The Long Ecological Revolution

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Re: The Long Ecological Revolution

Post by blindpig » Fri Oct 22, 2021 2:09 pm

CAPITAL VERSUS COMMONS, 3
Against Enclosure:
The Commonwealth Men
October 21, 2021
How early reformers fought privatization of land and capitalist agriculture

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A 16th Century printing press. Commonwealth views were widely disseminated in books, pamphlets and broadsides.

Capital versus Commons is a series of articles on early capitalism and agriculture in England. It was previously titled ‘Robbing the Soil.’

PART ONE discussed the central role of shared property and common rights to resources in pre-capitalist agriculture. In the 1400s that system began to break down, beginning the transition from feudalism to capitalism

PART TWO discussed the processes known as ‘enclosure.’ In the late 1400s, landlords began evicting small tenant farmers to increase profits, often by creating large sheep farms. In the 1530s that change was intensified when Henry VIII seized the church’s vast lands and sold them to investors who raised rents and imposed shorter leases. The twin transformations that Marx called primitive accumulation — stolen land becoming capital and landless producers becoming wage workers — were well underway when thousands of peasants rebelled against the changes in 1549.

PART THREE discusses the protestant reformers who opposed the growing drive for privatization of land in the mid-1500s.

by Ian Angus
“I must needs threaten everlasting damnation unto them, whether they be gentlemen or whatsoever they be, which never cease to join house to house, and land to land, as though they alone ought to purchase and inhabit the earth.”—Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury, 1550[1]
“Accumulate, accumulate! That is Moses and the prophets!”—Karl Marx, 1867[2]
The privatization of land has been justly described as “perhaps the weirdest of all undertakings of our ancestors.”[3]

Enclosure — the transformation of common resources into private property — was a fundamental feature of the rise of capitalism in early modern England. It involved not only new ways of using the land, but also, as both cause and effect, new ways of thinking about it.

The idea that individuals could claim exclusive ownership of parts of nature on which all humans depend was very weird indeed. Contrary to the oft-expressed view that greed is inherent in human nature, the shift to from commons-based to private-profit-based farming was not accepted easily — in fact, it was denounced and resisted as an assault of the laws of God and the needs of humanity.

+ + +

Henry VIII died in 1547, succeeded as king by Edward VI, then only nine years old. For the next six years, actual political power rested with a regency council, headed by the Duke of Somerset until 1549, and by the Duke of Northumberland from late 1549 until Edward’s death in 1553.

Somerset and Northumberland were strong protestants who wanted the English church to move farther from catholic doctrine and practices than Henry had allowed. To promote that, the law outlawing heresy was repealed and censorship was relaxed, beginning a period that has been called “the first great era in the history of English public discussion.”[4]

Liberal protestants took advantage of that opening to campaign vigorously, not just for religious reform, but against sin and corruption in society at large, particularly the erosion of traditional economic values. Their powerful condemnations of greedy landlords and merchants circulated both as books and sermons addressed to the wealthy, and as inexpensive pamphlets and broadsides that were sold in city streets.

They don’t seem to have acted as an organized group, but their speeches and writings clearly reveal the presence of a strong current of anti-capitalist opinion in England in the mid-1500s. Because they focused on the common weal — common good — historians have labelled them the commonwealth men.

Cormorants and greedy gulls

R.H. Tawney’s 1926 book Religion and the Rise of Capitalism remains the best account of the complex connections between social and religious criticism in Tudor England.

“It was an age in which the popular hatred of the encloser and the engrosser found a natural ally in religious sentiment, schooled, as it was, in a tradition which had taught that the greed of gain was a deadly sin, and that the plea of economic self-interest did not mitigate the verdict, but aggravated the offence.

“In England, as on the Continent, doctrinal radicalism marched hand in hand with social conservatism. The most scathing attack on social disorders came, not from the partisans of the old religion, but from divines on the left wing of the Protestant party, who saw in economic individualism but another expression of the laxity and licence which had degraded the purity of religion, and who understood by reformation a return to the moral austerity of the primitive Church, no less than to its government and doctrine.”[5]

The great sin they condemned was covetousness — the desire to accumulate ever more wealth. Hugh Latimer, the most popular preacher of the day, condemned landlords’ greed in general, and enclosure in particular, in a sermon preached before the King and other worthies.

“You landlords, you rent-raisers, I may say you step-lords, you unnatural lords, you have for your possessions yearly too much. For what here before went for twenty or forty pound by year, (which is an honest portion to be had gratis in one lordship of another man’s sweat and labour) now is let for fifty or an hundred pound by year. … Too much, which these rich men have, causes such dearth, that poor men, which live of their labour, cannot with the sweat of their face have a living …

“These graziers, enclosers and rent-raisers, are hinderers of the King’s honour. For where as have been a great many householders and inhabitants there is now but a shepherd and his dog.”[6]

Those views found support in the country’s top ruling circles. The Book of Private Prayer, prepared by Archbishop Cranmer and other officials of the established church in 1553, included a prayer “For Landlords.”

“We heartily pray Thee to send Thy Holy Spirit into the hearts of those that possess the grounds and pastures of the earth, that they remembering themselves to be Thy tenants may not rack nor stretch out the rents of their lands, nor yet take unreasonable fines. … Give them grace also … that they … may be content with that which is sufficient and not join house to house and land to land, to the impoverishment of others, but so behave themselves in letting out their lands, tenements and pastures that after this life they may be received into everlasting dwelling places.”[7]

One of the most vehement critics of greed and exploitation was the London-based printer and poet Robert Crowley, who offered this explanation for the 1549 peasant rebellions.

“If I should demand of the poor man of the country what thing he thinks to be the cause of Sedition, I know his answer. He would tell me that the great farmers, the graziers, the rich butchers, the men of law, the merchants, the gentlemen, the knights, the lords, and I can not tell who; men that have no name because they are doers of all things that any gain hangs upon. Men without conscience. Men utterly devoid of God’s fear. Yea, men that live as though there were no God at all! Men that would have all in their own hands; men that would leave nothing for others; men that would be alone on the earth; men that be never satisfied.

“Cormorants, greedy gulls; yea, men that would eat up men, women, & children, are the causes of Sedition! They take our houses over our heads, they buy our lands out of our hands, they raise our rents, they levy great (yea unreasonable) fines, they enclose our commons! No custom, no law or statute can keep them from oppressing us in such sort, that we know not which way to turn so as to live.”[8]

Condemning “lease mongers that cancel leases on land in order to lease it again for double or triple the rent,” Crowley argued that landlords should “consider themselves to be but stewards, and not Lords over their possessions.”

“But so long as this persuasion sticks in their minds — ‘It is my own; who shall stop me from doing as I like with my own as I wish?’ — it shall not be possible to have any redress at all. For if I may do with my own as I wish, then I may suffer my brother, his wife, and his children toil in the street, unless he will give me more rent for my house than he shall ever be able to pay. Then may I take his goods for that he owes me, and keep his body in prison, turning out his wife and children to perish, if God will not move some man’s heart to pity them, and yet keep my coffers full of gold and silver.”[9]

Back to the feudal

While no one can doubt the sincerity of their criticism of the rich, the commonwealth men were also “united in denouncing the rebels, whose sin could never be justified even if their grievances could.”[10]

The Archbishop of Canterbury, whose denunciation of wealth accumulation is quoted at the beginning of this article, also, in the same sermon, condemned “unlawful assemblies and tumults,” and people who “confound all things upsy down with seditious uproars and unquietness.” “God in his scriptures expressly forbids all private revenging, and had made this order in commonwealths, that there should be kings and governors to whom he has willed all men to be subject and obedient.”[11]

Speaking of the 1549 rebellions, Latimer declared that “all ireful, rebellious persons, all quarrelers and wranglers, all blood-shedders, do the will of the devil, and not God’s will.” Disobedience to one’s superiors was a major sin, even if the superiors were themselves violating God’s laws. “What laws soever they make as concerning outward things we ought to obey, and in no wise to rebel, although they be never so hard, noisome and hurtful.”[12]

Immediately after condemning landlords as cormorants and greedy gulls, Crowley told the 1549 rebels that they had been misled by the devil: “to revenge wrongs is, in a subject, to take an usurp the office of a king, and, consequently, the office of God.” The poor should suffer in silence, awaiting royal or divine intervention.

Like the nineteenth century “feudal socialists” who Marx and Engels criticized three centuries later, the commonwealth men were literally reactionary — they wanted “to roll back the wheel of history.” “From the ills of present-day society this group draws the conclusion that feudal and patriarchal society should be restored because it was free from these ills.”[13]

As historian Michael Bush says, the commonwealth men “showed concern for the poor, but accepted the need for poverty.”

“Without exception they subscribed to the traditional ideal of the state as a body politic in which every social group had its place, function and desert. … They pleaded with rulers to reform society, and proposed various means, but not by changing its structure. Their thinking was paternalistic and conservative. Although they censured the nobility, it was for malpractices, not for being ruling class.”[14]

English protestant reformers in the mid-1500s “inherited the social idea of medieval Christianity pretty much in its entirety,” so their views were “especially antithetical to the acquisitive spirit that animated the emerging society of capitalism.”[15]

In the 1500s, Tawney wrote, “the new economic realities came into sharp collision with the social theory inherited from the Middle Ages.”[16] What shocked and frightened the commonwealth men was not just poverty, but the growth of a worldview that repudiated “the principles by which alone, as it seemed, human society is distinguished from a pack of wolves.”

“That creed was that the individual is absolute master of his own, and, within the limits set by positive law, may exploit it with a single eye to his pecuniary advantage, unrestrained by any obligation to postpone his own profit to the well-being of his neighbours, or to give account of his actions to a higher authority.”

The wolf-pack creed they were fighting, Tawney commented ironically, was “the theory of property which was later to be accepted by all civilized communities.”[17]

A Losing Battle

The commonwealth men were eloquent and persuasive, but they were fighting a losing battle. The aristocrats who owned most of England’s farmland and controlled the government could tolerate public criticism and ineffective laws, but not anything that actually threatened their wealth and power. They blamed the 1549 rebellions on the critics, and quickly ousted the Duke of Somerset, the only member of the regency council who seemed to favor enforcing the anti-enclosure laws.

What remained of the commonwealth campaign collapsed after 1543, when the catholic Mary Tudor became queen and launched a vicious reign of terror against protestants. Some 300 “heretics,” including Hugh Latimer and Thomas Cranmer, were burned at the stake, and hundreds more fled to protestant countries on the continent.

Capitalist practices already had a strong foothold in the countryside in the 1540s, and they spread rapidly in the rest of the century, without regard to what Christian preachers might say. “Forms of economic behavior which had appeared novel and aberrant in the 1540s were becoming normalized virtually to the point of being taken for granted.”[18]

For landowners who wanted to preserve their estates, that shift wasn’t a choice. It was forced on them by changes beyond their control.

“Between the beginning of the sixteenth century and 1640 prices, particularly of foodstuffs, rose approximately sixfold. … [This] put an unusual premium energy and adaptability and turned conservatism from a force making for stability into a quick way to economic disaster. Landed families which stuck to the old ways, left rents as they were, and continued to grant long leases soon found themselves trapped between static incomes and rising prices.”[19]

As a result, the trends that Latimer and his co-thinkers opposed actually accelerated, and their vision of a reborn feudal paternalism was replaced in ruling class thought by what historian C.B. MacPherson calls “possessive individualism” — the view that society is a collection of market relations between people who have an absolute right to do as they wish with their property.[20] That view has remained central to all variants of capitalist ideology, down to the present.

Parliament never passed another anti-enclosure bill after 1597, and the Stuart kings who succeeded the Tudors in 1603 only gave lip-service to protecting the poor from enclosure. “Commissions were issued from time to time for the discovery of offenders, but their crimes were pardoned on payment of a money fine. The punishment of enclosers had degenerated into a revenue-raising device and little else.”[21]

As Christopher Hill writes, in the century before the English Revolution, ruling class attitudes toward the land changed radically. “No government after 1640 seriously tried either to prevent enclosures, or even to make money by fining enclosers.”[22]

But only the rich had decided that land privatization was a good idea. The poor continued to resist that weird undertaking, and for some, the objective now was communism.

To be continued …

Notes

I have modernized spelling, and occasionally grammar and vocabulary, in quotations from 16th and 17th century authors.

[1] Thomas Cranmer, “A Sermon on Rebellion,” The Works of Thomas Cranmer, ed. John Edmund Cox (Cambridge University Press, 1846), 196. The date 1550 is approximate.

[2] Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, (Penguin Books, 1976), 742.

[3] Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (Beacon Press, 2001), 178.

[4] Arthur B. Ferguson, The Articulate Citizen and the English Renaissance (Duke University Press, 1965), xiii.

[5] Richard H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism: A Historical Study (Angelico Press, 2021 [1926]), 140-41.

[6] Hugh Latimer, “The First Sermon Preached before King Edward, March 8, 1549,” Sermons by Hugh Latimer, (Christian Classics Ethereal Library)

[7] Quoted in Thomas Edward Scruton, Commons and Common Fields (Batoche Books, 2003 [1887]), 81-2.

[8] Robert Crowley, “The Way to Wealth,” The Select Works of Robert Crowley, ed. J.M. Cowper, (Kegan Paul Trench Trubner & Co., 1872), 132-3.

[9] Robert Crowley, “An information and petition against the oppressors of the poor commons of this realm,” The Select Works of Robert Crowley, ed. J.M. Cowper, (Kegan Paul Trench Trubner & Co., 1872), 162, 157.

[10] Catharine Davies, A Religion of the Word: The Defence of the Reformation in the Reign of Edward VI (Manchester Univ. Press, 2002), 159.

[11] Thomas Cranmer, “A Sermon on Rebellion,” The Works of Thomas Cranmer, ed. John Edmund Cox (Cambridge University Press, 1846), 192, 193

[12] Hugh Latimer, “The Fourth Sermon upon the Lord’s Prayer (1552)” Sermons by Hugh Latimer, (Christian Classics Ethereal Library) https://ccel.org/ccel/latimer/sermons/

[13] Karl Marx & Frederick Engels, Collected Works, vol. 6, (International Publishers, 1976) 494, 355.

[14] M. L. Bush, The Government Policy of Protector Somerset (Edward Arnold, 1975), 61.

[15] Arthur B. Ferguson, The Articulate Citizen and the English Renaissance (Duke University Press, 1965), 248.

[16] Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, 135.

[17] Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, 146-7.

[18] Keith Wrightson, Earthly Necessities: Economic Lives in Early Modern Britain (Yale University Press, 2000), 202.

[19] Lawrence Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558-1641 (Oxford University Press, 1965), 188, 189-90.

[20] C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Oxford University Press, 1962).

[21] Joan Thirsk, “Enclosing and Engrossing, 1500-1640,” in Agricultural Change: Policy and Practice 1500-1750, ed. Joan Thirsk (Cambridge University Press, 1990), 67.

[22] Christopher Hill, Reformation to Industrial Revolution (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1968), 51.

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Re: The Long Ecological Revolution

Post by blindpig » Sat Oct 23, 2021 3:48 pm

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The “Green Conscience” of the Rich

October 23, 2021
By Geraldina Colotti – Oct 15, 2021

During the Third China-CELAC Forum on Science, Technology, and Innovation, the Venezuelan Deputy Minister for Research and Application of Knowledge, Francisco Durán, said that it is necessary to make a critical reflection on the aspiration of perpetual economic growth since it is not feasible and has caused an extraordinary planetary environmental crisis. In addition, he reiterated that it is still possible to rectify courses and establish which are the real necessities for life and which are fictitious factors that do not justify the environmental impact.

It is a vision that derives from the Marxist idea, expressed by Hugo Chávez, that in order to change the climate it is necessary to “change the system”. It is worth remembering what Karl Marx wrote in the New York Daily Tribune in an article dated May 11, 1858: “Nothing is easier than to be idealistic on behalf of others. A satiated man can easily scoff at the materialism of the starving man, who asks for a mere piece of bread instead of sublime ideas.”

It is worth remembering these words when, with regard to the “ecological transition,” it is the capitalist governments, responsible for the devastation of the planet in the name of profit, that raise the banner of “green conscience.” In addition, in fact, with the same brazenness with which the European Parliament awarded the Sakharov Prize for freedom of opinion to the Venezuelan coup plotters, the United States gave Colombian President Iván Duque a million dollar donation and an award for his environmental advocacy. In Colombia, in 2020 alone, 65 environmental defenders were murdered, while Duque scuttles the Escazú Agreement—a pact signed by 24 Latin American countries that aims to provide greater transparency in information on environmental projects and create the necessary tools to protect leaders who defend the environment.

In the Italian city of Milan, delegates from more than 40 countries met until October 2 to prepare for the next climate summit (COP26), scheduled to take place in November in Glasgow. The Youth4Climate also involved 400 young people, delegates from 186 countries, who drafted a document for COP26. Meanwhile, in order to relaunch the cycle of capitalist accumulation, large multinational groups are focusing on renewable energies.

