The Long Ecological Revolution

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Re: The Long Ecological Revolution

Post by blindpig » Wed Jul 20, 2022 2:41 pm

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Establishment of Climate-Resilient Rural Livelihoods in Mongolia, 2012. (Photo: Asian Development Bank / Flickr)

Climate catastrophe vs. super profits: the real worries of the ruling class
Originally published: In Defence of Marxism on July 15, 2022 by Lotta Angantyr (more by In Defence of Marxism) | (Posted Jul 19, 2022)

The devastating effects of global warming are being felt by billions of people all around the world. Meanwhile, capitalist fat cats are openly downplaying the risk of entire cities being buried beneath the rising oceans as a trifling inconvenience. Like Emperor Nero before them, the rulers of this destructive system are fiddling–this time–as Rome drowns.

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While countless people are at risk of flooding from rising sea levels in the near future, billions are already feeling the effects of drought. Due to rising temperatures and extreme heat, the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) estimates that more than 2.3 billion people are right now facing water stress.

Among these, almost 160 million children are exposed to severe and prolonged droughts. Capitalism, and its reckless exploitation of the planet in the name of profit, is denying people the most basic necessities of life, and transforming whole swathes of the earth into deserts.

Sub-Saharan Africa has been especially badly ravaged by water scarcity. In May, the Horn of Africa saw its worst drought in four decades and up to 20 million people could go hungry this year as a result. A full 40 percent of Somalia’s population now face acute food insecurity.

But this crisis is not limited to the African continent. In mid June, Europe had an unusually early and extreme heatwave, with record temperatures in the western and central regions. On 16 June, France saw temperatures of 40°C, which is the earliest point in a year that this has been reached since records began. Wildfires have been spreading in Spain and Germany, with many people being ordered to flee their homes to escape the flames.

The burning of fossil fuels is the biggest driving force behind global warming. Reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) say that to limit global warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels (the limit set by the Paris Climate Accords), greenhouse gas emissions need to be reduced by 43 percent by 2030 and reach ‘net zero’ by 2050. This means completely negating the production of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, resulting from human activity.

To meet net zero by 2050, the International Energy Agency concluded in their report from last year that there could be no new oil or gas fields, or coal mines dug.

Meeting any of these goals would require a radical and rapid transition away from fossil fuels towards alternative energy sources. Under the profit-driven capitalist system, we are not only failing to make the necessary progress, but going into reverse.

Although many companies have set targets for cutting their greenhouse emissions, there are no serious plans to follow them up. A study from the New Climate Institute said that the biggest top 25 corporations (including Google and Amazon) are not merely just failing to meet their own targets, but routinely exaggerate their (insufficient) progress.

This goes to show that any so-called climate regulation will remain a dead letter while the means of production are controlled by a minority of profiteering parasites.

The real worries of the ruling class

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According to HSBC’s Stuart Kirk, the discussion about the risks of climate change is getting “out of hand” (Photo: Screen Grab)

The truth is that, while a section of the ruling class is alarmed at the prospect of climate change, the system as a whole is driven first-and-foremost by an insatiable lust for short-term profits. And some of the most degenerate and short-sighted capitalists take a totally cavalier attitude to climate change: downplaying the danger it poses, or denying it altogether.

For example, at a Financial Times conference earlier this year, HSBC’s (ironically titled) Global Head of Responsible Investments, Stuart Kirk, held a presentation with the title: “Why investors need not worry about climate risk”.

According to Kirk, the discussion about the risks of climate change is getting “out of hand”. He went on to say:

25 years in the finance industry, there is always some nut job telling me about the end of the world… but what bothers me about this one [risk of climate change] is the amount of work these people make me do. The amount of regulation coming down the pipe. The number of people in my team and at HSBC dealing with financial risks from climate change. Last night targets fell 25 percent. 25 percent! And people are asking the boards of U.S. companies to spend time dealing with climate risk.

We all shed a tear for the red tape imposed on fatcat bankers like Stuart Kirk, all in the name of trivial matters like the potential destruction of human civilisation!

He continued:

We’ve got regulators in the U.S. trying to stop us. We have the China problem. We’ve got a housing crisis looming [by which he means a collapse in the property market, rather than a crippling shortage of affordable housing]. We’ve got interest rates going up. We’ve got inflation coming down the pipe and I’m being told to spend time, time and time again looking at something that’s going to happen in 20 or 30 years, hence the portionality is completely wack!

Indeed, why worry about the problems of a couple of decades from now, when there are profits to be made today? The Global Head of Responsible Investments at HSBC can’t see any reason why he needs to worry about global warming, because human beings are tremendously adaptable, to the point of being able to live under water!

Human beings have been fantastic at adapting to change, adapting to emergencies. We will continue to do so. Who cares if Miami is six metres under water in 100 years? Amsterdam has been six metres under water for ages and it’s a really nice place.

In other words: what are a few drowned cities compared to HSBC’s investment portfolio? This kind of staggering hubris quite openly put the fate of the human race second to the bottom line of the big banks.

These scandalous remarks show an appalling and cynical attitude towards the future of the planet and the life sustained by it.

Carbon bombs


The capitalists are reluctant to relinquish the superprofits provided by the fossil fuel industry. In the past three decades ExxonMobil, Shell, BP and Chevron have made almost $2tn in profits. BP’s CEO Bernard Looney, described the company as a cash machine. As a consequence, they are studiously ignoring the devastating implications of scaling up production of fossil fuels.

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The 12 biggest oil companies are prepared to spend $103 a day for the rest of the decade to exploit new fields of oil and gas. (Photo: Public Domain)

An investigation by the Guardian shows that plans for the new oil and gas projects will in the next seven years produce a volume of greenhouse gases equivalent to China’s CO2 emission over the last decade.

Included in the plans are 195 so-called carbon bombs, which are oil and gas projects that each produce at least a billion tonnes of CO2 emissions over their lifetimes, denotating with a highly destructive impact on the climate.

The U.S., Canada and Australia have the biggest expansion plans for the number of carbon bombs and also give the world’s biggest subsidies for fossil fuels per capita. The 12 biggest oil companies are prepared to spend $103 a day for the rest of the decade to exploit new fields of oil and gas. These plans will make it impossible to limit global heating.

So while we are heading towards a climate catastrophe, world leaders are hiding their heads in the sand. Despite the fact that oil and gas industries are responsible for 60 percent of fossil fuels emissions, there was no mention of oil and gas in the COP26 final deal. Many of the richer countries who on the one had cynically describe themselves as ‘climate leaders’, are also the biggest players in building carbon bombs.

Back in 2020, when Joe Biden was running for president of the USA, he was calling for a transition from oil and gas and breaking America’s dependence on fossil fuels. Today, with its 22 carbon bombs, the U.S. has the potential to pump out 140bn tonnes of CO2, four times more than what the whole world emits yearly: more like a carbon nuclear warhead.

These big imperialist countries are now using the war in Ukraine to justify their plans to expand the oil and gas industry.

In March, Biden announced a deal with Europe that will guarantee long term demand for American fossil fuels until at least 2030. In the first four months of 2022, the U.S. sent almost three quarters of all of its liquefied natural gas to Europe. Biden’s energy secretary Jennifer Granholm last month said, in a room full of oil and gas executives, that the U.S. was now on a “war footing”. She continued:

In this moment of crisis, we need more oil supply . . . That means you, producing more right now, where and if you can.

In other words, as soon as U.S. imperialist interests came under threat in Ukraine, all of Biden’s talk of being the ‘climate president’ evaporated like so much hot air.

Super profits

Many oil and gas bosses are shedding tears over the war in Ukraine–tears of joy–because it has exacerbated the already rising inflation of gas and oil prices, which means bumper profits for them and their shareholders.

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Between January and March, Shell made $9.1bn in profit. (Photo: Public Domain)

In the first three months of 2022, the 28 largest producers of fossil fuels made close to $100bn in combined profits. Between January and March, Shell made $9.1bn in profit, which is almost three times higher than what they made in the same period 2021. Exxon also made a threefold increase with $8.8bn in profits. BP made $6.2bn, making its highest first-quarter profits in a decade.

At the same time as the BP’s Chief financial officer, Murray Auchincloss, said: “it’s possible that we’re getting more cash than we know what to do with”, up to 40 percent of British households risk ending up in fuel poverty in October. These bloodsuckers fatten themselves on the death, destruction and poverty created by an imperialist war, while disregarding the dire implications for future generations.

As always, it is the working class that has to pay for the crisis of capitalism. Both in terms of living with the catastrophic effects of climate change, and enduring the economic shocks that are forcing millions into poverty. Meanwhile the bosses will pocket their billions, without a care for the implications.

Capitalism is unable to save the planet. On the contrary, it is the biggest threat to human civilisation and will always prioritise profits over the planet and people’s lives. Instead of leaving the climate fight up to the bosses and politicians, the working class and its organisations must fight to take control of the economy, placing production into its own hands by expropriating the profiteers.

Only by controlling the polluting industries and the big banks can we fully transform society according to a general plan for the benefit of the planet and human need. This is the only way to avert the slide into barbarism to which capitalism condemns us.

https://mronline.org/2022/07/19/climate ... r-profits/

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But, but, but, it's all Joe Manchin's fault!

Why the US is so horribly incapable of meaningful climate action
Analysis by Zachary B. Wolf, CNN
Published 5:26 PM EDT, Mon July 18, 2022

While the world’s climate is hot and getting hotter, the US government is frozen in time.

Runways are melting in the UK. Lakes are drying up in the US. Fires are raging all over.

But the federal government is stuck in amber, blocked by a Supreme Court that pines for a pre-industrial age, insisting on new laws for the Environmental Protection Agency to fight climate change, and beholden to a custom in the Senate that makes any new climate law all but impossible.

One Democratic senator – Joe Manchin, from the coal-producing state of West Virginia – held the power to bless or destroy some climate action this year. He chose destruction.

Get used to these heat waves
Europe’s second major heat wave of this summer is its worst so far.

People shield their heads from the sun on Monday after a scaled down version of the Changing of the Guard ceremony took place outside Buckingham Palace in London during an extreme heat wave.
Hot records are outpacing cool by more than 10-to-1 this year as Europe, US brace for dangerous heat
The UK could record it’s highest ever temperature if, as expected, it logs 40 degrees Celsius (about 104 Fahrenheit) on Tuesday.

Wildfires are destroying areas in France and Spain.

Brits more used to the cool and damp have lived without air conditioning, something they might need to rethink since this week’s heat wave is a preview of the world’s new climate.

As CNN Senior Climate Editor Angela Fritz wrote last week, the weather the UK is experiencing now was actually part of a hypothetical climate change forecast prepared by the UK government. It’s coming true decades earlier than predicted.

Europe’s problem is the world’s problem
I asked Fritz why Americans should be looking at the weather in Europe. She sent me these reasons why we should expect more hot than cold as the climate changes – and why our way of life is compounding the problem:

Heat and climate change. Heat is one of those things that is irrefutably made worse by climate change. Burning fossil fuels traps heat in our atmosphere, which increases temperatures, which leads to more intense and more deadly heat waves.
It’s happening here too. What’s playing out in Europe right now is remarkably similar to what we saw last year in the Pacific Northwest – a region that is used to cooler weather besieged by record-breaking heat. Hundreds of people died in the Northwest last summer, and we’ve already seen reports that more than 1,000 people died of heat-related illness in Spain and Portugal in the past several days.
Humans caused this. Scientists later found that the Northwest heat wave would have been “virtually impossible” without human-caused climate change. The same will be said for Europe’s heat this week – and specifically the all-time records in the UK. We just wouldn’t be able to get these kinds of temperatures without global warming.
There will be more hot than cold. We’re not seeing nearly as much record-breaking cold now. We actually pulled up the latest record count for this year earlier today and found that warm records were outpacing cold ones by more than 10 to 1 so far in 2022. For 188 all-time heat records so far this year around the globe, only 18 cold records have been broken.

Don’t expect anything large and meaningful from the US government

The second part of this story has to do with the US government, which is witnessing a conservative Supreme Court wield more power to weaken the federal government.

Less power for the EPA. In June the conservatives who will control the court for decades denuded the EPA of its ability to, as CNN wrote, broadly regulate carbon emissions from existing power plants.

It also upended years of doctrine by which the federal government assumed authority to regulate everything from climate policy to worker safety.

(more blather...)

https://us.cnn.com/2022/07/18/politics/ ... index.html

Oh yeah, and Republicans too, gotta elect more Dems to save the planet! Machin and Biden are both Dems and between Machin's utterly predictable torpedo and Biden's equally predictable(if ya really pay attention to what he does, not what he says) expansion of oil exploration, trying to jack up production by all means possible, his incitement of a massively polluting war in Ukraine, viva la difference!

And let's not forget CNN and the rest of those lying capitalists tools who constantly dissemble and misdirect the public as to the heart of the problem, capitalism. They and their Owners cannot conceive of a world without capitalism and would at the least destroy civilization, denude biodiversity and leave the planet a much harsher place to maintain their class dominance. We must fight for survival.

Plenty of walls, plenty of lampposts....
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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blindpig
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Re: The Long Ecological Revolution

Post by blindpig » Fri Jul 22, 2022 4:40 pm

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As Myanmar experiences more extreme weather events, a roadmap that lays the context, analysis, and options on how to tackle climate change is highly essential. 2016 (Photo: IRRI)

Existing climate mitigation scenarios perpetuate colonial inequalities
By Jason Hickel (Posted Jul 22, 2022)

Originally published: The Lancet on July 20, 2022 by Aljosa Slamersak (more by The Lancet)

Summary
The challenge of climate mitigation is made more difficult by high rates of energy use in wealthy countries, mostly in the Global North, which far exceed what is required to meet human needs. In contrast, more than 3 billion people in poorer countries live in energy poverty. A just transition requires energy convergence—reducing energy use in wealthy countries to achieve rapid emissions reductions, and ensuring sufficient energy for development in the rest of the world. However, existing climate mitigation scenarios reviewed by The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change do not explore such a transition. On average, existing scenarios maintain the Global North’s energy privilege at a per capita level 2·3 times higher than in the Global South. Even the more equitable scenarios perpetuate large energy inequalities for the rest of the century. To reconcile the Global North’s high energy use with the Paris Agreement targets, most scenarios rely heavily on bioenergy-based negative emissions technologies. This approach is risky, but it is also unjust. These scenarios tend to appropriate land in the Global South to maintain, and further increase, the Global North’s energy privilege. There is an urgent need to develop scenarios that represent convergence to levels of energy that are sufficient for human wellbeing and compatible with rapid decarbonisation.

Read the Full Article Here https://www.thelancet.com/action/showPd ... %2900092-4

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Police officers help firefighters to extinguish a fire in Thrakomakedones, near Mount Parnitha, north of Athens, on Aug 7, 2021. Image credit: Harvey Morris, “Extreme weather puts pressure on nations to expand climate action,” China Daily Global, August 12, 2021.

Be moderate…we only want THE EARTH!
By John Bellamy Foster (Posted Jul 21, 2022)
A comment on the first part of the “Ecological Catastrophe, Collapse, Democracy and Socialism” debate

The following commentary was written by Marxist thinker and author of Marx’s Ecology John Bellamy Foster on the first part of the debate “Ecological Catastrophe, Collapse, Democracy and Socialism” between the renowned American intellectual Noam Chomsky, the Chilean exponent of the new ideology of Collapsist Marxism Miguel Fuentes and climate scientist Guy McPherson. (The debate “Ecological Catastrophe, Collapse, Democracy and Socialism” can be read at the website of Marxism and Collapse.) One of the main achievements of John Bellamy Foster’s critical commentary is explaining his position on this debate by developing his own ideas in relation to what for him would constitute the most urgent task of the moment: to respond to the ecological catastrophe and the danger of an imminent civilisational collapse from an ecosocialist perspective.

—Marxism and Collapse, June 11-12, 2022
I accept much of what Noam Chomsky, Miguel Fuentes, and Guy McPherson say, but do not agree completely with any of them. My view of the planetary ecological emergency starts with the world scientific consensus, insofar as that can be ascertained, and draws on the long critique of capitalism developed most centrally by historical materialism. In terms of the scientific consensus on climate change, the reports of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are most important. The planetary emergency is not, however, confined to climate change, and also encompasses the entire set of planetary boundaries that are now being crossed, demarcating the earth as a safe home for humanity. Most of my comments here, though, will center on climate change.

In terms of the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report, published over the course of 2021-2022, it is no longer possible for the world entirely to avoid crossing the 1.5° C increase in global average temperature. Rather, in the most optimistic IPCC scenario (SSP1-1.9) the 1.5° C mark will not be reached until 2040, global average temperatures will go up a further tenth of a degree by mid-century, and the increase in global average temperature will fall again to 1.4°C by the end of the century. We therefore have a very small window in which to act. Basically, meeting this scenario means peaking global carbon emissions by 2030 and reaching net zero carbon emissions by 2050. All of this was outlined in the first part of AR6 on the Physical Science Basis published in August 2021. This was followed by the publication of the IPCC’s Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability report in February 2022, and its Mitigation report in April 2022.

Global surface temperature changes relative to 1850-1900 (IPCC, 2021)
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Each IPCC assessment report (AR1-AR6) has three parts, each of which is published separately and is introduced by a “Summary for Policymakers,” followed by a series of chapters. In the IPCC process scientists, reflecting the scientific consensus, write the whole draft report. But the “Summary for Policymakers” for each published part—the only section of the overall report that is widely read, covered by the press, and constitutes the basis for governmental policies—is rewritten line by line by governments. Hence the published “Summary for Policymakers” is not the actual scientific consensus document, but rather the governmental consensus document that displaces the former. Especially with respect to issues of mitigation, related to social policy, governments can obliterate the entirety of what the scientists determined.

Capitalist world governments were particularly worried about, part 3 of AR6 on Mitigation, as drafted by scientists as of August 2021, since it was by far the most radical IPCC treatment of the mitigation issue, reflecting the fact that revolutionary-scale transformations of production, consumption, and energy use (both in terms of physical and temporal scales) were now needed if the 1.5°C pathway was to be reached—or even in order to keep the increase in global average temperature well below 2°C. This is considered the guardrail for avoiding irreversible out-of-control climate change, which, if crossed, would likely lead to a global average temperature of 4.4°C (best estimate) by the end of the century, leading to the collapse of global industrial civilization. Chapter I of the AR6 Mitigation report went so far as to question whether capitalism was sustainable.

Anticipating that governments were prepared drastically to alter the scientific consensus “Summary for Policymakers”, scientists associated with Scientific Rebellion (linked to Extinction Rebellion) leaked the scientific consensus report for part 3 on Mitigation in August 2021, days before the release of part 1 of the report on The Physical Science Basis. This action allowed us to see the radical social conclusions of the scientists in Working Group 3, who well understood the enormous social transformations that needed to take place to stay within the 1.5°C pathway, and the inability of existing and prospective technologies to solve the problem, independently of transformative social change. The scientific consensus Summary for Policymakers for part 3 on Mitigation also pointed to the importance of vast movements from the bottom of society—involving youth, workers, women, the precarious, the racially oppressed, and those in the Global South, who had relatively little responsibility for the problem but were likely to suffer the most. All of this was eradicated, and in many cases inverted, in the published governmental consensus “Summary for Policymakers” in part 3 of AR6 on Mitigation, which was almost a complete inversion of what the scientists had determined. For example, the scientific consensus draft said that coal-fired plants had to be eliminated this decade, while the published governmental consensus report changed this to the possibility of increasing coal-fired plants with advancements in carbon capture and sequestration. The scientific consensus Summary for Policymakers attacked the “vested interests.” The published version removed any reference to the vested interests. More importantly, the scientific consensus report argued that the 1.5°C pathway could be reached while dramatically improving the conditions of all of humanity by pursuing low-energy solutions, requiring social transformations. This, however, was removed from the published governmental consensus Summary for Policymakers.

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This, I think, is a good reflection of where the struggle lies in relation to the science and what we have to do. We have to recognize that there is a pathway forward for humanity, but that the capitalist world system, and today’s governments that are largely subservient to corporations and the wealthy, are blocking that pathway, simply because it requires revolutionary-scale socioecological change. The world scientific consensus itself in this planetary emergency is being sacrificed to what ecologist Rachel Carson called “the gods of production and profit.” The only answer, as in the past, is a social earthquake from below coupled with volcanic eruptions in every locale forming a revolt of the world’s population, emerging as a new, all-encompassing environmental proletariat. There are incredible obstacles before us, not least of all the attempts of existing states to mobilize the right-wing elements of the lower-middle class, what C. Wright Mills called “the rear guard of the capitalist system,” generating a neo-fascist politics. Nevertheless, we are facing a historically unprecedented situation. A Global Ecological Revolt is already in the making. Hundreds of millions, even billions, of people will enter actively into the environmental struggle in our time. Whether it will be enough to save the earth as a home for humanity is impossible to tell. But the struggle is already beginning. It is possible for humanity to win, and our choice as individuals is how we join the struggle.

It is clear from the world scientific consensus as embodied in the Mitigation report that a strategy of capitalist ecological modernization, financed by global carbon taxes and the financialization of nature, is something that is too little and too late—and relies on the juggernaut of capital that is already destroying the earth as a home for humanity—on the pretense that saving the climate can all be made compatible with the accumulation of capital.

What Robert Pollin and Noam Chomsky have advanced in terms of green taxes and a global Green New Deal that depends primarily on decoupling economic growth from greenhouse gas emissions through technological change—basically a strategy of capitalist ecological modernization with some just transition features, is not sufficient to deal with the crisis at this point—and would at best give us a little more time. Even this, though, is being resisted by the vested interests as a threat to the system. The capitalist class at the top is so intertwined with fossil capital as to be incapable of even a meaningful strategy of climate reform. It is prepared to drag its feet, while building fortresses to safeguard its own opulent conditions, stepping up its looting of the planet. This is not quite a suicidal strategy from the standpoint of the self-styled “masters of the universe”, because they have already largely separated themselves in their consciousness from humanity, the earth, and the future.

In contrast to Chomsky, Fuentes and McPherson, though realistic on many points, seem, in different ways, to have given up. Yet, humanity as a whole has not yet nor will it ever give up. As Karl Marx said quite realistically, in confronting the destruction that British colonial rule unleashed on the Irish environment and population in his day, it is a question of “ruin or revolution.” We know now that even in the most optimistic scenario whole constellations of ecological catastrophes are now upon us in the next few decades. This means that human communities and populations need to organize in the present at the grassroots for survival at the local, regional, national, and global levels. Issues of survival are bearing down the most on marginalized, precarious, oppressed, and exploited populations, although ultimately threatening the entire chain of human generations. It is here we must take our stand. As the great Irish revolutionary James Connolly wrote in his song “Be Moderate,” “We only want THE EARTH.”

—John Bellamy Foster, June 10, 2022

https://mronline.org/2022/07/21/be-mode ... the-earth/

Umm, fascism develops among the declassed petty bourgeois though the do utilize sections of the working class.

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Behind the Drought and Food Deficits in Africa
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on JULY 21, 2022

Abayomi Azikiwe

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There has been a deteriorating situation within various African states related to the impact of drought and the consequent lack of food for hundreds of millions of people.

These events on the continent cannot be analyzed separately from the broader international economic and security crises which have impacted the ability of the existing global markets to provide adequate food to the peoples of the world.

The acute shortages of food in various regions across Africa have not yet reached the officially designated category of a famine. However, if food assistance is not provided soon, estimates from the World Food Program (WFP) and the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) suggest that tens of millions of people will be on the verge of starvation.

WFP officials indicate that their efforts to address the current crisis, particularly in East Africa, would require an additional $192 million to provide the necessary food to prevent hunger. Considering what is being provided to the war in Ukraine by the West along with the massive tax breaks and subsidies to multinational corporations in the United States, $192 million pales in comparison.
Africa drought reportClick on image to view report.

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https://docs.wfp.org/api/documents/WFP- ... ivelihoods.

Any worsening of the food crisis in Africa could easily create further destabilization and displacement extending far beyond the continent. Since the Pentagon-NATO war against Libya during 2011, the consequent social disruptions continue up until today.

In Ethiopia, the previous administration of President Donald Trump sought to undermine the sovereignty of the Horn of Africa state by fueling tensions with Egypt which is stalling the full operational capacity of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD), the largest power generation facility in the region. The rebel Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) initiated a war against the central Ethiopian government in Addis Ababa at the aegis of Washington and its allies in Cairo and Khartoum in November 2020. Although the TPLF has been driven back into its provincial stronghold in the north of the country, the subsequent humanitarian crisis has been politicized by Washington and the EU member-states.

Somalia has been subject to direct Pentagon, Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and State Department interference for many years. Despite the presence of the African Union Mission to Somalia (AMISOM), which is heavily trained and funded by Washington and the EU, the Biden administration announced earlier in the year that it would redeploy 700 U.S. troops to Somalia.

Nonetheless, Somalia is once again a focal point of food deficits which borders on the brink of famine. All of the deliberate involvement by the western capitalist states has not been able to bring peace and stability to the country.

South Sudan is the newest recognized state by the United Nations and the AU. Since its independence in 2011, there have been several internal conflicts between the contending political forces inside the country. The U.S., Britain and Israel all backed the partitioning of the Republic of Sudan. Consequently, these entities must accept their substantial responsibility for the turmoil now in existence in South Sudan.

Surprisingly enough, the Biden administration has suspended aid to South Sudan. The government in the capital of Juba has made a direct appeal to Washington to resume aid shipments into the country.

Since the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic the overall global economic systems have been severely disrupted. Even in the Western European and North American industrial states, there has been a precipitous hike in food, energy, transportation and housing costs. The leading capitalist governments including the United States have failed to institute measures which could sustain the working class and oppressed living in these countries.

For example, the administration of President Joe Biden has not threatened to impose price controls on essential commodities and services which could provide assistance to the impoverished masses. Social programs such as school breakfasts and lunches are being terminated due to lack of funding. At the same time, at least $55 billion in military and other aid is being sent to Ukraine in order to prolong a proxy war against the Russian Federation. These military and capitalist economic priorities are hampering the ability of people across the world to meet their food and energy needs.

East Africa Has Become the Epicenter of the Threat of Famine

In the East African nations of Ethiopia, Somalia and South Sudan, a convergence of drought, supply chain problems which began at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, internal conflict and the unprecedented sanctions against the Russian Federation by the European Union (EU) and the U.S., is imperiling greater numbers of people on a weekly basis. The response of the Biden White House has been delayed and inadequate while the lack of food and medical attention is reaching critical levels.

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Africa and world food crisis during 2022Africa and world food crisis during 2022

While announcing additional funding for humanitarian relief by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the Biden administration has cloaked its stated commitments by blaming Russia for the food crisis in developing countries. Yet the U.S. has engineered the Ukraine crisis through a series of foreign policy maneuvers dating back to 2014 when the-then government of President Viktor Yanukovych was overthrown by the administration of President Barack Obama. Moreover, pressure has continued on the Ukrainian government to not negotiate a ceasefire with Moscow.

A press release from USAID claims:

“Today the United States, through the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), announced nearly $55 million in additional food-security assistance to Ethiopia. Ethiopia is currently experiencing increased food insecurity due to higher food and fertilizer prices, which have been exacerbated by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. USAID will utilize this new funding to help Ethiopians overcome the current food crisis and to build further resilience to prevent and respond to food-related shocks in the future.”

However, to what extent is this aid being pledged to Ethiopia will indeed go towards stabilizing the country as opposed to providing support and coordination to the TPLF and other rebel groupings seeking to overthrow the administration of Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed? Just several months earlier, a Congressional bill was withdrawn that called for the imposition of harsh sanctions against Ethiopia. At present, Addis Ababa has been suspended from participation in the Africa Growth and Opportunities (AGOA) program as a direct result of the foreign policy of the Biden administration.

With specific reference to Ethiopia, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) said on July 19 that:

“Four consecutive failed rainy seasons have brought on severe drought in Ethiopia’s lowland regions of Afar, Oromia, the Southern Nations, Nationalities, and Peoples’ (SNNPR) and Somali regions. Water wells have dried up and millions of livestock have died, resulting in mass displacement…. ‘This climate-induced crisis is a malnutrition crisis for children and not just in Ethiopia but across Africa,’ said [Manuel] Fontaine (UNICEF Director for Emergency Operations).

‘While UNICEF and partners are already on the ground providing lifesaving nutritional support for severely malnourished children, USAID’s recent $200 million contribution to UNICEF globally is a timely game changer and we are very grateful. This funding will significantly scale up our nutrition response across the world. ’The ripple effect of the war in Ukraine is also set to tip more families in Africa over the edge and will exacerbate food insecurity with increasing fuel prices and reduced availability of wheat imports. Ethiopia imports 67 per cent of its wheat from Russia and Ukraine.’”


Ethiopia along with other African states conduct extensive trade with Russia in the agricultural sectors. The sanctions imposed by Washington are undoubtedly worsening the economic uncertainty and food crisis. Obviously, the AU member-states are not in favor of the proxy war waged by Washington and Wall Street against Russia. The reconvening of the Russia-Africa Summit in November and December of this year is a strong indication that the continent is seeking ways to avoid the devastating impact of U.S. militarist policies in Eastern Europe.

The only medium and long-term solutions to the problems of climate change, drought, food deficits and famine is a dramatic shift in the international relations of production and distribution of wealth around the globe. An expanding majority of the working and oppressed peoples are demanding the redistribution of the world’s resources and wealth which can only result in the further weakening of imperialism.

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2022/07/ ... in-africa/

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More than a thousand deaths reported due to heat wave in Spain

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Of the total estimated deaths, the Daily Mortality Monitoring System indicated that 672 correspond to people over 85 years of age. | Photo: EFE
Published 21 July 2022

The past 18 and 19 July were the days with the most estimated deaths due to high temperatures with 184 deaths.

The Carlos III Health Institute (ISCIII) of Spain, dependent on the Ministry of Health, reported that until last Tuesday, 1,047 deaths were reported attributable to the high temperatures that affected the country.

Of the total estimated deaths from the heat wave, they detailed that 672 correspond to people over 85 years of age, 241 were between 75 and 84, while another 88 were between 65 and 74 years old.

Data from the Daily Mortality Monitoring System (MoMo), of the Carlos III Health Institute, the deaths known as "observed and estimated" due to the increase in temperature have been increasing since the beginning of the heat wave, being last Monday and Tuesday the days with the highest figure, 184.


In addition, he specified the death toll from July 10 to July 19: 15 on Sunday, 28 on Monday, 41 on Tuesday, 60 on Wednesday, 93 on Thursday, 123 on Friday, 150 on Saturday, 169 on Sunday. following, and 184 deaths on both July 18 and 19.

On the other hand, Spain is also close to having its worst summer with respect to forest fires, despite the fact that the second heat wave ended. According to the European Information System on these disasters, so far in 2022, more than 193,000 hectares have been devastated by the flames.

Similarly, the State Meteorological Agency detailed that seven Spanish provinces will continue to be at "significant risk" due to temperatures, which are around 40 degrees, while another 29 will have a risk warning for between 36 and 39 degrees.

https://www.telesurtv.net/news/espana-o ... -0031.html

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Re: The Long Ecological Revolution

Post by blindpig » Tue Jul 26, 2022 4:43 pm

Climate Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century
by Jayati Ghosh, Shouvik Chakraborty and Debamanyu Das
(Jul 01, 2022)

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Chicago Climate Justice activists protesting cap and trade legislation at the intersection of LaSalle & Adams in Chicago Loop (November 30, 2008). By Wesha - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, Link

This article draws on material used in work done by the authors for the Club of Rome’s Transformational Economics Commission.[/i]

Introduction

Imperialism can be defined broadly as the struggle of large, monopolistic capital over economic territory, actively aided and assisted by states. However, imperialism cannot be comprehensively addressed simply on a nation-by-nation basis but requires the recognition of the existence of an imperialist world system dominated by a hegemonic power. This was broadly the approach developed by V. I. Lenin more than a century ago. Though it has not changed in essence, it has morphed significantly in form, structure, and reliance on particular legal and institutional architectures.1 The economic territory is the subject of contestation and control, and it can take many forms: land; resources extracted from nature; labor (both paid and unpaid); markets; newly commodified services that were formerly seen to be more in the domain of public provision, ranging from electricity to education to security; newly created forms of property such as knowledge or intellectual property; even cyberspace.

Among the many new forms of economic territory that have proliferated in the neoliberal globalizing phase of capitalism, those associated with direct human environmental interaction with the planet remain in many ways the most crucial and the most strongly associated also with coercion, conflict, and war. The nineteenth century saw many such conflicts in the colonial expansion to other lands, in the attempt to establish control over physical territory with its attendant advantages. Wars in the late twentieth century were closely related to control over energy sources like oil. The twenty-first century may see growing water wars. Increasingly, the change resulting from anthropogenic rifts in the Earth System metabolism has come to define a sphere of struggle over influence, control, and appropriation that is now a major aspect of contemporary imperialism.

This particular feature of global capitalism today and its association with not just capitalism but with imperialism is becoming more and more evident in: (1) how core countries and elites are able to produce and consume based on an imperialist mode of living, generating increasing global carbon emissions with rising ecological footprints; (2) the deceptive and debilitating ways that climate change is addressed in international negotiations; (3) the operations of global finance that increase carbon emissions while failing to make available the required finance for effective mitigation strategies; (4) the privatized knowledge monopolies that prevent most of humanity from being able to access critical technologies required to confront the climate challenge; and (5) the changing technological requirements for both mitigation and adaptation, which give rise to further natural resource grabs aimed particularly at strategic minerals, along with new forms of extractivist competition among the leading powers.

