The Long Ecological Revolution

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Re: The Long Ecological Revolution

Post by blindpig » Thu Apr 21, 2022 2:16 pm

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Digital Elevation Model of our Earth (Photo: Kevin Gill)

IPCC WG3 report: from scientific rigor to social fable
Originally published: International Viewpoint on April 4, 2022 by Daniel Tanuro (more by International Viewpoint) - Posted Apr 20, 2022

This article discusses the draft of the Working Group 3 Summary for Policymakers from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPPCC), submitted for discussion and approval to 195 governments prior to its release on 4th April 2020. The report was mangled by various governments, with an additional 22 pages, mainly presenting carbon capture and storage (CCS) as a form of carbon dioxide removal (CDR) from the atmosphere. Warning against these proposed changes before they came out, Kevin Anderson of the Tyndall Centre for climate research in Manchester said: that the report could “pull its punches, hiding behind billions of tonnes of carbon dioxide removal… then the academic community will have abdicated its responsibility and opted for realpolitik over real physics. The climate responds only to the second.”

This is exactly what happened: in the words of a professor of CCS who supported the changes: “new fossil fuel facilities do not necessarily have to lock in future GHG emissions, provided that carbon capture and storage (CCS) readiness becomes an integral part of new infrastructure developments.” This reflects the statement in the SFP that “CCS could allow fossil fuels to be used longer, reducing stranded assets”, which also ignores the many other downsides of fossil fuel dependence, of which the war in Ukraine is one example.

The IPCC is now caught in the horns of a dilemma: technofixes using undeveloped technologies like CCS, versus the social measures it advocates, discussed–with all their contradictions as well – at the end of this article. [Eds]

* * * * *
Working Group 3 has just released its contribution to the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report, on greenhouse gas mitigation.1 It complements those of WG1 (on the science of climate change) and WG2 (on risks and adaptation). The article below presents the main points of the document. It simply aims to make the main conclusions of WG3 available to activists, for information purposes. Although some remarks will be proposed in the conclusion, it is not a question here of repeating the ecosocialist critique of capitalist productivism and its impasse. It has already been done elsewhere and will undoubtedly be deepened in the future, by myself and by others (including on the basis of the WG3 report).2

The catastrophe is deepening

The report starts by taking stock of the state of mitigation. In fact, it is more a question of a failure to mitigate. Global emissions of all greenhouse gases combined have increased by 11% compared to 2010. Their volume (59 GTCO2eq in 2018) is larger than ever in human history. Between 2010 and 2018, the rate of increase slowed down somewhat: 1.3% per year, compared to 2.3% during the previous decade.

Cumulative net CO2 emissions remain the main driver of climate change, and among these are emissions from fossil fuel combustion. However, emissions of fluorinated gases (a group of gases that are several hundred to several thousand times more radioactive than CO2, some of which can remain in the atmosphere for thousands of years) are now playing a significant role in warming. Between 1980 and 2018, emissions of these fluorinated gases increased by 430%, while CO2 emissions increased by 66%.

The increase in CO2 emissions is due much more to the consumption of energy and materials due to rising incomes than to population growth. Between 2010 and 2018, the increase in average GDP per person increased fossil CO2 emissions by 2.3%/year, while population growth increased them by 1%/year. Some countries have successfully decoupled economic growth and emissions, but in most cases this is relative, not absolute. The most emission-intensive activities have increased sharply over the decade 2010-2020: +28.5% for aviation, +17% for SUV purchase, +12% for meat consumption. The decoupling of energy demand from economic growth is only relative and a substantial decarbonization of energy systems is only observable in North America, Europe and Eurasia. Globally, the CO2 intensity per unit of energy has remained unchanged over the last 30 years.

Slightly less inequality between countries, more inequality within countries

Between countries, the inequality in emissions remains glaring, although it has slightly decreased over the last decades. Average greenhouse gas emissions of all gases combined per person in 2018 were 13.1 metric tons CO2eq in developed countries, 14.7 metric tons in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, 5.8 metric tons in Latin America and the Caribbean, 5.7 metric tons in Asia-Pacific, and 4.2 metric tons in Africa and the Middle East. Between 2010 and 2018, developed countries (17% of the population) emitted 35% of greenhouse gases; the Least Developed Countries (LDCs, 13% of the population) emitted just 3%. When we take the consumption of goods and services in developed countries as a basis (which includes “grey” emissions – imported in the form of products manufactured elsewhere), we see a slight decrease in grey CO2 emissions: from 46% in 2010 to 41% in 2015.

On the other hand, climate inequality within countries is increasing, both in terms of income (27% of income captured by the richest 1%) and in terms of emissions (the richest 10% cause 36-45% of global emissions, while the share of the poorest 10% is 3-5% (the two are obviously linked). Two-thirds of the richest 10% live in developed countries, the remaining third in “emerging countries”; most of the poorest 10% live in Sub-Saharan Africa, South-East Asia, Central Asia and Latin America. These regions are home to the 20% of the local population who do not have access to electricity and the 37% who do not have access to modern cooking facilities. The consumption patterns of the rich generate the largest carbon footprint: for example, 50% of air traffic is monopolized by the richest 1%. On the other hand, providing all humans on Earth with access to modern energy would have a negligible impact in terms of emissions…

Technology is not fulfilling its promises

Despite all the capitalist assurances, the facts show that technological progress is not solving the enormous challenge of climate stabilization. The annual rate of emissions growth has slowed significantly in the energy sector (1.4% between 2010 and 2018, compared to 3.2% in the previous decade) and in industry (1.7% compared to 5.0%) but has remained unchanged in the transport sector (around 2% per year). Since 2010, cost reductions have been strong in solar (87%), wind (38%) and batteries (85%); agrofuels account for 90% of the renewable energy used in transport. But these achievements of green capitalism do not put us on the path to “zero net emissions” by 2050, which is essential to stay below 1.5°C of warming.

Moreover, the recent news on the energy markets shows how reversible these developments are (cf. the revival of coal production in China and the extension of shale gas exploitation in the USA, etc., as part of the “post-covid recovery” – not to mention the impact of Putin’s war in Ukraine). From a productivist point of view, “green” technologies must therefore go hand in hand with carbon capture and sequestration (CCS), carbon removal from the atmosphere (CDR) and nuclear development. But these technologies are not progressing rapidly, in particular because of social concerns about safety and sustainability.

Projected emissions in 2030 are higher than government commitments, and these commitments in turn are not in line with the goal of limiting warming to below 1.5°C in the 21st century. The projected emissions gap in 2030 between nationally determined contributions (including conditional government commitments) and the pathway that gives a 50% chance of staying below 1.5°C without temporary overshoot is 25 to 34 GtCO2 equivalent (out of total emissions of 59 Gt!).

To measure the difficulty of bridging this gap, it is important to know that the existing fossil energy infrastructure will emit 658 GtCO2 by 2030, and that this emission volume will increase to 846 if we also take into account the fossil energy infrastructure that is planned to be built. These estimates represent about twice the carbon budget compatible with the respect of the 1.5°C (NB: they do not include the emissions of the projected infrastructures in industry, building and transport)…

With a constant degree of capacity utilization, and without any modification such as CCS installation, it is estimated that, in order to stay under the 1.5°C, the lifetime of the existing coal and gas power plants, which is currently 39 and 36 years respectively, would have to be shortened to 9 and 12 years (less if the planned power plants are actually built). These facts are enough to measure how strongly the multinational energy companies have and will have their foot on the train of the capitalist “ecological transition”…

Transforming the system?

Without new climate measures, the average global surface temperature will rise by 3.3 to 5.4°C by 2100. Staying below 1.5°C requires rapid emissions reductions and fundamental structural changes on a global scale. According to the scenarios, limiting warming to below 2°C requires that global emissions (all gases) peak “immediately” (between 2020 and 2025). Few scenarios still show the possibility of staying below 1.5°C without a slight overshoot (0.1°C). In any case, too little climate action in the short term will make the climate goals unattainable in the future. Staying below 1.5°C with a 50% chance and a slight overshoot requires emissions reductions of 35-60% in 2030 and 73-94% in 2050 (relative to the modelled emissions level in 2020).

In the scenarios limiting warming to 1.5°C with a 50% probability and a slight overshoot, the carbon budget still available is about 525 GtCO2 (the carbon budget only accounts for CO2). This implies that carbon neutrality will be achieved by 2055. Taking into account all greenhouse gases, the year of net zero is postponed by about 12 years. Deploying CDR technologies obviously increases the carbon budget. Reducing emissions of gases other than CO2 (methane, fluorinated gases,…) does not dispense with the obligation to reduce carbon emissions to net zero, but increases the carbon budget available for a given level of maximum warming. However, one must take into account the warming effect that would result from the reduction of aerosols that reflect solar radiation back to space…

“Just degrowth”…

We can then understand the need underlined by the IPCC for fundamental transformations in all sectors and all regions, through policies that reduce both CO2 emissions and those of other greenhouse gases. An important point here is that the IPCC, for the first time, echoes some research that explicitly argues for a break with the capitalist constraints of “ever more”. According to some researchers, climate stabilization cannot be achieved without a very substantial reduction in final energy consumption – a reduction so important that it necessarily implies a reduction in material production and transport.

These researchers are not neo-Malthusians: they all insist on the need for what might be called “just degrowth”, putting social equality and climate justice on the same level as climate stabilization. This new path (in the IPCC reports, of course) echoes indigenous “buen vivir” theories. It is partly expressed through so-called “lower demand” or “decent living scenarios”, or other (mostly unmodeled) proposals that reduce or completely eliminate the use of negative emission technologies (NETs), strongly advocate dietary change (less meat, especially beef), more easily meet the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and consequently reduce pressure on land, ecosystems and people – except for the rich, of course. It is significant that the IPCC report echoes this, even if its overall orientation remains clearly focused on the needs of capitalist accumulation (as if this were a law of nature).

… or recourse to negative emission technologies

With regard to these needs of accumulation, the IPCC report substantially develops the danger of “locking-in” in fossil fuels. It sees – rightly! – a major risk of postponing the necessary measures beyond the 2020-2030 decade, under the pressure of “established interests”. Globally, emissions from the energy sector must decrease by 2.2 to 3.3% per year until 2050 to stay below 1.5°C. Low-carbon technologies (note: this term, in the IPCC lexicon, includes nuclear) must produce 90 to 100% of electricity by 2050 (less than 40% today). At the same time, the share of electricity in final energy consumption should increase to 40% before 2050 to stay below 1.5°C (20% today). The stakes for the fossil fuel multinationals are enormous: because of a climate policy that is equal to the stakes, the “stranded assets” (the devaluation of capital) could amount to thousands of billions (trillions) of dollars…

As we have seen, negative emission technologies (NETs) are one of the ways in which governments can increase the carbon budget, postpone the “net zero” deadline, and therefore alleviate the threat of capital devaluation to the fossil fuel sectors. The deployment of these technologies is therefore necessary in most scenarios that limit warming to below 1.5°C (except for the “just degrowth” scenarios mentioned above). For the IPCC, CDR is used to counterbalance residual emissions in sectors where emission reductions are difficult (aviation, shipping, agriculture, steel, cement, petrochemicals).

The simplest and least expensive negative emissions technology is the use of CO2 absorption by ecosystems. Comparatively, this IPCC report is much more reserved on BECCS (bioenergy with carbon capture and storage) than the previous one. In the AR5, 95% of the climate scenarios were based on a massive implementation of this technology. Now the IPCC tells us that its mitigation potential “has declined”, that its massive implementation could have opposite effects, and that more scientific research is needed on this subject. The same need for more research is cited for other technologies that some have touted as silver bullets: direct capture-sequestration of CO2 from the air, fixing CO2 by eroding and converting certain rocks into carbonates, etc. Of all these systems, the IPCC now tells us that they can have negative effects on ecosystem services and on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)…

Social Feasibility and Wishful Thinking: IPCC in Wonderland

Overall, according to the IPCC, the existing potential for emission reductions achievable by 2030 would cut emissions in half by 2030, and mitigation options costing less than $20 per ton of CO2 would account for half of that potential. But this requires high long-term investments in the early years, and profound transformations in the short term. This raises the question of social feasibility, where the IPCC finds that solar, wind, demand side management, building changes, energy efficiency, electromobility and urban system transitions face less resistance than nuclear and negative emission technologies.

In general, this report, like the IPCC WG2 report, is considerably less technocratic and “economistic” than the previous one. Like the WG2 report on risk and adaptation, it emphasizes the priority to be given to “equity” and “stakeholder participation” in the perspective of a “just transition”. The authors note that individual behavioural changes alone cannot significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions. They stress that these changes must be embedded in structural, cultural and institutional change. They even emphasize the importance of social movements, especially youth movements, to move the lines against “established interests”…

At the same time, like that of WG2, this report is full of the profoundly unrealistic idea that it would be possible to make antagonistic social interests converge to save the Earth’s climate in universal harmony, without in the least questioning private ownership of the economy, competition for market shares, production for profit and the “produce for produce” that automatically follows from it. It would be enough to install new social norms. And to do this, it would be enough for 10 to 30% of the population, especially the socially visible ones, who have the means to reduce their emissions, to avoid flying, to live without a car, to switch to electromobility, and to invest in low-carbon companies to become the models of a new way of life…

I am still fascinated to see how sharp and rigorous scientific minds prefer to tell themselves fables rather than draw the right social conclusions from their own analysis…

P.S.
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ATTACHED DOCUMENTS

ipcc-wg3-report-from-scientific-rigor-to-social-fable_a7612.pdf (PDF – 927.2 KB)
Extraction PDF [->article7612]

FOOTNOTES:
1.↩ There is not enough time and space to review the chapters of the report devoted more specifically to the mitigation of emissions in industry, transport, land use (cities in particular), agriculture-forestry-land use (in this sector, the balances between food, fibre and fuel production, CO2 absorption, rights of rural communities and protection of biodiversity… are particularly difficult, especially in a productionist scheme!
2.↩ See “Contribution to the development of an ecosocialist programme in the framework of the necessary reduction of global material production”.

https://mronline.org/2022/04/20/133958/

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HARVARD STUDY REVEALS FRACKING IS KILLING EXTRACTION ZONE RESIDENTS
6 Apr 2022 , 12:01 pm .

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Fracking is killing those who live near the wells where oil is extracted with this method (Photo: Getty images)

A Harvard University study found that people over the age of 65 who live near fracking sites in the United States die sooner than those who don't live near those oil and gas extraction sites.

Although the environmental damage caused by this practice was already well known, the American university study now indicates that fracking is silently killing those who live near the extraction zones.

"Exposure to unconventional oil and gas development and all-cause mortality in Medicare beneficiaries," the study led by Longxiang Li at the University's School of Public Health, reviews Strategic Culture , is called . Research that was presented since 2020, but curiously it was not taken into account by the US government or by media such as the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe, the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post .

The health data examined was that of 15 million US residents over the age of 65 who receive health care from the federal Medicare program and live near fracking sites . In total there are 2,500,000 wells of this extraction method, which can give an idea of ​​the magnitude of the damage.

What is fracking and why does it cause so much damage? It is simply the unconventional exploitation of oil and gas. It consists of opening layers of rock at great depth under great hydraulic pressure using sand, water, chemicals and other additives. And it causes harm because the elements used poison the air, groundwater, rivers, lakes, drinking water, plants and animals, and also people.

The bottom line is that the closer they live to fracking wells , the sooner they will die. But what is most aberrant is that, the Harvard study points out, companies purposely locate sites near poor communities with lower incomes and where African-Americans live. To the weakness due to structural poverty, fracking is added as a deadly formula.

https://misionverdad.com/estudio-de-har ... extraccion

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

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Re: The Long Ecological Revolution

Post by blindpig » Fri Apr 22, 2022 1:45 pm

Media Need to Treat Every Day as Earth Day if We Want a Livable Planet
JULIE HOLLAR
Earth on track to be 'unlivable'
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The LA Times‘ decision (4/5/22) to put the news that the planet is becoming uninhabitable on page 3 summed up the problem with corporate media’s climate change coverage.
On Earth Day, no doubt most major media will pay lip service to the extreme dangers of climate change. But what happens the next day?

A major Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, released at the end of February, could scarcely have been more clear—or more dire:

Any further delay in concerted anticipatory global action on adaptation and mitigation will miss a brief and rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a livable and sustainable future for all.

The IPCC released a follow-up report on April 4 focused on how to limit the damage; the co-chair of the report’s working group warned that “it’s now or never.” It’s too late to avoid many of the effects of our addiction to fossil fuels, but drastic action must be taken immediately if the planet has any hopes of avoiding catastrophic levels of warming.

US media, however, are largely treating the climate crisis as just another news story among many.

When the dramatic IPCC report was released on February 28, most major outlets covered it in prime time. CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News, ABC World News Tonight and PBS NewsHour mentioned the report that day. But in the subsequent six weeks, the climate crisis dropped almost entirely off the radar of most of these shows.

NBC Nightly News and ABC World News Tonight mentioned climate change (or the “climate crisis,” or “global warming”) only one other night during that period—a month later, when the next IPCC report came out (4/4/22). CBS Evening News returned to the subject only twice (3/31/22, 4/5/22). PBS NewsHour, to its credit, ran eight more shows that mentioned the crisis.

Incredibly, cable news was even worse. None of the 6 pm CNN, MSNBC or Fox news programs even mentioned either IPCC report. CNN‘s Situation Room mentioned climate change only once (3/7/22) during the entire six weeks. MSNBC‘s The Beat aired two shows that touched on it (3/2/22, 3/3/22). Fox News Special Report named climate change nine times—but almost always in the context of attacking a Democratic statement or action to address it.

