The Long Ecological Revolution

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Re: The Long Ecological Revolution

Post by blindpig » Tue Nov 09, 2021 2:41 pm

UN SCIENTISTS BLAME CLIMATE CHANGE ON CAPITALISM; IMPLICATIONS FOR MARXISTS

UN Scientists Blame Climate Change on Capitalism; Implications for Marxists
By W. T. Whitney Jr.

November 5, 2021

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Capitalism’s role in causing climate change now gains new visibility. Scientists advising world leaders present at the 26th Conference of the Parties (COP26) on November 1-12 in Glasgow affirmed the association. To slow down climate change and mitigate its effects, they want action taken to reduce capitalism’s impact on the climate.

The climate crisis is worsening. For Monthly Review magazine, the COP26 gathering represents “a last-ditch effort to achieve a global solution on behalf of humanity as a whole.” The COP is the decision-making body of the 1995 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.

The UN-sponsored Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), made up of 230 climate scientists from 66 countries, monitors climate-change trends and effects. Their observations, analyses, and recommendations appear in the IPCC’s Assessment Reports, which are issued periodically. IPCC scientists, who “have spent the last 3 years reviewing over 14000 studies,” are in the process now of releasing their Sixth Assessment Report, with 4000 pages.

On August 9, 2021 they released the Report’s Part I on the “physical science basis of climate change.” The IPCC will not release Part II, about impacts, and Part III, about mitigation, until early 2022, after all UN member states have reviewed the two sections. Key portions of the two have been leaked and, widely disseminated, they are the basis for this report.

Earlier Assessment Reports attributed climate change to human activity, unspecified. What with IPCC scientists linking expanded industrial production and consumerism with rising greenhouse gas emissions, capitalism enters the picture.

As summarized by the Monthly Review editors, Part II asserts that “Life on Earth can recover from a drastic climate shift by evolving into new species and creating new ecosystems. Humans cannot… We need transformational change operating on processes and behaviors at all levels: individual, communities, business, institutions and governments. We must redefine our way of life and consumption.”

An important finding of Part III, according to the editors, is that, “technological improvements that allow for relative decarbonization are not enough. Rather, what is required … ‘is fundamental structural changes at the global level’ … in production and consumption systems. Accelerated climate-change transitions require a shift to entirely new systems of sustainable development. ‘Transformative change’ must replace incremental changes favored by the status quo.”

Monthly Review indicated also that “for the first time in the IPCC process,” Part III called for a “turn to demand-side strategies, exploring cutbacks in energy use and across all economic sectors, as well as aggressively pursuing conservation and low-energy paths.”

Part III, crucially, “indicates at one point, referring to the analysis of Malm and others that: ‘The character of social and economic development produced by the nature of capitalist society [is] …ultimately unsustainable.’”

This is not a new idea. Advocates for environmental sustainability – Marxists, academic socialists, eco-socialists, environmentalists – have long concerned themselves with capitalism’s impact on the environment. Visionary Marxist scholar Kenneth Neill Cameron called for action almost 30 years ago. Concluding his book Marxism, a Living Science (International Publishers, 1993), he discusses global warming.

“Most Marxists write as though … social advance will take place in a social bubble shut off from nature. The scientific evidence, however, points to an era of environmental stress. The evidence was already strong in 1984 when this book first went to press … [It’s] a perspective beyond anything Marx and Engels had to confront … Clearly then the struggle for socialism will take place in a world racked by natural disasters of social origin.”

Cameron explores the curbing of fossil-based fuel and reliance on alternative energy. He suggests that, “there is only one way known to slow down and then eliminate these disasters, namely by phasing out the gases that cause them.” He declares that:

“[T]o fully replace the fossil-fuel-based corporate structure is beyond the capacity of capitalism and requires a socialist planned economy … As this struggle progresses it will become apparent that human survival will depend not just on clean energy but on a socio-economic system run by the people in their own interest. In short, a new dimension has been added to the struggle for socialism, which no longer aims only at universal “social justice” but at assuring human survival.”

Marxists like Cameron, however, realize that words and theory are not enough. From Marx, they know that merely to interpret the world falls short; “The point … is to change it.”

Marxists are able to frame climate-change action in a straightforward way. Inasmuch as their primary object is fighting capitalism, and capitalism causes climate change, and climate change endangers humanity, Marxists are duty-bound to involve themselves in the climate fight as learners, teachers and activists.

How would they do this, and what might the prospects be?

The opinions of the IPCC scientists, having circulated, constitute a kind of UN endorsement of fight-back against capitalism. To the extent that the UN position gains respect, capitalism becomes fair game for wider criticism within society as a whole. That’s helpful.

Marxists, self-described “scientific socialists” and prone to theorizing, analyzing problems, and strategizing, are prepared. As materialists, they embrace scientific inquiry and study of the natural world. The intersection of science and politics is familiar territory.

Marx himself modeled that approach. For example, he made the association between diminished productivity of soil in Britain and burgeoning industrialization. Having consulted with German scientists, he concluded that the movement of small farmers away from the land and into British factories, as industrial workers, had led to crops being under-fertilized. Because farmers had left the land, fertilizer in the form of animal and human excreta was in short supply.

Marxists are versatile. Having theorized, strategized, and acted in widely varying situations, they’ve shown that they probably would be able to confront the climate crisis. They’ve studied and defended waged labor laid low by the extraction of surplus value, small farmers displaced or oppressed by landlords, women (mostly) laboring in social reproduction for no pay, and those whose bodies, land, or subsoil resources have been plundered.

But capitalism won’t disappear quickly. After all, preparation for the way capitalism looked in the 1800s required a couple of centuries. As long as capitalism lasts, formation of a mass movement ready to defend environmental sustainability, and the climate, won’t happen soon, especially in the industrialized world.

For the sake of their jobs, wages and salaries, working people employed by entities dependent directly or indirectly on the market economy require economic stability and predictability. Under capitalism, that means an economy that produces and grows, always – one that, along the way, aggravates climate change. Working people, therefore, may find it more compelling to preserve the status quo than to pursue goals realizable only in the future, virtuous though they may be.

Relatedly, many wage workers, unemployed people, unionists, and seniors are leery of the environmental movement. They may resent the seemingly disproportionate involvement there of activists with comfortable life styles or object to the scarcity of black and brown people in such campaigns. It’s not yet clear how these twin projects, replacing capitalism and coping with climate change, are ultimately going to come together.

The possibility does emerge, however, that crisis-ridden capitalism, loaded with contradictions, will face some sort of a collapse. Waiting in the wings are disasters like pandemics, wars, massive default on debt, underproduction due to climate-caused catastrophes, oil shortage, and more. In chaotic situations like these, the building of a mass response to the climate crisis, one that is collective, anti-capitalist, and necessary, might come about.

The stimulus would derive from fears and perplexity. These, of course, could also lead to the authoritarian solutions of fascists and their like. Such a potential outcome adds to the urgency of preparing for the great mobilization of a socialist nature that we need.

Meanwhile, socialists and Marxists have promoted programs directed at protecting the environment and climate. These are the multifaceted programs often referred to as Green New Deals, as outlined in Mark Brodine’s book Green Strategy, in John Molyneux’s article in Climate & Capitalism, and by Sean Sweeney writing in New Economic Forum. As envisioned, they would accompany far-reaching proposals for progressive social and political change. Such undertakings are at risk of cooptation by corporations and other capitalist forces.

As the fight to ameliorate climate change proceeds, Marxists should take advantage of the teachability of their message. The idea that phenomena are connected – capitalism, expanding production, and rising emissions – is fact-based and logical. Lesser explanations blame the perversity of individuals. Exclusive focus on short-sightedness, disregard for the truth, ignorance, heartlessness, and/or immorality distracts from societal factors at work.

Class struggle will undoubtedly intensify in the years ahead. Faced with climate chaos, the upper classes, with their money, properties, and connections, will seek to wall themselves off from turmoil and victims, perhaps even hire enforcers to protect their remaining privileges.

Undone by climate change and its fallout – desertification, drought, floods, no homes, no livelihoods – people on the run worldwide become the rejects of resourced societies. Easily stigmatized, they serve as pawns for dividing and immobilizing the working class. And like nothing else, their plight calls for redistribution of wealth and resources, that is, if notions of the common good mean anything at all.

The object of this report has been to raise the consciousness of Marxists, socialists, and anyone else. Marxists ought to realize that they can contribute to and even lead collective efforts to head off climate change and to mitigate adverse effects. They have two major resources: the chain of causation from capitalism to climate change and anti-capitalism, which is their foundational tenet.

We are facing “the tragedy of our times;” and countries are “now so perilously close to the edge.” (Barbados prime minister Mia Mottley) Time is up; revolutionary socialists of all kinds need to set priorities. Let the discussion and work begin.

https://mltoday.com/un-scientists-blame ... -marxists/

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Fossil fuel companies have over 500 people at COP26, more than any single country, report says

By Angela Dewan, CNN

Updated 9:36 AM ET, Mon November 8, 2021

Glasgow, Scotland (CNN)More than 100 fossil fuel companies are understood to have sent 500 lobbyists to the COP26 climate talks in Glasgow, Scotland, more than any single country at the summit, according to the environmental campaign group Global Witness.

The group analyzed the UN's provisional list of named corporate attendees and found at least 503 people linked with coal, oil and gas companies were at the conference. Fossil fuel use is the biggest driver of human-made climate change.

The list included people either directly affiliated with fossil fuel companies, including Shell, Gazprom and BP, as well as those attending as members of delegations and groups that act on behalf of the fossil fuel industry.

The analysis found that the fossil fuel lobby had around two dozen more than the largest country delegation.

They also outnumber the event's official Indigenous constituency by around two to one, as well as the number of delegates from the eight-worst affected countries by climate change over the last two decades -- Puerto Rico, Myanmar, Haiti, the Philippines, Mozambique, the Bahamas, Bangladesh and Pakistan.

"The presence of hundreds of those being paid to push the toxic interests of polluting fossil fuel companies, will only increase the skepticism of climate activists who see these talks as more evidence of global leaders' dithering and delaying," said Murray Worthy, gas campaign leader at Global Witness.

"The scale of the challenge ahead means there is no time for us to be diverted by greenwashing or meaningless corporate promises not matched by delivery. It's time for politicians to show they are serious about ending the influence of big polluters over political decision-making and commit to a future where expert and activist voices are given center stage."

Canada, Russia and Brazil were among the countries that registered members of the fossil fuel industry for attendance.

When questioned on why the event's organizers had allowed so many people from the industry to attend, COP26 President Alok Sharma said: "At the end of the day, It is up to parties and observers who gets accreditation as part of their delegations."

Patricia Espinosa, Executive Secretary of the UN's climate agency, said that the UN did not invite or acknowledge any official delegation of fossil fuel companies, but that the agency had no control over which people each country registered as a delegate.

"It is really the sovereign right of every government to accredit every representative as part of its delegations, persons it deems appropriate," Espinosa said. "We do not allow open lobbying or open promotion of oil and gas, of course, that would be against the objectives of the Paris Agreement and the convention."

The analysis comes amid growing criticism from civil society groups that the event is not as inclusive as promised. COP26 President Alok Sharma has pointed to the need for social distancing as the reason some people, including those with observer status, have been unable to enter rooms where negotiations are taking place.

A recent report by the UN Environment Programme showed that many of the world's largest fossil fuel producers are still planning to ramp up production in the coming years, and will be burning far more fossil fuels in 2030 than what is consistent with global climate pledges.

The analysis used the plans of 15 major economies to estimate the world will produce roughly 110% more coal, oil, and gas in 2030 than what would be necessary to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, and 45% more than what would be consistent with 2 degrees.

https://us.cnn.com/2021/11/08/world/cop ... index.html

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US must fulfill climate vows to win world's trust
By Yang Pingjian | China Daily | Updated: 2021-11-09 07:12

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Long before the ongoing UN Climate Change Conference began in Glasgow on Oct 31, US President Joe Biden vowed to restore the US' climate leadership through a "new climate deal".

However, considering the US' flip-flop on climate change in the past, Biden's remark cannot be taken at face value.

First, if Biden wants Washington to regain the global climate leadership, the US has to take responsibility for its huge cumulative greenhouse gas emissions and take concrete actions to mitigate their effects.

That carbon dioxide remains in the atmosphere for 100-150 years means CO2 emissions from the late 19th century continue to affect the climate system even today. So advanced Western countries, especially the US, that have been spewing millions of tons of greenhouse gases to propel their economy for the past one and a half century or more have a far greater responsibility to take corrective measures.

According to available data, about 1.5 trillion tons of CO2 have been discharged into the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution, and the United States accounts for more than 400 billion tons of that, far more than any other country. Even in terms of per capita cumulative carbon emissions since 1850, the US' share is at least eight times that of China and dozens of times of India.

The US used its first-mover advantage to emit far more CO2 than any other country, amassing enormous wealth and becoming the world's largest economy, but it has not taken responsibility for all those emissions, let alone making efforts to mitigate their effects.

Therefore, to regain the global climate leadership, the US should first face up to its emissions history and compensate developing countries for limiting their scope for emissions and thus restrain their economic development, and making the poor and most vulnerable countries the worst victims of climate change.

Second, the US must abandon unilateralism and stop putting its own interests above those of the rest of the world. From Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama to Donald Trump, US presidents have treated global climate rules as a trifling matter.

But countries around the world came together at the UN climate conference in December 2015 to finalize the Paris Agreement. The Obama administration did ratify the Paris Agreement in September 2016-only for the Donald Trump administration to withdraw the US from the climate pact the next year, citing "unfair economic burden" on the US as the reason.

To be fair to Biden, as soon as he entered the White House, he signed the instrument to return the US back to the Paris Agreement. But that came with a rider that Washington would regain its leadership in global climate governance.

It is thus evident that the US always puts its own interests first and doesn't care much about international agreements and rules, or global interests. But without abandoning unilateralism, convincing the international community of the continuity of its climate policy and abiding by international rules, the US cannot expect to play a key role in global climate governance.

Third, the US must take concrete actions to mitigate the effects of climate change, because it is not only the largest cumulative emitter of greenhouse gases but also economically and technologically the most advanced country in the world. This is important because the US has not fulfilled its climate obligations till now. For example, it failed to reduce emissions by 7 percent by 2005 from the 1990 level-in fact, emissions from its energy sector rose by 19.2 percent from 1990 to 2005.

By failing to fulfill its global obligations and continuing to break international rules, the US has set a bad precedent for other developed countries. The US must realize that it can't continue business as usual while expecting to lead the global fight against climate change.

Fourth, since different countries are in different stages of development, they should set their own emissions reduction targets depending on their economic and technological prowess. That is precisely what is meant by common but differentiated responsibilities, which was formalized as international law at the UN Conference on Environment and Development at Rio de Janeiro in 1992.

When it comes to reducing emissions, the US does not practice what it preaches. Accusing other countries of wrongdoing or inaction cannot solve the climate problem either in the US or the rest of the world; on the contrary, it would undo the hard-won achievements of cooperation. Also, the US should stop doubting and challenging the global climate governance framework, abandon zero-sum games, and refrain from pointing fingers at others to hide its own failures and breaching of global climate rules.

As the largest developed country in the world, the US would do better to cooperate with the largest developing country, China, to address global and common challenges, such as climate change. Such cooperation should be based on equality and fairness, and the US should withdraw all trade terms that don't conform to green development, lift restrictions on the import of new energy products from China, and allow the export of green, low-carbon, clean energy and green equipment to China. For instance, the US cannot demand that China reduce its coal production on the one hand and export more coal to China on the other, and impose sanctions on Chinese photovoltaic companies in a naked display of unilateralism and hegemonism.

Considering that climate change poses a threat to people around the world, it is imperative that all countries work together on the principles of equity, and common but differentiated responsibilities.

The international community welcomes the US' return to the global climate governance framework, but to win the trust of other countries the US has to fulfill all its global climate obligations and provide financial and technological support to developing countries to help them adapt to and mitigate climate change.

The author is a researcher at the Chinese Research Academy of Environmental Sciences.

http://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/20211 ... 74177.html

Well, they had to say it, but they know what it will take to change it.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: The Long Ecological Revolution

Post by blindpig » Wed Nov 10, 2021 2:35 pm

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COP26 farce shows that the ‘build back better’ dreams have been crushed
Posted Nov 10, 2021 by James Plested

Originally published: Red Flag (November 7, 2021 ) |

Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, when people were first experiencing the “distancing effect” of lockdowns, the world had something of a cultural moment centred on the idea that we should “build back better”. The simple—and entirely sensible—proposal was that we should use the period of enforced social isolation to reflect critically on the status quo and consider how, instead of returning to normal after the pandemic, we could try to build a better, more equal and sustainable society.