To support them, a powerful media campaign which, concealing class interests and the search for an increase in the rate of profit—which in any case will not protect the system from a new deadlock in its valorization process—and tries to present the “necessary sacrifices” as if they were for everyone. Instead, it is not wages that are increasing, but electricity and gas rates. An increase that is also affected by the obligations imposed by the European Union’s emissions trading to reduce dependence on coal.

The planned ecological reconversion, which also implies a digital transition, will lead to more layoffs, other industrial accidents, greater wage compression, and other aggression or blackmails to the countries of the South that possess strategic resources. Meanwhile, oil, gas, and coal account for more than 80% of world consumption. The main source of energy used to produce the gigantic amount of electricity used in the digital sector (between 1% and 3% of global electricity consumption, which could increase five fold by 2030) is coal. And digital pollution is advancing at an even faster rate today.

The “green conscience” of the bourgeoisie ends where their wallet begins, until the popular classes decide to make them pay the bill.

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Re: The Long Ecological Revolution

Post by blindpig » Wed Oct 27, 2021 3:21 pm

We demand real zero, not net zero!

October 26, 2021

Net zero emissions and other false solutions allow polluters to continue polluting

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Declaration adopted by the Oilwatch International Global Gathering in Nigeria, October 19-21.

Oilwatch International network members, community representatives from oil regions, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), community-based organizations (CBOs), the academia and the media met in Port Harcourt, the Rivers State, Nigeria, between 19–21 of October 2021, physically and virtually, for the maiden edition of the Oilwatch International Global Gathering.

The gathering, which had the theme Demanding Real Zero, Not Net Zero aimed to present the way out of the climate quagmire and present real options for climate action. The Global Gathering looked critically at the false solutions to Climate Change including the Net Zero concept which world leaders, corporations and investors are echoing as the world gets ready for COP26.

Participants deliberated on the failure of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change’s Conference of Parties (COP) which over the years has become an avenue for trade talks, commercial pledges, and avoidance of real action irrespective of the glaring unfolding climate catastrophe. At a time when the world is experiencing extreme weather events including droughts, wildfires, cyclones, hurricanes and floods, leaders are getting sucked into false solutions that lock in dependence on fossil fuels with the promises of techno-fixes for carbon removals, solar radiation management and/or carbon offsets.

The implications of fossil fuels exploitation on human rights and on primary economies including agriculture, fisheries, and livelihoods of community folks were also discussed.

Participants observed the following:

1Big polluters, the perpetrators of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions globally have continued to wield untoward influence on the climate negotiations as evidenced in the new mantra of Net Zero, a suite of algorithms and technologies, an updated version of the myth of carbon offsetting, which now seems still to be leading the discussions, rather than real climate actions, now under the Paris Agreement.
2Net Zero and other false solutions allow polluters to continue polluting and lock in extractive and other obnoxious activities that empower the fossil fuels industry.
3Net Zero erases the very essence of history and the responsibilities to cut down emissions.
4Countries and territories in the Global South that have not contributed significantly to the problem are disproportionately impacted by climate change.
5The fossil fuel industry and their allied political leaders are seeking ways to expand destructive fossil extraction in places such as the Okavango Basin in Namibia and Botswana, Saloum Delta in Senegal and Delgado in Mozambique while continuing their polluting activities in the Niger Delta, the Amazon, and other places.

Flowing from intense debates and discussions, participants at the Global Gathering declared as follows:

1There must be a halt to the propagation of false narratives such as Net Zero Emissions at a time the world requires Real Zero Emissions as the way out of calamitous climate change.
2COP26 in Glasgow UK, should not be an arena for deliberations on false notions such as Nature Based Solutions, Net Zero, Carbon neutrality, carbon offsetting but rather real actions including keeping fossil fuel resources in the ground.
3The use of Nature Based Solutions should not be an excuse for land and sea grabbing and displacement of indigenous communities.
4All governments need to urgently go back to a binding global emissions reduction rather than the so-called Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) which according to the UN computations of submissions made so far will lead the world to a calamitous temperature increase of up to 2.7oC above pre industrial levels.
5There should be no new coal, oil, or gas extraction expansion plans in line with the best available science as outlined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the United Nations Environment Program.
6Phase-out of existing extraction of fossil fuels in a manner that is fair and equitable, considering the respective dependency of countries on fossil fuels and the importance of transitioning workers in the fossil fuels industry to more social, environment and climate friendly sectors.
7Need for Parties attending COP26 to reintroduce the distinction between the Kyoto Protocol Annex 1 Countries and consider the creation of the Annex 0 countries and consider payment of ecological debts to communities that have been sacrificed over the years while fossil fuel corporations rake in blood profits
8Ensure a global just transition to 100% access to renewable energy, with no corporate and no extensive base, that contribute to energy sovereignty, support for dependent economies to diversify away from fossil fuels, and enable all people and communities, especially in the Global South, to flourish.
9Communities should play major roles and be heard in negotiations at the COP as they are at the forefront of the climate disasters occurring globally.
10Oil impacted communities that suffer impacts like the Niger Delta, or Ecuadorian Amazon, must be properly cleaned up. Oil companies should be held accountable and not continue in impunity.
11Fossil fuel and other extractive companies and their enabling governments linked to human rights abuses must be held accountable, compelled to divest, and obligated to justly compensate environmental defenders, climate activists, and communities they have victimized.
12An immediate release of the arrested staff of Africa Institute for Energy Governance (AFIEGO) — Oilwatch Africa members in Uganda– and a halt to further harassment of earth defenders across the world.
The declaration is endorsed by:

Oilwatch International
Oilwatch Africa
Oilwatch Latin America
Oilwatch South East Asia
Health of Mother Earth Foundation(HOMEF), Nigeria
World Rainforest Movement, Uruguay
Accion Ecologica, Ecuador
Oil Change International, Africa
Indigenous Environmental Network
Kalikasan People’s Network for the Environment, Philippines
Friends of Lake Turkana, Kenya
Environmental Rights Action/Friends of the Earth, Nigeria
Federation of Organizations for Social and Educational Assistance (FASE)
Centre for Environmental Justice, Togo
Friends of the Earth Togo
Peace Point Development Foundation, Nigeria
Policy Alert, Nigeria
We The People, Nigeria
Kabetkache Women Resource Development Centre, Nigeria
People Advancement Centre, Nigeria
Lekeh Development Foundation, Nigeria
SWAYA, Nigeria
YEAC, Nigeria
Centre de Recherche et d’actions sur les Droits Économique et Sociaux Culturels (CRADESC), Senegal
South Durban Community Environmental Alliance, South Africa
FishNet Alliance
No REDD in Africa Network
Corporate Accountability and Public Participation Africa (CAPPA), Nigeria
Media Awareness and Justice Initiative (MAJI), Nigeria
Rainbow-Watch Development center, Nigeria

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Despite Pandemic, Greenhouse Gas Emissions Increased in 2020

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Despite coronavirus lockdowns, greenhouse gas concentrations hit a record last year. | Photo: Twitter/@eha_news

Published 25 October 2021

The volume of heat-trapping gases in the Earth's atmosphere reached a new record high in 2020, with an annual growth rate higher than the average for the 2011-2020 period, warns the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) in its most recent bulletin. The WMO warns that the trend continues in 2021 and that we are far off the path of the Paris Agreement.


The concentration of carbon dioxide (CO2), the most important greenhouse gas, reached 413.2 parts per million (ppm) in 2020 and was 149% above pre-industrial levels.

"The amount of CO2 in the atmosphere surpassed the 400 ppm milestone in 2015. And just five years later, we exceeded 413 ppm. This is not just a chemical formula and a few figures on a graph. It carries major negative implications for our daily lives and well-being, for the state of our planet and for the future of our children and grandchildren," said WMO Secretary-General Professor Petteri Taalas.

The organization warns that if emissions are not curbed, global temperatures will continue to rise. Carbon dioxide is a long-lived gas and, therefore, the temperature level we are currently observing will persist for several decades, even if emissions are rapidly reduced to net zero.

Suppose we add global warming to this situation. In that case, the end result will be a proliferation of extreme weather events such as heatwaves, heavy rainfall, melting ice masses, rising sea levels and ocean acidification, which will have far-reaching socio-economic repercussions.

Approximately half of the CO2 currently emitted by human activities remains in the atmosphere, while the oceans and terrestrial ecosystems absorb the other half.

The bulletin warns of the possibility that, in the future, the oceans and terrestrial ecosystems could lose their effectiveness as CO2 sinks, their capacity to absorb the gas and to act as regulators that prevent further temperature increases.

At the same time, the WMO pointed out, concentrations of other gases such as methane (CH4) and nitrous oxide (N2O) were equivalent in 2020, respectively, to 262% and 123% of the levels in 1750, the year chosen to represent the moment when human activity began to alter the Earth's natural balance.


The economic slowdown caused by COVID-19 had no apparent effect on atmospheric levels of greenhouse gases or their rates of increase. However, there was a transient decline in new emissions, according to the WMO.

Taalas stressed that the bulletin sends a strong scientific message to negotiators attending the 26th session of the Conference of the Parties (COP26) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.

"If the current rate of increase in greenhouse gas concentrations continues, the temperature increase at the end of this century will far exceed the target set under the Paris Agreement to limit global warming to 1.5 to 2 °C above pre-industrial levels. We are way off track," he said.

"The last time the Earth recorded a comparable concentration of CO2 was between three and five million years ago. At that time, the temperature was 2 to 3 °C higher, and the sea level was 10 to 20 meters higher than it is today, but there were not 7.8 billion people on the planet then," he added.

The scientist said that, although many countries are setting their goals to achieve carbon neutrality and that major commitments in this regard are expected during COP26, it is necessary to transform these ambitions into actions that have an impact on the gases that cause climate change.

"We must transform our industrial, energy and transport systems and our entire way of life. The changes needed are affordable economically and technically feasible. There is no time to lose," he emphasized.

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Re: The Long Ecological Revolution

Post by blindpig » Sat Oct 30, 2021 1:49 pm

Graphic: China's efforts in fighting climate change
By Ma Chi | chinadaily.com.cn | Updated: 2021-10-30 07:00

China published a white paper on Wednesday illustrating its progress in mitigating climate change and sharing its experiences and approaches with the rest of the world.

The white paper, titled "Responding to Climate Change: China's Policy and Actions", was issued by the State Council Information Office. It shows the country's robust development in renewable energy and accelerated low-carbon transformation in recent years.

According to the document, China's carbon intensity in 2020 was 48.4 percent lower than 2005, which means it over-delivered on its commitment to cut carbon intensity by 40-45 percent from the 2005 level by 2020.

The country has pledged to further reduce its carbon intensity by over 65 percent by 2030 from the 2005 level.

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In addition, China has prioritized the development of renewable energy.

The proportion of non-fossil energy in its energy mix has been lifted to 15.9 percent last year, up 8.5 percentage points from 2005. It aims to raise the figure to around 25 percent by 2030.

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China has also been rapidly reducing its energy consumption intensity. From 2011 to 2020, it has cut energy consumption intensity by 28.7 percent, one of the fastest in the world.

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During the 13th Five-Year Plan (2016-2020) period, China saw average annual economic growth of 5.7 percent with an average energy consumption growth of 2.8 percent, and the amount of energy it saved during the period accounted for about half of the global total.

The country's new energy industry is witnessing strong growth. China has topped the world in new energy vehicle output and sales for the last six years. The country's NEV fleet surpassed 6 million in June.

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In the manufacture of wind power and photovoltaic power generation equipment, China has established the most complete industrial chain in the world, the white paper said.

By the end of 2020, China was the largest producer of PV cells and modules, and led in the world in newly-added PV capacity for eight years in a row.

In 2020, China announced new targets and measures for Nationally Determined Contributions. The government aims to peak carbon dioxide emissions before 2030 and achieve carbon neutrality before 2060.

http://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/20211 ... 7238d.html

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The Global Climate Wall
October 29, 2021
The world’s wealthiest countries are responding to the climate crisis by militarizing their borders

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The biggest emitters of greenhouse gases spend an average of 2.3 times as much on arming their borders as on climate finance. Some spend 15 times as much. They aim to keep migrants away, rather than addressing the causes of displacement.


Executive Summary of Global Climate Wall, a new study published by the Transnational Institute.https://www.tni.org/en/publication/global-climate-wall

The world’s wealthiest countries have chosen how they approach global climate action – by militarizing their borders. As this report clearly shows, these countries – which are historically the most responsible for the climate crisis – spend more on arming their borders to keep migrants out than on tackling the crisis that forces people from their homes in the first place.

This is a global trend, but seven countries in particular – responsible for 48% of the world’s historic greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions – collectively spent at least twice as much on border and immigration enforcement (more than $33.1 billion) as on climate finance ($14.4 billion) between 2013 and 2018.

These countries have built a ‘Climate Wall’ to keep out the consequences of climate change, in which the bricks come from two distinct but related dynamics: first, a failure to provide the promised climate finance that could help countries mitigate and adapt to climate change; and second, a militarized response to migration that expands border and surveillance infrastructure. This provides booming profits for a border security industry but untold suffering for refugees and migrants who make increasingly dangerous – and frequently deadly – journeys to seek safety in a climate-changed world.

KEY FINDINGS

Climate-induced migration is now a reality


*Climate change is increasingly a factor behind displacement and migration. This may be because of a particular catastrophic event, such as a hurricane or a flash flood, but also when the cumulative impacts of drought or sea-level rise, for example, gradually make an area uninhabitable and force entire communities to relocate.
*The majority of people who become displaced, whether climate-induced or not, remain in their own country, but a number will cross international borders and this is likely to increase as climate-change impacts on entire regions and ecosystems.
*Climate-induced migration takes place disproportionately in low-income countries and intersects with and accelerates with many other causes for displacement. It is shaped by the systemic injustice that creates the situations of vulnerability, violence, precarity and weak social structures that force people to leave their homes.

Rich countries spend more on militarizing their borders than on providing climate finance to enable the poorest countries to help migrants

*Seven of the biggest emitters of GHGs – the United States, Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom, Canada, France and Australia – collectively spent at least twice as much on border and immigration enforcement (more than $33.1 billion) as on climate finance ($14.4 billion) between 2013 and 2018.1
*Canada spent 15 times more ($1.5 billion compared to around $100 million); Australia 13 times more ($2.7 billion compared to $200 million); the US almost 11 times more ($19.6 billion compared to $1.8 billion); and the UK nearly two times more ($2.7 billion compared to $1.4 billion).
*Border spending by the seven biggest GHG emitters rose by 29% between 2013 and 2018. In the US, spending on border and immigration enforcement tripled between 2003 and 2021. In Europe, the budget for the European Union (EU) border agency, Frontex, has increased by a whopping 2763% since its founding in 2006 up to 2021.
*This militarization of borders is partly rooted in national climate security strategies that since the early 2000s have overwhelmingly painted migrants as ‘threats’ rather than victims of injustice. The border security industry has helped promote this process through well-oiled political lobbying, leading to ever more contracts for the border industry and increasingly hostile environments for refugees and migrants.
*Climate finance could help mitigate the impacts of climate change and help countries adapt to this reality, including supporting people who need to relocate or to migrate abroad. Yet the richest countries have failed even to keep their pledges of meagre $100 billion a year in climate finance. The latest figures from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) reported $79.6 billion in total climate finance in 2019, but according to research published by Oxfam International, once over-reporting, and loans rather than grants are taken into account, the true volume of climate finance may be less than half of what is reported by developed countries.
*Countries with the highest historic emissions are fortifying their borders, while those with lowest are the hardest hit by population displacement. Somalia, for example, is responsible for 0.00027% of total emissions since 1850 but had more than one million people (6% of the population) displaced by a climate-related disaster in 2020.

The border security industry is profiteering from climate change

*The border security industry is already profiting from the increased spending on border and immigration enforcement and expects even more profits from anticipated instability due to climate change. A 2019 forecast by ResearchAndMarkets.com predicted that the Global Homeland Security and Public Safety Market would grow from $431 billion in 2018 to $606 billion in 2024, and a 5.8% annual growth rate. According to the report, one factor driving this is ‘climate warming-related natural disasters growth’.
*Top border contractors boast of the potential to increase their revenue from climate change. Raytheon says ‘demand for its military products and services as security concerns may arise as results of droughts, floods, and storm events occur as a result of climate change’. Cobham, a British company that markets surveillance systems and is one of the main contractors for Australia’s border security, says that ‘changes to countries [sic] resources and habitability could increase the need for border surveillance due to population migration’.
*As TNI has detailed in many other reports in its Border Wars series,2 the border security industry lobbies and advocates for border militarization and profits from its expansion.