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Chart 1. Cumulative Carbon Dioxide Emissions from Fossil Fuel Combustion Worldwide from 1750 to 2020

*EU is composed of France, Germany, Italy, Poland, and the United Kingdom.

Source: Our World in Data; Climate Watch Data; Global Carbon Project; Statista.

The Carbon Debt in History and Today

Historically, today’s so-called developed countries are responsible for nearly 80 percent of cumulative global carbon emissions from 1850 to 2011. This historical process of the concentration of greenhouse gas emissions is the major contributor to the climate change impacts that the world is facing today. They are fundamentally a result of overexploitation and abuse of the planet by a small group of now-rich countries, which today account for around 14 percent of the global population. Meanwhile, the effects of those climate change impacts are being felt disproportionately by developing countries, which are less able to deal with the consequences because of lower per capita incomes, less fiscal space, and reduced access to international capital markets.

This means that there is a major concern about existing climate debt, which needs to be addressed in any conception of a just transition. The net zero commitments for the future currently being made by rich countries do not make any explicit mention of the truly vast negative impact of their own past growth trajectories. If this climate debt were to be taken into account, it would mean a major revamp of existing proposals made by these countries. For example, it has been estimated that “the US fair share of the global mitigation effort in 2030 is equivalent to a reduction of 195% below its 2005 emissions levels, reflecting a fair share range of 173–229%.”2

In international negotiations on addressing climate change, the advanced economies have succeeded in shifting the terms away from any notions of historical responsibility and climate debt, instead focusing only on current emissions levels. There is also no recognition of the need to compensate those countries most impacted by climate change already (predominantly low- and middle-income countries), which have suffered extensive loss and damage due to rising sea levels, more extreme climate events, and worsening possibilities for cultivation. This is not just about ethics; it is counterproductive, because it reduces or even destroys the minimal international solidarity and cooperation that is essential to ensure that humanity can cope with the climate crisis. There can be no transition to a sustainable economy in a healthy planet—”just” or otherwise—if these legitimate concerns of developing countries are not taken into account.

The current pattern of commitments to reduce carbon emissions also means that the climate debt of this small group of rich countries to the rest of the world will continue to grow. The projections and commitments made by rich countries in effect mean that they will continue to appropriate the vast bulk (around 60 percent) of the estimated global “carbon budget” for the next three decades if the additional 1.5°C limit of global warming is maintained. If, as seems increasingly likely, the 1.5°C barrier is breached quickly (in the most optimistic Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [IPCC] scenario, this will occur by 2040), with potentially unspeakable consequences, these few rich countries will still be predominantly responsible.

Estimating National Responsibility for Carbon Emissions

It should be obvious that natural processes—and the Anthropocene effects on them—do not observe national boundaries. The atmosphere and the oceans do not rely on visas to cross borders, and the impact of climate change and degradation of nature spread across locations. Despite this, strategies to address climate change remain fundamentally national, even on international platforms. The “climate responsibility” of different countries forms the basis of climate negotiations and national commitments to control greenhouse gas emissions, as most recently evidenced in November 2021 at the UN Climate Change Conference in Scotland.

How is such climate responsibility determined? The standard method (also used by the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change) is based on carbon dioxide-equivalent emissions generated by productive activity within national boundaries. This makes China, the United States, and India the three largest emitters of carbon dioxide today, accounting for more than half the global total. China and India have dramatically increased emissions, especially since the turn of the century, while most advanced economies have shown lower increases and, in some cases, slight declines. Indeed, this allowed much finger pointing at China and India at the Glasgow UN Climate Change Conference.

In general, developing countries have shown much faster rates of increase of carbon emissions since 2000: by 2019, they had gone up in China by more than 3 times, in India by 2.7 times, in Indonesia by 4.7 times, and in Saudi Arabia they nearly doubled. Meanwhile, in the United States and Japan, total national production-based emissions actually declined by around 12 percent over these two decades. In Germany, the decline was nearly 22 percent.3 These declines reflect a combination of forces: changes in trade patterns that enabled these countries to shift the more carbon-intensive production to other (mostly developing) countries and thereby effectively “export” their carbon emissions; changes in economic structure toward services that rely less on energy use; changes in the composition of energy away from the most polluting sources (like coal) to less carbon-polluting sources like natural gas, as well as nuclear and renewable energy.

The way most climate change discussions are couched in terms of absolute total emissions or in terms of gross domestic product, rather than per person, obscures the deeper inequalities that pervade the current patterns. Despite recent absolute reductions, the advanced economies still remain by far the greatest emitters in per capita terms. In per capita terms, the United States and Australia produce eight times more carbon emissions than developing countries like India, Indonesia, and Brazil, who are nevertheless being castigated for allowing emissions to increase. Even China, despite recent increases, still shows less than half the level of per capita carbon emissions of the United States.

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Chart 2. Per Capita CO2 Emissions in 2020

Source: Global Carbon Project, November 2021; Global Carbon Atlas; Statista.

However, even per capita carbon emission comparisons based on national production do not reveal the full extent of the inequalities that currently exist. By sourcing high-carbon products and services from other countries, nations can effectively “export” their emissions. Since the turn of the century, advanced economies followed the now infamous strategy proposed by Larry Summers of exporting polluting industries to the developing world—and adding carbon-emitting industries and production processes to this list. Shifting from direct emissions to “indirect” emissions through cross-border trade means that the full emissions embodied in the consumption and investment of the rich countries are not counted.</p

The leaked scientific-consensus “Summary for Policymakers” of Working Group III on Mitigation in the IPCC’s Sixth Annual Assessment explained that over 40 percent of developing country emissions were due to export production for developed countries. This was removed by governments in the final published version of the report.4 The exported emissions by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries increased rapidly from 2002 (notably, after China joined the World Trade Organization) and peaked in 2006 at a negative carbon balance of 2,278 million metric tons, which was 17 percent of the group of countries’ production-based emissions. They have been declining thereafter, but still remain at around 1,577 million metric tons.5

Once final demand emissions are taken into account, the per capita differences across countries are even greater, and the advanced economies still remain by far the greatest emitters. While the United States showed eight times the per capita carbon emissions of India in production terms in 2019, the U.S. emissions were more than twelve times that of India when final demand emissions are calculated for 2015. U.S. per capita emissions based on final demand were more than three times those of China, although in aggregate production-based terms China is seen as today’s largest emitter.

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Chart 3. Per Capita CO2 Emissions by Final Demand in 2015

Source: Global Carbon Project; Global Carbon Atlas; Statista; OECD Data.

Inequality as a Driver of Carbon Emissions

National averages can be misleading, disguising significant inequality within a country, determined by levels of income, location, and occupation, among other factors. According to the 2022 World Inequality Report, global carbon inequalities are now mainly due to inequalities within countries, which now account for nearly two thirds of global carbon inequality, having nearly doubled in share from slightly more than one third in 1990. In fact, the poorest half of the population in rich countries is already at (or near) the 2030 climate targets set by rich countries, when these targets are expressed on a per capita basis.

Interestingly, there are globally high emitters in low- and middle-income countries and globally low emitters in rich countries. Predictably, the richest decile in North America is made up of the most extravagant carbon emitters in the world, with an average of seventy-three tons of carbon emissions per capita each year, which is seventy-three times the per capita emissions of the poorest half of the population of South and Southeast Asia. The rich in East Asia also emit very high levels, though still significantly less than in North America.

The surprise, however, is in the relatively low emissions of the bottom half of the population in the rich regions. In Europe, the lowest emitting 50 percent of the population emits around five tons per year per person, the bottom 50 percent in North America around ten tons, and the bottom 50 percent in East Asia around three tons. These relatively small carbon footprints contrast sharply with those of the top 10 percent of emitters in their own countries, but also with emissions by the richest in relatively poor regions. The top decile in South and Southeast Asia, for example, emits more than double the amount of carbon than the bottom half of the population in Europe, and even the top decile in sub-Saharan Africa emits more than the poorest in Europe.

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Chart 4. Per Capita CO2 Emissions by Region and Income Category

Source: World Inequality Report 2021 and Lucas Chancel, Climate Change and the Global Inequality of Carbon Emissions 1990–2020 (Paris: World Inequality Lab, 2021).

Notes: Calculated based on World Inequality Report methodology. Personal carbon footprints include emissions from domestic consumption, public and private investments, and imports and exports of carbon embedded in goods and services traded with the rest of the world. Modeled estimates are based on the systematic combination of tax data, household surveys, and input-output tables, with emissions split equally within households.

What is more, growing inequality also seems to drive carbon emissions overall. While the bottom half of income groups in the United States and Europe reduced per capita emissions by 15 to 20 percent between 1990 and 2019, the richest 1 percent increased their emissions quite significantly everywhere. Today, the richest 10 percent of people on the planet are responsible for nearly half of all carbon emissions. This may come as no surprise to those who have been watching the super-rich take extraterrestrial joyrides, at a cost of $55 million per ticket, in just one of the many ways in which their conspicuous consumption affects the ecosystem.

As the rich in different countries have become even richer (and more politically powerful), they are even more blatant and uncaring about their environmental impact—or happy to render lip service rather than pursue real change in their patterns of investing and living. This conforms to the pattern that would be predicted by a recognition of imperialism. The elites in rich and poor countries alike are able to benefit from an economic system in which they grab more and more of available resources, including extraction from nature and exploitation of the planet.

This suggests that climate policies should target wealthy polluters more. Instead, carbon taxes fall more heavily on low- and middle-income groups and have relatively little impact on the consumption patterns of the wealthiest groups, both in rich and in poor regions. Clearly, the strategies to reduce carbon emissions need to start focusing on containing the consumption of the rich, both within individual countries and globally. This requires a major shift in how climate alleviation policies are conceived and implemented.

The Role of Finance in Brown and Green Investments
Rich nations have been primarily responsible for creating the present climate crisis, but poorer nations face disproportionate burdens of the impact and are more financially constrained in implementing green policies. To address this imbalance, at the 2009 UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, developed nations pledged to provide climate finance to the developing nations of $100 billion annually. This amount was certainly far short of the actual need, as a recent IPCC report notes: estimations of adaptation costs alone (not including mitigation) range between $15 and $411 billion per year for climate change impacts to 2030, with most of these estimates exceeding $100 billion. Even this does not take into account new estimates of the financial impact of loss and damage resulting from climate change that is already impacting much of the world.6

However, even this relatively paltry amount was not actually provided. Since 2013, total estimates of this finance come, on average, only to $60 billion, with a fraction of this as bilateral aid.7 The latest estimate for 2020 suggests that around $80 billion was mobilized—but a significant part, around one third, through multilateral institutions and another significant portion through private finance, neither of which strictly speaking should be seen as part of the climate finance commitments of the rich countries. Bilateral public finance, which is really what was promised, has amounted to between a quarter to one third of the amount, coming to the pitiful average of less than $18 billion per year from 2013 to 2019. Contrast this with the massive amounts of money, literally several trillions of dollars, that the rich countries’ governments were able to produce “out of a hat” as additional fiscal spending to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic and its impact within their own economies over 2020 and 2021.

The extraordinary stinginess of rich nations in terms of addressing the climate finance needs of the rest of the world is even more striking when it is evident that such finance could also be provided almost for free, for example by recycling the new special drawing rights (supplementary foreign exchange reserve assets) recently issued by the International Monetary Fund (IMF)—of which the rich countries received around $400 billion. Yet even commitments made as of April 2022 by rich nations to the IMF’s Resilience and Sustainability Trust, set up to provide climate finance (admittedly to a very limited group of countries and under possibly problematic conditions), have thus far come to only around $40 billion.

The paucity of climate finance is even more striking when compared to the fossil fuel subsidies being provided by rich nations. These governments have been heavily subsidizing their own fossil fuel industries even as they exhorted much poorer countries to do more to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. But the full extent of these subsidies has been hidden by the methods used to measure them. The standard way to measure government support for fossil fuel production or consumption is to look at direct budgetary transfers and subsidies, as well as tax breaks for the sector. Using this method, the OECD and the International Energy Agency (IEA) have estimated that governments across fifty-two advanced and emerging economies—accounting for about 90 percent of global fossil fuel energy supply—provided fossil fuel subsidies worth an average of $555 billion per year from 2017 to 2019.8

However, this massively understates the actual fossil fuel subsidies that governments provide. A more comprehensive measure used by IMF researchers that includes both explicit subsidies, or undercharging for supply costs, and implicit subsidies, or undercharging for environmental costs and foregone consumption taxes, provides a much more significant total for fossil fuel subsidies.9 According to this, global fossil fuel subsidies in 2020 totaled $5.9 trillion, more than ten times the OECD-IEA estimate. This is not surprising: implicit subsidies accounted for 92 percent of the total.

China was the largest provider of fuel subsidies in absolute terms followed by the United States, Russia, India, and the European Union. The total subsidy provided just by the United States to the fossil fuel industry was $662 billion in 2020, mostly in the form of implicit subsidies. In contrast, the Joe Biden administration’s commitments to climate finance were just $5.7 billion (and are only supposed to be increased to $11.4 billion by 2024). Indeed, the IPCC estimates that global climate finance from both public and private sources totaled only about $640 billion that year. This highlights the extent to which government intervention is skewing prices, and therefore market incentives, in favor of fossil fuels, rather than against them.

In such a context of skewed incentives driven by public subsidies to fossil fuel industries, it is not surprising that private finance remains heavily oriented toward these “brown” energy investments, despite all the talk of public-private partnerships and “blended finance” to enable “green” energy investments. Effective analysis of private financial flows is hampered by the lack of reliable, systematic, and transparent data related to cross-border financial flows particularly in fossil fuel industries. Better data disclosure on fuel finance by source, destination, and their corresponding power generation capacity is essential for policy coordination. But the available data suggests that the majority of the overseas finance for coal industries comes from private entities, particularly commercial banks and institutional investors primarily from the advanced economies. Out of the top fifteen lenders to new coal investment globally, fourteen were based in advanced economies. Similarly, the dominant institutional investors in bonds or stocks of fossil fuel companies are also from these Western economies, the top three being BlackRock, Vanguard, and Capital Group—all from the United States. A study has found that the carbon emissions indirectly generated by the cash and investments (including marketable securities) of major multinational corporations, including supposedly more green “digital” companies, is huge because of the fossil fuel investments of the banks in which they invest. It found that for Alphabet, Meta, and PayPal, for example, the emissions generated by their cash and investments (financed emissions) exceed all their other emissions combined.10

It seems obvious that any serious policies aimed toward mitigation and adaptation should redress this imbalance between climate finance (for both mitigation and adaptation) and the subsidies and finance that continue to be provided to traditional fossil fuel industries. Unfortunately, the Ukraine War has led many governments—especially Global North governments that can afford to take a more medium-term view—to quickly renege on even the relatively meager and obviously inadequate climate pledges they made only a few months previously at the UN Climate Change Conference in Glasgow. Instead of seeing the oil price spike as an opportunity to hasten the shift away from fossil fuels, governments in the core capitalist economies as well as low- and middle-income countries have tried to reduce the pain by keeping domestic energy prices low, for short-term political reasons.

The New Scramble for Resources

The development of new technologies has never provided a route out of imperialism as defined here, but it can and does change the nature of the resources that are sought to be controlled by the major powers. This is just as true of the required energy transition, which necessarily requires a significant increase in the use of some critical minerals. These have already experienced significant surges in both demand and supply in recent years, and the IEA projections show that mining of critical minerals will grow at least thirty times in the next two decades.

Consider, as an example, the specific case of lithium, which is particularly crucial to the decarbonization of the global economy, required to support electric vehicles, smart gadgets, and appliances at homes and offices, digital cameras, mobiles, laptops, and tablets. Rechargeable lithium-ion batteries are essential for electric vehicles, portable electronic devices, electric tools, as well as grid storage applications. Apart from its use in batteries (estimated to be around three-quarters of the end use of this mineral), lithium is required for ceramics, glass, lubricating greases, continuous casting mold flux powders, polymer production, air treatment, and other uses. In the IEA Sustainable Development Scenario, lithium demand is projected to increase by forty-two times by 2040.11

Currently, lithium is produced and exported mainly by nations in the Global South, with the exception of Australia, which is currently the largest producer of commercial lithium. Pure elemental lithium is highly reactive and hence cannot be found in nature. Instead, it is found in the form of concentrations in salt brines or in mineral ores. In Australia, it is extracted directly from hard rock deposits, while it is extracted from brine pools in certain Latin American economies (the salares of Bolivia, Chile, and Argentina), and each has different extraction and processing techniques. Identified lithium resources are much larger than current production, having increased substantially to almost eighty-nine million tons in 2021 due to continued exploration.12 Most of the identified lithium resources are in Bolivia, Argentina, and Chile. Though China is an important player in this game, particularly in controlling supply chains, its imports currently exceed its exports, making it a net importer of lithium carbonate used to make lithium-ion batteries.

There are major concerns about the environmental impact of lithium mining, especially in developing countries. The lithium triangle in Latin America, comprised of Chile’s Salar de Atacama, Bolivia’s Salar de Uyuni, and Argentina’s Salar de Arizaro, holds the largest known lithium reserves in the world, under the salt flats (salares). The lithium must be pumped from underground and then concentrated by evaporation. Lithium extraction has already adversely impacted the ecosystem and Indigenous communities in these Latin American nations, resulting in depletion and reduced accessibility of fresh water, and contamination of local streams used by humans and livestock, as well as for irrigation in Argentina’s Salar de Hombre Muerto. The region is a home to several Indigenous Atacameño communities who have traditionally relied on the land and natural resources for their livelihoods—livestock keeping, small-scale mining, textiles, and handicrafts. In the absence of formal negotiations, the interests of the mining companies are overrepresented at the expense of the local communities who are left pauperized. Mining operations have also been associated with human rights abuse, respiratory ailments, labor exploitation, and finally displacement of the traditional owners of these lands. There are additional concerns regarding the quality, accessibility, and framing of information needed to obtain consent from these communities. Compared to these externalities, the economic benefits to these regions have been minuscule.13

Extraction techniques in the lithium triangle include brine pumping and solar evaporation, using almost around 500,000 gallons of water to produce one ton of lithium. Overexploitation of water alters the natural hydrodynamics of these regions and reduces availability of water for local communities.14 Industrial extraction and the resulting commodification of water by the mining industry form the basis of Indigenous people’s contestation over water resources. National and multinational companies often use their power and money to acquire and appropriate water sources from Indigenous communities in perpetuity.15 Disputes over water management have also manifested in the form of disparity in access to groundwater between large and peasant farmers in Chile. Lithium mining also poses water pollution threats: for instance, in China, emissions of toxic chemicals like hydrochloric acid from lithium mines and the associated deaths of yaks and fish in the Liqi River have resulted in disputes and protests from local villagers.16

Mining operations and related activities associated with these strategic minerals also adversely impact the local flora and fauna. Significant environmental degradation over the past two decades includes vegetation decline, elevated daytime temperature, decreasing soil moisture, and increasing drought conditions in national reserve areas. There are also concerns related to potential threats to the existing biodiversity.17

Disputes arising from land claims associated with mining have manifested in conflicts in Argentina (between organized movements at municipal levels and provincial governments over mining rents), Guatemala (involving collective action by Indigenous communities), Peru (with peasant movements holding popular consultations on mining projects), Venezuela (protests against mining activities in the Orinoco Mining Arc), and other regions. In Chile, tension between the Mapuche and local authorities continues to remain high.18

There is evidence of displacement of Indigenous communities. For instance, the rural population in the northern communes of the Tarapacá region in Chile decreased from almost 46 percent to 6 percent between 1940 and 2002. There are other forms of disputes originating from lack of proper compensation to the Indigenous communities, or failure to keep the promised compensation. Minera Exar, a joint Canadian-Chilean venture, had arrangements with six local communities to extract lithium in Argentina. With the expected sales to be around $250 million per year, each of these Indigenous communities were promised compensation in the range of $9,000 to $60,000 a year. However, testimonies from locals suggest otherwise, as pointed out by Luisa Jorge, a resident and leader in Susques: “lithium companies are taking millions of dollars from our lands…they ought to give something back. But they aren’t.”19

It is possible to do things differently. Extraction of lithium need not be necessarily costly for local communities, with the right institutional and regulatory framework. For example, state-led resource extraction in institutionally strong states can effectively collect resource rents and channel them to the benefit of the domestic economy. Governments can raise additional revenue, through progressive corporate profit taxation and resource rent taxes, along with levying royalties to secure a stream of revenue upfront. However, royalty rates on strategic minerals were lowered drastically during the peak of the Washington Consensus under the garb of lowering corporate taxes to incentivize foreign direct investment. Today, for most economies, royalties are assessed on an ad valorem basis, the range varying between 2 and 30 percent. This necessarily requires the involvement of the state in the entire process, especially to ensure that rights of local communities are not compromised. (In this context, it has been found that retaining at least 51 percent rights in the shares of extracting and processing companies can reduce dependence and power-meddling by superpowers like the United States and China.)20

Obviously, though, all this also requires the transparency and accountability of governments involved to prevent a top-down approach that often ends up in the further concentration of rent in the hands of the elite. Transparency through independent audits of profits, costs, revenues, and sharing of proceeds can prevent and reduce such exploitation.21

Lithium is only one of the minerals over which control is going to be hotly contested over the next decade. Rare-earth elements (which are not actually scarce but are difficult and costly to extract because they are found as constituents of other minerals) are a group of seventeen metals that will play a critical role in the future, because they are required for everything from LED displays to weapons systems. The current forms of extraction require them to undergo many stages of complex and expensive processing that can also be environmentally damaging.22 They are mined from deposits around the world. The different elements are separated chemically to become processed metals.

Currently, China is the leading player at all stages of rare-earth production. It holds the world’s largest rare-earth reserves, at around 37 percent. Its dominance is even greater downstream in the processed rare-earth minerals: Chinese firms are estimated to control more than 85 percent of the costly processing stage of the supply chain. However, other players have entered the market in recent years. Australia and the United States, the second- and third-largest suppliers last year, produced around 12 percent and 9 percent of global rare-earth elements, respectively. As global demand for these grows along with the requirements for investment, military, and consumption goods, as well as for frontline equipment for a green transition, new frontiers and strategies of control are likely to emerge. In addition, China dominates solar photovoltaic manufacturing and is home to more than 90 percent of the world’s silicon wafer manufacturing capacity. All these are reasons why the core capitalist countries view China as such a threat, and why the imperialist wars of the twenty-first century are likely to be more complex and play out in different ways.23

Indeed, there are new frontiers opening up constantly, especially as newer forms of technological change create possibilities for mining and extraction from parts of the earth that were previously not so amenable to exploitation, for example the Arctic and Antarctic poles that are already being destroyed and simultaneously made more accessible because of melting. Similarly, there is already interest in seabed mining and private attempts to scour deep oceans for minerals, notwithstanding potentially disastrous ecological consequences like mass extinctions of marine life.24

Conclusion

This discussion has shown that climate imperialism has emerged as a new—and potentially even the most lethal—form of imperialism in the world economy today. Confronting it requires recognizing and dealing with all its different aspects. But it also requires addressing the monopolies of knowledge created by the global regime of intellectual property rights that has been instituted and cemented by the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights between World Trade Organization countries. This has already proved to be deadly during the COVID-19 pandemic, as it enabled Big Pharma (which has benefited from massive public subsidies for vaccine development) to profiteer from the disease, deny vaccine access to billions of people across the world, and prevent other companies in other locations from producing vaccines and life-saving therapeutics. But it will be even more deadly when it comes to the necessary technologies to enable humanity to mitigate and cope with climate change and future pandemics, already wreaking havoc around the world. We are now in the thrall of a really deadly form of imperialism, one that will not just destroy nature and human lives, but all of the planet.

None of this is necessary, of course—different economic, legal, and institutional arrangements could alter all of this in a more just and equitable direction and be in harmony with nature and the planet. Obviously, this requires a complete transformation of the global capitalist system that has brought us to the brink of disaster. If we do believe that humanity can step back from this brink, this is both necessary and urgent.

Notes at link

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A Green New Deal Photo: Anesti Vega, Green New Deal Climate Strike Mural © 2019; Mural: Maluco Studios, September 25 2019, San Francisco. (Photo: Heidi De Vries / Flickr)

“Neither liberal nor social democratic policies have a structured approach to understanding imperialism, including its ecological history”
By Alejandro Pedregal, Max Ajl (Posted Jul 25, 2022)

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Max Ajl does not bite his tongue, neither when he writes nor when he speaks. This rural sociologist based in Tunisia, a researcher associated with the Tunisian Observatory for Food Sovereignty and the Environment and with the Rural Sociology Group at Wageningen University, has written possibly the fiercest critique of the dominant models of the Green New Deal (GND), both social democratic and liberal. With a language as scathing as it is rigorous, his A People’s Green New Deal, published by Pluto Press, is an urgent book that, in addition to speaking out against the Eurocentrism of Western green policies, devotes half of its pages to elaborating alternative proposals. Its method draws from the anti-imperialist and anti-colonialist internationalism of the rich radical thought of the Global South—from the Marxist theory of dependency of Ruy Mauro Marino or Vania Bambirra, to the Thirdworldist world-systems analysis of Samir Amin or the decolonialism of Enrique Dussel—, in order to address head- on, without any subterfuge, the current climate emergency and the ecologically unequal exchange between core and periphery, and to imagine an eco-socialist future hand in hand with a socially just degrowth. Economic anthropologist Jason Hickel has called Ajl’s work “the best book yet on the GND”; historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, a “lucid and profound” text with “an actual political program of survival and renewal,” where “nearly every sentence is urgent and quotable”; indigenous activist Nick Estes has called it a “critical work” so that, in the face of the climate emergency, the North understands the persistence of anti-capitalism and anti­imperialism in the South; and evolutionary biologist Rob Wallace has invited anyone who “really wants to learn what’ll be necessary for our species to survive climate apocalypse” to read it. We spoke with Ajl about his critiques of hegemonic GNDs and the alternatives to them, as well as his position on other pressing debates within environmentalist thought and the challenges facing the Global South in light of the global geopolitical reconfiguration brought about by the war in Ukraine.

Your book intervenes in the GND debate by disputing the dominant approaches by liberal and social-democrat views, hegemonic within certain sectors of the Western left. What are the features and limitations of these two, especially in regard to the development of social-democracy and its connection to the history of the socialist bloc?

Liberal and social democratic policies converge and diverge. Both envision a place for capitalism in the short-to-medium term; neither have a structured approach to understanding imperialism, including the ecological history of imperialism. Neither support national liberation for the periphery. Both in general neglect agriculture, especially smallholder agriculture and pastoralism in the periphery. And both are warm (if not very warm) to capitalist-developed technological solutions. They lack a clear sense of the social subjects who will carry forward ecological transformation on a world scale. And they practice an essentially opportunist and frequently chauvinist politics, trying to lull and allure liberal anti-racist progressives, rejecting building a common front with radical forces in the South, and rejecting anti-imperialism as a political practice (this is alleged to be “campism,” a northern smear dredged up from Trotskyite pro-NATO Cold War scribbles, and essentially now used primarily to tar anti­imperialists in order to harry them into silence or embarrassment).

Each of these GND approaches forgets that northern post-war industrial Fordism/social democracy emerged against the threat of foreign communist powers setting the world developmental agenda on a systemic level, combined with the domestic popularity of extremely radical redistributive policies, not to say widespread explicitly communist sympathies and organizing. That is, even on their own terms–which I reject–they are unachievable, which may be why they are increasingly receiving financial support from the Rockefeller Foundation for their policy papers. The ruling class seems to understand that it has a clear interest in channeling unease with the social-ecological crisis into dead-end reformist technocracy. These proposals also forget that the post-war welfare states were based on a history of colonial looting and ongoing neo-colonial value transfer. It is not a surprise, then, that many proposals for a northern social-democratic or socialist GND malign the radical attempts at social transformation in Venezuela or Zimbabwe, or erase the role of the U.S. in the anti-MAS coup d’etat in Bolivia, or are willing to surrender on the Palestinian struggle. That is, they ignore or deride the national question and more-or-less converge by effect on continued neo-colonial domination of the South alongside ecological civilization or ecological market socialism for the North.

How does your approach differ from these positions?

In fact, I think my book would be a little different if I had written it now. Having spent more time with literature from the 1970s and metabolized better the essence of thinking around national liberation, I more and more think that in line with the classical Leninist hypotheses (which are now castigated as “Third Worldism”) revolution, including ecological revolution, can only begin in the weak links of the world-system where primitive accumulation is permanent, social reproduction and under-reproduction of the ecology converge, and the victims of neo­colonialism encounter simultaneous national, social, and ecological contradictions. This does not mean there is no place for northern struggle for eco-socialism, but it means that we have to raise consciousness around things like anti-imperialism, national sovereignty, the climate debt, etcetera, at every step of transforming northern capitalism into a northern eco-socialism founded on permanently sustainable management of the ecology and rational collective management of the human interaction with non-human nature.

If we put agriculture, sustainable/appropriate technology, including architecture, the national question, climate debt, and world developmental convergence through directly taking on the northern “style of development” based on capitalist-induced over-consumption and over-production of commodities, at the center of these debates, we end up with a political strategy. And this would be based on popular organizing to enhance the quality of the use-values available to the northern working classes, turn them into social rights, and build a principled anti-imperialist front with southern national-popular forces.

Can you tell us about how your approach engages, methodologically and analytically, with unequal exchange and dependency theories, as these contributions are so closely linked to radical authors from the Global South? How is this related to the demands of national liberation movements and the anti-imperialist radical tradition, for instance? And how are those related to the ecological emergency we live in?

National liberation puts the politics of sovereignty and essentially auto-centered development, or more likely regional collective self-reliance, at the center of ecological planning. It reminds us that the dusk of formal colonization was often the dawn of neo­colonialism, precisely meaning continued value drain from South to North. Dependency theories, which many northern academics have put great effort into discrediting, is at its core a theory of the drain of surplus value and of the peripheral social structures which allow for the outflow of value. To stop that outflow of value you need to reconfigure domestic social structures, re-orient them towards introverted and auto-centered development, putting the productive forces and the play of the productive forces under domestic popular and proletarian control. This is the line of thought we can trace from Amilcar Cabral to Ismail-Sabri Abdalla, and which reached its peak in practice with the Chinese revolution. Unequal exchange, of course, is one mechanism for the outflow of value (there are many others, including illegitimate debt repayments, intellectual property monopolies, dollar seigniorage, etcetera). Now, my approach draws on the new theories of ecologically unequal exchange, which in fact group together a diverse family of empirical findings essentially showing that alongside increased northern appropriation of the products of global hectarage and mineral resources, there is also an uneven exposure to global pollution. In fact, this is a form of super­exploitation based on the under-reproduction of non-human nature which leads to damage to human life and its reduction below its potential historically-given level. This tells us, again, that the southern proletariat, semi-proletariat, slum-dwellers, peasants, pastoralists, forest dwellers, face the ecological crisis as a crisis of day-to-day well-being and so need to be central to a liberatory vision.

In your book, you discuss the importance of ecological debt and reparation for a genuine people’s GND, which would take seriously the environmental damage caused by the North to the South. What does this demand imply? What are the historical reclamations in this regard and what’s the importance of the Cochabamba Agreement for this matter?

Ecological debt has been raised at least since the early 1990s (perhaps, and likely, earlier). It is akin to a broader discourse of reparations coming from a wide variety of actors who have been “the underside” of imperialism and colonial-capitalist accumulation, be it from the slave trade, colonial drain, or more recently the neo­colonial enclosure of the atmosphere and appropriation of the biosphere’s capacity to absorb and metabolize C02 emissions. Because the South cannot emit the same amount of per capita emissions without crashing the biosphere, and because the South cannot walk the same cheap energy paths, and because the South is already suffering from damages from global warming, the North accordingly owes it a debt. Building on earlier demands, the Cochabamba’s People’s Agreement stated that the OECD countries should do fiscal transfers of 6 percent of their gross national product (GNP), or around $1.2 trillion from the U.S. alone, for an indeterminate period, as reparations. So we know what it means numerically. The question is, what does it mean politically? I do not have a clear answer to that. At the very least it clarifies that the responsibility for the ecological crisis is essentially northern. But concretely speaking, it would require a widespread insurrectionary atmosphere in the North to actually commit to fiscal transfers to the South, since they would go alongside a controlled reduction of the ecological “heaviness” of northern production and consumption. That “reduction,” which is basically what degrowth refers to, would mean a constant lightening of the ecological impact of northern production–which cannot merely be reduced to de-commodification–and in turn, would flow from a heightened consciousness that northern “ways of life” have to change to create a planet in which many are able to live well. We are, obviously, very far from that situation on any level.

You have also exposed how reasonable environmental concerns and terminology (the debate around the notion of extractivism comes to mind, for instance) can be instrumentalised by the imperial cores for their own interests of global dominance. This has been the case, for instance, with certain segments of the environmental left in regard to Bolivia, Venezuela, Ecuador, etc. What are the limitations and dangers of these views?.