The idea of “building back better” took off. Since it was first raised as a slogan back in March and April 2020—initially mainly in the world of progressive NGOs and “left” Twitter—it has been taken up by everyone from U.S. President Joe Biden and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson to the OECD, the United Nations and the NSW Public Service Commission.

The popularity of “build back better” as a slogan reflects that no-one in their right mind would be overly enthused by the idea of “building back the same”. Why, having been jolted for a moment out of our immersion in the ugly reality of a capitalist system piling one crisis on top of another, would we want everything to go back to being just as it was before?

When the pandemic hit Australia in late February last year, we were just emerging from the “black summer” of devastating bushfires. It would be strange, in that context, if anyone much wanted merely to get back to the kind of capitalist normality that devoured so much of Australia in flames, or to get busy rebuilding an economy that was sacrificing, in ever more obscene and blatant ways, the interests of the majority of poor and working-class people to the greed of the rich.

Globally, the obscenities of capitalist normality were even more extreme. Who would want to go back to a world in which total annual military spending was almost US$2 trillion—one in which countries everywhere, led by major powers like the U.S., were competing to ensure their stockpile of deadly weapons and new technologies of mass murder were built up faster than those of their rivals? Who would want a world in which the number of forcibly displaced people had doubled in less than a decade, and in which an estimated 25 million refugees faced increasingly brutal treatment from governments determined to deny them any hope of resettlement? Who would want to “build back” to a world in which millions were dying from hunger every year?

No matter how popular the idea of “building back better” became as a slogan, however, it was unlikely that anything much would change unless we fought for it. More than a year and a half on, the pandemic continues to rage along its deadly course, with no end in sight. In June 2020, the average (official) daily death toll from COVID-19 was fewer than 5,000. In October this year, it was around 7,000. In the meantime, governments around the world have been more or less successful in convincing people that we should accept this ongoing burden of death and disease as part of the “new normal”.

On top of the ongoing suffering inflicted by the pandemic, we’re seeing a return of all the old social, economic and environmental ills that we were supposedly going to “build back better” from. COP26 is a marker of that depressing reality. The sight of world leaders gathering in Glasgow to engage in what Greta Thunberg aptly described as a “global North greenwashing festival” and “a two-week celebration of business as usual and blah, blah, blah” shows the extent to which the normal, pre-pandemic functioning of global capitalism has returned.

“Nature is healing”, as the saying goes—but in this case it’s the “nature” of a system that is rapidly destroying the planet on which we depend so that the fossil fuel industry and other big business interests can go on more or less in the manner to which they’ve grown accustomed. Reflecting the lack of any shift away from the pre-pandemic “normal” on climate, global emissions are, according to the Global Carbon Project, set to rise nearly 5 percent this year—almost completely wiping out the 5.4 percent drop recorded in 2020 due to lockdowns and associated restrictions on travel and other emissions-intensive activities.

And when it comes to greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, the pandemic had no impact at all. According to the latest Greenhouse Gas Bulletin from the World Meteorological Organization, concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere hit a new high of 413.2 parts per million (ppm) in 2020—a rise of 2.5 ppm from 2019, slightly above the average annual increase of 2.4 ppm over the past decade.

On every other issue, it’s the same story. Instead of a fairer and more equitable distribution of society’s wealth, we’ve got a return to the most naked and brutal inequality. Welfare in Australia and elsewhere—raised in the early period of the pandemic as part of government stimulus packages—has been slashed back down close, or equal, to pre-pandemic levels. Meanwhile, inflation is rising in many countries, outstripping sluggish wage growth and eating into living standards. There’s been a lot of talk, in the past two years, about the value of “essential workers”. But when it has come to actually paying those workers more, it’s a different story.

At the same time, the wealthiest section of society has never had it so good. Big businesses, along with anyone with a significant share and/or property portfolio, have done very well out of government stimulus measures targeting the top end of town. According to the 2021 Australian Financial Review Rich List, Australia’s richest 200 individuals and families increased their collective wealth by $55.6 billion in the first year of the pandemic—rising from $424 billion to $479.6 billion. Since 2019, Gina Rinehart’s wealth alone has risen by $17 billion (from $13.8 billion to $31 billion)—enough to pay the annual salaries of 232,876 nurses.

Ultra-low interest rates have also contributed to an unprecedented property boom. Sydney’s median house price is approaching $1.5 million, having risen by more than 30 percent in the past 12 months. That equates to an increase of $6,700 a week, or $967 a day. Property investors are laughing all the way to the bank. But for young and working-class people who don’t have wealthy parents to support them, the prospect of ever owning a home is rapidly disappearing over the horizon.

Adding to the deep anxieties felt by so many is the increasing threat of war. Instead of more global cooperation on issues of common concern (another popular inclusion in various “build back better” lists), the world of geopolitics is more fractious than it has been for decades. At the centre of it all is the growing drive by the U.S. and its allies for war with China.

The Australian media have made much of the claim that Prime Minister Scott Morrison lied to French President Emmanuel Macron about the submarines deal. It’s a classic case of not seeing the wood for the trees. The big problem facing Australians isn’t that we’re led by a lying clown like Morrison—in this day and age, being led by lying clowns is to be expected—but that we’re led by one who is loudly beating the drums for a potential Third World War.

How long can it go on like this? The short answer is: as long as we let it. Nothing will change while the widespread public opposition to the destructive status quo of capitalism is expressed merely through “calling on” world leaders to do this or that. No number of comment pieces, tweets or glossy brochures about how we should “build back better” is actually going to make it happen. All that’s likely to occur is what has, in fact, transpired. Those in power will take the slogan and turn it into a meaningless catchphrase designed—just like all the “net zero by 2050” talk—to rebrand, rather than actually change, the existing system.

The Australian government hasn’t—as a recent article by Marian Wilkinson in the Saturday Paper argued—been “captured” by the gas lobby or any other particular big business interests. The Australian government, and this applies whether it’s the Liberals or Labor in power, isn’t a neutral body that can easily be influenced this way or that. “The executive of the modern state”, as Marx wrote in the Communist Manifesto, “is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie”. The government isn’t the hostage, but the hostage-taker. It is working hand in glove with big business and the rich to hold the rest of society captive to their interests.

To really start to “build back better”, whether on climate change, inequality, war or anything else, we need first to rid ourselves of any remaining illusions that those holding us hostage within the death machine of global capitalism can be convinced to drive the radical change we need. “When the rulers have spoken”, German poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht wrote,

then the ruled will start to speak.

https://mronline.org/2021/11/10/cop26-f ... n-crushed/

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OP26: Military pollution is the skeleton in the West’s climate closet
Posted Nov 10, 2021 by Jonathan Cook

Originally published: Middle East Eye (November 8, 2021 ) |

World leaders gathered in Glasgow last week for the COP26 summit in a bid to demonstrate how they are belatedly getting to grips with the climate crisis. Agreements to protect forests, cut carbon and methane emissions and promote green tech are all being hammered out in front of a watching world.

Western politicians, in particular, want to emerge from the summit with their green credentials burnished, proving that they have done everything in their power to prevent a future global temperature rise of more than 1.5C. They fear the verdict of unhappy electorates if they come back empty-handed.

Climate scientists are already doubtful whether the pledges being made go far enough, or can be implemented fast enough, to make a difference. They have warned that drastic action has to be taken by the end of this decade to avert climate catastrophe.

But the visible activity at the summit hides a much starker reality. The very nations proclaiming moral leadership in tackling the climate crisis are also the ones doing most to sabotage a meaningful agreement to reduce humanity’s global carbon footprint.

A photo from the opening of COP26 showed British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, the summit’s host, warmly greeting U.S. President Joe Biden and Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett. But rather than fete them, we should treat this triumvirate as the big villains of the climate talks.

Their armed forces are the most polluting on the planet–and the goal at COP26 is to keep that fact a closely guarded secret.

Hidden from view

U.S. expenditure on its military far outstrips that of any other country–except for Israel, when measured relative to population size. Although the UK trails behind, it still has the fifth largest military budget in the world, while its arms manufacturers busily supply weapons to countries others have shunned.

The U.S. military alone is estimated to have a larger carbon footprint than most countries. It is widely assumed to be the world’s largest institutional consumer of crude oil.

And emissions from the West’s militaries and arms makers appear to be growing each year rather than shrinking–though no one can be certain because they are being actively hidden from view.

Washington insisted on an exemption from reporting on, and reducing, its military emissions at the Kyoto summit, 24 years ago. Unsurprisingly, everyone else jumped on that bandwagon.

Since the Paris summit of 2015, military emissions have been partially reported. But all too often the figures are disguised–lumped in with emissions from other sectors, such as transport.

And emissions from overseas operations–in the case of the U.S., 70 percent of its military activity–are excluded from the balance sheet entirely.

Conflicts and wars

Most of Europe has refused to come clean, too. France, with the continent’s most active military, reports none of its emissions.

According to research by Scientists for Global Responsibility, the UK’s military emissions were three times larger than those it reported–even after supply chains, as well as weapons and equipment production, were excluded. The military was responsible for the overwhelming majority of British government emissions.

And new technology, rather than turning the military green, is often making things much worse.

The latest fighter jet developed by the U.S., the F-35, is reported to burn 5,600 litres of fuel an hour. It would take 1,900 cars to guzzle a similar amount of fuel over the same period.

Norway, like many other countries, has been queuing up to get its hands on this new-generation jet. According to the Norwegian newspaper Dagsavisen, the total emissions by the Norwegian military over the next decade will rise by 30 percent as a result of its F-35 purchases alone.

As well as discounting the environmental harm caused by military equipment procurement and supply chains, countries are also excluding the significant impacts of conflicts and wars.

Each year of the U.S. occupation of Iraq that began in 2003, for example, is conservatively estimated to have generated emissions equivalent to putting an additional 25m cars on the road.

Military spending up

Unlike the farming and logging industries, or the manufacturing industries, or the fossil fuel industries, efforts to curb the growth in military spending–let alone reverse it–are off the table at the COP26 summit.

And for that, Washington has to take the major share of the blame.

Its “defence” budget already comprises about 40 percent of the $2tn spent annually on militaries worldwide. China and Russia–ostensibly the two bogeymen of the COP26 summit–lag far behind.

The government of Boris Johnson unveiled last year what it called “the biggest programme of investment in British defence since the end of the Cold War”. Britain is no outlier. After a short-lived “peace dividend” caused by the break-up of the Soviet Union, global military expenditure has been on an almost continuous upward trend since 1998, led by the U.S.

Paradoxically, the upturn began about the time western politicians began paying lip service to tackling “climate change” at the Kyoto summit.

U.S. military spending has been rising steadily since 2018. It is set to continue doing so for at least another two decades–way past the deadline set by climate scientists for turning things around.

The same global upward trend has been fed by a surge in military expenditure by Middle Eastern countries–notably Saudi Arabia and the UAE–since 2013. That appears to reflect two trends rooted in Washington’s changing approach to the region.

First, as it has withdrawn its overstretched occupation forces from Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. has increasingly outsourced its military role to wealthy client states in this oil-rich region.

And second, as Israel and the Gulf states have been encouraged to forge closer military and intelligence ties against Iran, these same Gulf states have been allowed to play military catch-up with Israel. Its famed “qualitative military edge” is being gradually eroded.

Propping up this Middle East arms spree is the UK, which has been exporting to the Saudis, and the U.S., which heavily subsidises Israel’s military industries.

Power competition

All this means that, while western politicians promise to cut emissions at COP26, they are actually busy preparing to increase those emissions out of view. Ultimately, the problem is that little can be done to green our militaries, either substantively or through a greenwashing makeover. The military’s rationale is neither to be sustainable nor to be kind to the planet.

The arms manufacturers’ business model is to offer clients–from the Pentagon to every tinpot dictator–weapons and machines that are bigger, better or faster than their competitors. Aircraft carriers must be larger. Fighter jets quicker and more agile. And missiles more destructive.

Consumption and competition are at the heart of the military mission, whether armies are waging war or marketing their activities as purely “defensive”.

“Security”, premised on a fear of neighbours and rivals, can never be satiated. There is always another tank, plane or anti-missile system that can be purchased to create greater “deterrence”, to protect borders more effectively, to intimidate an enemy.

And war provides even greater reasons to consume more of the planet’s finite resources and wreak yet more harm on ecosystems. Lives are taken, buildings levelled, territories contaminated.

The UK has 145 military bases in 42 countries, securing what it perceives to be its “national interests”. But that is dwarfed by more than 750 U.S. military bases spread over 80 countries. Shuffling off this energy-hungry power projection around the globe will be much harder than protecting forests or investing in green technology.

The U.S. and its western allies would first have to agree to relinquish their grip on the planet’s energy resources, and to give up policing the globe in the interests of their transnational corporations.

It is precisely this full-spectrum power competition–economic, ideologic and military–that propelled us into the current climate disaster. Tackling it will require looking much deeper into our priorities than any leader at COP26 appears ready to do.

https://mronline.org/2021/11/10/cop26-m ... te-closet/

A sure marker that we have achieved a people's government will be when the military/security apparatus is de-funded to the point it can be drown in a bathtub. Until then the struggle is literally life and death.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: The Long Ecological Revolution

Post by blindpig » Thu Nov 11, 2021 1:53 pm

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Carbon tax over-rated
Posted Nov 11, 2021 by Anis Chowdhury, Jomo Kwame Sundaram

Originally published: JOMO (November 8, 2021 ) |

SYDNEY and KUALA LUMPUR: Addressing global warming requires cutting carbon emissions by almost half by 2030! For the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, emissions must fall by 45% below 2010 levels by 2030 to limit warming to 1.5°C, instead of the 2.7°C now expected.

Instead, countries are mainly under pressure to commit to ‘net-zero’ carbon (dioxide, CO2) emissions by 2050 under that deal. Meanwhile, global carbon emissions–now already close to pre-pandemic levels–are rising rapidly despite higher fossil fuel prices.

Emissions from burning coal and gas are already greater now than in 2019. Global oil use is expected to rise as transport recovers from pandemic restrictions. In short, carbon emissions are far from trending towards net-zero by 2050.

False promise

At the annual climate meetings in Glasgow, carbon pricing is being touted as the main means to cut CO2 and other greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. The European Union President urged, “Put a price on carbon”, while Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau advocates a global minimum carbon tax.

Businesses are also rallying behind one-size-fits-all CO2 pricing, claiming it is “effective and fair”. But there is little discussion of how revenues thus raised should be distributed among countries, let alone to support poorer countries’ adaptation and mitigation efforts.

Carbon pricing supposedly penalizes CO2 emitters for economic losses due to global warming. The public bears the costs of global warming, e.g., damage due to rising sea levels, extreme weather events, changing rainfall, droughts or higher health care and other expenses.

But there is little effort at or evidence of compensation to those adversely affected. Therefore, poorer countries are understandably sceptical, especially as rich countries have failed to fulfil their promise of US$100bn yearly climate finance support.

The CO2 price market solution is said to be “the most powerful tool” in the climate policy arsenal. It claims to deter and thus reduce GHG emissions, while incentivizing investment shifts from fossil-fuel burning to cleaner energy generating technologies.

No silver bullet

Carbon pricing’s actual impact has, in fact, been marginal–only reducing emissions by under 2% yearly. Such impacts remain small as ‘emitters hardly pay’. Most remain undeterred, still relying on energy from fossil fuel combustion. Also, many easily pass on the carbon tax burden to others whose spending is not price sensitive enough.

Only 22% of GHGs produced globally are subject to carbon pricing, averaging only US$3/ton! Hence, such price incentives alone cannot significantly discourage high GHG emissions, or greatly accelerate widespread use of low-carbon technologies.

Powerful fossil-fuel corporate interests have made sure that carbon prices are not high enough to force users to switch energy sources. Thus, existing CO2 pricing policies are “modest and less ambitious” than they could and should be. Meanwhile, several factors have undermined carbon taxation’s ability to speed up ‘decarbonization’.