The border security industry also provides security to the oil industry that is one of main contributors to the climate crisis and even sit on each other’s executive boards

*The world’s 10 largest fossil fuel firms also contract the services of the same firms that dominate border security contracts. Chevron (ranked the world’s number 2) contracts with Cobham, G4S, Indra, Leonardo, Thales; Exxon Mobil (ranking 4) with Airbus, Damen, General Dynamics, L3Harris, Leonardo, Lockheed Martin; BP (6) with Airbus, G4S, Indra, Lockheed Martin, Palantir, Thales; and Royal Dutch Shell (7) with Airbus, Boeing, Damen, Leonardo, Lockheed Martin, Thales, G4S.
*Exxon Mobil, for example, contracted L3Harris (one of the top 14 US border contractors) to provide ‘maritime domain awareness’ of its drilling in the Niger delta in Nigeria, a region which has suffered tremendous population displacement due to environmental contamination. BP has contracted with Palantir, a company that controversially provides surveillance software to agencies like the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), to develop a ‘repository of all operated wells historical and real time drilling data’. Border contractor G4S has a relatively long history of protecting oil pipelines, including the Dakota Access pipeline in the US.
*The synergy between fossil fuel companies and top border security contractors is also seen by the fact that executives from each sector sit on each other’s boards. At Chevron, for example, the former CEO and Chairman of Northrop Grumman, Ronald D. Sugar and Lockheed Martin’s former CEO Marilyn Hewson are on its board. The Italian oil and gas company ENI has Nathalie Tocci on its board, previously a Special Advisor to EU High Representative Mogherini from 2015 to 2019, who helped draft the EU Global Strategy that led to expanding the externalization of EU borders to third countries.

This nexus of power, wealth and collusion between fossil fuel firms and the border security industry shows how climate inaction and militarized responses to its consequences increasingly work hand in hand. Both industries profit as ever more resources are diverted towards dealing with the consequences of climate change rather than tackling its root causes. This comes at a terrible human cost. It can be seen in the rising death toll of refugees, deplorable conditions in many refugee camps and detention centres, violent pushbacks from European countries, particularly those bordering the Mediterranean, and from the US, in countless cases of unnecessary suffering and brutality. The International Organization for Migration (IOM) calculates that 41,000 migrants died between 2014 and 2020, although this is widely accepted to be a significant underestimate given that many lives are lost at sea and in remote deserts as migrants and refugees take increasingly dangerous routes to safety.

The prioritization of militarized borders over climate finance ultimately threatens to worsen the climate crisis for humanity. Without sufficient investment to help countries mitigate and adapt to climate change, the crisis will wreak even more human devastation and uproot more lives. But, as this report concludes, government spending is a political choice, meaning that different choices are possible. Investing in climate mitigation in the poorest and most vulnerable countries can support a transition to clean energy – and, alongside deep emission cuts by the biggest polluting nations – give the world a chance to keep temperatures below 1.5°C increase since 1850, or pre-industrial levels. Supporting people forced to leave their homes with the resources and infrastructure to rebuild their lives in new locations can help them adapt to climate change and to live in dignity. Migration, if adequately supported, can be an important means of climate adaptation.

Treating migration positively requires a change of direction and greatly increased climate finance, good public policy and international cooperation, but most importantly it is the only morally just path to support those suffering a crisis they played no part in creating.

https://climateandcapitalism.com/2021/1 ... mate-wall/
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Re: The Long Ecological Revolution

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COP26: why advanced countries must proportionately make by far the biggest cuts in carbon emissions–factual briefing
Posted Oct 31, 2021 by John Ross

Originally published: Learning from China (October 29, 2021 ) |

The COP26 conference on climate change is discussing an issue which will profoundly affect every person on our planet. Climate change, together with nuclear war, is one of the two issues which can overturn the present basis of human civilisation. Because of the extreme seriousness of this issue, the COP26 conference should therefore be an arena for strictly objective international scientific discussion and international cooperation. Fortunately, as will be seen, strictly objective scientific evidence on the issue of climate change has been put forward in the run up to the conference.

Regrettably, however, COP26 has also become a site for geopolitical propaganda, primarily carried out by the U.S., to try to obscure the realities on climate change. This attempts to present the situation on climate change as being that the advanced countries, and in particular the U.S., are playing a leading role in the fight against climate change and that it is developing countries, and in particular China, which are the chief problem on climate change. This is shown by media reflecting this propaganda–for example the Financial Times, surveying the conference, declared: “China and India cast pall over climate ambitions ahead of COP26.”

As will be seen this claim is the exact reverse of the truth. It is the advanced countries, and in particular the U.S., which are the chief problem on climate change due to their far higher per capita carbon emissions than developing countries. Furthermore, the policy positions advanced by the U.S. are a demand that the advanced countries, and in particular itself, should be given a privileged position in terms of the right to emit far more carbon per person than developing countries. This is unacceptable from the point of view of justice, democracy, the equality of nations, and even racially–this policy demands that overwhelmingly white countries should be given a privileged position compared to people of colour.

Because of the seriousness of this a series of articles will be run here on the implications of climate change. But this article has a strictly limited aim of setting out the factual position. This shows why it is clear that the U.S. and advanced countries are demanding a privileged position for themselves and why this is unacceptable.

The IPCC’s scientific evidence

It is fairly well known that the U.S., and advanced economies, attempt to present the issue of climate change in a way that does not acknowledge their overwhelming historical responsibility for carbon emissions and therefore climate change. This criticism is entirely valid–it is simply because it is well known it will not be dealt with here. But what is not so well known is that before the COP26 conference objective scientific evidence has also been put forward on the current situation on climate change which shows exactly the same pattern. In particular, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has published an important report: “Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis”. The purpose of this article is to analyse the data produced by the IPCC.. This clarifies clearly that the claim being made by the U.S. and other advanced countries is for a privileged position in current carbon emissions. This is therefore the issue concentrated on in this briefing.

Analysing the core of the present situation, the key factual data concluded by the IPCC is set out in Table 1. As will be seen the IPCC gives various probabilities of hitting the key goal of 1.5 degrees of warming compared to pre-industrial levels, depending on the number gigatons of carbon which is emitted after the beginning of 2020. Thus with 900 gigatons of carbon emitted there is only a 17% chance of hitting this target, with 650 gigatons of emissions there is a 33% chance, with 500 gigatons a 50% chance of hitting the target, with 400 gigatons of emissions a 67% chance, with 300 gigatons of emissions an 83% chance. All these variants are worth analysing but, as is it the most central one, what will be analysed in this article is the one with the 50% chance of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees. This requires that a global 500 gigatons of carbon is emitted.

Given this 500 gigaton figure it is then easy to calculate the per capita “carbon budget”, that is the maximum allowable carbon emissions for each person on the planet–which is 64.8 tons. Given the population of each country it is then also easy to work out the permissible carbon budget for each individual country. This means that any country asking for a per capita cumulative carbon budget above 64.8 tons is asking for a privileged position compared to humanity as a whole, and any country with a cumulative per capita carbon emission below 64.8 tons is making an above average aid to humanity in meeting this target.

Table 1
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Changes in population

To complete the factual picture, it is then necessary to note that over long periods of time, up to 2050 or beyond, the population of individual countries will change. For example, on UN projections, between 2020 and 2050 the population of the U.S. will increase by 15%, India’s population will increase by 19%, but China’s population will fall by 3%, Germany’s population will fall by 4%, Japan’s population will fall by 16% etc. Therefore, it is necessary to make calculations based not only on present populations but on future population. For this purpose, in this article, projections from the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs will be used.

High per capita carbon emissions are overwhelmingly concentrated in high income economies
Turning to the present situation, it is then completely clear that high per capita carbon emissions are overwhelmingly concentrated in high income countries.

This key data on this is summarised in Table 2, which shows a comparison to world average per capita emissions–to be clear it is not suggested present world emissions are sustainable, they are too high, but this is primarily to simply give a point of comparison for judging present relative emissions.

The pattern is evidently clear. Of the 213 countries (and 3 sub-country administrative regions), for which there is data, 78 have per capita carbon emissions above the world average. But of these 56, that is 72%, are advanced economies. Only 22, that is 28%, are developing economies. In contrast there are 138 countries which have below world average emissions–of which only 15, that is 11% are advanced economies, and 123, that is 89%, are developing economies.

In summary, the factual situation is entirely clear. It is the advanced economies which overwhelmingly have above average per capita CO2 emissions and it is developing economies which overwhelmingly have below average per capita emissions. In short it is advanced economies whose policies are by far most inadequate from the point of view of restricting emissions.

Table 2
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The detailed situation of advanced and developing economies

Looking in more detail at the situation of advanced and developing countries this shows the situation is even worse. Table 3 shows the 213 countries and three sub-country administrative regions ranked by their level of per capita emissions. These are taken in groups of 20–the highest 20 per CO2 carbon emitters, then countries ranked 21-40 by carbon emissions, then countries ranked 41-60 etc.

The pattern is crystal clear. The higher the level of per capita carbon emissions the more the situation is dominated by advanced economies. Of the 20 countries with the highest per capita emissions 16, that is 80%, are advanced economies. Of the countries ranked 21-80th in terms of per capita carbon emissions 40, that is to two thirds, are advanced economies. Only once significantly below world average per capita emissions are arrived at are there more developing than advanced economies in each group.

In summary, it is the advanced economies which have by far the worst results in the world in terms of excessive per capita carbon emissions. And the higher the level of per capita carbon emissions the more the situation is dominated by advanced countries. Therefore, not merely historically but in terms of current emissions, the advanced economies have the policies which most diverge from what is required for the planet. By far the greatest violators of what is required on climate change are the advanced economies, and the biggest proportional reductions which are required are therefore also in advanced economies.

Table 3
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The fake criteria for climate emissions put forward by the U.S.

Once the facts on global climate emissions are grasped then the fake character of the criteria for U.S. “leadership” in fighting climate change becomes transparently clear.

The U.S. attempts to present the situation as the criterion for success in fightin climate change is the percentage reduction from current emissions. Thus, Biden has announced that the U.S. aims at “to achieve a 50-52 percent reduction from 2005 levels” of emissions which is supposed to represent “Building on past U.S. leadership” Given that in 2005 U.S. per capita CO2 emissions were 20.8 tons this means that the U.S. proposes to reduce per capita carbon emissions by 2030 to 10.4 tons. But this means that by 2030 the U.S. proposes that its level of per capita CO2 emissions should be 220% of the present world average!

That is not leadership, it is carbon damage on an incredible scale, and a claim for a completely privileged position for the U.S. in the world. It means, for example, that by 2030 the U.S. claims its per capita carbon emissions should be 42% higher than China’s are today. This is not U.S. leadership; it is to be a total climate change laggard.

The entire method put forward by the U.S., based on percentage reduction from present emissions levels, is fraudulent–a distortion of reality. Because all this method does is to protect the position of the highest CO2 emitters! To take a few examples, if the U.S method of aiming at a 50% reduction in emissions by 2030 was aimed at, and applied to present levels, this would mean a claim that the U.S. was allowed to emit per capita 8.0 tons of CO2, China was entitled to 3.7 tons, Brazil to 1.2 tons, India to 1.0 tons, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo to 0.02 tons! Such comparisons have nothing to do with U.S. leadership on climate change–on the contrary it shows the U.S. is claiming a privileged position for itself. It also shows why similar claims for a privileged position by advanced economies must be rejected.

What is being shown by the U.S. is not leadership on climate change but a claim for privilege by advanced countries and, in reality, for the white population of these countries against the overwhelming majority of humanity who are people of colour and who live in developing countries. Such an approach is not merely unacceptable from the point of view of justice but it is also ineffectual–it will obviously never be accepted by the 84% of the world’s population who live outside the advanced economies.

The real situation on climate change

Fortunately, the scientific data produced by the IPCC makes it possible to calculate the real changes which are required to combat climate change. These are summarised in Table 4.

To analyse the effect of this, as with most issues in the world–such as the percentage of world population, the percentage of world GDP etc–the key consequences for climate change are concentrated in a small number of countries. Only 17 countries each have carbon emissions accounting for more than 1% of the world total. Together these countries account for 75% of world carbon emissions. Therefore, analysis of these countries is sufficient to follow the world trends.

The key data for these countries is set out in Table 4. The pattern is clear. Of the world’s largest emitters of carbon only two, Saudi Arabia and Australia, have higher per capita emissions than the U.S. Furthermore, despite their extremely reressive policies, these are small emitters of CO2 compared to the U.S.- Australia accounts for 1.2% of world carbon emissions, and Saudi Arabia 1.8%, compared to the U.S.’s 14.8%.

In summary, the U.S. stands in a higher league all of its own in terms of its per capita CO2 emissions. In particular, making the comparison to the largest developing countries, China’s per capita CO2 emissions are only 46% of those of the U.S., Indonesia’s 15%, Brazil’s 14%, and India’s 12%. Any attempt to portray the U.S. as a leader in fighting climate change is therefore grotesque.

Because U.S. per capita carbon emissions are so much higher than any other major country it makes clear why U.S. CO2 emissions cuts must be correspondingly much more rapid than any other major country to fit within its carbon budget. As shown in Table 4 U.S. annual average reduction of CO2 emissions from 2020 onwards must be 20.2% a year–compared to 10.2% a year for China and 3.0% for India. (To be clear, for all countries, this is not the precise annual average that must be achieved but the annual average achieved over time–so if emissions fall more slowly, or rise, in the initial period there must be correspondingly rapid falls after this initial period). To give a comparison, this average means that by 2030 U.S. emissions per capita should have fallen to 1.3 tons per capita, compared to its proposed target of 8.0 tons per capita. That is the U.S. is proposing that its per capital carbon emissions by 2030 should be more than 6 times what is required to fit within its carbon budget. This has nothing to do with climate change leadership, it is climate change vandalism.

Table 4
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Conclusion

The above data does not all detract from the fact that climate change is one of the two most serious threats facing humanity–together with nuclear war. The world needs to radically reduce CO2 emissions. As China, fortunately, is the most advanced of the developing countries, it needs to limit CO2 emissions. But the attempt to present developing countries, and in particular China, as most responsible for the danger of climate change is purely propaganda by the U.S.–China ranks number 50 in the world in terms of per capita carbon emissions. The U.S., and advanced economies in general, are not leading on climate change, they are claiming a privileged position for themselves.

There are three main forces in the world who are fighting for a just response to the common threat to humanity posed by climate change:

The Global South–that is developing countries, who as the data shows, are being fundamentally discriminated against by the advanced countries and in particular the U.S.
China, which as the most advanced and powerful of the developing countries, is a particular target of U.S. distortion and propaganda.
Progressive sections of the Western movement against climate change–while, as noted, the U.S. is primarily engaging in propaganda and attacks on developing countries and China there are nevertheless undoubtedly forces within the Western movement against climate change which reject such positions. Furthermore while scientists, and research by organisations such as the IPCC, tries to be careful not to become too involved in policy questions their research entirely undermines the claims of the U.S.
To put matters in a nutshell, the U.S. is regretably attempting to carry out a crude propaganda campaign around COP26. The facts show clearly that what the U.S. is attempting to claim for itself is a privileged position against climate change. It is not the leader on climate change but the world’s greatest climate change laggard. It is advanced economies which are claiming a privileged position on climate change. Any force fighting climate change in the West has to take this as a fundamental starting point. The U.S. is not leading the world on the fight against climate change, it is simply claiming a privileged position for itself.

The fight against a climate change is a very real one for the whole of humanity. But its starting point, as the facts show, must be that it is the advanced countries that must make by far the biggest proportional reductions in CO2 emissions. The attempt by the U.S. to present the main problems as being in the developing countries, not the advanced ones, is a pure statistical distortion.

https://mronline.org/2021/10/31/cop26-w ... -briefing/

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Africans looking to more efforts from COP 26
By EDITH MUTETHYA in Nairobi, Kenya | China Daily | Updated: 2021-11-01 09:14

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A demonstrator holds up a sign as he attends a Fridays for Future climate strike in Milan, Italy ahead of Glasgow's COP26 meeting on Oct 1, 2021. [Photo/Agencies]

As the 26th United Nations Climate Change Conference of the Parties gets underway, Africans expect action from it on mitigation, finance and adaptation in the effort to combat climate change impact.

Despite contributing only 2 to 3 percent of global emissions, the continent still stands out disproportionately as the most vulnerable region in the world.

Barbara Creecy, South African minister for Forestry, Fisheries and the Environment, said the Glasgow outcome should be a package deal that advances the negotiations and all three aspects of the Paris Agreement, namely mitigation, adaptation and implementation of climate action.

"South Africa envisages an outcome at COP 26 on adaptation that will enable practical progress, including launching a formal program of work to implement the Global Goal on Adaptation," she said.

Though countries have committed to open and transparent discussions and have shown a willingness for a successful COP 26, financial issues remain the greatest challenge, Creecy said.

Differences exist

Huge differences exist between developed and developing countries on the financing required for developing and least developed countries to meet the challenges posed by climate change, she said.

She cited Article 2.1.c of the Paris Agreement, which requires all parties to make financial flows consistent with a pathway toward low greenhouse gas emissions and climate resilient development.

"What is striking is that we have as yet no common global understanding or guidelines to implement Article 2.1.c. These issues together with the future of long-term climate finance deliberations under the convention will be a make or break for COP 26, as was the case in Madrid at COP 25 in 2019."