Gloomy reports on the fate of our planet don’t drive ratings, nor do corporations thrill to the thought of their ads running next to such reports. But as the IPCC reports made abundantly clear, the climate crisis is an emergency that demands urgent, sustained attention and action—not a fleeting mention once a month.

https://fair.org/home/media-need-to-tre ... le-planet/

Is this writer naive or what? Who owns the major media and what are their class interests?

Socialism or barbarism

(Edit) Deleted provided photo, looks like a fancy resort to me.

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Earth Day: Biden & US capitalism’s broken climate promises
Katie MiernickiApril 22, 2022 1 3 minutes read
Download PDF flyer https://flyer-generator.herokuapp.com/? ... sts/104278

As we celebrate the beauty, diversity, and life-sustaining qualities of our planet this Earth Day, we must also recognize the dire future that awaits it under the status quo. It is absolutely clear that climate change threatens the very survival of human civilization. Yet, politicians in the United States – the self-proclaimed leaders of the world who preside over its largest source of emissions per capita – remain at a standstill.

The world’s scientists have come to a consensus that the earth can only handle 1.5℃ of warming before total climate catastrophe begins. Thanks to Wall Street financiers, fossil fuel lobbyists, and their friends in government, the world has already surpassed 1.1℃ of warming, and is now on track for around 3℃ of warming by the end of the century unless there is a drastic change.

Unfettered fossil fuel usage and the drive for profit have already done significant damage. Each passing summer reliably brings record-breaking heat. Wildfires globally are increasing in frequency and severity, with fires now occurring year-round. Tornadoes, floods, and rising sea levels continue to devastate lives and collapse essential infrastructure worldwide. Biodiversity loss is increasing due to rising temperatures as well as ongoing ecosystem destruction at the hands of capitalist industry.

And in the wake of these catastrophes, the U.S. government’s response has routinely been inaction or outright hostility to the idea of doing more to protect the planet. Opponents of environmental destruction, especially Indigenous water protectors, have faced imprisonment. 2021 saw a record number of environmental activists killed globally for their work.

Last November gave the Biden administration a historic opportunity to guide global climate policy at the COP26 Climate Summit. Biden had a chance to detail his plan to achieve the goal he laid out last Earth Day — a 50 percent reduction in emissions below 2005 levels by the year 2030. Instead, the summit once again produced only non-binding commitments. It was attended en masse by over 500 paid fossil fuel lobbyists, the largest delegation at the summit by far, which constituted double the entire number of Indigenous delegates.

The Build Back Better bill, which was expected to be Biden and the Democrats’ signature piece of domestic policy legislation, hardly delivered on its climate promises either – and even these proposals ultimately went down in flames.

The bill’s climate section allocated $555 billion for preventing climate catastrophe. The majority of this money — $320 billion — would go towards tax credits for producers and buyers of renewable energy sources. Funding would also go towards making buildings more energy efficient, paying homeowners to switch to electric appliances or solar panels, providing rebates for purchasers of electric vehicles, and creating a Civilian Climate Corps.

Notably absent is any provision for penalties for companies that continue to burn massive quantities of fossil fuels. Biden is intentionally trying not to step on the toes of the powerful fossil fuel CEOs and lobbyists, instead raising unrealistic proposals like funding for “carbon capture” – a technology so impractical, expensive, and inefficient that it is not widely implemented anywhere in the world.

But even still, the passage of Build Back Better would have been a major development in the context of U.S. environmental policy history, considering that the last attempt to pass climate legislation was under Obama in 2009. But right-wing Democrat Joe Manchin – who is himself a coal industry capitalist through his company Enersystems! – ultimately withdrew from negotiations and killed the bill entirely.

Now, under the cover of war hysteria targeting Russia, Biden is preparing to actually expand oil and gas drilling in the United States to offset the high gas prices that could bite Democrats in the midterm elections.

It is clear that “green capitalism” will not save us. A democratically-planned economy focused on meeting the needs of the people and the planet is the only way forward.

https://www.liberationnews.org/earth-da ... rationnews

And what will the petty bourgeois environmentalists do? Why, they will blame Russia, of course. Despite the mountain of fact they will happily accept the MSM version of reality than have to admit that they have again bought another 'pig in a poke'.

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Why is Earth Day on Lenin’s birthday?
April 22, 2022 Struggle - La Lucha

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Millions of people around the world rally for environmental justice every year on April 22, which is Earth Day. This struggle is more important than ever as capitalist climate change continues to cook the earth.

A big step forward in the environmental movement has been targeting toxic racism. It’s not accidental that children in the Black-majority city of Flint, Michigan, were poisoned by their lead-contaminated drinking water.

Water protectors from Indigenous nations fight Big Oil and its dangerous pipelines. Hundreds of people who stopped the Dakota Access Pipeline were arrested.

Latinx and Haitian farmworkers can be poisoned by pesticides. Ninety percent of pesticides used in the U.S. are applied in agriculture. Five out of six farmworkers are Latinx.

Twelve of the 14 markers for harmful pesticides were found in the blood and urine of Black and Latinx people at levels five times that of whites.

Chemical plants throughout the southern United States are often located in Black communities. While in the North, Black and Latinx people living in the South Bronx have the highest number of asthma cases in the country.

Millions of poor white people also suffer from pollution. Cancer clusters exist alongside petrochemical plants from Philadelphia to West Virginia to Louisiana and Texas.

Only through struggle has any progress been made. Auto companies didn’t want to use catalytic converters that have reduced smog.

The waters off the African country of Somalia were used as a dumping ground for toxic waste from Europe until the polluters were fought off.

Capitalist politicians have learned to speak differently than when Ronald Reagan was elected California governor in 1966. At the time people wanted to save the redwood forests from the clear-cutting lumber companies.

Reagan’s response to this concern was to remark “once you’ve seen one redwood tree, you’ve seen them all.”

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Sign hung behind the bike of an activist during the first Earth Day on April 22, 1970. Photo: Denver Post

Hijacking a movement

So how did April 22 get to be Earth Day? The 1960s were a time of revolt throughout the world.

Socialist countries accounted for nearly a third of the world’s population. The Vietnamese and Laotian people were fighting 500,000 U.S. troops as well as napalm bombs and agent orange pesticides. Their courageous struggle found support all over the planet.

The Black liberation movement terrified the wealthy and powerful. Hundreds of thousands of anti-war demonstrators filled the streets of Washington D.C. The women’s and the LGTBQ2S movements were on the rise.

The widespread readership of books and pamphlets by V. I. Lenin – the leader of the Bolshevik Revolution – indicated how strong the movement of workers and oppressed people was.

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Stamp celebrating 150th Lenin’s birthday published by Vietnam.

By 1970, Lenin’s writings had been translated into more languages than the New Testament worldwide. April 22, 1970, was the centennial of Lenin’s birth. Meetings and events were planned around the world to commemorate Lenin’s life.

The U.S. ruling class wanted to divert attention from this important anniversary. They sought to keep an environmental movement within the bounds of capitalist politics.

Capitalists also wanted to put the socialist countries on trial as polluters.

Many of the socialist countries ― including China, Cuba, North Korea, and Vietnam ― had been open or disguised colonies of the big capitalist countries. These countries that liberated themselves from colonial underdevelopment were always trying to catch up.

They often had to use coal as their main fuel supply. Money that could have gone to protect the environment had to be spent to defend themselves from the U.S. and NATO.

The capitalist answer was to establish Earth Day on April 22. Big business claimed it was against pollution, too.

Capitalist media used the slogan “people cause pollution,” as if it didn’t have anything to do with making profits, the profits-before-people system.

The TV networks almost never mention that the Pentagon is the world’s biggest polluter. Today the banks, utilities and other corporations claim to be “green” as the earth continues to heat up.

We need to take Earth Day away from the billionaires. And we need to learn from V.I. Lenin and the Bolsheviks who first broke the capitalist chains enslaving humankind.

https://www.struggle-la-lucha.org/2022/ ... -birthday/

Dunno about the premise of this article, seems like 'after the fact' explanation to me. Could be wrong, but sometimes we ascribe more intent and ability to the bosses than they got, though they mighta had they thought of it.

I was on Hopkins Plaza in Baltimore on that day in 1970, the first time I'd copped out of class, but hardly the last...

Sex&Drugs&Rock&Roll had a lot more to do with distracting us at the time, it sure did work. As did the 'New Left' and pacifist idealism. Anything but communism....

All that time lost............my blood boils thinking about it.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: The Long Ecological Revolution

Post by blindpig » Sat Apr 23, 2022 2:05 pm

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Mitigation of Climate Change Report 2022: “Litany of broken climate promises” – UN Chief
Originally published: The UN in Malaysia, Singapore and Brunei Darussalam on April 5, 2022 by United Nations (more by The UN in Malaysia, Singapore and Brunei Darussalam) - Posted Apr 23, 2022


The United Nations Secretary-General called the latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change “a litany of broken climate promises” showing the world is “on a fast track to climate disaster.”

In a video message, António Guterres said the report “is a file of shame, cataloguing the empty pledges that put us firmly on track towards an unlivable world.” According to the new publication, the planet is on a pathway to global warming of more than double the 1.5-degree limit agreed in Paris. “Some government and business leaders are saying one thing – but doing another. Simply put, they are lying. And the results will be catastrophic,” said Guterres.

The UN chief remembered the last UN Climate Conference, COP26, that happened in Glasgow in November 2021, saying the international community left the meeting “with a naïve optimism, based on new promises and commitments.” Despite those efforts, Guterres said, the main problem – the enormous, growing emissions gap – was all but ignored. To keep the 1.5-degree limit agreed in Paris within reach, the world needs to cut global emissions by 45 per cent this decade.

Despite this target, current climate pledges would mean a 14 per cent increase in emissions. Guterres noted that “climate activists are sometimes depicted as dangerous radicals”, but, for him, “the truly dangerous radicals are the countries that are increasing the production of fossil fuels.” “Investing in new fossil fuels infrastructure is moral and economic madness. Such investments will soon be stranded assets – a blot on the landscape, and a blight on investment portfolios,” he warned.

Today’s report is focused on mitigation, and sets out viable, financially sound options in every sector that can keep the possibility of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees alive. First and foremost, the international community must triple the speed of the shift to renewable energy.

The Secretary-General noted that in most cases, renewables are already far cheaper. According to him, the shift also means “governments ending the funding of coal, not just abroad, but at home.” It means climate coalitions, made up of developed countries, multilateral development banks, private financial institutions, and corporations, supporting major emerging economies in making this shift.

Noting that “leaders must lead”, but that everyone can do their part, Guterres said the world owes “a debt to young people, civil society and indigenous communities for sounding the alarm and holding leaders accountable.”

The UN chief stressed that today’s report comes at a time of global turbulence, with inequalities at unprecedented levels and the recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic is scandalously uneven.

On top of that, inflation is rising, and the war in Ukraine is causing food and energy prices to skyrocket. But, according to Guterres, increasing fossil fuel production will only make matters worse. Instead, he said, “a shift to renewables will mend our broken global energy mix and offer hope to millions of people suffering climate impacts today.”

https://mronline.org/2022/04/23/mitigat ... port-2022/

Well, Mr Secretary General, assume some of that shame yourself: your whole-hearted support for Western capitalist warmongering adventurism sure ain't helping. The Pentagon's 'toys' and stratagems are the greatest single polluter on Earth. We'll not be at peace with our planetary environment if we are not at peace with ourselves.

The US has 'owned' the UN for the past 30 years but that era is coming to an end, hopefully not too late. All of the environmental agreements in the world ain't worth the paper they're printed on if consideration of profits has any part of it. The repetition of this obvious fact, with no actions or alternatives offered, shows the hollowness and worthlessness of the 'environmentalism industry', all they got is more misdirection. The cowardice and dishonesty is what is truly shameful.

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The Earth Remembers What We Did, Let’s Move to Address the Wrongs
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on APRIL 22, 2022
Otobong Inieke

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Higher rates of drought, deforestation, unpredictable rainfall and more dangerous storms are among the stark indicators of a strained ecosystem. In Nigeria, people are generally aware of the recent rain seasons being too ‘early’ or the cold harmattan winds unusually blowing long into the first three months of the year. When we consider the UN sustainable goals (SDGs), the Paris Climate Accords, or the Kyoto Protocols, it is clear to see that there is more effort to cater to capitalist interests as opposed to holding environmentally destructive corporations responsible for their actions. Consider that the highest polluters like the multinational fossil energy companies and imperialist militaries are from the rich countries that also chair these committees and climate emergency hearings.

Earth Day is meant to be a celebration of the earth and the collective actions taken to protect vital ecosystems supporting life as we know it. But like a bad movie stuck on repeat, we keep hearing about conferences and accords that do nothing more than push neoliberal austerity policies.

Lagos city’s Victoria Island which is on the Atlantic coast of Nigeria, is an example where citizens use available media to express their worries about the intense floods they face during rainy seasons. The challenge according to Seyifunmi Adebote – a veritable Nigerian environmentalist – can be attributed to eroding coastlines and changing climate conditions. In the same vein, a spokesperson for the Nigerian Emergency Management Agency (NEMA) is quoted as saying “there is this problem of the river bank being washed away. The increase in water level is eating into the land”.

For extra context, while Nigerians complain about the floods, poor drainage and government inaction, South Energyx Nigeria Ltd, the developers of the Eko Atlantic City project plan to build an 8km long ‘great wall of Lagos’ to protect the new city and by extension Victoria Island. Without addressing the core issues of poor land use and rampant white elephant projects, and as far as no sustainable practices are collectively adopted to mitigate the immediate effects of poor city drainage and eroding coastlines, no ‘great wall’ will prevent nature from taking its course no matter how dire.

Across the Atlantic, while damage to the Amazon takes front stage in the media, the Caribbean has the Cockpit Country Forest which is the largest remaining natural forest in Jamaica. The forest through its freshwater springs, ponds, and streams, supplies Western Jamaica with roughly 40% of its water needs. As usual, such ecosystems are home to unique plants and animals found only in the forest, but aside from irregular rainfalls and drought problems, Cockpit Country is threatened by heavy bauxite mining – the primary ore for aluminum- and in this regard, the Jamaica Environment Trust published a 2020 report called ‘Red Dirt’ which details the impact of the Bauxite industry of the land, people, and economy of Jamaica.

It is of utmost importance to remember that Cockpit Country was also the haven for maroons resisting British imperialists during the maroon wars of the 16th century, and to this day the Accompong Maroons hold direct custodianship of the territorial lands of Cockpit Country. The importance of the forest as a cultural site and symbol of resistance and triumph cannot be overstated.

Solutions to the issues plaguing our environment and ecosystems are many, indigenous communities have always prioritized stewardship of the lands, through a kind of reciprocal relationship. Restorative farming techniques are still practiced by small-scale farmers and the focus is on organic soil management and away from excessive industrial chemicals for pest management. Fortunately, there are mounting numbers of Pan-African revolutionaries, community activists, and organizations that continue to struggle to educate us all about the importance of reclaiming the symbiotic relationship we have with the natural environment, as opposed to maintaining the capitalistic relationship which seeks to dominate in essence and place profit above delicate life-sustaining systems.

The earth as we know it deserves more than flashy neoliberal symbology and media exploitation, but it is the responsibility of we Africans to educate ourselves, and to the best of our ability, avoid being distracted when the liberal western media goes into overdrive come April. We always celebrate the earth, our ancestors lived and breathed the celebration of the earth through our religions, and traditional practices, we don’t need corporations to remind us. We just need to remember.

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2022/04/ ... he-wrongs/

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Environmentalists from Guatemala and El Salvador reject mining

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The environmental groups reject the mining exploitation in Cerro Blanco, which is in Asunción Mita, Guatemala. | Photo: @acafremin
Published April 23, 2022 (3 hours 13 minutes ago)

Mining will damage the Ostúa River, connected to Lake Güija, which flows into the Lempa River, a source of fresh water.

Environmental organizations and communities from El Salvador and Guatemala went out on Friday to protest in the vicinity of Lake Güija, against the exploitation of a mine that operates in Guatemalan territory and pollutes the area's aquifers.

Salvadorans from the border area between the two countries boarded boats on the lake. Halfway through the journey, they met Guatemalan environmentalists who were also demonstrating for the same cause.

According to the residents, the mining of Cerro Blanco is affecting the community, as it is contaminating the water of the Güija. The demonstration took place within the framework of the celebration this Friday of World Earth Day.



The resident María Sifuentes said that her municipality Asunción Mita is a place that has been rich in water, cattle and crops. “We don't want this new mining project model to end up with Asunción Mita's water,” she declared.

The leader of the Central American Alliance Against Mining, Pedro Cabezas, stated that they want El Salvador and Guatemala to become aware of the impact of metal mining, especially the Cerro Blanco project.

For the extraction of gold in the Cerro Blanco mine, it is necessary to use enormous amounts of water and cyanide to extract it from the stone, since this metal is not found as nuggets, but as particles embedded in the stone.


These forms of extraction put human, plant and animal life at risk, since cyanide contaminates for more than 50 years and there are studies that say it can last more than 70 years.

In El Salvador, metallic mining was prohibited five years ago. However, the cross-border areas between the two countries have more than 40 areas of mining interest that, if developed, would contaminate the main sources of water for Salvadorans.

Lake Güija is a body of fresh water with a surface area of ​​45 square kilometers shared by El Salvador (74 percent of its extension) and Guatemala (26 percent of its extension).