First, carbon taxes have never actually provided much climate finance. Second, CO2 taxes misrepresent climate change as due to ‘market failure’, not as a fundamental systemic problem. Third, it seeks efficiency, not efficacy! Thus, it does not treat global warming as an urgent threat.

Fourth, market signals from carbon taxation seek to ‘optimize’ the status quo, rather than to transform systems responsible for global warming. Fifth, it offers a deceptively simplistic ‘universal’ solution, rather than a policy approach sensitive to circumstances. Sixth, it ignores political realities, especially differences in key stakeholders’ power and influence.

Unfair to poor

Even if introduced gradually, the flat carbon tax will burden poorer countries more. Worse, carbon pricing is regressive, hurting the poor more. Thus, the burden of CO2 taxes is heavier on average consumers in poor countries than on poor consumers in ‘average’ countries.

A UN survey showed a seemingly fair, uniform global carbon tax would burden–as a share of GDP–developing countries much more than developed countries. Thus, although per capita emissions in poorer countries are far less than in rich ones, a flat CO2 tax burdens developing countries much more.

Also, a standard carbon tax burdens low-income groups more, by raising not only energy costs directly, but also those of all goods and services requiring energy use. With this seemingly fair, one-size-fits-all tax, low income households and countries pay much more relatively.

Analytically, such distributional effects can be avoided by differentiated pricing, e.g., by increasing prices to reflect the amount of energy used. Also, compensatory mechanisms–such as subsidies or cash transfers to low-income groups–can help.

But these are administratively difficult, particularly for poor countries, with limited taxation and social assistance systems. Furthermore, effectively targeting vulnerable populations is hugely problematic in practice.

Mission impossible?

Selective investment and technology promotion policies are much more effective in encouraging clean energy and reducing GHG emissions. Huge investments in solar, hydro and wind energy as well as public transport are required, typically involving high initial costs and low returns. Hence, public investment often has to lead.

But most developing countries lack the fiscal capacity for such large public investment programmes. Large increases in compensatory financing, official development assistance and concessional lending are urgently needed, but have not been forthcoming despite much talk.

Climate finance initiatives generally need to improve incentives for mitigation, while funding much more climate adaptation in developing countries. Potentially, a CO2 tax could yield significantly more resources to cover such international funding requirements, but this requires appropriate redistributive measures which have never been seriously negotiated.

Carbon taxes can help

Even without an ostensibly market-determined CO2 price, taxing GHG emissions would make renewable energy more price competitive. The UN advocated a ‘global green new deal’ in response to the 2008-2009 global financial crisis. It noted a US$50/ton tax would make more renewables commercially competitive, besides mobilizing US$500bn annually for climate finance.

A mid-2021 International Monetary Fund (IMF) staff note has proposed an international carbon price floor. This would “jump-start” emissions reductions by requiring G20 governments to enforce minimum carbon prices. Involving the largest emitting countries would be very consequential while bypassing collective action difficulties among the 195 UN Member States.

The scheme could be pragmatically designed to be more equitable, and for all types of GHGs, not just CO2 emissions. But even a global carbon price of US$75/ton would only cut enough emissions to keep global warming below 2°C–not the needed 1.5°C, the Paris Agreement goal!

https://mronline.org/2021/11/11/carbon-tax-over-rated/

It was a scam from day 1 and that most major enviro orgs embraced the idea shows whose side they are really on. The only thing to be relied upon from the petty booj is betrayal.

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Mother Nature, Inc.

Originally published: Dissident Voice by Robert Hunziker (November 8, 2021 ) | - Posted Nov 11, 2021

Wall Street investors have hit the jackpot. Soon they’ll be able to buy, own, and dictate The Commons, public lands, the world of Mother Nature. In fact, a pilot project is already in the works with ecosystems up for sale as Wall-Streeters anxiously prepare to gobble up the valued benefits of Mother Nature.

According to the NYSE PR Dept. they’ll IPO nature: “To preserve and restore the natural assets that ultimately underpin the ability for there to be life on Earth.” What? Really?

And, according to NYSE COO Michael Blaugrund:

Our hope is that owning a natural asset company is going to be a way that an increasingly broad range of investors have the ability to invest in something that’s intrinsically valuable, but, up to this point, was really excluded from the financial markets.

Then, does this mean that neoliberal capitalism is becoming nature’s beneficent caretaker so environmentalists can stop wringing their hands about the horrendous loss of wild vertebrate life, down a whopping 68%, and loss of wetlands and loss of huge chunks of rainforests these past few decades, all of which echoes a guttural sound of impending extinction? Answer: Don’t count on it.

For starters, there’s something extraordinarily distasteful and downright disgusting about Wall Street buying control of nature’s resource capabilities. It bespeaks of an upside down world where the ludicrous becomes acceptable, but is it really acceptable? Is it?

The main character in this new scheme to own the world is a new asset class with a very plain name that says it all: Natural Asset Company or NAC. Yes, if you are a billionaire, get ready to buy up to 30% of the world’s natural resource beneficence to society. It’s going to be offered on the biggest auction block of the world, the New York Stock Exchange under the cover of sustainability of nature and protection of biodiversity, wink, wink!

Of course, this prompts a series of questions, headlined by when does Mother Nature morph into a tollbooth?

In simplest of terms, NACs allow for the formation of specialized corporations the hold the rights to the ecosystem services produced on a given chunk of land. The services might be sequestration of carbon or clean water or possibly rare Tibetan mountain air or maybe a lake teeming with trout in the wilderness. The possibilities are endless when auctioning off major chunks of an asset as big as the planet.

The NAC will maintain, manage and grow the natural asset that it has commoditized, working towards maximizing the profit potential of the natural asset, although, of course, this is not emphasized in the PR material. Nevertheless, it could lead to near-infinite profits. After all, the living Earth does rejuvenate and replenish and service ecosystems on its own accord, a natural process that goes on forever. Why not own it?

If ever there has been a time for the people of the world to drop whatever they are doing and focus on one issue, now is that time. The Commons is for sale! Think long and hard about that proposition, study it, discuss it, and decide whether to agree that Mother Nature should be monetized. If not in agreement, then do something, tell everybody, tell anybody who’ll listen, carry poster boards in the street, join a protest march, bang pots and pans, do something to relieve that breakneck pressure building around your temples!

The Intrinsic Exchange Group, in partnership with the NYSE, is currently working with the Costa Rica government on a pilot project of NACs in the country in order to institute its protocol for ownership of forests, lakes, waterfalls, mountains, meadows, caves, wetlands, in essence, all of nature. Costa Rica is the proving grounds for ownership of Mother Nature, whether she likes it or not.

First, NAC identifies a natural asset, like a forest, for example, which is quantified using special protocols that have already been developed by various coalitions amongst multinational corporations, which in and of itself is remarkably terrifying. The NAC decides who has the rights to the natural asset’s productivity and how it is to be managed. It is then monetized via an IPO on the stock exchange. Thus, the NAC becomes “the Issuer” to potential buyers of the natural asset that the NAC represents. Essentially, NAC is a real estate agent of Mother Nature. The buyers are institutional investors, or the occasional billionaire, that want to own the rights to the benefits of wetlands or rainforests or natural water springs or rarified mountainous air or hot springs or whatever they want to own. The world is their oyster to buy, own, enjoy, and profit by.

Throughout all human history nature has been The Commons or the cultural and natural resource for all of society inclusive of natural processes like air and water. But now private investors are deleting The Commons with claims of “conservation and sustainability” of 30% of what’s called “protected areas” of our precious worldwide assets.

According to initial calculations, NACs will unlock $4Quadrillion in assets as a new feeding ground for Wall Street investors to buy the rights to clean water and clean air and trout streams and bass-laden lakes and gorgeous picturesque waterfalls and lagoons, an entire forest, or maybe eventually extend into the oceans. Who knows the range of possibilities once nature is transacted on Wall Street.

Monetizing nature!

What’s next, what’s left?

The Commons is property shared by all, inclusive of natural products like air, water, and a habitable planet, forests, fisheries, groundwater, wetlands, pastures, the atmosphere, the high seas, Antarctica, outer space, caves, all part of ecosystems of the planet.

The sad truth is Mother Nature, Inc. will lead to extinction of The Commons, as an institution, in the biggest heist of all time. Surely, private ownership of nature is unseemly and certainly begs a much bigger relevant question that goes to the heart of the matter, to wit: Should nature’s ecosystems, which benefit society at large, be monetized for the direct benefit of the few?

https://mronline.org/2021/11/11/mother-nature-inc/

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Corn Belt N2O emissions outweigh soil carbon storage
November 10, 2021
Nitrogen emissions can overwhelm the climate benefits of storing carbon in agricultural soil


About 200 million tonnes of synthetic nitrogen fertilizer is applied to soils every year. About two-thirds of the nitrogen ends up in rivers and lakes and the atmosphere.

by Ian Angus

Two years ago, in a series of articles on Disrupting the nitrogen cycle, I described how fossil fuels and industrial agriculture have created a major rift in the Earth System’s metabolism, by releasing more than twice as much reactive nitrogen into the environment as nature alone has ever produced.

“In particular, close to 200 million metric tons of synthetic fertilizers are used every year — and most of the reactive nitrogen they contain escapes into the broader environment, polluting air and water and disrupting ecosystems. … It is painfully clear that any serious effort to prevent ecological catastrophes in this century must include reining in the overproduction of reactive nitrogen.”

An under-studied part of nitrogen pollution is the nitrous oxide gas that microorganisms in the soil give off as a byproduct of the nitrogen biochemical cycle. Nitrogen stimulates nitrous oxide production, so adding nitrogen fertilizers to soil increases emissions.

A study published this month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) quantifies the climate-changing impact of nitrous oxide (N2O) emissions from soil in the midwestern US Corn Belt, the largest and most productive agricultural region in North America. It finds that agricultural soils fertilized with the most widely-used chemicals emit high amounts of nitrous oxide across a wide range of environmental conditions, far exceeding the benefits of using the same soils as a means of sequestering carbon.

“Nitrous oxide (N2O) is a powerful greenhouse gas with 298 times the warming potential of carbon dioxide (CO2) over 100 years, and N2O is also the leading contributor to stratospheric ozone depletion. Agricultural soils are currently the primary anthropogenic source of N2O, as a consequence of increased application of synthetic nitrogen fertilizer and manure over the past century. Without efforts to reduce emissions, atmospheric N2O will continue to rise along with demand for agricultural products, threatening our ability to mitigate climate change and ozone depletion.”

Steven Hall of Iowa State University, the study’s senior author, says their study shows that “the climate warming effects of nitrous oxide emissions from local corn and soybean soils are two-fold greater than the climate cooling that might be achieved by increasing soil carbon storage with common agricultural practices.”

Storing carbon in agricultural soils can mitigate climate change, but the PNAS article shows that “the outsized impact of N2O emissions from drainage-impaired Corn Belt soils exceeds climate benefits of current efforts to increase soil carbon through agricultural management.”

“If we want to maximize our climate benefit, we want to be strategic about it,” Hall said. “We’re not simply going to flip the switch on climate just by putting more carbon in the soil. Nitrous oxide emissions need to be a priority as well.”

https://climateandcapitalism.com/2021/1 ... and-ozone/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: The Long Ecological Revolution

Post by blindpig » Fri Nov 12, 2021 2:44 pm

New draft of COP26 agreement includes unprecedented but weakened reference to fossil fuels
By Ivana Kottasová, Angela Dewan and Helen Regan, CNN

Updated 4:32 AM ET, Fri November 12, 2021
What does COP stand for? And your other burning questions answered

Glasgow, Scotland (CNN)A new version of the COP26 draft agreement was published early on Friday and retains an unprecedented reference to fossil fuels, despite a fierce campaign from major coal, oil and gas producers to have it removed entirely.

But the substance in this draft is weaker than the previous one, using watered down language, some of which can be open to interpretation.
The draft comes on the last day of the nearly two-week climate conference but is not final -- it will still need all 197 parties in attendance to agree to it, and further watering down is entirely possible.

Keeping some mention of fossil fuels, however, increases pressure on major coal, oil and gas producers like Saudi Arabia, China, Russia and Australia, which were trying to have the article on fossil fuels either weakened or removed, according to two sources familiar with the talks. Officials in all four countries did not respond to CNN's request for comment.

Pressure is now mounting on the fossil fuel producers to keep the language in.

The new text calls for the acceleration of "the phaseout of unabated coal power and of inefficient subsidies for fossil fuels."

The added word "unabated" essentially means countries could continue to use coal if they are able to capture large amounts of the carbon dioxide they emit. The concept is controversial as the technology to fully capture greenhouse gases is still in development. And "inefficient" was also added, leaving that part of the agreement fairly open to interpretation.

Nonetheless, if any line on fossil fules are kept, it would be the first Conference of the Parties climate agreement to make any mention of the role of coal, oil and gas, the biggest contributors to the human-made climate crisis.

"It's always a bit of a tradeoff. The fact that we've got the phaseout of fossil fuel subsidies and the phaseout of coal in the text is really new and important," Helen Mountford, vice president of climate and economics at the World Resources Institute, said in a briefing.

"The fact that they've added in 'unabated' in front of coal and 'inefficient' in front of fossil fuel subsidies, compared to the text a couple of days ago, is definitely going back to some more comfortable negotiated language in other fora. So I would expect that some countries like Saudi Arabia would have been pushing for adding the inefficient in front of the fossil fuel subsidies."

While it's progress on the political level, the agreement is far weaker than what scientists say is necessary for the world to contain global warming to 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels. The most recent UN climate science report showed that the world needs to nearly halve emissions over this decade to keep that limit within reach.

Watering down.

The language of the new draft agreement is softer compared to the first iteration in several sections. That is typically expected in climate negotiations, and the final agreement could be weaker still.

While the first draft of the agreement "urged" countries to come back with stronger emission-cutting targets by the end of next year, the new one merely "requests" them to do so.

And while the first draft "noted with serious concern" that money provided to developing countries to deal with the climate crisis was insufficient, the latest draft only omits the word "serious." The issue of who should pay for the impacts of the crisis has become the main sticking point in talks.
Calls for the world's richest countries to provide more money has strengthened somewhat in the second draft, however, putting in more specific deadlines and urging developed countries to at least double the amount of money the transfer to the developing world to help them adapt to the crisis by 2025.

Money for adaptation had become the main sticking point stalling talks.

The Friday draft agreement, published by the COP26 presidency, also retains language saying the world should be aiming to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.

The document "recognizes that the impacts of climate change will be much lower at the temperature increase of 1.5 °C compared to 2 °C and resolves to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 °C."

To do that, "rapid, deep and sustained reductions in global greenhouse gas emissions" are required, the document says. That language is in line with the latest science, which shows the world must limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels in order to avoid the climate crisis worsening and approaching a catastrophic scenario.

A key analysis published on Tuesday said the world is on track for 2.4 degrees of warming. That would mean the risks of extreme droughts, wildfires, floods, catastrophic sea level rise and food shortages would increase dramatically, scientists say.

https://www.cnn.com/2021/11/12/world/co ... index.html

Hmm, " two sources familiar with the talks"....while the US talks platitudes but it's business as usual back home.

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Dear friends,

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

Nothing useful seemed to emerge from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) at COP26 this week. The leaders of developed countries made tired speeches about their commitment to reversing the climate catastrophe. Their words rang with the clichés of spin doctors, their sincerity zero, their actual commitments to lowering carbon emissions nil. Mitzi Jonelle Tan, a Filipino climate activist and spokesperson for Fridays for Future, said that these leaders ‘spew empty, tired promises’, leaving young people like her with a ‘sense of betrayal’. As a child, she said, she felt the danger of being caught up in flash floods in the Philippines, floods that have terrible repercussions for high-risk countries. ‘There’s a climate trauma that young people experience’, said Tan, ‘yet the UNFCCC keeps us out’.



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The Pacific Climate Warriors at COP26 in Glasgow, 6 November 2021.



The youth-led Pacific Climate Warriors marched through rainswept Glasgow on 6 November, their flags of the South Pacific Islands fluttering in the fast wind. They were one amongst many groups from small island states and from areas with large populations of indigenous peoples who face great and urgent threats to their existence. ‘We don’t want your pity’, said Reverend James Bhagwan of the Pacific Climate Warriors. ‘We want action’.