I find it helpful to take a sociology of knowledge approach to this question. First, though, to be clear, when people encounter ecological degradation that damages their ability to live decent lives, it is natural that they name and resist that degradation. We should have all the sympathy in the world for people living in such conditions. But such sympathy is not a political map, and naming is not innocent or random. It is not clear to me that extractivism, as circulated in the works of scholars like Alberto Acosta, Eduardo Gudynas, or Maristella Svampa, provide any such political map. Take Svampa, who has been particularly embraced by the regime-change left. She writes, “Contemporary neo- extractivism refers to a way of appropriating nature and a development model based on the over-exploitation of natural goods, largely nonrenewable, characterized by its large scale and its orientation toward export, as well as by the vertiginous expansion of the borders of exploitation to new territories.” Is this in any way an improvement over previous widespread core-periphery analysis or dependency analysis, based on extraversion, disarticulated accumulation, and unequal exchange in world trade? It is basically analytical chaos, what Marx called a chaotic concept. It cannot tell us how to balance the social needs of those segments of peripheral population who unfortunately need capital from commodity exports in order to secure their social needs (and would need to process some of those commodities under any conceivable industrialization pattern as part of a socialist transition). On the analytical level, as Alvaro Garcia Linera has written, “Just as the extractivism of our societies is an integral part of the networks of the international division of labour, the industrial processing of raw materials or the knowledge economy are part of the same world capitalist division of labour. Neither extractivism nor non-extractivism is a solution to this worldwide domination.”

We need to discuss how to move to ecologically modulated industrialization, including for reasons of national self-defense, as part of national liberation and in a situation of neo-colonial dependency. Those are the issues. The extractivist discourse, part-and-parcel of a shift on the Left away from serious comprehension of macro-economic planning, the need for industrialization, and the need to re-think industrialization, has simply not proven to be a basis for thinking through these issues in a way that can give us a guiding rope that allows us to navigate theoretically and practically contradictions which emerge between communities directly harmed by resource extraction, and those in the periphery which need resources from that extraction for day-to-day survival. Although I am a committed agro-ecologist, a pure focus on ecologically embedded agricultural production cannot and will not by itself solve developmental problems of the 21st century.

As you have noted, it’s been largely discussed that the environmental damage led by the Global North economies is mostly suffered by the peoples in the Global South. What sort of social reorganization could be taken to stop this?

Northern economies need to be restructured, first, on non-capitalist lines, to produce not for the accumulation of surplus value, but oriented around the permanently ecologically sustainable production of things people need for day-to-day survival and a decent life, including homes, cultures, appropriate levels of industrialization, decent food, medical care, and transport systems. We know that this can be done with far lower levels of ecological impact, whether this be preventative healthcare, agro-ecology, sustainable/vernacular building materials and designs, collective mass transit and re-planned cities. Life will certainly have to change in the North in substantial ways, as the other option is to off-load the costs of “social democratic” green industrialization onto the South, which would be a disaster from any perspective.

As a rural sociologist, you dedicate quite a big part of your argument to the agricultural question, in relation to land and soil. Why is this so relevant and yet so often undervalued by mainstream environmentalism in the Global North? What are the major issues to take into consideration in this regard for thinking of a people’s GND?

There is a deep anti-peasant prejudice in western thought, including western Marxism (anti-peasant more than anti­nature, since western thought often fetishizes a certain construction of nature). People naturally do not think about where they get their food, because they basically think machines get their food for them. In fact, substantial amounts of global labor regimes are engineered to support imperialism and global accumulation overall and cheap tropical foodstuff for northern workers, as part of the northern corporatist pact. Now: it is only natural that those regimes would be made invisible, because they would imply different theoretical and therefore political mandates for northern environmentalism. In particular it would mean putting national liberation and the agrarian question, North and South, at the center of socialist planning, thought, and practice. Agriculture is also a keystone sector for at least getting to genuine 0 C02 emissions, and for that matter for certainly attention­ intensive and perhaps, perhaps not labor-intensive C02 drawdown. This drawdown is a matter of survival for southern states to ride out this century. Thus we need to place agriculture front-and-center for land use planning including moving to national-level planning of agro-ecological production. Agrarian questions are just critical also to dry up labor reservoirs, increase rural consumption and free up a surplus for sovereign industrialization, as well as to secure necessary domestic inputs for, again, an ecologically attentive form of Third World (and First World!) industrialization, moving to sustainable and renewable inputs where possible. This means placing agriculture in conversation with global planning the world over.

There are tendencies within certain trends of environmentalism, even within the left, to think almost exclusively on solutions from a technological perspective to address the ecological emergency. How does this techno-fetishism and techno-optimism neglect North-South relationships? What would be the role of technology in a people’s GND?

The whole techno-fetishism is first of all a brain-exploding device which is anti-thought, and which prevents us from adopting a principled Marxist position on technology. Absolutely no one is against technology as such, not just because everyone wants some technology in their lives, but furthermore because there really are not technologies “as such.” There are concrete technologies, which depend on particular configurations of market prices and access to pollution sites and labor inputs in order to be feasible or un-feasible, and at least at an initial point, reflect the class interests of those in a position to determine the trajectory of technological development. This means not merely levels of pollution but “solutions” to global warming like geo-engineering or bio­fuels which will far more sharply impact the South versus the North–for example through allowing global warming to continue through burning fossil fuels in the hope of a future technological salvation which will come too late for Bangladesh or the Caribbean; or which preserves the northern monopoly-capitalist created “way of life” while suppressing peripheral food consumption, as in the case of biofuels.

A socialist or people’s GND would be heavily reliant on technology but would use the precautionary principle when implementing technological change, would ensure that the intellectual property would be in the public domain or in the hands of radical states, would try to develop technology in partnership with the poorer people who would need it, and would be mindful of the ecological impacts of industrial versus non-industrial technologies (which reminds us that the extractivism discussion touches on real concerns even if in an unproductive way).

The war in Ukraine seems to have displaced the environmental debate from the central focus of the public debate. The urgency of implementing certain environmental policies seems to be postponed as a consequence. At the same time, this seems to reshape the geopolitics of energy globally, while there emerges the possibility of a more marked division between North and South, affecting prospects of trade and the reorganization of the finance sector. What kind of scenarios could open for the environmental struggles in this context? What role could the Global South play for that matter?

It seems to me that the U.S. removal of sanctions on Venezuela is a major opening for a renewal of socialist construction in Latin America, after the imperial-imposed Thermidor which has been ongoing for the past years. Amidst the new rising surge of the Left within the electoral sphere, a reflection of unceasing popular mobilization and the complete discrediting of neoliberalism if not capitalism as modes of political rule, we need to forge a new political-ecological and eco-socialist discourse which takes seriously the concerns raised by the “extractivist” discussion, but in a way that allows for moving forward towards eco-socialist horizons. In particular, the new political space and slightly reduced atmosphere of imperial predation should be an opportunity to again insist that socialism is on the agenda and that the forms of accommodation to monopoly capital, which have gained strength over the last decade, need to be actively resisted. Finally, of course, leftist forces the world over need to assess the opportunities and limits of a new multi-polarity in terms of opening up developmental space closed off by the anti-developmental agenda of U.S.-EU monopoly capital and free up a surplus for sovereign industrialization, as well as to secure necessary domestic inputs for, again, an ecologically attentive form of Third World (and First World!) industrialization, moving to sustainable and renewable inputs where possible. This means placing agriculture in conversation with global planning the world over.

https://mronline.org/2022/07/25/neither ... l-history/

Edited for bad editing.
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Re: The Long Ecological Revolution

Post by blindpig » Thu Jul 28, 2022 2:32 pm

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Biden’s staff sounds climate alarm — about Biden
Originally published: The Lever on July 25, 2022 by Julia Rock and David Sirota (more by The Lever) | (Posted Jul 27, 2022)

President Joe Biden’s surrender on climate policy amid the intensifying crisis has prompted his own agency experts to sound a rare public alarm about their boss’s retreat, according to a letter being circulated throughout the administration and Capitol Hill.

The letter to Biden and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.)–provided to The Lever by a House Democratic staffer–is initialed by 165 staffers at federal health and environmental agencies and at 75 congressional offices. They are demanding the president use more aggressive tactics to pass his long-promised climate agenda through the Senate.

“President Biden, you have an exigent responsibility to reduce suffering all over the world, and the power and skills to do so, but time is running out,” says the letter, which is now being circulated throughout the administration for more signatures. “You are the president of the United States of America at a pivotal moment in the history of the world. All that we ask is that you do everything in your power. We’ve done our part. We implore you to do yours.”

The letter was provided to The Lever by Saul Levin, a House Democratic staffer and coordinator of the Congressional Progressive Staff Association Climate Working Group. The officials signed the letter anonymously with their initials, to protect against political retribution. Another House Democratic staffer confirmed that the letter was being circulated to government officials for their signatures.

​​“Our house is on fire, and Manchin burned the stairs. Democratic leaders are walking away,” Levin told The Lever. “We cannot. We must test the fire escape, find the fire extinguisher, tie some sheets together if we have to: Our lives depend on it.”

Levin was referring to Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) once again proclaiming that he was walking away from negotiations on $375 billion in clean energy tax credits. It also follows Biden declining to declare a climate emergency, which would allow him to institute a ban on crude oil exports, halt fossil fuel imports, and block investments in fossil fuel projects, among other things.

Echoing the letter, Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) told The Lever: “President Biden must declare a climate emergency now. This is the time we need a moonshot for renewable energy.”

This unusual action from staffers at Biden’s own agencies spotlights the high stakes of the moment–the window of opportunity to pass climate legislation under a Democratic trifecta may be coming to an end, and it could be years before massive investments in clean energy become possible again.

The letter calls on Biden to “immediately declare a climate emergency and end fossil fuel extraction on federal lands. Then, and most importantly, you must intervene in stalled Senate negotiations.”

While the average age of a U.S. senator is 64, and Biden is 79, the average staffer is much younger–and will live through the consequences of their bosses’ inaction.

Specifically, the staffers are calling on Biden to send a public letter to Manchin giving him two options.

“The first option must be for Senator Manchin to vote to pass the House Build Back Better climate justice provisions by the end of July, as part of a reconciliation package,” the staffers wrote.

The second must represent a bold and creative alternative that Senator Manchin understands to be much worse. For example, you and Senator Schumer could strip Senator Manchin of his Chairmanship of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, shut down the Mountain Valley Pipeline Project, eliminate the use of mountaintop removal and coal burning, and establish stringent water and air pollution standards.

This message to Biden comes two weeks after congressional staffers first sent a letter to Schumer and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) demanding they reach a deal to pass the clean energy tax credits, first reported by CNN.

Just days after they sent that letter, Manchin told Democratic leadership, after weeks of negotiations, he would not support a reconciliation package that included climate spending. He soon hedged, saying he would potentially support a broader package after the August recess if inflation seems to be abating.

Manchin’s concerns about inflation should ring hollow: There is overwhelming consensus among economists that subsidizing clean energy would actually reduce inflation by making energy cheaper for consumers.

Summarizing academic testimony to lawmakers, climate reporter David Wallace-Wells noted in a recent column that “the public health costs of air pollution [are] so high that a total decarbonization would entirely pay for itself through the public health benefits alone. You don’t even need to consider climate, in other words, for decarbonization to make sense, even according to the strictest cost-benefit analysis.”

On the other hand, Manchin is a millionaire who has made his fortune in coal and has taken more campaign contributions from the oil and gas industry than any other senator. Every year, Manchin receives hundreds of thousands of dollars from a coal brokerage that he founded and which his son now runs.

After Manchin’s declaration imperiling the climate spending, Biden urged Democratic congressional leadership to move ahead with a much smaller spending package that would only include an extension of Affordable Care Act subsidies and a prescription drug price negotiation provision.

Last Wednesday, Schumer confirmed that the Senate would move forward with the health care-only reconciliation bill, saying they would make a renewed push for climate spending after July’s inflation numbers are published. “There is always a second reconciliation bill available to us,” he told E&E News.

Other senators have been less willing to give up on a climate package.

“We’re much closer to a climate deal than people realize,” Sen. John Hickenlooper (D-Colo.) tweeted after Schumer announced the Senate would proceed with a health care-only package. “Let’s not throw in the towel just yet.”

But, by publishing this letter, staffers are telling the public that Biden and Schumer have given up too early, especially when the stakes are so high.

https://mronline.org/2022/07/27/bidens- ... out-biden/

We've just heard that the Dems have got 'something' to pass. Well, the ruling class wants the Dems in power so the MSM will declare victory, just as they do in Ukraine. That Manchin has signed on indicates that climate and wealth wise this dog ain't worth the paper it's written on. There will be a few warm fuzzies for propaganda purposes, but anything meaningful is simply beyond the capacity of capitalism to accommodate. We will find a 'Pandora's Box' of devils in the details. "40% greenhouse gas reduction by 203"' ain't gonna happen if the capitalists have their say, period. And it is, after all, their government.

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Why apartments are failing the heat stress test. (Photo: Pursuit by The University of Melbourne)

European states commit to climate inaction as heat wave begins to recede

Originally published: World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) on July 21, 2022 by Samuel Tissot (more by World Socialist Web Site (WSWS)) | (Posted Jul 26, 2022)

The heat wave devastating southern and western Europe gradually began to recede yesterday, as violent storms brought cooler weather across parts of France and Britain. The heat wave continued in southern Europe, with temperatures close to 40°C across much of southern Spain and Italy, and wildfires are still burning across the region.

Already, the horrific impact of European heat waves caused by global warming is apparent. Health officials confirmed over 1,700 deaths in Spain and Portugal alone, as workers labor in sweltering heat and large numbers of the elderly live without air conditioning. While Spain has lost 15,000 hectares of forest to fire in the last week, Europe’s largest forest fires have been in France’s Gironde, where over 20,000 hectares of forest have been destroyed so far and 40,000 people evacuated.

While the worst of this heat wave may have passed, much of Europe remains in drought conditions. Cities and towns in Italy’s Po Valley region are rationing water. River levels are so low in southern Germany that river-based transport has been suspended. With several weeks of summer to come, more extreme heat waves, continued drought and larger wildfires are highly likely.

Yet already, top officials across Western Europe are signaling that no substantial action will be taken to halt emissions that are fueling global warming, or build the necessary infrastructure to deal with growing droughts, rising ocean levels, and intensifying wildfires.

In Britain, the Tory government, which has cut 11,500 firefighters since 2010, did not even make a pretense of action in response to the heat wave. Deputy Prime Minister Dominic Raab blithely told Britons to “enjoy the heat” on Sunday. Yesterday, cabinet minister Kit Malthouse declared:

Britain may be unaccustomed to such high temperatures but the UK, along with our European neighbors, must learn to live with extreme events.

These comments mimic European governments’ insistence that the population must “learn to live with COVID-19,” which has become a euphemism for mass death and infection without any measures to prevent contagion.

This came after London’s fire brigade experienced its busiest day since World War II on Tuesday, as fires spread around the British capital on the country’s hottest day on record. London mayor Sadiq Khan told Sky News:

It was the busiest day for the fire service in London since the second world war. They received more than 2,600 calls—more than a dozen simultaneous fires requiring 30 engines, a couple requiring 15, and some requiring 12.

While other European governments’ statements were less provocatively worded, all of them laid out the same policy of inaction and indifference.

Spanish Socialist Party (PSOE) Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, who rules in coalition with the pseudo-left Podemos party, tried yesterday to adopt a pose of concern. He announced that over 500 Spaniards had died from the heat, though Spain’s Carlos III Institute had confirmed 678 heat-related deaths the day before. Sanchez concluded by asking “citizens to exercise extreme caution” and to recognize the blindingly obvious fact that “climate emergency is a reality.”

On Wednesday afternoon, French President Emmanuel Macron travelled to La Teste-de-Buch in Gironde to meet with firefighters who have been fighting to contain blazes in the region since July 12. He remarked, “We are at the beginning of the season… We know that it will take several weeks to completely stabilize the situation.’

Trying to put the best face on the situation and look forward to the future, Macron added:

There is the day after. After [the fire is extinguished] we will have to replant and rebuild … We are going to launch a major national project to replant this forest and prevent the risks of today and tomorrow.

These vague remarks, void of any concrete proposals beyond replanting trees, signal that there will be no real change to his government’s approach to global warming and extreme weather. Indeed, in 2019 French fire-fighters threatened to go on strike against low staffing levels and poor equipment. Though France has among the larger fleets of water-dropping planes in Europe, it is too small, concentrated around the city of Nîmes, and arrived too late to prevent the blazes in Gironde from escalating beyond a size the planes could put out.

The decisive question in addressing climate change and its impact is the mobilization of the working class and youth in a political struggle, taking as its point of departure that fighting climate change requires fighting the capitalist system. It is apparent that Europe’s capitalist governments have no plans to make the vast investments in research and infrastructure that are necessary to protect the population from deaths in future heat waves and wildfires, or halt greenhouse gas emissions that are driving global warming.

Despite differences in presentation, Macron, Sanchez and the Tories follow the same fundamental policy toward global warming and resulting extreme weather events. While they hand out trillions of euros to the banks and corporations and pour hundreds of billions into NATO’s war against Russia in Ukraine, no resources are left to take meaningful action on climate change. It is impossible, as Europe descends into war, for capitalist governments to internationally coordinate such action. As a result, nothing is done.

This has had disastrous consequences. Since the pre-industrial era the world’s temperature has risen 1.1 degrees Celsius. The 2015 Paris Accords, hailed by world governments as the solution to global warming and its effects, sought to limit this rise to 2 degrees Celsius. Even if one were to suppose that capitalist governments were to stay within this limit, the consequences of just half the target level are already proving to be deadly.

The last five years have already seen unprecedented wildfires in Australia, Portugal, Greece, Russia and the U.S., wiping whole towns off the map. In the last year, flash floods, another consequence of global warming, have killed thousands in Australia, India, Bangladesh, Germany, the U.S. and Turkey.

Despite scores of deadly wildfire events throughout the Mediterranean in recent years, including 66 deaths in Portugal in 2017 and 90 deaths in Algeria last year, neither the EU nor national governments made any major changes to prepare for wildfires like the current ones.

In Greece, which experienced its worst wildfire season on record last year, evacuations are continuing on Mount Penteli just north-east of Athens. Winds of 80 kilometers per hour are driving a rapid expansion of the wildfire burning in that area. The localities of Drafi, Anthousa, Dioni and Dasamari have all been evacuated, including a hospital. Emergency firefighters have been called in from Romania to assist in the battle against the blaze.

Workers and young people must draw the necessary lessons from the inaction of capitalist governments across Europe and the world against wildfires and global warming. The struggle against climate change and to protect the environment is a political and class struggle. As is the case with the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, war and inflation, the only solution to global warming is a direct assault on the ill-gotten wealth of the capitalist class and the socialist transformation of world society.

https://mronline.org/2022/07/26/europea ... to-recede/

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INTERVIEW WITH JEFF SPARROW

Capitalism’s crimes against nature
July 24, 2022

To stop climate change, we must understand how capitalism generates destructive processes that put Earth at risk

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Jeff Sparrow, the author of Crimes Against Nature: Capitalism and Global Heating (Scribe, 2021) is a columnist for The Guardian Australia and a lecturer at the Centre for Advanced Journalism at the University of Melbourne. He was interviewed by Martin Empson, whose most recent book is Socialism or Extinction: The Meaning of Revolution in a Time of Ecological Crisis (Bookmarks, 2022).

I want to start with the central theme of your book — capitalism. It’s a subject that is increasingly part of discussion in the environmental movement. So could begin by talking about how you approach capitalism and the environment in the book?

I was someone who first encountered Marxist ideas at university in the late 1980s. At that point, the way it was presented implied Marxism had almost nothing to say about the environment or the natural world. You could be interested in Marxism or you could be interested in the environment, but the two things had nothing in common.

Later I went back and reread Karl Marx’s classics under the influence of a new generation of Marxist environmental thinkers such as John Bellamy Foster. It was only then that I understood the crushingly obvious point that Marxism is profoundly an engagement with the natural world. In some ways, that’s what materialism as a theory means. That really changed the way that I thought both about Marxism and, more importantly, environmentalism.

Increasingly people concerned about climate change — a huge and growing proportion of the population — recognize that climate change is a result of a systemic issue. But, to really understand how that systemic issue manifests itself, you have to have some kind of understanding of capitalism.

This is one of the arguments that I wanted to make in the book. You can’t really talk about climate change, and you certainly can’t develop a credible solution to climate change, without understanding the nature of capitalism. And how it is that capitalism generates these destructive processes that now put the planet as a whole at risk.

In your book you explore this partly by discussing how capitalism, as it develops, transforms social relations. Tell us about this.

One of the motivations for writing this book was to overcome the despair that prevents many people engaging with climate change. Even people who are profoundly political often find it very hard to read articles about climate change, because it’s just so grindingly awful. If you are a socialist, you are accustomed to dealing with awful things, but there’s something particularly horrible about a species disappearing or the slow-moving devastation of entire regions. If you are a political person, you have to overcome that despair because it is deeply disempowering.

So I wanted to tackle that problem. That meant coming to terms with some of the theoretical issues. Take the concept of “wilderness”, which is often something that people use to define the environment. There is a kind of common sense environmentalism that’s about defending the wilderness — defined as ecologically pristine — against the encroachment of human beings.

But I argue in the book that, if this is how you understand the environmental task, you’re setting yourself an impossible goal. And that’s because that is the whole point of the Anthropocene — a geological epoch defined by human activity. There is no longer any part of the planet that is entirely untouched by human beings. Once you start to think about that, you can extend the argument a lot further.

Look, for instance, at the English landscape. Elements that we think of as being wilderness are, in fact, the result of a long engagement by human beings. People alter the landscape as they alter the kinds of societies in which they live.

So that relationship between human beings and nature is not a simple opposition. But, in fact, it’s a kind of dialectical relationship with humans and nature fundamentally shaping each other.

This isn’t just a theoretical point — it has political implications. If we recognize humans have always altered the environment, it opens up the possibility of a new environmentalism, which isn’t simply trying to hold up the destruction of wilderness. It’s about potentially making the planet better, establishing a different kind of relationship with nature. That’s a much more hopeful way of looking at the planetary crisis. It opens up the possibility that environmentalism can achieve something good, rather than just make the place less bad.

How did capitalism transform our relationship with nature?

The development of capitalism changes people’s relationship with nature in a very fundamental way. As an Australian I am very conscious of living in a country founded as a colonial settler state. The European invasion had a wrenching effect on the indigenous people who had lived in Australia for 40,000 or 50,000 years prior to white settlement.

It is really important for people with a background like mine to realize that there was a culture that lived in a very different relationship with nature. They were not “noble savages” that lived lightly on the land. As new scholarship shows, indigenous people fundamentally altered the Australian continent. But they were able to live in a way that made the ecology richer and far more dynamic. That’s because it wasn’t determined by the profit-driven priorities of capitalism, but instead was shaped by tradition and culture.

So we have before us an example that really puts the light to the claims of the right wing. If people did that in the past, then there is no reason why we cannot do it in the future. What is stopping us are the capitalist relationships, the social relations introduced into Australia in 1788.

After the white invasion, the landscape of the continent changed almost beyond recognition within the space of several years — a very brief timescale. There was tremendous erosion with the fertile plains, disappearing under the feet of white settlers. This was not to do with technology or overpopulation. It has to do with capitalist relations that prevented the kind of land management that indigenous people had previously relied upon.

Indigenous people were very conscious of, and worked with, a whole series of natural cycles that were destroyed. It’s an important point when it comes to combating that sort of right wing slander about the way that people lived. But, as I said before, it’s also crucial because if it happened in the past, there’s no reason why it can’t happen in the future.

Now, I’m not suggesting Australia is going to return to a pre-industrial society. But if indigenous people were able to manage the land in a sustainable fashion for tens of thousands of years, you would think that modern science and technology should make that process easier, not harder. So why is it that we can’t maintain a sustainable relationship in the way that indigenous people did prior to white settlement? Well, the answer is capitalism.

Today, production is not driven by custom, traditional law or an understanding of what’s best for the environment, it is driven by the demands of profit. When those profit relations were introduced to Australia, they had a catastrophic effect on indigenous people and on the landscape as a whole. Of course, there’s a tendency for some people on the left to romanticize indigenous culture, in an unhelpful way. In the book, I instead emphasize some of the parallels with the process of capitalist development that happened in England, which lead to white settlement in Australia.

The development of capitalism in England meant a fundamentally different relationship with the land. It also produced mass unemployment and criminality, which led to the need to transport people to Australia. Working class people in England had their traditional relationship with their village or region completely smashed by enclosures — when common land was seized by landowners and capitalist farmers — and the imposition of wage labor — having to sell your labor for a wage to survive. This is something which most people were entirely unaccustomed to.

A similar process happens again with the introduction of capitalism in Australia. It is fascinating to read the accounts of how indigenous people in Australia experienced the imposition of wage labor. Again and again, you find the colonial masters complaining that indigenous people didn’t understand the concept of wages. And they would just work for a little bit, then they would leave. It draws attention to the fact that, prior to capitalism, indigenous people enjoyed a much higher standard of living than after capitalism. And that their relationship with nature was a tremendous source of meaning. They saw wage labor as tremendously empty and soulless. The idea that you would work as instructed by a single master just did not make any sense to them.

The complaints made by the colonial masters in Australia about indigenous people parallel the complaints made by early industrialists in England about the Scots, the Irish and the other rural communities. In both cases, the bosses say, “These people don’t understand. They don’t want to work. They’ll turn out for a while, then they’ll stop working.”

So rather than being a god-ordained condition, wage labor is something relatively new — and everywhere it was imposed, it was experienced as horrendous. The way that people understood themselves as human beings, and the way they understood nature as well, was changed.

You approach some of these subjects in your book quite differently to other writers. There is a fascinating chapter on the way that car culture came to dominate over sustainable public transport through the actions of the automobile industry, and a chapter on tobacco advertising that draws out an analogy with modern climate denialism. You use the story of Frankenstein to talk about capitalism “out of control” in its relations to nature and people. It is an interesting approach.

I opened with an essay about car culture. One of the arguments I’m trying to tackle is that the environmental crisis is the result of ordinary human beings being greedy and lazy and stupid. They’re so selfish that they are happy to destroy the planet for short‑term gain. Car culture, and particularly American car culture, is the quintessential example of this.

When we think about greedy humans destroying the planet, we think of Americans with big cars that they insist on driving everywhere. But if you look at the development of car culture in the US, you encounter a history riven by really intense struggles. I had no idea before I started researching stuff that there was a thriving tram system throughout the US in the 1890s, which was destroyed because it wasn’t profitable. The vehicles were, in many ways, more technologically advanced than internal combustion engines.

Again and again technological innovations emerge that have a potential for actually making people’s lives better. Then they are seized by the wealthy and used in ways that make both ordinary people’s lives and the environmental situation worse.

Something else that really jumped out at me was how important arguments around nature were to the early working class. Today, if you are trying to make a case for the centrality of the working class to transforming society, you will be told that working class people hate nature. And that only middle class types care about trees or animals or beautiful landscapes or whatever.

The modern working class was formed out of processes such as the enclosures and a savage, violent dislocation from the land. So, one of the ways ordinary people discussed the new conditions of industrial capitalism was in terms of how their relationship with nature had changed. And how much they hated it. If you read the Chartists — a mass working class movement in 1830s and 40s Britain — you find them saying, “We used to live in a countryside where there were trees. And now we live in this capitalist hell-scape.”

I feel in some ways that dislocation from nature gets normalized in a later stage of capitalism. That’s because separation of the working class from the countryside becomes an established fact.

Today, though, we’re in a somewhat different situation. Climate change and other disasters affect the poorest and the most oppressed more than they do the wealthy. And so it’s increasingly a part of working class life to be affected by things like hurricanes and floods, or having to work outside in freak climatic conditions.

In the book, I discuss the Amazon factories. You read these horrific stories of people working in hot warehouses where there are ambulances out the front to pick people up when they collapse. This is something that climate change is making worse and worse, directly affecting working class people’s lives in a way that perhaps we might not have expected a couple of generations ago. So I think there’s an interesting kind of return of nature as a concern for working class people, almost forced upon them by the crisis.

Do you think that the Covid pandemic has helped this process?

Covid is not a direct result of climate change. But at the same time, it’s not something that can be separated from the broader ecological catastrophe, which climate change is a part of. Because land has been cleared and urban settlements are spreading, human beings are increasingly coming into contact with ecologies that have never had any experience of human beings.

This is leading to viruses spreading more often, and Covid is part of that process. So you can link Covid to the environmental crisis — and it is a very clear example of the way that the environmental crisis affects the working class and poor people far more than anyone else. So the relationship between the environmental catastrophe and class became clearer and clearer.

Now, that doesn’t necessarily mean that people grasp that relationship. But we have all seen statistics about the number of billionaires whose wealth has gone up to stratosphere levels during Covid. Whereas, if you’re someone who’s working for takeaway delivery company Door Dash or in the precarious sector, you were shafted during the pandemic. So we’re in a moment now where class is becoming more and more central to the environmental catastrophe. If you don’t understand that, then I think you’re incapable of responding.

Two of the book’s chapters take up issues of the environment and racism. One looks at how the early environmental movement in the US was shaped by right wing ideas that persist today. You say, for instance, that “for many African-Americans, the outdoors invokes bigotry, the Klan and racism violence”. The other chapter looks at the myths of overpopulation. Can you summarize these issues?

The environmental movement has a complex history but in the US, in particular, it was shaped by a right wing romanticism about the past. It often drew an explicit parallel between invasive weeds and feral animals and immigrants or people from “undesirable” races. Some of the first and most important environmental campaigns in the US were led by people who were eugenicists and extreme racists. Most environmentalists today are, of course, anti-racists, but some of the theoretical ideas from the bad old days still remain.

If you write or talk about the environmental crisis, invariably, someone will come up to you at the end and say, “Well, that’s all very well. But the real problem is that there are too many people.” It is an argument that makes intuitive sense at a really simplistic level. If we accept that the world is finite and only so many people can live in a finite space, then the idea that overpopulation is a problem seems like common sense.

Of course, the world doesn’t actually work like that. In the abstract, there is probably a definite number of people that you could cram onto the planet. In the here and now, and in the immediate future, questions of population have nothing to do with how societies are organized.

At the most obvious level, some of the poorest countries in the world have very few people in them. Whereas you can go to an incredibly wealthy city, like New York, where huge numbers of people are crammed into a small space. No one says, “Well, actually, what you need to do is get rid of all of these people and things would be better.” So “populationism” is a simple argument, but a wrong argument. And what’s more it is a right wing argument. I think that’s really important. In the early iterations of population arguments, books like Paul Ehrlich’s Population Bomb weren’t necessarily obviously from the right, but the right wing dynamics of it quickly began to develop.

With populationism, on the most basic level, the question always becomes who are the surplus people who need to go? Of course, it’s never the populationist campaigners themselves. No one ever says, “There are too many people in the world. Therefore, my family and I are going off to the euthanasia booths”. They always blame someone else.

When it’s not directed against people in the Global South, it’s directed against the teeming masses back home. Then in terms of a specific program, it is always attached to coercive notions about imposing sterilization and mandating limits on the number of children people can have. And in countries where this program has been implemented, it’s always had horrific results.

Now, the predictions that have been made by overpopulation theorists are massively disproven. For instance, the rate of population growth is slowing so much that many countries are now talking about the need to increase population.

But it keeps coming back as a zombie argument because it’s one that thrives on despair. It is an argument that says people are the problem, just by existing. Well, that’s not an argument that’s going to appeal as much at a moment where the movement is surging forward, where people are changing the world and opening up new possibilities. It is an argument that becomes much more attractive when people feel despairing about the ability to mobilize the masses. If you do not feel you can mobilize the masses, it is a lot easier to say the masses are a problem.

And it’s connected to arguments about consumerism as well, which goes deep into the DNA of the early environmentalist movement. There’s this notion that the problem is people consuming too much — they’re greedy, they’re lazy. They want their big screen TVs or whatever. It’s a hop, skip and a jump from that to say, people themselves are the problem — not just because of what they do but because they exist.

Infamously, the fascist perpetrator of the Christchurch massacre in New Zealand made this argument explicitly, writing in his manifesto about the need to exterminate immigrants. Likewise, some of the people that Donald Trump drew on in his anti‑immigrant campaign in 2016, had longstanding links to the early environmental movement. They had moved not just to the right, but to the far right, from a populationist perspective.

I should stress the modern environmental movement has done a pretty good job of challenging populationist arguments and driving racists out of the movement. That’s why we’ve only seen the modern far right taking up environmental themes as slogans in a very tentative kind of way. Most of the far right are still climate deniers, but there are various straws in the wind where you can see how this will be a promising aspect for the far right.

Take Australia, which has some of the most atrocious immigration policies anywhere in the world. What are going to be some of the predicted manifestations of climate change in the next few years? A mass exodus of climate refugees from countries all over the world that have been inundated by rising sea levels and catastrophic temperature changes.