The Cerro Blanco mine is in Asunción Mita, Guatemala. The extractive effects will damage the Ostúa River, which connects with Lake Guija and flows into the Lempa River, the main supplier of drinking water for El Salvador.


Despite the fact that the Government assures that the exploitation of the mine will not cause contamination in the area, the National Table against Mining emphasizes that it has scientific evidence that demonstrates the contrary.

Some of the participating organizations were the Madre Selva Collective of Guatemala and the Foundation for Studies for the Application of Law (FESPAD) and the Association for the Development of El Salvador, from this other Central American country.

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Re: The Long Ecological Revolution

Post by blindpig » Thu Apr 28, 2022 2:56 pm

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How the corporate interests and political elites watered down the world’s most important climate report
Posted Apr 27, 2022 by Juan Bordera


The Summary for Policymakers for the April 2022 Working Group III Report of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)—the third part of the IPCC’s 2021-2022 Sixth Assessment Report—addressing Mitigation, is according to UN Secretary General António Guterres, “a litany of broken climate promises… Simply put, they [the vested interests] are lying,” denying the science, present in the report as a whole but excluded or downplayed in the Summary for Policymakers. “Climate activists,” Guterres explains, are sometimes portrayed as dangerous radicals, but the truly dangerous radicals are the countries that are increasing fossil fuel production” (malaysia.un.org). These statements–which could belong to any social movement spokesperson–are just some of the strongest statements that the present UN Secretary-General has made in the wake of the official release of the Work Group 3 report, the world’s most crucial climate report hitherto and likely into the future.

The IPCC scientist in Working Group III in charge of proposing a concrete mitigation plan, that is, to reduce emissions and seek viable solutions (technological, economic, and social) to the biggest crisis ever faced by humankind. The science has never been clearer: we must drastically reduce emissions to have a chance of maintaining the climate stability that allows us to live on this planet. But the Summary for Policymakers and Managers (the SPM), which will be the only thing the vast majority of policymakers and business leaders will read of the report’s 2,900+ pages, does not measure up to the science behind it, nor to the challenge of climate change, the ecological crisis, and the energy transition. The Summary for Policymakers in the IPCC Working Group III document is the only thing that is not strictly scientific. The protocol established by the United Nations allows countries, often pressured by their business lobbies, to make changes and negotiate line by line on the content of The Summary for Policymakers. This is undoubtedly the part of the report that most reveals the duplicity of souls, the lights and shadows, the true character—extremely bipolar—of the IPCC drafting process.

After the last phase of revision of the report, which took several days longer than expected–with its publication was even delayed due to the struggle to modify the Summary for Policymakers—one thing is crystal clear: the make-up of the Summary of the report by lobbies and governments during the process–also documented by the BBC–is unfortunately and unquestionably real, and the rebellion of a part of the scientific community against this situation is not only more than justified, but, given the inaction, it is essential to try to remedy the situation.

A few months ago, thanks to a collective of scientists (Scientist Rebellion), we managed to publish the leak of the first draft of this group III, and the global impact was immediate–The Guardian, Der Spiegel, CNBC, Yale University, Monthly Review…–Dozens of media from more than 35 countries echoed the red warning message documented by the leaked draft of the IPCC (mronline.org).

To headline their articles, journalists usually chose between two of the pearls included in the first draft, which only the hands of scientists had touched. One of them, that emissions should peak in 2025 and fall rapidly, remains intact in the final version of this Summary for Policymakers. The other big headline, that all existing gas and coal plants should be shut down in about a decade, has completely disappeared from the summary.

But it is not the only thing that has changed. When comparing the two versions, the surprises are enormous. We have found a multitude of examples of changes that further soften a report that, if there is one thing it is guilty of from the outset, it is great moderation. And above all, if anything, the world has changed, since the report was written. The works analyzed in the compendium have a deadline: October 2021. Since then, we have experienced the first serious shocks of an energy and supply chain crisis that has been brewing for years. A war has begun that has changed politics and economics perhaps forever, and more and more voices are warning that we are on the verge of a major food crisis. When everything accelerates, the validity of the analysis becomes even more ephemeral.

This is probably the last major work of the IPCC that comes in time to guide our societies to maneuver and avoid collapse. Some believe that the direction set out in the report is clear, but reading The Summary for Policymakers, the sense it conveys is more of a civilization that is teetering unsteadily as it lurches forward; a civilization that is sustained by dwindling oil, which has to be phased out, and a glacier that is melting faster and faster. Both climate and energy stability depend on our ability to accept this situation.

In the process, between the version of the Summary leaked in August and the one finally published, the most notable changes are the following:

*No mention of the closure of gas and coal plants within a decade. Fossil industry lobbies have managed to tone down the overall narrative of the summary directed against their industry. It is known that the delay in the publication of the report was mainly for this reason. Interested countries–notably Saudi Arabia–lobbied to remove this recommendation.
*The tone is lowered regarding the responsibility of the wealthiest 10%. The leaked summary noted that they pollute ten times more than the poorest 10%.
*Many references to direct emissions from aviation, the car industry and meat consumption have disappeared. In fact, the word “meat” disappears from the final published version of the Summary. These emissions are reflected in the newly published report in association with other emissions from the sector, and their importance is therefore diluted.
*The first draft warned of “vested interests” as one of the factors hindering progress on the energy transition. That mention, which appears in the report, has been dropped from the Summary, a victim of precisely those same vested interests that pressure governments. Who says there is no poetry in scientific reports?
*One of the sentences that most confronted the report’s absolutely predominant techno-optimism is removed: “the cost, performance and adoption of many individual technologies has progressed, but overall deployment and implementation rates of technological change are currently insufficient to meet climate goals”; a statement that clashed squarely with the logic of voluntary carbon markets and big business.
*On the Carbon Capture and Sequestration mechanism: Saudi Arabia, again, along with other countries such as the UK, has fought to strengthen this controversial point that allows them to continue business as usual, demonstrating utter frivolity. The prevailing techno-optimism believes that a yet-to-be-developed technology will magically come to the rescue and even allow “continued use of fossil fuels”. Much material on these technologies has been introduced to justify the idea of net-zero emissions that has little or no scientific basis yet underpins the report’s central thesis.
*Any faint mention of the problems with the materials needed for the energy transition, which are indispensable for developing renewable energy, batteries or electric cars, is missing from the summary. This was present in the first draft.
*Also gone is the mention of participatory democracy as one of the main tools to unblock and accelerate a transition for which there is hardly any time left.
*The point that “ambitious mitigation and development goals cannot be achieved through incremental changes” has disappeared altogether. The
make-up is applied to the references that seek to emphasize that individual and incremental changes are not enough.

Fortunately, by analyzing the full report of scientists (aside from the Summary of Policy Makers)–since the report other than the Summary is not subject to redaction by powerful interests and thus represents the scientific view fairly free of pressure–we can find a path that leads us to nothing less than a revolution in our energy and socio-economic systems, giving a glimpse of the emerging commitment of part of the scientific community to degrowth. This is the only way left to us to tackle the multiple emergencies in which our societies are immersed. The word “degrowth” is mentioned 28 times in the full report, compared to zero in the summary for politicians. The sentence referring to the unsustainable nature of capitalist society is also retained, demonstrating the report’s sleekness.

For the first time, the IPCC echoes what civil society has been warning about for years and warns, in chapters 14 and 15, of the obstacle that the Energy Charter Treaty (ECT) and its investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) mechanism pose for the development of climate change mitigation policies. Having gone unnoticed for three decades, today, this international agreement for the energy sector continues to protect investments in fossil fuels. It allows investors and multinationals–precisely those who have brought us to this crossroads–to sue states when they consider that they have legislated against their economic interests, present or future. The numbers speak for themselves: in Europe alone, the fossil infrastructure protected by the treaty amounts to 344.6 billion euros.

The question is, can we move away from fossil fuels without first moving away from ECT? And why has it not been included in the summary for politicians? At this point, it is no longer enough to include bold mentions in reports whose summaries are then watered down by lobbyists. It is not only natural for a part of the scientific community to rebel and take action: it is more than desirable. This is precisely what we need to provoke a debate we seem to avoid. This debate, the elephant in the room, is that we need to change the socio-economic model, and fast. We need to act, take risks, and maybe, hopefully, inspire society to mobilize again. We need to abandon fossil fuels before they abandon us.

Juan Bordera

Antonio Turiel (Spanish Natiuonal Research Council—CSIC)

Fernando Valladares (CSIC)

Marta García Pallarés

Javier de la Casa (investigador en el CREAF [Ecological and Forestry Applications Center])

Fernando Prieto (Observatorio de la Sostenibilidad)

Ferran Puig Vilar (ingeniero y experto en clima)

Published here: ctxt.es

https://mronline.org/2022/04/27/how-the ... te-report/
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Re: The Long Ecological Revolution

Post by blindpig » Mon May 02, 2022 2:24 pm

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Climate March Vancouver (Photo: greeneconomycoalition.org/ Flickr)

Toward building a “New World”
Posted Apr 29, 2022 by Victor Wallis

[This article, part of a symposium on “building a new world within the shell of the old,” criticizes the perspective that rejects both capitalism and socialism in favor of a “green” economy. It is re-posted, with permission, from Green Horizon, No. 44 (Spring/Summer 2022).]

The aspiration to “build a new world within the shell of the old” has a long history. It is typically associated with the traditions of cooperativism and anarchism. But it is also part of the socialist/communist tradition, as articulated by Marx himself. Marx characterized communist society, in Capital, as the society of “associated producers.” Although he did not delineate this vision in detail, he explicitly situated its embryo in the cooperative movements of his time. Viewing producer cooperatives as a dimension of the labor movement, he argued that their role in ultimately empowering the “associated producers” depended on their embracing, along with their workplace practices, the wider class struggle against the power of capital.

The tension between the tasks of transforming one’s immediate surroundings and restructuring the larger society has never abated. It reflects a duality that is present in all living creatures. We are at once separate beings and units of a collectivity. In the case of humans, especially, the collectivity exists at multiple levels, with links of reciprocity not only between individuals and their immediate communities, but also between any such local entities (as well as individuals) and wider regional/national/global structures.

This observation draws us back to recent arguments in Green Horizon, where a certain impatience if not exasperation is expressed in regard to socialist agendas, and it is suggested that our movement might more fruitfully focus on transforming our immediate surroundings rather than aiming at state power. More broadly, it is argued that socialism shares with capitalism a top-down and productivist orientation that we should firmly reject, in favor of a supposed Third Way that is neither capitalist nor socialist, but Green.

The inspirational model for this non- and even anti-socialist approach lies principally in the beliefs and practices of Indigenous peoples. I share the appreciation of Indigenous societies, as I explain in a whole section of my book on ecosocialism, in which I discuss the conditions under which the priorities of those societies might come to gain wider acceptance. The view that socialism or Marxism necessarily clashes with such an approach derives from particular 20th-century experiences of revolution as interpreted through a capitalist ideological prism. The stereotype of Marxism as inherently developmentalist, however, has been thoroughly refuted, over the last three decades, in the writings of Richard Levins, John Bellamy Foster, Paul Burkett, Kohei Saito, and Michael Lebowitz. The common thread in their arguments is that the anti-Marxists attribute to Marx a perspective–as with the labor theory of value–that Marx treats as belonging (on the contrary) to the dynamics of capital, which he seeks to undercut. As he puts it (contrary to widespread misconceptions about his position),

Labor is not the source of all wealth. Nature is just as much the source of use values… as is labor.

Marx’s approach, in its refusal to view Nature through the eyes of capital, i.e., as a resource which, like workers, can be used up and cast off at will, clashes frontally with capital’s developmentalist stance. Thinkers who fail to see this then fall easily into the “plague on both your houses” attitude expressed in many Green Horizon articles that touch on capitalism and socialism.

These articles consider capitalism and socialism side-by-side as if we were simply shopping for our preferred system (including “neither of the above”). But there’s a problem here, in that, without our having had any say in the matter, we are actually living under capitalism. This is so obvious that one easily forgets it. What it means, however, is that if we want to adopt any other way of organizing our lives, the alternative does not just offer itself to us on an even playing field with capitalism. In order to attain it, we must first get out from capitalist domination; we must strip away the power of capital!

No matter what our ultimate goal might look like, this is the sine qua non. We can have endless discussions about the precise contours of the society we want to achieve, and I share with Green Horizon writers a preference for as biodiverse, decentralized, and democratic an arrangement as possible. But the framework for whatever arrangement we seek will be set by the process through which we initially escape the claws of capital.

Given, then, that our starting point is the rejection of capitalism, what we face is not an either/or between socialism and a “green economy.” Our task instead is to envisage the general contours of what we want and then assess the various possible ways of getting there. While certain elements of a green or localized economy can be introduced directly, the complete liberation it envisages cannot be reached without dissolving the core institutions of capitalist power, including its aggressive/competitive/exhibitionistic culture. This has been, and remains, the historic task of socialism. After all, what can replace the power of a minuscule profit-driven propertied class if not the power of the organized majority (whatever precise form this power might take)? And what is it that can weld this majority into a political force, if not a common class interest?

The reason so many Green writers seem to balk at this conclusion is that, echoing the surrounding capitalist consensus, they identify socialism by definition with the harshest of its first-epoch manifestations (e.g., the Soviet Union under Stalin), thereby refusing to challenge the negative impression of socialism that they encounter in workers socialized by corporate media. Lifting actual socialist revolutions out of their historical context, they turn the outcomes of particular mixes of national and conjunctural traits into ironclad axioms as to what socialism entails. They see socialism as being inherently bureaucratic and top-down, whereas in fact the revolutionary process brings numerous impulses and tendencies to the fore, making for a range of possible outcomes.

What drives the frequent negative or repressive traits is a mix of factors, which vary in character and importance from one country or set of conditions to the next. Some aspects of the prerevolutionary culture–e.g., patterns of hierarchy–may be difficult to shake, especially under conditions of scarcity. Probably the biggest adverse factor, however, is the drive of capitalist interests–whether internal or external–to disrupt and destroy the revolution, even (or especially) if it has wide popular support and could serve as an inspiration to others. To the extent that a revolutionary process begins on a note of hope (for example with an election victory by a socialist-oriented party or coalition), globally imposed U.S. sanctions can be counted on to bring it grief, compromising its achievements and giving corporate media and politicians a pretext to call its leadership dictatorial (as in the present case of Venezuela).

Those with “green” goals who seek to avoid such unpleasantness tout the scenario of local grassroots organizing, including a multiplicity of diverse institutions. I do not reject any of this; it plays a necessary role in drawing people into activism and also in eventually running the society that we aspire to. The problem, however, is that it does not address the current persistence of the monster in the room, namely, overarching capitalist power. Political action to confront that power requires a unified movement. The view that such unity precludes concern for the diversity of popular needs reflects precisely the negative stereotype of socialism–and of revolution–that the capitalist ruling class invokes to preserve its own legitimacy. The point is not to deny instances where revolutionary parties or regimes have done the wrong thing; the point is to understand those moments and to recognize that socialist movements and socialist-oriented governments are “works in progress,” with conscious protagonists who have every reason to try to avoid the consequent disappointments in the future.

If you really want changes requiring the dismantling of capitalism–and this does include the changes necessary to the imagined “green economy,”–then you will join in these efforts rather than condemning the project that inspires them.

https://mronline.org/2022/04/29/toward- ... new-world/

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UN warns of degradation of 40% of the world's soils

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"Modern agriculture has altered the face of the planet more than any other human activity," warned the executive secretary of the Unccd, Ibrahim Thiaw. | Photo: UN
Published 28 April 2022

According to the international organization, in no other decade has humanity faced such a variety of familiar and unknown risks.

The United Nations Organization (UN) warned this Thursday that due to environmental damage due to anthropogenic activities, up to 40 percent of the soil is degraded, affecting half of humanity and the world's Gross Domestic Product (GDP), equivalent to 44 billion dollars.

According to the second Global Land Outlook report of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (Unccd), natural resources such as soil, water and biodiversity are not currently used sustainably, threatening the health and survival of many species. in the planet.

“The current commitment of nations to restore 1,000 million hectares of degraded land by 2030 requires 1.6 trillion dollars this decade, a fraction of the 700,000 million dollars annually in fossil fuels and agricultural subsidies,” the entity warned.


He also added that proportionally to the increase in food prices, dire consequences such as climate change advance, for which a crisis base is needed to restore and use the land in a sustainable way.

In this sense, the document raises the potential contributions of investments in land restoration for the conservation of biodiversity and ecosystems; poverty reduction, human health and other factors that threaten the sustainable development goals.


“Investing in large-scale land restoration is a powerful and cost-effective tool to combat desertification, soil erosion and loss of agricultural production; As a finite resource and our most valuable natural asset, we cannot afford to continue taking the land for granted,” stressed UNCCD Executive Secretary Ibrahim Thiaw.

https://www.telesurtv.net/news/onu-advi ... -0027.html
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Re: The Long Ecological Revolution

Post by blindpig » Tue May 03, 2022 2:32 pm

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Marxist Ecology in the light of Contemporary Ecological Thought: reflections on the Ontological questions in dark, deep and Marxist ecology
Originally published: Economic & Political Weekly on April 23, 2022 Vol. 57, Issue No. 17 by Varun Wighmal (more by Economic & Political Weekly) (Posted May 02, 2022)

The paper strives to explore some fundamental debates concerning the question of ecology, nature and culture in Marxian corpus. First, it attempts to explicate the differences and commonalities between the philosophical conception of nature in Marxism and contemporary and old ecological thoughts like Dark ecology of Timothy Morton and Deep ecology of Arne Naess. Second, the paper is also an attempt to revisit some of the larger philosophical and ontological questions pertaining to nature and ecology; especially the questions related to ontological position of mind and matter in relation to nature and how these fundamental questions have a bearing on the current and future trajectory of ecological thought and movements globally in the Anthropocene epoch.