Developing countries cannot implement ambitious mitigation targets unless there is sustainable, cost effective financing from developed countries and other multilateral and philanthropic institutions.

"South Africa is among the many vulnerable developing countries that are already experiencing the impacts of climate change. This is evident from the increased frequency of extreme weather conditions such as floods, droughts and heat waves that threaten lives, food security, and infrastructure," Creecy said.

COP 26 must reestablish trust between developed and developing countries by ensuring existing financing commitments are honored, she said.

Similar sentiments were shared by Akinwumi A. Adesina, president of the African Development Bank, who said action, and not promises, is critical in the key areas of mitigation, finance and adaptation.

"Action to avoid the worst impacts of the climate disaster must start with developed countries making true on their commitment of 'new, additional' and predictable climate finance from a floor of $100 billion per year."

Michael Olusanya, executive director of the environmental protection group GreenWay International Foundation in Ghana, said the outcome of COP 26 will determine the direction of key aspects of the fight against climate change.

http://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/20211 ... 7275a.html

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As Chávez said, ‘let’s not change the climate, let’s change the system!’: a conversation with Max Ajl
Posted Nov 01, 2021 by Cira Pascual Marquina, Max Ajl

Originally published: Venezuelananlysis (October 29, 2021 ) |

This week and through November 12, the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26) takes place in Glasgow, Scotland. COP26 brings together heads of state and other prominent figures to talk about climate change. However, the conference won’t address the central environmental problem: capitalism. In this interview we talk to Max Ajl, author of A People’s Green New Deal (Pluto Press, 2021), which examines the capitalist roots of the environmental crisis, and addresses its impact on countries of the Global South such as Venezuela.

It’s important to bring up the Global South’s perspective on climate change in the context of COP26. In A People’s Green New Deal you argue that so called “green economies” (and in general the proposals that we know as the Green New Deal-GND) often replicate the existing logic of domination, particularly when it comes to the Global South. Briefly, can you explain your hypothesis?

Mao put this simply: “Everything reactionary is the same; if you do not hit it, it will not fall.” We can add: you have to take aim to hit.

The great majority of progressive proposals take aim neither at capitalism nor imperialism. In fact, they are often blind to them. If we want to change the world-system, we need to have a sense of what it is. In the most general sense, drawing on Samir Amin, we can say that it is a system of polarized accumulation, producing great mountains of wealth, on the one hand, and far larger seas of poverty, on the other. That is a feature and not a bug of the system: the wealth accumulated at the core of the system is stolen from the periphery. To change that type of world-system, you need first of all to strike at the current mechanisms of value transfer from periphery to core. Those include uneven exchange of values–or the core receiving goods embodying more labor than those embodied in its exports–and the core receiving goods which concentrate more of the world’s resources than those it exports. Another element is: ongoing primitive accumulation, including the collapse of peripheral sovereignty, as in Yemen and elsewhere, which is part of safeguarding the petrodollar.

The 2010 Cochabamba People’s Agreement went further. It recalled the (unrealized) Bandung-era effort to achieve political and economic decolonization and liberation. But the Cochabamba Agreement added something new: we need to speak of ecological decolonization. In other words, the global ecology’s sinks for waste from CO2 emissions were not just used. They were enclosed by the wealthy states. Because that space cannot be restored in the short term, southern states/peoples are owed some kind of replacement: climate debt, to the tune of six percent of northern GNP per year.

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This map shows that the countries of the Global South are the most affected by climate change. (Photo: University of Richmond)

These are structural features of the world system. Unless you identify them, target them, and strike at them, they won’t fall. They will continue. So, logically, the prevailing proposals for a GND, or for a “green economy,” will simply reproduce the polarized system if they do not take into account these logics, diagnoses, structures, and demands. They will tend to look away from the historical sources of wealth and not support reparations. The point is that we cannot subsist on a politics of GNDs based on slogans such as “just transition,” “sustainable development,” or even “a Green New Deal,” socialist or not, unless they specifically mention these demands and the mechanisms of uneven development.

With that in mind, what kind of reorganization on a global scale is needed so that the people of the Global South don’t end up paying the consequences of the climate crisis?

There are five fundamental elements that are central to reconfiguring North-South relations (the specific internal texture of changes in the Global South’s production and its ecological self-defense strategies are different questions, clearly involving, as the Bolivian leadership has said, food sovereignty and sovereign industrialization among other measures).

One element is the demilitarization of the core states. In effect, southern social movements advanced this demand in the Cochabamba process when they pointed out that the U.S. spends as much on its military as is demanded from the U.S. in climate debt payments. They called for “a new model of civilization in the world without… war-mongering.” Demilitarization is also necessary to achieve a “just transition,” meaning, in concrete terms, stabilization if not improvement in life outcomes for people in the imperial core. Militarization amounts to a horrific use of social surplus and industrial capacity, geared at preserving world accumulation and guaranteeing imperialist value flows. It needs to go.

Second, there needs to be a real respect for sovereignty, and a political struggle to ensure that respect. People in the North need to actively resist their governments’ attempts to economically asphyxiate the South and to impose unilateral coercive sanctions. That means the abolition of the so-called “terror lists,” which are primarily used to criminalize groups in the Arab-Iranian region carrying out any defense of national sovereignty or defense of anti-colonial projects.

The basics of international law need to be respected, including honoring the territorial sovereignty of states like Venezuela and Syria. The latter is occupied by U.S. troops, without any protest from the western left. The former suffers from paramilitary infiltration from Colombia, a U.S. client state–again without much objection from the western left. Needless to say, removing external destabilization does not mean that these countries will suddenly produce autonomist socialist societies. Rather, the removal of external aggression creates a better atmosphere for internal social struggle aimed at more democratic freedoms, internal social(ist) redistribution, and ecological justice.

Third, there needs to be payment of climate debt. Northern environmental movements have purposefully suppressed this demand, inasmuch as they took distance from the Evo Morales and Hugo Chávez governments, all the while hypocritically expressing concern about extractivism (which is an input into the commodities and industrial processes that are key to northern accumulation).

The Cochabamba People’s Agreement and the Bolivian government specifically demanded six percent of northern GNP, around $1.2 trillion from the U.S., and around $3.2 trillion from the OECD on the whole. This includes an adaptation debt, to help “Poor countries and people who live daily with rising costs, damages and lost opportunities for development,” and an emissions debt, since “developed countries’ historical and current excessive emissions are limiting atmospheric space available to developing countries.”

Fourth, there should be a vast and immediate reduction in fossil-energy use and emissions in the Global North, as a consequence of their current and worsening overuse of atmospheric sinks for CO2.

Fifth, there should be settler-decolonization, including support for the national liberation struggles of peoples still fighting against settler-colonial domination in places like Palestine and current-day Canada and the U.S.

Some people argue for an anti-extractivist solution to the crisis. On paper, that might appear to be a great solution. However, people of course actually live in places like Venezuela, Bolivia, and Nigeria, and the conditions of dependency are such that freezing production would be suicidal for them. What policies should be pursued in the extractivist economies of the periphery?

One should acknowledge that anti-extractivist campaigns often reflect real and desperate social issues that people face. For example, people in Bolivia and in Venezuela must deal with horrible ecological harms of resource extraction in their countries. Nevertheless, these anti-extractivist campaigns in the North are often no more than weapons against Third World development.

There is no possible industrialization in any part of the world without resource extraction, especially of minerals. Are people demanding that we live in grass-covered knolls like hobbits? That extraction will produce political, social, and ecological costs, where it occurs is undeniable. The question is how to balance those costs with the majority’s need to escape poverty. There is obviously no simple answer. One answer is to go back to the demands for changes in the terms of trade, (“international action in favor of fair and stable prices for [Third World] exports,” in Ismail-Sabri Abdallah’s phrase).

My point here is both rhetorical and real: all things being equal, if countries could produce half as much lithium or anything else and receive the same proceeds, then resolving difficult developmental dilemmas would be easier. Instead, extractivist theory leads to the “displacement of the debate over politics and policy from North to South,” in the words of Sam Moyo, Paris Yeros, and Praveen Jha. It sidesteps any question of northerners’ responsibility for political transformation (a cynic would say that is why this discourse is so popular!). So one issue is serious international activism around the terms of trade, with the understanding that changes benefitting the Third World, which are entirely possible, could immediately enhance developmental possibilities.

In the words of the Tunisian Observatory for Food Sovereignty and the Environment, “Faced with this conflagration, the obligation to act falls upon all, even if responsibility does not.” Countries cannot simply wait. Venezuela, for example, needs to return to its policies of two decades ago and aggressively support peasant activists’ efforts for agrarian reform. Venezuela is a tremendously rich country in terms of agricultural potential and that potential needs to be realized. The country must be able to feed itself, and furthermore needs to retain more value locally through sovereign industrialization, including a sovereign renewable energy system that could jump-start such a process.

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Chávez at COP15 in Copenhagen, Denmark, when he said “Let’s not change the climate, let’s change the system!” (Archive)

It would be good to have better terms of trade with the West and China, but it would be better to retain value through in situ industrialization. I have little to say about the technicalities of protecting Venezuelan farmers from cheaper imported food and an overvalued currency. However, the current crisis, including the kidnapping of Alex Saab, is proof that the basis of a national economy, where possible, is food sovereignty with its capacity to keep inflation under control.

At the COP15 in Copenhagen, Hugo Chávez said: “Let’s not change the climate, let’s change the system!” More recently, Bolivian Vice President David Choquehuanca made a call for an anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist approach to climate change. Can you talk to us about these calls from the Global South?

The North is calling for reforms and crisis-management, and for an essentially Keynesian green shift in the industrial composition of the world system. At best, it seeks a transition to socialism in some undefined future moment, or points to unreal solutions like space mining. By contrast, Chávez and Choquehuanca stepped onto the world political stage, in 2009 and 2021 respectively, and called for ending capitalism. Choquehuanca clearly denounced “limitless accumulation.” He spoke of the threats of “green capitalism” when brought to bear on technologies in the fields of biology, biotechnology, artificial intelligence, and space colonization. Likewise, Chávez spoke of “global imperial dictatorship,” and placed the responsibility for dealing with climate change primarily on the United States and its allies. They clearly named the global-scale problems their countries and the South confront and demanded a solution for them.

Can we deal with climate change in a way that achieves liberation and justice for all of the oppressed world–including oppressed, alienated, exploited, and colonized people in the core countries–without following these two leaders in identifying capitalism and imperialism as the systems destroying the planet? Is it any wonder that people find it more comfortable to discuss Venezuelan and Bolivian extractivism in the imperial core countries, rather than try to respond to the analysis they put forward and the politics which derive from it?

https://mronline.org/2021/11/01/as-chav ... h-max-ajl/

Is there any greater barbarism than the heedless wreckage of the environment which supports all life on Earth?

They will keep jerking us around with lies and half-measures until life is unsupportable for most on Earth for the sake of the next fat quarter. Nothing short of placing the means of production in the hands of all humanity and adopting a planned economy(the antithesis of capitalism) has any chance of preserving human civilization and life as we know it.

Socialism or barbarism!

( And yes, if there are any Primitivists reading this, we must have civilization, the Anthropocene which capitalism has made requires large scale management. Far from ideal but it's the hand we've been dealt.)
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: The Long Ecological Revolution

Post by blindpig » Wed Nov 03, 2021 1:47 pm

Reducing Production for a Livable Future
November 2, 2021
Stan Cox says there will not be a livable future unless we slash obscene levels of corporate production

THE PATH TO A LIVABLE FUTURE
A New Politics to Fight Climate Change, Racism, and the Next Pandemic
City Lights Books, 2021

reviewed by Don Fitz

As climate change leads humanity’s march to Armageddon, data surfacing during late 2021 suggests that the march could be much briefer than previously thought. “Nature is starting to emit greenhouse gases in competition with cars, planes, trains, and factories,” asserts Robert Hunziker. The Amazon has switched from soaking up CO2 to emitting it. Likewise, the Arctic has flipped from being a carbon sink to becoming an emission source. Permafrost is giving off the three main greenhouse gases (GHGs): CO2, methane, and nitrous oxide. So much Siberian permafrost is melting that buildings are collapsing as methane bombs explode, resulting in craters 100 feet deep.

As global warming becomes obvious, “climate denial” fades into the sunset. The twin twilight stars replacing it are the “Blah, blah, blah” of inaction and “energy denial.” Greta Thunberg famously ridiculed the “Blah, blah, blah” of politicians who publicly moan grave concern and then vote to do nothing. The scorn had barely leaped from her lips when news broke regarding the Uinta Basin Railway in Utah where “the Biden administration is poised to approve a right-of-way through the Ashley National Forest that … would enable crude oil production in the basin to quadruple to 350,000 barrels a day.” Not much chance of capping oil with this administration.

The term “energy denial” reflects an intense belief that “alternative energy” (AltE) such as solar, wind, and hydro-power cause nothing but trivial problems which should be ignored in order to allow unlimited expansion of production. Michael Klare is one of innumerable progressive authors who use justified hysteria over climate change to demand unjustified spending of trillions of dollars on AltE.

Stan Cox whacks all three dragon heads in his new book The Path to a Livable Future: A New Politics to Fight Climate Change, Racism and the Next Pandemic. He dismisses the anti-science and racism of climate denialists such as Trump, strips bare the insincerity of the early Biden administration, and uncovers the lurking dangers of energy denial.

The book goes beyond these. Cox demonstrates that climate change is not a “thing-unto-itself” which can be halted by a quick fix of a few trillion dollars; but, is a pernicious stain in an interwoven fabric of oppressive systems. This lays the groundwork for outlining a multiplicity of problems which must be addressed to confront climate change. These include reducing production via a participatory economy, establishing financial equality, and building mutual aid networks.

Conventional Wisdom

Core to Cox’s analysis is a concept that runs so contrary to conventional leftist wisdom that many will not speak it, read it, or publish it. He is at the forefront of authors willing to melt the golden calf of AltE. He slams congressional proposals for a “Green New Deal,” noting that they fail to include any plans for restricting fossil fuel (FF) production and merely pretend that increases in solar and wind will cause a reduction in its use. Reduction is not written into the plans because FFs are essential for manufacturing AltE equipment. The book portrays the most troubling aspect of AltE to be its promotion as a panacea. This contributes to the preservation of social structures that are most in need of replacement:

“If we attempt to construct a wind- and solar-powered society that replicates today’s high-energy living arrangements and transportation systems, the result will be the creation of ‘green sacrifice zones’ in nations that have large deposits of cobalt, lithium, and other metals that go into the mechanisms essential to renewable electricity systems.”

What Else Is There?

His alternative to a massive increase in AltE is simple and obvious: produce a lot less unnecessary stuff. Within this simple truism, issues of complexity rise to the fore.

Cox continues the tradition of those who realize that increasing complexity leads to an increase in breakdown. More complex systems require more energy to construct, require more energy to function, and are more difficult to fix. Gadgets with 2000 parts are easier to break and harder to repair than are those with 20 parts. Authors such as Joseph Tainter and Richard Heinberg have applied this idea to human systems, explaining that as societies evolve toward more complexity, they require more social energy to maintain interpersonal connections and are more prone to collapse.

Cox takes this concept to a higher level for the US in the 2020’s, especially regarding racial and social injustice, diseases like Covid, and climate change:

“How can a just transition to a low emissions economy be systematically planned if, due to intolerable heat and humidity in the Sun Belt and Mississippi Valley, wildfires on the West Coast and in the South, constant pummeling by hurricanes on the Gulf Coast, and sea-level rise on all coasts, we become a nation of climate refugees, with the affluent snapping up the safe ground? … We can have ecological sustainability or capital accumulation, but not both.”

Entanglements are nowhere more perplexing than in food and agriculture. As Ronnie Cummins points out, “Agriculture is the largest employer in the world with 570 million farmers and farm laborers,” with annual spending on food estimated at $7.5 trillion, making it the largest global industry. His research background means that his analysis of food, land and agriculture is where Cox’s light shines most brightly. He points out that soil depletion interacts with all of these, which then feeds into climate change. Techno-fixes for climate change tend to require more land or other inputs. Simultaneous use of multiple techno-fixes requires enormous energy input which then compromises ecosystems.

An example of the complexity is biogas from agricultural, which has been proposed as a source for energy. Cox acknowledges that such energy would not require additional land but points out that “the amount of gas that can be produced is limited by the quantities of food, crop, and animal wastes available.” Solar energy is a vastly more popular form of energy, but Cox explains its link to agriculture: “Plans for ‘100% renewable’ energy would require solar installation on at least as many square miles of the Earth’s surface as are now occupied by all food production and human settlements combined.”

Then, Who Decides?