What is going to happen when those people arrive in countries like Australia? There will be a renewed push for border security. The problem is that, in some ways, that can seem like a more common sense response to many people because the detention centres and the island gulags are already in place. All the infrastructure of a far right response to climate change already here. You end up with a world of walls, heavily policed city states and the rhetoric becomes environmental rhetoric. “Our country is overloaded. We can’t take any more people. There’s a climate catastrophe. That’s why these people have got to be herded into camps.” I don’t think that that’s a science fiction scenario. I think that, unless we’re able to build a movement, that’s quite a plausible future scenario.

One of the inspiring things about the mobilization around COP26 in Britain was the extent to which the movement took up the question of climate refugees.

Yes! Likewise, we’ve just been through the Black Lives Matter movement. According to some estimates, it was the largest ever protest mobilization in human history — an extraordinary fact given most people’s sense of where we are at politically. The fact that something like that can happen is testament to how unstable the situation is, how quickly things can change.

And, as I try to argue in the book, the environmental crisis is increasingly manifesting itself as part of working class life. So it’s inevitably becoming entwined with working class struggles that might not necessarily seem like climate struggles.

I write about attempts to unionize in Amazon warehouses in the US where the conditions are Dickensian. The implementation of monitoring technology creates factories in some ways worse than 19th century sweatshops when it comes to monitoring what workers do every second of the day. But the people attempting to organize in those places necessarily have to confront Covid and necessarily have to confront the experience of intensified heat. And both of those are connected to the environmental crisis.

You can see a potential where organization around basic rights to unionize increasingly provide scope to raise environmental demands. It is not inevitable, of course, and depends on the political arguments that people make. But I think you can see how this might unfold in a way that would have seemed impossible 20 years ago. Then there seemed to be such a sort of wall between working class struggles and environmental struggles.

How should socialists engage in the environmental movement?

I think that the socialist movement is learning a lot from the environmental movements. But at the same time I think we also have to be prepared to strongly make the argument that this is a systemic crisis. And say the only way that we are going to solve it is to develop a new relationship between humanity and nature, a fundamentally different mode of production. And that has always been a key socialist demand. Obviously that sounds like quite a maximalist program. But the stakes are so high now that, in a funny kind of way, if you’re not putting a maximalist program, you don’t seem serious. Nobody believes the climate crisis can be solved by putting your recycling out.

One of the things that makes your book so important is the way you put the working class at the heart of the argument. In particular, the last chapter, which talks about William Morris and the idea of a society based on democratic planning of the economy. We can learn from the environmental movement, but we, as the revolutionary left, have something to offer – a vision of an alternative society. Can you conclude with your thoughts on this?

To be honest it is the sort of issue that in the past, we might have danced around, and not spelled out very clearly because it sounds too radical, too utopian. It is not a question that can be dodged anymore. We have to actually talk about the different way that the world might be organized. As Bellamy Foster argues, William Morris’ News From Nowhere is a classic of socialist utopianism, but it’s also very clearly and very self-consciously, an environmental utopia.

For Morris, the two things are fundamentally intertwined. His Marxism is in some ways quite idiosyncratic, but he really goes to the core of the problem where he says that, what we need to do is we need to talk about the way that human beings relate to nature. And the way that they relate to nature is through labor. And so how we labor — and, in particular the selling of “labor power”, our ability to work — has profound consequences on our ability to shape the world around us. He presents a vision of a socialist future in which human beings are living and working in a different way — and central to that is the question of planning.

So I talked earlier about how in Australia the way that the land was managed by a whole series of customs and laws and traditions. The vision that Morris puts forward is a management of the land in a more conscious sense — a process where the working population democratically and collectively decides what they want to make, what they want to use, what they want to produce and that’s what they do. As soon as you think about that as a possibility, the climate problem becomes much less thorny. We know what to do to end climate change. We know all the things that have to happen.

We know that we have to shut down coal mines. We know that we have to move away from fossil fuels. We know that we have all these technologies that, in theory, enable us to do all sorts of wonderful things. The problem is that capitalism prevents us from doing so. So if we are able to decide what to do democratically and collectively, the possibilities that open up are just endless.

I quote in the book an extraordinary International Monetary Fund (IMF) paper where economists talk about whales, which sequester large amounts of carbon in their bodies. When whales die, they bring that carbon in the bottom of the ocean and so play a significant role in preventing carbon emissions. So how do the IMF decide to protect them? They say that in order to protect whales we have to decide what a whale is worth so they can be governed by a market which will then work its magic and protect the whales. It sounds absurd, but of course this is the argument that so many mainstream policymakers use when they’re talking about climate.

As I say in the book, if you and I confronted a whale that was in trouble, we wouldn’t set up a market. We would push it back in the water. Once you remove that necessity to create markets to govern everything that humans do, the future opens up. The problem doesn’t seem nearly as hopeless. We have a long way to go to create a workers’ democracy and a planned economy. But I do think that the movement as a whole has to start talking about this.

https://climateandcapitalism.com/2022/0 ... interview/
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Re: The Long Ecological Revolution

Post by blindpig » Sat Aug 06, 2022 4:34 pm

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Biden’s staff sounds climate alarm — about Biden
Originally published: The Lever on July 25, 2022 by Julia Rock and David Sirota (more by The Lever) | (Posted Jul 27, 2022)

President Joe Biden’s surrender on climate policy amid the intensifying crisis has prompted his own agency experts to sound a rare public alarm about their boss’s retreat, according to a letter being circulated throughout the administration and Capitol Hill.

The letter to Biden and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.)–provided to The Lever by a House Democratic staffer–is initialed by 165 staffers at federal health and environmental agencies and at 75 congressional offices. They are demanding the president use more aggressive tactics to pass his long-promised climate agenda through the Senate.

“President Biden, you have an exigent responsibility to reduce suffering all over the world, and the power and skills to do so, but time is running out,” says the letter, which is now being circulated throughout the administration for more signatures. “You are the president of the United States of America at a pivotal moment in the history of the world. All that we ask is that you do everything in your power. We’ve done our part. We implore you to do yours.”

The letter was provided to The Lever by Saul Levin, a House Democratic staffer and coordinator of the Congressional Progressive Staff Association Climate Working Group. The officials signed the letter anonymously with their initials, to protect against political retribution. Another House Democratic staffer confirmed that the letter was being circulated to government officials for their signatures.

​​“Our house is on fire, and Manchin burned the stairs. Democratic leaders are walking away,” Levin told The Lever. “We cannot. We must test the fire escape, find the fire extinguisher, tie some sheets together if we have to: Our lives depend on it.”

Levin was referring to Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) once again proclaiming that he was walking away from negotiations on $375 billion in clean energy tax credits. It also follows Biden declining to declare a climate emergency, which would allow him to institute a ban on crude oil exports, halt fossil fuel imports, and block investments in fossil fuel projects, among other things.

Echoing the letter, Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) told The Lever: “President Biden must declare a climate emergency now. This is the time we need a moonshot for renewable energy.”

This unusual action from staffers at Biden’s own agencies spotlights the high stakes of the moment–the window of opportunity to pass climate legislation under a Democratic trifecta may be coming to an end, and it could be years before massive investments in clean energy become possible again.

The letter calls on Biden to “immediately declare a climate emergency and end fossil fuel extraction on federal lands. Then, and most importantly, you must intervene in stalled Senate negotiations.”

While the average age of a U.S. senator is 64, and Biden is 79, the average staffer is much younger–and will live through the consequences of their bosses’ inaction.

Specifically, the staffers are calling on Biden to send a public letter to Manchin giving him two options.

“The first option must be for Senator Manchin to vote to pass the House Build Back Better climate justice provisions by the end of July, as part of a reconciliation package,” the staffers wrote.

The second must represent a bold and creative alternative that Senator Manchin understands to be much worse. For example, you and Senator Schumer could strip Senator Manchin of his Chairmanship of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, shut down the Mountain Valley Pipeline Project, eliminate the use of mountaintop removal and coal burning, and establish stringent water and air pollution standards.

This message to Biden comes two weeks after congressional staffers first sent a letter to Schumer and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) demanding they reach a deal to pass the clean energy tax credits, first reported by CNN.

Just days after they sent that letter, Manchin told Democratic leadership, after weeks of negotiations, he would not support a reconciliation package that included climate spending. He soon hedged, saying he would potentially support a broader package after the August recess if inflation seems to be abating.

Manchin’s concerns about inflation should ring hollow: There is overwhelming consensus among economists that subsidizing clean energy would actually reduce inflation by making energy cheaper for consumers.

Summarizing academic testimony to lawmakers, climate reporter David Wallace-Wells noted in a recent column that “the public health costs of air pollution [are] so high that a total decarbonization would entirely pay for itself through the public health benefits alone. You don’t even need to consider climate, in other words, for decarbonization to make sense, even according to the strictest cost-benefit analysis.”

On the other hand, Manchin is a millionaire who has made his fortune in coal and has taken more campaign contributions from the oil and gas industry than any other senator. Every year, Manchin receives hundreds of thousands of dollars from a coal brokerage that he founded and which his son now runs.

After Manchin’s declaration imperiling the climate spending, Biden urged Democratic congressional leadership to move ahead with a much smaller spending package that would only include an extension of Affordable Care Act subsidies and a prescription drug price negotiation provision.

Last Wednesday, Schumer confirmed that the Senate would move forward with the health care-only reconciliation bill, saying they would make a renewed push for climate spending after July’s inflation numbers are published. “There is always a second reconciliation bill available to us,” he told E&E News.

Other senators have been less willing to give up on a climate package.

“We’re much closer to a climate deal than people realize,” Sen. John Hickenlooper (D-Colo.) tweeted after Schumer announced the Senate would proceed with a health care-only package. “Let’s not throw in the towel just yet.”

But, by publishing this letter, staffers are telling the public that Biden and Schumer have given up too early, especially when the stakes are so high.

https://mronline.org/2022/07/27/bidens- ... out-biden/

Biden was a Trojan Horse from Day 1 and the party progressives fell for it hook, line and sinker. While the rank and file of that caucus are certainly naive Bernie Sanders had to know what was going down again showing him to be a treacherous dog tho mebbe he's just as senile as Biden.

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Nationalise energy firms, unions demand as BP reports £6.9bn profits and energy bills soar
Originally published: Morning Star Online on August 2, 2022 by Matt Trinder (more by Morning Star Online) | (Posted Aug 04, 2022)

ENERGY firms must be nationalised to stop an epidemic of unfettered profiteering, unions demanded today after BP reported its biggest quarterly profit for 14 years.

The energy giant’s bumper underlying profit, which rose to a staggering £6.9 billion between April and June as oil and gas prices soared, are an “insult to families struggling to get by,” the TUC said.

BP’s haul, the second highest for the second quarter in the firm’s history, came as experts predicted that typical annual household energy bills could hit more than £3,600 this winter.

The cost of filling up at the petrol pump and keeping the lights on at home has soared as increased demand for energy after the easing of most Covid-19 restrictions globally has coincided with a drop in supplies from Russia amid its invasion of Ukraine.

As well as BP, other firms, including Shell, Equinor, TotalEnergies and British Gas owner Centrica which have not faced extra extraction costs, have also reported bumper takings.

BP boss Bernard Looney claimed that he was “backing Britain” by “investing” £18bn in this country over the next decade.

However, TUC general secretary Frances O’Grady said:

Every family should get a fair price for the energy they need, but with energy bills rising much faster than wages, these profits are an insult to families struggling to get by.

Ministers must do more to get wages rising across the economy and we should bring energy retail firms into public ownership so we can reduce bills for basic energy needs.


Unite union leader Sharon Graham said:

People will be confounded by the latest profits announced by BP.

The British economy does not work for workers and their families. Britain’s real crisis isn’t rising prices, it’s an epidemic of unfettered profiteering.


Cat Hobbs, director of campaign group We Own It, said:

Oil and gas giants recording record profits at the same time as the rest of us are wondering how we will heat our houses throughout winter is adding insult to injury.

She told the Morning Star:

We need a real windfall tax on these super-profits, but we need to go further too.

The government should commit to setting up a publicly owned energy supply company alongside a state-owned renewables company, as is the norm across Europe.

This could permanently bring bills down and lead the transition to the clean, green future that we need.


Labour, which, under Sir Keir Starmer’s leadership, has resisted calls for renationalisation of key industries, warned that “people are worried sick” about soaring costs, with energy consultancy firm Cornwall Insight predicting a rise in the annual energy price cap to £3,359 in October and £3,616 from January.

Tory minsters finally bowed to political pressure earlier this year and announced a £400 discount on household energy bills funded by a 25 per cent windfall tax on oil and gas giants’ profits made in Britain.

But the tax only applies from May 26, so BP will not be required to pay the levy on most of its second-quarter profits and a new “investment allowance” will nearly double the tax relief available to already mega-rich energy firms.

Condemning the “totally wrong” compromise, shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves claimed that Labour would “bring down energy bills for good with a green energy sprint for home-grown power and a 10-year warm homes plan to cut bills for 19 million cold, draughty homes.”

Scottish Greens environment spokesman Mark Ruskell called for a “meaningful windfall tax and a major investment in renewable energy so that we can finally break the link between fossil fuel prices and household bills.”

https://mronline.org/2022/08/04/nationa ... ills-soar/

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To save the Planet, we must choose
Originally published: The Lever on August 1, 2022 by David Sirota (more by The Lever) | (Posted Aug 03, 2022)

In the climate change era, if ExxonMobil is celebrating legislation, it’s a bad sign. So when the company’s CEO, Darren Woods, last week lauded Congress’s new climate spending bill, that was a warning not just about the specific “all-of-the-above” energy provisions in the bill, but also about our continued unwillingness to make binary choices, even when they are necessary.

Choice avoidance is the Washington Consensus. Politicians seeking to simultaneously appease voters and their CEO donors routinely tell us we get to have our cake and eat it too. They insist we can have billionaires and shared prosperity, legalized corruption with democracy, lower inflation plus corporate profiteering, and a livable planet alongside a prosperous ExxonMobil. You name the crisis, and we are infantilized to believe the world is an all-you-can-eat buffet and that either/or choices aren’t necessary.

It is an alluring fantasy–but the last decade shows it is just that: a fantasy.

Think about health care. In 2009, we were told we did not have to follow every other industrialized country and choose universal health care over corporate health insurance. Instead, President Barack Obama promised a “uniquely American system” that would avoid such a choice–it would create robust health insurance and pharmaceutical profits, and also a humane system of medical care for all.

A decade later, reality tells a different story: Health insurance and pharmaceutical giants are making huge profits, paying out billions to executives, and jacking up prices–but millions remain unable to access basic care. Even now, after the corporate health care system delivered hundreds of thousands of preventable pandemic deaths, we’re avoiding the necessary, binary choice to discard the current system and embrace something like Medicare For All. Despite a recent government report touting the benefits of making that choice, we’re told the best solution is choice avoidance–just giving more government subsidies to the same predatory insurers rationing care.

It’s the same story for Wall Street.

After the 2008 financial crisis crushed millions of Americans, lawmakers said we didn’t have to choose to reinstate New Deal laws that safeguarded against such crises. They told us we didn’t have to choose to nationalize, break up, or limit the size of financial institutions. And they assured us we didn’t even have to prosecute or fire the specific bankers who engineered the meltdown. Instead, their solution was just propping up too-big-to-fail banks with bailouts and cheap money, shielding financial executives from punishment, and creating some light-touch regulations that fundamentally change nothing.

A decade later, Wall Street profits and bonuses are booming, the financial services industry occupies an outsized share of our economy, and governments are funneling even more cash into that sector. Meanwhile, banks have extracted nearly half a trillion dollars in overdraft fees from consumers, and some experts say another financial crisis is on the horizon.

Now comes the climate crisis, where the costs of decades of choice avoidance are wildfires, droughts, fire tornados, deadlier hurricanes, derechos, and all sorts of other weather monsters. As scientists say we only have a few years left to prevent climate change’s worst effects, we are at another decision point–and yet we are still refusing to choose.

While Democrats tout their spending bill’s important new investments in clean energy–and they are important–the legislation includes language making new solar and wind projects contingent on expanding oil and gas leases on federal lands and waters. The more clean energy we build out, the more dirty energy becomes available for fossil fuel companies to extract and burn.

This provision was the bribe for a long-sought vote from Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), a coal magnate who is Congress’s top recipient of fossil fuel industry cash, and whose staff reportedly confers weekly with Exxon’s lobbyists.

Natural resources law professor Sam Kalen told Bloomberg that this language is “one of the worst policy provisions I’ve seen,” while the Center for Biological Diversity’s Brett Hartl called it “a climate suicide pact.” Scores of climate groups demanded the language be eliminated before the bill is passed.

Other climate advocates insisted the existing legislation will still reduce emissions and therefore must move forward. Sociologist Daniel Aldana Cohen astutely noted that even if passed in its current form, the legislation will be “opening new terrains of struggle… where this unlocks enough investment for new coalitions to fight over, which in turn accelerate and transform policy landscapes across scales.”

Whatever you think about the bill, the United States government’s refusal to make a binary energy choice is exactly why Exxon’s CEO and the fossil fuel industry are celebrating. They are thrilled that somehow–even at this late hour in the climate cataclysm they created–their bankrolled lawmakers are still pretending fossil fuels and a habitable ecosystem can coexist.

“We’re pleased with the broader recognition that a more comprehensive set of solutions are going to be needed to address the challenges of an energy transition,” said ExxonMobil’s Darren Woods.

The company added in a statement that the “government can promote investment through clear and consistent policy that supports U.S. resource development, such as regular and predictable lease sales, as well as streamlined regulatory approval and support for infrastructure such as pipelines.”

Kathleen Sgamma, president of the oil and gas lobbying group Western Energy Alliance, praised the provision tying lease sales for renewable energy development to oil and gas leases.

“This provision was quite a pleasant surprise,” Sgamma told Bloomberg.

Tying wind and solar to oil and natural is actually a really clever all-of-the-above energy move. The bill forces them not to neglect oil and natural gas.

That “all-of-the-above energy” strategy–an Orwellian motto parroted from Manchin himself–is the climate version of the pernicious choice-avoidance ideology. It comes only months after United Nations scientists effectively warned that an “all of the above” energy policy that includes fossil fuels is climate denial that will destroy the world.

The good news in their report is that we still can quickly stave off the worst effects of climate change and save our ecosystem. But we can only do that if we stop pretending we never have to make a choice. The science is clear: To save our species, we must halt new fossil fuel development. Now.

That requires making the kind of binary, zero-sum choice we almost never make–in this case, a choice to discard one resource for another, not tie clean power to dirty energy.

Such binary choices take us out of our comfort zone. They require us to acknowledge disturbing realities and accept the prospect of change. They require conditions and fortitude that remain in short supply.

To survive this emergency, we need honesty from news outlets that may not want to tell hard truths about choices that might reduce their advertisers’ profits.

We need maturity and climate focus from voters who have gotten used to being sold choice avoidance and easy fixes.

And, most of all, we need integrity from political leaders who keep promoting “all-of-the-above” fictions that imperil our world.

https://mronline.org/2022/08/03/to-save ... st-choose/

David Sirota makes me want to puke. This is the kind of bullshit that gets us nowhere, "it's this one bunch of evil capitalists and their paid political stooges! We must choose!!!"

Capitalist punk that he is Sirota cannot conceive that this situation is inevitable as long as profit is the ruling idea of our society, that nothing happens unless the rich can make a profit they find suitable

And there can be no integrity under the rule of capital, it produces corruption the way a body shits.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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blindpig
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Re: The Long Ecological Revolution

Post by blindpig » Mon Aug 15, 2022 4:34 pm

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How private corporations stole the sea from the Commons
Originally published: Janata Weekly on August 7, 2022 by Guy Standing (more by Janata Weekly) | (Posted Aug 10, 2022)

For most of human history, the oceans have been seen as a global commons, the benefits and resources of which belong to us all in equal measure. But our seas–and the marine environment as a whole–are being ravaged by exploitation for corporate profit. The result is a social, economic and ecological crisis that threatens the very life support system of the Earth.

The oceans cover 70% of the planet’s surface, provide half the oxygen we breathe and help combat climate change by absorbing carbon dioxide. Some 40% of the world’s population live in coastal communities and depend on ocean, coastal and marine resources for their livelihoods and well-being.

Many of the critical issues affecting the ‘blue commons’ require international action. These include the depletion of fish populations by subsidised industrialised fisheries; destruction of the seabed and vital coral reefs by oil multinationals; a threatened biodiversity wipe-out from deep-sea mining for minerals; and the reckless spread of commercial aquaculture.

The 2022 UN Ocean Conference, held last month in Lisbon, came up with plenty of fine words and promises, but nothing that would put these trends into reverse. Just before the conference, after more than two decades of negotiations, the World Trade Organization finalised a feeble agreement on fishing subsidies, in which the initial commitment to abolish “harmful subsidies” was deleted from the final text.

My new book, ‘The Blue Commons’, argues that the only way to stop–and reverse–the destruction and depletion of marine resources and ecosystems is to revive the ethos of the sea as a commons, managed for the benefit of all by those whose lives and livelihoods depend on it.

Only commoners have a tangible and emotional vested interest in preserving the seascape and using the seas’ resources sustainably. And they should be compensated for loss of the ‘blue commons’, with ‘common dividends’ financed by levies on exploitation for private gain.

Privatising the sea

Since 1945, when the U.S. unilaterally asserted ownership of the continental shelf and parts of the high seas around its shores, much of the ‘blue commons’ has been converted into private property.

In 1982, UNCLOS (United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea) endorsed the biggest enclosure in history, granting countries exclusive economic zones (EEZs) that extended 200 nautical miles from their coastlines. This set in train procedures and institutional mechanisms that have expanded privatisation and financialisation to all parts of the marine economy.

It also cemented neocolonialism, granting ex-imperial countries such as the U.S., France and the UK millions of square miles around lands far from their shores–their so-called ‘overseas territories’.

It is hard to exaggerate the scale of the plunder of the ‘blue commons’ in the period of neoliberal economic dominance since the 1980s. The seas have become the frontier of global rentier capitalism. The spreading claws of financial capital are evident almost everywhere, with private equity growing in prominence.

The financial industry, fronted by the World Bank, has steered the much-touted ‘blue growth’ strategy, promising an unlikely combination of economic growth, poverty alleviation and environmental improvement. The pickings for profit look tempting. Were the seas a country, the income generated from all marine activities would make it the world’s seventh-biggest economy, which (at least pre-Covid) was expected to see rapid growth fuelled by tourism, ports and shipping.

Specifically British problems

Some issues affecting the marine environment are particularly pertinent in Britain. Taken together, they justify the creation of a ‘national commission on the blue economy’, to reset economic and social policy regarding our waters.

The UK government operates a regressive, weakly administered fishing quota system that gives private property rights to commercial fishing companies. Most of the UK fishing quota goes to a handful of big corporations. Well over a quarter has been given to just five families, all on The Sunday Times Rich List. Just one giant vessel–registered in the UK but Dutch-owned–has 23% of the English quota.

The system by which fishing quota is divided up is opaque and susceptible to corruption. But the government’s 2020 Fisheries Act, which regulates fisheries post-Brexit, made no changes. It has led to chronic overfishing–often illegal–compounded by the fact that breaches are treated as mild civil offences, not criminal ones.

To take just one example: in 2015, the Dutch-owned super-trawler mentioned above was caught with 632,000 kilos of illegally caught mackerel. It was fined just £102,000 and then allowed to sell the fish for £437,000 and retain its quota share.

To compound this impunity, the Royal Navy and Scotland’s Marine Sea Fisheries Inspectorate have only 12 ‘marine protection vessels’ to monitor fishing practices in a sea area three times the size of the UK’s land area. Meanwhile, the Marine Management Organisation (MMO), England’s regulatory body, had its budget slashed as part of austerity, leading to a sharp drop in inspections and investigations of fishery violations and a similar drop in warnings and prosecutions.

Marine protection in name only

The UK government has made much of its claim to be extending its protection of sea and marine species through marine protected areas (MPAs), also called marine conservation zones. These cover nearly a quarter of the UK’s territorial waters. But most MPAs are poorly protected, with highly destructive fishing methods such as bottom-trawling and dredging allowed in many of them.

Recently, the MMO brought a case against Greenpeace for dropping boulders into supposedly protected areas to disrupt trawling. The judge had the sense to toss out the case as “absurd”, urging the MMO to do its designated job, and not harass those induced to act in its stead. Meanwhile, BP was recently given the go-ahead by another government regulator to dump thousands of tonnes of steel pipes and cables from a decommissioned oil rig into an MPA in the North Sea.

Under common law in the UK, the monarchy and the government are supposed to be trustees or stewards, responsible for preserving the commons as such for future generations. Instead, they have handed over the commons for multinationals to exploit for profit, with minimal environmental protections or compensation for the commoners–the British public.

For instance, in another sell-out of the ‘blue commons’, the Crown Estate (the Queen’s property company) has been allowed to auction off large expanses of the seabed around Britain to multinational corporations for offshore wind farms. The latest round in 2021 will raise up to £9bn over ten years for the royal family and the Treasury.

Deep-sea mining–and worse to come

Coming up are even bigger concerns: prospective deep-sea mining (aka ‘seabed harvesting’) for minerals, and the extension of intellectual property rights to ‘marine genetic resources’ (MGRs), which are of particular interest to medicine.

UK Seabed Resources, a subsidiary of the U.S. arms company Lockheed Martin, in partnership with the UK government, holds licences to search the Pacific for deep-sea mining sites. High demand for minerals such as cobalt and lithium important to the electronics and renewable energy industries means deep-sea mining promises to be highly profitable–but threatens to cause potentially catastrophic damage to marine ecosystems.

The International Seabed Authority (ISA), the regulator for deep-sea mining in more than half the world’s ocean area, has a mandate to promote “the orderly, safe and rational management” of seabed resources. It is charged with mitigating the damage from seabed mining, but not with stopping or even limiting it, despite calls from leading scientists for a moratorium. And the ISA’s pitiful budget is nowhere near large enough to monitor what giant corporations are up to.

If the ISA fails to agree a mining code, after years of delay, unregulated commercial seabed mining could start next year.

As for intellectual property rights, the UK has missed the proverbial boat. Companies in just three countries, Germany, the U.S. and Japan, hold more than three-quarters of the thousands of patents already taken out on marine genetic resources. Astoundingly, one multinational alone, the German chemical giant BASF, owns nearly half the patents.

These patents will guarantee monopoly income flows from the blue economy for many years, and give rich corporations in rich countries private control over a key research and development agenda that affects the whole world.

https://mronline.org/2022/08/10/how-pri ... e-commons/

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Climate crisis poses stark choice: Socialism or Extinction
Originally published: Climate crisis poses stark choice: Socialism or Extinction on August 11, 2022 by Alex Thomson (more by Climate crisis poses stark choice: Socialism or Extinction) (Posted Aug 13, 2022)

Book review, Socialism or Extinction: The Meaning of Revolution in a Time of Ecological Disaster, by Martin Empson

In his latest book, Socialism or Extinction: The Meaning of Revolution in a Time of Ecological Disaster, Martin Empson neatly lays out his argument as to why the climate crisis cannot be solved under capitalism. The title itself references Rosa Luxemburg’s use of the words ‘socialism or barbarism’ to describe the choice facing humankind during World War I, thus underlining both the higher stakes we currently face with climate change, but also referencing the role of revolution in bringing that conflict to an end.

As a longstanding environmentalist, socialist and member of the Socialist Workers Party (UK), Empson is bringing to this work years of activism and discussion. As such, he describes the work as ‘an unapologetic defense of revolution’.

Empson puts the work into context by describing the current environmental crisis facing the world, ‘a code red for humanity’ as per the 2021 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). In outlining the urgency of addressing climate change, he references the particular impact on the global south and how closely the current crisis is tied to capitalism, citing loss of biodiversity, factory farming, unequal impacts to the poor and the global south.

By the very competitive nature of capitalism, he argues that it is inherently wasteful, and ‘endlessly hungry’. Not only does it function by anticipating future demand and thus creating waste when estimates are incorrect, but also its products and processes are in a state of constant change to get ahead of the competition.

By suggesting that industry developed a reliance on fossil fuel not to make production cheaper or more efficient, but to gain power over workers, he reinforces an inextricable link between fossil fuels and capitalism. He also argues that the climate crisis was created by capitalism, is inherent in capitalism and thus cannot be solved under capitalism, that the system must be dismantled and this can only be done by workers through a socialist revolution.

The limitation of top down approaches to fixing climate change is that making real change would be counterproductive to the tiny minority who hold so many of the world’s resources and concentrated power, and thus so many of the existing ‘solutions’ are simply greenwashing.

In defining the concept of socialist revolution, Empson is emphatic that it must be from the bottom up, using the power of workers to regain control the means of production. He discusses the role of violence in a revolution, saying that while socialists should not condemn violence out of hand, non-violence is a more successful method of making change. He emphasizes that such a global issue requires a global solution by transforming the world, and providing a decent life, home, diet, health and education to all.

In the second half of the book, Empson describes how society would work after a revolution, making the point that while revolution is not inevitable, it is possible where the status quo becomes untenable and enough workers come together to stand up to demand change and implement it.

He describes the conditions under which such a revolution would occur, and points out that the capitalist state itself was created by breaking down the feudal society that came before it. In analyzing previous revolutions, Empson illustrates how workers are capable of creating an effective workers state as long as they can defend it against counter revolution. The workers state would eventually fall away to socialism. Empson illustrates his theory with case histories of past revolutions, both in the recent past in Egypt, Sudan and further back with the Paris Commune and the Russian revolution of 1917. He does make the point that different factors must be at play to make a revolution successful, such as a mass mobilization of workers who are pushed to the point of refusing to continue under the current system, but as well, a significant number of socialists who are in place to provide support and guidance, as the Bolshevik Party did in 1917. The point that stands out in his examples is that again and again during periods of revolution, workers have come together, put aside their differences and worked effectively to organize their community. While each of these revolutions was part of a wider movement and/or spread geographically, Empson makes it clear that a socialist upheaval would effectively have to be worldwide to transcend and eventually break down borders to deal with a global issue.

Martin Empson effectively argues that only a socialist revolution can rescue us from imminent climate catastrophe. Building on the thought of Marx, Lenin and Luxemburg, he makes the case that this is urgently necessary and how it is possible. Along the way, he gives us examples of revolutionary communities successfully organized by the working class. While he does take the time to sketch out the issues of climate change that put us at risk, he does not map out climate solutions specifically, but instead makes the case that workers have the knowledge, the skills and the power to transition to a more sustainable socialist society. Socialism or Extinction is an engaging and compelling read.

(Socialism or Extinction: The Meaning of Revolution in a Time of Ecological Disaster, by Martin Empson is published by Booksmarks in the UK.)

https://mronline.org/2022/08/13/climate ... xtinction/

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U.S. has the warmest nights ever
August 8, 2022

July 2022 was a textbook case of how global warming gets even more pronounced after dark.

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The Frazier Fire rages through grassland in Wichita County, Texas, on July 22. Texas had its hottest and fifth driest July on record. (Image source: Texas A&M Forest Service)

by Bob Henson

As it melts records across the Northern Hemisphere, the scorching summer of 2022 has squeezed out the warmest month of nights in U.S. history. Sweltering nights are a recipe for trouble during major heat waves, as they give human bodies in un-air-conditioned places less chance of recuperating from the more intense heat of the day.

In its July 2022 national climate roundup, NOAA reported on Monday, August 8, that the monthly average temperature of 76.42 degrees Fahrenheit (24.68 degrees Celsius) across the contiguous United States was the third hottest for any month on record, just behind July 1936 and July 2012.

It was a top-ten-hottest July for 20 U.S. states in an arc stretching from the Pacific Northwest to the Southern Plains, across the mid-South, and into the Mid-Atlantic and southern New England (see Fig. 2 below).

A preliminary total of 30 U.S. sites recorded all-time highs in July, with another 18 tying their previous all-time highs, according to NOAA’s Daily Weather Records website.

Toasty by day, and still warm by night

Even more notable, the nationally averaged daily minimum temperatures (63.57°F) were the warmest for any single month in the 128 years of U.S. record keeping, just slightly outpacing 63.55°F from July 2012.

The 10 months with the warmest average daily lows have all been Julys, and nine of those 10 months have occurred in the last 25 years. Since 1970, July daily lows have warmed by more than 2.5°F, and July daily highs have climbed by about 1.8°F.

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Figure 1. Daily minimum temperatures for July since 1895, averaged across the month and across the contiguous United States. Also shown is the linear trend since 1970, capturing the era of increased warming over the last half century. (Image credit: NOAA/NCEI)

Both theory and observations indicate that a planet being warmed by human-produced greenhouse gases will tend to get more of that warming where and when it’s normally cool: at higher latitudes, during winter, and at night. A landmark 1993 study found that daily minima were warming three times faster than daily maxima over the Northern Hemisphere. That conclusion doesn’t mean summer days are immune from human-produced heating, just that the temperature bump at night tends to be even larger.

Two U.S. states had their warmest average daily minima for any month on record in July 2022 by substantial margins:

*Colorado: 55.9°F (old record 55.6°F from July 1954);
*New Mexico: 62.0°F (old record 61.6°F from July 2011); and

The trend isn’t limited to the United States, of course. So-called “tropical nights” (those with lows of 68°F or higher) are becoming more common in the United Kingdom, as Stephen Burt (University of Reading) pointed out in an essay on July 15, just before the peak of a record-smashing UK heat wave. Burt noted that half of all tropical nights since 1814 at Oxford up to that point had occurred in the past 25 years.