There has been an extensive debate within Marxism concerning the question of nature and its concomitant questions about the interaction of nature and culture or nature and society. This debate goes back to the writings of Karl Marx himself and got livelier after Friedrich Engels’s magnum opus Dialectic of Nature. Marx’s own writing reflected a comprehensive or totalised system of knowledge, which gave due emphasis to the question of ontology. That is, it contends the fundamental question of what constitutes reality and being. This ontological undercurrent in Marx can be seen in his doctoral dissertation, which was a comparative study of Epicurus and Democritus on the philosophy of nature. In his thesis, Marx analysed the materialistic philosophy of ancient thinker Epicurus and also formulated his initial understanding of the working of nature and its materialistic mechanism. This early work of Marx has also been interpreted as an introduction to his dialectical conception of nature, wherein nature is perceived to work in a dialectical materialistic fashion. Although some recent writers like Thomas Nail have argued for a different understanding of Marx’s thesis, wherein Marx formulated that unfolding of nature or change in nature does not happen only dialectically, which is somewhat deterministic, rather it happens as dialectic kinetic swerves (sudden or abrupt change in any process) (Nail 2020).

Whatever may be the case, it becomes quite clear that Marx right from the onset had ontological concerns about nature and its materialistic or non-materialistic underpinning. This negates the later interpretation of Marx and Marxism as an economic theory or philosophical system that was indifferent to the fundamental question of ecology and nature. It has been argued by contemporary political ecologists like John Bellamy Foster that this anti-ecological interpretation of Marx’s oeuvre was a product of neo-Kantian and neo-Hegelian interpretations of Marxism, especially by Frankfurt School and Western Marxism theorists (Foster 2000). This neo-Kantian thinking with epistemology centric discourse completely sidelined the foundational and ontological questions in Marxism.

This had a huge impact on the question of ecology or nature and society as it was assumed that Marxism and its dialectical method is only applicable to society and its unfolding and the domain of nature was virtually left untouched or ignored by this discourse. The domination of Western Marxism and the new left in academia with its Kantian and Hegelian leaning is partly responsible for the marginalisation of the discourse of nature and natural science within Marxism. It can be argued, without an iota of doubt, that it was not the case in original or early Marxism. In early Marxism which includes the writings of both Marx and Engels, nature and society or nature and culture were not seen as independent domains, rather they were perceived as a continuous relational or dialectical process. And, the method of dialectics which entails both struggle and unity of opposites was thought of as a basic scientific method by which all of reality, whether social or natural, unfolds. In other words, the processes that bring changes in the social world were inextricably linked or entwined with the processes of the natural world. This can be substantiated by some common examples from Marx’s own writings and ideas, especially his conception of social and natural metabolism and the metabolic rift that had accompanied the capitalist transformation of agriculture.

Marx formulated that natural and social metabolism is interlinked and disruptions in one bring changes in the other. The best example was the loss of soil fertility that resulted because of the transformation in social relations with capitalist agriculture in enclosure movements in England. The irreversible loss of nutrients from the soil and disruption in the soil cycle embodies a metabolic rift between natural and social metabolism, which was otherwise considered as one and intertwined. This shows the deep insights that Marx had on nature and its relation with society, which was not just an epistemological insight about the question of how we do know or perceive natural and social reality, but what fundamentally entails as nature and society and their enmeshed relationship, i.e. the question of social and natural ontology. These ontological and scientific concerns in Marx are thoroughly explored by philosophers like Helena Sheehan (1985) in her work Marxism and the Philosophy of Science and also by a natural scientist like Richard Lewontin, Richard Levins and Stephen Jay Gould; all of them have tried comprehending nature and its processes and vicissitude through a dialectical prism and method.

Marxist Ecology in the light of Dark and Deep Ecology

After highlighting the basic ecological thinking in Marx and other early Marxist and the drift that happened with Western Marxism, it becomes pivotal to explore Marxist ecological thinking in relation to some other prominent and new ecological philosophies and thought. Two prominent eco-philosophies that are worth reckoning in light of this debate are Dark and Deep ecology. Dark ecology is relatively new and therefore has varied and ambiguous interpretations. It is a sort of ecological thinking that strives to frame the question of ecology without the conception of nature (Morton, Ecology Without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics 2007). This was formulated by philosopher Morton in his major work named Ecology without Nature. Morton belongs to the avant-garde tradition of post-continental philosophy named object-oriented ontology (OOO) and speculative realism. Both these ideas and philosophies contend a position that fundamentally challenges both Kantian correlationism1 and anthropocentrism2. Morton, who is inspired by philosophers like Graham Harman and Bruno Latour, asserts that our formulation of nature is extremely anthropocentric. This is because of the spectre of non-humans, which constitutes virtually every entity in the universe, barring humans.

Morton propounds that Dark ecology is an aesthetic critique of the conception of nature that privileges humans or sentient beings over objects and non-human stuff. This aesthetic of ecological experience that Morton calls Dark ecology transcends all anthropocentric binaries of nature versus culture and asserts solidarity with non-humans on a plane of immanence. Fundamentally, Morton argues for a flat ontology3, wherein the human-centric universe is demolished and a true post-human aesthetic experience is formulated that subverts the violence of the Neolithic agricultural revolution, which severed the symbiosis of human and non-human existence. The symbiotic real that Morton proposed in his work was about the inseparable or entangled existence of humans with non-humans or objects and was also a flat plane of immanence with no duality or transcendence or hierarchy in the ecosphere and which got severed with the Neolithic revolution or agriculture. This severing, according to Morton, is the root cause of our ecological crisis. Dark ecology is nothing but an aesthetic experience or phenomenology that strives to undo this severing by making humans conscious of the complex network that the ecosphere is and how each actor in the network is enmeshed with the other. Morton calls for an eco-communism in his recent work, which is about the solidarity of humans with non-humans. Morton argues that a spectre is haunting Marxism, which is basically the spectre of non-humans. He acknowledges the anthropocentric undercurrents in Marxism and still contends that communism or Marxism has more potential than capitalism because, according to Morton, anthropocentrism is a bug, not a feature of Marxism (Morton 2019). He postulates a post-human economy4 in which human thought is no longer the top access mode to the world.

His work of Dark ecology and ecology without nature is an avant-garde intervention in post-continental philosophy and literary theory that blends together insights from Marxism, Heidegger’s ontology, Lacaian and Derridean framework. Morton, unlike shallow ecologists or liberal ecologists, wants to ontologise ecological thinking, and this resonates with Marx’s own attempt in his doctoral thesis as well as Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 and Das Kapitalto bring out deep ontological and materialistic concerns about nature and ecology. The difference between the ecological frame of Morton and Marx lies in their vantage point concerning the ontology of object and matter, because Marx, unlike Morton, did not argue for an active role or agency of non-human objects in social relations independent of human labour, this makes Marxian analysis not completely post-human as is the case with Morton.

After, explicating Dark ecology and its juxtaposition with the Marxian ecological framework. It becomes crucial to delve into some of the vital questions raised by Deep ecology and its adherents and how the Marxian frame fits in it. Deep ecology is an ecological thought as well as a movement started by philosopher Arne Naess and espoused by Vandana Shiva and others who contend that nature has intrinsic value. In other words, the formulation of use-value or exchange value by Marx or any other political economist eludes the basic notion that apart from values attributed to nature by humans and their economic processes, it is the nature that has value-in-itself independent of human attribution.

In Deep ecological framework, nature is alive and should not be seen as dead, inert or brute matter. This fundamental operative logic distinguishes deep ecology from shallow-liberal ecology, which argues for the preservation of nature for human needs and survival. Deep ecologists have also accused Marx of engaging in the same anthropocentric fallacy that liberal political economists fall in that is of seeing nature and its products as a gift to man. Deep ecologists’ accusation against Marx has also been accepted by many eco-socialist like Joel Kovel and others who have accepted the idea that Marx lacked a true ecological lens, due to his spatio-temporal position. This position against Marx has also been accepted by Akeel Bilgrami, who has also alleged that Marx’s thinking lacks a deep ecological frame. But Bilgrami does not blame Marx for this lack, because he contends that there was no ecological Copernican revolution, when Marx was writing, which made him oblivious of some of the catastrophic consequences of capitalism.

Deep ecologist argues that it is not just capitalism that promotes ecological destruction, but it is a modern or modernist frame of perceiving nature in predatory terms that fuels this catastrophe. There lies the fundamental distinction between Marxian ecology and Deep ecology because Marx despite his stringent condemnation of capitalism and capitalist modernity did not oppose modernity as such. It was capitalism, not modern productive forces that according to Marx wreaked havoc on the environment and nature. In his, envision of future communism advancement of technology and productive forces are a prerequisite for any communist society.

Deep ecology shares a lot with animistic epistemology and ontology. Animism, which is nothing but panpsychism5 in action view nature and every entity of nature as alive and also attributes rudimentary agency or subjectivity to matter. And, here we can draw a strong parallel between Deep and Dark ecological frameworks. Both frameworks somehow attribute agency to matter and objects or nature, which is non-human, the difference emanates in their method. Dark ecology which is inspired by object oriented ontology of Graham Harman that transcends Kantian correlationism that privileges human subjectivity for any knowledge of the object and the Cartesian notion that the world is split into two kinds of entities: human thinkers and dead physical matter. Object Oriented Ontology (OOO upholds Kant’s basic conception of the thing-it-itself, but the primary difference between OOO and Kant is the claim by OOO proponents like Harman and Morton that objects are noumenal (that is exist in themselves), not just for us, but for each other as well. And, hence the deep error of Kantian philosophy is the assumption that we cannot speak of any relationship that does not include humans as one its elements. For example, we cannot talk about thunder-in-itself, but only about how thunder manifests to humans under the condition of time and space. In other words, OOO speaks of objects outside of any relations. This ontological assumption is accepted by Dark Ecology of Morton and through this, he formulates a non-anthropocentric model of ecology. Deep ecology is also non-anthropocentric but does not accept the fundamentals of Dark ecology, which is based on object oriented ontology and actor-network theory of Latour. Deep ecology in a way ascribes human-like subjectivity to all of nature and objects; albeit some scholars have tried drawing some link between Deep and Dark ecology through a common notion of panpsychism, but it is quite contested as to how much of a link can be drawn between the two, as Dark ecology is primarily lies in the domain of aesthetic experience and argues for a fundamental shift in human consciousness and Deep ecology perceives all nature to be alive like humans.

Marxist ecological framework does not go into such conceptual philosophical questions about the ontology of objects and can we speak of objects outside of our subjectivity like thing-in-itself. Many Marxist thinkers have criticised both Dark ecology and Deep ecology for ignoring concrete historical and social factors that shape any ecology and its framework. Dark ecology is seen as an attempt by Marxists to obfuscate and absolve capitalist exploitation of nature by bringing obscure complex ontological questions in their analysis of nature and ecology. I believe this criticism is not very strong due to Marx’s own engagement with ontological questions as shown in the earlier part of the paper. Deep ecology has also been criticised by Marxist ecologists due to its cryptic and mystical language and it’s complete sidelining of concrete social and economic factors in their ecological analysis.

Conclusions
The paper started with an endeavour to introduce Marxist ecological thought and to trace its genealogy in the writings of early Marx. It contends that Marx and Marxism right from inception had taken ontological questions seriously. It argued that Marx was a comprehensive philosopher, who had conceptualised a totalised ontology of humans and nature. He saw both nature and humans or society have always existed in a symbiotic relationship that got disrupted by capitalist agriculture and mode of production. The paper also looked at the attempts initiated by Western Marxism that tried to separate Marxism from natural sciences and positioned the process and method of dialectics as belonging only to the human and social sphere. This fallacy was disproved by delving into Marx’s ontological concerns about nature and matter as well by the involvement of Marxist natural scientists in framing and perceiving nature dialectically.

It then explored the domain of Dark and Deep ecology and juxtaposed the non-anthropocentrism of both these ecological frameworks with Marxist ecological thought and argued that Marx was not completely anthropocentric, as he is usually accused of, but he also did completely touch on some of the intriguing ontological questions about object, matter and its ontology as framed by Dark ecologist and OOO theorists. Dark ecology subscribes to a relational ontology, wherein everything is inextricably interconnected and this common factor blends insights of all three ecological frameworks, whether Dark, Deep or Marxist.

Deep ecological concern and their panpsychist orientation were also juxtaposed with Marx’s analysis of the matter. It can be argued that the new interpretation of Marxism in light of new materialism that perceives matter to be active, dynamic and in motion and changing abruptly especially by Nail in his work Marx in Motion provides new space to interpret Marx’s ontology in a panpsychist lens. This could be interesting future work that can bridge some of the gaps between Dark, Deep and Marxist ecology. Finally, the paper was an attempt to explore new perspectives on the question of ecology and nature and to envision a new ontological framework which is truly relational and transcends anthropocentrism and hubris of human exceptionalism.

https://mronline.org/2022/05/02/marxist ... l-thought/

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Climate crisis rages as U.S. pushes war for energy profits
May 3, 2022 Scott Scheffer

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In early April, a rescue crew in McKinney, Texas, helped motorists whose cars were swept away in flash floods.

For a brief period last summer, even as the COVID-19 pandemic dominated the headlines, climate change news burst to the forefront.

There were wildfires in several western U.S. states, where record-breaking droughts dried up the water system. There were floods in China, Central Europe and India, where 1,300 people died. A Pacific Northwest heat wave took the lives of more than 1,000 people in the normally temperate and humid region.

Considered the most extreme heat wave in world history, it shocked climatologists and was a basis for the reassessment of climate change timelines.

All of this was happening as President Joe Biden’s proposed “Build Back Better” legislation, which included funds for action on climate change, was being crushed in Congress. The legislation was already not enough – but still too much for the powerful energy industry and giant banks to allow.

The defeat left the White House without a plan of action to bring to the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26) in Glasgow last October.

The humiliation and consequent surrender by Biden revealed the weakness of the executive branch of the capitalist U.S. government when it is forced to confront the power of the ruling class, and in particular, giant energy corporations and banks.

Washington prioritizes war

Because of the resources ostensibly at the fingertips of the U.S. empire, capitalist media throughout the world interpret the role of the U.S. as primary in the global effort to fight climate change. This is false hope. The U.S. military is itself the worst single entity that emits CO2 in the world and has evolved into nothing less than a brutal police force for the U.S. energy industry in its efforts to control the world’s oil, natural gas and coal.

The energy industry is a powerful section of the capitalist class and garners huge and growing investment by the giant banks. Instead of aiding the replacement of fossil fuels with wind and solar, or pushing reforestation on a massive scale, the major oil companies are now investing in ventures that by design can enable their continued drilling and fracking of oil and natural gas.

They can’t lead this fight. A leopard doesn’t change its spots.

Nonetheless, and understandably, during the leadup to the Glasgow conference, tens of millions of people throughout the world were hoping the White House would take charge and work to alleviate the menacing climate crisis.

Despite the U.S. delegation attending the conference with obvious empty promises instead of a list of actions already funded and soon to be underway, the conference stiffened some of the goals set at previous conferences. All agreed on preventing the global rise in temperature since the industrial revolution from topping 1.5 degrees, reaching “carbon neutrality” by 2050, and mobilizing financing for the global south for mitigation and adaptation.

Since the conference, the White House’s failed climate proposals are all but forgotten. The media is focused now on the conflict in Ukraine – a crisis created by Washington that threatens the world with nuclear war, as U.S. imperialism maneuvers to increase its domination of oil, gas and energy pathways.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has issued strident warnings that not enough progress has been made in the five months since COP26 and humanity is not on pace in the fight to save the planet. The funding promised to the global south has not come to pass.

Without the blazing headlines over climate change nagging Biden, the White House has now made a u-turn. To alleviate the consequences of Biden and NATO’s campaign against Russia and Donbass, he greenlit the auction of 1.7 million acres in the Gulf of Mexico to oil giants Exxon, Shell, Chevron and others, in a realization of right-wing Sara Palin’s cry to “drill, baby, drill.”

The people pay the price

But there’s no need to hear from the IPCC, or to do a deep dive through mainstream media, to know that the crisis is ongoing. Hundreds of thousands of people are experiencing the consequences firsthand.

An April 5 Newsweek headline reported, “Texas Flash Flooding Sweeps Cars Away as Roads Turn Into Rivers.”

Firefighters in drought-stricken Flagstaff, Arizona, have finally made headway in battling a 19,000-acre fire that was within miles of the city.

In Durban, South Africa, families are mourning more than 400 victims and cleaning up after devastating floods swept away homes of many of the poorest South Africans.

As if the people of Iraq haven’t endured enough at the hands of U.S. imperialism, after wars and sanctions that killed millions, a report by the European Union’s Institute for Security Studies says that Baghdad could be uninhabitable by 2040. The number of 120-degree days will increase from 14 per year not long ago to 40 per year by then.

Awareness of the impending threat is as old as the problem itself. The pioneer of climate science was a remarkable scientist and women’s rights fighter – Eunice Newton Foote, who studied and wrote about the dangers of greenhouse gasses. Her work had to be introduced to other scientists by a male colleague in 1856. But the science was isolated and largely ignored for nearly a century.

Now there are hundreds of thousands of expert climatologists throughout the world. Engineers are constantly pushing innovations that should be invested in, developed and employed. All of this science and every resource needs to be freed from the influence of the capitalist class.