War and its environmental discontents were also on the minds of many. From 1981–2000, the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp was set up as a permanent protest against the storage of Trident nuclear missiles in the United Kingdom. Alison Lochhead, a former resident of the Peace Camp, marched in Glasgow with determination. ‘Where will you now set up your camp?’ I asked her. ‘Across the world’, she replied – a world in which the United States military is the largest institutional polluter. Activist Myshele Haywood marched with her dog and a sign that read, ‘The global military is the world’s biggest polluter’. The other side of the sign read, ‘Oil is too precious to burn. Save it to make medicine, plastics, and other things’.



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Sonia Guajajara, executive coordinator of the Articulation of Indigenous Peoples of Brazil



On 7 November, during the COP26 Coalition People’s Summit, I was on the jury of The People’s Tribunal on the UNFCCC and its failure to address a range of issues. We heard from a range of rapporteurs and witnesses, each speaking with great feeling about the differential climate catastrophes on nature and on human life. Every minute, $11 million is spent to subsidise fossil fuels (that’s $5.9 trillion spent in 2020 alone); this money underwrites the cascading climate catastrophe, yet few funds are raised to mitigate the negative effects of fossil fuels or to transition to renewable forms of energy. The remainder of this newsletter details the findings of the Tribunal, which was comprised of Ambassador Lumumba Di-Aping (former Chief Climate Negotiator for the G77 and China), Katerina Anastasiou (Transform Europe), Samantha Hargreaves (WoMin African Alliance), Larry Lohmann (The Corner House), and me.



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Over a hundred thousand people gathered in the streets of Glasgow for the Global Day of Action. Photograph by Oliver Kornblihtt (Mídia NINJA).





The Verdict of The People’s Tribunal: People and Nature vs the UNFCCC
7 November 2021

There were six charges put before the Tribunal concerning the failures of the UNFCCC to:

• address the root causes of climate change;
• address global social and economic injustices;
• come up with appropriate climate finance for planetary and social survival, including the rights of future generations;
• create pathways to a just transition;
• regulate corporations and avoid the corporate capture of the UNFCCC process; and
• recognise, promote, and protect the Rights of Nature law.

The jury of five listened carefully to the special prosecutor, to the rapporteurs, and to the witnesses. We were unified in our conclusion that the UNFCCC, which was signed by 154 nations in 1992 and ratified by 197 countries by 1994, has utterly failed the peoples of the world and all species that rely on a healthy planet to survive by failing to stop climate change. This perilous inaction has failed to limit the increase of the average global temperature.

In its latest 2021 reports, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) found that the Earth has reached an average temperature increase of 1.1 degrees, while sub-Saharan Africa is close to breaching the ‘safe’ 1.5 degree mark.

The UNFCCC has forged an intimate partnership with the very corporations that have created the climate crisis. It has allowed powerful governments to threaten poor countries into submission, guaranteeing certain misery and death for hundreds of millions of people in the poorest parts of the world over the next two decades.

The UNFCCC’s inaction has permitted powerful oil, mining, agriculture, logging, aviation, fishing, and other corporations to continue their carbon intensive activities unfettered. This has contributed to a growing biodiversity crisis: recent estimates suggest that anywhere from 2,000 species (at the low end) to 100,000 species (at the high end) are being exterminated each year. The UNFCCC is implicated in mass extinction.

The UNFCCC has refused to democratise the process and to listen to those on the frontlines of the crisis. This includes the one billion children who live in the 33 countries that are at ‘extremely high risk’ due to the climate crisis – in other words, almost half of the world’s 2.2 billion children – as well as indigenous communities and working-class and peasant women from the countries and nations that bear the brunt of a crisis that they did not produce.

As the world confronts a rapidly escalating climate crisis – evidenced by flooding, droughts, cyclones, hurricanes, rising sea levels, furious fires, and new pandemics – the poorest, most vulnerable, and highly indebted nations are owed a great climate debt.

Powerful nations in the UNFCCC have forced a rollback on earlier commitments to global redress for the long history of unequal and uneven development between nations. Developed countries pledged $100 billion per year for the climate fund but they have failed to provide that money, thereby neglecting their own commitments. Instead, developed countries plough trillions of dollars into their own national efforts to mitigate the impacts of climate change and support adaptation to a warming climate, while the poorest and most heavily indebted nations are left to fend for themselves.

We, the jury, find that the UNFCCC violated the UN Charter, which demands that UN members states ‘take effective collective measures for the prevention and removal of threats to peace’ (Chapter 1). The Charter charges states ‘to achieve international cooperation in solving international problems’.

The UNFCCC has also violated Chapter IX of the UN Charter, ignoring Article 55’s demand to create ‘conditions of stability and well-being’ as well as ‘economic progress and social progress’ and to promote ‘universal respect for, and observance of, human rights.’ Furthermore, the UNFCCC has violated Article 56, which enjoins member states to take ‘joint and separate action in cooperation’ with the UN.

We, the jury of the People’s Tribunal, find the UNFCCC guilty of the charges made by the special prosecutor and established by the witnesses. In light of our sentence, we claim the following measures of redress for the peoples of the world:

1. The discredited and unrepresentative UNFCCC must be disbanded in its current form and reconstituted from the ground up. The new people-led global Climate Forum must first and foremost be democratic and centre those carrying the fallout of the environmental and climate collapse. The polluters of our Earth cannot be part of a Climate Forum which serves people and the planet first.
2. Historically developed countries must fully finance the bill to end carbon emissions and pay the climate debt owed to the peoples of the Global South; such action is necessary to help the most impacted populations mitigate the worst of the climate fallout and adapt to a rapidly warming climate. There is a specific debt owed to working women in the Global South, who have worked harder and longer hours to support their households as they navigate the unfolding crisis. Such debts must be settled through democratic, people-centred mechanisms which circumvent corrupt states and corporations that are currently profiteering from the crisis.
3. Illicit financial flows must be cut off and immediately expropriated to fund climate adaptation and just transitions in formerly colonised nations. These illicit financial flows have resulted in the theft of $88.6 billion from Africa per year, while up to $32 trillion sits in illegal tax havens.
4. Global military spending – nearly $2 trillion in 2020 alone, amounting to trillions over past decades – must be converted to fund climate justice initiatives. Similarly, the odious and illegitimate debt of poor nations must be identified and cancelled. This would free up significant national revenues to build the infrastructure, services, and supports that will allow billions of people to navigate the climate emergency. The vast sums of money spent on the national security plans of wealthy nations, which aim to shield those nations responsible for the vast majority of pollution from those fleeing climate change-induced catastrophes, must be similarly diverted to support the peoples of the Global South.
5. A transformed and representative UN General Assembly must call a special session on reparations for ecological and climate debt, damages related to slavery and colonialism, and the reproductive debt owed to women in the Global South.
6. This People’s Tribunal must hold the UNFCCC to account for its crimes against nature and people through legal action.
7. The UN Binding Treaty on Transnational Corporations and Human Rights affirms not only the obligation of transnational corporations to respect all human rights, but also the rights of states to provide protections against human rights violations committed by transnational corporations. In addition, the treaty affirms human rights over the interests of trade and investment treaties and provides for the free, prior, informed, and continuous consent of communities confronting corporate-driven ‘development’ projects.
8. The UN General Assembly must open a special session on ‘trade liberalisation’ and ‘market technologies’, thoroughly examining their negative impacts on agriculture, biodiversity, and ecosystems, and the way that they create and reproduce the crisis.
9. The UN General Assembly must immediately hold a hearing on the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth.



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Ana Pessoa, Black Lives Matter/ ‘It’s time to reconnect’, 2021.



The Marshall Islands, a chain of coral atolls and volcanic islands, is one of fourteen countries in Oceania that is greatly threatened by rising sea levels. Recent studies show that 96% of Majuro, the capital, is at risk of frequent flooding while 37% of the city’s existing buildings face ‘permanent inundation’ in the absence of any form of adaptation.

In 2014, Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner, a Marshallese poet, wrote a rousing poem for her seven-year-old daughter Matefele Peinam:

… there are thousands out on the street
marching with signs
hand in hand
chanting for change NOW

and they’re marching for you, baby
they’re marching for us

because we deserve to do more than just
survive
we deserve
to thrive …


Warmly,

Vijay

https://thetricontinental.org/newslette ... -tribunal/

A couple of photographs had to be substituted.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: The Long Ecological Revolution

Post by blindpig » Sat Nov 13, 2021 2:51 pm

Bill Dores: Wall Street and the Pentagon, not China, pose the largest climate threat
November 11, 2021 Struggle - La Lucha

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The U.S. has just experienced its deadliest wildfires in history.

Press TV

Political analyst and activist Bill Dores says Washington’s “attempt to frame China for the world climate crisis is one of the most hypocritical acts in history,” as the United States is the source of the deadliest corporate and military assault on the planet in history, not China.

Dores, a writer for Struggle-La Lucha and longtime antiwar activist, made the remarks in an interview with Press TV on Thursday after Democrats in the United States House of Representatives and Senate called on U.S. President Joe Biden to use targeted sanctions to punish individuals and companies that are worsening the global climate crisis.

In a letter to U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen last week, Democratic lawmakers particularly targeted China and its companies despite the fact that studies show that the U.S. military is the largest consumer of hydrocarbons on the planet and one of the largest polluters in history.

According to the New York Times, the United States has contributed more than any other country to the atmospheric carbon dioxide that is scorching the planet.

Senators Ed Markey (D-Mass), Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Rep. Veronica Escobar (D-Texas), who signed on the letter, called on the Biden administration to target individuals and companies “that are perpetrating the worst climate damage.”

Following is the complete text of Dores’s comment to Press TV:

U.S. hypocrisy on looming climate disaster

Washington’s attempt to frame China for the world climate crisis is one of the most hypocritical acts in history. It is also one of the most dangerous. It is a deliberate effort to sabotage the international cooperation needed to prevent looming climate disaster. And it is a step toward war, the ultimate environmental destroyer.

Fracking industry agent Donald Trump claimed that climate change is a “hoax created by and for the Chinese.” Joe Biden admits the climate crisis is real but seeks to blame it on China. Some U.S. senators even say China should be sanctioned for its alleged environmental misdeeds.

What mendacity! China leads the world in renewable energy production, reforestation, electric vehicles, high-speed rail and solar panel manufacture.

In recent years, China has surpassed the U.S. in overall carbon emissions. But China is the largest country in the world. It has nearly five times the population of the United States. Its per capita emissions are less than half those of the U.S.. And it has a concrete strategy to seriously reduce them.

Meanwhile, the watered-down infrastructure bill passed by Congress gifts tens of billions of dollars to the U.S. fossil fuel industry. That’s not surprising considering 28 U.S. senators are directly invested in fossil fuel companies. And that 11 lawyers for ExxonMobil helped to write the bill.

The Trump regime imposed tariffs on Chinese-made solar panels at the behest of his oil company bosses. Biden has outright banned the import of Chinese-made solar panels.

The White House claims Chinese solar panels are made with forced labor. Yet the racist U.S. prison-industrial complex is the biggest exploiter of forced labor in the world. Imagine how many jobs installing those panels could create for workers here.

If Washington were really concerned about human rights, it could stop sending cops and marshals to attack the Water Protectors, Native activists and their allies defending their land against fracking and pipelines. They have been gassed, clubbed, shot and jailed by federal and state agents in the U.S. and Canada. Under HR1374, a law now before Congress, state agents would be authorized to murder anti-pipeline protesters.

Biden seeks to weaponize the climate crisis

Trump denied the climate crisis. Biden seeks to weaponize it. Though their tactics be different, they share one object: To try and restore the stranglehold the U.S. corporate ruling class once had on the world economy.

For decades, Washington and Wall Street used their power to strangle economic development in Africa, Asia and Latin America. They kept themselves at the center of the world economy by keeping most of the world impoverished. Meanwhile, U.S. companies poisoned the air with abandon.

Greenhouse gases don’t go away. At least 25 percent of those that now fill the atmosphere are made in the U.S. That doesn’t count the output of the offshore operations of U.S.-owned corporations.

For decades after World War II, U.S. corporations owned most of the world’s known oil reserves. That was key to U.S. global power. They purposely kept oil-rich countries “underdeveloped” and dependent on selling oil. Today Washington tries to achieve that with war and sanctions.

In the 1970s and 1980s, oil-producing countries began to take back ownership of their own resources. The Libyan Revolution of 1969, the Iraqi nationalizations of 1972 and the especially the Iranian Revolution of 1979 were catalysts in this process.

In 1991, as soon as the Cold War ended, the U.S. went to war against oil-producing countries. Under different names and pretexts, that imperialist war has raged for 30 years. It has destroyed millions of lives and cost trillions of dollars. The climate is also a victim.

U.S. war machine is the most polluting institution on earth

From 2001 to 2017, the U.S. military poured 1.6 billion metric tons of carbon into the atmosphere. At least 400 million tons of that came from U.S. military operations in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan and Syria.

The U.S. war machine, with its massive global operations, is the most polluting institution on earth. In 2017, it unleashed 60 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide into the air. That was more than the individual output of 140 countries. Every year it dumps 750,000 tons of toxic waste-depleted uranium, oil, jet fuels, pesticides, defoliants, lead and other chemicals into our air, water and soil.

The U.S. Army’s M1 Abrams Main Battle Tank uses nearly 4 gallons of fuel per mile. An Air Force B2 bomber burns at least 4.2 gallons of jet fuel per mile and has to be refueled every six hours. In the so-called “war on terror,” B2 bombers flew 44 hours from Missouri and Nebraska to rain bombs on people in Iraq and Afghanistan. But the biggest waste of energy is the constant transport of troops, weapons and supplies around the world.

When the Clinton administration signed the Kyoto climate agreement in 1997, it insisted the U.S. military be exempt from the treaty’s restrictions.

Washington’s 30-year oil war had another devastating impact on our planet’s climate. It unleashed the “shale oil revolution” that has made the U.S. the world’s No. 1 fossil fuel producer.

U.S. fracking industry poisons the earth

After the U.S. invaded Iraq, Corporate America pumped hundreds of billions of dollars into fracking-the hydraulic fracturing of oil and gas from shale rock. War and sanctions against oil-producing countries created a triple-digit energy price bubble that made these huge investments seem profitable. They stimulated the plunder of Canada’s tar sands, the DAPL and Enbridge 3 pipelines and mountaintop removal projects in Appalachia.

Fracking not only poisons the earth and water, it unleashes much more methane than conventional drilling. The collapse of the fracking boom has left many of these wells abandoned. There are over 3 million abandoned oil and gas wells across the United States. At least 2 million are unplugged and gushing out methane and other chemicals.

Plugging those wells and reclaiming the land around them would create a lot more jobs than fracking and pipelines do. So would investing in renewable energy, reforestation, mass transit and high-speed rail instead of war.

Attacking China over climate change is a red herring. If Washington is serious about preventing environmental disaster, it should end the U.S. corporate and military assault on the planet. To make that happen will take a people’s struggle against corporate power.

End the wars and sanctions. Bring home all the troops, war fleets and warplanes. Invest that money in renewable energy, expanding mass transit systems, affordable high-speed rail and reforestation. And to help poorer countries do the same. Those things could create millions of high-paying jobs. Ban fracking and shut down the DAPL and Enbridge pipelines. The sky is the limit when the needs of humanity are put before corporate profit.

Source: Press TV

https://www.struggle-la-lucha.org/2021/ ... te-threat/

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COP26 negotiators rush to get deal
By ANGUS MCNEICE in Glasgow | China Daily | Updated: 2021-11-13 08:29


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A person walks past a projection during the UN Climate Change Conference (COP26) in Glasgow, Scotland, Britain, November 1, 2021. [Photo/Agencies]

COP26 President Alok Sharma released early on Friday morning the second draft of a Glasgow agreement on climate action, which included an expression of "deep regret" over climate finance failures and adjusted language on coal and fossil fuels.

Sharma then engaged in a maelstrom of mediation, visiting dozens of national delegations in a bid to get the agreement over the line on the final day of the 26th United Nations Climate Change Conference of the Parties, or COP26.

The new draft included several important tweaks to an earlier version and included for the first time a call to phase out coal use and end fossil fuel subsidies this decade. The latest version of the text softened this language, and now applies to "inefficient" fuel subsidies and "unabated" coal projects. Unabated means that a plant has not invested in abating technology, such as carbon capture and storage.

Several campaigners took issue with this updated language, arguing that the qualifier "inefficient" presents loopholes and that abated coal projects still produce emissions. Greenpeace International Executive Director Jennifer Morgan said the agreement is now "critically weakened".