According to a global analysis published in 2020, locations with the most asymmetric response to warming (i.e., places where nights are warming fastest relative to days) tend to be getting cloudier, more humid, and wetter.

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Figure 2. Daily minimum temperatures for July since 1895, averaged across the month and across the contiguous United States. Also shown is the linear trend since 1970, capturing the era of increased warming over the last half century. (Image credit: NOAA/NCEI)

Among the U.S. cities that had their warmest July on record in 2022, based on average temperature (daily lows plus daily highs):

*Salt Lake City: 87.3°F (old record 85.7°F from 2021);
*San Antonio, TX: 89.8°F (old record 88.7°F from 2009); and
*Tampa, FL: 86.3°F (old record 85.15°F from 2020)

The statewide average for daily highs in Texas during July 2022 was a withering 100.2°F, which topped the July record of 99.8°F from the infamous heat wave of 1980. The only hotter month for daily highs in Texas was the 101.6°F recorded in August 2011 during another brutal heat wave.

As for warm nights, it’s hard to overstate what happened in July 2022 in Galveston, Texas. An astounding 24 out of 31 nights set record-warm minimum temperatures. In the last 13 days of that month, the temperature never dipped below 84°F, and there was an eight-way tie for the warmest night ever observed in July (86°F).

A tale of two moisture anomalies

Precipitation was a starkly mixed bag across the United States in July. Drought expanded to cover much of the nation (51%) by month’s end, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor. Severe drought intensified in several areas, especially the Southern Plains.

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Figure 3. Statewide rankings for average precipitation for July 22, as compared to each July since records began in 1895. Darker shades of green indicate higher rankings for moisture, with 1 denoting the driest month on record and 128 the wettest. (Image credit: NOAA/NCEI)

During that same period, massive cloudbursts doused records and led to destructive flash floods in other locations. One focused area of flooding ran from the Midwest to the Appalachians, as record rains fell in both St. Louis and in eastern Kentucky. Catastrophic flooding ensued in the latter, killing at least 37 people.

Last month was the second driest July on record in Rhode Island, the fifth driest in Texas, and the tenth driest in Connecticut. The only state where it was a top-ten wettest month was Kentucky, which slogged through its fourth wettest July on record.

https://climateandcapitalism.com/2022/0 ... s-history/

Global hunger numbers jump; 2.3 billion are ‘food insecure’
August 9, 2022

World is further away from ending hunger, food insecurity and malnutrition

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The number of people affected by hunger globally rose to as many as 828 million in 2021, an increase of about 46 million since 2020 and 150 million since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a United Nations report that provides fresh evidence that the world is moving further away from ending hunger, food insecurity and malnutrition .

The 2022 edition of The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World report presents updates on the food security and nutrition situation around the world, including the latest estimates of the cost and affordability of a healthy diet. The report also looks at ways in which governments can repurpose their current support to agriculture to reduce the cost of healthy diets, mindful of the limited public resources available in many parts of the world.

The report was jointly published by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), the UN World Food Program (WFP) and the World Health Organization (WHO).

The numbers paint a grim picture:

*As many as 828 million people were affected by hunger in 2021 – 46 million people more from a year earlier and 150 million more from 2019.
*After remaining relatively unchanged since 2015, the proportion of people affected by hunger jumped in 2020 and continued to rise in 2021, to 9.8 percent of the world population. This compares with 8 percent in 2019 and 9.3 percent in 2020.
*Around 2.3 billion people in the world (29.3 percent) were moderately or severely food insecure in 2021 – 350 million more compared to before the outbreak of the COVID‑19 pandemic. Nearly 924 million people (11.7 percent of the global population) faced food insecurity at severe levels, an increase of 207 million in two years.
*The gender gap in food insecurity continued to rise in 2021 – 31.9 percent of women in the world were moderately or severely food insecure, compared to 27.6 percent of men – a gap of more than 4 percentage points, compared with 3 percentage points in 2020.
*Almost 3.1 billion people could not afford a healthy diet in 2020, up 112 million from 2019, reflecting the effects of inflation in consumer food prices stemming from the economic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic and the measures put in place to contain it.
*An estimated 45 million children under the age of five were suffering from wasting, the deadliest form of malnutrition, which increases children’s risk of death by up to 12 times. Furthermore, 149 million children under the age of five had stunted growth and development due to a chronic lack of essential nutrients in their diets, while 39 million were overweight.
*Progress is being made on exclusive breastfeeding, with nearly 44 percent of infants under six months of age being exclusively breastfed worldwide in 2020. This is still short of the 50 percent target by 2030. Of great concern, two in three children are not fed the minimum diverse diet they need to grow and develop to their full potential.

As this report is being published, the ongoing war in Ukraine, involving two of the biggest global producers of staple cereals, oilseeds and fertilizer, is disrupting international supply chains and pushing up the prices of grain, fertilizer, energy, as well as ready-to-use therapeutic food for children with severe malnutrition. This comes as supply chains are already being adversely affected by increasingly frequent extreme climate events, especially in low-income countries, and has potentially sobering implications for global food security and nutrition.

https://climateandcapitalism.com/2022/0 ... -insecure/

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Mother Earth needs collective climate action, now
By OP Rana | CHINA DAILY | Updated: 2022-08-15 07:21

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JIN DING/CHINA DAILY

News has been coming thick and fast. Most of it worrying. That this is one of the hottest summers on record is news, but not new. The past few summers have been equally bad, if not worse. What's worrying is that extreme temperatures melted many roads into black goo in the United Kingdom last month-something that is becoming common in the West.

What's even more worrying is a new study that says the world's largest ice sheet faces a dreadful future, for its fate rests in the hands of humankind (read big corporations and global leaders). If global warming drives temperatures above 2 degrees Celsius, the East Antarctic ice sheet could melt, pushing up sea level by many meters.

East Antarctica holds the vast majority of the Earth's glacier ice, which climate scientists thought was stable. But now it is showing signs of being extremely vulnerable to climate change. And if all of it melts, scientists say, sea levels would rise by 52 meters.

Adding to the worries is the fact that the West Antarctic ice sheet, although it is far smaller than the East Antarctic sibling, has already become unstable. The total loss of the West Antarctic ice sheet would raise the sea level by 5 meters.

As for the Greenland ice sheet, which could cause a sea level rise of up to 7 meters, it is on the brink of a tipping point, scientists have warned. Sea levels are already rising faster than they have done for about 3,000 years, because mountain glaciers and the Greenland ice sheet are melting at an unprecedentedly fast rate, and ocean waters are expanding as they heat due to global warming.

And even a couple of meters of sea level rise could spell disaster for the world, coastal regions in particular, including iconic cities such as New York City, Shanghai and Mumbai.

Before the mind-numbing study highlighting the heightened threat to the East Antarctic ice sheet was published, on June 26 to be precise, came another piece of shattering news. After discussing and negotiating issues of global importance amid a tense atmosphere, the representatives of 196 countries concluded the fourth meeting of the open-ended Working Group on the Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework at the UN Environment Programme building in Nairobi on a disappointing note.

Instead of reaching consensuses on many of 23 targets included in the framework's document, as was expected, the delegates agreed on only two. The fact that the Aichi targets lapsed in 2020 makes the failure of the Nairobi meeting even more disheartening. The UN Convention on Biological Diversity had adopted the targets at a conference in Aichi, Japan, in 2010 to protect biodiversity which underpins global food security, clean water and people's health.

The expected global deal to halt biodiversity loss dissolved into disagreements despite the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services emphasizing on many occasions that declining in biodiversity poses a generational threat to humans.

The Global Biodiversity Framework has been designed to revive species loss and reconceive the Aichi targets in the post-2020 period by, for example, increasing the coverage of terrestrial and marine protected areas, introducing better regulations and policies for sustainable development, and protecting biodiverse species.

The two targets the delegates agreed on are Target 19.2, to strengthen capacity-building efforts and development, and Target 12, to create more green and blue spaces in urban and densely populated areas.

Of special concern is the fact that, due to advances in biotechnology, corporations no longer need to have physical access to, for instance, plants. To extract the plants' genetic value, they can use their digitized genetic information. The result: big companies could reap all the profits even if they depend on, but without contributing to, the traditional knowledge of Indigenous and local people.

Yet another bit of disturbing news is the possibility of climate change disrupting ecological cues, which prompt animals to migrate. What can be disturbing about that, you may ask. When animals, including butterfly kaleidoscopes or elk herds or bat cauldrons, migrate, they do so in response to ecological cues, which guide the manner and extent of the migration process.

That climate change will deal a terrible blow to migratory species is tragic enough. But, worse, as a recent study in Nature shows, the disruption will lead to unusual interspecies contact, which could cause new transmissions and mutations of viruses.

As such, aside from having a massive ecological impact on the global fauna, it could seriously impact human health, for the majority of emerging infectious disease threats are zoonotic (transmitted by animal-to-human contact) in origin.

The study suggests we could be on the cusp of a mass-scale viral transmission event.

Now to the moral of the story: the international community has no choice but to put its heads and hearts together, forget about power and profits, chicanery and charade, trick-or-treat, and work together to keep global temperature rise to below 2 C. The tragedy is that these evil traits have become part of the DNA of some countries and corporations.

Only a few economies such as China and the European Union have been doing enough to tread the course to a healthy planet.

Until the pretenders shed their sheep's clothing, repent for their sins, start believing that Earth is the only place they can call home and without it there won't be any power or profit, and work to improve its health, we are in for dark times.

http://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/20220 ... 7215d.html
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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blindpig
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Re: The Long Ecological Revolution

Post by blindpig » Tue Aug 23, 2022 2:31 pm

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Class struggle or degrowth?
Originally published: Uneven Earth on August 11, 2022 by Gray Maddrey (more by Uneven Earth) | (Posted Aug 18, 2022)

In his recent book, Climate Change as Class War, Matthew Huber argues that the ecological crisis is primarily caused by the capitalist mode of production, especially the preponderant deployment of fossil capital, ‘the forms of capital that generate profit through emissions’. For many on the anti-capitalist left, this is a conclusion that hardly bears repeating. Nevertheless, Huber is right to centre the claim. Ecological collapse is accelerating and requires immediate action. While the global average of emissions must reach zero by 2050 to stay within 1.5–2 °C heating, in order to do this at pace, the parts of the world most responsible for emissions must reach net zero by 2030. But not only are we failing to make progress toward these goals, emissions continue to rise with no end in sight. Huber puts it bluntly: ‘We’re still losing.’

Climate Change as Class War, Matthew Huber

We’re still losing to capitalism—but why? Because, in the first instance, Huber emphasizes, we are not really fighting it. Capitalism is uniquely defined by its class structure: capitalists, the business owners and corporate boards of directors who organize production; and workers, those they hire to carry it out. While the capitalist class comprises a relatively tiny number of people, it dominates the working class in terms of property owned and legal authority over its use. In order to make a living, workers have no option but to sell their time to capitalists in the labor market. However, due to its relatively immense size and leverage at the point of production—through strikes and other forms of collective action—the working class has the potential to exercise its own form of power. This is where climate struggle must be located, Huber tells us: the sites of mass emissions. Capitalism can be fundamentally challenged by nothing other than class struggle, so only class struggle can fundamentally address the ecological crisis. In this historical moment, climate change is class war.

In addition to its strategic position in the production process, the working class has the most to gain from class struggle. Huber suggests that the point of building class power is to alleviate ‘the lack of control over the basics of life [that] defines working-class life’. In fact, this is how the struggle against the capitalist class ought to be framed. In a capitalist economy, even the means of subsistence—basic goods such as food, energy, and housing—are available only in markets that operate on the principle of profit. This makes access to them unreliable for the majority of workers, who live from paycheck to paycheck. From the perspective of the working class, resolution of the ecological crisis ought to be seen as ancillary to universal access to these means of subsistence—through a public guarantee of basic goods outside the marketplace. Huber then highlights the possibility of organizing around this goal in the electricity sector as the fastest route to mitigating the ecological crisis: ‘As the climate crisis intensifies and the technical case for electrifying everything becomes clearer, a “socialism in one sector” approach could be the core of a public sector–led decarbonization program.’ That is, electrifying everything would simultaneously begin to reverse ecological collapse and lead the way towards further public provisioning of basic goods.

However, in Huber’s estimation, climate ‘struggle’ is predominantly oriented around consumption rather than production: instead of building power at the point of production, climate struggle has focused on building knowledge about our individual carbon footprints. Unfortunately, Huber claims, ‘knowledge is not power’. Although he begins here with a critique of naive science communicators and technocratic policy experts, whose approaches assume that not enough of us are convinced of the reality of ecological crisis or that we are not properly taxed for emissive consumption choices, the primary targets of Huber’s antagonism are ‘anti-system radicals’, that is, proponents of the degrowth movement. For Huber, they are more egregious than the others because they attempt to critique capitalism yet alienate those actually capable of challenging it, the working class. Growth is not the problem with capitalism; capitalists are. Whereas the working class has a material interest in ‘more’, Huber maintains, degrowth is a politics of ‘less’ and therefore ultimately undermines itself.

Huber has already been criticized for his failure substantively to engage with degrowth, thereby missing any compatibility with his own position. The degrowth movement calls for an equitable downscaling of production and consumption that will reduce societies’ throughput of energy and raw materials. It does not implore us to take individualized responsibility for overconsumption. Furthermore, an equitable distribution of that downscaling would result in those with the least now having even more after. I would like to deepen the present critique by showing how Huber’s failure to engage with degrowth results in a failure to recognize tensions intrinsic to his own position. First, there is no empirical evidence that the plan to electrify ‘everything’ would sufficiently mitigate the ecological crisis. On the contrary, the material and energy requirements of such a project on the existing (and growing) scale of infrastructure would likely exacerbate the crisis. Second, Huber’s disregard for the problem inherent to growth rests on misunderstanding the capitalist mode of production as capitalists’ power to organize production. While this is certainly part of it, the ‘mode of production’ is more completely understood as the way life itself is organized within capitalism, which requires perpetual growth. Finally, without grasping the relationship between capitalism and growth, motivating class struggle solely on the grounds of material security will not necessarily lead to a greener future. The very meaning of ‘material interests’ is influenced by capitalism, so class struggle must coincide with efforts to interpret and advance our own desires beyond what life within capitalism conditions us to take for granted. For this reason, I underscore the significance of socialist political education for degrowth. A future beyond growth is one we can learn to freely associate with only through democratic pedagogy.

Evidence in Favor of Degrowth
An implicit point of contact between Huber and degrowth occurs early in the book where he centres capitalist production:

[LafargeHolcim, the largest cement company in the world] boasts of a new strategy called ‘Building for Growth,’ which ‘aims to drive profitable growth and simplify the business to deliver resilient returns and attractive value to stakeholders.’ The company does not seem to see a contradiction between this growth orientation and its stated goal of sustainability, which includes a ‘mission to cut its net CO2emissions per tonne of cement.’ Of course, if you cut the ‘emissions per tonne’ but keep growing the tonnage you make, you still produce more emissions. [emphasis mine]

In the empirical literature surrounding degrowth, this fact is known as ‘relative decoupling’—when the amount of emissions per energy use decreases. But, as Huber observes, relative decoupling is not enough. If the amount of emissions per energy use decreases, but energy use does not decrease, then emissions still increase, albeit more slowly. Further, due to improved resource efficiency, relative decoupling often results in a price reduction of the produced goods. This creates the ‘rebound effect’, a rise in demand and energy use to the point where emissions increase even more quickly than before. What would be necessary is absolute decoupling, a decrease in overall emissions irrespective of energy use. Huber later says that ‘if we actually decarbonize energy, the need for aggregate reductions in energy consumption is less obvious’ [emphasis his]. This is the extent of his argument, but the consideration has already been made within the discourse on decoupling: there is evidence against the possibility that absolute decoupling from emissions can be achieved at the scale of the global economy quickly enough to mitigate the ecological crisis. There is also no evidence that absolute decoupling can be achieved with respect to ecological variables other than emissions if economic growth is sustained.

In this regard, Huber’s text lacks a broad ecological awareness. Rather than focus exclusively on CO2emissions and climate change, degrowth is about several facets of ecology, such as the full range of planetary boundaries, various limits to things—from freshwater use to biodiversity loss—beyond which rapid or irreversible changes to the global ecosystem become more likely to occur. Huber continues:

Our energy system is currently bifurcated between those things that run on electricity … and those that run on other forms of energy …. Theoretically, many of these non-electric energy applications can be electrified, moving them for example, from gasoline to battery-powered automobiles, from natural-gas furnaces to electric heat pumps, and from combustion-based industrial heat to electric heat to replace such processes as steam reforming for hydrogen with electrolysis. [emphasis mine]

Setting aside just how theoretical this transition is (electricity itself is currently primarily generated through fossil fuels, so the transition to renewables will have to deal with the rate of decoupling of emissions and energy use), there is the question of how materially intensive such a process would be. Calculating from World Bank estimates, the global economy at its current rate of growth would need to increase lithium extraction by at least 2700% between now and 2050 in order to produce the batteries necessary to store energy at the grid level (not to mention the other rare metals required for renewable-energy infrastructure: copper, cobalt, silver, and so on). But even at existing levels of extraction, lithium mining devastates local communities and environments. Worse yet, most of this mining occurs in the Global South, exacerbating inequality between it and the North.

Yet Huber also takes issue with the North–South critique that ‘frames inequality as between the rich countries in the Global North and the poor countries in the Global South’. According to Huber, concepts such as ‘North’ and ‘South’ fail to articulate the inner dynamic of these political geographies, in particular their class dynamic: in both the North and South, the exploited masses are the working classes. Far from ignoring this, however, the critique conceives the North–South dynamic as the capitalist class dynamic recreated at a global scale. Northern countries use four times or more material per capita than planetary boundaries allow. In comparison, a majority of countries (mostly Southern) use less material per capita than could be safely allocated. This is the result of imperial, neo-colonial relations between the North and South, such as the structural adjustment programs implemented by the IMF since the latter half of the 20th century. Among other things, these relations have regimented access to valuable resources for the North, and the fact remains regardless of whether the ‘transnational capitalist class’ is to blame. In order to liberate the working classes within Southern countries, the dissolution of imperial relations between the North and South is prerequisite. Without the possibility of absolutely decoupling energy and material throughput from planetary boundary variables such as land-system change, aggregate consumption in the North will have to be significantly reduced—both to accommodate renewed exchange with the South and as a measure against ecological collapse.

This is just a glimpse of the research that undermines the idea that electrifying everything (or any other so-called ‘green growth’ approach) would successfully mitigate the ecological crisis, much less in an internationally egalitarian way. The evidence cannot be overstated, but I leave it here because I want to address the core of Huber’s critique of degrowth: the notion that a ‘politics of less’ will not win over the working-class who are struggling to make ends meet.

Capitalism and the Mode of Production

At the height of his critique of degrowth, Huber urges us to consider the literal meaning of the term: ‘the prefix “de” indicates less, or as an online dictionary defines the prefix: “used to indicate privation, removal, and separation.”’ It is therefore surprising that he fails to reflect on how versatile the meaning of ‘less’ is. When ‘degrowth’ means less of a bad thing, degrowth is a good thing. Huber practically acknowledges this when he states that ‘a class politics would articulate a confrontational approach where the capitalist class must degrow so that the working class can see growth in material security and basic human freedom’ [emphasis mine]. This is consistent with the entire framework of degrowth, which is oriented to the fact that the economy has outgrown, and is destroying, the Earth. The problem with economic growth in the abstract is that it is ‘infinite’—continuous, for its own sake, and ignorant of its material or ecological basis. When the economy ‘grows’, there is more production and thus more ‘value’ in circulation. But, for example, this can be the result of ‘planned obsolescence’, a general design strategy that ensures frequent consumption by artificially limiting the lifespan of products. The most infamous example concerns light bulbs designed to last 1000 hours, despite existing knowledge and capacity to produce bulbs that could last twice as long, but this practice manifests in various ways. It can be found in the production of technologies—from furniture and clothing to smartphones and home appliances—that are easier to trash and replace than to repair or upgrade. It is also evinced in a culture of advertising that facilitates desire for the ‘new’ even when it is only superficially different from the ‘old’. In all of these cases, the fact that we spend (or waste) more time and resources producing things overall is irrelevant to the resultant economic growth.

From this angle, Huber appears to side with the degrowth movement: ‘As we have seen since the 2008 financial crisis, we can have quite steady growth alongside wage stagnation and declining labor force participation. The mass of the working class is not really benefiting from growth.’ So what’s wrong with degrowth?

Capitalism does not require aggregate societal growth, but growth for capital (M-C-M’). It is private capital that controls investment, the profitability of which will determine whether capital grows …. It is true that economists have created all manner of statistical tools to track something called ‘growth,’ but this does not mean we live in a society where the owners of the means of production collectively devise strategies to grow the economy. … Thus, growth ideology creates the myth of a unified aggregate societal ‘system’ of capitalist growth.

Huber argues that degrowth misses the mark: by going after fictional aggregate societal growth, the degrowth movement ‘lets off the hook’ the capitalist class who controls and profits from growth for capital. It is true that the degrowth movement has historically comprised a wide variety of views, some of which have failed to centre the critique of capitalism—by one-sidedly critiquing consumerist culture or insufficiently appreciating the power dynamics of class, for example. As Matthias Schmelzer, Andrea Vetter, and Aaron Vansintjan recognize in their recent compendium, The Future is Degrowth, the movement must be ‘explicitly critical of capitalism’ and take on ‘systems of domination such as patriarchy, colonialism, imperialism, racism, and capitalism as the central, structural problems facing us today’ [emphasis mine]. While the degrowth movement is becoming more actively aligned with socialism of late, it has always been implicitly critical of capitalism through its critique of aggregate societal growth. Contrary to Huber’s statement above, capitalism does require such growth, and to see why requires investigation of the capitalist mode of production.

Several times throughout the book, Huber cites the formula M-C-M’, which abbreviates the ‘circuit of capital’, a representation of the capitalist mode of production. Some amount of money M (including what is distributed as wages) is invested in the production of commodity C, which upon consumption returns as a greater amount of money M’ (the difference being profit). If there were no consumption of C, there would be no return of M’. Now, the growth of any specific firm does not require aggregate societal growth. Huber is correct as far as this goes. One company may simply absorb the business of its competitors while the size of the economy remains the same. However, capitalist economy rests on a basis of growth for capital in general and therefore does require aggregate societal growth (when inferring from what applies to individual parts that it also applies to the whole, Huber’s reasoning falls into the ‘fallacy of composition’). Overall, capital cannot grow unless consumption keeps up with production to complete the circuit. If the aggregate value within society were not growing, then it could not be continually appropriated as growth for capital. If the capitalist mode of production conditionally requires growth for capital, it consequently requires aggregate societal growth.

There is no need for the process of aggregate growth to be collectively controlled by the capitalist class. It follows ‘on its own’ from the mechanisms of capitalist economy, for example, the system of compound interest on loans, which requires exponential growth for its debts to be reliably paid. Additionally, capitalism is structured against an equitable distribution of value. As Thomas Piketty statistically shows in Capital in the 21st Century, the rate of return on investment (growth for capital) is systematically greater than aggregate growth; that is, capitalists’ share of wealth tends to crowd out the workers’ share. Despite this, the promise of growth equalizes the tension between classes. Because workers’ livelihoods intimately depend on their incomes from capitalists, this promise is received simultaneously as an opportunity and as a threat. On the one hand, growth promises to improve workers’ lives with cheap, commercial goods or high wages (although, either of these are bought at the expense of intensified labor exploitation and material extraction in ‘periphery’ markets, such as those in the Global South). On the other hand, growth promises to destabilize workers’ lives when the circuit of capital is disrupted. The classical Marxian analysis of capitalism demonstrates the economy’s periodic tendency for consumption to be unable to keep up with production and therefore for the economy to collapse into recession, but the threat can also be wielded more locally and intentionally to quell working-class resistance and manufacture consent to the expansion of capital.

Because material well-being structurally hinges on the promise of growth, it is in many workers’ immediate interest to maintain the capitalist mode of production—especially, but not exclusively, those in the Global North. For this reason, the capitalist mode of production cannot be reduced to the power capitalists have to organize production. Whereas private ownership of the means of production is an historic premise and material condition of capitalism (making it necessary to overcome on the road to socialism), the essence of the capitalist mode of production is the capitalist form of value. In spite of his reference to M-C-M’, Huber’s exclusive focus on capitalists’ direction over the literal production of commodities ultimately fails to interrogate the circuit through which their value as capital is realized. This analysis of the mode of production is one-sided and elides the problematic of growth.

To take this investigation further, we need to ask what, in general, is meant by ‘mode of production’. In The German Ideology, Karl Marx equates a society’s mode of production [Produktionweise] with its way of life [Lebensweise]: ‘As individuals express their life, so they are. What they are, therefore, coincides with their production, both with what they produce and how they produce.’ While this definition reinforces the idea that isolated critiques of consumption are wrong-headed, it is because such critiques are one-sided. If the way of life is the mode of production, then there is never a society in which consumption can be considered in isolation from production. Conversely, as we have seen, a critique of the mode of production isolated from consumption is one-sided as well. Neither side can be made sense of without the other.

A concrete example of this is located in the way that electricity is currently produced and consumed. As remarked upon in the first section, electricity is primarily generated through fossil fuels. Fossil fuels are considered high-energy ‘stocks’, meaning that they store large amounts of energy that can be released on demand, which allows electricity production to be continuous and intense. We are not a passive recipient of this fact: we actively construct the world around continuous, intense electricity production. It becomes normalized, feeding into the further development of an energy grid designed around high-energy stocks. This is why we would have to massively expand lithium mining for batteries if we were to convert the current energy grid to renewables. The ‘flow’ of energy—the rate at which energy can be produced—from wind turbines, solar panels, and so on is insufficient to power the grid. Renewable sources of energy are also intermittent: the wind does not always blow, and the sun does not always shine. Batteries would be necessary to convert these low-energy, intermittent flows into high-energy stocks. However, this uncritically assumes that we require continuous and intense energy production. Marx describes in the Grundrisse how production and consumption ‘create’ each other by ‘completing’ each other. Intermittency may be a problem for our current way of life, but that way of life is itself the source of the problem. Then, in Capital, Marx refers to the mode of ‘social reproduction’ to articulate how the immanent relationship between production and consumption perpetuates, or reproduces, the way of life. A critique of fossil capital that does not encompass the mode of consumption, including how we have used fossil fuels to design a world that is ‘always on’, is not a critique of the mode of production either.

This imbrication of production and social reproduction implies that economies are characterized by the production of not only things but forms of subjectivity as well. In Between Capitalism and Community, a study of the obstacles to transitioning out of capitalism, Michael Lebowitz provocatively calls the subjectivity of capitalism its ‘second product’, and he warns, ‘never forget the second product’. A well-known example of the second product is the subjectivity of the worker, who within the capitalist division of labor is another cost of production. Workers are therefore continually cheapened, guided by the production process rather than exercising agency over it, which ‘rationally’ results in disinterest and low thresholds of capacity. The subjectivity of the consumer is also affected. In the marketplace, consumers do not simply purchase goods but exchange ‘bourgeois right’ to them—the abstract right to what is yours and no one else’s (what we casually refer to as ‘private property’). This is conditioned by the competition that structures not only capitalists’ relations to profit but everyone’s relation to physical survival itself. Because markets exclusively supply access to everything, including the means of subsistence, capitalism naturalizes the ideal of bourgeois right to whatever it is one may want or need, regardless of why one may need or want it. Again, this is the ‘rational’ result.

Marx makes a note of this in Critique of the Gotha Programme: ‘What we have to deal with here is a communist society, not as it has developed on its own foundations, but, on the contrary, just as it emerges from capitalist society; which is thus in every respect, economically, morally, and intellectually, still stamped with the birthmarks of the old society from whose womb it emerges.’ Although Marx references ‘morals’ in this passage, he does not mean to moralize—to patronize individual conscience. Rather, he acknowledges that the subjectivities of capitalism do not automatically dissolve within new material conditions but must be transformed by the possibilities they engender. Paulo Freire expands on a related point in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, saying that

almost always, during the initial stage of the struggle, the oppressed, instead of striving for liberation, tend themselves to become oppressors, or ‘sub-oppressors’. The very structure of their thought has been conditioned by the contradictions of the concrete, existential situation by which they were shaped. … At this level, their perception of themselves as opposites of the oppressor does not yet signify engagement in a struggle to overcome the contradiction; the one pole aspires not to liberation, but to identification with its opposite pole.

In the struggle of the working class to be liberated from the marketplace, there is no guarantee that it will desire a progressively different way of life than capitalism has offered. For example, without a critique of the ‘American Dream’ built into such liberation, residential developments structured around low-density housing, transportation networks structured around individual automobiles, and production structured around private wealth in general may expand under the proliferation of bourgeois right. Such a proliferation gave birth to the ‘middle class’ in the United States and Europe after World War II, but further expansion of the middle class remains the goal even of popular social-democratic leaders worldwide, such as Bernie Sanders. Once again, this is not a moralistic failure but speaks to the need for an explicit critique of the mode of social reproduction—a need that has been emphasized primarily by feminist and anti-colonialist critics of capitalism (whose voices are absent from Huber’s text). Without such a critique, ‘liberation’ may not in fact be revolutionary: even if it did not intensify imperial relations with the Global South, it would continue to drive ecological collapse, regardless of the success of decarbonization.

Even if this is not the future that Huber envisions, there is nothing in particular about his strategy that resists it. He admits in his conclusion that ‘shifting to public ownership [of utilities] does not guaranteedecarbonization. … All public power does is to grant us a democratic opening for creating a comprehensive public sector–led transformation of the electricity sector.’ For the same reason, it does not guarantee subordination of capitalist growth to post-capitalist society. Of course, whereas there is never the guarantee that the future we are striving after will come to be, it would behoove us to understand better how to arrange for its possibility.

Class Struggle, Degrowth, and Political Education

I am faithfully sympathetic to Huber’s ecological concern and opposition to capitalism, but I have argued that his position is disoriented. On the one hand, the idea to electrify everything will not mitigate the ecological crisis. On the other hand, the idea appears appropriate because the logic of Huber’s argument does not sufficiently grasp the mode of production, which is not totally determined by material conditions but is caught up in the mode of social reproduction. A class struggle that reflexively accepts the current mode of social reproduction is therefore by itself incapable of leading us into a greener, more equitable future. Of this final fact, though, Huber is relatively aware—to continue the previous quote: ‘All public power does is to grant us a democratic opening for creating a comprehensive public sector–led transformation of the electricity sector in line with what climate science says is necessary. Actual movements need to do the rest’ [emphasis mine]. Ironically, this is where degrowth comes in: climate science says that infinite economic growth is unsustainable.

Class struggle that reflexively accepts the current mode of social reproduction is by itself incapable of leading us into a greener, more equitable future. This is where degrowth comes in.

Furthermore, when it explicates an eco-socialist future, the degrowth movement stands to ‘write history backwards from the future’ and answer the question with which Lebowitz concludes Between Capitalism and Community: ‘What must we do in the present for the future to become what it must?’

Historical paths are inherently unstable; given the sensitivity of outcomes to the interaction of parts and wholes, any slight deviation in the starting point (for example, the disintegration of feudalism) might lead to someplace other than capitalism. The point is critical. If you write history forward, how can you understand the next system? If capitalism disintegrates, what system emerges in its place? … If we write history forward, it is assumed that the contradictions of capitalism … are sufficient to yield the movement to community. But are they?

Lebowitz shares Marx’s concern in Critique of the Gotha Programme about the different ways in which the new society might emerge from the old. As I adumbrated, it would be possible for a fledgling socialist society to unintentionally build upon the ‘metabolic rift’—the contradiction between capital and nature—in the transition from capitalism, even after it formally abolished the capitalist class. The way to intentionally prevent this possibility is to target the subjectivity of capitalism.

I agree with Huber that the material interests of the working class are objective. Stefania Barca affirms this in ‘The Labor(s) of Degrowth’: ‘Logically speaking, working-class people … have a vested interest in the subversion of [capitalism].’ To be working-class is to be systemically exploited and therefore to have an interest in subverting capitalism. However, Barca does not take this interest to be immediate: it is possible even as a worker for one to be subjectively—that is, from one’s own point of view—interested in the maintenance of capitalism. As seen in the previous section, this interest is self-perpetuating: it is socially reproduced through the promise (both opportunity and threat) of growth. Even though it is objective, an interest in subversion must still be subjectively grasped through understanding oneself as systemically exploited. Beyond that, there is the question of what exactly the working-class interest in subversion entails. Does it simply entail liberation from the capitalist class, through a livelihood independent from income, or more generally the freedom to determine new ways of life? This question directly bears on who ultimately is working-class. Barca suggests that ‘a good starting point is enlarging the concept of class relations beyond the wage labor relation and toward a broader conception of work as a mediator of social metabolism’. In that case, the working class would comprise anyone without the freedom to direct social reproduction, from traditional ‘industrial’ workers to homemakers and ‘meta-industrial’ workers outside the labor market. Whatever the extent of the working class may be, its members must recognize each other as such in order to take collective action against capitalism. Along these lines, class struggle would be best conceived as the project of the working class not only to be liberated from the domination of the capitalist class, but to recognize itself as free to determine its material interests for itself.

