The Long Ecological Revolution

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Re: The Long Ecological Revolution

Post by blindpig » Tue Aug 03, 2021 1:51 pm

Robbing the soil, 1: Commons and classes before capitalism
August 1, 2021
“All progress in capitalist agriculture is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the worker, but of robbing the soil.” (Karl Marx)

Image
Harvesting grain in the 1400s

Robbing the Soil is a new series of articles on capitalist agriculture, part of my continuing project on metabolic rifts. Your constructive comments, suggestions, and corrections will help me get it right. -IA

by Ian Angus

To live, humans must eat, and more than 90% of our food comes directly or indirectly from soil. As philosopher Wendell Berry says, “The soil is the great connector of lives…. Without proper care for it we can have no community, because without proper care for it we can have no life.”[1]

Preventing soil degradation and preserving soil fertility ought to be a global priority, but it isn’t. According to the United Nations, a third of the world’s land is now severely degraded, and we lose 24 billion tonnes of fertile soil every year. More than 1.3 billion people depend on food from degraded or degrading agricultural land.[2] Even in the richest countries, almost all food production depends on massive applications of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides that further degrade the soil and poison the environment.

In Karl Marx’s words, “a rational agriculture is incompatible with the capitalist system.”[3] To understand why that is, we need to understand how capitalist agriculture emerged from a very different system.

****

For almost all of human history, almost all of us lived and worked on the land. Today, most of us live in cities.

It is hard to overstate how radical that change is, or how quickly it happened. Two hundred years ago, 90% of the world’s population was rural. Britain became the world’s first majority-urban country in 1851. As recently as 1960, two-thirds of the world’s people still lived in rural areas. Now it’s less than half, and only half of those are farmers.

Between the decline of feudalism and the rise of industrial capitalism, rural society was transformed by the complex of processes that are collectively known as enclosure. The separation of most people from the land, and the concentration of land ownership in the hands of a tiny minority, were revolutionary changes in the ways that humans lived and work. It happened in different ways and at different times in different parts of the world, and is still going on today.

Our starting point is England, where what Marx labelled “so-called primitive accumulation” first occurred.

Common Fields, Common Rights

In medieval and early-modern England, most people were poor, but they were also self-provisioning — they obtained their essential needs directly from the land, which was a common resource, not private property as we understand the concept.

No one actually knows when or how English common farming systems began. Most likely they were brought to England by Anglo-Saxon settlers after Roman rule ended. What we know for sure is that common field agriculture, in various forms, was widespread when English feudalism was at its peak in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

The land itself was held by landlords, directly or indirectly from the king. A knight might hold and live on just one manor — roughly equivalent to a township — while a top aristocrat, bishop or monastery could hold dozens. The tenants who actually worked the land, often including a mix of unfree serfs and free peasants, paid rent and other fees in labor, produce or (later) cash, and, in addition to the use of arable land, had a variety of legal and traditional rights to use the manor’s resources, such as grazing animals on common pasture, gathering firewood, berries and nuts in the manor forest, and collecting (gleaning) grain that remained in the fields after harvest.

“Common rights were managed, divided, and redivided by the communities. These rights were predicated on maintaining relations and activities that contributed to the collective reproduction. No feudal lord had rights to the land exclusive of such customary rights of the commoners. Nor did they have the right to seize or engross the common fields as their own domain.”[4]

Field systems varied a great deal, but usually a manor or township included the landlord’s farm (demesne) and other land that was farmed by tenants who had life-long rights to use it. Most accounts only discuss open field systems, in which each tenant cultivated multiple strips of land that were scattered through the arable fields so no one family had all the best soil, but there were other arrangements. In parts of southwestern England and Scotland, for example, farms on common arable land were often compact, not in strips, and were periodically redistributed among members of the commons community. This was called runrig; a similar arrangement in Ireland was called rundale.

Most manors also had shared pasture for feeding cattle, sheep and other animals, and in some cases forest, wetlands and waterways.

Though cooperative, these were not communities of equals. Originally, all of the holdings may have been about the same size but in time considerable economic differentiation took place.[5] A few well-to-do tenants held land that produced enough to sell in local markets; others (probably a majority in most villages) had enough land to sustain their families with a small surplus in good years; others with much less land probably worked part-time for their better-off neighbors or for the landlord. “We can see this stratification right across the English counties in Domesday Book of 1086, where at least one-third of the peasant population were smallholders. By the end of the thirteenth century this proportion, in parts of southeastern England, was over a half.”[6]

As Marxist historian Rodney Hilton explains, the economic differences among medieval peasants were not yet class differences. “Poor smallholders and richer peasants were, in spite of the differences in their incomes, still part of the same social group, with a similar style of life, and differed from one to the other in the abundance rather than the quality of their possessions.”[7] It wasn’t until after the dissolution of feudalism in the fifteenth century that a layer of capitalist farmers developed.