However, negotiators from several developing nations contend that the first draft unfairly shifted responsibility onto poor nations from rich ones, at a time when climate finance commitments remain unfulfilled.

A group of more than 20 nations, including China, which have formed the Like Minded-Group of Developing Countries, or the LMDC, had questioned how countries without well-developed clean energy infrastructure were supposed to make a rapid low-carbon transition when rich countries still had not delivered on a promise to raise $100 billion in annual climate finance.

"Under the Paris Agreement finance is an obligation, finance is not charity to developing countries from the developed world," Bolivian negotiator Diego Pacheco Balanza said on Thursday, speaking on behalf of the LMDC.

China's special climate envoy, Xie Zhenhua, said last week that the missed target had severely impacted mutual trust between negotiators.

The new draft of the agreement expressed "deep regret" that finance goals had not been reached and "urged" rich nations to deliver the annual $100 billion "urgently" through 2025.

The draft also called on nations to raise their emissions reduction targets by 2022, a recognition that current pledges are not sufficient to keep the average rise in global temperature to within 2 C and 1.5 C, a target laid out in the Paris Agreement six years ago. The agreement urged action from nations that have not done so to deliver in 2022 updated emissions reduction targets and netzero plans.

On Thursday, United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said governments need to step up action heading into the last day of COP26.

COP26 has delivered some notable deals on deforestation, fossil fuel subsidies, coal and methane reduction, and engagement with the private and finance sectors.

"But they are far from enough," Guterres said on Thursday. "The emissions gap remains a devastating threat. The finance and adaptation gap represents a glaring injustice for the developing world."

Negotiations over Article 6 of the Paris Agreement, which concerns carbon markets and remains unfinished, continue to cause controversy.

In a carbon market, countries that have exceeded emissions reduction targets can sell carbon credits to other nations or firms.

http://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/20211 ... 751fb.html

The carbon market scam, like 'net zero', are Western capital's schemes to continue raking in the dough and maintaining geo-political dominance while the world burns. Capitalists are top tier criminals in the War Against Earth & Humanity.

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Amazon Deforestation Records Reveal The Truth About Bolsonaro

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Extinction Rebellion activists protest against the destruction of the Amazon, U.K., Nov. 12, 2021. | Photo: Twitter/ @AmplifyXR

Published 12 November 2021 (19 hours 25 minutes ago)

Since Jair Bolsonaro came to power, deforestation rates have skyrocketed. Brazilian net emissions of carbon dioxide equivalent increased from 1,970 million tons in 2019 to 2,160 million tons in 2020.

Amid the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26), Greenpeace and other international organizations denounced that the Brazilian Amazon's deforestation grew by 5 percent during the last year, a figure that seriously questions the statements of the President Jair Bolsonaro's delegates.

On Thursday, the Brazilian National Institute for Space Research (INPE) published data showing that the world's largest rainforest lost 877 square kilometers in October. This figure represents an increase of 5 percent compared to the loss of 836 square kilometers recorded in October 2020.

In the last two years, some 8,000 kilometers of forest have been lost in the first 10 months of each year as a result of business activities carried out in the Amazon. These unfortunate figures were denounced to the international community on the day in which world leaders seek to reach an agreement to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees during this century.

Despite the evidence, Brazilian officials vow the Bolsonaro administration has lowered deforestation rates through control and surveillance campaigns. They also dared to argue that Brazil will eliminate illegal deforestation by 2028 and reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 50 percent in 2030.
Gennaro Carotenuto
@GenCar5
Txai Suruí, la giovane indigena del Rondonia di 24 anni, studentessa di diritto, che ha rappresentato i popoli amazzonici a #Glasgow alla
@COP26
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Michela Murgia and 5 others
8:09 AM · Nov 11, 2021·Twitter for iPad
, e per questo insultata brutalmente da #Bolsonaro, vive da quel momento sotto minaccia. Lei risponde: “i popoli indigeni vivono così”.
The tweet reads, "Txai Surui, the 24-year-old Indigenous law student from Rondonia, who was brutally insulted by Bolsonaro for representing the Amazonian peoples at COP26 in Glasgow, has lived under threat ever since. She replied, 'Indigenous peoples live like this, threatened'."

"Emission reductions happen on the forest floor, not in Glasgow plenaries," Climate Observatory Secretary Marcio Astrini said outraged at claims from a government which has given free rein to land grabbers, loggers, and miners.

"While the Bolsonaro administration tries to sell Brazil as a 'green superpower' at COP26, October deforestation broke another record, which has been driven by anti-environmental policies promoted by the President and the Environmental Ministry with the support of Congress," the Greenpeace Amazon Campaign spokesperson, Roberto Batista, pointed out and recalled the violence that the far-right politician deploys against Indigenous peoples.

Since Bolsonaro came to power in January 2019, deforestation rates in the Brazilian Amazon have skyrocketed towards levels not seen since 2002. Brazilian net emissions of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) increased from 1,970 million tons in 2019 to 2,160 million tons in 2020. The former Capitan, however, defends resource depletion arguing his country needs economic growth.

https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/Ama ... -0008.html
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: The Long Ecological Revolution

Post by blindpig » Mon Nov 15, 2021 1:58 pm

Image
Climate activists protesting during the official final day of the Cop26 summit in Glasgow

COP26 was a failure. But the people’s alternative can still be a success

Originally published: Morning Star Online by Morning Star Online Desk (November 2021 ) | - Posted Nov 15, 2021

Has COP26, which has wound up in Glasgow after two weeks of political showboating and grassroots protest, been a failure?

In one sense the answer is yes. Lobbying by fossil fuel interests has seriously weakened proposals to phase out subsidies for coal, oil and gas.

The richest nations tried to present themselves as climate saviours while shunting the blame onto developing countries: witness the way U.S. President Joe Biden accused China of “a lack of urgency” on global warming when U.S. emissions per head are more than twice China’s and will still be higher than China’s and India’s put together even if Washington meets all its 2030 reduction targets–which it won’t, if the trouble Biden’s green infrastructure legislation has run into in the U.S. Senate is any guide.

There have been impressive-sounding pledges on financial assistance to the developing world; but these may share the fate of the 2009 promise to offer $100 billion (£75bn) a year to help global South countries adapt to the threat of climate change.

The sum has not been met. It is dwarfed by the more than $3 trillion in subsidies G20 countries have provided for fossil fuel industries since 2015, or for that matter the $750bn spent by the United States on its military over the last year.

If the agreement sounds like too little, too late, the reality is worse, because the politicians signing up cannot be trusted.

Brazil has signed up to ending deforestation by 2030: yet under President Jair Bolsonaro this is accelerating, not slowing. This August we learned an area seven times the size of greater London had been felled in the last year alone, the worst assault on the Amazon in a decade.

Indonesia combines the same promise with plans to double palm oil production in the next decade: presumably if it is serious about retiring the chainsaws in 2030 that’s because it doesn’t expect there to be any forest left.

Indigenous representatives placing the blame on colonialism have a point, and the destruction goes alongside trampling on indigenous rights from Brazil to India, where the Narendra Modi government perversely claims conservation as a reason to expel adivasis from their ancestral lands–depicting them, without evidence, as a threat to endangered wildlife–before awarding logging and mining contracts in the “protected” areas.

The “too little, too late” narrative is misleading because it implies governments are acting to address climate change but need to get their skates on. In fact the world’s wealthiest countries show no sign of abandoning business as usual.

The reason is obvious: an economic system that rewards short-term profit over long-term sustainability cannot reconcile itself to the logic of “keep it in the ground.”

And as capitalism has evolved it has become shorter and shorter-term in outlook: the length of time investors hang onto shares has been shrinking for decades, from around eight years in 1960 to just five months by 2020, incentivising reckless asset-stripping and plunder over long-term resource management.

This is not a system which is capable of addressing climate change, so the summit was a failure. Real action requires taking public control of the economy and removing “investors’” profits from the equation.

Yet the other summit–the mass demonstrations, the trade union and NGO meetings, the climate activists who joined striking workers on picket lines–can still be a success.

Unity between the labour movement and demonstrators for ecological and social justice is a precondition for transformative change. Only organised labour can challenge the power of capital: and a broad-based anti-monopolies alliance of unions with community and campaigning organisations could carry real political weight.

Since the defeat of Corbynism in 2019 the Establishment has done its best to silence or belittle anyone who believes that another world is possible. But the riotous “alternative” Cop26 shows that millions still do.

https://mronline.org/2021/11/15/cop26-w ... a-success/

Italics added.

Opposition is one thing, the easy thing. Organizing that opposition under the banner of socialism, the proven and absolutely necessary alternative, has yet to manifest. This is cowardice and petty booj class interest and leave the movement for survival vague, without focus and thus less robust in the argument for the future. ('you say what you are against, but what are you for?')

Socialism or barbarism!

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China matching green words with eco deeds
By XU WEI | chinadaily.com.cn | Updated: 2021-11-14 02:59

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A wind-power plant in Zhoushan, Zhejiang province. [Photo by Yao Feng/For China Daily]

Experts say nation honors commitments, willing to 'walk the walk' in climate fight

China has matched its climate change mitigation commitments with a detailed road map and slew of concrete actions, and the nation has risen to the challenge of transitioning to green energy, officials and experts have said.

They commented in response to criticism from some Western nations as the 26th United Nations Climate Change Conference of the Parties, or COP26, in Glasgow, Scotland drew to a close on Friday.

In his written statement to the COP26, President Xi Jinping reiterated the need to focus on concrete actions in response to the climate crisis, saying that China will foster a green, low-carbon, and circular economic system at a faster pace, press ahead with industrial structure adjustment, and rein in the irrational growth of energy-intensive and high-emissions projects.

"Visions will come true only when we act on them," he said. "We will speed up the transition to green and low-carbon energy, vigorously develop renewable energy, and plan and build large wind and photovoltaic power stations."

Analysts said the scale and depth of China's climate actions are unprecedented, even as the world's second-largest economy and largest developing country is faced with an equally urgent task to keep up economic growth and raise people's living standards.

"In a sense, China is still in its early youth in terms of economic growth. But the nation has already taken up the responsibility of a grown-up in its climate actions," said Zhang Yuquan, an associate professor at the China-UK Low-Carbon College at Shanghai Jiaotong University.

"The nation has risen up to the arduous challenges by rolling out a portfolio of policy measures, and involving both the public sector and the market to join the actions. China now has a clear pathway to a decarbonized future."

In the follow-up to his announcement last year that China will peak carbon emission before 2030 and attain carbon neutrality before 2060, Xi presided over several key meetings to lay out a policy framework for the climate response actions.

A meeting of the Central Committee for Financial and Economic Affairs, chaired by Xi in March, mapped out a host of measures to help the nation to honor its climate commitments.

A master working guideline was unveiled last month, aiming to elevate energy efficiency to an advanced international level, and lift non-fossil energy consumption to more than 80 percent of the whole by 2060.

The State Council, China's Cabinet, published a concrete action plan last month for peaking carbon emission before 2030, which includes specific targets for different sectors as the nation forges ahead to phase out coal consumption and increase renewable energy.

Together, the policy documents would form a 1+N policy system that would provide a road map the country needs to follow, including tasks for key sectors.

Xie Zhenhua, China's special climate envoy, said at a media briefing on the sidelines of COP26 that distant targets and slogans are far from enough, and clear road maps coupled with transformation in the economy and society, as well as innovation and cooperation, can truly solve the problems.

"China is not only talking the talk, but also walking the walk. We have not only set the targets, but also determined the corresponding policy measures, actions and investments," he said. "We have timetables and road maps. We honor every commitment we have made, and that can truly speak volumes for the level of actions."

State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi also underscored China's concrete actions in its climate fight, saying that China is not only a serious-minded and responsible participant in the process of tackling climate change, but also, more importantly, a doer that keeps feet on the ground.

In addition to policy initiatives already rolled out to support the climate actions, the nation is vigorously developing renewable energy, with 15 of the world's top 20 photovoltaic companies and all of the top five being Chinese, he told Spain's Foreign Minister Jose Manuel Albares Bueno in a meeting via video link last week.

He added that seven of the world's top 10 wind power companies are Chinese, and the nation has phased out 120 million kilowatts of installed coal-fired power generation capacity during the past decade, more than the United Kingdom's existing total installed capacity.

China has topped the global new-energy vehicle market since 2015, and the nation's forest coverage rose sharply, from a mere 8.6 percent in 1949 to 23.04 percent by the end of 2020, according to official statistics.

Wang stressed that going green will not happen overnight but should be planned scientifically and pursued in an orderly and progressive fashion.

The nation's challenges in transitioning to green energy were highlighted in a wide-ranging power shortage in September and last month, which even resulted in outages in residential communities and hospitals in parts of Northeast China.

He Yun, an associate professor at Hunan University, who has closely followed the climate crisis, said China has pledged to achieve carbon neutrality only 30 years after its carbon emissions peak — a much shorter span than the European Union, United States, and Japan.

"This would call for the world's fastest-growing economy to cut its economy from fossil fuels, and accelerate its clean-energy investments at a pace few had dared believe was possible," she said.

Other analysts said China's climate ambitions were fully demonstrated in its 14th Five-Year Plan (2021-25), which stipulated that the nation must cut energy consumption per unit of GDP by 13.5 percent, and carbon dioxide emissions per unit of GDP by 18 percent, in the next five years.

"Six of the eight binding targets in the 14th Five-Year Plan are related to the environment. That shows a strong emphasis from the central government on the climate targets. It will also give people confidence in China's all-out efforts over reaching these goals," said Dimitri De Boer, chief representative for China of environmental law organization ClientEarth, and team leader of the EU-China Environment Project.

De Boer noted that China's economy has had a strong reliance on carbon-intensive sectors, and the nation's economy is now faced with downside pressure, which has brought about greater challenges to carbon reduction efforts.

"Despite the challenges, the nation has brought the approvals of programs with high energy consumption and high emissions under effective policy control, and the overall carbon emission appear to be reaching a plateau," he said.

He added that China's "1+N" climate action plan has set a strong, overarching policy framework for the peaking, and subsequent constant reductions, of carbon emissions, and the nation must prioritize efforts to bring all key stakeholders, including local governments, businesses, and the public, on board going forward.

"There is a need for greater public awareness of the climate crisis, so that the whole society can take part in the transformation," he said.

http://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/20211 ... 75317.html
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Re: The Long Ecological Revolution

Post by blindpig » Thu Nov 18, 2021 2:48 pm

COP26: Greenwashing and Plutocratic Misadventures
​​​​​​​ Ajamu Baraka, BAR editor and columnist 17 Nov 2021

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COP26: Greenwashing and Plutocratic Misadventures

For all the policy failures of COP26 it may actually be an inflection point in history -- a point where social and political conditions force a transformation of consciousness and politics that can usher in epochal change.

COP 26 reaffirmed what has been obvious from the beginning: the Northern colonial and capitalist states most responsible for creating the climate crisis are unwilling to place people before profits in order to address the planet’s looming ecological collapse and humanitarian catastrophe.

We need justice. But that word -- Justice! -- despite all of the philosophical pontificating from John Locke to John Rawls, is a concept incompatible with the rapacious civilizational logic of a colonial/capitalist system based on self-interest, greed, and social Darwinism. Yet, without a firm commitment to the institutionalization of a just world order in which the gifts of mother-earth are equally shared along with respect for the earth and its natural order, the evidence is now irrefutable - human society will not survive.

The elementary logic of this observation suggests the necessity for a radical divergence from production processes, consumption patterns, destructive relationships to the natural world and degrading social relationships, is denied by powerful Northern capitalist countries.

What does this mean? It means that the appeals to reforms, finance and rationality coming out of the COP process are not enough to overcome the entrenched short-term interests of the international capitalist plutocrats.

It means recognizing that the fight for climate and environmental justice is in fact a revolutionary project, requiring mass-global resistance and the expropriation of economic and political power of finance and corporate capital. Without this recognition, the COP process will continue to be nothing more than a public relations stunt geared to convincing the public that green capitalism and saving the planet are compatible.

In his piece that appears in this special edition, Anthony Rogers-Wright points out that “the cataclysms of the interlinked crises of COVID and climate change were elucidated this past year in ways that cannot be repudiated.” That is true. But there were other connections that were made that are transforming the consciousness of peoples in the global South and the nationally oppressed and workers within the core capitalist nations that were exposed during the COVID crisis. The most immediate connection being that the lives of ordinary people mean nothing to the lords of capital.