In light of this, those of us who believe in the necessity of degrowth would do well to incorporate it into the larger body of socialist political education (Huber himself discusses the significance of political education but mainly in the context of union campaigns). Lebowitz, channeling Freire, designates political education as the primary function of the ‘revolutionary political instrument’. Following the discussion above, this requires that it break with the ‘banking concept’ of education according to which teacher–leaders ‘deposit’ knowledge into the minds of student–followers. Such pedagogy presupposes a passivity on the part of students and is therefore antithetical to ‘protagonizing’ them—activating their understanding of their fundamental role in transforming the world. Instead, revolutionary pedagogy would provide a ‘problem-posing’ education that generates knowledge through dialogue. Similarly, Marta Harnecker argues in ‘Ideas for the Struggle’ that ‘true popular pedagogues [are] capable of stimulating the knowledge that exists within the people … through the fusion of this knowledge with the most all-encompassing knowledge that the political organization can offer’. Barca connects this to degrowth when she states that

the degrowth movement must build a constructive dialogue with the alienated and exploited workers of the world. Here, in the messy reality of everyday re/productive work, complex contradictions arise that need to be addressed in fundamentally new ways. Different forms of metabolism clash with each other and produce environmental conflicts, which enter into communities’ and people’s lives, questioning identities, crushing certain life-forms, and turning them into cogs of the dominant social metabolism.

Another way the degrowth movement provides this education is through ‘the commons’, spaces that either implicitly resist or explicitly deny the logic of bourgeois right. In England before the rise of capitalism, the commons were primarily forests where villagers collected wood or pastures where they raised animals. In today’s commodified world, the commons are less common, but small-scale examples include communal gardens and libraries of things. Among other approaches, opening varieties of commons to people can be a part of what philosopher Barbara Muraca calls the ‘education of desire’. In the foreword to Degrowth in Movement(s), she writes: ‘In the alternative spaces of experience established through social experiments, one can learn to desire differently, better, and even more. Instead of repressing desire through a one-sided notion of voluntary simplicity, the point is rather to free oneself from the forces that limit the autonomy to demand more (in political terms).’ In such spaces, people may come to recognize the extent to which they feel alienated from their individual and communal capacities to direct their lives in broader society, discussing future commons and organizing with others around the subversion of capitalism for the sake of their own liberation. Further, these democratic forms of education would help not only to distance degrowth from, but to immunize it against, adjacent trajectories such as ‘eco-austerity’, the notion that Huber ostensibly takes issue with, which frames ecological transition around accepting lower levels of material comfort (‘voluntary simplicity’) without investigating the subjectivity of capitalism and its mode of social reproduction.

Huber’s belief that ‘we should appeal to a working-class interest in more—specifically, more access to the elements of a secure life’ is not a mistake. It should be the foundation of revolutionary pedagogy. The problem is that he rejects the rich vision of a democratic world that elaborates on this interest, in which not only could secure life be sustained, but the point of securing life—our own freedom—could be explored. The timeline of the ecological crisis requires that we transform the mode of production and the ‘second product’ at the same time by preparing ourselves for the world we want to create through our struggle against the world we have to inherit. Degrowth is a transitional program without which the metabolic rift will devour the Earth. Class struggle is a movement without which the emancipatory potential of degrowth will fail to be realized. We need both—and only a revolutionary pedagogy can unify them. Knowledge may not be power, but should the future ‘become what it must’, the process of buildingpower will have been one of building knowledge.

https://mronline.org/2022/08/18/class-s ... -degrowth/

The proper formulation is 'class struggle then (maybe) de-growth'. I cannot see 'de-growth' being accomplished without the victory of the proletariat. First we must see how resources squandered by capitalism might be applied to human immediate need. The waste is almost unfathomable, from production to marketing to consumption, the military to obscene private accumulation. No small undertaking but nothing else will work. The working class cannot be asked to 'cut back'(even if that's not what's being asked it's how it will be characterized) when they can barely make ends meet. And there is definitely a whiff of eco-fascism in the air, especially from the elite.

Revolution first, if we cannot control the economy how can we change it?

Image
In this May 2, 2018 photo, Pam Weeks, curator at the New England Quilt Museum, points to names on a quilt by artist Jennifer Eschedor, that is part of the exhibit: ‘Beyond the Border Wall, The Migrant Quilt Project,’ at the museum, in Lowell, Mass. Artists, quilt makers, and activists joined forces to create unique memorials to migrants from Mexico and Central America who died in the southern Arizona desert. They’ve sewn quilts from bits of clothing, keepsakes, and found objects collected in the migrants’ makeshift camps. | Steven Senne / AP

Climate change has long prompted migration, now it may drive anti-capitalist consciousness, too
By W. T. Whitney, Jr. (Posted Aug 20, 2022)

Originally published: Peoples World on August 11, 2022 (more by Peoples World) |

U.S. government programs for migrants who cross the country’s southern border are punitive and disjointed. Left-leaning political groupings may criticize, but they too have fallen short in conceptualizing lives of dignity for migrants in the United States. Nor do they adequately take into account adverse circumstances weighing on migrants’ lives in their home countries.

First among the forces pushing masses of people northward is the environmental crisis. The role of climate change in reducing soil productivity and food availability and in predisposing already beleaguered people to migrate is of great concern.

One assumption here is that capitalist systems of production and consumption have been central to causing the climate to change for the worse. Another is the need for a war on capitalism so as to stave off more climate change and cope with its fallout. That hasn’t happened in the industrialized northern countries.

Southern regions may be different. The excesses of capitalist globalization have hurt masses of people there; they were never afforded the relief northern peoples gained from welfare-state remedies. So in some cases, they may be more ready to take up the climate change fight.

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Unidentified migrants, who did not wish to give their names, from the state of Jalisco, Mexico, cross the waters of the Rio Grande, with the help of two ‘coyotes’ or smugglers, in an attempt to reach the U.S. border, in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, May 18, 2006. | German Garcia / AP

Northern climate change warriors who are anti-capitalist ought to be establishing linkages of support with their southern counterparts. One precedent for them is Spain. Anti-fascists in 1936 joined the International Brigades to defend the Spanish Republic. Now, in one way or another, northerners would be joining a faraway fight, this time against climate change. One locality is Guatemala.

Storytelling
Author Ilka Oliva Corado describes herself as an “indigenous, undocumented immigrant in the United States.” An English-language version of her story, which is situated in Guatemala and titled “The Plum,” appears here. Excepts follow:

Guillermina leaves the grocery bags on the table and hurriedly takes out a plum, washes it ,and takes a bite… She is grateful for the hands that cared for it from the time the seed of the tree was planted. Ever since she was a child, her peasant grandparents taught her to be thankful for the labor of those who work on the land.

She was from Parramos, Chimaltenango, in Guatemala. When she arrived in the United States, she was speaking only her mother tongue, Cakchiquel… She spent 20 years working as a domestic worker in New York… Guillermina left Guatemala with her brother Jacobo to help her parents raise her younger siblings… She was on the eve of her fifteenth birthday when she left her indigenous clothing behind and packed two pairs of pants and two T-shirts in her backpack…

(Oliva Corado writes that the traffickers sexually abused Guillermina and her brother as they traveled in Mexico, from Chiapas to Tijuana.) “She doesn’t know what happened to her memory. But she managed to block all recall of the journey after they arrived in Tapachula [in Chiapas].” (The author writes that Jacobo was similarly abused. He remembers, has nightmares, and sleeps fitfully at night.)

He works three jobs. Every Friday they collect their money so that Guillermina can send off the remittance. Neither of the two will allow their younger siblings to emigrate. At home… they work the land of their grandparents, but Miguel, the youngest, didn’t listen to them and emigrated with another group of friends. He wanted to leave to help his older siblings deal with the economic burden of the house. Now he’s been missing for three years.

Guillermina bites into the plum that takes her back to remembering the bean fields, shade from the avocado and orange trees, and furrows in the cornfields. It was there she saw her younger siblings beginning to walk while her parents were working.

Plum juice drips from the corner of her lips… But tasting the fruit that Miguel loved so much sets off the pain that for three years has been knotted in her throat and she begins to cry inconsolably.

It was in the supermarket that she received the call from Jacobo. There is news of Miguel. A forensic team did tests and they have confirmed his identity. A humanitarian rescue team searching months ago for a missing migrant woman found his bones in a dry river in Sonora. Her parents will be able to bury their young son in the town cemetery, finally.


Context

The family’s land may not have been producing enough food to satisfy nutritional needs, nor enough to sell and provide cash. International agencies concerned about food shortages use a scale that registers severity. It consists of phase 1–no significant problem; phase 2–stress; phase 3–crisis; phase 4–emergency; and phase 5–widespread acute malnutrition.

The 2022 Global Report on Food Crises, assembled by United Nations agencies, reported on trends in Guatemala, population 16.9 million. In November 2018, 2.12 million Guatemalans were classified as experiencing food “crisis.” The corresponding figures in August 2020 and in May 2021 were 3.24 million and 3.29, respectively. As of those dates, there were 4.67 million, 7.21 million, and 7.78 million people, respectively, who endured food stress. A recent report indicates that, as of September 2021, 4.6 million Guatemalans were facing food crisis (phase 3) or food emergency (phase 4).

The World Meteorological Organization, reporting in July on the impact of climate change in Latin America and the Caribbean, points out that,

Droughts, heat waves, periods of cold, more tropical storms, and floods have led to loss of life, serious damage to agricultural production and infrastructure, and displaced populations.

The authors of another detailed report on the region’s “Climate Change Emergency” state that,

The present bimodal pattern of precipitation in Central America may be distorted in the coming decades… Extreme phenomena like droughts, hurricanes, and the Niño Southern Oscillation will be recurring… and their intensity will increase with climate change .. These phenomena magnify social-economic vulnerability in the region.

A survey of the impact of changing climate in Guatemala claims that drought “mostly afflicts the semi-arid region of the country known as the “dry corridor,” and that “in the coming years, that area is expected to extend to higher elevations.” Recently, rain has been uncharacteristically scarce or absent during heat waves.

Rural families in Guatemala grow or produce food from their own land. Family members may also work seasonally on big farms to be able to purchase additional food, or they fish or hunt. High poverty rates underscore the vulnerability of their lives: 70% in Guillermina’s Chimaltenango department and nearly 80% among Guatemala’s indigenous population. Now, the impact on food supplies of droughts, storms, and floods—which are more severe because of climate change—adds to their plight.

Many Guatemalans and others in the Global South have to move. They go to big cities or they cross national borders to begin new lives, and/or earn money to support families at home. Plenty of other reasons to migrate do exist, such as land grabs, governmental chaos, and violence from criminals, gangs, paramilitaries, and soldiers.

But migration undertaken in response to climate change effects is highly significant, so much so that victims are everywhere, and in the millions. On that account, the prospect emerges of mass political mobilization and of growing awareness along the way of capitalism as enemy.

Capitalist-inspired intrusions already fill the landscape with mines and oil-extraction facilities, dams and flooded rivers, pollution, mega land-holdings and mono-culture farming operations. U.S. political interference, debt to owed foreign banks, privatizations, and cuts in social spending have provoked opposition movements. Growing appreciation of linkage between these manifestations of global capitalism and capitalism’s contribution to climate change may serve to stimulate anti-capitalist resistance movements that are ready to take on the environmental crisis.

This possible scenario in the Global South ought to resonate with anti-capitalist activists in the North. The great need is for international solidarity. Author, editor, and eco-socialist John Bellamy Foster offers perspective in his recently published article in Monthly Review, titled “Ecology and the Future of History.” Excerpts follow:

The agent of revolution is increasingly a class that is not to be conceived in its usual sense as a purely economic force but as an environmental (and cultural) force: an environmental proletariat… [and] Most of the major class struggles and revolutionary movements over the centuries of capitalist expansion have been animated in part by what could be called ecological imperatives—such as struggles over land, food and environmental conditions.

He adds:

In general, Third World liberation movements have been aimed at both the environment and economy and have been struggles in which peasants and Indigenous peoples have played central roles, together with nascent proletarian and petty bourgeois forces… [and] All material struggles are now environmental-class as well as economic-class struggles, with the separation between the two fading.

Finally,

The objective consequence of the changing social and ecological environment, the product of uncontrolled capitalist globalization and accumulation, arising from forces at the center of the system, is inevitably to create a more globally interconnected revolutionary struggle: a new eco-revolutionary wave emanating primarily from the Global South.

https://mronline.org/2022/08/20/climate ... sness-too/
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Re: The Long Ecological Revolution

Post by blindpig » Fri Aug 26, 2022 2:58 pm

WSJ Sells Lithium Neocolonialism as Climate Necessity
TEDDY OSTROW

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The Wall Street Journal (8/10/22) underexposes its photos of a lithium mine in Chile—the way corporate media traditionally indicate a socialist dystopia.
True to its name, the Wall Street Journal never fails to lay bare its corporate sympathies. In a recent feature headlined “The Place With the Most Lithium is Blowing the Electric-Car Revolution” (8/10/22), the Journal warps anti-neoliberal and Indigenous resistance to ecological destruction and resource plundering into pesky obstacles to green capitalist innovation.

The story is one of corporate tragedy: The so-called “Lithium Triangle,” a region that covers parts of Chile, Bolivia and Argentina, is flush with the white metal that is integral to electric vehicle (EV) and battery production. But EV companies don’t have the full access they want, as Indigenous groups and leftist governments resist these foreign multinationals from taking the spoils and harming the environment while they do it.

‘A major bottleneck’
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Thea Riofrancos (Logic, 12/7/19) critiques “‘green extractivism’: the subordination of human rights and ecosystems to endless extraction in the name of ‘solving’ climate change.”
Reporter Ryan Dube deserves credit for quoting one Indigenous leader and one environmentalist about their concerns with lithium production in the region. These South American Indigenous populations reside in what climate justice groups have termed sacrifice zones, or what Thea Riofrancos (Logic, 12/7/19) has called the “extractive frontiers of the energy transition.” Lithium production in places like Chile’s Salar de Atacama induce water shortages, threatening the environment’s biodiversity and the livelihoods of those surrounding the salt flats—and often in breach of Indigenous peoples’ right to prior consultation and consent.

But these quotations and brief descriptions are eclipsed by pro-production voices, and language describing their resistance as “setbacks,” or a “challenge” to the “battery makers [who] desperately need” the lithium. We are told that the resistance is “stifling” production. That production has “suffered” as leftist governments seek “greater control over the mineral and a bigger share of profits.”

The muted treatment of Indigenous and environmental groups’ concerns works to reduce the “Lithium Triangle” to just that—its lithium. Indeed, the article warns that the entire South American continent could become “a major bottleneck” for the EV industry.

According to the Journal, the collection of countries that compose this “Saudi Arabia of lithium” are not equipped to reap their own land’s valuable resources. The article quotes Benjamin Gedan, acting director of the Latin American program at the US government-funded Wilson Center think tank (who FAIR—4/30/19—noted in 2019 expressed support for regime change in Venezuela):

Latin America specializes in killing golden geese, and one of the quickest ways to do so is through resource nationalism…. This boom could very quickly turn to bust if bad policies are brought forward.

This narrative is as patronizing as it is old. European colonists justified their genocidal conquest of the American continents by claiming Indigenous peoples weren’t properly using the lands they were living on. Today, EV companies and sympathetic analysts claim entitlement to South America’s lithium reserves because its emergent leftist governments won’t cede control of the resource to Western capital interests.
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Evo Morales (Jacobin, 10/7/20): “The coup was directed against us and for our natural resources, for lithium.”
The latest corporate worry is on Chile’s election last year of leftist President Gabriel Boric, who seeks to create a state lithium company to compete with private corporations. The country’s proposed rewrite of its dictatorship-era constitution (FAIR.org, 8/1/22) also has multinationals biting their nails, as it would expand Indigenous and environmental rights over mining.

Indeed, the Chilean popular uprisings in 2019 that prompted the country’s ongoing reforms were in part driven by the inequality and harm caused by the nation’s two private lithium producers—one of which has been run by the billionaire son-in-law of the former dictator Augusto Pinochet (Bloomberg, 6/23/22).

But Gedan and the Journal crown Bolivia, the country with the largest proportion of Indigenous people in South America, as the “ultimate cautionary tale” for resource nationalism. The article notes Bolivia’s lackluster lithium production since its former president Evo Morales nationalized the industry in 2008, with hopes to eventually make the country a battery and EV manufacturer itself.

Missing from the history lesson were the barriers Morales’ socialist government faced as a Global South country subjected to economic underdevelopment as a commodity exporter for richer nations. Most recently, that included the right-wing, US-backed coup of Morales’ government in 2019 (FAIR.org, 11/15/19), which—though contested—some believe was driven by multinational corporations who opposed his administration’s lithium production policies (Jacobin, 10/7/20). In any case, the coup illustrated the ruthlessness with which the US rejects Latin American governments that dare question Western control over their political and economic systems.

The Journal’s Dube also seemed to forget that the Morales government’s nationalization of hydrocarbons played a key role in the country cutting poverty by 42% and extreme poverty by 60% (CEPR, 10/17/19), among other internationally praised achievements. Indeed, Morales’ plans for an EV and battery industry in the country was a means to break its dependency on its highly successful state hydrocarbon sector.

Revolution for whom?

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Open Veins of Latin America, by Eduardo Galeano

Most curiously missing, however, is critical discussion of the so-called “electric-vehicle revolution” the headline warns South America is “blowing.” A revolution for what? Electric vehicles for whom?

The piece fails to describe the alleged importance of EVs in mitigating the climate crisis. The word “climate” isn’t even used once. While lithium mining will be critical to putting the brakes on the climate catastrophe, it is debatable whether a revolution of individual electric cars will be our savior—rather than, say, a more equitable and much less resource-consumptive expansion of public transportation (Jacobin, 6/10/22).

But perhaps the absence of climate context is truer to the motives of EV companies’ race for Latin America’s golden geese, wrecking environments and lives in the process: corporate profits.

Emergent leftist governments in South America are resisting Western corporations’ meddling because they know that the communities most directly impacted by lithium mining won’t be the ones driving the Teslas at the end of the supply chain. The “revolution” was never for Latin America.

Western multinationals and their boosters at the Journal may long for a return to the “open veins of Latin America,” as Uruguayan author Eduardo Galeano described the region’s outflowing plunder by colonial and neocolonial powers. They may view violating Indigenous rights and destroying ecosystems as the costs of doing business.

But the Indigenous groups and anti-neoliberal movements fighting to keep those veins closed—or open on their own terms—are not the obstacles. The Wall Street Journal shouldn’t frame them as such.

https://fair.org/home/wsj-sells-lithium ... necessity/

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Will the Manchin Climate Bill reduce climate pollution?
Originally published: Food & Water Watch on August 10, 2022 by Jim Walsh and Peter Hart (more by Food & Water Watch) | (Posted Aug 25, 2022)

The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) takes aim at a lot of things over the next decade–everything from prescription drug prices to corporate tax rates. For climate advocates, the headlining claim is this: the IRA would reduce greenhouse gas emissions by about 42%.

But that target isn’t actually in the bill. In fact, there are no emissions targets in the bill at all. Instead, this legislation relies on carrots (money to nudge private markets in the right direction) over sticks (actual mandates to reduce pollution).

So where does that 42% number come from? And is that reduction actually likely?

Several models claim to predict the IRA’s outcomes, but the one getting the most attention is from Princeton University’s REPEAT Project. Its model estimates that, without any new legislation, emissions will fall about 27% from 2005 highs. With the IRA, according to the model, emissions could fall about 42%.

But the model relies on some suspect reductions. For example, that 42% would need an astonishing turnaround for so-called carbon capture technologies. And it forecasts a massive increase in the deployment of clean energy–as well as tax credits for purchasing electric vehicles with requirements that no maker can meet yet.

The Analysis Makes A Bad Bet On Carbon Capture
The REPEAT analysis acknowledges that carbon capture is currently responsible for almost no emissions reductions. However, it projects that emissions reductions from carbon capture will reach 50 megatons of carbon by 2024–mostly from coal plants–and 200 million tons per year by 2030.

There’s no explanation for this miraculous growth, but the analysis nonetheless suggests there will be “6 gigawatts of carbon capture retrofits at existing coal-fired power plants and 18 gigawatts of gas power plants with carbon capture installed by 2030.” These assumptions would require $17 billion in carbon capture tax credits in 2030 alone. That is far more than the $3.2 billion total 2022-2031 expenditure the Congressional Budget Office estimates.

Overall, the analysis assumes that carbon capture would deliver “roughly one-sixth to one-fifth” of total emissions cuts. This is an unfathomable improvement for an industry that has failed to deliver emissions reductions after decades of research and billions in funding.

The analysis also leaves its assumptions unclear on the actual emissions reductions of carbon capture technology. While the industry claims it can capture 90% of emissions, real-world analyses of full lifecycle emissions put that figure closer to 39%, at best. And captured CO2 is almost entirely used for more oil drilling, eliminating any supposed climate benefits.

Counting On Cars That Might Not Exist
The analysis also pins emissions reductions on changes to existing tax credits for electric vehicles. But there are serious questions about this policy. Several reports have already noted that there are currently no EVs that will meet the IRA’s requirements. The bill mandates that tax credits can only go to EVs with battery and mineral components sourced from the U.S. or favored trading partners.

The supply chains to make these cars don’t even exist yet, but the model assumes they will. It seems logical to think a more generous tax credit would increase EV purchases. However, real-world limitations could significantly limit projected emissions reductions.

The Model Misses Fossil Fuels And Frontline Communities
The REPEAT analysis also assumes continued growth in fossil fuels; gas-fired power and coal stay strong in the energy mix. This is particularly concerning for communities near fossil fuel infrastructure. They’ll see more pollution from facilities receiving subsidies under the IRA. This is more than just wasting money on dirty infrastructure–it could increase pollution under the guise of climate action.

The fossil fuel industry is also pushing for a massive expansion of fossil fuel exports, which the REPEAT modeling acknowledges. Yet, it doesn’t account for those greenhouse gas emissions in its 42% claims.

The model also doesn’t account for the “side deal” that secured the support of West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin, which calls for fast-tracking major new energy projects. Right now, we can’t calculate how that agreement might work, but it explicitly aims to build new sources of pollution more quickly.

All of this–as well as the IRA’s unconscionable provisions on new drilling on public lands—will take a serious toll on communities near polluting facilities, and will lock us into continued climate emissions.

It Doesn’t Capture Leaking Methane
The IRA’s only provision that directly addresses oil and gas industry emissions is a fee on methane leaks. Under the bill, the fee would rise to $1,500 per ton in 2026. But negotiations with Senator Manchin substantially weakened this provision. Now, it won’t apply to the majority of the industry.

While that is not part of the REPEAT analysis, we note that they rely on a 100-year timeframe to calculate the CO2 equivalence of methane (instead of 20 years). This is misleading because so much of methane’s climate impact comes in the near-term.

Moreover, the analysis uses outdated assumptions from the EPA that significantly underestimate methane leakage and the impacts of gas on warming in general.

There’s A Difference Between Models And Reality
There are also fundamental questions about the type of forecasting used in the REPEAT analysis. How well do these models predict the future? What assumptions do they make?

On that count, the report includes caveats that readers might miss. “Optimization modeling used in this work assumes rational economic behavior from all actors,” the authors write. They add that “these results indicate what decisions make good economic sense for consumers and businesses to make… whether or not actors make such decisions in the real world depends on many factors we are unable to model.”

Energy industry actors don’t make rational decisions based on costs, consumer benefits or the public good. For instance, clean renewable power is cheap and abundant, yet utilities embrace fossil fuels. That’s in part because they profit from existing infrastructure that poisons communities and the climate.

Additionally, the REPEAT modeling doesn’t calculate increases in water and air pollution that will come from carbon capture, hydrogen and other fossil fuel infrastructure likely under the IRA. Increases in harmful emissions other than carbon dioxide and methane will inevitably result from more fracking, pipelines and fossil fuel power plants, too. The burden will fall on disadvantaged communities. Models don’t show these impacts, but they’re real nonetheless.

https://mronline.org/2022/08/25/will-th ... pollution/

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Blaming China and other developing countries for climate change ‘is simply racist’
Originally published: China Environment News on August 22, 2022 by China Environment News (more by China Environment News) (Posted Aug 25, 2022)

In response to our article posted on another Facebook environmental site commenting on how China leads the world in green energy, a US reader from New York in the USA commented:

It may, but China is still the biggest CO2 emitter by far.

This sort of snide response needs to be called out for what its is–Western supremacist bigotry.

China Environment Net responded to the author as follows:

So you are saying there are too many Chinese, as that is the ONLY reason for such a “loaded” comment? Given that each Chinese citizen produces ONLY ONE THIRD of the CO2 produced by each US American, Canadian and Australian separately, and the EU countries are not too far behind, the logical thing to do is immediately cut rich Western countries CO2 output first (and probably the West’s standard of living), and in the next year or two! Any other approach is inequitable, irrational and, well simply racist.

[This is especially so] Given that 70% of the CO2 currently in the atmosphere and oceans was sourced from the West. Privileged Western “environmentalists” seem to want the global south/developing world to remain poor while the 15% of the global population in the West continue their extravagant life style uninterrupted???
The party is over, especially for the USA. Time to come to grips with facts-the attached from The Lancet is helpful to see past the anti-China hate rants spewing out of Washington.

The Lancet article explains a method for quantifying national responsibility for damages related to climate change by looking at national contributions to cumulative CO2 emissions in excess of the planetary boundary of 350 ppm atmospheric CO2 concentration.

This approach is based in the principle of equal per capita access to atmospheric commons and calculates national fair shares of a safe global carbon budget consistent with the planetary boundary of 350 ppm (as per IPCC recommendations).

These fair shares are then subtracted from countries’ actual historical emissions (i.e. territorial emissions from 1850 to 1969, and consumption-based emissions from 1970 to 2015) to determine the extent to which each country has overshot or undershot its fair share. Through this approach, each country’s share of responsibility for global emissions in excess of the planetary boundary can be calculated.

A summary of the study’s findings show:

# the USA was responsible for 40% of excess global CO2 emissions;

# the European Union+UK (EU-28) was responsible for 29% of excess global CO2 emissions

# the industrialised countries (i.e. those classified by the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change as Annex I nations were responsible for 90% of excess emissions global CO2 emissions;

# the Global North ( i.e. USA, Canada, Europe, Israel, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan) was responsible for 92% of excess emissions global CO2 emissions;

# by contrast, most countries in the Global South (Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia) were within their boundary fair shares, including India and China.


https://mronline.org/2022/08/25/blaming ... ly-racist/

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Imperialism is the arsonist: Marxism’s contribution to ecological literatures and struggles
Originally published: Abstrakt on 2021 by Derek Walls (more by Abstrakt) | (Posted Aug 23, 2022)

Marxism’s contributions to ecological literature and struggles is a rich and contradictory field of discussion. Marxism in diverse ways has fed into environmental struggles and broader ecological politics. Broadly, I would argue that there has been a deepening appreciation of the ecological themes in the work of Marx and Engels in recent decades. Most significantly, and recently, there has been a shift towards debates around Eco-Leninism, with several different attempts to read the climate crisis through the insights of Lenin. However, specifically Green Party politics, in some states, has seen a movement of former Marxist-Leninists towards a revisionist understanding of politics, with revolutionary objectives being discarded. The way that Marxism’s contribution to ecological literatures and struggles has played out is also internationally diverse, my understanding is strongest when it comes to West European examples but the growth of militant environmental movements across the globe must be acknowledged.

One starting point is the example of the German Green Party. I heard an interesting story; I cannot comment as to whether it is true! An intern worked for a prominent elected German Green Party politician, I forget whether the politician sat in the Bundestag, the European Parliament or a Lander (regional parliament). The intern had been asked to go to the politician’s home while he was away on political business. Watering the plants, the intern was surprised to find a huge, in fact life size, poster of the Great Helmsman himself Chairman Mao, on the wall.

This anecdote has a serious side and illustrates a number of ways in which Marxism has informed ecological literatures and struggles. Most empirically and least significantly the German Greens can be seen as partly a product of anti-revisionist politics. It is also interesting to note how ecological movements and struggles have acted as a movement from Red to Green, a movement from Marxist-Leninist commitment to centre-ground revisionist reform politics. It also reminds us to examine in an open way a range of key Marxists, including Mao, Lenin, Marx, Engels, Trotsky, and Luxemburg in terms of their attitudes to nature.

Marx’s Ecology
A variety of academics and green political writers argued bluntly that Marxism had little to contribute to ecological struggles. Marx and Engels were defined as Prometheans concerned to use nature as an instrument to promote human progress. Communism was based in Marx’s work on rapid industrialisation with little thought for the consequences for the environment. Thus green or ecological political ideology provided a break from existing ideologies. Jonathon Porritt, a leading member of the British Ecology Party made such claims in Seeing Green in the early 1980s, arguing bluntly that communism and capitalism were two facets of a wider anti-ecological ideology,

dedicated to industrial growth, to the expansion of the means of production, to a materialist ethic as the best means of meeting people’s needs, and to unimpeded technological development. Both rely on increasing centralization and large-scale bureaucratic control and co-ordination. From a viewpoint of narrow scientific rationalism, both insist that the planet is there to be conquered, that big is self-evidently beautiful, and that what cannot be measured is of no importance. (Porritt, 1984: 44)

In turn the environmental record of socialist countries such the USSR was seen as both environmentally destructive and entirely consistent with such a Marxist anti-ecology based on the foundation of classic texts by Marx and Engels (Cole, 1993).

An alternative approach from the editors the academic journal Capitalism Nature Socialism (CNS) was to emphasise that Marx’s work is vital to ecological politics. This was based on an understanding that capitalism drives environmental destruction and thus green political economy inevitably demanded an articulation with anti-capitalism, if it was to provide a realistic chance of overcoming ecological problems. James O’ Connor developed this approach with his description of the ecological contradictions of capitalism, arguing that capitalism tended to degrade its possibility of existence by destroying nature. Without nature, capitalism could not survive, but the continued drive for accumulation, exploitation and profit tended to destroy nature (O’Connor, 1988). In turn, Joel Kovel, also associated with CNS, argued that economic growth tended to degrade the environment and that economic growth is functional to capitalism. In his book title The Enemy of Nature, he found the answer in capitalism. Kovel noted the distinction between ‘use values’ and ‘exchange values’, discussed by Marx in the first chapter of the first volume of Capital, was essential to creating an ecologically sustainable society. Thus by making goods to last longer and providing communal products for use, human prosperity could grow without the waste of capitalism. However, like Porritt and other green critics of Marx, Kovel argued that while Marx provided a necessary analysis to capitalism, Marxism was resistant to ecological themes,

Forged at the moment of industrialization, its [i.e. socialism’s] transformative impulse tended to remain within the terms of the industrialized domination of nature. Thus it continued to manifest the technological optimism of the industrial world-view, and its associated logic of productivism — all of which feed into the mania for growth. The belief in unlimited technical progress has been beaten back in certain quarters by a host of disasters, from nuclear waste to resistant bacteria, but these setbacks barely touch the core of socialist optimism, that its historical mission is to perfect the industrial system and not overcome it. The productivist logic is grounded in a view of nature that regards the natural world […] from the standpoint of its utility as a force of production. It is at that point that socialism all-too-often shares with capitalism a reduction of nature to resources — and, consequently, a sluggishness in recognizing ourselves in nature and nature in ourselves. (Kovel, 2007: 229)

Such perspectives from Kovel and O’Connor might be linked politically to the birth of popularisation of the term ecosocialism. Existing socialism and communism were anti-ecological, key texts might advocate a disregard for nature, so while socialism and/or communism were essential to ecological struggles, they need a prefix ‘eco’ to be distinguished from existing anti-ecological left alternatives.

I would argue that we have seen a sharp break from such perspectives, since the publication of US sociologist John Bellamy Foster’s book Marx’s Ecology. Foster argues, convincingly to my mind, that ecology is core to Marx and Engels’ project (Foster, 2000). Indeed an examination of Marx and Engels’ texts suggests an overwhelming concern with environmental issues. In turn their philosophy based on relationships derived from Hegel and perhaps Spinoza, is akin to ecology defined as a science of relationships. For example, in Capital vol 3 Marx notes,

Even an entire society, a nation, or all simultaneously existing societies taken together, are not the owners of the earth. They are simply its possessors, its beneficiaries, and have to bequeath it in an improved state to succeeding generations as boni patres familias [good heads of the household]. (Marx, 1959 [1894]: 530)

Discussion of such seemingly contemporary themes of deforestation, pollution and food additives can be found in Capital.

Engels also focussed on ecological questions,

Let us not, however, flatter ourselves overmuch on account of our human conquest over nature. For each such conquest takes its revenge on us. Each of them, it is true, has in the first place the consequences on which we counted, but in the second and third places it has quite different, unforeseen effects which only too often cancel out the first. The people who, in Mesopotamia, Greece, Asia Minor, and elsewhere, destroyed the forests to obtain cultivable land, never dreamed that they were laying the basis for the present devastated condition of these countries, by removing along with the forests the collecting centres and reservoirs of moisture. […] Thus at every step we are reminded that we by no means rule over nature like a conqueror over a foreign people, like someone standing outside nature – but that we, with flesh, blood, and brain, belong to nature, and exist in its midst, and that all our mastery of it consists in the fact that we have the advantage over all other beings of being able to know and correctly apply its laws. (Engels, 1972)

Marx and Engels’ sustained meditations on the sciences including biology, brought them to consider environmental issues. The exploitation of labour was to them also allied to environmental threats to health and safety. Engels’s Condition of the English Working Classlooked at how a poor work place environment contributed to the degradation of workers.