Self-Management

If we were to believe an influential article published in 1968, commons-based agriculture ought to have disappeared shortly after it was born. In “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Garrett Hardin argued that commoners would inevitably overuse resources, causing ecological collapse. In particular, in order to maximize his income, “each herdsman will try to keep as many cattle as possible on the commons,” until overgrazing destroys the pasture, and it supports no animals at all. “Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all.”[8]

Since its publication in 1968, Hardin’s account has been widely adopted by academics and policy makers, and used to justify stealing indigenous peoples’ lands, privatizing health care and other social services, giving corporations ‘tradable permits’ to pollute the air and water, and more. Remarkably, few of those who have accepted Hardin’s views as authoritative notice that he provided no evidence to support his sweeping conclusions. He claimed that “tragedy” was inevitable, but he didn’t show that it had happened even once.[9]

Scholars who have actually studied commons-based agriculture have drawn very different conclusions. “What existed in fact was not a ‘tragedy of the commons’ but rather a triumph: that for hundreds of years — and perhaps thousands, although written records do not exist to prove the longer era — land was managed successfully by communities.”[10]

The most important account of how common-field agriculture in England actually worked is Jeanette Neeson’s award-winning book, Commoners: Common Right, Enclosure and Social Change in England, 1700-1820. Her study of surviving manorial records from the 1700s showed that the common-field villagers, who met two or three times a year to decide matters of common interest, were fully aware of the need to regulate the metabolism between livestock, crops and soil.

“The effective regulation of common pasture was as significant for productivity levels as the introduction of fodder crops and the turning of tilled land back to pasture, perhaps more significant. Careful control allowed livestock numbers to grow, and, with them, the production of manure. … Field orders make it very clear that common-field villagers tried both to maintain the value of common of pasture and also to feed the land.”[11]

Village meetings selected “juries” of experienced farmers to investigate problems, and introduce permanent or temporary by-laws. Particular attention was paid to “stints” — limits on the number of animals allowed on the pasture, waste, and other common land. “Introducing a stint protected the common by ensuring that it remained large enough to accommodate the number of beasts the tenants were entitled to. It also protected lesser commoners from the commercial activities of graziers and butchers.”[12]

Juries also set rules for moving sheep around to ensure even distribution of manure, and organized the planting of turnips and other fodder plants in fallow fields, so that more animals could be fed and more manure produced. The jury in one of the manors that Neeson studied allowed tenants to pasture additional sheep if they sowed clover on their arable land — long before scientists discovered nitrogen and nitrogen-fixing, these farmers knew that clover enriched the soil.[13]

And, given present-day concerns about the spread of disease in large animal feeding facilities, it is instructive to learn that eighteenth century commoners adopted regulations to isolate sick animals, stop hogs from fouling horse ponds, and prevent outside horses and cows from mixing with the villagers’ herds. There were also strict controls on when bulls and rams could enter the commons for breeding, and juries “carefully regulated or forbade entry to the commons of inferior animals capable of inseminating sheep, cows or horses.”[14]

Neeson concludes, “the common-field system was an effective, flexible and proven way to organize village agriculture. The common pastures were well governed, the value of a common right was well maintained.”[15]

Commons-based agriculture survived for centuries precisely because it was organized and managed democratically by people who were intimately involved with the land, the crops and the community. Although it was not an egalitarian society, in some ways it prefigured what Karl Marx, referring to a socialist future, described as “the associated producers, govern[ing] the human metabolism with nature in a rational way.”[16]

Class Struggles

That’s not to say that agrarian society was tension free. There were almost constant struggles over how the wealth that peasants produced was distributed in the social hierarchy. The nobility and other landlords sought higher rents, lower taxes and limits on the king’s powers, while peasants resisted landlord encroachments on their rights, and fought for lower rents. Most such conflicts were resolved by negotiation or appeals to courts, but some led to pitched battles, as they did in 1215 when the barons forced King John to sign Magna Carta, and in 1381 when thousands of peasants marched on London to demand an end to serfdom and the execution of unpopular officials.

Historians have long debated the causes of feudalism’s decline: I won’t attempt to resolve or even summarize those complex discussions here.[17] Suffice it to say that by the early 1400s in England, the feudal aristocracy was much weakened. Peasant resistance had effectively ended hereditary serfdom and forced landlords to replace labor-service with fixed rents, while leaving common field agriculture and many common rights in place. Marx described the 1400s and early 1500s, when peasants in England were winning greater freedom and lower rents, as “a golden age for labor in the process of becoming emancipated.”[18]

But that was also a period when longstanding economic divisions within the peasantry were increasing. W.G. Hoskins described the process in his classic history of life in a Midland village.

“During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries there emerged at Wigston what may be called a peasant aristocracy, or, if this is too strong a phrase as yet, a class of capitalist peasants who owned substantially larger farms and capital resources than the general run of village farmers. This process was going on all over the Midlands during these years …”[19]

Capitalist peasants were a small minority. Agricultural historian Mark Overton estimates that “in the early sixteenth century, around 80 per cent of farmers were only growing enough food for the needs of their family household.” Of the remaining 20%, only a few were actual capitalists who employed laborers and accumulated ever more land and wealth. Nevertheless, by the 1500s two very different approaches to the land co-existed in many commons communities.

“The attitudes and behavior of farmers producing exclusively for their own needs were very different from those farmers trying to make a profit. They valued their produce in terms of what use it was to them rather than for its value for exchange in the market. … Larger, profit orientated, farmers were still constrained by soils and climate, and by local customs and traditions, but also had an eye to the market as to which crop and livestock combinations would make them most money.”[20]

As we’ll see, that division eventually led to the overthrow of the commons.