How then, could a sustainable society reduce energy sufficiently to avoid climate change while providing quality lives and without wrecking global ecology? How will reducing production affect enormous disparities according to race, gender, impoverishment and location? Who decides what to reduce and how? The author answers by returning to ideas from his previous book, Any Way You Slice It and combining them with concepts of participatory economics. Subtitled The Past, Present and Future of Rationing, that book refuted the assertion that rationing would limit the ability of poor people to attain basic necessities. In his current book, Cox explains that rationing would be a central part of reducing resource inequities:

“The phase-out [of FFs] must be accompanied by systems to ensure … much more equitable access to energy. Today, more affluent, predominantly white households have much higher than average consumption of energy in all forms, while millions of of lower-income households cannot afford as much energy as they need.”

Since the largest source of GHGs is unnecessary production by the corporate class plus their luxury waste via “conspicuous consumption,” the focus of rationing must be on producing vastly fewer wasteful products and more of those required for human existence. Cox concludes that “We need a more serious debate over how to determine which products and services are essential.” Affirming that “the path to a livable future is clearly not going to be a capitalist one,” he suggests that economic decisions cannot be left to “Blah, blah, blah” politicians. Instead, they must be discussed far more broadly: “Those who are affected by the rules must be the ones who make the rules and also monitor” the use of resources. Cox advocates citizen’s assemblies as the beginning point of deliberation that would feed into a multi-layered administration that would finalize and carry out polities.

As an example of how such a participatory economic system could work, Cox details how Cuba responded to the Covid crisis by collecting information from patients and doctors at neighborhood medical offices and then sending that information to clinics, which summarized it and passed it to national health decision-makers. Far from producing health care less efficient than a market economy, Cuba’s system of health care rationing via participatory input allowed it to have a more successful response to Covid than did the US.

While rationing systems and participatory economics are essential components of a new society, they are the mechanistic parts. Humanity will not be reborn without passionately adopting a deeper understanding of social relationships. For this, Cox looks to mutual aid, which fuses a world view with ongoing actions of helping others in need.

It is fitting that one of the first examples Cox gives of mutual aid is the United Farm Workers of the 1960s which provided farmworkers with basic provisions alongside mobilizing for labor rights. After all, labor unions throughout history have supported those on strike. The workplaces of the world are where humanity collectively produces those things required for our survival.

The book also describes how the Black Panther Party offered free clinics, sickle-cell anemia screening and the Breakfast for Children program. Huey Newton called them “survival programs, meaning survival pending revolution.” Such visions of people helping each other from an inner desire to do so is reminiscent of Che Guevara’s conception of the “new man,” a dream that became the germ of the Cuban health system.

Going Forward

Even the best analyses suffer an occasional fault and this book is no exception. Though others may skip over it, I spent so many years opposing incinerators that reading this line evoked a “Huh?” from me: “Medical wastes can harbor pathogens and therefore usually must be incinerated.” Actually, even the worst human pathogens do not require anywhere near the 2000 degree heat that incinerators reach for their destruction. Autoclaves work fine for medwaste and do not create the variety of toxins that incinerators do. Fortunately, calling for burning medwaste was a stand-alone lapse that actually runs counter to the author’s overall perspective of advocating the most environmental solution available.

The other problem, however, recurs. Though frequently chastising the Democratic Party (DP) for inaction, the author turns to them for solutions: “We must show them [DP] that they are mandated to represent the will of the people, not the Silicon Valley tycoons, the natural gas extractors.” In reality, neither of the two big money parties is likely to take “meaningful action” regarding climate catastrophe. If the Trump cabal garners support from disparaging ethnic minorities and immigrants, the DP rallies its base with calls for “more stuff,” yielding it even less likely to advocate producing less of the unnecessary.

It has long been said in many ways that problems cannot be solved by relying on individuals and institutions who created them. The novel crisis of climate change nested within intertwined social problems calls for new ways of thinking — ways which are manifested in new mutual aid groups, new trade unions, and new political institutions.

Overall, The Path to a Livable Future may be the most serious and thought-provoking new book on climate change available. It challenges shortcomings of dominant paradigms and offers alternatives that do not shy away from dilemmas.

The proposed solution that is most likely to be scorned is the assertion that it is possible to reduce production without harming the world’s poor. It is worth noting that Cuba has attained a longer life expectancy and lower infant mortality rate than the US while spending less than 10% per person per year. Indisputably, a drastic reduction in dollars spent on health care can accompany a higher quality of life.

When Cox goes through methods of cooling during hot summers and the energy needed for agricultural production, he carefully explains not only the complexity of each but how they fit into the nexus of systems affected by and affecting climate change. The threat to humanity’s existence from climate change is far too profound and connected to far too many other intricate difficulties than to simplify it with slogans for quick fixes. It is well past the time to face hard decisions of how to reduce obscene levels of corporate production instead of fiddling with perpetual energy fantasies while the planet burns.

https://climateandcapitalism.com/2021/1 ... le-future/

Bolding added

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Increase in plastic pollution in marine areas

A UNEP report warns that plastic represents 85 percent of the waste that reaches the oceans, but by 2040 these volumes will triple, "with an annual amount of between 23 and 37 million tons."

Image

2 NOVEMBER 2021

The speed with which plastic pollution advances is explained because this material can travel long distances.

From the Arctic to the Mariana Trench, one of the deepest areas of the ocean; pollution of marine areas is increasing when seeing the amount of plastic that is deposited in these ecosystems.

The speed with which plastic pollution advances is explained because this material can travel long distances, thus moving to urban areas, generating an increase in waste.

How do they get to the marine areas? There are several factors that influence this process, including wind, rain, rivers, drainage or, most unfortunate of all, direct action when plastic waste is left dumped in marine areas.

Plastic represents a serious threat, not only for ecosystems, but for all species that inhabit the planet. We are all exposed to suffer the consequences of the increase in this type of pollution.

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Photo: UN

Alert in marine areas for pollution
With the arrival of Covid-19, plastic waste increased unprecedentedly, according to a report from the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP).

"It is expected that (plastic pollution in marine areas) will double by 2030, with dire consequences for health, the economy, biodiversity and the climate," says the entity.

In addition, it warns that recycling is no longer enough to counteract the effects and calls before the false solutions that are spread about this situation.

If timely measures are not taken, more than 70 percent of this waste will end up in landfills and oceans, and more than 12 percent will be burned, causing more pollution and diseases, affecting the planet to a greater extent.

According to the report, plastic represents 85 percent of the waste that reaches the oceans, but by 2040 these volumes will triple, "with an annual amount of between 23 and 37 million tons."

A danger to all

UNEP has also specified that plastic pollution disproportionately harms groups and peoples in vulnerable situations, putting their basic rights to health and well-being at risk.

This chain of impacts makes it more difficult or impossible to meet the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in a scenario like this.

This report focuses on the issue of environmental justice in the face of plastic pollution, being a scourge that is being exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic, affecting the communities that work near the production and disposal sites of this material.

Every day, waste such as masks, gloves, bottles of hand sanitizers, protective medical suits, containers to carry food, delivery packages, among other plastic products, abound; being several of them deposited in the environment, without evaluating the consequences of that action.

Plastic degradation time and its impact
Plastic in the oceans can entangle, choke, and drown many animals, including fish, turtles, whales, wolves, seabirds, dolphins, and sharks.

Once plastic waste reaches the ocean, it takes many decades and even hundreds of years to degrade. Depending on the type of plastic, the degradation time may vary.

In the oceans, ultraviolet (UV) radiation that comes from sunlight is the main agent that degrades plastic, which is accelerated by the action of the waves. This results in much smaller fragments that continue to break down and become microplastics.

Image

This makes it much more difficult to estimate how long it takes for plastic to biodegrade, but specialists from the entity consider that it is much slower than on earth. Once the plastic reaches the ocean, it is buried and with less exposure to sunlight, delaying its degradation.

During this time, until they degrade, plastic waste causes serious damage to marine fauna. More than 700 species in these areas are affected.

In addition to this, more than a million birds and more than 100,000 mammals each year die as a result of the plastics that reach the sea.

How does plastic pollution affect humans?
UNEP warns that risks to human health and well-being occur from the burning of plastic waste, as well as “the ingestion of shellfish contaminated with plastic, exposure to pathogenic bacteria carried in it, and leaching (separation through solvent of the soluble parts of the insoluble ones) of substances of concern in coastal waters ”.

Plastic pollution can cause deterioration in your nervous system, cancer, leukemia, cardiovascular and even reproductive problems, among others.

“The current pollution is ubiquitous and persistent. Although the world has achieved significant economic growth in recent decades, this has been accompanied by large amounts of pollution, with significant repercussions on human health and ecosystems, as well as on the functioning of some of the main processes of terrestrial systems. like the weather, ”the report details.

https://www.telesurtv.net/telesuragenda ... -0029.html

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Re: The Long Ecological Revolution

Post by blindpig » Thu Nov 04, 2021 1:25 pm

TRANSCRIPT: “Will they mourn us on the front line?” Mia Mottley, PM of Barbados, speech at the Opening of the World Leaders Summit of the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26), November 1, 2021
Editors, The Black Agenda Review 03 Nov 2021

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US President, Joseph Biden and Mia Amor Mottley, Prime Minister of Barbados

Barbados Prime Minister Mia Amor Mottley's comments at COP26, the United Nations Climate Change Conference held in Glasgow, provided an impassioned call for global action on climate change. But what does it mean to beg for your life from the white neocolonial powers who have destroyed the earth?

The tiny eastern Caribbean country of Barbados -- with a population of just 287,371 people and a land mass of just 167 square miles -- has been punching well above its weight of late. Under the control of the British monarch since the first permanent white settlers arrived from England in 1627, Barbados, in a few weeks time, will transition from a parliamentary constitutional monarchy to a parliamentary republic. The island nation is at long last ditching the hereditary monarch as the head of state, currently Queen Elizabeth II (also known as “Elizabeth the Second, by the Grace of God, Queen of Barbados and of Her other Realms and territories Queen, Head of the Commonwealth”), and replacing her with a democratically elected president . Meanwhile, the current Prime Minister of Barbados, the dynamic Mia Amor Mottley, has been using the world stage as a platform to indict the west for its complicity in both causing global crises, and for their absolute apathy in responding to them. Witness Mottley’s viral “Get up, stand up ” speech at the United Nations General Assembly in New York this past September, where she addresses the pandemic, climate change, poverty, and food insecurity. Or watch her impassioned November 1 address to COP26, the United Nations Climate Change Conference held in Glasgow.

Barbados, like much of the Caribbean, is facing what has been called an “existential threat ” from climate change as rising sea levels, the destruction of underwater ecologies, and increasingly powerful hurricanes have the potential to wipe the archipelago off the map. In her COP26 address, Mottley demonstrates that she is acutely aware of this threat, as she is of the “reckless” and “dangerous” nature of the half-hearted attempts by the G7 countries to address climate change.

Mottley’s speech has garnered praise for its stark and unvarnished reminder of the consequences of inactivity on climate change. But it has also sparked another response: a cynical shrug of the shoulders and a “so what?” Given the urgency of the climate emergency, does it make sense for an obviously gifted politician to fly around the world to conferences and assemblies to make these performative appeals in the halls of white power? Should leaders of the smaller, darker nations go begging help from the larger, paler nations when help has never been forthcoming? And what of the fact that Mottley herself is deeply imbricated with these same demonic powers? She was more than willing to develop a pay-to-stay plan during the pandemic that generated national income by encouraging the wealthy citizens of the global north to work remotely from Barbados. She re-implemented a visa requirement for Haitians, themselves struggling with the question of climate change. The Barbadian Defense Forces work closely with SOUTHCOM, even though the Pentagon, as is well known, is the largest single emitter of CO2 in the world. Meanwhile, Ottley’s recent meeting with US Vice President Kamala Harris was as civil, tepid, polite, and uninspired as tea with the Queen of England herself.

Therein lies the contradiction. Mottley’s speech at Glasgow is certainly good. Her delivery is undeniably powerful. Here analysis is clearly on point. But it is also a depressing and quixotic statement on Black sovereignty when a country like Barbados -- a country that is only just beginning to break the chains of colonialism -- must beg for its life from the neocolonial powers. When pretty speeches are a substitute for direct action, while justice is invoked without plans for reparation, we can be damn sure those existential, ecological threats will be realized in the Caribbean, and everywhere Black people live. And they will not mourn us on the front line.

“Will they mourn us on the front line?” Speech at the Opening of the World Leaders Summit of the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26), November 1, 2021

Mia Amor Mottley


…. The pandemic has taught us that national solutions to global problems do not work. We come to Glasgow with global ambition, to save our people, and to save our planet. But we now find three gaps. On mitigation: climate pledges are NDCs. Without more, we will leave the world on a pathway to 2.7 °C and, with more, we are still likely to get to 2°C. These commitments, made by some, are based on technologies yet to be developed. And this is at best reckless and at worst dangerous. On finance: we are $20 billion dollars short of the $100 billion and this commitment, even then, might only be met in 2023. On adaptation: adaptation finance remains only at 25%, not the 50/50 split that was promised nor needed given the warming that is already taking place on this earth. Climate finance to frontline small island developing states declined by 25% in 2019. Failure to provide the critical finance, and that of loss and damage, is measured, my friends, on lives and livelihoods in our communities. This is immoral. And it is unjust. If Glasgow is to deliver on the promises of Paris , it must close these three gaps.

So I ask to you: what must we say to our people living on the front line in the Caribbean, in Africa, in Latin America, in the Pacific, when both ambition and, regrettably, some of the needed faces at Glasgow are not present? What excuse should we give for the failure? In the words of that Caribbean icon Eddy Grant: “Will they mourn us on the front line ?” When will we, as leaders across the world, address the pressing issues that are truly causing our people angst and worry, whether it is climate or whether it is vaccines? Simply put: when will leaders lead? Our people are watching and our people are taking note. And are we really going to leave Scotland without the resolve and the ambition that is sorely needed to save lives and to save our planet? How many more voices and how many pictures of people must we see on these screens without being able to move? Or are we so blinded and hardened that we can no longer appreciate the cries of humanity? I have been saying to Barbadians for many years that many hands make light work.

Today, we need the correct mix of voices, ambition, and action. Do some leaders in this world believe that they can survive and thrive on their own? Have they not learned from the pandemic? Can there be peace and prosperity if one third of the world, literally, prospers and the other two thirds of the world live under siege and face calamitous threats to our well being? What the world needs now, my friends, is that which is within the ambit of less than 200 persons who are willing and prepared to lead. Leaders must not fail those who elected them to lead. And I say to you there is a sword that can cut down this Gordian knot. And it has been wielded before. The central banks of the wealthiest countries engaged in $25 trillion of quantitative easing in the last 13 years. 25 trillion. Of that, $9 trillion was in the past 18 months - to fight the pandemic. Had we used that $25 trillion to purchase bonds to finance the energy transitions or the transition of how we eat or how we move ourselves in transport, we would now, today, be reaching that 1.5 °C limit that is so vital to us.

I say to you today in Glasgow, that an annual increase in the [Subsidy Dependence Indices] of $500 billion a year for twenty years put in a trust to finance the transition is the real gap, Secretary General, that we need to close. Not the $50 billion being proposed for adaptation. And if $500 billion sounds big to you, guess what? It is just 2% of the $25 trillion. This is the sword we need to wield. Our excited one hour into this event if far less than it was six months ago leading up to this event. Can we, with those voices and these pictures from Sir David [Attenborough ] and others, find it within ourselves to get the resolve to bring Glasgow back on track or do we leave today believing that it was a failure before it starts?

Our world, my friends, stands at a fork in the road - one no less significant than when the United Nations was formed in 1945. But then, the majority of our countries here did not exist. We exist now. The difference is we want to exist 100 years from now. And if our existence is to mean anything, then we must act in the interest of all of our people who are dependent on us. And if we don’t, we will allow the path of greed and selfishness to sow the seeds of our common destruction. The leaders of today - not 2030; not 2050 - must make this choice. It is in our hands. And our people and our planet need it more than ever. We could work with who is ready to go because the train is ready to leave. And those who are not yet ready, we need to continue to encircle and to remind them that their people - not our people - that their citizens need them to get on board as soon as possible.

Code red! Code red!

To the G7 countries: Code Red! Code Red!

To the G20: Earth to COP, that’s what it says? Earth to COP?

For those who have eyes to see, for those who have ears to listen, and for those who have a heart to feel: 1.5 °C is what we need to survive, 2 °C, yes, S[ecretary] G[eneral], is a death sentence for the people of Antigua and Barbuda, for the people of the Maldives, for the people of Dominica and Fiji, for the people of Kenya and Mozambique, and yes, for the people of Samoa and Barbados. We do not want that dreaded death sentence. And we have come here to say: “Try harder.” Try harder because our people, the climate army, the world, the planet, need our actions now - not next year, not in the next decade. Thank you.

*Transcribed from the video recording by the editors of the Black Agenda Review.

https://www.blackagendareport.com/trans ... ld-leaders

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The “Free Market” Will Not Save us rom Climate Crisis: 5 Lessons from the Pandemic
November 3, 2021
By Sarah Lazare – Nov 1, 2021

If there’s one thing the past 18 months have taught us, it’s that a capitalist deus ex machina will not reveal itself anytime soon.