John Bellamy Foster argues that ecological considerations were central to Marx’s construction of historical materialism. In turn, Marx’s notion of a metabolic rift between humanity and the rest of nature, has been used by Foster to conceptualise ecological crisis. Healing the rift is the answer to problems such as climate change, to the extent that humans master nature, we are mastering an element of ourselves rather than something alien. Thus while Marxists and other socialists might self-criticise their approach to ecological questions, the description of Marx and Engels as anti-environmental thinkers has been exposed as a myth. How, though, have Marxists engaged with green movements, and to what extent have Marx and Engels’ ecological assumptions informed practical struggles? Certainly since the 1970s Marxists have sometimes joined Green or Ecological political parties.

German Greens roots in Maoism
Specifically ecological political parties emerged in the 1970s. Broadly this was a result of the globalisation of environmental problems, reflected in scientific reports such as MIT’s Limits to Growth. The first Ecology Parties were found in the UK and New Zealand/ Aotearoa (Parkin, 1989). These to some extent were conservative institutions without a critique of capitalism or human exploitation. However, the emergence of broader and more radical social movements can be seen as leading a transformation from purely environmental parties to Green Parties. The anti-nuclear power and anti-nuclear weapons movements during the 1970s and 1980s helped create green political parties, the most significant being the German Green Party. The German Greens originated partly from the activism of anti-revisionists to seek a new source of intervention (Hülsberg, 1988: 51-53).

I am not sure if there was a distinct reason for anti-revisionists to get involved with the German Greens. It seems more that this was part of a general engagement of the German left. The story of the German Greens has been told many times: briefly, those on the left, involved in social movements, joined a platform to fight elections. Those who had been involved in the student movement, and some sympathetic to the Baader-Meinhof gang, joined environmentalists. At first the Greens were, in the words of an early leader figure Petra Kelly, ‘the anti-party party’ (Emerson, 2011: 55). Given the openness of the German electoral system, co-option was perhaps close to inevitable. Greens were elected on radical platforms but eventually joined coalition regional governments with the SPD, and the party over the decades has moved broadly to the centre right.

A number of prominent German Green politicians, for example, Ralf Fücks, a former mayor of Bremen; and Winfried Kretschmann, Minister-President Baden-Württemberg were originally active in Kommunistischer Bund West Deutschland. Perhaps the largest Maoist political party in what was at the time West Germany it took a decision to join the Greens en masse in 1982. Other anti-revisionists joined the Greens along with those closer to autonomist networks such as Joschka Fischer and Daniel Cohn-Bendit (Kühn, 2005).

The relationship of green parties and ecological movements to Marxism has demonstrated contradictory tendencies. One has been a move from a more conservative environmentalism to great radicalism and commitment. For example, the British Ecology Party was founded by members of the right wing Conservative Party, however while Marxism has never been strong in the organisation’s history, it has broadly moved to the left (Wall, 1994). Typically in one recent leadership contest hustings, all the candidates insisted that they opposed capitalism (Jarvis, 2021). On the other hand, in the words of the East German eco-Marxist Rudolf Bahro, there has been a shift From Red to Green (Bahro, 1984). The German Greens are perhaps the best known example, as briefly discussed, but there are many others. For example, the Green Left in Holland are now a standard European Green Party, like the Germans, in the political centre, but they were created originally out of the dissolution of four Dutch left wing political parties including the Communist Party (Voerman, 2006: 80). This trend isn’t of course restricted to Greens, one thinks of the movement of the Dutch Socialist Party from Marxism to fairly standard social democracy. And as we know from Lenin, most socialist parties of Europe at the start of the first world war including the SPD ditched communism and supported their contending nation states. Certainly the German members of anti-revisionist organisations who joined the Greens have generally moved dramatically from Mao and Hoxha to accommodation with the Christian Democrats.

At times these contradictory movements are reflected in the work of a single individual. André Gorz, the French ecological theorist, acted paradoxically to promote a movement from red to green, and conversely from environmentalism to anti-capitalist commitment. Best known for his book Farewell to the Working Class, the former Marxist argued that class conflict was largely redundant and new social movements, including environmentalists, represented a force for potential change (Gorz, 1987). Thus he can be seen as giving textual support to the movement from anti-revisionism into social movements, into Green Parties and within the Greens moving apparently ever to the political right. Conversely his text Ecology as Politics, identified the economic drive to accumulate as the key source of ecological risk. Prefiguring Joel Kovel’s arguments by two decades, he argued that capitalism is the cause of environmental destruction. ‘’This is the nature of consumption in affluent societies; it ensures the growth of capital without increasing either the general level of satisfaction or the number of genuinely useful goods (‘use values’) which people have at any given point in time.’ (Gorz, 1980: 23) Gorz thus, amongst other authors, helped promote an anti-capitalist critique amongst some greens, which pointed back to Marx’s broad analysis of capitalism in Capital vol one.

Green Trotskyism?
One approach has been to argue that while Marx was green, the failure of much 20th century socialism to promote environmentalism could be placed at the door of Stalin and Stalinism. This seems to my mind a superficial approach, blaming an individual rather than engaging in sustained analysis. Equally it is difficult to find an environmental core in the work of Trotsky, who might be seen as Stalin’s main critic. Trotsky typically argued that communism was a project of perhaps rather brutally and crudely mastering nature.

Through the machine, man in Socialist society will command nature in its entirety, with its grouse and its sturgeons. He will point out places for mountains and for passes. He will change the course of the rivers, and he will lay down rules for the oceans. The idealist simpletons may say that this will be a bore, but that is why they are simpletons. Of course this does not mean that the entire globe will be marked off into boxes, that the forests will be turned into parks and gardens. Most likely, thickets and forests and grouse and tigers will remain, but only where man commands them to remain. (Trotsky, 1941: 5)

Having said this Trotsky did argue that ‘man will do it so well that the tiger won’t even notice the machine, or feel the change, but will live as he lived in primeval times. The machine is not in opposition to the earth. In turn there have been some manifestations of environmentally aware Trotskyism. The present Fourth International, from Ernest Mandel’s line, is explicitly ecosocialist in nature. Its various national sections are highly engaged in ecological work. In Britain, Alan Thornett of Socialist Resistance, which is associated with this Fourth International, produced a detailed account of an ecosocialist approach to climate change (Thornett, 2019). Polemics from others in the Fourth International have explicitly criticised Trotsky for failing to address ecological issues, unlike Marx and Engels (Tanuro, 2015)

The existence of numerous Trotskyist internationals can be confusing, although of course this is a feature of other forms of Marxism. It is possible that the Mandelite Fourth International was influenced by Pabloite strands of thought. The Greek Trotskyist Michel Pablo split the Fourth International in the 1960s but his comrades re-joined in the 1990s (Coates, nd). During the 1970s they were strong advocates of what might be seen as an ecosocialist approach. Strongest perhaps in Australia, a leading Pabloite, the physicist Alan Roberts, published The Self-Managing Environment in 1979 (Roberts, 1979). Drawing on both Marx and Freud it criticised the kind of consumer capitalism theorised by Marcuse and other Western Marxists. Roberts’ argument was that a lack of democratic involvement including an absence of workers’ control, led to a frustrated demand for consumer goods. The less we participate and have the ability to shape our life experience, the more we compensate by consuming wasteful goods. The ecological crisis is seen as a product of capitalist growth, growth in consumer capitalism is environmentally destructive. A self-managed socialist society is thus an ecosocialist alternative. Roberts also produced a strong critique of neo-Malthusian environmentalists who blamed ecological problems on over population rather than capitalism. Other chapters in The Self-Managing Environmentcovered the so-called ‘tragedy of the commons’ arguing that rather than acting as a metaphor for environmental destruction as suggested by the right wing biologist Garrett Hardin, commons had been seized by force and enclosed.

Nick Origlass, a leading Pabloite, engaged in local government ecosocialism, creating his own independent Labour Party in Leichhardt Municipal Council in Sydney to win local power and challenge toxic waste dumping in his community (Greenland, 1988). Australia also saw the creation of the green ban movement, where trade unionists in the Building Workers Union refused to work on construction projects that damaged the environment (Koffman, 2021).

Another Trotskyist figure passionately involved with ecosocialist politics is the Peruvian revolutionary Hugo Blanco. While Blanco retains fraternal links with the Fourth International, his present politics is closer to that of the Mexican Zapatistas. He publishes the newspaper Lucha Indigena and is also an active support of the Rojava Revolution. Originally an agronomy student, he studied in Argentina, he led a peasant uprising in the early 1960s which successfully gained land reform. During his many decades of activism he has become increasingly engaged in ecological and indigenous struggles (Wall, 2018). As I write, he is in his 80s but remains a leading ecosocialist thinker and activist.

Green Cuba
While Socialist states have been criticised on their ecological policies during the 20th century, Cuba has proved a sharp exception. Since the early 1990s, Cuba has pursued policies to drastically reduced climate change emissions and to protect the environment in a variety of ways. The reason for Cuba’s overt and strong turn towards environmental protection is twofold. The collapse of the Soviet Union meant that Cuba was no longer supplied with cheap oil after 1990. This led to a severe crisis, in the context of a continuing US blockade, resulting in what has been termed the ‘Special Period’. Thus a sharp reduction in the consumption of oil was vital so as to ensure the survival of Cuban society (Plonska and Saramifar, 2019). In turn, and apparently irrespective of this necessity, Fidel Castro became deeply engaged in ecological concerns and debates. At the 1992 UN Rio conference on the international environment he made the case for green policies, noting:

An important biological species – humankind – is at risk of disappearing due to the rapid and progressive elimination of its natural habitat. We are becoming aware of this problem when it is almost too late to prevent it. It must be said that consumer societies are chiefly responsible for this appalling environmental destruction.

With only 20 percent of the world’s population, they consume two thirds of all metals and three fourths of the energy produced worldwide. They have poisoned the seas and the rivers. They have polluted the air. They have weakened and perforated the ozone layer. They have saturated the atmosphere with gases, altering climatic conditions with the catastrophic effects we are already beginning to suffer.” (Castro, 2016)


Cuba has been so successful at introducing environmentally friendly policies that it has regularly been cited as the world’s best example of sustainable development. Agriculture has been partially decarbonised, with a push to grow using organic farming. There has been significant investment in renewable energy including wind turbines. Buses have been promoted as a means of reducing dependence on oil to power cars. In 2019, Cuba topped the Sustainable development index promoting economic activity that was ecologically sustainable (Trinder, 2020).

Indeed the supposedly anti-ecological record of the Soviet Union and other socialist states has recently been challenged in a detailed comparative study (Engel-Di Mauro 2021). While Cuba’s environmental policies are increasingly well know, it is perhaps often forgotten that the Soviet Union in its earliest years was also lauded as an environmental model. Under Lenin, National parks were opened and animal conservation was promoted (Stahnke, 2021). In recent years the notion of eco Leninism has become noted by diverse writers. Andreas Malm the Swedish academic has argued that to overcome the climate crisis we need to return to Lenin. He has argued that the urgency of the climate crisis might mean embracing an approach similar to the war communism of the early years of the Soviet Union (Malm, 2020).

Marxism as a guide to ecological alternatives
So how do we draw this all together, moving from cataloguing various manifestations of ecological Marxism to constructing a political alternative? I have briefly sketched some articulations of Marxism and ecological movements/literatures but this is a vast field and I have left much out. There are four themes I would like, in conclusion, to at least note 1) The commons 2) Working class productivity 3) Anti-imperialism, and finally 4) the role of Leninism in promoting transition.

The commons, a notion of collective ownership, most extensively explored in recent years by the Nobel Prize winning political economist Elinor Ostrom is essential to tackling ecological problems (Ostrom 2019). It is also a recurring concept in the work of Marx and Engels. Capitalism is a driver of ecological destruction, the notion of collective ownership of resources in contrast creates the possibility of shared prosperity and sustainability. Marx’s observation that we are not the owners of the Earth and should leave it in a better state for future generations, noted above, is a useful starting point for a green political economy. The Marxist aspiration for a society based upon the ensemble, the collective and creative interaction of all of us, for example, promoted by the British musician and revolutionary Cornelius Cardew is pertinent (Norman, 2019).

Climate change and other severe environmental problems demand working class solutions. The productivity and creativity of workers is vital to ecological alternatives. The often forgotten history of working class environmental politics demands study. I noted above the example of the Australian Green Ban movement in halting environmentally damaging building projects. Workers produce and can produce alternative sustainable futures, the concept of workers’ plans for ecological production is important (Hampton, 2015).

Anti-imperialism is another important dimension. Thomas Sankara (2018) reminds us that imperialism is the arsonist that burns the forests .There are numerous movements that link anti-imperialism with ecological politics, stretching from indigenous social movements in Latin America to the Rojava Revolution. Another useful contribution from Andreas Malm is his insight into how fossil fuels were the historical product of colonial exploitation and capitalist accumulation (Malm, 2016). The Peruvian Marxist José Carlos Mariátegui argued that land was at the heart of struggles for autonomy in the face of colonial domination (1971). This is a theme taken up by Max Ajl who argues ‘Eco-socialists have to start from the basic demands of colonised peoples: namely national liberation. The Palestinian liberation struggle is one of the few, but not the only, remaining ‘classical’ national liberation struggles, which aims to break foreign settler control over the land.’ (Hancock, 2021).

In a wide ranging survey of ecology and Leninism, Lenin’s significance to ecological movement can be seen as ranging from an analysis of imperialism to an embrace of base building and dual power strategies (Woody, 2020). Lenin’s strategic analysis might be of value in theorising how to build political organisations that can overcome the ecological crisis (Wall, 2020). Leninism is, out of a number of important Marxist contributions to ecological debates, to my mind potentially the most important. Lenin’s contribution was to investigate how in a specific context we make revolution. There is a growing awareness that capitalism is the key driver of climate change and other ecological ills. Transforming society and transcending capitalism can be seen as essential to human survival, the critical investigation of how we do so can be advanced by an open reading of Lenin’s words and work. Lenin helped make history in a very different world to ours, so his insights cannot be crudely cut and pasted on to contemporary reality but re-reading his texts is vital. The French philosopher Alain Badiou notes that, ‘We must conceive of Marxism as the accumulated wisdom of popular revolutions, the reason they engender, and the fixation and precision of their target’ (Bostells, 2011: 280). We need precision in tackling an accelerating and many sided ecological crisis, Marxism, read with care and acted upon materially, will guide us.

Derek Wall teaches political economy at Goldsmiths, University of London, is a former international coordinator of the Green Party of England and Wales, and is active in the Marxist Centre.

Sources
Bahro, Rudolf (1984) From Red to Green: Interviews with New Left Review. London: Verso.

Bostells, Bruno (2011) Badiou and Politics. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press.

Castro, F. (2016) “Fight the ecological destruction threatening the planet!” Climate and Capitalism, accessed: October 9, 2021.

Coates, Andrew (nd) “The British Pabloites“, accessed: October 9, 2021.

Cole, Daniel H., (1993). “Marxism and the Failure of Environmental Protection in Eastern Europe and the U.S.S.R.” Indiana University Maurer School of Law

Emerson, Peter (2011) Defining Democracy Voting Procedures in Decision-Making, Elections and Governance. Berlin/Heidelberg: Springer Berlin Heidelberg

Engel-Di Mauro, Salvatore (2021) Socialist States and the Environment: Lessons for Eco–Socialist Futures. London: Pluto Press.

Engels, Frederick, (1972 [1883]) Dialectics of Nature. Moscow: Progress., accessed: October 9, 2021.

Foster, John Bellamy (2000) Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature. New York: Monthly Review Press.

Gorz, André (1980) Ecology as Politics. Boston: Southend Press.

________ (1987) Farewell to the Working Class: An Essay on Post-Industrial Socialism. London: Pluto.

Greenland, Hall. (1998). Red Hot: The Life & Times of Nick Origlass, 1908–1996, Wellington Lane Press.

Hampton, Paul (2015) Workers and Trade Unions for Climate Solidarity: Tackling Climate Change in a Neoliberal World. London: Routledge.

Hancock, Alfie (2021) “A People’s Green New Deal: An interview with Max Ajl” Ebb.,accessed: October 9, 2021.

Hülsberg, Werner (1988) The German Greens: A Social and Political Profile. London: Verso.

Jarvis, Chris (2021) “6 things we learnt from the first Green Party leadership hustings” Bright Green, accessed: October 9, 2021.

Koffman, Chloe (2021) “Remembering Australia’s Green Bans” Tribune, accessed: October 9, 2021.

Kovel, Joel (2007) The Enemy of Nature: The End of Capitalism or the End of the World?London and New York: Zed Press.

Kühn, Andreas (2005) Stalins Enkel, Maos Söhne: die Lebenswelt der K-Gruppen in der Bundesrepublik der 70er Jahre. Frankfurt: Campus Verlag.

Malm, Andreas (2016) Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming. London: Verso.

________ (2020) Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency: War Communism in the Twenty-First Century. London: Verso.

Mariátegui, José Carlos (1971 [1928]) Seven Interpretative Essays on Peruvian Reality. University of Texas Press., accessed: October 9, 2021.

Marx, Karl (1959 [1894]) Capital. The process of capitalist production as a whole. Volume III.New York: International Publishers.

Norman, Fiona (2019) “Who Killed Cornelius Cardew?” Ebb, accessed: October 9, 2021.

O’Connor, James (1988) Natural Causes: Essays in Ecological Marxism. New York: Guilford Press.

Ostrom, Elinor (2019) Governing the Common: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Actions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Parkin, Sara (1989) Green Parties: An International Guide. London: Heretic Books.

Plonska, Ola and Saramifar, Younes (2019) The Urban Gardens of Havana: Seeking Revolutionary Plants in Ideologized. London: Palgrave.

Porritt, Jonathan (1984) Seeing Green: The Politics of Ecology Explained. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

Roberts, Alan (1979) The Self-Managing Environment. London: Allison and Busby.

Sankara, Thomas (2018 [1985]) “Imperialism is the arsonist of our forests and savannas”, accessed: October 9, 2021.

Stahnke, Ben (2021) “Lenin, Ecology, and Revolutionary Russia”, accessed: October 9, 2021.

Tanuro, Daniel (2015) “Environment: The foundations of revolutionary eco-socialism” International Viewpoint, accessed: October 9, 2021.

Thornett, Alan (2019) Facing the Apocalypse: Arguments for Ecosocialism. London: Resistance Books.

Trinder, Matt (2020) “Cuba found to be most sustainably developed country” Green Left, accessed: October 9, 2021.

Trotsky, Leon (1941[1924]) “Trotsky on the Society of the Future” The Militant, 23 August 1941, accessed: October 9, 2021.

Voerman, Gerrit (2006) “Losing colours, turning green” Richardson, Dick and Rootes, Christopher (eds) The Green Challenge. London: Routledge.

Wall, Derek (1994) Weaving a Bower Against Endless Night. An Illustrated History of the Green Party. London: Green Party of England and Wales.

________ (2018) Hugo Blanco: A revolutionary for life. London: Merlin Press.

________ (2020) Climate Strike: The Practical Politics of the Climate Crisis. London: Merlin Press.

Woody, Gus (2020) “Revolutionary Reflections | Moving towards an ecological Leninism”. RS21, accessed: October 9, 2021.

https://mronline.org/2022/08/23/imperia ... struggles/

Fuck Trotsky. As the necessary change can only come through revolution that leaves the Trots with no say or play, they never saw a revolution the did like...

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For China heat waves are the ‘new normal’ under climate change
Originally published: Sixth Tone on July 20, 2022 by Liu Zhao (more by Sixth Tone) | (Posted Aug 23, 2022)

For more than a month, much of China has been blanketed by extreme heat. From June 16 to July 9, local governments issued 1,372 high-temperature “code reds,” indicating temperatures are expected to rise above 40 degrees Celsius within 24 hours. Nationally, 71 meteorological stations have reported record highs since the start of June, including many in regions not traditionally associated with high heat. In one blistering stretch, surface temperatures measured by a station in the central province of Henan reached 74.1 degrees Celsius.

The scientific consensus is that the earth is warming. Researchers estimate that global average temperatures have increased by approximately one degree Celsius since the advent of industrialization. Temperatures in China have risen even faster in recent decades. Since 1950, the annual average temperature in China has increased by 0.24 degrees Celsius every 10 years.

Although the damage done by heat waves is not as visible as other side effects of climate change like extreme precipitation or floods, rising temperatures are already causing tens of thousands of deaths in China every year.

Assistant Professor Liu Zhao

To better understand the scale of this challenge, my research team and I reviewed records related to summer heat waves across 31 cities from 1961 to 2020. They point to a simple truth: heat waves are getting longer, stronger, and hotter, with direct consequences for our health.


In the past 60 years, and especially since 2000, heat waves have not only increased in number, they are also being recorded outside the traditional summer months. For example, Guangzhou recorded just three heat wave events in the 1970s, compared to 34 in the 2000s. The time span during which heat waves were reported also widened, from the original late June-to-mid-September window to anytime from mid-May to the end of September. In Shanghai, which logged temperatures over 40 degrees Celsius for three consecutive days last week, the average number of heat wave days has increased from about 7 per year in the 1990s to around 20 per year from 2000 to 2020.

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Temperatures measured during heat waves are also climbing. For instance, before 2000, the traditional “furnace” city of Chongqing almost never experienced heat waves with average daily maximum temperatures in excess of 40 degrees Celsius. It has since done so four times, including during one heat wave that lasted more than 10 days.Yet many people in China continue to see high temperatures as more discomforting than deadly. That’s a mistake. A 2020 study published in The Lancet found that heat-related deaths in China had increased fourfold over the past 20 years, reaching 26,800 in 2019. High temperatures can cause heat stroke and hyperthermia, and significantly increase the risk of death from respiratory and circulatory diseases. Sudden short-term changes in temperature are also associated with increased hospitalization rates for cardiovascular disease, heart failure, and strokes.This year, deaths from hyperthermia have already been reported in Zhejiang, Shaanxi, and Sichuan provinces; many of those who died were workers on construction sites and in factories. One construction worker in the northwestern city of Xi’an reportedly worked nine hours in high temperatures before succumbing.The appearance of heat waves earlier in the year poses additional risks, as sudden temperature spikes in late spring and early summer, before people are prepared, can be deadly. Previous studies have shown that more heat wave-related deaths and disease hospitalizations are reported in early summer than in late summer.

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Even in the current best-case scenarios, such as achieving the two-degree warming limit set by the Paris Agreement, China could see heat-related mortality more than double. Small differences in temperatures could have momentous consequences. If we halt climate change at 1.5 degrees Celsius, we could prevent more than 27,900 heat-related deaths every year.Conversely, if we fail to reduce emissions as planned, global average temperatures will rise by around 4 degrees Celsius, and heat-related excess mortality is expected to increase from 1.9% in the 2010s to 2.4% in the 2030s, before reaching 5.5% in the 2090s. This poses a particular danger to countries with aging populations like China, as elderly people with pre-existing conditions are among the most vulnerable to high temperatures.Awareness of the risks associated with heat waves has risen in China in recent years, and both central and local governments have improved warning mechanisms, adjusted work rules, and handed out subsidies to those affected, but the country is far from prepared. At the local level, public cooling spaces should be opened in cities to help low-income people, and more attention needs to be paid to the needs of vulnerable groups like delivery drivers, construction workers, and the elderly.More fundamentally, the world needs to adopt stronger climate change mitigation and adaptation measures, such as reducing the use of fossil fuels and increasing urban green spaces. For many people, 2090 still seems far in the future, but as the heat waves currently engulfing China and Europe (and the USA) show, the choices we make now will decide, not just the fates of our children, but also our own.

https://mronline.org/2022/08/23/for-chi ... te-change/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: The Long Ecological Revolution

Post by blindpig » Sat Sep 03, 2022 2:14 pm

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A fast-flowing outlet glacier calves a ‘megaberg’ into Greenland’s Uummannaq Fjord. (Photo: Alun Hubbard)

What’s going on with the Greenland ice sheet? It’s losing ice faster than forecast and now irreversibly committed to at least 10 inches of sea level rise
Originally published: The Conversation on August 29, 2022 by Alun Hubbard (more by The Conversation) | (Posted Sep 03, 2022)

I’m standing at the edge of the Greenland ice sheet, mesmerized by a mind-blowing scene of natural destruction. A milewide section of glacier front has fractured and is collapsing into the ocean, calving an immense iceberg.

Seracs, giant columns of ice the height of three-story houses, are being tossed around like dice. And the previously submerged portion of this immense block of glacier ice just breached the ocean—a frothing maelstrom flinging ice cubes of several tons high into the air. The resulting tsunami inundates all in its path as it radiates from the glacier’s calving front.

Fortunately, I’m watching from a clifftop a couple of miles away. But even here, I can feel the seismic shocks through the ground.

Despite the spectacle, I’m keenly aware that this spells yet more unwelcome news for the world’s low-lying coastlines.

As a field glaciologist, I’ve worked on ice sheets for more than 30 years. In that time, I have witnessed some gobsmacking changes. The past few years in particular have been unnerving for the sheer rate and magnitude of change underway. My revered textbooks taught me that ice sheets respond over millennial time scales, but that’s not what we’re seeing today.

A study published Aug. 29, 2022, demonstrates—for the first time—that Greenland’s ice sheet is now so out of balance with prevailing Arctic climate that it no longer can sustain its current size. It is irreversibly committed to retreat by at least 59,000 square kilometers (22,780 square miles), an area considerably larger than Denmark, Greenland’s protectorate state.

Even if all the greenhouse gas emissions driving global warming ceased today, we find that Greenland’s ice loss under current temperatures will raise global sea level by at least 10.8 inches (27.4 centimeters). That’s more than current models forecast, and it’s a highly conservative estimate. If every year were like 2012, when Greenland experienced a heat wave, that irreversible commitment to sea level rise would triple. That’s an ominous portent given that these are climate conditions we have already seen, not a hypothetical future scenario.

Our study takes a completely new approach—it is based on observations and glaciological theory rather than sophisticated numerical models. The current generation of coupled climate and ice sheet models used to forecast future sea level rise fail to capture the emerging processes that we see amplifying Greenland’s ice loss.


How Greenland got to this point
The Greenland ice sheet is a massive, frozen reservoir that resembles an inverted pudding bowl. The ice is in constant flux, flowing from the interior—where it is over 1.9 miles (3 kilometers) thick, cold and snowy—to its edges, where the ice melts or calves bergs.

In all, the ice sheet locks up enough fresh water to raise global sea level by 24 feet (7.4 meters).

(video at link)

Greenland’s terrestrial ice has existed for about 2.6 million years and has expanded and contracted with two dozen or so “ice age” cycles lasting 70,000 or 100,000 years, punctuated by around 10,000-year warm interglacials. Each glacial is driven by shifts in Earth’s orbit that modulate how much solar radiation reaches the Earth’s surface. These variations are then reinforced by snow reflectivity, or albedo; atmospheric greenhouse gases; and ocean circulation that redistributes that heat around the planet.

We are currently enjoying an interglacial period—the Holocene. For the past 6,000 years Greenland, like the rest of the planet, has benefited from a mild and stable climate with an ice sheet in equilibrium—until recently. Since 1990, as the atmosphere and ocean have warmed under rapidly increasing greenhouse gas emissions, Greenland’s mass balance has gone into the red. Ice losses due to enhanced melt, rain, ice flow and calving now far exceed the net gain from snow accumulation.



What does the future hold?

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Meltwater lakes feed rivers that snake across the ice sheet—until they encounter a moulin. (Photo: Alun Hubbard)

The critical questions are, how fast is Greenland losing its ice, and what does it mean for future sea level rise?

Greenland’s ice loss has been contributing about 0.04 inches (1 millimeter) per year to global sea level rise over the past decade.

This net loss is split between surface melt and dynamic processes that accelerate outlet glacier flow and are greatly exacerbated by atmospheric and oceanic warming, respectively. Though complex in its manifestation, the concept is simple: Ice sheets don’t like warm weather or baths, and the heat is on.

What the future will bring is trickier to answer.

The models used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predict a sea level rise contribution from Greenland of around 4 inches (10 centimeters) by 2100, with a worst-case scenario of 6 inches (15 centimeters).

But that prediction is at odds with what field scientists are witnessing from the ice sheet itself.

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In August 2021, rain fell at the Greenland ice sheet summit for the first time on record. Weather stations across Greenland captured rapid ice melt. (Photo: European Space Agency)

According to our findings, Greenland will lose at least 3.3% of its ice, over 100 trillion metric tons. This loss is already committed—ice that must melt and calve icebergs to reestablish Greenland’s balance with prevailing climate.

We’re observing many emerging processes that the models don’t account for that increase the ice sheet’s vulnerability. For example:

*Increased rain is accelerating surface melt and ice flow.
*Large tracts of the ice surface are undergoing bio-albedo darkening, which accelerates surface melt, as well as the impact of snow melting and refreezing at the surface. These darker surfaces absorb more solar radiation, driving yet more melt.
*Warm, subtropical-originating ocean currents are intruding into Greenland’s fjords and rapidly eroding outlet glaciers, undercutting and destabilizing their calving fronts.
*Supraglacial lakes and river networks are draining into fractures and moulins, bringing with them vast quantities of latent heat. This “cryo-hydraulic warming” within and at the base of the ice sheet softens and thaws the bed, thereby accelerating interior ice flow down to the margins.

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Author Alun Hubbard’s science camp in the melt zone of the Greenland ice sheet. (Photo: Alun Hubbard)

The issue with models
Part of the problem is that the models used for forecasting are mathematical abstractions that include only processes that are fully understood, quantifiable and deemed important.

Models reduce reality to a set of equations that are solved repeatedly on banks of very fast computers. Anyone into cutting-edge engineering—including me—knows the intrinsic value of models for experimentation and testing of ideas. But they are no substitute for reality and observation. It is apparent that current model forecasts of global sea level rise underestimate its actual threat over the 21st century. Developers are making constant improvements, but it’s tricky, and there’s a dawning realization that the complex models used for long-term sea level forecasting are not fit for purpose.

There are also “unknown unknowns”—those processes and feedbacks that we don’t yet realize and that models can never anticipate. They can be understood only by direct observations and literally drilling into the ice.

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A large tabular iceberg that calved off Store Glacier within Uummannaq Fjord. (Photo: Alun Hubbard)

That’s why, rather than using models, we base our study on proven glaciological theory constrained by two decades of actual measurements from weather stations, satellites and ice geophysics.

It’s not too late
It’s an understatement that the societal stakes are high, and the risk is tragically real going forward. The consequences of catastrophic coastal flooding as sea level rises are still unimaginable to the majority of the billion or so people who live in low-lying coastal zones of the planet.

Personally, I remain hopeful that we can get on track. I don’t believe we’ve passed any doom-laden tipping point that irreversibly floods the planet’s coastlines. Of what I understand of the ice sheet and the insight our new study brings, it’s not too late to act.

But fossil fuels and emissions must be curtailed now, because time is short and the water rises—faster than forecast.

https://mronline.org/2022/09/03/whats-g ... ice-sheet/

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George Bahgoury (Egypt), Untitled, 2015.

Dear friends,

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

In November 2022, most member states of the United Nations (UN) will gather in the Egyptian resort city of Sharm El Sheikh for the annual UN Climate Change Conference. This is the 27th conference of the parties to assess the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, commonly referred to as COP 27. The international environmental treaty was established in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, with the first conference held in Berlin in 1995; the agreements were extended in the Kyoto Protocol of 2005 and supplemented by the Paris Agreement of 2015. No more needs to be said of the climate catastrophe, which threatens mass species extinction. The move away from carbon-based fuel has been stalled by three main impediments:

Right-wing forces which deny the existence of climate change.
Sections of the energy industry which have a vested interest in the continuation of carbon-based fuel.
Western countries’ refusal to admit that they remain principally responsible for the problem and to commit to repaying their climate debt by financing the energy transition in developing countries whose wealth they continue to siphon off.
In public debates over the climate catastrophe, there is barely any reference to the Rio Earth Summit of 1992 and the treaty that noted: ‘The global nature of climate change calls for the widest possible cooperation by all countries and their participation in an effective and appropriate international response, in accordance with their common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities and their social and economic conditions’. The phrase ‘common but differentiated responsibilities’ is an acknowledgement of the fact that while the problem of climate change is common to all countries and none are immune to its deleterious impact, the responsibility of countries is not identical. Some countries – which have benefited from colonialism and carbon fuel for centuries – have a greater responsibility for the transition to a decarbonised energy system.

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Roger Mortimer (Aotearoa/New Zealand), Whariwharangi, 2019.