Primitive Accumulation

For Marx, the key to understanding the long transition from agrarian feudalism to industrial capitalism was “the process which divorces the worker from the ownership of the conditions of his own labor,” which itself involved “two transformations … the social means of subsistence and production are turned into capital, and the immediate producers are turned into wage-laborers.”[21]

“Nature does not produce on the one hand owners of money or commodities, and on the other hand men possessing nothing but their own labor-power. This relation has no basis in natural history, nor does it have a social basis common to all periods of human history. It is clearly the result of a past historical development, the product of many economic revolutions, of the extinction of a whole series of older formations of social production.”[22]

A decade before Capital was published, Marx summarized that historical development in an early draft.

“It is … precisely in the development of landed property that the gradual victory and formation of capital can be studied. … The history of landed property, which would demonstrate the gradual transformation of the feudal landlord into the landowner, of the hereditary, semi-tributary and often unfree tenant for life into the modern farmer, and of the resident serfs, bondsmen and villeins who belonged to the property into agricultural day laborers, would indeed be the history of the formation of modern capital.”[23]

In Section VIII of Capital Volume 1, titled “The So-Called Primitive Accumulation of Capital,” he expanded that paragraph into a powerful and moving account of the historical process by which the dispossession of peasants created the working class, while the land they had worked for millennia became the capitalist wealth that exploited them. It is the most explicitly historical part of Capital, and by far the most readable. No one before Marx had researched the subject so thoroughly — Harry Magdoff once commented that on re-reading it, he was immediately impressed by the depth of Marx’s scholarship, by “the amount of sheer digging, hard work, and enormous energy in the accumulated facts that show up in his sentences.”[24]

Since Marx wrote Capital, historians have published a vast amount of research on the history of English agriculture and land tenure — so much that a few decades ago, it was fashionable for academic historians to claim that Marx got it all wrong, that the privatization of common land was a beneficial process for all concerned. That view has little support today. Of course it would be very surprising if subsequent research didn’t contradict Marx in some ways, but while his account requires some modification, especially in regard to regional differences and the tempo of change, Marx’s history and analysis of the commons remains essential reading.[25]

*****

The next installment in this series will discuss how, in two great waves of social change, landlords and capitalist farmers “conquered the field for capitalist agriculture, incorporated the soil into capital, and created for the urban industries the necessary supplies of free and rightless proletarians.”[26]

To be continued ….

[1] Wendell Berry, Wendell Berry: Essays 1969-1990, ed. Jack Shoemaker (Library of America, 2019), 317.

[2] https://www.unccd.int/news-events/bette ... new-report

[3]. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. David Fernbach, vol. 3, (Penguin Books, 1981), 216

[4] John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark, and Hannah Holleman, “Marx and the Commons,” Social Research (Spring 2021), 2-3.

[5] See “Reasons for Inequality Among Medieval Peasants,” in Rodney Hilton, Class Conflict and the Crisis of Feudalism: Essays in Medieval Social History (Hambledon Press, 1985), 139-151.

[6] Rodney Hilton, Bond Men Made Free: Medieval Peasant Movements and the English Rising of 1381 (Routledge, 2003 [1973]), 32.

[7] Rodney Hilton, Bond Men Made Free, 34.

[8] Garrett Hardin, The Tragedy of the Commons, Science, December 13, 1968.

[9] Ian Angus, The Myth of the Tragedy of the Commons, Climate & Capitalism, August 25, 2008; Ian Angus, Once Again: ‘The Myth of the Tragedy of the Commons’, Climate & Capitalism, November 3, 2008.

[10] Susan Jane Buck Cox, No Tragedy of the Commons, Environmental Ethics 7, no. 1 (1985), 60.

[11] J. M. Neeson, Commoners: Common Right, Enclosure and Social Change in England, 1700-1820 (Cambridge University Press, 1993), 113.

[12] J. M. Neeson, Commoners, 117.

[13] J. M. Neeson, Commoners, 118-20.

[14] J. M. Neeson, Commoners, 132.

[15] J. M. Neeson, Commoners, 157.

[16] Karl Marx, Capital Volume 3, trans. David Fernbach, (Penguin Books, 1981), 959.

[17] For an insightful summary and critique of the major positions in those debates, see Henry Heller, The Birth of Capitalism: A Twentieth Century Perspective (Pluto Press, 2011).

[18] Karl Marx, Grundrisse, trans. Martin Nicolaus (Penguin Books, 1973), 510.

[19] W. G. Hoskins, The Midland Peasant: The Economic and Social History of a Leicestshire Village (Macmillan., 1965), 141.

[20] Mark Overton, Agricultural Revolution in England: The Transformation of the Agrarian Economy, 1500-1850 (Cambridge University Press, 1996), 8, 21.

[21] Karl Marx, Capital Volume, 1, 874.

[22] Karl Marx, Capital Volume 1, 273.

[23] Karl Marx, Grundrisse, 252-3.

[24] Harry Magdoff, “Primitive Accumulation and Imperialism,” Monthly Review (October 2013), 14.

[25] “The So-Called Primitive Accumulation” — Chapters 26 through 33 of Capital Volume 1 — can be read on the Marxist Internet Archive, beginning here. The somewhat better translation by Ben Fowkes occupies pages 873 to 940 of the Penguin edition.