At the height of the COVID outbreak nations in the global South experienced the consequence of disrupted global production and supply chains in ways even more severe than the economic disruptions that caused so much suffering among workers and the poor in the Northern nations.

With massive unemployment and stretched state budgets trying to provide minimum economic support to their populations and healthcare systems ravaged by structural adjustment policies imposed on them by the colonial powers, nations in the global South attempting to survive-- but without the ability of the US to print money that is accepted as a global currency --asked the Northern nations to suspend, just postpone, not forgive their overwhelming debt payments during the covid crisis. They were rebuffed.

COVID revealed the hidden reality of the dictatorship of capital and the fact that no lives matter to capitalists beyond their ability to provide labor or buy capitalist products. Those revelations explain why the comforting rhetoric of liberal reformism that mollified some activists involved in the COP process in the past is no longer working.

COP26 might be a turning point. One of those inflection points in history where conditions force a transformation of consciousness and thus a new politics that can usher in epochal change.

In Glasgow, the people saw how the colonial gangsters lobbied to weaken proposals to phase out subsidies for coal, oil, and gas. The people understood clearly what was really being said and what kinds of interest were really important when the powerful tried to explain why the target of a measly 100 billion a year to assist the nations who were not even responsible for the climate crisis was not realized. Especially when the people were aware that these same G20 nations who could not meet their obligations had subsidized fossil fuel industries to the tune of 3 trillion dollars just since 2015.

Radicalization occurs when all of the liberal options are proven to be untenable and unsupportable by objective reality. A political crisis for the continued rule of capital is being produced by the imposition of debt, the subversion of democratic projects, the militarism and wars, the environmental destruction, and the exploitation of resources and labor by capitalist nations.

It is this realization that is reflected in new forms of resistance and a steeled opposition, especially among the young, from indigenous, nationally oppressed, and racialized colonized peoples that are inoculated against the liberal obscurantism that has dominated so many of these global gatherings and resulted in so many being funneled into liberal reformism.

Imperialism, in the historic form of the Pan-European colonial/capitalist white supremacist patriarchy is the enemy. This is a revelation and a position that the internationalist African revolutionary movement recognized some time ago. It is an affirmation of the correctness of that position that so many, while not yet using those terms, have, nevertheless, come to understand that unless we disarm the colonial/capitalist West, we are all doomed.

https://www.blackagendareport.com/cop26 ... adventures

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Climate Action Pretense at COP26
Margaret Kimberley, BAR Executive Editor and Senior Columnist 17 Nov 2021

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Climate Action Pretense at COP26

Joe Biden’s presence at COP26 was a photo opportunity giving the impression that he is fighting the climate crisis. But the U.S. and other governments continue carbon production while pretending to take action and ignore the needs of the Global South who suffer at the hands of the rich nations


The 26th Conference of the Parties, COP26, climate summit ended with its president fighting back tears. Alok Sharma came to Glasgow, Scotland hoping for an agreement to end the extraction of coal. Instead he said this, “I apologize for the way this process has unfolded. I am deeply sorry.”

The international climate conferences are a perennial disappointment to anyone who understands the depth of the world wide catastrophe. Every year the rich capitalist nations find a way to undermine the process and consign millions of people to misery and devastation. Activists from all over the world gather in an effort to have an impact on the process, but they are literally outnumbered by fossil fuel lobbyists who always get what they want.

This conference ended with an agreement to “phase down” the use of coal instead of phasing it out altogether. Phasing down is deliberately ambiguous and makes a mockery of the 2015 Paris meeting which ended with an agreement to allow a temperature increase of no more than 1.5˚C. The fact that climate agreements allow world temperatures to rise is but one indication that the process falls far short from what the world needs.

Yet the seemingly small 1.5˚C will have devastating consequences, with droughts and storms bringing catastrophe to millions of people. The can is always kicked down the road and the final agreement is a sham.

The political duopoly in the United States behaves as it always does with phony heroes and phony villains as in professional wrestling. Republicans refuse to participate in climate agreements, democrats show up for the cameras, but only to fool the rubes into thinking that something important is being accomplished.

It doesn’t matter if democrats show up at COP26 if they refuse to respond to elephants in the room. The United States military is the world’s biggest polluter but its carbon production, and that of other nations’ forces, are exempt from climate goals. When a journalist asked Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other congressional leaders about military spending and its role in climate change, it was clear they had never considered the issue at all. They were shocked to be asked a question which showed a direct relationship between their actions and global warming and then responded with nonsense. They said the military, which contributes to climate change, needs money to respond to the climate change it causes by its very existence. Why does it matter that George W. Bush and Donald Trump withdrew from previous climate agreements if democrats follow in their footsteps and ignore even the flimsy goals it asked the U.S. to meet?

Joe Biden appeared in Glasgow but no one should be impressed. Like his predecessors he has opened public lands to oil drilling. Keeping temperature rise to 1.5˚C requires that carbon emissions be cut in half. If the United States were serious there would be no fossil fuel extraction on public lands. It would have to end altogether.

The U.S. is not the only nation keeping the status quo as the world heads toward a cliff. Brazil and Indonesia continue massive deforestation for logging and cash crop production but claim they will adhere to the agreement requiring the practice to end by 2030. Apparently they plan to destroy all of their forests before that time and then pat themselves on the back because they are no longer killing trees. India insisted on watering the coal extraction language, but if other nations had been serious they would have spoken up and demanded an end to the world wide coal industry. India agreed to be the bad cop in this story. The G20 nations have subsidized fossil fuel production to the tune of $3 trillion just since 2015. Clearly the U.S. is not alone in its subterfuge.

Meanwhile the need to compensate the Global South for environmental damage is placed on the back burner of priorities. In 2009 rich nations promised to pay $100 billion per year for five years beginning in 2020. There is no mechanism to do this and the final COP26 agreement only includes a promise to continue discussing a problem which is already clearly understood.

The movement needed to fight for climate justice must be massive and international in scope. The first order of business is to understand the manipulations and duplicity that COP26 and prior agreements have engendered. Kyoto, Paris and now Glasgow are not the saviors they pretended to be. They are in fact the obstacles.

https://www.blackagendareport.com/clima ... ense-cop26

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A Dirty Occupation: The UN’s Criminal Enterprise and Ecological Catastrophe in Haiti
Jemima Pierre, BAR Editor and Columnist 17 Nov 2021

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UN tanker truck offloading the raw sewage of MINUSTAH Peacekeepers at Morne Cabrit sewage treatment plant in January 2013. Photo: Isabeau Doucet

What are the environmental and ecological impacts of large-scale military occupations by the United Nations “peacekeeping” missions? The deadly cholera epidemic unleashed on the Haitian people by UN soldiers is an extension of a totality of violence - material, political, and ecological – enacted by a presumably humanitarian peacekeeping mission.

When we consider the current ecological threat to the earth and its inhabitants, we cannot forget the outsized place of war and empire in exacerbating climate change and enabling environmental catastrophe. The ongoing United Nations occupation of Haiti provides an example. As does the introduction of a cholera epidemic by UN soldiers. Cholera is an extension of the totality of violence - material, political, and ecological – enacted by a presumably humanitarian peacekeeping mission.

Do people ever wonder how a tiny island nation such as Haiti handles the environmental consequences of a multi-year, multi-billion-dollar foreign military occupation which, at any given time, had between 6000 and 12,000 military troops and police stationed in Haiti alongside thousands of civilian personnel? We know, for instance, that the U.S. military – with its vast global infrastructure of cargo planes, container ships, trucks, and drones to supply its operations in 800 military bases, as well as its arsenal of weapons and ammunition – is the largest polluter on the planet. What are the environmental and ecological impacts of a large-scale military occupation by the United Nations?

A report from 2008 calculated that UN military occupations are responsible for more than half of the organization’s climate footprint. Another study reveals that a mission of 15,000 occupying troops produces “about 11,000 tons of solid waste a year, not including the waste resulting from the use of ammunition, the development and changing state of the land used by the UN bases, water use, and emissions.” That same report tells us that “the average Malian generates 237.3 kilograms of waste per year, while a UN peacekeeper produces 677 kilograms a year.” Imagine how many tons of “occupation waste” that Haiti has had to absorb during the two decades of a racist foreign military occupation.

Ecological ruination is built into the infrastructure of occupation. In Haiti, the United Nations completely disfigured the built environment. While the large multi-acre MINUSTAH headquarters was in Port-au-Prince, near the Toussaint Louverture International Airport for access to airfields and airspace, there were permanent and semi-permanent encampments built all over the country--UN constructed bases, camps, and outposts. Painted in bold blue and guarded by armed soldiers, these encampments, large and small, become prominent markers on the landscape. The building of encampments also meant the appropriation of land and other resources from predominantly poor villagers throughout the country. Indeed, one of the common names for MINUSTAH occupation soldiers was “vòlè kabrit,” goat thieves.

In the fall of 2010, the United Nations “peacekeeping” mission, MINUSTAH, brought cholera to Haiti. When the epidemic was first discovered, those in the global north quickly pulled from the ready arsenal of racist justifications, linking the origins of the disease to Haiti’s poverty and presumably unsanitary behavior. But this was quickly rebuffed by local communities who led reporters to the exact source of the epidemic – the MINUSTAH Méyè base located a few meters from a stream flowing from the Artibonite river, the main water source for the many villages around the area. Apparently, the UN base regularly used the river as a dumping site for their soldiers’ fecal waste. This was in addition to literal shit-holes -- large pools of feces -- left in fields nearby. The UN can desecrate Haitian villagers’ land and water this way because its officials and underlings have a blatant disregard for poor Black Haitian people as human beings. Because, surely, the killing of 30,000 white Canadians or Australians would generate more outrage.

But these soldiers are also equated with the filth and violence of cholera, a disease that takes away one’s dignity. “Minista, kolera!” signs swept the cities and the countryside of Haiti at the height of the epidemic, a bold effort to force these armed foreign occupiers to take ownership of a degrading disease that, along with their feces, they believed that Black people deserved.

Cholera victims – victims of the UN’s occupation waste – suffered multifold indignities. The so-called peacekeeping operations of the UN are dirty occupations, ecological and environmental disasters for the victim-nations. It is not an accident that most humanitarian “peacekeeping” occupations these days occur primarily in nonwhite countries, and especially in Black countries – on the African continent and in Haiti. And in the end, the United Nations claimed immunity and refused to compensate the hundreds of thousands impacted by their dirty disease.

It took three years to bring cholera under control, and by then the disease had killed 30,000 to 50,000 people and destroyed millions of lives. Haitian cholera victims may be the forgotten casualties of the ecological catastrophe of a foreign military occupation under the guise of humanitarianism. But all of Haiti’s ecology – its rivers, lakes, farmland, its air quality – is an environmental and imperialist crime scene.

https://www.blackagendareport.com/dirty ... ophe-haiti
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Re: The Long Ecological Revolution

Post by blindpig » Sat Nov 20, 2021 3:36 pm

THE TIME OF MONSTERS

The failure of COPitalism
November 19, 2021
Even on its own terms, the outcome of the COP26 climate conference in Glasgow was catastrophic

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Over 100,000 demonstrated in the streets of Glasgow.

by Brendan Montague
Ecologist, November 12, 2021

The future was supposed to be copitalism: a new global economic paradigm where national governments work together through the United Nations (UN) Conference of the Parties (COP) process to limit emissions and prevent runaway climate breakdown – while leaving capitalism otherwise intact.

The climate conferences have taken place annually for a quarter of a century. The aim is to negotiate global emissions targets that will be translated into national policies. The high-water mark was the Paris Agreement of COP21 when the worlds’ leaders agreed to limit global heating to 1.5C.

The mechanism agreed was “nationally determined contributions” (NDCs). This means national governments are responsible for submitting commitments to cut emissions to the UN. The COP process is also supposed to include a “ratchet mechanism” where those government commitments are made increasingly ambitious.

Credibility

In order to deliver on the NDCs each country would have to use a combination of carrot – investment, incentives, tax cuts – and stick – regulation and taxation – to move capital away from fossil fuels and towards “green” technology and infrastructure. The most obvious and effective means of reducing emissions is a limit or stop on the exploitation of coal, oil and gas.

Thus, “copitalism” is designed to maintain the status quo except where specific economic activity drives us towards climate breakdown. Capital accumulation remains the logic of our economies. Economic growth is maintained, or profit is delivered by the distribution of wealth from the poorest to the richest. Corporations continue to deliver profits for shareholders. Social inequality deepens. Poverty grinds.

The Glasgow conference, COP26, was the first deadline for presidents and prime ministers to hand in their Paris Agreement homework. The problem is, reducing fossil fuel exploitation involves a confrontation with the wealthiest, most entrenched monopoly corporations in human history.

And even on its own terms, the outcomes from the COP process over the last two weeks are catastrophic. As Climate Action Tracker (CAT) reported during the conference: “The projected warming from current policies – not proposals, what countries are actually doing – is … at 2.7 ̊C with only a 0.2 ̊C improvement over the last year and nearly one degree above the net-zero announcements governments have made.”

Bill Hare, the chief executive of Climate Analytics, a CAT partner organization, has said: “It’s all very well for leaders to claim they have a net zero target, but if they have no plans as to how to get there, and their 2030 targets are as low as so many of them are, then frankly, these net zero targets are just lip service to real climate action. Glasgow has a serious credibility gap.”

The new promises emanating from Glasgow would reduce this warming by just 0.1C. As Climate Action Tracker has established, there is a “very big credibility gap” when it comes to net-zero policy. Life under such conditions will not be worth living for millions, if not billions, of people.

Damage

The primary weakness of the COP process is that even the best outcomes are, by design, not action but words. The conferences are focused on national governments setting out new commitments, always framed by deadlines years into the future. The politicians and their parties may not even be in power when those chickens come home to roost.

Those members of civil society paying the most attention – concerned citizens, protesters, charities and NGOs and the thousands of journalists – feel duty bound to celebrate and amplify the smallest successes from the COP process. There is a deep concern that the general public will become disheartened, climate anxiety will intensify and campaigners will switch off.

And so one of the major successes being touted at the conference is an agreement signed by 40 countries to phase out coal power by the 2030s for the coloniser economies and 2040s for the colonised, and to end all investment in new coal power generation. China has not agreed to reduce coal production and burning at home.

There has also been much fanfare about the surprise agreement between the United States – historically the largest contributor to climate breakdown – and China – currently the largest national contributor. But even here the response of many at COP26 has been characterized thus: “This was a stage-managed nothingburger. There was nothing new bar words, nothing on coal, finance or loss and damage.”

The problem is, climate breakdown is a physical reality.

Share price

A total of 88m barrels of oil were produced globally in 2020. The historically unprecedented international shutdown of production as a result of the global pandemic did not come close to reducing our use of oil by the levels necessary to prevent climate breakdown. Indeed, production was at a historic high of 95m barrels in 2019. There is no reason to believe it will not return to these suicidal levels in the coming years.

Further, a total of 159,610,000 tonnes of coal were produced globally in 2020. Again, the pandemic slowdown resulted in a dip in mining. But, even so, coal production globally is higher today than when the gavel was struck to mark the signing of the Paris Agreement in 2016. And bear in mind that there remains 1,074,108,000,000 tonnes of proven coal reserves around the world.

The actual introduction of a copitalist economy would inevitably result in coal, oil and gas becoming stranded assets. Those companies that hold these assets would not be able to exploit them, turning assets into sales into profits into dividends for shareholders. The share prices might not collapse, but they would certainly move. If capitalism works on any level, then it is that those with capital will only invest in companies that deliver a return on that investment.

The share prices of the major energy companies tell the same story. ExxonMobil currently has a market capitalisation of $281 billion. A share in the company today is worth $64 – indistinguishable from the price on the opening day of COP26 and well above the $35 price from this time last year. ExxonMobil shareholders do not fear copitalism.

Likewise, the share price of the Peabody Energy Corporation – the world’s largest private coal company – remains steady at $11, almost three times its value last year. Closer to home, shares in BP have risen from £2.36 each to £3.41 in the course of the last year, as the company recovers from the pandemic.