When attempting to convey the stakes of curbing climate change, it is tempting to reach for metaphors. What if an asteroid with the power to destroy our entire planet were headed for Earth, and we had the power to change its course, but only through international cooperation? Or what if we had advance knowledge of a massive nuclear explosion that will wipe out human civilization unless we stop it? Would we be giving so much air time to the “let the asteroid destroy the planet” lobby? Or to “pro-nuclear explosion” front groups? Would those positions have any credence at all?

But then, one realizes that we are already living through a metaphor for climate change: What if a deadly pandemic were devastating all of humanity, and we had the power to vaccinate people against it, but failure to vaccinate the entire world put everyone at risk, because it gave birth to new, dangerous variants? Of course, this comparison is imperfect and messy. After all, climate change is already here and, like shortages of vaccine supply, is most devastating for people in the Global South, where the harmful effects of both crises compound each other. From Bangladesh to Honduras, for example, the Covid crisis has hampered the emergency response to super cyclones and hurricanes. But as a reporter who’s been covering the advent of vaccine apartheid since before Covid vaccines were even developed, I have been chilled by what the abuses of private industries, and the fecklessness of wealthy nations in standing up to industry, portend for a climate crises that, scientists say, must be dramatically reversed now, lest we face humanity-threatening mega-storms, droughts, heat, famine, and mass deaths.

Which makes this interview with Thomas Friedman on CNBC Monday all the more bleak. His techno-utopianism is less popular than it was 10 years ago, but it’s still very much the prevailing ideology of policymakers, if not de jure, certainly by default. Again and again, we are told that “market incentives” and “innovation” will be largely sufficient to tackle the world’s most pressing problem:


As world leaders gather in Glasgow for the COP26 United Nations climate talks, now is an important moment to emphasize that the idea that “the market” will save us from climate change isn’t just bad in theory, it’s been definitely disproven by the wide-scale failures of the past year and a half.

Here are the lessons we learned, and the ones we should focus on in the coming week.

1. Companies lie. Since India and South Africa proposed in October 2020 that the World Trade Organization suspend patent rules so that more people can get access to cheaper, generic versions of Covid vaccines, the pharmaceutical industry has waged an all-out campaign against such a measure, to maximize its current and future profits. Companies like Pfizer and Moderna have embraced a key talking point against the sharing of vaccine recipes: Waiving intellectual property rules is useless, because the Global South doesn’t have the capacity to manufacture mRNA vaccines. Establishing such capacity is a laborious process that doesn’t happen overnight. As Stéphane Bancel, chief executive of Moderna, put it in May, “There is no idle mRNA manufacturing capacity in the world. This is a new technology, you cannot go hire people who know how to make mRNA—those people don’t exist.” Such an argument, replete with racism and paternalism, has considerable currency. It makes people pushing for a patent waiver sound like kooky activists who don’t understand how the world works, and it makes pharmaceutical companies look like sage purveyors of advice to those who don’t know any better.

But it turns out that this is an empirical claim that is provably false. On October 22, the New York Times ran a story about 10 different facilities in the “developing world” that could start producing Pfizer and Moderna vaccines if the companies simply told them how—and legally permitted them—to do so. Those facilities are located in India, Brazil, Thailand, South Africa, Argentina, and Indonesia, and they include companies that “are already making other Covid vaccines” or testing or producing their own mRNA vaccines, journalist Stephanie Nolan notes. Of course, this is not news to people in those countries, who are well aware that rich western countries aren’t the only ones capable of producing life-saving vaccines. Indonesia’s health minister told a World Health Organization event in May that the country could produce 550 million Covid-19 doses annually if pharmaceutical companies would just tell it how to.

The news that companies lie certainly is not groundbreaking, and is something that news observers are already aware of, after oil company Chevron was caught lying to the public about the harms of climate change for decades. But when those lies unfold in real time, they can be difficult to detect: Large companies have an air of officialdom and seriousness, especially when those companies claim they are saving the world, and their assertions are frequently treated as fact by news outlets and politicians. In a world where the fossil fuel industry—the equivalent of the pro-Earth-destroying-asteroid lobby—is exerting influence over the COP26 negotiations (even if its formal role has been scaled back), identifying and exposing these falsehoods is of vital importance.

2. International financial institutions like the World Trade Organization are an impediment to survival. The global intellectual property rules established by the WTO in the mid-1990s weren’t just favorable to pharmaceutical companies—they were largely shaped by them, in order to protect their bottom lines. Companies like Pfizer campaigned aggressively to ensure that international patent rules conform to a U.S. model, in which a patent owner has monopoly control over how that patent is used, with rare exceptions. That Pfizer is now profiting handsomely from these rules, while an estimated only four out of 100 people living in poor countries are fully vaccinated, is by design. The WTO rules, after all, were created in the midst of the HIV/AIDS crisis, which saw pharmaceutical companies deny life-saving drugs by invoking patent norms. More than a year ago, Global South countries petitioned the global body to suspend patent rules, but such an effort has so far been unsuccessful. While the United States was initially one of the main opponents, now the European Union is leading the blocking of such a measure. Much of the negotiations take place in the shadows, far from public oversight, even though it’s harder to imagine a debate of greater interest to public wellbeing.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the Global Justice Movement knew the WTO rigs international rule in favor of unbridled corporate power, and those protesters have been horrifically vindicated by the pandemic. But this harsh reality also applies to the climate crisis. As the watchdog group Public Citizen noted in 2018, the WTO has been invoked numerous times to squash environmental protections: “The European Union and Japan have used WTO tribunals to attack Canada over the state of Ontario’s successful feed-in-tariff program that incentivized the production of renewable energy, forcing Canada to revise its groundbreaking clean energy program. The United States successfully attacked India’s programs that incentivized local solar production.” But the harm goes beyond direct obstruction of environmental protections. There are also opportunity costs: International bodies that tip the scales in favor of corporate power foreclose on other possible forms of international organization that prioritize solidarity and internationalism.

3. Don’t trust rich countries’ promises of benevolence. Instead of throwing robust support behind patent waivers, wealthy nations have actually lobbied against them while making repeated and much-vaunted pledges to donate vaccines to the Global South throughout the pandemic. (The Biden administration said in May it supports some kind of patent waiver, but its actual support has been half-hearted, at best.) Yet, there is just one problem: Those countries have fallen dramatically short when it comes to actually delivering on such pledges. An October 21 report from People’s Vaccine Alliance, a coalition of more than 75 organizations, found that rich countries have collectively promised 1.8 billion donations of Covid vaccines, but just 261 million have been delivered, coming to a paltry 14 percent. The global COVAX vaccine distribution effort, backed by the Gates Foundation, fares no better: The report finds that western pharmaceutical companies have made good on just 12 percent of the doses promised to the initiative. These promises garner countries fawning headlines, but delays translate directly into more preventable deaths. While the United States is delinquent on its own promises, it’s already moving forward on booster shots for its own people, infuriating public health activists throughout the world.

Such broken promises are relevant to the climate change discussion because wealthy nations are making similar voluntary promises when it comes to climate change. At the recent G20 summit in Rome, for example, world leaders agreed that they must take action to keep global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius, the threshold beyond which we would see snowballing catastrophe, but were vague on their commitments to actually achieving this, and didn’t even commit to achieving net zero carbon emissions by the middle of this century. If the behavior of wealthy nations during Covid teaches us anything, it’s that rhetoric means very little, and what really counts is what’s materially happening on the ground.

4. Nationalism kills in more ways than one. Since the pandemic began, the United States has continued imposing devastating sanctions on countries like Iran, Venezuela, North Korea, and Cuba. As I noted for the American Prospect, the Biden administration has continued the worst Trump-era sanctions, including maximum pressure sanctions on Iran, which are cutting off vital supplies for treating Covid, and are estimated to be responsible for 13,000 excess Covid deaths between May and September of 2020. Some initial payments from Venezuela to COVAX were rejected due to sanctions, though they eventually went through. As Natasha Hakimi Zapata noted for In These Times in August, “While Cuban researchers have been able to develop a handful of vaccines using Cuba’s reserves, they face shortages of syringes, test tubes, reagents, and other supplies necessary for both testing and administering their vaccines.”

The Biden administration did withdraw from Afghanistan (although a different kind of war still continues), but the United States is barreling forward on other interventions, from drone war in Somalia to continued support for the Saudi-led war on Yemen. Countries in the grips of Covid crises must also grapple with this direct violence, as well as medical systems battered by intervention. One report issued in 2019 found that the U.S.-Saudi coalition is responsible for 72 attacks on medical facilities in Yemen, for example. Meanwhile, rather than sharing vaccine information openly in the spirit of cooperation, the United States has poured resources into cracking down on research “theft” and “piracy,” targeting geopolitical foes like China, Russia, and Iran.

If there is any time to set aside a nationalist, belligerent approach to world affairs, it’s during a pandemic where the wellbeing of everyone on this planet is so obviously tied together. Yet our “national security” apparatus, the most bloated in the world, is actually making the whole world less safe. This includes, paradoxically, the United States, which is left more vulnerable to dangerous new variants that are more likely to emerge when the virus replicates uncontrolled. This reality offers a grim warning as climate change worsens. Not only is the U.S. military a bigger greenhouse gas emitter than 140 countries, but it encourages fortressing, nationalism, and confrontation, in the face of a problem that can only be resolved through global cooperation.

5. The markets will not fix it. Since the beginning of the Covid crisis, we’ve been told that our current system of pharmaceutical development and distribution, in which research is heavily subsidized with public funds but then funneled into private pharmaceutical monopolies, is the best way to get the vaccine to the world. Industry trade groups and pharmaceutical companies themselves told us over and over that they simply would not be motivated to do such research without the profit motive that lies at the heart of this system. Nearly two years into the pandemic, we have an opportunity to look at how this system is performing for the entire world, and all signs suggest it’s not well. On October 28, ahead of the G20 meeting, the World Health Organization issued a dire warning: “Africa has fully vaccinated 77 million people, just 6% of its population. In comparison, over 70% of high-income countries have already vaccinated more than 40% of their people.” This terrible global reality, for which the term “apartheid” is an accurate description, should be grounds alone for reimagining our entire global system of getting vaccines into people’s arms.

Unjustified faith in the market goes hand in hand with the fact that, around the world, pharmaceutical companies have the upper hand over national governments. This is brazenly on display in Latin America, where pharmaceutical companies are muscling terrified governments into abusive contract terms. As the Bureau of Investigative Journalism reported in February, “Pfizer has been accused of ‘bullying’ Latin American governments in Covid vaccine negotiations and has asked some countries to put up sovereign assets, such as embassy buildings and military bases, as a guarantee against the cost of any future legal cases.” There are even examples of industry trade groups making veiled threats of withholding vaccine supply in retaliation for policies that challenge patents. Such policies are not incidental: They are built into the DNA of corporations. After all, a corporation is legally required for its only fealty to be to its shareholders. Which is why it’s profoundly misguided to look to such companies to resolve shared global crises, whether it’s the pandemic or the climate crisis.

There is no world in which we curb the climate crisis without taking on the fossil fuel industry. As the latest IPCC report shows, this industry must be stopped in its tracks if we want to prevent the worst-case mass-death scenarios, and even then a certain amount of climate change will still be locked in. That’s why piecemeal, market-based “solutions” like carbon pricing will not make a dent in the problem, and arguably do more harm than good.

Ultimately, the pandemic shows us that our best hope for global survival lies not in the markets, but in our collective ability to beat back the power of capital and its close sibling, imperialism. There is no shortage of people who recognize this, from global protesters demanding an end to vaccine apartheid, to climate activists rallying under the slogan, “socialism or barbarism.” The pandemic and its horrible lessons are a dress rehearsal for an even greater climate crisis to come. Our only choice is to learn the grim lessons from this catastrophe, so that we can mitigate—and survive—the next one.

https://orinocotribune.com/the-free-mar ... -pandemic/

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Will Glasgow fix broken climate finance promises?
Posted Nov 04, 2021 by Anis Chowdhury, Jomo Kwame Sundaram

Originally published: JOMO (November 1, 2021 ) |

SYDNEY and KUALA LUMPUR: Current climate mitigation plans will result in a catastrophic 2.7°C world temperature rise. US$1.6–3.8 trillion is needed annually to avoid global warming exceeding 1.5°C.

Creative accounting

Rich countries have long broken their 2009 Copenhagen COP16 pledge to mobilize “US$100 billion per year by 2020 to address the needs of developing countries”. The pandemic has worsened the situation, reducing available finance. Poor countries–many already caught in debt traps–struggle to cope.

While minuscule compared to the finance needed to adequately address climate change, it was considered a good start. The number includes both public and private finance, with sources–public/private, grants/loans, etc.–unspecified.

Such ambiguity has enabled double-counting, poor transparency and creative accounting, noted the UN Independent Expert Group on Climate Finance. Thus, the rich countries’ Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) reported US$80bn in climate finance for developing countries in 2019.

Fudging numbers

But OECD climate finance numbers include non-concessional commercial loans, ‘rolled-over’ loans and private finance. Some donor governments count most development aid, even when not primarily for ‘climate action’.

Also, the dispute over which funds are to be considered ‘new and additional’ has not been resolved since the 1992 adoption of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) at the Rio Earth Summit.

Official development assistance redesignated as climate finance should be categorized as ‘reallocated’, rather than ‘additional’ funding. Consequently, poor countries are losing aid for education, health and other public goods.

India has disputed the OECD claim of US$57bn climate finance in 2013-14, suggesting a paltry US$2.2bn instead! Other developing countries have also challenged such creative accounting and ‘greenwashing’.

Climate finance anarchy
Developing countries expected the promised US$100bn yearly to be largely public grants disbursed via the then new UNFCCC Green Climate Fund. Oxfam estimates public climate financing at only US$19–22.5bn in 2017-18, with little effective coordination of public finance.

Developing countries believed their representatives would help decide disbursement, ensuring equity, efficacy and efficiency. But little is actually managed by developing countries themselves. Instead, climate finance is disbursed via many channels, including rich countries’ aid and export promotion agencies, private banks, equity funds and multilateral institutions’ loans and grants.

Several UN programmes also support climate action, including the UN Environment Programme, UN Development Programme and Global Environment Facility. But all are underfunded, requiring frequent replenishment. Uncertain financing and developing countries’ lack of meaningful involvement in disbursements make planning all the more difficult.

Financialization has meant that climate funding increasingly involves private financial interests. Claims of private climate finance from rich to poor countries are much contested. Even the OECD estimate has not been rising steadily, instead fluctuating directionless from US$16.7bn in 2014 to US$10.1bn in 2016 and US$14.6bn in 2018.

The actual role and impact of private finance are also much disputed. Unsurprisingly, private funding is unlikely to help countries most in need, address policy priorities, or compensate for damages beyond repair. Instead, ‘blended finance’ often uses public finance to ‘de-risk’ private investments.

Putting profits first

The poorest countries desperately need to rebuild resilience and adapt human environments and livelihoods. Adaptation funds are required to better cope with the new circumstances created by global warming. Needed ‘adaptation’–such as improving drainage, water catchment and infrastructure–is costly, but nonetheless desperately necessary.

But ‘donors’ prefer publicizable ‘easy wins’ from climate mitigation, especially as they increasingly gave loans, rather than grants. Thus, although the Paris COP21 Agreement sought to balance mitigation with adaptation, most climate finance still seeks to cut greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.

As climate adaptation is rarely lucrative, it is of less interest to private investors. Rather, private finance favours mitigation investments generating higher returns. Thus, only US$20bn was for adaptation in 2019–less than half the sum for mitigation. Unsurprisingly, the OECD report acknowledges only 3% of private climate finance has been for adaptation.

Chasing profits, most climate finance goes to middle-income countries, not the poorest or most vulnerable. Only US$5.9bn–less than a fifth of total adaptation finance–has gone to the UN’s 46 ‘least developed countries’ (LDCs) during 2014-18! This is “less than 3% of [poorly] estimated LDCs annual adaptation finance needs between 2020-2030”.

Cruel ironies
The International Monetary Fund recognizes the “unequal burden of rising temperatures”. It is indeed a “cruel irony” that those far less responsible for global warming bear the brunt of its costs. Meanwhile, providing climate finance via loans is pushing poor countries deeper into debt.

Increasingly frequent extreme weather disasters are often followed by much more borrowing due to poor countries’ limited fiscal space. But loans for low-income countries (LICs) cost much more than for high-income ones. Hence, LICs spend five times more on debt than on coping with climate change and cutting GHG emissions.

Four-fifths of the most damaging disasters since 2000 have been due to tropical storms. The worst disasters have raised government debt in 90% of cases within two years–with no prospect of debt relief.

As many LICs are already heavily indebted, climate disasters have been truly catastrophic–as in Belize, Grenada and Mozambique. Little has trickled down to the worst affected, and other vulnerable, needy and poor communities.