[26] Karl Marx, Capital Volume 1, 895.

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Re: The Long Ecological Revolution

Post by blindpig » Fri Aug 06, 2021 1:01 pm

Jeff Bezos says everything will be ok
August 4, 2021
Billionaire greenwashing in hyperdrive

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by Roy Wilkes

The climate crisis may be dire, with ever more frequent and increasingly devastating floods and wildfires, with killer droughts and heatwaves across the globe, with oceans warming 40% faster and arctic ice sheets melting 70% faster than had been predicted a mere five years ago, with arctic permafrost melting and belching super-greenhouse methane into the atmosphere, and with carbon emissions from fossil fuel combustion continuing to rise year on year regardless.

But everything will be ok. Because corporate capital, and even its richest personification, billionaire superstar astronaut hero Jeff Bezos himself, is on the case. So everything will definitely be ok.

You will have seen the slick ad for Amazon’s latest wheeze — The Climate Pledge — whose aim is “to achieve the Paris goals ten years early.”



With ominous music in the background, young people are asking, “What can businesses do to help fight the climate crisis?” before adding, “I’ve got a few ideas…” Kids from around the world, variously earnest, funny, hip and cute, chip in with their concerns and their suggestions. We finally cut to an idyllic lake scene, with a young man diving off a boat, and we are left feeling reassured that everything will be ok after all, because: “108 businesses have accepted the challenge, The Climate Pledge, Paris, 10 years early, Paid for by Amazon, co-founder of the Climate Pledge.”

In a separate video, Bezos explains the three part Climate Pledge: firstly to measure and report emissions on a regular basis; secondly to implement decarbonization strategies in line with the Paris agreement, through real business changes and innovations; and thirdly to do “credible” offsets to neutralize any remaining emissions that cannot be eliminated.

He introduces Christiana Figueres, former UN Climate Chief and now Head of Global Optimism (I kid you not), who reassures us that all of this is “science driven.” Figueres finds it refreshing that the head of such a large company is “totally imbued with the science,” which is of course because “Jeff has a physics background.” Figueres herself has a diplomatic background. And she also has form as a greenwasher of corporate capital. As Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, she spoke at the Polish Government’s “Coal and Climate Summit”, a parallel event to the 2013 UN Climate Summit in Warsaw, where she reassured us that “coal could be part of the global warming solution.”

We then hear from Professor Dara O’Rourke, Senior Principal Scientist at Amazon, who explains that the company is “building sustainability in a very Amazonian way,” which means of course, “science, connected to technology, connected to customer obsession [!], to approach the scale of the sustainability challenges we all face.” O’Rourke repeatedly tells us how “complex” Amazon is, which perhaps explains why his talk is a torrent of complex but meaningless gobbledygook.

This, for example, is how he tries to justify the Amazonian way of deliberately stimulating unsustainable consumerist desires for instant gratification: “Same day shipping is actually our lowest carbon ship option. This is because getting inventory local to customers is almost always the sustainability way.” I had to listen to that bit a few times, to make sure I hadn’t misheard it.

To be fair though, O’Rourke does at least look embarrassed as he delivers this drivel, rushing the more absurd bits out in the hope that we won’t think too much about what he is saying. He looks relieved to finally hand us back to Jeff, who is “super excited” by it all. (But is it as exciting as flying a super-polluting rocket into space?) But it can only work if companies all work together, Jeff tells us, because “we are all part of each other’s supply chain.”

In a bragging dig, perhaps aimed at the other eco-minded tech billionaires, Bezos explains that Amazon is the ideal role model because, “we’re not only moving information around, we’re moving packages around, we deliver more than 10 billion items a year…”

And therein of course lies the problem. Using 80% renewable energy to power its offices and warehouses by 2024 and 100% by 2030 won’t make a scrap of difference to the climate crisis, nor will the replacement of its fleet of vans with the 100 000 fully electric delivery vehicles it has now ordered. The problem with Amazon isn’t how it powers its buildings and its vans. The problem with Amazon is the business model itself.

In the 1990s carbon emissions were rising by 1% per year. In the 2000s that more than tripled, only pausing for banking crashes and pandemics. Capital was busily fragmenting production to maximize profit, shifting much of it to the global south in pursuit of cheap labor and cheap (and dirty) energy. There was a massive expansion and liberalization of trade, with huge volumes of commodities, both components and finished products, being shipped across vast distances in fossil fuel guzzling container ships and airplanes. Amazon was and still is a product of that carbon-intensive neoliberal globalization.

But none of that matters. The important thing is that Amazon is “signaling to the market” and thereby “stimulating investment in green technology.” Because capital works in mysterious ways. It’s complex.

Corporate capital’s crocodile tears about climate change aren’t new. In the late seventies and early eighties, scientists at Exxon conducted extensive research on the climate impacts of carbon dioxide emissions, publishing their findings in the Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences. In 1979 David Slade, then manager of the US government’s carbon dioxide research program, was effusive: “We are very pleased with Exxon’s research intentions related to the CO2 question. This represents very responsible action, which we hope will serve as a model for research contributions from the corporate sector.”