The scholarship on the matter is clear: Western countries have benefited inordinately from both colonialism and carbon fuel to attain their level of development. The data from the Global Carbon Project, which was headed by the US Department of Energy’s now defunct Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Centre, shows that the United States has been far and away the largest producer of carbon dioxide emissions since 1750. By itself, the United States has emitted more CO2 than the entire European Union, twice as much as China, and eight times more than India. The main carbon emitters were all colonial powers, namely the US, Europe, Canada, and Australia, which, despite consisting of roughly one tenth of the global population, have together accounted for more than half of cumulative global emissions. From the 18th century on, these countries have not only dispensed the bulk of the carbon in the atmosphere, but they continue to exceed their share of the global carbon budget.

Carbon-fuelled capitalism, enriched by the wealth stolen through colonialism, has enabled the countries of Europe and North America to enhance the well-being of their populations and attain their relatively advanced level of development. The extreme inequalities between the standard of living for the average European (748 million people) and the average Indian (1.4 billion people) is seven times greater than it was a century ago. Though the reliance by China, India, and other developing countries on carbon, particularly coal, has risen to a high level, their per capita emissions continue to remain far below those of the United States, whose per capita emissions are close to twice that of China’s and eight times more than India’s. The lack of acknowledgment of climate imperialism leads to a failure to properly resource the Green Climate Fund, which was created in 2010 at COP 16 with the aim of helping developing countries ‘leapfrog’ carbon-fuelled social development.

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At the global level, debates on how to address the climate crisis frequently revolve around various forms of a Green New Deal (GND), such as the European Green Deal, the North American GND, and the Global GND, which are promoted by nation states, international organisations, and different sections of environmental movements. In order to better understand and strengthen this discussion, the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research office in Buenos Aires, Argentina, gathered leading eco-socialist scholars to reflect on the different GNDs and the possibilities to realise a genuine transformation to stave off the climate catastrophe. That discussion – with José Seoane (Argentina), Thea Riofrancos (United States), and Sabrina Fernandes (Brazil) – is now available in notebook no. 3 (August 2022), The Socioenvironmental Crisis in Times of the Pandemic: Discussing a Green New Deal.

These three scholars argue that capitalism cannot solve the climate crisis since capitalism is the principal cause of the crisis. One hundred of the world’s largest corporations are responsible for 71% of global industrial greenhouse gases (largely carbon dioxide and methane); these corporations, led by the carbon energy industry, are not prepared to accelerate the energy transition, despite the technological capacity to generate eighteen times the global electricity demand by wind power alone. Sustainability, a word that has been emptied of its content in much public discourse, is not profitable for these corporations. A social renewable energy project, for example, would not produce vast profits for the fossil fuel companies. Interest from certain capitalist firms in the GND is substantially motivated by their desire to secure public funds to engineer new private monopolies for the same capitalist class that owns those large corporations that pollute the world. But, as Riofrancos explains in the notebook, ‘“Green capitalism” purports to mitigate the symptoms of capitalism – global warming, the mass extinction of species, the destruction of ecosystems – without transforming the model of accumulation and consumption that caused the climate crisis in the first place. It is a “techno-fix”: the fantasy of changing everything without changing anything’.

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Gonzalo Ribero (Bolivia), Ancestor, 2016.

The mainstream discussion of GND emerges, as Seoane points out, from initiatives such as the 1989 Pearce report Blueprint for a Green Economy, which was prepared for the UK government and proposed the use of public funds to produce new technologies for private companies as a solution to the cascading crises in Western economies. The concept of the ‘green economy’ was not to green the economy, but to use the idea of environmentalism to revitalise capitalism. In 2009, during the world financial crisis, Edward Barbier, a co-author of the Pearce Report, wrote a new report for the UN Environment Programme titled Global Green New Deal, which repackaged the ‘green economy’ ideas as the ‘green new deal’. This new report once more argued for public funds to stabilise turbulence in the capitalist system.

Our notebook emerges from a different genealogy, one that is rooted in the World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth (2010) and the People’s World Conference on Climate Change and the Defence of Life (2015), both held in Tiquipaya, Bolivia and then developed in gatherings such as the Alternative World Water Forum (2018), the People’s Summit (2017), and the People’s Nature Forum (2020). At the heart of this approach, which grew out of the popular struggles in Latin America, are the concepts buen vivir and teko porã (‘living well’). Rather than simply saving capitalism, which is the concern of the GND argument, the point of our notebook is to think about changing the way we organise society, in other words, to advance our thinking about building a new system. Building these ideas, Fernandes says, must involve the trade unions (many of which are concerned about job loss in the transition from carbon to renewables) and peasant unions (many of which are gripped by the fact that land concentration destroys nature and creates social inequality).

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Klay Kassem (Egypt), The Mermaid Wedding, 2021.

We must change the system, as Fernandes argues, ‘but the political conditions today are not conducive to this. The right wing is strong in many countries, as is the denial of climate science’. Therefore, rapidly, the people’s movements must put a decarbonisation agenda on the table. Four goals lie before us:

Degrowth for Western countries. With less than 5% of the world’s population, the United States consumes a third of the world’s paper, a quarter of the world’s oil, nearly a quarter of the world’s coal, and a quarter of its aluminium. The Sierra Club says that US per capita consumption ‘of energy, metals, minerals, forest products, fish, grains, meat and even fresh water dwarfs that of people living in the developing world’. Western countries need to cut back on their overall consumption, scaling back, as Jason Hickel notes, the ‘unnecessary and destructive ones’ (such as the fossil fuel and arms industries, the production of McMansions and private jets, the manner of industrial beef production, and the entire business philosophy of planned obsolescence).
Socialise the key sector of energy generation. End subsidies to the fossil fuel industry and build a public energy sector that is rooted in a decarbonised energy system.
Fund the Global Climate Action Agenda. Ensure that Western countries fulfil their historic responsibilities in supporting the Green Climate Fund, which will be used to finance the just transition in the Global South in particular.
Enhance the public sector. Build more infrastructure for social rather than private consumption, such as more high-speed rail and electric buses, to decrease the use of private cars. Countries of the Global South will have to build their own economies, including by exploiting their resources. The issue here is not entirely whether to exploit these resources but whether they can be extracted for social and national development and not merely for the accumulation of capital. Buen vivir – living well – means to transcend hunger and poverty, illiteracy and ill-health, which will be developed by the public sector.
No climate policy can be universal. Those who devour the world’s resources must reduce their consumption. Two billion people have no access to clean water, while half the world’s population does not have access to adequate health care. Their social development must be guaranteed, but this development must be built on a sustainable, socialist foundation.

Warmly,

Vijay

https://thetricontinental.org/newslette ... -new-deal/

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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

Capitalism won’t fix the climate crisis. It will also not survive it
Originally published: Counter Punch on August 25, 2022 by John Kendall Hawkins (more by Counter Punch) | (Posted Sep 02, 2022)

CLIMATE WATCH—Bill McGuire is a volcanologist and Emeritus Professor of Geophysical & Climate Hazards at University College London.

His main interests include volcano instability and lateral collapse, the nature and impact of global geophysical events and the effect of climate change on geological hazards.

Over the years he’s written a few books on the coming catastrophes we face as a result of ignoring the root causes of the climate catastrophe we face. His latest book is Hothouse Earth (2022). It’s grim and grizzles.

Bill McGuire: . . . Global heating and climate breakdown are with us now, rather than a vague ten thousand years down the line. As we confront the greatest threat in human history, there is absolutely no room for whimsy, so the book’s subtitle—an ‘inhabitant’s guide’—signals that I am seeking, in all sincerity, to paint a picture—however grim—of what our future world is set to be like.

Hawkins: What’s causing the hothouse effect? In ‘For Dummies’ language.

McGuire: Around 2.4 trillion tons of carbon dioxide has been released into the atmosphere in the last couple of centuries. This is acting as a blanket, keeping in heat that would otherwise head off into space. This global heating has pushed up the average temperature of our world by around 1.2°C as a result, although in places the rise is as great as 5°C. We are already seeing global heating translating into the collapse of our once stable climate, with an explosion of extreme weather—drought, heatwaves, floods, storms—that is causing widespread destruction and loss of life. As the planet continues to heat up, this is only going to get worse.

Hawkins: Can it be mitigated?

McGuire: A global average temperature rise of 1.5°C is widely regarded as a guardrail that separates us and our world from dangerous climate change. To keep this side of the guardrail, the world’s greenhouse gas emissions need to fall 45 percent by 2030—just 90 months away. Although in theory, this is possible, in practice I am pretty certain that it isn’t. My conclusion is, then, that it is now practically impossible for us to dodge perilous, all-pervasive, climate breakdown that will affect everyone and insinuate itself into every aspect of our lives.

But this doesn’t mean that action is futile, it actually makes it more critical. Hothouse Earth is therefore a call to arms for us to act now to stop dangerous climate breakdown metamorphosing into a climate cataclysm. The near certainty of us shattering the 1.5°C guardrail also means that as well as doing everything we can to bring emissions down as fast as possible, we are also now going to have to work to adapt our infrastructure, lives and livelihoods to a world that is slated to be unrecognizable to the one our grandparents were born into.

Hawkins: In the foreword of Hothouse Earth you write:

“Some early post-COP26 modeling averred that, if pledges were all met and targets achieved, then we might be on track for ‘just’ a 1.9°C (3.4°F), or even 1.8°C (3.2°F), global average temperature rise. Firstly, however, this is a very big if indeed. Secondly, such predictions fly in the face of peer-reviewed research published pre-COP26, which argues that a rise of more than 2°C (3.6°F) is already ‘baked-in’ or, in plain language, certain.”

McGuire: There is some suggestion that, because of inertia in the climate system, the amount of carbon dioxide already emitted will ultimately translate to a global average temperature rise of 2°C or even a little more—a figure that is significantly above the 1.5°C threshold. Whether or not this proves to be the case, it raises the real possibility that our situation could well be even worse than we think.

Hawkins: In your chapter, ‘Ground Zero’ you talk about the wigmaker Arkwright’s Legacy. Can you tell us more about that and how it relates to today’s climate issues?

McGuire: It would be disingenuous of me to suggest that the English businessman and entrepreneur, Sir Richard Arkwright, was single-handedly responsible for the dire straits we find ourselves in today, but his role is clearly pivotal. The opening in 1771 of the water-powered Cromford Mill on the banks of the River Derwent, here in Derbyshire, saw the beginning of mass production, using cheap, semi-skilled, labor to manufacture yarn. With the onset of steam power a few years later, mass production exploded across Britain, bringing about the industrial revolution, and the beginning of the large-scale plundering of our world. The day Arkwright opened his mill, the carbon dioxide concentration of the atmosphere was 280ppm (parts per million). Today it is 419ppm and still climbing fast.

Hawkins: Perhaps the greatest political failure in global history is the lack of teeth at the UN, a body that should be ready to override intra-governmental emergency decisions for the world’s benefit. Climate Change, for instance. No more nukes No more wars (the UN’s original mandate). Would you agree with this assessment? And how do we change the calculus.

McGuire: The UN has played an admirable role in highlighting the huge threat that global heating and climate breakdown present, in particular through giving birth to the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) and launching the COP (Conference of Parties) climate conferences. The problem, as ever with the UN, is that it doesn’t have teeth. It can act only with the agreement of its members, nearly all of whom have their own agendas. Indeed some, including the United States, would prefer the organization did not exist at all, or if it did only so far as it rubber stamped what the U.S. wanted. The bottom line, however, is that the UN is all we have to push the climate breakdown agenda on the international stage, so we need to support it as much as we can and ensure that its work bears fruit.

Hawkins: Not too many lay people consider the sub-plots involved with Climate Change. Like what’s happening in Greenland. The one time it was brought up in recent years was by Trump in a self-farcical (if possible) reference to Denmark selling or putting up a Trump tower or something. But there’s more to Greenland, you say, than meets the greedy eye. Same for the Arctic meltdown. You’d think folks would be in grief mode, but instead they keenly observe how that melting will open up more oil fields—if we can fight off the Russians. You know?

McGuire: Yes, it is astonishing that some see climate breakdown as an opportunity, and fossil fuel corporations and some governments are poised to make the most of the melting of Arctic ice via exploring and exploiting any previously hidden oil, gas and mineral reserves that become accessible. This is predicated, however, on the fact that the world will operate tomorrow as it did yesterday. This is wrong.

In fact, by mid-century, it is not unlikely that global society and economy will be failing as climate breakdown bites ever harder. Rather than a new golden age of exploration, then, corporations of all shapes and sizes may well be struggling merely to survive, while national governments will have too many homegrown problems to look and act further afield.

Hawkins: You write:

“The problem is that Gaia is now sick and getting sicker. While taking ice ages and other natural climate shocks in its stride, widespread environmental damage and diversity loss has meant that Gaia is struggling to handle the vast quantities of carbon being pumped out by humankind’s activities at a rate unprecedented in Earth history. Lovelock himself is pessimistic that Gaia can get on top of the situation in the short term, and he has expressed the view that civilization will be hard-pressed to survive the ongoing breakdown of our climate.”

What might happen to us and the planet?

McGuire: A worst-case, or even end-game, scenario, envisages a cascade of feedback effects acting to drive irreversible, rapid heating, which could double the global average temperature of our world. Currently, this figure is around 15°C, so this would be hiked to 30°C. And this is the average. In places, temperatures could exceed 60°C, perhaps even 70°C. This would undoubtedly signal the end of civilization and have the potential—ultimately—to be an extinction level event for the human race, although it might be possible for small numbers to survive at the highest latitudes. I am still hopeful that this won’t happen, but it cannot be completely ruled out.

Hawkins: The late comic George Carlin addressed climate change with a “Fuck Us” attitude. Do you remember the rant?



He saw it through the eyes of Ecclesiastes: Earth abides, and the sun also rises.

What’s your scale of despair looking like?

McGuire: I have to say I am pretty gloomy. Despite unprecedented scenes on our screens this summer of wildfires obliterating entire streets in English villages, there are still those who refuse to accept that global heating is a thing. These people call themselves climate skeptics, but they are deniers pure and simple, and almost invariably of the libertarian hard right. Climate breakdown offends their worldview, as they see it as a threat to the free-market, capitalist, framework that they worship as a God. Indeed, it is a threat to capitalism, and capitalism will not tackle the climate emergency, not survive it. No system predicated on greed and short-term profit, rather than the greater good, will prevail against the storm that is coming, and—ultimately—the deniers will reap the whirlwind along with everyone else—which makes me marginally happier.

Hawkins: Tell us more about the Big Questions your book closes with.

McGuire: There is no bigger question than—how bad will things get? And, as I say in the book, the question could just as easily be, how long is a piece of string? The answer is nobody knows. Everything depends on what we do in the next 10 years or so. If we act now to make a serious dent in emissions—and the recent U.S. climate bill is one bit of good news in this respect—then we could limit the global average temperature rise to around 2°C. The world will still see huge changes and society and economy will struggle to adapt, particularly as temperatures would take many decades, if not centuries to return to ‘normal’. If we do nothing, or not enough, then we could be headed for a climate apocalypse, with global average temperatures up by anywhere north of 4°C, and the progressive tearing apart of human civilization as a result.

There are increasing calls—supported by tech billionaires and fossil fuel corporations—to ‘engineer’ our way out of the climate emergency, by one means or another—the current favorite is to block out the Sun by mimicking a volcanic eruption—but there is a long list of reasons why this is a very bad idea. Not least because it tackles a symptom, not the cause, of global heating, and detracts from efforts to slash emissions. Messing with an already messed-up climate, many would also say, is not a very good idea, especially when such a scheme would inevitably trample on the legal and human rights of a large part of a global society.

Frankly, there is really only one question that we need to pose, and that is—are we going to do everything possible to make our world as safe as it can be for our children and their children? And the answer, surely, has to be yes.

https://mronline.org/2022/09/02/capital ... te-crisis/

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Pakistan at Risk of Large-Scale Disease Outbreaks - WaterAid

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Of Pakistan's 154 districts, 116 have been affected, with more than 1 100 people killed by the floods and more than 33 million affected. Aug. 31, 2022. | Photo: Twitter/@africabnn

Pakistan faces a severe risk of diarrhea and dysentery outbreaks as people have no choice but to drink flood water due to heavy rains in recent weeks, WaterAid warned.

Families "have even been drinking flood water because there is no other option, a recipe for large-scale disease outbreaks. We are doing everything we can to reach them," WaterAid Pakistan Country Director Arif Jabbar Khan said.

Pakistani health officials are visiting some of the worst affected communities in Sindh (southern Pakistan). Malaria cases are rising in this region after weeks of rains and floods that have caused an increase in stagnant water.

WaterAid's Pakistan Country Director, Arif Jabbar Khan, said that "families are now living on the banks of overflowing canals and rivers in ramshackle huts made of bamboo and plastic," warning of the risk of large-scale disease outbreaks as people have no choice but to drink floodwater.

Devastating floods have hit Pakistan following heavy monsoon rains since early June. Of the country's 154 districts, 116 have been impacted, with over 1 100 people killed by the floods and over 33 million affected.


"Women's privacy and menstrual hygiene are also at risk; the temporary latrines are barely covered and do not provide the privacy women need to manage their periods. Women, already a taboo subject in the country, are now forced to use dirty clothes as sanitary pads as they have had to give it all up in a short time," the Pakistan Country Director further said.

https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/Pak ... -0024.html.

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Carbon reduction agreements
By Luo Jie | China Daily | Updated: 2022-09-02 08:34

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"Glory To Ukraine!:, the US fossil fuel bund..
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Re: The Long Ecological Revolution

Post by blindpig » Tue Sep 20, 2022 4:05 pm

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The Amazon fires have made headlines internationally, since this rainforest is one of the world’s most important natural preserves, producing 20% of the oxygen we breathe. Photo: NASA

It’s time to call it what it is: A capitalism-induced ecological crisis
Originally published: Dissident Voice on September 14, 2022 by Erin McCarley (more by Dissident Voice) | (Posted Sep 19, 2022)

One-third of Pakistan is under water. Record heat waves blanket the globe driving up temperatures beyond what humans can survive. Polar glaciers are melting much faster than scientists predicted. Droughts, fires and floods are ravaging the planet, forcing the displacement of tens of millions of people. And this is just the beginning.

It’s time to tell the truth. We can’t afford to wait any longer. We can’t afford to pretend that the same political-economic system that has caused the most historic levels of ecological destruction in human history is the same system that is going to fix it. Here, in the United States–the country on Earth most responsible for the highest levels of carbon emissions in Earth’s atmosphere–we have a very difficult political and social task in front of us. We have to tell the truth about the Earth’s thresholds, about the laws of physics, and about what’s causing our ecosystems to collapse, if we are to have any chance of a habitable future for ourselves, our children and grandchildren. We have to tell the truth, if we have any hope of human civilization at all.

But in telling this truth, we are faced with a terrible political reality that few are willing to admit. Many of us understand the science. We know that Earth’s ability to host humans depends on a very delicate balance of physical and ecological conditions that have only been present for a short time during the Earth’s lifespan. The Earth has been around for billions of years, but modern humans, as we know them, have only been here for some 200,000. Humanity is just a blip in our planet’s lifetime. The ecosystems that support human life are now in free-fall in terms of planetary time. We’re in the middle of the Sixth Mass Extinction, but this time, it’s because of human activity, fossil fuel extraction, and the unsustainable abuse of land, air and water. We’re in this terrible predicament because of an extractive economy that requires constant environmental destruction in order to fuel economic growth.

And despite decades of scientific awareness and dire warnings, the world’s most polluting and ecologically-destructive governments have done little to nothing, as they continue to build pipelines and wage global wars that enrich the one-percent, destroy the lives of millions, and drive up carbon emissions exponentially.

The same industries that benefit from ecological destruction- Big Oil, Big Agriculture, Tech Giants, the Military Industrial Complex–have for years tried to sell us a “greener capitalism” as a solution to the crisis. And they have been lying to us. Suggesting that individual consumption habits–light bulbs, electric cars, or the purchasing of carbon offsets–will somehow save us from disaster is a fairytale. It won’t. These attempts at tinkering around the edges of capitalism ignore the very nature of capitalism.

Capitalism as an economic system requires constant growth, constant profit, and endless extraction in order to achieve profit. If capitalism stops growing, stops profiting, it collapses. It is not a system that can ever achieve stasis or balance with other interdependent systems around it. Capitalism is not a stable system. It has to expand, consume everything, create bigger and bigger profits, until it devours its host. Capitalism is like a cancer. Or as Karl Marx wrote in Capital, Volume I, Ch. 15: “Capitalist production, therefore, develops technology, and the combining together of various processes into a social whole, only by sapping the original sources of all wealth–the soil and the labourer.”

Capitalism can grow externally in terms of wars, foreign interventions and militarized accumulation. In fact, as UC Santa Barbara Sociologist William I. Robinson describes, global capitalism has become dependent on war-making to sustain itself. Or it can grow internally by intensifying privatization, destroying labor rights, human rights and environmental protections within existing capitalist markets in order to open up more avenues for profit. In this interview, Robinson describes it:

For 530 years now, since 1492, we’ve had outward expansion- constant waves of colonialism and imperialism, bringing more and more countries, more and more people into the system. Now every country- every community on the planet- is integrated directly or indirectly into global capitalism. There’s no more room for what I call extensive enlargement or outward expansion. The other mechanism that capitalism has to expand is what I call intensive expansion, meaning that you turn more and more sectors and spheres of society into opportunities for accumulation. That’s been privatization- you privatize education, healthcare, public infrastructure, and nature. You’re not opening up new territories but opening up new areas.

In either case, capitalist growth is the growth of poverty, the growth of social and political inequality, of human suffering, and the destruction of the Earth’s ecosystems. We can see it on a global scale–everywhere capitalism has gone, the ecological commons have been destroyed. Indigenous people have been killed or displaced. Workers are enslaved or become alienated from their labor and exploited. And poverty has been created for masses of people where there was none before, while the commons and the public wealth have been privatized and consolidated by the top tier of the economy.

Just look at global wealth inequality. Oxfam’s 2022 Summary gives us a snapshot: “Since 1995, the top one percent [of humanity] has captured nearly 20 times more of global wealth than the bottom 50 percent of humanity. Over the last 30 years, the growth in the incomes of the bottom 50 percent has been zero, whereas incomes of the top one percent have grown 300 percent. Between 2020 and 2021, the wealth of the world’s ten richest men has doubled since the pandemic began. And 20 of the richest billionaires are estimated, on average, to be emitting as much as 8,000 times more carbon than the billion poorest people.”

These obscene levels of wealth, this vast sea of poverty, and all of the political repression, genocide, and endless wars that maintain it… All of this was born from capitalism–a system that privatized the commons, killing and displacing indigenous people from their homelands and forcing enslaved people to labor under conditions of torture, death and imprisonment. These are the origins of this political and economic system on this continent–a system that has spread like a cancer all over the globe. It has become clearer and clearer that maintaining a habitable planet for humans, as well as meeting the material needs of the masses, is a global project that is incompatible with an extractive economy that requires constant economic growth.

There is no logical end to capitalism except the destruction of the earth itself. That is the nature of the beast. And no amount of tinkering around the edges of capitalism will change this fundamental truth. We can buy carbon offsets. We can put solar panels on our houses. We can plant more trees. We can bury carbon in the ground. But none of these strategies can match the scale of the destruction that has already taken place within every layer of the ecosystem. Constant economic growth requires constant extraction–This is not compatible with a living planet whose ecological thresholds are fixed and whose millions of interdependent ecosystems require balance. To understand this basic incompatibility is to understand that capitalism, itself, is at the root of our ecological crisis.

Here in the United States, these simple truths about capitalism are completely obfuscated and denied by the corporate media, the fossil fuel industry, and pretty much everyone in the government because if the truth were known widely, it would upend our political systems. It would pose an existential threat to global capitalists who are profiting from our ecosystem’s destruction. It is no coincidence that the same governments in the world who refuse to do anything serious to halt climate collapse are full of politicians whose pockets are being lined by the same industries responsible for the destruction. The political-economic system causing ecological collapse is the exact same system preventing us from solving this crisis.

And viciously colluding with government and industry failure is a popular culture that has been discouraged from understanding what capitalism is and how it actually works. In truth, it is challenging and perplexing to try to describe a political, economic and cultural system that pervades every aspect of our lives. It is the air we breathe. It is not easy to step outside of capitalism in order to see it objectively, its logic, or the laws that govern it. To see clearly how capitalism works is akin to stepping outside of the matrix.

To make matters worse, ours is a country that has spent its entire history demonizing capitalism’s alternatives–especially communism and socialism. This demonization began with the first U.S. capitalists and colonialists in their attempt to destroy the communism of indigenous nations. The genocide of Native peoples across the Americas wasn’t only motivated by the desire to capture their land base. It wasn’t just about 15th-Century papal bulls that gave Christian nations the right to conquer non-Christian nations. It was also deeply rooted in destroying the idea of the commons, the model of communal landholdings, of communal governance and culture. So indigenous nations were seen by the U.S. government as a threat to capitalism from the beginning. In the eyes of our settler-colonial empire, these nations had to be eradicated—not just for the seizure of their lands, but to eliminate the ideological, political and cultural alternative that they represented. These advanced societies had lived connected to and in ecological balance with the earth for thousands of years.

The U.S. government labeled indigenous nations as “backward” and “savage” not only to justify state violence against them, but also as a way of reinforcing the colonial ideology of Western Expansion, Manifest Destiny, and capitalism to the U.S. public. To allow indigenous cultures to live in peace and sovereignty was fundamentally incompatible with the expansive colonial project that was, and still is, the United States. As indigenous peoples are still laying their bodies on the line to stop pipelines like Keystone XL, DAPL, Line 3, and MVP (just to name a few), we can see how indigenous stewardship of ancestral and treaty-protected homelands, the respect for the common good of all living things, and the desire to protect future generations constitute a cohesive ideology of balance and sustainability–an ideology that is still posing a threat to capitalism today.

Is it any wonder that the United States–a country founded on genocide and built by slave labor–is still killing, caging and oppressing the same peoples on whose land and by whose forced labor all of this wealth was originally constructed? Today, under our system of racial capitalism, the United States imprisons more people (especially black and brown people) than any other country on earth. And by 1955, the indigenous land base had shrunk to just 2.3 percent of its original size.

The “discoverers,” the slave masters, the robber barons, and the oil tycoons of the last few centuries are still with us. Their power has expanded exponentially, and they wear different clothes now. They are the U.S. military and all its private contractors around the globe, police and arms manufacturers, global weapons manufacturers, digital technology CEO’s, the world’s largest bank and oil company executives, and a small handful of multibillionaires whose stockholdings pull the puppet strings of most national governments and dictate the direction of growth in the global economy. And they don’t just dictate the direction of growth, they also dictate the social and political revolutions that must be crushed in order to achieve that growth.

In 1994, after the passage of NAFTA, Mexico’s President Zedillo ordered the army to attack the EZLN (Zapatista)-controlled villages and tried to capture their leaders. Up to that point, Zedillo had been trying to find a peaceful solution to the Zapatista rebellion, but this sudden policy change came after he received an internal memo from Chase Manhattan Bank, which insisted that the Mexican government eliminate the Zapatistas. This is just one of hundreds of examples where Wall Street has dictated what social and political movements around the world must be crushed in order to open up capitalist markets.

In addition, any country or group that has tried to live freely and with any degree of sovereignty outside of capitalism’s ever-expanding chokehold has faced CIA-backed coups, massive military invasions, political interventions, economic blockades and assassinations of its leaders. From the USSR, Libya, Vietnam, Korea, Cuba, Chile, Nicaragua, Venezuela, and Bolivia (just to name a few) to the tiniest and poorest countries like Grenada and Laos, any attempt at an anti-capitalist government or political revolution on the smallest scale has been relentlessly attacked and subverted by U.S. imperial forces working in tandem with global capitalists. These revolutions, these social and political experiments, constitute what Noam Chomsky once called, “the threat of a good example.”

And inside the United States, any social movement that has attempted to organize movements or political parties advancing alternatives to capitalism/colonialism have been viciously attacked—starting in 1492 with the genocide of the indigenous peoples to the repression of slave rebellions from the 1600s onward. And beginning in the late 1800s, U.S. socialist/communist political parties and labor movements were violently repressed. A few examples throughout U.S. History: the Haymarket Massacre (1886), the Pullman Strike (1894), the Ludlow Massacre (1914), the Palmer Raids against the IWW (1917), the multiple imprisonments of Eugene Debs and attacks on the Socialist Party, the Battle of Blair Mountain (1921), the black lists under McCarthyism (1950s), the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg (1951), the relentless attacks against the Black Panthers and the American Indian Movement from the FBI’s COINTELPRO in collaboration with state police; the imprisonment of Angela Davis, Assata Shakur, Bobby Seale, Huey P. Newton, the Chicago 7, the Panther 21, the assassinations of Malcolm X, Fred Hampton, and MLK.

So here we are, friends and comrades, inside the “Belly of the Beast,” as Che Guevara once described the United States. And we are surrounded by layer upon layer of capitalist indoctrination, myths of U.S. exceptionalism, white supremacist and colonial histories, and constant propaganda to prevent us from recognizing and questioning the basic idea that this political-economic system might be the cause of so much global suffering, even as it has grown so big and powerful as to threaten our own species survival.

As a young university student many years ago, I had the privilege of studying sociology under John Bellamy Foster–one of the most renowned Marxist sociologists in the United States, who has spent a lifetime documenting capitalism’s relationship to ecological destruction. In his classes, I was often surrounded by other sociology students who, when discussing the ecological crisis, echoed the refrain of the dominant culture–“If humans weren’t so greedy, we wouldn’t be in this situation!”

While I understand the frustration that leads to this statement, human history does not back it up in any way. I can’t count the times over the years that I have heard the “humanity equals greed” argument. I have many indigenous friends who would not take kindly to the white-supremacist idea that their resilient and time-tested cultures, which have lived in relative harmony with the Earth for thousands of years, are still not recognized under the popular definition of “humanity.” For someone to describe the whole of humanity as greedy, without ever having researched or experienced any of capitalism’s alternatives, represents a kind of self-reinforcing myopia that can only lead us deeper and deeper down the rabbit hole–into a tunnel that is rapidly narrowing and coming to an end.

Furthermore, this humanity-equals-greed myth is a mask designed to cover up the fact that capitalism rewards and reproduces only the worst qualities of human nature, while it starves and deprives our best qualities–our natural instincts toward caretaking each other, toward solidarity, mutual aid, and building community. Most of us, humans, possess these good qualities as well, but these cooperative human qualities are not financially or politically rewarded under capitalism. The volunteer work, the acts of kindness toward strangers–these activities can exist as hobbies inside of capitalism. They are socially approved, as long as they take place outside the hours of our wage labor, and as long as they don’t threaten the power structures that maintain the system. Or in the words of Brazilian Archbishop Dom Helder Camara, “When I feed the poor, they call me a saint, but when I ask why the poor are hungry, they call me a communist.”1

We must broaden our minds and our movements if we are to survive. Against all odds, against all indoctrination, we have to imagine a different future in order to create it. Even within this society that refuses to see beyond its own economic walls, its own self-constructed, capitalist paradigms, we must be brave enough and honest enough to seek the truth–to understand that capitalism is not inevitable. It is but one type of economy with distinct features and characteristics, and it can be replaced, just as it was instituted. It will not be easy. It will require nothing short of a global political, social and economic revolution. But if we cannot summon the courage and the international solidarity to embark on this journey together, then capitalism will devour us—all of us. If we cannot collectively envision and design a future beyond capitalism, then there will not be a future that includes us.

It starts by understanding the system we are living under and what the laws are that govern it. It starts with studying capitalism’s alternatives (socialism, communism, and anarchism) in order to have the theory and the understanding of alternative political economies. We know why the “S” word and the “C” word have been so uniformly demonized throughout U.S. History, why red-scare tactics are always a tool of the ruling class, and why these tools are resurging again at this moment, as more and more youth turn toward capitalism’s alternatives. The ruling classes don’t want us to see beyond the walls of our own cages.

Capitalism is not just an economic system, but a political system that has locked us into profit-driven political parties and political cycles that never allow us to structurally evolve out of our deepest and most existential crises. Let’s be clear—this isn’t about voting. This is about building a revolution–an international solidarity movement big enough to take on and replace global capitalism. We have to learn how previous anti-capitalist movements have been destroyed, neutralized and subverted and begin learning from that history before it’s too late.

We must work together. We cannot stay in our silos. Silos are based on individual identity, and we must build collective, class-based, and international solidarity if we are to survive the chaos that is coming. No matter who we are, our struggles and our liberation are connected. Societies based on individualism cannot survive species-level extinction events. This is going to require all hands on deck—all of us working together.

We must make ourselves useful to the movements around us that are already taking the biggest risks and doing the hardest work—from indigenous movements like the Red Nation, who have already created revolutionary programs to address these overlapping crises, to land and water protectors, to labor unions, to abolition movements, to racial and economic justice movements, to anti-war and peace movements. We have the teachers and the leaders that we need.

We must build massive networks of support and care at local and community levels, while at the same time, build international political movements that can replace the most corrupt capitalist states. It’s a long, hard road ahead and a multi-generational project, and it’s not for the weak of heart. It’s going to take all of our courage, all of our resilience, and all of our love for our children and grandchildren. And it starts with telling the truth about capitalism.

https://mronline.org/2022/09/19/its-tim ... al-crisis/

What is needed is Lenin's 'professional revolutionaries'. This is exactly what the Russian communists at 'Breakout' are saying.

Ain't nothing else going to get the job done... nothing else.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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