Though every criminal U.S. energy corporation today claims to be “green,” it’s never been more clear that the fight against climate change must be severed from their grasp to turn the situation around. The needed momentum won’t come from any occupant of the White House – Democrat or Republican. The only real power capable of saving our planet is in the independent mobilization of the people.

https://www.struggle-la-lucha.org/2022/ ... y-profits/

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BP profit more than doubles on ‘exceptional’ oil trading
By Mark Thompson, CNN Business
Published 6:45 AM EDT, Tue May 3, 2022

BP took a hit of more than $24 billion from ditching its business in Russia but reported a huge jump in profit for the first quarter.

The UK-based energy giant said Tuesday that its underlying profit soared to $6.2 billion from $2.6 billion in the same period last year, boosted by “exceptional oil and gas trading” conditions.

Oil prices have shot up by nearly 40% since the start of 2022, with benchmark Brent crude trading well above $100 a barrel. Prices for natural gas have also surged. The gains have been driven by fears of a global supply shock following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

In response to the war, the United States, Canada, United Kingdom and Australia have banned imports of Russian oil, and the European Union could soon join them. EU countries are dramatically scaling back purchases of Russian natural gas, and Moscow has already cut off supplies to Poland and Bulgaria.

On Feb. 27, three days after President Vladimir Putin sent his forces across the border into Ukraine, BP (BP) said it would ditch its stake of nearly 20% in Russian state oil giant Rosneft, and abandon three joint ventures with the country’s biggest oil producer. On Tuesday, it said those decisions led to an after-tax charge of $24.4 billion, and a loss of $20.4 billion.

“In a quarter dominated by the tragic events in Ukraine and volatility in energy markets, BP’s focus has been on supplying the reliable energy our customers need,” CEO Bernard Looney said in a statement. “But it has not changed our strategy, our financial frame, or our expectations for shareholder distributions,” he added.

How to spend it?
Shareholders are in line for a windfall. BP announced a first quarter dividend of 5.46 cents per share, up from 5.25 cents last year, and said it would use spend $2.5 billion — or 60% of its surplus cashflow — buying back shares in the next three months.

Shares of BP were up 2.5% in London trading, taking the stock’s gain for the year so far to nearly 22%.

The PCK oil refinery, which is in majority owned by Russian energy company Rosneft, stands illuminated on March 21, 2022 in Schwedt, Germany. Russian oil arrives at the refinery via the Druzhba ("Friendship") pipeline and deliveries are so far not falling under sanctions.
Opinion: The best solution to high gas prices: tax the oil companies
Opposition lawmakers said the bumper earnings reinforced their call for the UK government to impose a one-off windfall tax on excess profits generated by companies producing oil and gas in the North Sea.

They want the proceeds to help fund additional relief for households who are paying sky high prices for fuel and heating in the worst cost-of-living crisis in decades.

“With so many people struggling to pay their energy bills, we should have a windfall tax on oil and gas companies in the North Sea, who have made more profit than they were expecting,” Keir Starmer, leader of the opposition Labour Party told the BBC. “Have a windfall tax on that and use that to help people with their energy bills, up to £600 for those who need it most.”

(more...)

https://us.cnn.com/2022/05/03/investing ... index.html

War, capitalism, climate, it's socialism or barbarism, no mistaking.
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Re: The Long Ecological Revolution

Post by blindpig » Fri May 06, 2022 1:51 pm

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Crude contaminates the Aguarico 4 oil pit, an open pool abandoned by Texaco after 6 years of production and never remediated.

Donziger: A tale for our times
Posted May 06, 2022 by Craig Murray

Originally published: Craig Murray Blog on April 28, 2022 (more by Craig Murray Blog)

Texaco operations in Ecuador from 1962 to 1994 dumped 70 billion litres of “wastewater”, heavily contaminated with oil and other chemicals, into the Amazon rainforest, plus over 650,000 barrels of crude oil. They polluted over 800,000 hectares.

It is one of the worst ecological disasters in history–30 times greater than the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska and 85 times greater than the Gulf of Mexico spill by British Petroleum (BP) in 2010. During the supposed clean up in the provinces of Sucumbios and Orellana, before it left Ecuador, Texaco hid over a thousand different swamps of toxic waste throughout the rainforests, dumping a layer of topsoil over them.

Texaco was taken over by Chevron in 2000. Chevron claims that Texaco only ever extracted $490 million in profit from Ecuador over 30 years. The accounting of that is hotly contested by the Amazon Defense Coalition which claims Texaco made $30 billion profit. One thing for sure is that even the Chevron figure is at historic values, not real terms, and would be worth vastly more today.

The cost of the pollution to the inhabitants of the Amazon is incalculable in simple monetary terms, as is the cost of the environmental catastrophe to the entire world. However in the mid 1990’s Ecuador was firmly under the United States heel and–as Chevron’s legal team assert–in 1995 the Government of Ecuador was persuaded to sign a ludicrous clean-up agreement with Texaco as it left the country, releasing it from all legal obligations at a cost of just U.S. $40 million.

Yes, that really is just $40 million. Compare that to the $61.6 billion that BP paid out for the almost 100 times smaller Deepwater Horizon environmental disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. In 1998 the corrupt, U.S. controlled, government of Ecuadorean President Jamil Mahuad signed a final release relieving Texaco for all liability from economic pollution. That release has now been upheld by the Court of International Arbitration in the Hague.

How this was achieved by Chevron/Texaco is well explained in a book I highly recommend, a copy of which was sent to me in prison by a supporter:
The Misery of International Law by Linarelli, Salomon and Sornarajah (Oxford University Press 2018).

A Chevron lobbyist in 2008 said that “we can’t let little countries screw around with big companies like this”. At the time of this writing, Chevron is the fourth largest company headquartered in the United States, operating in over one hundred countries, with gross revenues twice that of Ecuador’s GDP. When Texaco began operations in Ecuador in 1964, the country was unstable and extremely poor, with bananas as its main export. One lawyer who works for Oxfam had argued that “Texaco ran the country for twenty years. They had the U.S. Embassy in their pocket. They had the military. Politically, there was no way that Texaco was going to be held accountable in Ecuador.” At the time Ecuador needed Texaco’s expertise and technology if it was to extract the oil. The lawsuit alleged that Texaco dumped 18 billion gallons of toxic waste into the water system in the region, along with 17 billion gallons of crude oil, and left 916 clearly visible unlined toxic waste pits full of black sludge throughout the region. At the time, Texaco’s operations did not violate Ecuadorean law. Ecuador had no real environmental law at the time. While Chevron vigorously contests the facts, the evidence shows that Texaco failed to use environmentally sustainable technologies in its operations in Ecuador. As the former Ecuador Ambassador to the United States Nathalie Cely has put it: “When Texaco left Ecuador, significant profits in hand, it left unprecedented damage to the environment in its wake and no compensation to those affected.”

In my writing I always try to add value when I can by giving my own experience where relevant, and the situation described here reminds me precisely of the impunity with which Shell acted in Nigeria in their similarly massive pollution of the Niger Delta. I witnessed this close up when I was Second Secretary at the British High Commission in Lagos from 1986 to 1990. My brief was “Agriculture and Water Resources” and I therefore encountered the environmental devastation at first hand.

From my privileged diplomatic position I also saw the political power wielded by Shell in Nigeria through corruption and bribery, and I absolutely recognise the description given above of Texaco in Ecuador: “They had the U.S. Embassy in their pocket”. In Nigeria, Shell had the British High Commission in their pocket, throughout decades in which all bar one of Nigeria’s military dictators was trained at Sandhurst, and the exception went to another British military college.

The Chairman and MD of Shell Nigeria, Brian Lavers, was treated as a deity and lived a life of extraordinary power and luxury. The British High Commissioner, Sir Martin Ewans, himself a very haughty man, deferred routinely to Lavers. I recall one occasion when the diplomatic staff were all instructed to attend a private briefing by Lavers in the High Commission. He made some dismissive and complacent comments about the “fuss” over pollution. I, a rather diffident and nervous young man on my first diplomatic assignment, very respectfully queried him on something I knew from direct observation to be untrue. I got a public ticking off from the High Commissioner followed by a massive private bollocking from my boss, and was later told that Shell made a complaint against me to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in London.

So, in brief, I know of what they speak. I should add that I am still extremely upset by all of this because of the subsequent execution of Ken Saro Wiwa, whom I knew, and other indigenous environmental activists, for which I hold Shell in part culpable. 35 years since I got carpeted for raising the shocking effects, and 25 years since the executions shocked the world, Shell’s devastation of the Niger Delta continues. (see Footnote).

29 years ago, in 1993, Steven Donziger, a New York lawyer, visited Ecuador and saw communities who lived their lives with their bare feet and hands permanently covered in oil sludge and other pollutants, whose agriculture was ruined and who suffered high levels of mortality and birth defects. He started a class action against Texaco in the United States, representing over 30,000 local people. Texaco, confident that they had control of Ecuador, requested the U.S. court to rule that jurisdiction lay in Ecuador. It also set about obtaining the agreement from the Government of Ecuador to cancel any liability. In 2002 the New York court finally agreed with Texaco (now Chevron) that is had no jurisdiction and the case moved to Ecuador, much to Chevron’s delight.

What Chevron had not bargained for was that corrupt U.S. control of Ecuador might loosen. In 2007 left wing Rafael Correa became President and Chevron’s previously total impunity in the country dissolved. In 2011 Donziger and his team won an award of $18 billion in compensation for the local population from a provincial Ecuadorean court, later reduced to $9.5 billion by the Supreme Court of Ecuador.

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Chevron now did two things. Firstly, it invoked the bribery obtained agreements of 1995 and 1998 limiting its liability to the paltry $40 million clean-up operation, and appealed to the international tribunals specified in those agreements. Chevron succeeded, as was fairly certain to happen. The agreements had indeed been signed and did relieve Texaco/Chevron of any liability.

This brings us into precisely the same area as Investment Promotion and Protection Agreements and the ability of huge multinationals to bully or bribe poorer states into signing away their sovereign authority in favour of judgement, not by a multilateral state institution like the International Court of Justice, but of a commercial tribunal formed of western corporate lawyers of strong neo-conservative ideology.

Western governments put enormous pressure on developing countries to succumb to such jurisdiction, including making it a condition of aid flows. The system is so unfair on developing countries that even Hillary Clinton inveighed against it, before she started fund-raising for her Presidential bid.

Big oil apologists are cock-a-hoop that the disgraceful, well-feathered right wing jurists of the Permanent Court of Arbitration in the Hague gave Chevron a judgement that their bribed 1998 “Get out of jail free” card did indeed say “Get out of jail free”. This case in itself damns the arbitration system. The truth is, of course, that no developing country has ever initiated surrendering its sovereignty to such a tribunal, and it is strongly in the institutional and financial interest of the tribunal and its members to find in favour of the big western corporations on which their very existence thus depends.

The second thing that Chevron did was to attempt to destroy Steven Donziger personally. In 2011 they filed a suit in New York under the anti-mob Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organisations Act, arguing that in Ecuador Donziger had bribed a judge, bribed witnesses and plaintiffs, ghost-written the original judgement and subverted expert witnesses.

The case against Donziger now becomes an incredible tale of corrupt judges in both Ecuador and the United States, of whom the most corrupt of all is U.S. District Judge Lewis A Kaplan. It is important to note that the case against Donziger came before Kaplan as a civil case, not a criminal case. Chevron were seeking an injunction to stop Donziger acting further against them. Originally they were suing Donziger for $60 billion in damages, but that was dropped because it would have meant Donziger had a jury. By merely seeking an injunction, Chevron could ensure that Kaplan was unconstrained.

What happened next beggars belief. Kaplan made a ruling setting aside the judgement of the Ecuadorean court on the grounds it was based on racketeering, coercion and bribery. It should be recalled that, at Chevron’s insistence, the New York District Court had nine years earlier ruled it had no jurisdiction over the case, and that jurisdiction lay in Ecuador. Kaplan now ruled the opposite; both times Chevron got what they wanted.

So who is Kaplan? From 1970 to 1994 he was in private practice, representing in particular the interests of tobacco companies including Philip Morris–itself, I would argue, sufficient sign of moral bankruptcy. He was also the “trusty” judge the federal government used to rule that years of detention and torture in Guantanamo Bay did not affect prosecutions of detainees there. On the plus side, Kaplan did allow Virginia Giuffre’s lawsuit against Prince Andrew to go ahead; but then Andrew is not a U.S. state or commercial interest.

The only testimony of bribery and corruption which Kaplan heard came from a single source, Ecuadorean judge Alberto Guerra. He claimed he was bribed to support the local plaintiff’s case against Chevron and to ghost write the judgement with Donziger for the trial judge. No other evidence of racketeering or bribery was given before Kaplan.

Guerra was extremely unconvincing in court. In his judgement for Chevron Kaplan stated that:

“Guerra on many occasions has acted deceitfully and broken the law […] but that does not necessarily mean that it should be disregarded wholesale…evidence leads to one conclusion: Guerra told the truth regarding the bribe and the essential fact as to who wrote the Judgment.”

Guerra produced no corroboration of his story. He could not, for example, show any draft of, or work on, the judgement he had allegedly ghostwritten with Donziger. A forensic search of Donziger’s laptop found nothing either. The reason for this was to become clear when Guerra admitted, before the International Court of Arbitration, that he had invented the whole story.

Not only had Guerra invented the whole story, but he had in fact been bribed by Chevron with a large sum for his testimony. Guerra admitted that he had invented the story to Chevron of Donziger offering to buy him for $300,000, simply to raise the price which Chevron would pay him. Before giving evidence in the USA, Guerra spent 51 days being coached on his evidence by Chevron’s lawyers–which Kaplan permitted as it was a civil not a criminal case.

In 2016 the United States Second Circuit Court of Appeals upheld Kaplan’s verdict for Chevron, on the grounds that Guerra’s evidence had been properly given in a U.S. court, and it had not been recanted in any formal evidence to a U.S. court; while Donziger could not prove, without Guerra’s testimony in court, that Guerra had been paid by Chevron.

Followers of the Assange case will of course note the parallels with Siggi Thordarson, the convicted fraudster who was paid by the CIA to give evidence against Assange that is central to the “hacking” charges under the Espionage Act, but whose open admission that he lied in his testimony the English High Court refused to hear as he has not formally withdrawn his evidence in court.

In the interests of scrupulous honesty, I should note that Chevron seem to me to have one good legal point. There was unlawful coordination between one technical expert in the case in Ecuador and Donziger’s legal team. This was motivated by genuine environmental concern and goodwill, and not by bribery, but was nevertheless unwise. I do not however believe that any reasonable judge would find this in itself sufficient to dismiss the case, given the great weight of other evidence on the pollution and its effects.

Kaplan now set out, at Chevron’s behest, to destroy Donziger as an individual. Extraordinarily in a civil case, Kaplan ruled that Donziger must turn over all of his phones, laptops and communications devices to Chevron, so they could investigate his dealings with others over the Ecuadorean case.

Donziger of course refused on the grounds that he was an attorney representing the local plaintiffs in the case, and the devices held numerous communications covered by attorney-client privilege. Kaplan ruled that the clients were not in U.S. jurisdiction so attorney-client privilege did not apply. He then sought to institute a criminal prosecution of Donziger for contempt of court for refusing to obey his order to hand them over to Chevron.

It should be noted that by this stage Rafael Correa had retired as President of Ecuador as decreed by the constitution, and the CIA was again firmly in control through the traitorous President Lenin Moreno. Not only was Donziger entitled on absolute grounds to refuse to hand over attorney-client communication, there was now a real danger the indigenous people and other locals involved in the case might be targeted for reprisals in Ecuador by Moreno and the CIA.

There is again a startling resonance with the Assange case. When Moreno removed Assange’s diplomatic immunity, and Assange was grabbed from the Ecuadorean Embassy in London and imprisoned, all of Assange’s papers were seized by the Ecuadorean government and shipped back to Quito, where they all were handed over to the CIA. These specifically included thousands of documents relating to Assange’s defence against extradition, documents which were covered by attorney-client privilege. Again, when dealing with an “enemy of the state” like Assange or Donziger, the judges decided that this did not matter.

Let me again interpolate some personal experience. Judge Kaplan now decided to transform Chevron’s civil case against Donziger into an explicitly criminal case of contempt of court. In Scotland and throughout the UK, Kaplan could simply have declared Donziger guilty of violating his own Order and sent him to jail, precisely as judge Lady Dorrian did to me. But in the United States–as in every other democracy outside the UK–a judge cannot arbitrarily decide on a violation of their own order.

Kaplan therefore referred Donziger’s “contempt” to the federal prosecutors of the Southern District of New York. But they declined to prosecute. Here we had a civil case brought by Chevron over a decision by an Ecuadorean court which the U.S. courts had insisted had jurisdiction, but which Kaplan had repatriated, found for Chevron on the basis of extremely dodgy evidence, and now turned into the criminal trial of an environmental activist lawyer based on a complete repudiation of attorney-client privilege. Federal prosecutors viewed none of this as valid.

So Kaplan now did something for which nobody can provide a convincing precedent. In 2020 he appointed private legal prosecutors, paid for by his court, to bring the criminal case against Donziger which the state prosecutors had declined to bring. Kaplan had personal links to the firm involved, Seward and Kissel, who had been acting for Chevron in various matters less than two years previously. During the prosecution process, Seward and Kissel as prosecutors were in constant contact with Chevron’s avowed lead lawyers, Gibson Dunn and Crutcher, over the case.