It was, however, the potential impact of climate research on profit, rather than the impact of the emissions themselves on the habitability of the planet, that weighed most heavily on the minds of Exxon’s executives. Exxon’s answer was to shoot the messenger. In the mid 1980s Exxon culled its climate research program, sacked most of its climate scientists, and cynically invested millions of dollars in a PR offensive aimed at casting doubt on the scientific facts that its own scientists had helped to uncover.

John Browne, former chief executive of BP (which cleverly rebranded itself as “Beyond Petroleum”, even changing its logo to the Helios god of the sun), admits that business has been guilty of greenwashing. What we really need of course, is greenwash that is more convincing. So John has helpfully created BeyondNetZero, to convince us that, “business can be a force for change on climate.” John already has plans in place for his next venture: BeyondHumanity, so that computers can keep generating investments and profits long after we’ve all disappeared.

Amazon’s suggestion of buying carbon offsets is particularly helpful and makes great business sense. BP has already set a shining example on this, paying offset developer Finite Carbon $100 million for 13 million offsets in the Colville reforestation project in Washington State. BP is so committed it has even bought a large stake in Finite Carbon itself. The offsets though have been razed to the ground by wildfires, as have other offset projects such as those favored by Microsoft in Oregon.

The real beauty of these schemes is that they are perfectly recyclable. BP plants trees so it can continue extracting fossil fuels … the combustion of which raises global temperatures … which causes wildfires … which burn the trees… which makes land available for planting more trees!! A capital cycle chasing the carbon cycle, and eating its own tail.

Appropriating the concerns of young people as a PR exercise is insidious. Spreading false hope that corporate capital can be relied on to save the planet delays us in developing and popularizing real solutions to the crisis. Those solutions are not complex, they are remarkably simple and painfully obvious. We must leave fossil carbon where it belongs, in the ground. Which means ending the corporate mass production of waste, and producing locally what we actually need. Production for need, not profit.

The solution to Amazon’s contribution to the ecological crisis isn’t complex either. It is to abolish Amazon.

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Re: The Long Ecological Revolution

Post by blindpig » Thu Aug 12, 2021 1:41 pm

The Amazon could be a savanna

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"On average, since 2001, 169,000 km2 of the Amazon have been burned annually. Of these, 26,000 km2, within the Natural Protection Areas and Indigenous Lands", confirms the Raisg.

AUGUST 9, 2021

The advance of extraction, fires, deforestation and the loss of carbon contribute to the deterioration of an Amazon region.

Think of the size of a football field disappearing every six seconds. That was the rate of loss of the rainforests, a year before the pandemic began.

This indelible image is similar to the annual percentage of destruction of these forests, during the past 20 years.

The simile was exposed by the World Resources Institute before the degree of speculation of the last decades, worsened since 2019 when the president of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro, weakened the application of environmental laws. A third of all the loss of primary - or mature - tropical forest in the world took place in that country.

After Bolsonaro came to power, the South American giant has registered the highest rate of deforestation in the last 13 years. Farmers and domain speculators set the land on fire for soybeans, other crops and cattle ranching, devastating dense vegetation, the largest carbon pool on the planet.

Logging and land conversion have damaged 34 percent of the world's original rainforests and degraded another 30 percent, the non-profit Foundation Norway confirms.


More than half of the destruction has been reported since 2002 in the Amazon, one of the largest natural areas on the planet, which warming can transform into savanna.

The loss of forests and tropical jungles, enhances global warming. With climate change, it is difficult for the remaining forests to survive.

Nature forms a cycle that now "is terrifying," says researcher Anders Krogh. The total forest lost between 2002 and 2019 was greater than the area of ​​France, it confirms.

An obstacle

This is how Bolsonaro described it during his campaign for the Presidency. Brazil's vast protected lands are an obstacle to economic growth and it has since vowed to open them to exploitation for commercial purposes. That terrible promise is happening.

While the press and social networks echoed the resignation of the Minister against the Environment, Ricardo Salles, the Bill 490/2007 was approved by 40 votes to 21, voted in the Constitution, Justice and Citizenship Commission of the Chamber of Deputies, is a coup de grace to the Amazon.

If accepted by Congress, it will become law. Salles was definitely doing the tough work for Agriculture Minister Tereza Cristina as she feigns Bolsonaro's fallacy that he drives a "modern" agribusiness.

In the meantime, they have reduced efforts to combat illegal logging, mining and ranching, causing the Amazon to lose more than 500,000 square kilometers (km2).

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Photo: José Caldas

This "pruning" represents 8 percent of the largest tropical forest in the world, says the Amazon Network for Georeferenced Socio-environmental Information (Raisg) in its report "Amazonia under pressure."

The "progress of extraction, infrastructure projects, fires, deforestation and carbon loss", contributes to the deterioration of an Amazon region, shared by nine countries: Brazil, Colombia, Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, Venezuela, Suriname , Guyana and French Guiana.

It is the home of indigenous communities, inhabited by some 47 million people, in its 8 million square kilometers.

"On average, since 2001, 169,000 km2 of the Amazon have been burned annually. Of these, 26,000 km2, within the Natural Protection Areas and Indigenous Lands", confirms the Raisg.

Brazil occupies almost 62 percent of the tropical forest and is the main responsible for the high rates of deforestation. They total 425,051 km2 cut down in two decades. Currently, the economic exploitation of the region is advancing with "the paralysis of the demarcation process" of indigenous lands.