Funding gap

Based on countries’ own long-term goals for mitigation and adaptation, the UNFCCC’s Standing Committee on Finance estimated that developing countries need US$5.8-5.9 trillion in all until 2030. The UN estimates developing countries currently need US$70bn yearly for adaptation, rising to US$140–300bn by 2030.

In July, the ‘V20’ of finance ministers from 48 climate-vulnerable countries urged delivery of the 2009 US$100bn vow to affirm a commitment to improve climate finance. This should include increased funds, more in grants, and with at least half for adaptation–but the UNFCCC chief has noted lack of progress since.

Only strong enforcement of rigorous climate finance criteria can stop rich countries abusing currently ambiguous reporting requirements. Currently fragmented climate financing urgently needs more coherence and strategic prioritization of support to those most distressed and vulnerable.

This month’s UNFCCC COP26 in Glasgow, Scotland, can and must set things right before it is too late. Will the new Cold War drive the North to do the unexpected to win the rest of the world to its side instead of further militarizing tensions?

https://mronline.org/2021/11/04/will-gl ... -promises/

Big questions there and I'm afraid the answers are 'no'.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: The Long Ecological Revolution

Post by blindpig » Fri Nov 05, 2021 2:44 pm

Will the People with Guns Allow Our Planet to Breathe: The Forty-Fourth Newsletter (2021)

NOVEMBER 4, 2021

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Chris Jordan (USA), Crushed Cars #2 Tacoma, 2004.



Dear friends,

Greetings from the desk of the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.

It is perhaps fitting that United States President Joe Biden arrived in Glasgow for the 26th Conference of Parties (COP26) on the climate catastrophe with eighty-five cars in tow months after declaring ‘I’m a car guy’ (for details on the climate catastrophe, see our Red Alert no. 11, ‘Only One Earth’). Only three countries in the world have more cars per person than the US, and these countries (Finland, Andorra, and Italy) have a much smaller population than the United States.

Just before Biden left for the G20 summit, his meeting with Pope Francis, and COP26, he had his administration pressure the oil-producing states (OPEC+) to ‘do the needful when it comes to supply’ – namely to increase oil production. While the US pressured OPEC+ to boost oil production, the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) released its key report on global emissions. UNEP pointed out that the G20 countries account for close to 80% of global greenhouse gases and that the three highest per capita major carbon emitters are Saudi Arabia, Australia, and the United States. Since the populations of Saudi Arabia (34 million) and Australia (26 million) are so much smaller than that of the United States (330 million), it is clear that the US emits much greater volumes of CO2 than these other two countries: Australia accounts for 1.2% of global carbon emissions, while Saudi Arabia accounts for 1.8%, and the United States 14.8%.

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Francesco Clemente (Italy), Sixteen Amulets for the Road (XII), 2012-2013.


Before the Glasgow meeting, the G20 leaders convened in Rome to firm up their own approach towards the climate catastrophe. The communiqué that emerged from this meeting, ‘G20 Rome Leaders’ Declaration’, was tepid, using terms like ‘make progress’, ‘strengthen actions’, and ‘scale up’. According to the report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), unless carbon emissions are reduced, it is unlikely that the key goal of having no more than 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming compared to pre-industrial levels will be met. The IPCC notes that there is an 83% chance of reaching that target if carbon emissions are reduced to 300 gigatons from now to the time that we achieve net-zero carbon emissions (there are currently 35 gigatons of annual CO2 emissions from fossil fuels). There is only a 17% chance of reaching a global temperature increase of no more than 1.5 degrees Celsius if we can only reduce emissions to 900 gigatons. The IPCC suggests that the faster the world moves to net-zero emissions, the better the chance of preventing catastrophic levels of warming.

At the 2015 COP21 meeting in Paris, none of the powerful countries would even utter the phrase ‘net-zero emissions’. Now, thanks to the work of the IPCC reports and to the mass campaigns around the world on the climate emergency, the phrase is forced into the mouths of leaders who would prefer to be ‘car guys’. Though the need to move to zero carbon emissions by 2050 has been on the table for some years, the G20 statement ignored this and chose the vague formulation that net emissions must end ‘by or around mid-century’. There was also little appetite to talk about global methane emissions, which are the second most abundant anthropogenic greenhouse gas after CO2.

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Iwan Suastika (Indonesia), The Beauty and the Fragile Ones (Planet Earth), 2020.


In the days before the COP26 meeting, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet said, ‘It is time to put empty speeches, broken promises, and unfulfilled pledges behind us. We need laws to be passed, programmes to be implemented, and investments to be swiftly and properly funded, without further delay’. However, there has been a delay since the 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro. Picking up on the UN Conference on the Human Environment held in Stockholm (1972), the countries of the world pledged to do two things: reverse the degradation of the environment and recognise the ‘common but differentiated responsibilities’ of developed and developing countries. It was clear that developed countries – mainly the West, the old colonial powers – had used up far more than their share of the ‘carbon budget’, while developing countries had not contributed nearly as much to the climate catastrophe and struggled to fulfil their basic obligations to their populations.

The Rio formula – common and differentiated responsibilities – hung over the Kyoto Protocol (1997) and the Paris Accords (2015). Promises were made but not met. Developed countries promised what began to be called ‘climate finance’ both to mitigate the disastrous outcomes of the climate catastrophe and to shift reliance upon carbon-based energy to other forms of energy. The Green Climate Fund has remained far smaller than the annual $100 billion commitment pledged in 2009. The Rome G20 meeting did not come to any consensus on the empty bucket; meanwhile, it is important to recognise the stark contrast that, during the pandemic, a total of $16 trillion in fiscal stimulus was disbursed between March 2020 and March 2021, mainly in the developed countries. Given the improbability of a serious discussion about climate finance taking place, it is likely that COP26 will be a failure.

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He Neng (China), Waterfront, 1986.

Tragically, the COP26 process has been swept into the matrix of dangerous geopolitical tensions, driven largely by the United States in its quest to prevent China’s scientific and technological advancement. Coal is at the centre of the debate, with the argument being made that unless China and India cut back on their coal-fired power plants, no carbon reduction will be possible. At the United Nations in September, China’s President Xi Jinping said, ‘China will strive to peak carbon dioxide emissions before 2030 and achieve carbon neutrality before 2060’; he also stated that China would ‘not build new coal-fired plants overseas’. This was a monumental statement, far ahead of any of the pledges made by the other major global powers. Rather than build on this commitment, the debate driven by the West has largely been to malign developing countries, including China, and blame them for the climate catastrophe.

Looking at the IPCC evidence, economist John Ross recently showed that, according to the United States’ own proposal to reduce current emissions by 50-52% from 2005 levels, the country’s level of per capita CO2 emissions would still make up 220% of the global average in 2030. If the US were to reach its goal, the country’s per capita carbon emissions in 2030 would be 42% higher than China’s are today. The US has suggested that it would like to see a 50% reduction of emissions by 2030; since it would take the baseline at the uneven present levels of emissions, it would be allowed to emit 8.0 tonnes of CO2, China would be entitled to 3.7 tonnes, Brazil to 1.2 tonnes, India to 1.0 tonnes, and the Democratic Republic of Congo to 0.02 tonnes. As it stands, Ross shows, China’s per capita CO2 emissions are only 46% of US emissions, while other developing countries emit far less (Indonesia, 15%; Brazil, 14%; India, 12%). For further details, please follow the Climate Equity Monitor developed by the MS Swaminathan Research Foundation and the National Institute of Advanced Studies (Bengaluru, India).

Rather than focus on the necessary energy transition, developed countries have taken to crude propaganda against a handful of developing states such as China and India. The Energy Transition Commission’s Making Mission Possible: Delivering a Net-Zero Economy report estimates that the cost of a transition will be 0.5% of global GDP by 2050, an insignificant amount compared to the catastrophic alternatives such as the disappearance of several small island nations and increasing wildly erratic weather patterns.

The cost of the transition has decreased because of the decline in the costs of key technologies (onshore wind farms, solar photovoltaic cells, batteries, etc.). However, it is important to recognise that these costs are kept artificially low because of the very low wages paid to miners of key minerals and metals that power these technologies (such as cobalt miners in the Democratic Republic of the Congo) and because of the paltry royalty payments collected by countries of the South for these raw materials. If the real costs were paid, the transition would be more expensive, and the countries of the South would have resources to pay for the shift without reliance upon the climate fund.

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Victor Ehikhamenor (Nigeria), Child of the Sky VII, 2015


Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research will be in Glasgow along with delegates from the International Peoples’ Assembly. We will be at various events to gauge the sentiment of people’s movements. At the conference, Nnimmo Bassey of the Health of Mother Earth Foundation (Benin City, Nigeria) and I spoke about the catastrophe together. Bassey wrote a powerful poem, ‘Return to Being’, extracted here:

The battle rages
Who must gobble up the carbon budget,
Wrap Mother Earth in endless bales of smog?
Whose task is to pile the climate debt
And whose lot to be the carbon slave?
Colonise the biosphere
Obliterate the ethnosphere
Hopes mapped in colonial geographies of death
Scarified for sport, booby-trapped, and floating on blood



The dream is gone, the cock has crowed,
The betrayer seeks a branch to ape a pendulum swing
And one or two shed a tear for the press
As the hawk glides softly on the winds of the dirge seeking a hapless prey
Funeral drums burst by pulsating biceps of pain
Flutes whisper a dirge long forgotten suddenly emerging from the depths of years of erased histories
As daughters and sons of the soil pick up pieces of sacred hills, rivers, forests
Mother Earth awakes, embraces her visible and invisible children
And finally humans return to being.


Warmly,

Vijay

https://thetricontinental.org/newsletterissue/cop26/

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Reclaiming Our Time for the Planet
Raymond Nat Turner, BAR poet-in-residence 03 Nov 2021

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Reclaiming our time

for the Planet…


Grand Canyon bathtub rings telling
us the Colorado River’s dropped over
150 feet. Twenty years of drought—And
A wildfire a week; A nor’easter; superstorm;
hurricane; tornado; typhoon; And
tsunami over blackened birds, slimy, gooey,
tar balled waters—obligatory oil spills over
Corporate propaganda cycles—A delicious
recipe for disaster…

Whisker-sized particulate matter’s winning
Air superiority in pumpkin skies. Skies
Bees buzzed decks from; Skies hummingbirds
and butterflies hung out in.
Skies crows dropped from, jamming with
pigeons and spying on stashing/noshing
squirrels. A place you could get a gallon of
unleaded water that smelled drinkable…

This was before Roundup Ready corporate
propaganda cycles ejaculating Satan’s sperm
into our aquifers. Before prioritizing our
Friends by stages/types of cancer they suffer…

No need for nuance here—let’s say it simply—
say it plainly:
the kettle’s been on the back burner whistling
Frantically for decades—Warning of capitalist
immolation…And the world can’t wait…

The world can’t wait…Bassackwards…
for 21st century technology to catch
up with 17th century ideology—can’t
wait in perpetuity on old
mush-mouthed men’s mumblings on markets—
Seventeenth century
catechisms covering 21st century climate crimes…

The world can’t wait…
for more inflated claptrap; more cleverly crafted
lies—more methane promises huffed and puffed—
Killing us softly with their carbon…




© 2021. Raymond Nat Turner, The Town Crier. All Rights Reserved.

https://www.blackagendareport.com/recla ... ime-planet
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: The Long Ecological Revolution

Post by blindpig » Sat Nov 06, 2021 1:35 pm

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COP-out 26
Posted Nov 06, 2021 by Michael Roberts

Originally published: System Change Not Climate Change (November 1, 2021 ) |

This week, COP26 meets in Glasgow, Scotland. Every country in the world is supposed to be represented in meetings designed to achieve agreement on limiting and reducing greenhouse gas emissions so that the planet does not overheat and cause widespread damage to the environment, species and human livelihoods across the planet.

We are currently on track for at least a 2.7C hotter world by the end of the century–and that’s only if countries meet all the pledges that they have made. Currently they are nowhere near doing that. Governments are “seemingly light years away from reaching our climate action targets”, to quote UN chief Guterres.

Global energy-related carbon dioxide emissions are on course to surge by 1.5 billion tonnes in 2021–the second-largest increase in history–reversing most of last year’s decline caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Global emissions are expected to increase by 16%, not fall, by 2030 compared with 2010 levels.

COP stands for the Conference of the Parties to the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, which set the stage for all international cooperation on climate. According to the UN, the top three priorities of the Glasgow COP26 are to: 1) keep the global temperature rise to no more than 1.5 degrees Celsius through “rapid, bold emissions cuts” and net-zero commitments; 2) increase international finance for adaptation to at least half the total spent on climate action; 3) meet the existing commitment to provide $100 billion in international climate finance each year so that developing countries can invest in green technologies, and protect lives and livelihoods against worsening climate impacts. The reality is that even these modest priority targets are not going to be agreed in Glasgow and certainly not met in application, given the current make-up of governments and the plans of industry and finance around the world.

There is no longer any plausible scientific argument against the view that human activities are having a profound effect on the climate. The dwindling band of ‘climate sceptics’ have been silenced (at least in the mainstream media) by the overwhelming and increasing evidence that fossil-fuel based industrial and energy production and transport is causing rising carbon and other greenhouse gas emissions and this is the the cause of global warming. Moreover, global warming since the industrial revolutions of the 19th century has now risen to the point where it is destroying the planet.

But what is not so understood is that this impending (and already beginning) disaster could still be averted and reversed and without a significant cost to governments. Indeed, the latest report from the International Energy Agency’s World Energy Outlook 2021 shows that we know what to do about it, in substantial detail and at an affordable cost. But there is no political will to do so by governments, beholden are they to the fossil-fuel industry, to aviation and transport sectors and to the demands of finance and industrial capitalists as a whole to preserve profits at the expense of social need.

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Already there is a yawning gap between government commitments to reduce emissions to be offered at COP26 and what is necessary. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) estimates that limiting global average temperature increases to 1.5C requires a reduction of CO2 emissions of 45% by 2030 or a 25% reduction by 2030 to limit warming to 2C. 113 governments have offered National Determined Contributions (NDCs), which will reduce greenhouse gas emissions by only 12% in 2030 compared to 2010.

The world’s governments plan to produce more than twice the amount of fossil fuels in 2030 than would be consistent with limiting warming to 1.5°C. Governments are collectively projecting an increase in global oil and gas production, and only a modest decrease in coal production, over the next two decades. This leads to future production levels far above those consistent with limiting warming to 1.5°C or 2°C. In 2030, governments’ production plans and projections would lead to around 240% more coal, 57% more oil, and 71% more gas than would be consistent with limiting global warming to 1.5°C.

Indeed, G20 countries have directed around USD 300 billion in new funds towards fossil fuel activities since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic–more than they have toward clean energy. According to the International Energy Agency, only 2% of governments’ “build back better” recovery spending has been invested in clean energy, while at same time the production and burning of coal, oil and gas was subsidised by $5.9tn in 2020 alone.

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Which countries are to blame for this failure to do anything remotely close to avoiding the environmental disaster. China is usually picked out as the main culprit. It is currently by far the world’s biggest emitter of CO2 and is planning to build 43 new coal power plants on top of the 1,000 plants already in operation. But China has some excuses. It has the largest population in world and so its per capita emissions are much lower than most other major economies (although it’s the mass that counts). Second, it is the manufacturing centre of the world providing goods for all the rich countries of the Global North. As a result, its emissions are going to be huge because of the consumer demand for its products globally.

Moreover, historically, cumulative emissions built up in the atmosphere in the last 100 years come from the rich previously industrialised and now energy consuming North. There is a direct, linear relationship between the total amount of CO2 released by human activity and the level of warming at the Earth’s surface. Moreover, the timing of a tonne of CO2 being emitted has only a limited impact on the amount of warming it will ultimately cause. This means CO2 emissions from hundreds years ago continue to contribute to the heating of the planet – and current warming is determined by the cumulative total of CO2 emissions over time.

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In total, humans have pumped around 2,500bn tonnes of CO2 (GtCO2) into the atmosphere since 1850, leaving less than 500GtCO2 of remaining carbon budget to stay below 1.5C of warming. This means that, as the Glasgow COP26 takes place, the world will collectively have burned through 86% of the carbon budget for a 50-50 probability of staying below 1.5C, or 89% of the budget for a two-thirds likelihood. More than half of all CO2 emissions since 1751 were emitted in the last 30 years.

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In first place on the historical rankings is the US, which has released more than 509GtCO2 since 1850 and is responsible for the largest share of historical emissions with some 20% of the global total. China is a relatively distant second, with 11%, followed by Russia (7%), Brazil (5%) and Indonesia (4%). The latter pair are among the top 10 largest historical emitters, due to CO2 from their land.

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The biggest emitters or consumers of carbon apart from the fossil fuel industry are the richest wealth and income earners in the Global North who have excessive consumption and fly everywhere. It is the military (the biggest sector of carbon consumption). Then there is waste of capitalist production and consumption in autos, aircraft and airlines, shipping, chemicals, bottled water, processed foods, unnecessary pharmaceuticals and so on is directly linked to carbon emissions. Harmful industrial processes like industrial agriculture, industrial fishing, logging, mining and so on are also major global heaters, while the banking industry operates to underwrite and promote all this carbon emission.