For all these reasons the Donziger case has been described as the first private criminal prosecution by a corporation in U.S. history. Chevron’s ability to control the entire judicial and legal process has been terrifying. Every public affairs NGO you can think of, not in the pockets of big oil and climate change denial, has raised serious concerns about the case.

Contrary to convention, though not contrary to law, Kaplan also personally appointed the judge to hear the case for criminal breach of his order, rather than leaving it to the court system. His nominee, Judge Loretta Preska, committed Donziger to house arrest pending trial. On October 21 2021 she sentenced Donziger to six months in prison; the maximum for contempt of court in the USA (I was sentenced to 8 months in Scotland). After 45 days Donziger was released from prison due to Covid, to serve the rest of his sentence under house arrest. In total, before and after trial, Donziger spent 993 days in detention. He was released two days ago.

Donziger has been disbarred as a lawyer. Chevron have a lien on his home and all his assets for compensation. They have paid nothing to the victims of their pollution of the Amazon.

I really cannot think of any individual story that better incorporates so many aspects of the dreadful corruption of modern western society. We are all, in a sense, the prisoners of corporations which dictate the terms on which we live, work and share knowledge. Justice against the powerful appears impossible. It is profoundly disturbing, and I recommend everyone to take a few minutes to reflect about the full meaning of the Donziger story in all its many tangents.

There is a good interview with Steve Donziger, which understandably concentrates on the personal effect upon him, here.

Footnote:
It would be churlish of me not to mention that when Sir Brian Barder became High Commissioner in Lagos he took a different line on Shell and pollution, much to the annoyance of Tory minister Norman Tebbit. 20 years later I was eventually sacked by the FCO for an excess of dissent, and Brian and Jane immediately invited me to dinner. Brian is no longer with us but his son @owenbarder is well worth following on development issues.

https://mronline.org/2022/05/06/donziger/

'Corruption' is part and parcel of capitalism, to treat it as an aberration implies that capitalism is reformable, which it is not.

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Re: The Long Ecological Revolution

Post by blindpig » Sat May 14, 2022 2:14 pm

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Ecological rift and alienation: Field notes from Goa and Sikkim

Originally published: Economic and Political Weekly on May 4, 2022 by Hindolee Datta (more by Economic and Political Weekly) (Posted May 11, 2022)

Goa and Sikkim, two of the smallest states in India by area, are also places that have some of the richest plant and animal biodiversity, with Goa nestled between the Western Ghats and the Arabian Sea, and Sikkim being a part of the eastern Himalayas. Incidentally, their natural beauty also makes them ideal tourist destinations. Currently, Goa is about to see a resumption in mining activities, mining fields that were left abandoned for a decade will open up soon, and places like Mollem (an ecological hotspot) will be dug up in the name of “development projects” (Datta 2022). The mountains of Sikkim and North Bengal too are being dug up for the Sivok-Rangpo railway project, with plans of extending it to Gangtok at a second phase later on. In this paper, I explore the Marxist ecological tradition and the metabolic rift through primary field evidence from Goa, and parts of North Bengal and Sikkim. I present the observations from field visits to these places followed by an analysis of observations from the Marxian ecologist perspective, foregrounding the idea of ecological rift and alienation as discussed by John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark, Richard York and Fred Magdoff.

In a village called Maina in South Goa, villagers who once had freshwater springs flowing before their homes now store water in large blue drums all year round. Located near Sanvordem, the South Goa mining capital, the soil beneath Maina is rich in iron-ore, and was the site of extreme mining activity from 2008-11, during what was the Age of Greed (de Souza 2015). Hills were dug up and aquifers blasted to obtain mud and iron which then made their way to China and Japan. With the local aquifers and springs gone, the hills now echo when villagers cry out ujanu (no water) in the height of monsoons.

Nearly 150 since Karl Marx predicted the collapse of nature and Friedrich Engels warned about nature’s revenge, their worst nightmares are on track to becoming reality. Aside from the very palpable and tangible effects human activity has had on nature and the environment, our relationship with each other has also seen a considerable shift since the time Marx first commented on the Modern Age. The concept of Alienation, which was central to their ecological critique, too has evolved with the times, to make space for newer and newer technological and social “developments” which have created newer rifts (Haydock 2017).

In this paper, I explore the Marxist ecological tradition and the metabolic rift through primary field evidence1 from Goa, and parts of North Bengal and Sikkim. Goa and Sikkim, two of the smallest states in India by area, are also places that have some of the richest plant and animal biodiversity, with Goa nestled between the Western Ghats and the Arabian Sea, and Sikkim being a part of the eastern Himalayas. Incidentally, their natural beauty also makes them ideal tourist destinations. Currently however, Goa is about to see a resumption in mining activities,2 mining fields that were left abandoned for a decade will open up soon, and places like Mollem (an ecological hotspot) will be dug up in the name of “development projects” (Datta 2022). The mountains of Sikkim and North Bengal too are being dug up and burrowed through for a railway project that connects Sivok, a town near Siliguri, West Bengal to Rangpo in Sikkim, with plans of extending it to Gangtok at a second phase later on.

In the following sections, I present the observations from the field visits in Goa and Sikkim followed by an analysis of these observations from the Marxian ecologist perspective, foregrounding the idea of ecological rift and alienation as discussed by John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark, Richard York and Fred Magdoff.

Notes from Goa

Eat Dust: Mining and Greed in Goa (2016), born out of author Hartman de Souza’s personal narrative, was centered around his sister Cheryl’s farm. Located in Maina, a village in South Goa between Cavorem and Rivona, the farm is on land rich in iron-ore, which the local mining bigwigs were desperate to acquire. Especially since that lucrative piece of forest land was in between two separate mines, and getting that land would fulfil the dream of having their own little mining corridor.

In the years when illegal mining had raised its head in Goa, Cheryl, with her mother Dora, daughter Aki and village resident Rita, were at the centre of protests, given that the mining activities were underway in their very own backyard. Dora was the stuff of legends–in October 2008, 85 years old and wheelchair bound, she chained herself to the entrance of the mines to stop the trucks from doing their bid. Needless to say, all of them spent some time in Aguada jail.

During the Age of Greed in Goa, Cheryl was the “mad woman” who kept crying about water standing atop a hill (which was designated to be razed out for mining activities). Most of the villagers paid her no mind, since there were springs all around; plus, they were given enough allurement to keep their mouths shut. Having no water felt like the stuff from a deranged woman’s dreams.

Now, years down the line, when the local communities come to her to discuss the water problem, what can she do anymore? For when that hill was blasted, it released the aquifer which was the village’s main water source. “The water came gushing through our homes, and didn’t recede for 6 days,” Cheryl said.

The natural water that is left is contaminated with arsenic, mercury and other hazardous compounds which were used for cleaning out the mud and iron, to be packed onto trucks and sent offshore.3 “Almost all the topsoil, mud and iron-ore they took from the hills behind us are now in China. It was low-grade iron ore, very high in demand there,” said Cheryl. She recalls how trucks would go past the farm, day and night, carrying mud, followed by JCB carriers that were used to flatten the mud elsewhere.

It’s not just water, but food too. Where there are now mines, there used to be dense forests, housing tigers, leopards, deer, wild bison and monkeys, as well as otters, monitor lizards, various kinds of fish, among hundreds of species of plant and wildlife. Different species of snakes and butterflies could also be found. Now with their habitat and food sources lost, the surviving animals have had to move closer to human habitations. Cheryl herself has lost multiple dogs to tiger and leopard attacks. With the food chains disrupted, wild bison and monkeys finish off fruits and vegetables that the villagers grow–this has upturned the local farming system, creating scarcity where there used to be none. This was also a major reason why life became extremely difficult for all during the COVID-19 lockdowns in March-August 2020: no one had any source of livelihood, farms didn’t reap a harvest, there was no money or fuel to drive down to Quepem some 20km away and buy food (Datta 2022).

Near the Karnataka border in the south-eastern part of Goa, at the foothills of the Sahyadris, lies Mollem, a protected area covering 240 sq km, comprising a reserved forest and sanctuary. However, since last year, proposed “development” projects which include the setting up of a double railway line, roadways, electrical line and coal mining requiring almost 40,000 trees to be felled and 1.8 million tonnes of mud to be shifted from the area threaten this ecological hotspot.

Across Goa, extreme weather events have started to seem normal. In 2021, after an exceptionally wet summer and a cyclone-filled monsoon, Goa saw monsoon-like rains for the first time in November. These weather changes have already begun creating havoc on local farming and growing patterns, destroying all seeds for the next harvest season. Even the sea, Goans say, has been behaving differently. Judging by the water currents, they all agree that another tsunami is coming.

North Bengal – Sikkim

The Sivok-Rangpo railway project commenced in 2019 after a 10year delay. Primary observations reveal that this project, covering nearly 45 km with 28 bridges and 14 tunnels comprising 38.5 km, is being undertaken by clearing a considerable portion of forest cover, burrowing through significant chunks of the Himalayan mountains as well as mining of the Rangit and Teesta rivers flowing adjacent to the railway route for sand and stones used in the construction process.

Key trade and defense interests have expedited the project over the last few years; locals believe that the railway route will make ferrying goods from China more convenient, as well as help turn Sikkim into a more functioning “borderland” area. Local communities, by the promises of employment opportunities and better connectivity, seem to be ignoring the very real consequences they have been facing, namely a prolonged monsoon season well into October, high temperatures in December, regular landslides even without rainfall, and roads spontaneously caving in in the absence of trees to hold the soil anymore with precautionary sign boards marking them as “sinking zones”.

Blasting these mountains to create tunnels has ended up removing forest cover and released water from aquifers; trucks carry sand and crushed stone from the river banks to the construction site the water bleeds out from the battered mountains till they run dry and the trucks billow dust as they come and go, to the point of completely blocking visibility on the roads. From Jalpaiguri in North Bengal, to Melli and Rangpo in South Sikkim all the way to Gangtok in the east, surface water quality, air quality and soil quality have all been adversely affected. The remaining vegetation along these routes is covered entirely by a thick coating of dust. All of this stands in sharp contrast to how calm, clean and beautiful everything was before this project commenced. Now, food stalls, engineering company boards, mounds of sand, JCB carriers, cranes, stone crushers, cement mixers can be seen lined up the entire way. Like in Goa, the removed forest cover has made monkeys homeless, who now hang around by the roadsides.

Absurdity and alienation exist in how labourers fortify the battered mountain sides with stones dug from the river bank, concrete and thick wire nets to prevent further landslides, since there are no trees left along those paths to hold on to the soil anymore. The mountains have turned fragile and turn to dust without further provocation.

Massive billboards advertising cement and iron companies are strewn along the mountain roads wherever permissible and adorn small and big shops with happy faces of famous Bollywood actors and sportspersons promising a better future for people’s families, in a messaging that clearly seeks to manufacture consent to justify the assault that the local ecology and biophysical entities are being subjected to.

Rifts and Contradictions
For years, the loss of land and livelihood has been upheld as the sacrifice people would have to make in order to get jobs and money later on. It does not seem to matter that any sort of prosperity has failed to trickle down to the people till date, barring those few who get to fatten their pockets.

Marx’s analysis of political economy starts off with talking about the theft of dead wood from Germany’s forests by Prussians even though it was from common land and to meet basic necessities (SWP TV 2011); similarly in these two states, there is a theft of a whole horde of natural resources. In Goa, mud and iron have been extracted in unholy amounts, by upturning and stealing the soil, all in the name of development. In North Bengal and Sikkim now, the Rangit and Teesta riverbeds are being excavated for sand and stones, which are subsequently crushed to make concrete that allows for the laying of railway lines.

The metabolic rift, as espoused by Marx, involves a break in natural processes wherein nutrients from the soil, consumed by humans and plant and animal life, fail to find their way back in the form of physical remains. Historically, industrial activities, beginning from the production of fertilisers for agriculture to the livestock industry, resulted in compartmentalised changes in the spatial relationship of humans, plants and animals (Foster and Magdoff 1998). As a result, remains from the end of the production and consumption cycle end up as waste (in the form of sewage, industrial run-off, sludge, packaging materials, etc.). As Foster says, generating ecological rifts with nature is an endemic tendency of capitalism, and waste is built into its system of production.

This alienation from nature and the ecological contradiction is further exacerbated by what is known as the Lauderdale paradox, namely where the system promotes private riches while destroying public wealth: the use value of resources (water, soil, minerals) is destroyed by capitalist forces which promote the creation of scarcity in order to turn them into commodities which can then be monopolised by private players (Clark and Foster 2010). In the case of Goa and Sikkim, the metabolic rift is not simply changing the nature or quality of the soil, but the entire landscape itself. Mountains are being razed to dust as we speak. Landslides have become commonplace since neither are there trees to hold the soil in place, nor is there any water (either in aquifers or as groundwater) left in the soil which could allow for afforestation. This in turn also increases propensity for disaster events which will only make life exceedingly difficult in the future.

In Maina, there are other reasons as to why the local Velip and Dhangar communities, among others, did not play a bigger role in opposing mining activities. They eventually became the agents of the mining industry, enabling the system either as private contractors or truck drivers who ferried the loot from mine to railway/port. However, this is not to say that these communities accumulated wealth off of mining’s back–one-time payments did little to improve their socio-economic status or living standards. Money and the premise of development feeds the social aspirations of people who buy into the myth of development that justifies the environmental exploitation and degradation, as well as lends acceptance among the people whose lands are being destroyed before their own eyes.

Foster’s discussion of the Dependence effect highlights these contradictions inherent in a system where consumption patterns are determined at the level of production by those controlling the means of production, and not by the vast number of workers. Politics and power dictate the flow of money which creates commodities to satisfy irrational consumption needs which generates more money that gets accumulated as wealth. A system whose primary goal is to keep production moving, creates demands for commodities that are simply non-essential and ensures profits for those in control. Alienation of labour, environment and nature, and of communities from each other have allowed for these rifts to take hold. The profit maximisation system relies on this flow, where wealth and capital get concentrated in the hands of a few, and workers are left to survive with the lowest possible compensation. In Goa, as one crosses Quepem, this fact bares itself in simple visuals–the countryside in that part of town has small hamlets, with a few pakka houses built at a little distance from the main settlements with at least one truck parked in front.

The labouring workforce for these projects, as in most Indian cities, predominantly arrives from the states of Bihar, Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh. The migrant labourers receive bare minimum wages to work in terrible working conditions, and struggle to make ends meet and have two full meals a day. With systemic forces ensuring their alienation from each other and their work, one cannot expect them to be conscious about the land they work in or nature or the climate for that matter.

While some in the local communities gain petty profits from the exploitative system, any form of dissent from these workers (be it regarding work conditions or the nature of their work) threaten to oust them from the system, making their survival an uncertainty. Decent work conditions for the workforce, adequate compensation and remuneration, food, health insurance, in addition to schooling opportunities for their children–would all have been gamechangers for the climate movement.

Engels puts this fact succinctly across in the eulogy he delivered at Marx’s funeral, saying:

Just as Darwin discovered the law of development or organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of development of human history: the simple fact, hitherto concealed by an overgrowth of ideology, that mankind must first of all eat, drink, have shelter and clothing, before it can pursue politics, science, art, religion, etc.; that therefore the production of the immediate material means, and consequently the degree of economic development attained by a given people or during a given epoch, form the foundation upon which the state institutions, the legal conceptions, art, and even the ideas on religion, of the people concerned have been evolved…

The evidence from Goa, North Bengal and Sikkim brings us back to the question of production which is now undertaken not to satisfy basic human needs, but to capitalism’s need to multiply on itself in order to sustain the system (SWP TV 2011). Capitalism is antithetical to the human need for clean air, water, food and shelter and is uprooting all systems that satisfy those needs in order to keep the wheels of production moving and exchange value secure. Had it only been concerned about core human needs, mining operations and irrational production in the name of “development” projects would cease; aside from the fact that there are enough recyclable materials in circulation in the world for us to not require further mining, and energy production which can be reliant on renewable resources, human survival and non-human nature depends on cutting back on the irrational cycle of production. All this points to a very grim prediction for the future, already in motion, where only the uber rich, the monopolists and private players, will be able to afford these basic human necessities anymore.

A point of critique in the existing Marxian framework of metabolic rift and the current ecological crisis comes on the lines of what David Harvey cautioned about the risk of “crying wolf”–keeping in mind Foster’s view that people tend to think mechanically rather than dialectically, a lot of people dispute the arguments around the impending world catastrophe, especially when things do not break down in the way or within the timeframe that they are expected to (Haydock 2017). Shifting the narrative from the future that still remains abstract and hard to comprehend, as Lejano and Nero (2020) point out, to the struggles and changes in environment that are lived experiences in the present may help to connect the general public to the dark fact that ecological changes which Marxists and scientists predicted have been set in motion already.

Hindolee Datta did her M.A. in Linguistics from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, and is currently an independent researcher.

Notes:
1.↩ Field visits were conducted in Goa during November 2021 and in North Bengal and Sikkim during December 2021. The quotes by Cheryl in the following sections are from conversations during said field visit to Maina.
2.↩ A Supreme Court order halted mining activities in September 2012, only because a report by the Justice MB Shah Commission revealed that Rs 35,000 crores were siphoned offshore, by mining companies like Vedanta, Magnum, Minescape, Fomento, among others.
3.↩ Vedanta’s official website states: “Vedanta is a major supplier to the domestic market with the Goa iron ore mine also serving the Chinese and Japanese export markets” through Sesa Goa Iron Ore, a Vedanta group company.