Agribusiness in the nature reserve

Bolsonaro seeks sponsors for the natural reserves of Brazil and the planet. The Government intends that Brazilian or foreign companies and investors "contribute money to preserve the Amazon."

In February 2021 he appeared with this "initiative" for 120 nature reserves. This is equivalent to 63 million hectares or 15 percent of the area of ​​the largest rainforest in the world.

“Adopt a park”, the propaganda program presented by Bolsonaro, exerts political pressure and constitutes a real threat to the Amazon.

In it, it defines that Brazilians can adopt an ecological reserve for 50 reais per hectare (8 euros, 9 dollars) and for foreigners it will cost 10 euros.

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Photo: Anadolu Agency

The first company to accept is the French supermarket chain Carrefour. Precisely the president of France, Emmanuel Macron, has been the president who has criticized the Bolsonaro government the most, for its lack of interest in conserving the Amazon.

According to the newspaper Estadão, the multinational Carrefour will adopt the Lago de Cuniã reserve. Located on the border with Bolivia, it has 75,000 hectares, with a legal status that would allow controlled extraction of wood and subsistence agriculture. The Ministry of the Environment reports that five other companies are negotiating their interests.

Incidentally, the Greenpeace environmentalists accused the Bolsonaro government of promoting "a new media action to clean up its image," while assuring that it "continues to destroy the instruments that protect the conservation units, scrapping the ICMBio, militarize its structures and impose significant budget cuts. ”.

Meanwhile, the Brazilian government says that the management of the reserves will remain in the hands of government environmental organizations - will it? - such as Ibama (Brazilian Institute of the Environment) or the Chico Mendes Institute (ICMBio, focused on conserving biodiversity), to those that the government itself is reducing strength.

Definitely, they take advantage of the fact that the pandemic attracts all the media attention to pass laws that weaken environmental enforcement and facilitate agribusiness.

Image
Photo: Florian Plaucheur

Let us remember that on September 24, 2019, in Bolsonaro's first speech before the General Assembly of the United Nations (UN), the president defined as complaints the "exaggeration" and "manipulation" around the fires in The Amazon.

"The Amazon is not being devastated or consumed by fire, as the press falsely says," he said, adding that "it is a fallacy to say that the Amazon is a world heritage site" or represents "the lungs of the Earth."

"The (Brazilian) Amazon is larger than all of Western Europe" he commented and emphasized that, more than 60 percent, it is "preserved", so his Government "does not accept" that another country "say" what should be done to conserve that biome.

Thus, blatantly, while reality shows otherwise.

Who saves the indigenous?

As recognized by the Brazilian Government, 690 of its territories are inhabited by indigenous people, who occupy approximately 13 percent of the country's surface.

Of the 826 indigenous peoples in all of Latin America, a majority are in Brazil. There are 900,000 people who live in 305 tribes, although half of Brazil's indigenous people are already outside the Amazon.

For Latin America, indigenous peoples make up 8 percent of the population that occupies it, by reference to the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC). Which means that some 45 million Latin Americans are natives.

It is indigenous communities that best safeguard forests, a defining task to reduce carbon emissions. Paradoxically, they lack all support, decent income and access to basic services, in addition to facing the destruction of their environment.

A report by the International Labor Organization (ILO) - with data from nine Latin American countries - indicates that indigenous peoples represent 30 percent of the people living in extreme poverty. Of this, those who give birth and perpetuate existence are 7 percent of indigenous women, who live on less than $ 1.90 a day.

This is also stated by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) in its report “Indigenous and Tribal Peoples and Forest Governance.” Deforestation rates in Latin America and the Caribbean are significantly lower in indigenous and tribal territories, where governments have formally recognized collective territorial rights.

At present, complaints from indigenous communities about the indiscriminate exploitation of forests are increasing, due to the growing demand for food, minerals, energy, wood, tourism, legal and illegal.

The natives understand better than anyone how it will significantly affect rainfall, temperature, food production and the universal climate. Their territories contain about a third of the carbon stored in the forests of Latin America and the Caribbean and 14 percent of the carbon stored in the tropical forests of the world.

Indigenous territories in the Amazon basin lost less than 0.3 percent of the carbon in their forests between 2003 and 2016. In comparison, non-indigenous protected areas lost 0.6 percent.

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Photo: Prensa Latina

The region's total gross carbon emissions from indigenous settlements reached just 2.6 percent despite the fact that these peoples cover only 28 percent of the Amazon basin.

The deforestation rate within indigenous forests, where land ownership has been secured, is 2.8 times lower than outside such areas. They are 2.5 times lower in Brazil. What will happen tomorrow?

FAO details that among all the collective territories titled in Latin America, they avoid between 42.8 and 59.7 million tons of CO2 emissions each year; which is equivalent to taking 9 to 12.6 million vehicles out of circulation during a year.

This happens in the 404 million hectares occupied by indigenous peoples, only where governments have formally recognized collective or usufruct property rights of some 269 million hectares.

Approximately 60 percent of the population lives in cities. Some of them have grown on average more than 50 times since 1940, with a high deficit of necessary services, including education and health. There are greater water shortages, drainage, treatment plants, drainage and solid waste management.

A large part of the urban population suffers from critical poverty and lives in favelas, neighborhoods or shantytowns that, in many cases, are clusters of stilt houses or houseboats.