Campaigners

The justification for this political project is that the need to avert climate breakdown is so urgent and critical, and the likelihood of a wider and deeper political transformation of our societies and our economies is so remote, that the capitalists must be appeased while being persuaded that climate mitigation is in their interests as much as anyone else’s.

The problem with the capitalist project is that capitalists are not running the capitalist system, but perversely the capitalist system runs the capitalists. The corporate leadership of any country does not choose what or how it produces but instead is the flotsam of our societies willing to do anything to ride the wave of capitalist wealth-making at any cost.

Ben van Beurden, the chief executive of Shell, is a moral vacuum. But this is not a personal failing of a human being who just happens to have risen through the ranks of his corporation through hard work and diligence.

A capitalist logic has promoted those executives who deliver results, deliver profits, precisely by grinding the most out of the human and natural resources they control. No amount of evidence or hectoring can change van Beurden’s mind. And if it does, he will be out of a job.

The assembled delegates, the surrounding banks of NGO campaigners and exhausted journalists try to understand the daily shocks and disappointments of the COP process. It is assumed that a failure of understanding on the part of a particular leader – usually someone else’s leader – is the cause of failure at the conference. We are wedded to the idea of human agency, of powerful saviors, of national leaders.

Billionaires

The delegates of COP26 negotiating our collective future are hidden away in a cordoned off zone within the Blue Zone. More than 500 of those delegates are either directly within the employ of fossil fuel companies or delegates for government departments working with Big Coal, Oil and Gas. The NGOs and the journalists accredited to the zone are locked out of the real discussions, relying on press conferences for any crumbs of information.

The Blue Zone itself feels like a military encampment on the banks of the River Clyde. The fences tower overhead with delegates rushing through turnstiles guarded by security. The Green Zone along the road is entirely separate, but here the pavilions are dominated by National Grid, Unilever, Sainsbury’s and Microsoft. The message – that corporations are the solution – is not subtle. The Green Zone is open to the public, and school children tour the science museum styled displays.

Civil society is represented in Glasgow. But the COP26 Coalition is both physically and metaphorically cast into the hinterland in venues scattered across the living center of the city of Glasgow. Here the science of climate change is understood and accepted, and the reality of the actual change needed to prevent calamity is discussed. The attendees are actual people from Glasgow.

The discussions at the venue in Adelaide Place were wide ranging and meaningful, taking in the Green New Deal, degrowth, Indigenous traditions, the threat of green colonialism, food sovereignty, international trade, and more. But the event seemed only to coincide with the COP negotiations happening less than two miles away. There seemed no possibility of these debates influencing the proceedings.

Copitalism should be a dystopian nightmare. The COP26 conferences are a political project aimed at maintaining as much as possible of our current global economic system. The billionaires will continue to make gargantuan profits, fueling their intergalactic fantasies. At the same time, 15 million people have likely died from coronavirus and billions are denied a cheap vaccine to maintain the profits of the pharmaceutical industry.
Monsters

But the experience of COP26 during the last few days suggests that copitalism itself is an unachievable utopian dream, as vacuous as Charles Fourier’s vision of the oceans turning to lemonade. There is, alas, no real need for a neologism. Capitalism cannot allow copitalism to exist, such is its rapacious need for mountains and oceans of coal, oil and gas.

Barack Obama when president of the United States was instrumental in defusing the Paris Agreement and now calls on young people to protest for climate action. During his speech on Monday he made the following confession: “There are times where the future seems somewhat bleak. There are times where I am doubtful that humanity can get its act together before it’s too late, and images of dystopia start creeping into my dreams.”

The reality is that COP26 is failing because capitalism cannot allow copitalism to supersede. We cannot postpone the work of ending capitalism until after we have moved to avert climate breakdown. Because capitalism is climate breakdown. Ta’Kaiya Blaney of the Tla A’min Nation, the Indigenous activist told People’s Plenary meeting before a walkout today: “Cop26 is a performance. It is an illusion constructed to save the capitalist economy rooted in resource extraction and colonialism. I didn’t come here to fix the agenda – I came here to disrupt it.”

This argument does not have to be simplified for the public. We already know. As Cora, a 15-year-old member of Fridays For Future from Edinburgh said so eloquently this week: “Letting that kind of capitalist theatre run every COP? We are never going to see the change that we need now.”

But if copitalism is now an impossible utopia, is capitalism really the only game in town? Is it easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of the billionaire? Or is now the time for the climate movement to merge fully into the environment movement, the social justice movement, the (dare I say it) anti-capitalist movement so that we can aggregate our traumas, our grievances, our hopes, into something with the force and multitude that can begin to challenge the capitalist machine at the core of our misfortunes?

The famous quote from the Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci also seems apposite right now. “The old world is dying and the new world struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters.”
https://climateandcapitalism.com/2021/1 ... opitalism/

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Re: The Long Ecological Revolution

Post by blindpig » Tue Nov 23, 2021 2:52 pm

In the Name of Saving the Climate, They Will Uberise the Farmlands: The Forty-Sixth Newsletter (2021)

NOVEMBER 18, 2021

Dear friends,

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

As the last private plane takes off from the Glasgow airport and the dust settles, the detritus of the 26th United Nations Climate Change Conference, COP26, remains. The final communiqués are slowly being digested, their limited scope inevitable. António Guterres, Secretary-General of the United Nations, closed the proceedings by painting two dire images: ‘Our fragile planet is hanging by a thread. We are still knocking on the door of climate catastrophe. It is time to go into emergency mode – or our chance of reaching net zero will itself be zero’. The loudest cheer in the main hall did not erupt when this final verdict was announced, but when it was proclaimed that the next COP would be held in Cairo, Egypt in 2022. It seems enough to know that another COP will take place.

An army of corporate executives and lobbyists crowded the official COP26 platforms; in the evening, their cocktail parties entertained government officials. While the cameras focused on official speeches, the real business was being done in these evening parties and in private rooms. The very people who are most responsible for the climate catastrophe shaped many of the proposals that were brought to the table at COP26. Meanwhile, climate activists had to resort to making as loud a noise as possible far from the Scottish Event Campus (SEC Centre), where the summit was hosted. It is telling that the SEC Centre was built on the same land as the Queen’s Dock, once a lucrative passageway for goods extracted from the colonies to flow into Britain. Now, old colonial habits revive themselves as developed countries – in cahoots with a few developing states that are captured by their corporate overlords – refuse to accept firm carbon limits and contribute the billions of dollars necessary for the climate fund.

The organisers of COP26 designated themes for many of the days during the conference, such as energy, finance, and transport. There was no day set aside for a discussion of agriculture; instead, it was bundled into ‘Nature Day’ on 6 November, during which the main topic was deforestation. No focused discussion took place about the carbon dioxide, methane, or nitrous oxide emitted from agricultural processes and the global food system, despite the fact that the global food system produces between 21% and 37% of annual greenhouse gas emissions. Not long before COP26, three United Nations agencies released a key report, which offered the following assessment: ‘At a time when many countries’ public finances are constrained, particularly in the developing world, global agricultural support to producers currently accounts for almost USD 540 billion a year. Over two-thirds of this support is considered price-distorting and largely harmful to the environment’. Yet at COP26, there was a notable silence around the distorted food system that pollutes the Earth and our bodies; there was no serious conversation about any transformation of the food system to produce healthy food and sustain life on the planet.

Instead, the United States and the United Arab Emirates, backed by most of the developed states, proposed an Agriculture Innovation Mission for Climate (AIM4C) programme to champion agribusiness and the role of big technology corporations in agriculture. Big Tech companies, such as Amazon and Microsoft, and agricultural technology (Ag Tech) firms – such as Bayer, Cargill, and John Deere – are pushing a new digital agricultural model through which they seek to deepen their control over global food systems in the name of mitigating the effects of climate change. Stunningly, this new, ‘game-changing’ solution for climate change does not mention farmers anywhere in its key documents; after all, it seems to envisage a future that does not require them. The entry of Ag Tech and Big Tech into the agricultural industry has meant a takeover of the entire process, from the management of inputs to the marketing of produce. This consolidates power along the food chain in the hands of some of the world’s largest food commodity trading firms. These firms, often called the ABCDs – Archer Daniels Midland, Bunge, Cargill, and Louis Dreyfus – already control more than 70% of the agricultural market.

Ag Tech and Big Tech firms are championing a kind of uberisation of farmlands in an effort to dominate all aspects of food production. This ensures that it is the powerless smallholders and agricultural workers who take on all the risks. The German pharmaceutical company Bayer’s partnership with the US non-profit Precision Agriculture for Development (PAD) intends to use e-extension training to control what and how farmers grow their produce, as agribusinesses reap the benefits without taking on risk. This is another instance of neoliberalism at work, displacing the risk onto workers whose labour produces vast profits for the Ag Tech and Big Tech firms. These big firms are not interested in owning land or other resources; they merely want to control the production process so that they can continue to make fabulous profits.

The ongoing protests by Indian farmers, which began just over a year ago in October 2020, are rooted in farmers’ justified fear of the digitalisation of agriculture by the large global agribusinesses. Farmers fear that removing government regulation of the marketplaces will instead draw them into marketplaces controlled by digital platforms that are created by companies like Meta (Facebook), Google, and Reliance. Not only will these companies use their control over the platforms to define production and distribution, but their mastery over data will allow them to dominate the entire food cycle from production forms to consumption habits.

Earlier this year, the Landless Workers Movement (MST) in Brazil held a seminar on digital technology and class struggle to better understand the tentacles of the Ag Tech and Big Tech firms and how to overcome their powerful presence in the world of agriculture. Out of this seminar emerged our most recent dossier no. 46, Big Tech and the Current Challenges Facing the Class Struggle, which seeks to ‘understand technological transformations and their social consequences with an eye towards class struggle’ rather than to ‘provide an exhaustive discussion or conclusion on these themes’. The dossier summarises a rich discussion about several topics, including the relationship between technology and capitalism, the role of the state and technology, the intimate partnership between finance and tech firms, and the role of Ag Tech and Big Tech in our fields and factories.

The section on agriculture (‘Big Tech against Nature’) introduces us to the world of agribusiness and farming, where the large Ag Tech and Big Tech firms seek to absorb and control the knowledge of the countryside, shape agriculture to suit the interests of the big firms’ profit margins, and reduce agriculturalists to the status of precarious gig workers. The dossier closes with a consideration of five major conditions that are behind the expansion of the digital economy, each of them suited to the growth of Ag Tech in rural areas:

A free market (for data). User data is freely siphoned off by these firms, which then convert it into proprietary information to deepen corporate control over agricultural systems.
Economic financialisation. Data capitalist companies depend on the flux of speculative capital to grow and consolidate. These companies bear witness to capital flight, shifting capital away from productive sectors and towards those that are merely speculative. This puts increasing pressure on productive sectors to increase exploitation and precarisation.
The transformation of rights into commodities. The fact that public intervention is being superseded by private companies’ meddling in arenas of economic and social life subordinates our rights as citizens to our potential as commodities.
The reduction of public spaces. Society begins to be seen less as a collective whole and more as the segmented desires of individuals, with gig work seen as liberation rather than as a form of subordination to the power of large corporations.
The concentration of resources, productive chains, and infrastructure. Centralisation of resources and power amongst a handful of corporations gives them enormous leverage over the state and society. The great power concentrated in these corporations overrides any democratic and popular debate on political, economic, environmental, and ethical questions.

In 2017, at COP23, participating countries set up the Koronivia Joint Work on Agriculture (KJWA), a process that pledged to focus on agriculture’s contribution to climate change. KJWA held a few events at COP26, but these were not given much attention. On Nature Day, forty-five countries endorsed the Global Action Agenda for Innovation in Agriculture, whose main slogan, ‘innovation in agriculture’, aligns with the goals of the Ag Tech and Big Tech sector. This message is being channelled through CGIAR, an inter-governmental body designed to promote ‘new innovations’. Farmers are being delivered into the hands of Ag Tech and Big Tech firms, who – rather than committing to avert the climate catastrophe – prioritise accumulating the greatest profit for themselves while greenwashing their activities. This hunger for profit is neither going to end world hunger, nor will it end the climate catastrophe.

The images in this newsletter come from dossier no. 46, Big Tech and the Current Challenges Facing the Class Struggle. They build on a playful understanding of the concepts underpinning the digital world: clouds, mining, codes, and so on. How to depict these abstractions? ‘A data cloud’, writes Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research’s art department, ‘sounds like an ethereal, magical place. It is, in reality, anything but that. The images in this dossier aim to visualise the materiality of the digital world we live in. A cloud is projected onto a chipboard’. These images remind us that technology is not neutral; technology is a part of the class struggle.

The farmers in India would agree.

Warmly,

Vijay

https://thetricontinental.org/newslette ... echnology/

The images, which would not copy, should be viewed at the link.

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Peace and environmental activists brought the question of the role of the military in causing climate change to the fore even while it was ignored by the official COP26 summit. (Photo: Abby Martin)

What role does the military play in climate change?

Originally published: Peoples Dispatch by Zoe Alexandra (November 20, 2021 ) | - Posted Nov 23, 2021

Despite the global military industrial complex being one of the single largest contributors to climate devastation, there was almost zero discussion of the military in the official COP26 summit that concluded on November 12. Peace and environmental activists have called this unspoken truth the elephant in the room and pointed out that unless the world makes a serious commitment to peace and demilitarization, it will be impossible to meet emission cap targets and slow the advance of climate change.

According to research done by Dr. Stuart Parkinson of the U.S.-based organization Scientists for Global Responsibility (SGR), the total carbon footprint of the U.S. military adds up to 205 million tons, while that of the United Kingdom is 11 million tons. These numbers come from meticulous research and data compiling by organizations such as SGR and others, because comprehensive data on the subject is not available.

The lack of data on military carbon footprint is primarily due to the fact that existing United Nations climate conventions and agreements do not require militaries to meet any emissions targets nor report on the extent of emissions. In some cases, emissions from a foreign military base, like one of the United States’ 800+ bases around the world, get counted into the host country’s total.

The significant omission was highlighted by journalists, activists, and academics during the COP26 proceedings. Organizations such as the U.S.-based peace group CODEPINK organized a series of actions and events during the parallel ‘People’s Summit for Climate Justice’ to shed light on this crucial issue and to demand that world leaders respond.

Military as polluters

Another reason the military is often overlooked in discussions of the primary actors responsible for greenhouse gas emissions, destruction of the environment and biodiversity, and other processes that have driven our planet into crisis, is the limited understanding of its actions, which is by design.

Due to the covert nature of warlike conflicts in the 21st century, as well as that of the arms industry, many people in global north countries are unaware of what goes into maintaining and producing the complex of troops, bases, supplies and military armament, and of course the impact of these actions like ground deployment, bombings, drone strikes, and others.

As presented by Dr. Stuart Parkinson in the discussion “Challenging the Military Carbon Bootprint” organized by CODEPINK during the People’s COP26 Summit in Glasgow, the elements of the military’s impact on the environment are vast. They include: the direct impact of war (bombing campaigns, drone strikes, shootings) on the environment which could range from destruction of oil infrastructure, agriculture, ecosystems, deforestation, etc.; the production processes and supply chain for the military tech industry, as well as other necessary goods like food, uniforms, etc.; the use of military equipment such as aircraft, tankers, and more in exercises, patrols, and in war; the maintenance and establishment of the vast network of military bases which includes waste management, supplies, and alteration of the landscape; and other production, distribution, and processes that are part of the vast war machine.

U.S. political establishment refuses to budge on military question
Journalist Abby Martin of Empire Files who was inside the “blue zone” of COP26 asked several U.S. politicians about why both Democrats and Republicans have continued to funnel millions into the Pentagon, which is a bigger polluter than 140 countries combined.

Martin asked House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi: “How can we seriously talk about net zero if there is bipartisan consensus to constantly expand this large contributor to climate change which is exempt from these conferences, [the] military is exempt from climate talks.” Pelosi’s response to Martin was telling. She said that the climate crisis is a national security matter as it provokes migration and conflict over land and resources, implying that it is necessary to maintain a large defense budget to ensure that the U.S. is able to manage the impact of climate change through military aggression.

This position is reflected in other documents released by the U.S. security establishment. The Pentagon has been considering the impact of climate change on “national security” for many years. In a speech given in 2014, then Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel called climate change a “‘threat multiplier’… because it has the potential to exacerbate many of the challenges we already confront today–from infectious disease to armed insurgencies–and to produce new challenges in the future.”


Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was the only elected U.S. leader who broke the consensus and agreed that the military should be included in any pledge to cut greenhouse gases. She told Martin,

When we have global conferences about cutting emissions, to omit conversations about military investment is to omit measuring our CO2 emissions… there is no way for us to draw it down if we don’t measure it and we don’t commit to it.

Military to protect transnational corporations

Not only does the military play a role in contributing to environmental devastation with emissions, but globally, militaries and private security play an important role in ensuring the survival of extractive projects when they are met with resistance from local communities. This pattern can be seen in countries across the world–from the militarized crackdown on the resistance to the Dakota Access Pipeline in Standing Rock, U.S., to the participation of the Honduran military in suppressing protests against the hydroelectric project Agua Zarca.

Nnimmo Bassey, an environmental activist from Nigeria, has worked tirelessly to shed light on the role played by his country’s military in protecting the operations of the transnational oil corporation Shell in the Niger Delta. In the CODEPINK discussion during the People’s Summit, he recalled the horrific execution of writer Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight colleagues on November 10, 1995 by the Nigerian military government because of their protests against the oil companies, like Shell, that were actively destroying their land, Ogoniland. The area is one of the most polluted places in the world because of the extensive and clumsy oil extraction by transnational companies. According to a report by the United Nations Environment Program, the soil in that region is contaminated to a depth of 5-10 meters which has affected almost all of the bodies of water, including the groundwater. To this day, it is the transnational companies who receive protection from the state, while the livelihood of communities is threatened by contamination and militarization.

Bassey declared that,
this is complete ecocide and a terrible crime against humanity. None of this would be possible without the corporations working with the protection of the armed forces.
https://mronline.org/2021/11/23/what-ro ... te-change/

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Biden to announce release of oil reserves as part of effort to lower gas prices

By Kate Sullivan and Betsy Klein, CNN

Updated 7:31 AM ET, Tue November 23, 2021

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President Joe Biden visits the Port of Baltimore, Wednesday, Nov. 10, 2021. Biden's trip to the port is likely the start of a national tour to showcase the $1 trillion legislation that cleared Congress last week. Biden is pointing to Baltimore's port as a blueprint on how to reduce shipping bottlenecks that have held back the economic recovery. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)

President Joe Biden visits the Port of Baltimore, Wednesday, Nov. 10, 2021. Biden's trip to the port is likely the start of a national tour to showcase the $1 trillion legislation that cleared Congress last week. Biden is pointing to Baltimore's port as a blueprint on how to reduce shipping bottlenecks that have held back the economic recovery. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)
(CNN)President Joe Biden on Tuesday will announce the Department of Energy will release 50 million barrels of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve as part of an effort to lower high gas prices and address the lack of oil supply around the world.

This release will be in coordination with other major energy consuming nations, including China, India, Japan, the Republic of Korea and the United Kingdom, the White House announced in a fact sheet.

https://us.cnn.com/2021/11/23/politics/ ... index.html

Thank fucking god that we don't have Trump heedlessly trashing the environment anymore...

Hey you environmentalists,what have the Dems actually done other than talk while we got this and the upcoming auction of more offshore leases on the Gulf are happening?

Ya'll are stupid, or worse.
"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 » Wed Nov 24, 2021 3:08 pm

THE OUTCOME OF COP26 AND THE NEXT GLOBAL SCENARIOS
Betzabeth Aldana Vivas

23 Nov 2021 , 11:23 am .

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The British Alok Sharma's showbusiness was captured in the media , crying and apologizing at the closing of the United Nations Conference on Climate Change 2021 (COP26), held in Glasglow, the Scottish capital.

Sharma's forced drama revealed the seams of the green discourse or energy transition of these western spheres, shedding any responsibility for the role they have played in the world production and consumption system. For The Guardian , the Briton expressed:

"We are on our way to relegate coal to history ... But in the case of China and India, they will have to explain to climate-vulnerable countries why they did what they did."

It is not clear what he means by "why they did what they did", when much of this excessive exploitation of natural resources has its origins in early UK-led colonialism, and continues today. This was shown by a report by the English organization War on Want, entitled "The New Colonialism: Britain's Struggle for Africa's Energy and Mineral Resources", which indicates that more than 100 companies listed on the London Stock Exchange They have mining operations in Africa and, combined, they control resources worth more than $ 1 trillion.

The same practices of the colonial period remain in force, it is part of the status quo of the Global North when it uses its influence to guarantee that large mining companies have access to raw materials from the African continent or from any country in the Global South. The whimpering over the outcome of COP26 is the perennial pose adopted by these characters.

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Caricature of Cecil Rhodes, a mining magnate who established himself the owner, in addition to British imperialism, of the combined territory of what we now know as Zimbabwe and Zambia (Photo: Edward Linley Sambourne)

WITHOUT FALLING INTO DECEPTIONS

Another kind of incremental agreement emerged from COP26, this time called the Glasgow Climate Pact (GCP, its acronym in English) that indicates the reduction of coal , whose controversy in the wording was folded to the fact that the clause cited the "elimination" and not reduction.

This pact aims directly and against fossil fuels to supposedly reduce their consumption and dependence.

It is known that the narrative of the media is extended with the focus of guilt, that is, that the climate crisis is produced by the poor man and by the so-called developing countries, especially China. But nobody talks about the emissions accumulated in the atmosphere by those western countries for a hundred years, since the CO 2 emissions of 100 years ago continue to contribute to global warming. Current warming is determined by the cumulative total of CO 2 emissions over the past two centuries.

According to the graph, the United States is the country that has released the most accumulated historical emissions of CO 2 , with the military and transportation industry being some of the sectors that register the most carbon emissions.(see link)

Joe Biden has presented the Green New Deal plan to achieve the transition to "clean" energy, promising net zero emissions in the coming years. But this promise and the speech to the world, for all countries to adopt the green mandate, is blown away because in practice the oil production of the United States is increasing significantly and rapidly without any shame, by September production was around the 10.7 million b / d and for October it reached 11.4 million b / d.

And going for more, in August Biden announced plans to open up 80 million acres of water in the Gulf of Mexico along with hundreds of thousands more on land for oil and gas exploration projects.

Internationally, the US flagship company, ExxonMobil, frequently announces new discoveries in Guyana's Stabroek block. Environmental specialists warn about the disaster in the sensitive marine ecosystem where the North American oil company carries out its explorations.

As a fun fact, Roger Cohen was a retired ExxonMobil executive and was in charge of climate consequences investigations within that company. In 2015, an internal Cohen memo was leaked , noting that the company's long-term business plans could produce effects that would in fact be catastrophic. ExxonMobil along with other transnationals are the biggest perpetrators of the climate crisis.

It should be noted that the strategies of the Global North are not only focused on creating production plans but that these go hand in hand with containment plans and attack on outside projects that compete in these dynamics of resource control. This week, the US State Department announced the imposition of "sanctions" on a company and its vessels for participating in the construction of the Nord Stream II gas pipeline, another action of total interference.

The objective of owning and maintaining exclusivity in access, distribution and use of energy has not permeated, only that this time they take out the activist card of caring for the planet to boost their attempts to control resources, and beyond this, it is the fact that these operations are only in private hands and reduces the action of the States.

On the other hand, China with its growing economic and technological strength has become a leading global force in the fight against climate change, both for life on the planet and in stopping the true intentions of the Global North to paralyze pivotal countries in new methods of development and geopolitical relations. Its commitments on emissions are exclusive, stating that the country's carbon dioxide will peak by 2030, and reach carbon neutrality by 2060.

Returning to Glasgow, the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ) also emerged, an association in the framework of COP26 where more than 400 large companies claimed to invest more than 100 billion dollars in net zero emissions projects. Again, where is the business? .

It is in that money in the form of loans, which from a business perspective, it is ostensible that in future scenarios countries with resources and that have been hit by the actions of global Western elites, in their attempts to deal with the climate crisis, they will be committed to returning most of the donations to the "rich" countries.

This climate finance alliance is openly led by former Bank of England Governor ( give us back our gold ), Mark Joseph Carney and Michael R. Bloomberg, including the membership of CEOs from BlackRock, Bank of America, Banco Santander, HSBC, London Stock Exchange Group and the Investment Committee of the David Rockefeller Fund.

More reasons to point out on the radar that this is not dedicated to addressing real solutions to the climate crisis but rather they are new avenues for financial powers to keep their expansion on fossil fuels.

In addition, the GFANZ seeks to create a new international financial architecture from a sphere that clearly seems to show that private multilateralism that they are promoting from hidden agendas, whose first objective is to increase the levels of private investment of the members of this coalition in those economies.

It is alarming that the focus on the international agenda from multilateral bodies is folding to these elements of a financial nature, when they have not yet finished adopting or actually solving, for example, the lifting of the imposition of unilateral coercive measures on countries that is evident that everything concerning these practices is foreign to International Law.

How can a country under siege meet its sustainability goals with normality and completeness? However, it must be said, with all the great obstacles, Venezuela in full COP26 delivered to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) the Update of the Nationally Determined Contribution (CND) document. And said by the Minister of Ecosocialism, José Alejandro Lorca, unilateral coercive measures limit the ability to act in the face of the climate crisis and these are contrary to the basic foundations of international and environmental law, as they restrict the sustainable development of our people.

By way of closing, decarbonizing economies or saying goodbye to fossil fuels is a total hoax in capitalism. Attention is also directed to the extraction of metals; it is simply taking control of the reserves of the resource that generates money. Wherever there is copper, nickel, cobalt, lithium and coltan, large corporations will be attracted, like all cannibals, to the delicacy that makes them grow.

Accelerated energy transition that is consistent with the International Energy Agency (IEA) "net zero emissions" scenario will imply a growing demand for metals over the next decade. The concern is not the planet, but access to raw materials.

https://misionverdad.com/investigacione ... s-globales

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Climate injustice at Glasgow COP-out
Posted Nov 24, 2021 by Anis Chowdhury, Jomo Kwame Sundaram

Originally published: JOMO (November 23, 2021 ) |
SYDNEY and KUALA LUMPUR: The planet is already 1.1°C warmer than in pre-industrial times. July 2021 was the hottest month ever recorded in 142 years. Despite the pandemic slowdown, 2020 was the hottest year so far, ending the warmest decade (2011-2020) ever.
Betrayal in Glasgow

Summing up widespread views of the recently concluded Glasgow climate summit, former Irish President Mary Robinson observed,

People will see this as a historically shameful dereliction of duty,… nowhere near enough to avoid climate disaster.

A hundred civil society groups lambasted the Glasgow outcome:

Instead of a multilateral agreement that puts forward a clear path to address the climate crisis, we are left with a document that takes us further down the path of climate injustice.

Even if countries fulfil their Paris Agreement pledges, global warming is now expected to rise by 2.7°C from pre-industrial levels by century’s end. Authoritative projections suggest that if all COP26 long-term pledges and targets are met, the planet will still warm by 2.1℃ by 2100.

The United Nations Environment Programme suggests a strong chance of global warming disastrously rising over 1.5°C in the next two decades. Earlier policy targets–to halve global carbon emissions by 2030, and reach ‘net-zero’ emissions by 2050–are now recognized as inadequate.

The Glasgow UN Framework Convention on Climate Change 26th Conference of Parties (COP26) was touted as the world’s ‘last best hope’ to save the planet. Many speeches cited disturbing trends, but national leaders most responsible for greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions offered little.

Thus, developing countries were betrayed yet again. Despite contributing less to accelerating global warming, they are suffering its worst consequences. They have been left to pay most bills for ‘losses and damages’, adaptation and mitigation.

Glasgow setbacks

Glasgow’s two biggest hopes were not realized: renewing targets for 2030 aligned with limiting warming to 1.5℃, and a clear strategy to mobilize the grossly inadequate US$100bn yearly–promised by rich country leaders before the Copenhagen COP in 2009–to help finance developing countries’ efforts.

An exasperated African legislator dismissed the Glasgow Leaders’ Declaration on Forests and Land Use as an “empty pledge”, as “yet another example of Western disingenuousness… taking on the role of ‘white saviour’” while exploiting the African rain forest.

Meanwhile, far too many loopholes open to abuse remain, undermining efforts to reduce emissions. Further, no commitment to end fossil fuel subsidies globally–at US$11 million every minute, i.e., around US$6 trillion annually–was forthcoming.

No new oil and gas fields should be developed for the world to have a chance of getting to net-zero by 2050. Nevertheless, governments are still approving such projects, typically involving transnational corporate giants.

Various measures–e.g., ‘carbon capture and storage’ and ‘offsetting’–have been touted as solutions. But carbon capture and storage technologies remain controversial, unproven at scale, expensive and rarely cost-competitive.

The Glasgow outcome did not include any commitment to fully phase out oil and gas. Meanwhile, the language on coal has been diluted to become virtually toothless: coal-powered plants will now be ‘phased down’, instead of ‘phased out’.

Offsets off track

Offset market advocates claim to reduce emissions or remove GHGs from the atmosphere by some to ‘off-set’ emissions by others. Thus, offsetting often means paying someone poor to cut GHG emissions or forcing them to pay someone else to do so. With more means, big business can more easily afford to ‘greenwash’.

Carbon offset markets have long overpromised, but underdelivered. As they typically exaggerate GHG emission reduction claims, offsetting is a poor substitute for actually cutting fossil fuel use. Meanwhile, disagreements over offset rules have long stalled international climate change negotiations.

Buying offsets allows GHG emitters “to keep polluting”, albeit for a fee. Highly GHG emitting activities by wealthier individuals, companies and nations can thus continue, after “transferring the burden of action and sacrifice to others”–typically to those in poorer nations–via the market.

For Tariq Fancy–who managed ‘sustainable investing’ at BlackRock, the world’s largest fund manager–the market for offsets is a “deadly distraction”, “leading the world into a dangerous mirage,… burning valuable time”.

Meanwhile, most established offset programmes–e.g., the United Nations’ REDD+ programme or the Kyoto Protocol’s Clean Development Mechanism–have clearly failed to meaningfully reduce GHG emissions.

More than 130 countries have committed to achieve net-zero by 2050. But net-zero targeting has actually allowed the world to continue kicking the can down the road, instead of acting decisively and urgently to verifiably cut GHG emissions.

Hence, it is seen as a cynical “scam”, “nothing more than an expensive cover-up for continued toxic emissions”. Trading non-verifiable offsets–supposedly to achieve net-zero–allows continuing GHG emissions with business almost as usual.

Loss and damage?

Vulnerable and poor nations have argued for decades that rich countries owe them compensation for irreversible damage from global warming. In fact, no UN climate conference has delivered any funding for losses and damages to countries affected.

Rich countries agreed to begin a ‘dialogue’ to discuss “arrangements for the funding of activities to avert, minimize and address loss and damage”. Representing developing nations, Guinea expressed “extreme disappointment” at this ruse to delay progress on financing recovery from and rebuilding after climate disasters.

Developed nations account for two-thirds of cumulative emissions compared to only 3% from Africa. Carbon emissions by the wealthiest 1% of the world’s population were more than twice those of the bottom half between 1990 and 2015!

Low-lying small island nations–from the Marshall Islands to Fiji and Antigua–fear losing much of their land to rising sea levels. But their longstanding call to create a ‘loss and damage’ fund was rejected yet again.

South Pacific island representatives have expressed disappointment at lack of funding for losses and damages, and the watered down language on coal. For them, COP26 was a ‘monumental failure’, leaving them in existential peril.

Although historical responsibility for GHG emissions lies primarily with the wealthy countries, especially the U.S. and the European Union, once again, they have successfully evaded serious commitments to address such longstanding problems due to global warming.

Climate injustice

For the UN Secretary-General,

[o]ver the past 25 years, the richest 10% of the global population has been responsible for more than half of all carbon emissions, and the poorest 50% were responsible for just 7% of emissions.

The World Bank estimates that, if left unchecked, climate change will condemn 132 million more people into poverty over the next decade, while displacing more than 216 million from their homes and land by 2050.

Meanwhile, poorer countries–who have contributed least to cumulative GHG emissions–continue to suffer most. To address climate injustice, rich countries–most responsible for GHG emissions and global warming–must do much more.

Their finance for developing countries ought to be much more ambitious than US$100bn yearly. Financing terms should be far more generous than currently. Also, funding should prioritize adaptation, especially for the poorest countries most at risk.

https://mronline.org/2021/11/24/climate ... w-cop-out/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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