And the U.S. is really doing little to control or reduce the fossil fuel industry. On the contrary, crude oil and gas production is rising fast and exploration is being expanded. The Biden administration recently announced plans to open millions of acres for oil and gas that could ultimately result in production of up to 1.1bn barrels of crude oil and 4.4tn cubic feet of fossil gas. Being by far the biggest emitter in history, as well as the world’s number one oil producer, doesn’t seem to embarrass the U.S. while it claims to be a climate leader.

Indeed, most major oil and gas producers are planning on increasing production out to 2030 or beyond, while several major coal producers are planning on continuing or increasing production.

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No wonder the governments of the fossil fuel producers and consumers, like Saudi Arabia, Japan and Australia are among those countries asking the UN in Glasgow to play down the need to move rapidly away from fossil fuels; or for paying more to poorer states to move to greener technologies. China may be the world’s largest polluter but it is pledging to bring its emissions to a peak before 2030, and to make the country carbon neutral by 2060. And it is already a renewable energy leader, accounting for about 50% of the world’s growth in renewable energy capacity in 2020. The world’s most populous nation is also out in front on key green technologies such as electric vehicles, batteries and solar power.

Across 40 different areas spanning the power sector, heavy industry, agriculture, transportation, finance and technology, not one is changing quickly enough to avoid 1.5C in global heating beyond pre-industrial times, according to a report by the World Resources Institute.

And yet the cost of phasing out fossil fuel production and expanding renewables is not large. Decarbonizing the world economy is technically and financially feasible. It would require committing approximately 2.5 percent of global GDP per year to investment spending in areas designed to improve energy efficiency standards across the board (buildings, automobiles, transportation systems, industrial production processes) and to massively expand the availability of clean energy sources for zero emissions to be realized by 2050. The IEA reckons the annual cost has now risen to $4trn a year because of the failure to invest since the Paris COP five years ago. But even that cost is nothing compared to the loss of incomes, employment, lives and living conditions for millions ahead.

But it won’t happen because, to be really effective, the fossil fuel industry would have to be phased out and replaced by clean energy sources. Workers relying for their livelihoods on fossil fuel activity would have to be retrained and diverted into environmentally friendly industries and services. That requires significant public investment and planning on a global scale.

A global plan could steer investments into things society does need, like renewable energy, organic farming, public transportation, public water systems, ecological remediation, public health, quality schools and other currently unmet needs. And it could equalize development the world over by shifting resources out of useless and harmful production in the North and into developing the South, building basic infrastructure, sanitation systems, public schools, health care. At the same time, a global plan could aim to provide equivalent jobs for workers displaced by the retrenchment or closure of unnecessary or harmful industries.

All this would depend first on bringing the fossil fuel companies into public ownership and under democratic control of the people wherever there is fossil fuel production. The energy industry needs to be integrated into a global plan to reduce emissions and expand superior renewable energy technology. This means building renewable energy capacity of 10x the current utility base. That is only possible through planned public investment that transfers the jobs in fossil fuel companies to green technology and environmental companies.

None of this is on the agenda at COP26.

https://mronline.org/2021/11/06/cop-out-26/

It should be noted that capital's over-all greenwashing includes monopolizing the 'green' energy sources and implicitly extracting the raw material at it's advantage anywhere it can sink it's hooks in. Because if they cannot turn a profit they have no incentive and whatever is foreign to their ledger books is irrelevant to them.

We cannot possibly live with capitalism but we might live without it.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: The Long Ecological Revolution

Post by blindpig » Mon Nov 08, 2021 2:20 pm

Chronicle of a tragedy foretold
November 6, 2021 Angel Guerra Cabrera

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Fidel Castro at the Rio Summit, 1992.

Fidel Castro was the first head of state to warn about the very serious threat posed by environmental pollution and greenhouse gases to the human species. It will soon be 30 years since that warning was made in just under six minutes at the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, held in Rio de Janeiro in 1992.

An important biological species -the Cuban leader affirmed- is at risk of disappearing due to the rapid and progressive liquidation of its natural living conditions: man. And he immediately went to the heart of the matter, which is not greenhouse gases per se, but a whole complex multidimensional crisis originated by the capitalist system. It is necessary to point out -added the Commander- that consumer societies are fundamentally responsible for the atrocious destruction of the environment. They were born of the former colonial metropolises and imperial policies which, in turn, engendered the backwardness and poverty that today plague the immense majority of humanity.

With only 20% of the world’s population, they consume two-thirds of the metals and three-quarters of the energy produced in the world. They have poisoned the seas and rivers, polluted the air, weakened and perforated the ozone layer, and saturated the atmosphere with gases that alter climatic conditions with catastrophic effects that we are already beginning to suffer.

Only with some adjustments in the quantities, those words still allow us to characterize the brutal depredation of nature and the exploitation of the great majorities by the imperialist powers. In reality, the situation described by his prophetic warning has only worsened, because during the three decades that have passed, the barbaric neoliberal policies have deepened, accentuating capitalist exploitation, plundering and environmental depredation practiced by imperialist capital, causing catastrophic global warming and pollution.

Fidel was also the world leader who in the whole second half of the 20th century devoted more energy of his brilliant mind to analyze capitalist and imperialist exploitation and its consequences. Among them, the very serious problem of global warming which, together with the danger of nuclear war, formed a substantial part of his concerns until the last days of his life.

From his warning in Rio to his Reflections in the final stage, the facts prove the Commander right. As denounced by most of the social movements in attendance, with particular emphasis on the representatives of indigenous peoples, very little has been done to date by the developed countries, the main causes of this situation, to halt and reverse it.

In fact, despite how threatening the phenomenon has become, none of the pollutant emissions reduction targets set in the famous Paris Agreement, which came into force in 2016, not to mention the previous Kyoto ones, have been met. On the contrary, a temperature increase of 1.1 degrees Celsius over the pre-industrial era, the highest recorded in two million years, has already been reached.

Nor are the commitments reached so far at COP26 in Glasgow sufficient to avoid, before the middle of the 21st century, an increase in temperatures of more than two degrees Celsius and a climate change with terribly catastrophic effects. Increasing and more frequent heat waves that will kill many people, loss of forests and desertification; melting of glaciers, poles and Greenland’s permafrost; extreme and prolonged droughts, rains and floods of unprecedented magnitude, increase of temperature and acidity in the seas, irreversible flooding of large coastal areas and disappearance of small islands as a consequence of sea level rise, more frequent and intense tropical cyclones and storms, migration of important human masses; extinction of tens of thousands of species and loss of hundreds of ecological niches, both with consequences that are difficult to foresee, but certainly disastrous for life.

In truth, these phenomena are already here and are part of our daily lives. They will only become more and more common and will worsen exponentially, creating an unlivable situation for millions of human beings.

Meetings such as COP26 serve to raise awareness of the magnitude and serious threat to life posed by all of the above and to extract certain concessions, but they will not solve them. Only a gigantic pedagogical work together with great popular mobilizations can force governments to act on this crucial issue for humanity. The key to this was given by Hugo Chavez, “let us not change the climate, let us change the system.”

Source: Cubadebate, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English

https://www.struggle-la-lucha.org/2021/ ... -foretold/

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A rhetorical question
Can private finance be trusted to save planet?
By Harvey Morris | China Daily Global | Updated: 2021-11-08 09:20

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Activists take part in a march against global climate change, in Nairobi, capital of Kenya, Oct 29, 2021. [Photo/Xinhua]

Negotiators who have gathered at the 26th United Nations Climate Change Conference of the Parties, or COP 26, to find ways to ensure that the world meets its climate targets have been invited to put their faith in banks and global investors to save the planet.

In an initiative that has been greeted with skepticism from climate campaigners, a coalition of banks, insurance companies and investment firms committed $100 trillion of private capital to help the world meet net-zero carbon emissions targets by 2050.

The idea is that these big spenders-they include some of the biggest international banks-will direct their clients' money toward planet-saving investments and shun the fossil fuels that are contributing to global warming.

So far 450 financial institutions, spread across 45 countries, have signed up to the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero, a coalition convened by the United Nations in April under the leadership of Mark Carney, the UN's special envoy on climate action and finance.

Carney, the Canadian former head of the United Kingdom's central bank, said, "We now have the essential plumbing in place to move climate change from the fringes to the forefront of finance so that every financial decision takes climate change into account."

The theory behind the idea is that governments alone do not have the resources to fund the energy transition and that private money is vital to ensuring its success.

However, the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero has been the target of criticism from climate campaigners because it allows the loophole of continuing to finance fossil fuel extraction during the transition.

Carney believes big investors will have an interest in funding a clean energy transformation because that is where future profits lie. He said there was no reason investors backing low-carbon projects should have to make do with lower returns.

Despite this lure of future profits, big banks were reported ahead of COP 26 to be resisting any commitment to end financing of all new oil, gas and coal exploration projects this year.

Putting big investors in charge of saving the planet might seem tantamount to putting a fox in charge of the henhouse.

Anyone who lived through the 2008 financial crisis can recall that it was prompted by the reckless mortgage investments of big banks looking for easy profits. It was left to governments to use taxpayer money to bring the world financial system back from the brink.

Left to its own devices, investment money inevitably seeks out the most profitable projects, regardless of the implications for wider society. Big tobacco and big oil are among the sectors that have sought to maximize their profits by resisting pressure to limit the damage they cause.

Developed capitalist societies have also tended to prioritize the concept of shareholder value, in which returns on investment are seen as more important than the goods and services any given company produces or the way it treats its employees and customers.

That raises the question of whether the world can rely on the goodwill of asset managers and big corporations to do the right thing when it comes to the climate issue, or whether legislation will be required instead.

Carney acknowledged ahead of COP 26 that a privately funded green transition plan would also require governments to implement clear and credible net-zero policies.

"This includes carbon pricing, bans on internal combustion vehicles, national targets to phase out fossil fuel subsidies, and mandatory climate-related financial disclosures," he wrote in an opinion piece in the Financial Times.

He invited investors to assess who was part of the proposed$100 trillion green transition revolution and to ask whether it includes their bank, insurer, mutual fund manager or pension fund. His remarks were an invitation to investors themselves to keep the banks and asset managers to their commitments.

Investors and the corporations they finance have had to burnish their green credentials in recent years, reflecting pressure from ethical investors who demand societal benefits as well as a return on their money.

Business leaders as well as world leaders have descended on Glasgow for COP 26 in part to convince customers and investors that they are doing their bit for the planet.

Some climate campaigners have dismissed such tactics as "green-washing", a phenomenon linked more to image building than to genuine climate action. Activists challenge the credibility of banks that continue to finance fossil fuels.

While the jury is still out on whether COP 26 will be judged as a success, Swedish activist Greta Thunberg and her supporters have already declared it a failure. Perhaps with the banks in mind, she declared: "It should be obvious that we cannot solve the crisis with the same methods that got us into it in the first place."

http://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/20211 ... 73e8d.html
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Blaming China for the climate crisis is shameful nonsense
November 6, 2021 Carlos Martinez

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In the run-up to the COP26 UN Climate Change Conference, currently taking place in Glasgow, politicians and media in the West conducted a coordinated and insistent campaign to shift responsibility for the climate crisis on to China.

US President Joe Biden claimed in his closing statement to the G20 Summit, the day before the start of COP26, that China “basically didn’t show up in terms of any commitments to deal with climate change.” He further stated that meaningful progress on climate change negotiations is “going to require us to continue to focus on what China’s not doing.”

Biden specifically criticized Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin for not attending the G20 Summit in person, although he failed to mention that they did attend via video link. Several commentators on social media have noted that attending a climate change conference via Zoom produces significantly less emissions than arriving in a private jet and travelling round Glasgow in an 85-car motorcade, which is what Biden did.

Blaming China is nothing new, of course, and feeds in to the New Cold War that the US and its allies are cultivating, with a view to protecting and expanding the US-led imperialist system. China is an enemy, a “strategic competitor”; it must not be allowed to “win the 21st century”.

When it comes to the global struggle to prevent climate catastrophe, pushing responsibility towards China has a further benefit beyond old-fashioned demonization; it means shifting the responsibility away from the advanced capitalist countries which might otherwise be expected to fix a problem largely of their making.

The “it’s all China’s fault” narrative rests on two key themes: first, that China has for the last few years been the world’s largest emitter (in absolute terms) of greenhouse gases; second, that China has committed to achieving carbon neutrality by 2060, whereas the US and Britain have said they will bring all greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2050.

Such a narrative is flawed in five obvious ways:

First, China is the world’s most populous country, with a population of 1.4 billion Measured on a per capita basis, China’s emissions are very ordinary – around the same level as Bulgaria and New Zealand.

To understand the relevance of the per capita calculation, just imagine China is split into four different countries – that is, the wildest fantasies of the imperialist nations have been realized! Each one would have under half the emissions of the US.

Second, the comparison of current annual emissions distorts the overall picture. Greenhouse gases don’t suddenly disappear from the atmosphere; carbon dioxide hangs around for hundreds of years.

In terms of cumulative emissions – the quantity of excess greenhouse gases in the atmosphere right now – the US is responsible for 25 percent, although it contains just four percent of the world’s population. China meanwhile is responsible for 13 percent of cumulative emissions, in spite of having 18 percent of the world’s population.

Over the course of two hundred years, Europe, North America and Japan have become modern industrialized countries, burning enormous quantities of assorted fossil fuels and creating an environmental crisis. Now they want to both shift the blame onto others and pull up the ladder of development. Any reasonable person will agree that this is outright moral bankruptcy.

Third, the reason China’s emissions have gone up in recent decades while the West’s emissions have gone down has essentially nothing to do with people in the rich countries compromising on their lifestyles or governments making impressive progress on decarbonization; rather, it’s that the advanced capitalist countries have exported their emissions to the developing world.

China as the “workshop of the world” means that products consumed in the West are very often produced in China. Chinese emissions are primarily caused by manufacturing and infrastructure development, not by luxury consumption. In fact, average household energy consumption in the US and Canada is eight times higher than in China.

Fourth, and related, is the fact that China is a developing country. The leading capitalist countries of Europe, North America and Japan reached peak greenhouse gas emissions in the 1980s, after nearly two centuries of industrialization. If they succeed in achieving net zero emissions by 2050, their journey from peak carbon to net zero will have taken six or seven decades.

Before the proclamation of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, China’s economy was based overwhelmingly on small-scale agriculture. There was very little industry, very little transport infrastructure; only a tiny fraction of the population had access to modern energy. Since then, China’s use of fossil fuels has steadily increased as it has industrialized. If it meets its targets of reaching peak emissions by 2030 and zero carbon by 2060, both achievements will have taken less than half the time they took in the West.

Fifth, China is already making extraordinary progress towards tackling climate change. It is unquestionably the world leader in renewable energy, with a total capacity greater than the US, the EU, Japan and Britain combined. For the last two decades, it has been making a concerted effort to reduce its reliance on coal, which currently makes up 56 percent of its power mix, down from over 80 percent.

China’s forest coverage has increased from 12 percent in the early 1980s to 23 percent today. It has established national parks covering 230,000 square kilometers. Meanwhile it also leads the world in the production and use of electric cars, trains and buses. Around 99 percent of the world’s electric buses are in China, along with 70 percent of the world’s high-speed rail.

Even leading US politicians have recognized China’s progress. Back in December 2019, setting out his vision for the US to accelerate its decarbonization, John Kerry observed in an article for the New York Times that “China is becoming an energy superpower”, that “China surpassed us for the lead in renewable energy technology.” He commented: “China is doing things we are afraid to do. They offer citizens large subsidies for purchasing electric vehicles from state-owned companies.”

Of course, the world needs China – as the largest current emitter – to take serious action to reduce emissions. Indeed there is a clear consensus at all levels of Chinese government on tackling climate change, biodiversity and pollution. China is taking the project of constructing an “ecological civilization” very seriously, but it is hypocritical and nonsensical for the West to play the blame game and to push responsibility onto China.

As it stands, the US and its allies are more committed to their New Cold War than they are to a safe future for humanity. This is exemplified by US import bans on Chinese solar panels, based on the unproven and libelous accusation that this industry makes use of slave labor in Xinjiang.

Environmental catastrophe is knocking at the door. We need to get serious. The West must drop its policy of demonizing and threatening China; it must adopt an approach of multilateralism and cooperation. The US, Europe, China and others should be collaborating on research and development for climate change adaptation and mitigation; on renewable energy systems; on artificial intelligence systems for monitoring weather patterns; on providing urgently-needed support to the least developing countries.

China has been abundantly clear that it wants a close, collaborative relationship with the other major powers around environmental issues. The ball is in our court. Those of us in the West should be demanding our governments to stop shirking their responsibilities, to build mutual trust with China, and to do everything possible to keep Earth habitable for humanity.

Source: Morning Star

https://www.struggle-la-lucha.org/2021/ ... -nonsense/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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