In Brazil, it is the case that some of the most humble people and young professionals migrate to the Amazon. More and more people are joining the indigenous, rubber tappers, riverside and other traditional settlers, although they are not achieving sustainable development.

A large part of the population that comes to the Amazon region usually sees the jungle through the prism of the city. Maybe even reproduce the behavior of those who live outside the Amazon, without worrying about the consequences. They expect the jungle to provide free fish, bushmeat, timber, agricultural products, energy, and other goods.

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Photo: National Geographic

Manaus, the capital of the huge state of Amazonas, is a good example of this situation. Perhaps it matters little if there is unnecessary deforestation or if timber or gold is illegally exploited on indigenous lands.

Old estimates from 1994 indicated that the Amazonian population was greater than 22 million people, of which almost one million were indigenous and 60 percent of that population was urban.

Manaus, founded in 1848, today has more than 1.6 million inhabitants and continues to grow due to the expansion of agricultural and mining activities. Contrary to logic, the living conditions of the rural or peri-urban population are worse than in other regions.

Currently, the refusal to demarcate the lands where the natives live, even when determined by the Constitution -1988- and to allow Covid-19 to enter indigenous lands, has been denounced as genocide, because ultimately the jungle lives for them and their resistance has kept them on their feet.

Imbalance

Brazil has been the largest contributor to deforestation in the Amazon, with 1.4 million hectares per year or 45 percent of the total deforestation of this great green territory, says environmental specialist Marc J. Dourojeanni.

The Brazilian Amazon lost 1,180 square kilometers in May 2021, reported the National Institute for Space Research. 580.55 square kilometers of forest were devastated in April and 367.6 square kilometers of forest in March.

It is alarming. It occurs in lands with no agricultural vocation, mostly protection forests in the Andean-Amazonian countries, with serious implications on the behavior of rivers. The same happens in enormous ecological extensions, without preserving an agro-forestry balance.

One form of primary forest loss, which has increased rapidly in the Brazilian Amazon in the last year, is logging for agriculture and other land uses.

Who ensures the balance of the forest's goods and services? The fishing potential of rivers is constantly being reduced. Most of the deforested land is unused or underutilized. You only see them cutting down trees.

Who puts a stop to illegal hunting and fishing? Fishing is a growing activity throughout the Amazon. Hunting for commercial purposes has officially disappeared but is still practiced in all countries. There is a risk of extinction of certain species with the total destruction of ecosystems by deforestation.

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Photo: amazoniasocioambiental.org

Logging changes hands and increases its intensity. In the Amazon it is essentially anarchic. The most important recent phenomenon is the invasion of large foreign investors to carry out massive forestry exploitation.

Deforestation is accelerating in the region on indigenous lands that belong to the State, but are permanently and exclusively usufruct of the original peoples, constantly violated.

Mining and oil exploitation grows without environmental care. The Amazon reserve is extracted: copper, gold, manganese, nickel, zinc, kaolin, rock salt, iron, bauxite, diamonds. Huge stocks ensure limited shelf life.

Although mining is prohibited, on the Yanomami indigenous land alone, there are some 20,000 miners devastating the jungle. Part of them under the command of the First Command of the Capital (PCC), one of the largest factions of organized crime in Brazil. The Brazilian Amazon also concentrates the largest amount (53.8 percent) of the illegal mining points detected by that network.

Oil and natural gas are already being exploited. At the Vale do Rio Doce Company in Brazil, the use of these non-renewable natural resources has been detrimental to water resources and the potential life of its fish.

Also, protected areas and indigenous lands do not receive adequate treatment, despite their contribution to the biosphere reserve. The road infrastructure comes with threats. In the interior of each Amazonian country, there are numerous new road projects - thousands of millions of dollars at stake - that they foresee will be essentially from the private sector.

Those investors are unlikely to take care of the environment if they are not legally required to do so.

In the Amazon, the participatory process of civil society has been more difficult. However, they are much more active than before, highlights the environmental specialist, Marc J. Dourojeanni, in his presentation "Half a century of development in the Amazon: is there hope for its sustainable development?", Presented at the Amazonia 21 International Conference.

What awaits us

Researchers and environmentalists around the world are attentive to the increase in deforestation and the intransigence of the Brazilian government to curb illegal activity. Eight former Brazilian Environment Ministers jointly expressed that "what awaits us is the risk of excessive deforestation in the Amazon."

During a conference with journalists, Bolsonaro commented that the concern with the Amazon is due to an "environmental psychosis." "What happens there is not the responsibility of foreigners." Faced with such an assertion, a European journalist replied that "the Amazon is ours, not yours."

Since the campaign for the government, Bolsonaro even promised to eliminate the Ministry of the Environment. In the end it did not, but before taking office, Brazil abruptly withdrew its commitment to host a summit on climate change. The president then cut the environmental agency's budget by 24 percent.

When the Brazilian economy fell into recession in 2014, logging increased. Now it threatens to remove the rest of the barriers to the development of protected lands.

On April 22, during the Climate Leaders Summit, Bolsonaro pledged to eliminate illegal deforestation in the Amazon by 2030.