Refrences:
*Clark, Brett and John Bellamy Foster (2010): “Marx’s Ecology in the 21st Century,” Worldview of Political Economy, accessed on 27 February 2022, johnbellamyfoster.org
*Datta, Hindolee. 2022. “Eating Dust in Paradise.” The Telegraph India, February 14, 2022. [Retrieved February 27, 2022, from www.telegraphindia.com]
*De Souza, Hartman (2015): Eat Dust: Mining and Greed in Goa, Harper Collins.
*Foster, John Bellamy, and Magdoff, Fred. (1998). Leibig, Marx, and Depletion of Soil Fertility: Relevance for Today’s Agriculture. Monthly Review, 50(03), pp 43–60.
*Frederick Engels’ Speech at the Grave of Karl Marx. (1993). [Retrieved March, 26, 2022, from www.marxists.org]
*Haydock, Karen (2017): “A Marxist Approach to Understanding Ecology,” Economic and Political Weekly, Vol 52, No 37, pp 83-88.
*John Bellamy Foster (2009): The Ecological Revolution: Making Peace with the Planet, Kharagpur, Cornerstone Publications.
*John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark, and Richard York (2010): The Ecological Rift: Capitalism’s War on The Earth, Kharagpur, Cornerstone Publications.
*Lejano, Raul P., and Nero, Shondel J. (2020): The Power of Narrative: Climate Skepticism and the Deconstruction of Science. USA, Oxford University Press.
*SWP TV. 2011, August 26. Marxism and Ecology – John Bellamy Foster – Marxism 2011. [Retrieved February 27, 2022, from https://www.youtube.com]

https://mronline.org/2022/05/11/ecologi ... lienation/

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SEED CONTROL: ANOTHER WAR FOR POWER IN THE FUTURE
May 10, 2022 , 8:13 p.m.

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Entrance to the World Seed Bank, in the Svalbard archipelago (Norway) (Photo: File)

The war in Ukraine has caused world powers to move based on resources that could be compromised in the event of a further escalation into a broader global conflict. And one of those vital resources has to do with food and how to guarantee its production in its hypothetical catastrophic future.

An investigative work by Clara Sánchez reveals how imperialism and its corporations seek to move their chips to control the supply of seeds and, with it, have a food monopoly regarding everything related to agro-industrial production.

That is why the United States recently appointed Cary Fowler, creator of the Svalbard World Seed Vault, as its Special Envoy for Global Food Security.

This vault, also known as "Noah's Ark" or "Doomsday Vault" is located in the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard, in the Arctic Circle, and its purpose is "to protect, in the event of a local or global catastrophe, the biodiversity of crop species that serve as food to guarantee the planet's future food".

Sánchez highlights that, although this "ark" is operated by the Nordic Center for Genetic Resources (NorGen) in cooperation with the Norwegian Ministry of Agriculture and Food and the international organization Global Crop Diversity Trust, it is also linked to the Rockefeller Foundation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, DuPont/Pioneer, Syngenta, and Bioversity International (formerly the International Plant Genetic Research Institute), a branch of the Consortium of Centers for Research (CGIAR), created by the Rockefeller Foundation.

But the links with the US government do not end there. The researcher points out that Catalina Bertini, current chair of the board of the Global Crop Diversity Trust, is a US public official.

*She was Assistant Secretary of Agriculture for the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) from 1989 to 1992.
*On the recommendation of George W. Bush , she was given the position of director of the World Food Program in 1992.
*In 1997 she is renamed in the same institution with the support of Bill Clinton.
*Between 2001 and 2009 she was a fellow of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and, later, also of the Rockefeller Foundation.
*In Obama's time, he was part of the Board for International Development for Food and Agriculture (BIFAD), from where he advised USAID (2006-2015).

SINCE WHEN DOES THE VAULT OPERATE AND WHAT MOTIVATES ITS CREATION?

Since 2008, in the midst of the World Financial Crisis , it has functioned as a bank safe deposit box. It was inaugurated with 100,000 seeds and currently concentrates more than one million stored samples. By 2017, it had managed to gather 40% of the world's food diversity.

According to the work of Sánchez, all the countries of the world can deposit in this kind of vegetal memory of the world, but they can only withdraw them in case they have been exhausted or destroyed, either by natural catastrophes or armed conflicts.

Already the experiences of the past show the importance of protecting the seeds. Sánchez reviews the heroic act of a group of Soviet scientists who preferred death to eating the collection of the oldest seed bank in the world, the Leningrad Institute of Applied Botany, currently the Federal Research Center of the All-Russian Plant Genetic Resources Institute , necessary to revive agriculture in the Soviet bloc at the end of the war.

And it is because of the current conflict between Russia and Ukraine that the United States moves its files based on its interests. And this is clearly understood when the objective of the special envoy for Global Food Security is precisely "to give his strategic vision and advice on food security, nutrition and global food systems".

That the Head of the State Department says that it is to "guarantee the foreign policy of the United States" is a way of reaffirming the relationship between food and power, which has been an imperial maxim since the last large-scale war.

THE CONTEXT

As is already known, the "sanctions" against Russia affect a large part of the world because the Eurasian country is a large producer of cereals and inputs for agribusiness.

The war in Ukraine and the possible food crisis lead to consider seeds as one of the most important resources. That is why several countries are already beginning to move based on their protection.

All these strategic moves make it clear that there are no corporations moved by solidarity or powers of a philanthropic nature. None of these features define the seed protection project of the United States Department of State recently, much less in the face of the possible detonation of World War III.

There is no doubt that imperialism plays ahead of the appropriation, hoarding and control of seeds as a way of subsisting and, above all, to continue maintaining power as a form of extortion from the great global majorities.

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Re: The Long Ecological Revolution

Post by blindpig » Fri May 20, 2022 3:20 pm

Climate change indicators set records
May 18, 2022

The most recent seven years are the seven warmest years on record.

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Four key climate change indicators – greenhouse gas concentrations, sea level rise, ocean heat and ocean acidification – set new records in 2021. The WMO State of the Global Climate in 2021 report confirms that the past seven years have been the warmest seven years on record. 2021 was “only” one of the seven warmest because of a La Niña event at the start and end of the year. This had a temporary cooling effect but did not reverse the overall trend of rising temperatures. The average global temperature in 2021 was about 1.11 (± 0.13) °C above the pre-industrial level.

Criticizing “the dismal litany of humanity’s failure to tackle climate disruption,” United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres used the publication of the WMO flagship report to call for urgent action to grab the “low-hanging fruit” of transforming energy systems away from the “dead end” of fossil fuels to renewable energy.

The report, which will be used as an official document for the UN Climate Change negotiations known as COP27, taking place in Egypt later this year.

Key Messages of the 2021 report

Greenhouse gas concentrations reached a new global high in 2020, when the concentration of carbon dioxide (CO2) reached 413.2 parts per million (ppm) globally, or 149% of the pre-industrial level. Data from specific locations indicate that they continued to increase in 2021 and early 2022, with monthly average CO2 at Mona Loa in Hawaii reaching 416.45 ppm in April 2020, 419.05 ppm in April 2021, and 420.23 ppm in April 2022.

The global annual mean temperature in 2021 was around 1.11 ±0.13 °C above the 1850-1900 pre-industrial average, less warm than some recent years owing to cooling La Niña conditions at the start and end of the year. The most recent seven years, 2015 to 2021, are the seven warmest years on record.

Ocean heat was record high. The upper 2000m depth of the ocean continued to warm in 2021 and it is expected that it will continue to warm in the future – a change which is irreversible on centennial to millennial time scales. All data sets agree that ocean warming rates show a particularly strong increase in the past two decades. The warmth is penetrating to ever deeper levels. Much of the ocean experienced at least one ‘strong’ marine heatwave at some point in 2021.

Ocean acidification. The ocean absorbs around 23% of the annual emissions of anthropogenic CO2 to the atmosphere. This reacts with seawater and leads to ocean acidification, which threatens organisms and ecosystem services, and hence food security, tourism and coastal protection. As the pH of the ocean decreases, its capacity to absorb CO2 from the atmosphere also declines. The IPCC concluded that “there is very high confidence that open ocean surface pH is now the lowest it has been for at least 26,000 years and current rates of pH change are unprecedented since at least that time.”

Global mean sea level reached a new record high in 2021, after increasing at an average 4.5 mm per year over the period 2013 -2021. This is more than double the rate of between 1993 and 2002 and is mainly due to the accelerated loss of ice mass from the ice sheets. This has major implications for hundreds of millions of coastal dwellers and increases vulnerability to tropical cyclones.

Cryosphere: Although the glaciological year 2020-2021 saw less melting than in recent years, there is a clear trend towards an acceleration of mass loss on multi-decadal timescales. On average, the world’s reference glaciers have thinned by 33.5 meters (ice-equivalent) since 1950, with 76% of this thinning since 1980. 2021 was a particularly punishing year for glaciers in Canada and the US Northwest with record ice mass loss as a result of heatwaves and fires in June and July. Greenland experienced an exceptional mid-August melt event and the first-ever recorded rainfall at Summit Station, the highest point on the ice sheet at an altitude of 3 216 m.

Exceptional heatwaves broke records across western North America and the Mediterranean. Death Valley, California reached 54.4 °C on 9 July, equalling a similar 2020 value as the highest recorded in the world since at least the 1930s, and Syracuse in Sicily reached 48.8 °C. The Canadian province of British Columbia, reached 49.6 °C on 29 June, and this contributed to more than 500 reported heat-related deaths and fueled devastating wildfires which, in turn, worsened the impacts of flooding in November.

Flooding induced economic losses of US$17.7 billion in Henan province of China, and Western Europe experienced some of its most severe flooding on record in mid-July associated with economic losses in Germany exceeding US$20 billion. There was heavy loss of life.

Drought affected many parts of the world, including the Horn of Africa, Canada, the western United States, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Turkey. In sub-tropical South America, drought caused big agricultural losses and disrupted energy production and river transport. The drought in the Horn of Africa has intensified so far in 2022. Eastern Africa is facing the very real prospect that the rains will fail for a fourth consecutive season, placing Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalis into a drought of a length not experienced in the last 40 years. Humanitarian agencies are warning of devastating impacts on people and livelihoods in the region.

Hurricane Ida was the most significant of the North Atlantic season, making landfall in Louisiana on 29 August, with economic losses in the United States estimated at US$75 billion.

The ozone hole over the Antarctic was unusually large and deep, reaching its maximum area of 24.8 million km2 (the size of Africa) as a result of a strong and stable polar vortex and colder than average conditions in the lower stratosphere.

Food security: The compounded effects of conflict, extreme weather events and economic shocks, further exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, undermined decades of progress towards improving food security globally. Worsening humanitarian crises in 2021 have also led to a growing number of countries at risk of famine. Of the total number of undernourished people in 2020, more than half live in Asia (418 million) and a third in Africa (282 million).

Displacement: Hydrometeorological hazards continued to contribute to internal displacement. The countries with the highest numbers of displacements recorded as of October 2021 were China (more than 1.4 million), the Philippines (more than 386 000) and Viet Nam (more than 664 000).

Ecosystems: including terrestrial, freshwater, coastal and marine ecosystems – and the services they provide, are affected by the changing climate and some are more vulnerable than others. Some ecosystems are degrading at an unprecedented rate. For example, mountain ecosystems – the water towers of the world – are profoundly affected. Rising temperatures heighten the risk of irreversible loss of marine and coastal ecosystems, including seagrass meadows and kelp forest. Coral reefs are especially vulnerable to climate change. They are projected to lose between 70 and 90% of their former coverage area at 1.5 °C of warming and over 99% at 2 °C. Between 20 and 90% of current coastal wetlands are at risk of being lost by the end of this century, depending on how fast sea levels rise.

https://climateandcapitalism.com/2022/0 ... ndicators/

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Japan OKs controversial Fukushima water release
By WANG XU | China Daily | Updated: 2022-05-19 09:49

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This picture taken on March 5, 2022 shows storage tanks for treated contaminated water at the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant in Okuma, Fukushima prefecture. [Photo/Agencies]

Japan's Nuclear Regulation Authority on Wednesday approved a widely controversial plan to release Fukushima nuclear-contaminated water into the sea just as International Atomic Energy Agency Director-General Rafael Mariano Grossi arrived in the country to discuss it.

The plan, which was submitted by the wrecked Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant's operator Tokyo Electric Power, or TEPCO, was evaluated by the NRA with the comment that "we could find no problems in the submitted document".

However, local fisheries, Fukushima residents, environmental groups and neighboring countries have long questioned the plan's narrative, with scientists saying the long-term impact on the environment and humans is unknown, and that tritium, a carcinogen that was left in the water, can have a bigger impact on humans when consumed in fish than in water.

In 2011, a massive earthquake and tsunami destroyed the Fukushima plant's cooling systems, triggering the meltdown of three reactors and the release of large amounts of radiation. TEPCO has since used water to cool the highly radioactive damaged reactor cores.

Under the plan, Japan will gradually discharge the still-contaminated water from the spring of 2023, by first building a pipeline from the tanks to a coastal facility, where the water will be diluted with seawater, and then using another undersea tunnel to discharge the water at a point about 1 kilometer from the plant.

30-day public review

The NRA said the plan will go through a 30-day public review before becoming official, but many familiar with the process said this kind of formality can hardly overturn approval in Japan.

Coincidentally, the approval also came the same day as Grossi arrived in Japan for meetings with top officials to discuss the plan.

Grossi is scheduled to visit the Fukushima plant on Thursday and will have meetings with Japanese officials including NRA Chairman Toyoshi Fuketa on Friday.

A team of experts from the IAEA had visited the plant in February and March.

In a report issued by them in late April, the IAEA said it will continue assessing Japan's compliance with safety requirements and will draw conclusions at the end of the review process once "all relevant information has been considered and a holistic assessment can be performed".

http://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/20220 ... 5dadf.html

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Indonesia To Lift Palm Oil Export Ban

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Workers load palm fruits into a truck at a plantation in Bogor, West Java, Indonesia, on April 26, 2022. | Photo: Xinhua/Veri Sanovri

Published 19 May 2022

Indonesia's export ban on palm oil products will be lifted on May 23.

Indonesia will lift an export ban on crude palm oil, cooking oil, refined, bleached and deodorized (RBD) palm oil, and RBD palm olein starting May 23, as the country has brought domestic cooking oil prices and supply under control.

Indonesian President Joko Widodo said at a virtual press briefing on Thursday that the cooking oil supply in the local market has reached 211,000 tons, far higher than 64,000 tons the country had before the ban was imposed on April 28.

"Now we already have more (supply) than we need nationally," Widodo said.

The decision to lift the export ban came after protests from palm oil farmers and producers as they suffered declining prices and oversupply in fresh fruit bunches.

Separately, Indonesian Finance Minister Sri Mulyani Indrawati said the export ban has been estimated to reduce the country's revenue by 6 trillion rupiahs (407.33 million U.S. dollars).

https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/Ind ... -0027.html

"Oversupply", "undersupply", Capitalism can't seem to get it right, can it? And in the process of addressing these problems capitalism destroys lives and ecosystems. I can hear a planned economy calling out to us...

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Climate march in London on 21st September 2014. (Photo: Garry Knight / Flickr)

Prevent pandemics and halt climate change? Strengthen land rights for Indigenous peoples
Originally published: The Lancet on May 2022 by Jessica Hernandez, Julianne Meisner, Kevin Bardosh and Peter Rabinowitz (more by The Lancet) (Posted May 14, 2022)

There is a frenetic push to understand and address ecosystem change and biodiversity loss as drivers of pandemic virus emergence. But despite the growth of one health and planetary health concepts over the last few decades, we continue to see a minimisation of structural forces (including settler colonialism, capitalism, and globalisation) in the framing of our current ecological and climate crises and their connections to multispecies health. In particular, analyses of land tenure and land rights are barely mentioned, despite the fact that land is of vast economical and sociocultural significance and is the stage upon which human–animal–environment–pathogen interactions are played out.

Land is and means different things to different people. Indigenous, pastoralist, and rural farming communities are especially dependent on land, which is widely recognised by conservation organisations. Such communities are often uniquely vulnerable to the effects of ecosystem destruction while simultaneously having strong social norms and cultural values that support ecosystem preservation.

Most of the world’s biodiversity hotspots are also home to human communities, many of which are situated at the borderlands of national parks or within native ecosystems. Scientists have long known that these hotspots, where populations of bats, non-human primates, and other wildlife cluster, are also home to most unknown viruses and the most important terrestrial carbon reserves on the planet. Land disruptions at biodiversity hotspots are a major driver of viral spillover and contribute to climate change, but the connections between novel virus dynamics, climate, and the changing context of life for the millions of Indigenous peoples living in these hotspots are mostly overlooked, simplified, or ignored by pandemic disease research and prevention programmes.

