles Gate, (UK)
Nicole Haydock (UK)
Gordon Peters (UK)
Mark Hollinrake (UK)
Pat McCarthy (UK)
Clive Healiss (UK)
Rafael Arturo Guariguata (Germany)
Declan Walsh (UK)
Jim Hollinshead (UK)
Ken Barker (UK)
Tina Rothery (UK)
John Burr (UK)
Emma Lorraine Coulling (UK)
Andrew Francis Robinson (UK)
Richard Finnigan (UK)
Frank McEntaggart (UK)
Roger Silverman (UK)
Oliver Charleston (UK)
Louise Channon (UK)
Ian Angus (Canada)

https://climateandcapitalism.com/2021/0 ... 7-meeting/

I certainly agree with these goals but seem to have missed the part about 'how'... The thought of the G7 ratifying these goals is as fantastic as the fiction of Kim Stanley Robinson.

Paging V Lenin...
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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