Might this myopic approach to land and health be a hindrance to a new pluralistic and holistic way to address the roots of ecosystem disruption and, by extension, climate change and the emergence of new viruses? Despite occupying only 25% of the Earth’s surface, 80% of the world’s remaining biodiversity is stewarded by Indigenous peoples,1 and a recent UN report concluded that Indigenous peoples are the best guardians of Latin America’s forests.2 Some Indigenous communities also inhabit the rangelands that cover 54%3 of the world’s land surface,4 which is typically unsuitable for agriculture and infrastructure development (so-called marginal lands). In these ecosystems, many Indigenous peoples practice a livestock-dependent livelihood strategy: pastoralism. Under low-input pastoralist systems, the carbon cycle is commonly balanced or even negative,4 and migratory herds sustain healthy soils. In recognition of the crucial role of pastoralism to sustainable rangelands, and the importance of healthy rangelands to the resilience of pastoralist communities, 2026 is planned to be the International Year of Rangelands and Pastoralists.5

Planetary health and one health researchers should make explicit the links between land rights and health. This includes the marginalisation, exclusion, and forced displacement of Indigenous peoples, which have been shaped by colonial and postcolonial politics and economics. Such groups are often at the margins of state control and experience state incursion through systems of taxation, isolation, monetisation, commodification, and deculturation.6 But marginalisation does not mean passivity; on the contrary, Indigenous resistance movements and land defenders across the world are fighting every day to reclaim their lands and halt extractive activities.7 In Brazil, legal recognition of Indigenous forests in 2000 reduced deforestation by more than 20-fold by 2005,8 and indigenous resistance in North America has stopped or delayed greenhouse gas pollution equal to a quarter of annual emissions from the USA and Canada combined.9

Land tenure is inherently an issue of self-determination and strengthening land rights is an opportunity to restore the autonomy of marginalised ecosystem-dependent communities. Again, land is and means different things to different people and for Indigenous communities, land is inextricably connected to spiritual ways and languages, and social, economic, and legal systems.9 The issue of land tenure is thus also an issue of culture and breaking the cycle of ecological and epistemiological extraction perpetuated by settler colonialism and Western science will require the centring Indigenous voices. There are increasing examples of anticolonial health research, such as a 2021 Indigenous-led participatory research project centring Indigenous Maya concepts of health and wellbeing.10 Planetary health and one health research must adopt these frameworks both at large, and when addressing questions of land and health. Safeguarding biological and cultural diversity by securing Indigenous land rights is crucial to halting ecosystem destruction and, in turn, disease emergence and climate change.

We report no conflicts of interest.

Notes:
1.↩ FAO, The White/Wiphala Paper on Indigenous Peoples’ food systems. Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN, Rome. 2021
2.↩ Carrington D. Indigenous peoples by far the best guardians of forests—UN report. www.theguardian.com, March 25, 2021
3.↩ WWF, New data shows rangelands make up half the world’s land surface—and present a severely underutilized opportunity to address the climate and biodiversity crises. www.worldwildlife.org, March 25, 2021
4.↩ Houzer E, Scoones I, Are livestock always bad for the planet? Rethinking the protein transition and climate change debate. PASTRES, Brighton. 2021
5.↩ FAO, 42nd FAO Conference endorses the International Year of Rangelands and Pastoralists proposal!! www.fao.org. June 21, 2021
6.↩ Davis A, Sharp J, Rethinking one health: emergent human, animal and environmental assemblages. Soc Sci Med. 2020; 258 113093
7.↩ Hernandez J, Fresh banana leaves: healing indigenous landscapes through indigenous science. North Atlantic Books, Berkeley 2022
8.↩ Nepstad D, Schwartzman S, Bamberger B, et al. Inhibition of Amazon deforestation and fire by parks and indigenous lands. Conserv Biol. 2006; 20: 65-73
9.↩ Indigenous Environmental Network, Oil Change International, Indigenous resistance against carbon. www.ienearth.org Aug 2021
10.↩ Smith S-J, Penados F, Gahman L, Desire over damage: epistemological shifts and anticolonial praxis from an indigenous-led community health project. Sociol Health Illn. 2021; (published online Nov 26.) doi.org

https://mronline.org/2022/05/14/prevent ... te-change/

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Vast swath of U.S. at risk of summer blackouts, regulator warns
Naureen Malik and David R Baker, Bloomberg News

A vast swath of North America from the Great Lakes to the West Coast is at risk of blackouts this summer as heat, drought, shuttered power plants and supply-chain woes strain the electric grid.

Power supplies in much of the US and part of Canada will be stretched, with demand growing again after two years of pandemic disruptions, according to an annual report. It’s among the most dire assessments yet from the North American Electric Reliability Corporation, a regulatory body that oversees grid stability.

“It’s a pretty sobering report, and it’s clear the risks are spreading,” John Moura, director of reliability assessment and performance analysis, said in a press briefing. “I certainly do think it's our most cautionary tale here.”

Climate change is partly to blame. A historic drought is covering the western US, limiting supplies of hydroelectric power, and forecasts call for a hotter-than-average summer. But the fight against global warming poses its own risks as older coal-fired plants close faster than wind farms, solar facilities and batteries can replace them.

“The pace of our grid transformation is out of sync” with the physical realities of the existing power network, Moura said.

Supply-chain snags, meanwhile, are delaying Southwest solar projects and Texas transmission lines, while coal plants are having trouble obtaining fuel amid increased exports. And power grids face a growing threat of cyberattacks because of US support for Ukraine following the Russian invasion, according to NERC.


Electricity supplies will be particularly tight in the Midwest. Across the region, enough older plants have shut down to cut generation capacity 2.3 per cent since last summer. Demand, however, is expected to grow. Even when temperatures are normal, grid managers may need power from neighboring regions to keep air conditioners humming, and a heat wave or low wind speeds could trigger blackouts, according to the report. NERC had previously warned the Midwest could face power shortfalls as plants close, but not until 2024. The region also is missing a key transmission line damaged by a December tornado, with repairs expected to wrap up in June.

Early retirement of fossil fuel plants is an issue in other parts of the US as well. The coal and natural gas plants that continue to operate are running harder, and NERC expects them to break down more often, Moura said. The gas-fired plants in Texas that shut unexpectedly late last week during a spring heat wave underscore that risk, he said.

Throughout the West, drought will limit the output from hydroelectric dams. It even threatens power plants that draw their cooling water from the Missouri River, which is running low, according to the report. Wildfires amplified by the drought could darken skies with smoke, cutting the output from solar plants while simultaneously forcing homes with rooftop solar panels to rely more on the grid.

Last year, NERC issued a warning that was nearly as grim, saying electric grids that serve more than 40 per cent of the U.S. population were at risk of outages. In the end, most systems held up during the heat. One notable exception was in the Pacific Northwest, where Avista Corp. resorted to rolling blackouts during a unrelenting June heat wave, leaving more than 9,000 homes and businesses without power.

Some of the states cited in the report have already issued their own summer forecasts, some more upbeat than others. The Electric Reliability Council of Texas said in a Monday report that the state — which endured a deadly, days-long blackout last year during a winter storm — has enough power to meet expected record demand from June through September, although some analysts called the report too optimistic.

“We feel very confident about summer; our reserves have gone up,” said Brad Jones, Ercot's interim chief executive officer, during a press briefing Tuesday. Still, when supplies are strained, Texans will be asked to conserve earlier than they were in the past, Jones said. “I hope that each of you will turn to conservation as a way to both lower your bill as well as to help all of us in the market.”

California’s grid operators, in contrast, have warned that the state faces a risk of blackouts during the next three summers as the state shifts to cleaner energy. Hydropower generation has shrunk with the drought, older gas-burning plants have closed, and electricity supplies grow strained on hot summer evenings when the sun sets on the state’s many solar plants.

“We know that reliability is going to be difficult in this time of transition,” said Alice Reynolds, president of the California Public Utilities Commission, during a May 6 press conference.

https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/vast-swath- ... -1.1767730

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France's crop yields will be 'very poor' due to unprecedented drought

Issued on: 19/05/2022 - 15:51

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A picture taken on May 19, 2022 in Saint-Gilles, southern France, shows a wild plant in soil cracked by drought during an exceptional heat episode in France. © Nicolas Tucat, AFP

Extremely dry weather has caused severe damage to grain crops in some parts of France and substantial rain will be needed by early June to allow those in large producing regions to pull through, an agricultural institute said on Thursday.

France, the European Union's largest grain producer, has seen little rain in the past months and is experiencing record temperatures for May, a crucial month for winter crop development, prompting wheat prices to soar in recent weeks as concerns of tight global supplies worsened.

"There will be two situations coexisting in France. First the shallow to medium soils where very clearly the crops have already suffered and will not recover and yields will be very poor," Jean-Charles Deswarte, agronomist at crop institute Arvalis, told Reuters.

"Then you have irrigated situations or with very deep soils where for the moment we continue to think that in the end it can go quite well because, if not excessive, dry weather leads to less diseases and beneficial radiation," he added.

Regions with deep soils are mostly located in northern France and account for about half of the country's output.

However, Deswarte noted that "substantial" rain of between 30-50 millimeters (1.2-2.0 inches) by early June would be needed in these regions and that water restrictions that limit irrigation were rising in France.

It usually rains about 200 millimeters between March and June but there were only 50-60 millimeters so far, he said.

"We must be frank, today with the hydrological forecasts that Meteo France produces for the end of May and early of June, there will be a whole part of plots in France which will in any case be permanently affected by then," Deswarte said.

In regions with superficial to mid-level soils, about a third of the crop potential had already been lost, with damage on some parcels reaching 50%, Deswarte said. It was too early to give a country-wide forecast, he added.

For spring crops, which are at an early stage of development, water use would be crucial, he said.

"Whether it be for corn, sunflower or sorghum, when there is no water there is no plant," he said, noting that many farmers were using their irrigation quota to "save their wheat crops".

The French environment ministry on Thursday warned that more water restrictions would be imposed in the event of foreseeable water shortages.

https://www.france24.com/en/environment ... ed-drought
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: The Long Ecological Revolution

Post by blindpig » Mon May 23, 2022 4:20 pm

UN Warns of Worsening Drought in Horn of Africa Region

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The United Nations warns of high levels of acute food insecurity and water shortages in Horn of Africa. May. 20, 2022. | Photo: Twitter/@LolweTv

Published 20 May 2022

The United Nations (UN) is calling for financial assistance for the Horn of Africa region due to the worsening drought crisis.


The UN has issued warnings that from southern Ethiopia through Somalia to northern Kenya, drought and famine threaten the lives of more than 20 million people. "We don't have much time, we are pressed for money to save lives," UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs Martin Griffith said.

According to Griffith, who recently made a two-day visit to Kenya, the drought has affected more than 18 million people in Ethiopia, Somalia and Kenya, of whom most wake up hungry, not knowing whether they will have food that day or not.

The UN Under-Secretary-General said the situation is expected to worsen in the coming weeks, amid estimations that the next rainy season, from October to December, will be as disastrous as it has been in the past four seasons.

The UN warned that significant loss of life could occur in the coming period due to the drought ravaging the Horn of Africa, and urged a new wave of financial aid in order to broaden the reach of humanitarian operations in the region.


The last three rainy seasons in these areas where the population lives mainly on agriculture and livestock farming have seen a decrease in rainfall. There has also been an invasion of locust pests that ravaged crops in the Horn of Africa between 2019 and 2021.

https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/UN- ... -0027.html

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A major advance in defining the Anthropocene
May 20, 2022

Anthropocene Working Group announces shortlist of ‘golden spike’ locations; Scientists plan to vote this year

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The Anthropocene Working Group has taken a major step towards identifying a “golden spike” location to be used in the formal definition of the Anthropocene. In public meetings held this week, during the Unearthing the Present conference in Berlin, the AWG introduced their Anthropocene short-list — 12 possible candidates for a unique reference location that clearly indicates the beginning of the new epoch.

Golden spikes — formally called Global Boundary Stratotype Section and Points — are reference points that mark the beginnings of new stages in planetary history. The location that is finally selected will become an important part of the final definition of the Anthropocene in the Geological Time Scale.

Jens Zinke, Mark Williams, Jan Zalasiewicz and Stephen Himson, all associated with the University of Leicester, presented the results of research at the 12 sites that are being considered.

*Beppu Bay (marine sediments), Kyushu Island, Japan
*Crawford Lake (lake muds), Ontario, Canada
*Ernesto Cave (cave deposits), Italy
*Flinders Reef (coral), Coral Sea, Australia
*Gotland Basin (marine sediments), Baltic Sea
*Palmer Ice Core (ice sheet), Antarctic Peninsula
*San Francisco Estuary (marine sediments), California, USA
*Searsville Reservoir (lake muds), California, USA
*Sihailongwan Lake (lake muds), Jilin province, China
*Śnieżka Bog (peat layers), Poland
*Vienna Museum Excavation (urban soil), Austria
*West Flower Garden Bank (coral), Gulf of Mexico

The studies were unveiled for the first time at the meeting in Berlin, beginning a focused discussion of which one offers the most precise and complete record of the global changes at the beginning of the Anthropocene. A key issue will be each site’s usefulness to future scientists who study the new epoch.

Results of the 12 studies will be published in a coming issue of The Anthropocene Review, and AWG members plan to vote on a golden spike location in October and November. The result will be then included in a submission to a future meeting of the International Geological Congress, probably in 2024.

While the Anthropocene is widely recognized as a new phase in our planet’s history, it has still to be formally incorporated into the Geological Time Scale. This announcement is an important step towards that goal.

https://climateandcapitalism.com/2022/0 ... hropocene/

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Five actions to avoid the loss of biological diversity

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Forests, threatened by deforestation, as well as other ecosystems, are of vital importance to sustain life on Earth and play an important role in the fight against climate change. | Photo: Twitter @FAOClimate
Published May 22, 2022

In 2022, the theme of the Day for Biological Diversity, which is commemorated this Sunday, is “Building a shared future for all life on Earth”.

Biodiversity encompasses the wide variety of existing plants, animals and microorganisms, as well as the genetic differences within each species and ecosystems.

Despite technological advances, humanity is completely dependent on healthy and vibrant ecosystems for access to water, food, medicine, clothing, fuel, shelter and energy, just to name a few examples.

Forests, threatened by deforestation, as well as other ecosystems, are of vital importance to sustain life on Earth and play an important role in the fight against climate change.


Here are some actions to prevent the loss of biological diversity:

1. Stop climate change

It is shown that global warming can be prevented if limits are set on greenhouse gas pollution. Governments are required to limit carbon emissions and force those who pollute with global warming gases to pay.

2. Fight illegal hunting

In order to meet this objective, it is required to never buy, sell or possess any item made from ivory, as even legal sales of ivory fuel poaching. Remember that all ivory represents the death of an animal, be it an elephant or a walrus.

Likewise, don't keep exotic animals as pets, even if you see them in a pet store. The exotic animal trade is not regulated in all countries of the world, so buying them stimulates the capture of these species. It is best to leave the animals in their natural habitat.


3. Control invasive species

Another measure would be to immediately adopt the creation of an area for the control of invasive alien species that centralizes all the information to detect and control invasive alien species. In addition, of not granting some type of permits for the realization of introductions, reintroductions or repopulation with exotic species.

Another way to solve this problem is for construction to be prohibited, and existing farms or breeding facilities for alien species to be closed down. The existence of these facilities has been causing the escape or intentional releases of these species.


4. Avoid overexploitation of natural resources

It is also important to implement wastewater treatment programs so that they can be ingested by humans and make the plantations need less water. In addition, energy that does not emit carbon dioxide can be used to produce meat with a much lower consumption of resources.

Finally, do not use aerosols that damage the ozone layer or burn leaves or garbage, since their combustion generates pollutants that end up in the atmosphere.


5. Reduce pollution

The use of catalysts in automobiles to reduce the polluting gases they give off, added to the regular use of public transport and ecological means to pollute less, can serve this purpose.

It is also necessary to eliminate the accumulation of nutrients in small lakes; These nutrients come from dead plant debris that could cause eutrophication of the water. In addition, it is important not to abuse fertilizers and pesticides in crops and harvests, because in order to eliminate nitrate from the soil, biological methods are used, such as the cultivation of denitrifying bacteria.

Also, building and modifying buildings and homes to be more energy efficient can be combined with standards to maximize energy savings. Existing buildings and commercial spaces must be retrofitted to save energy by installing better-performing heating, cooling, and lighting systems.

https://www.telesurtv.net/news/protecci ... -0020.html

What would happen if the turtles of the world disappeared?

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Climate change, the devastation of their habitat and the actions of human beings are leading these reptiles to disappear. | Photo: Getty Images
Published May 23, 2022 (5 hours 32 minutes ago)

Specialists point out that the disappearance of the turtles would alter the functioning of ecosystems and the structure of biological communities throughout the world.

Turtles are reptiles that have been part of the Earth's ecosystem for years. It is estimated that there are at least 293 species of turtles scattered around the world, whose habitat is scattered between seas, oceans, rivers, lakes and land.

Currently, these beings are in danger of extinction due to human influence since, through poaching and indiscriminate hunting, they cause the disappearance of their ecosystem, to the point that many specialists consider that "the greatest threat to the conservation of turtles are humans”.

For this reason, every May 23rd World Turtle Day is celebrated, a date that aims to make people aware of the great importance of preserving this amphibian.



Turtles are estimated to have survived at least 200 million years, making them the closest thing to the species that survived the dinosaurs, although they are currently on the list of the most endangered animals on the planet, along with to birds, mammals, fish or even amphibians.

Among the main causes of the fatal event that could make this species extinct is "the overexploitation of these animals as pets, diseases and climate change."



A study carried out by a team of American scientists highlights that turtles play such important roles in the ecosystem as keeping food webs healthy, dispersing seeds or creating necessary habitats for other species.

The small work of turtles "contributes to the health of many environments, such as deserts, wetlands, freshwater environments and marine ecosystems. Their decline can have negative effects on other species, including humans, which may not be visible now," says US Geological Survey scientist Jeffrey Lovich.



Ecologist and researcher Josh Ennen points out that "the ecological importance of turtles, especially freshwater turtles, is underappreciated, and generally understudied."

"The alarming rate of disappearance of turtles could profoundly affect the functioning of ecosystems and the structure of biological communities throughout the world," said the specialist.

https://www.telesurtv.net/news/tortugas ... -0023.html

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

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