Meanwhile, it has not declared new areas of environmental protection, nor has it demarcated new indigenous land reserves. However, it means that Brazil as an agricultural exporting power is more interested in it than the so-called “lung of the planet”.

https://www.telesurtv.net/telesuragenda ... -0034.html

Google Translator

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ECLAC warns of deterioration of the environment in the region

Bárcena warned that the budget for environmental management fell by 35 percent in the last year.

The Executive Secretary of the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), Alicia Bárcena, warned this Wednesday about the environmental deterioration in the region, mainly of wooded areas and the need for more effective policies to protect it.

The latest report published by ECLAC indicates that the region is home to 23 percent of the world's forest area and warns that between 1990 and 2020, the proportion of forest cover systematically decreased from 53 to 46 percent of that territory.

Likewise, the document points out that at the beginning of the 90s the forested area of ​​the region reached about 1,070 million hectares, by 2010 it had been reduced to 960 million and by 2020 it decreased to 932, which implies a loss of 138 million hectares.


Causes such as new land uses for agriculture, forestry and livestock; and to a lesser extent, the expansion of cities, as well as the construction of roads associated with various economic activities, had an impact on the reduction of the area covered by natural forest by 150 million hectares, which represented a reduction of seven percent in forest cover.

This trend is sustained due to increasing declines in the last 30 years in large forested countries such as Brazil, which is home to 53.3 percent of the forests in the entire region, and has lost 92.3 million hectares, to the point of becoming, for the first time, the Amazon a net emitter of greenhouse gases.


Bárcena also warned about the fall in budgets for environmental protection, with a drop of 35 percent in 2020 compared to 2019; and only 0.2 percent of the Gross Domestic Product of the countries destined to solve this problem.

"Of the 14.6 trillion allocated by the 50 largest economies in the world to green recovery in 2020, only 2.5 percent were actually used in order to materialize said recovery," explained Bárcena.


He also added the need to "enforce the precepts of the Escazú Agreement, a mechanism implemented in the region to protect environmental defenders and advance information and access to environmental justice," he concluded.

According to the latest Global Forest Resources Assessment 2020 report, the total area of ​​forests in the world is 4.06 billion hectares, corresponding to 31 percent of the total land area. More than half are concentrated in just five countries, with Brazil being the second with the most forests.

https://www.telesurtv.net/news/cepal-ad ... -0029.html

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Re: The Long Ecological Revolution

Post by blindpig » Mon Aug 16, 2021 1:00 pm

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The end of growth? The capitalist economy & ecological crisis
Originally published: Socialist Alternative by Conor Payne and Chris Stewart (August 11, 2021 ) | - Posted Aug 16, 2021

Many ecologists, activists and academics argue that an obsession with economic growth is the cause of our current ecological crisis and a commitment to “degrowing” the economy is the solution.

Too often, however, this discussion lacks a sufficient class or anti-capitalist content and workers are blamed for our supposedly destructive “consumption patterns”. Instead, socialists should be clear that the cause of the climate crisis is the capitalist system and its incessant drive to accumulate profits, and that the only way to solve the crisis is to struggle for a socialist world where human need, including a sustainable relation to nature, comes before private greed.

Capitalism’s “boom and bust” cycle

Under capitalism, the driving force of the economy is the pursuit of profit. The competition between companies and even different capitalist powers for markets and resources means that this drive for profit is relentless and expansive. Therefore, capitalism also involves a continuous quest for economic growth.

At the same time, these companies will seek to “externalize” the cost of their activities, to leave them to be paid by someone else. The capitalist firm doesn’t care on what basis it grows; whether its products are useful or cause harm, or if its activities are environmentally sustainable.

Capitalism is a system of contradictions. The capitalists get their profits by exploiting workers, as well as the resources extracted from nature in the labor process. The constant need to accumulate more profits means capitalism extracts more and more resources in increasingly destructive ways, ultimately leading to the depletion of soils, minerals, forests, the life in our oceans etc–which undermines the system’s own sources of wealth.

Capitalism is increasingly coming up against the ecological barrier to its unrestrained development, as seen in mounting natural disasters, the recent shutdown of the power system in Texas, and a global pandemic, all at least partly attributable to humanity’s increasing incursions into nature.

As well as this, capitalism is a system that primarily organizes investment through the chaos of the stock market, where investment is motivated only by the pursuit of profit. Today, capitalists increasingly choose to speculate with their wealth through complex financial products that have little relation to actual value in society–what Marx termed “fictitious capital”. This is because they can make more short-term profits here than they can through actual productive investment.

At the same time, the desire of the capitalists to drive down the share of wealth that goes to the working class means that workers collectively are not able to buy all the goods the capitalists put to market. This is one way that capitalist growth eventually comes up against its limits and throws the system into crisis and recession. We are now experiencing this process of crisis in Ireland and internationally for the second time in just over a decade.

When growth has been rooted in productive investment, it has often led also to increases in working class living standards, although workers’ gains are usually dwarfed by those of corporations and the rich. Periods of economic growth, for example in the decades following World War 2, were also sometimes used by capitalist governments to grant social reforms in the interests of working people, such as pensions, public health and education services, welfare protections etc. This was done not out of any innate kindness but as a mechanism to stave off potential revolutionary challenges to the system from the working class.

However, in the preceding decades of neo-liberal capitalism, the basis for growth has been precisely the reduction of the share of wealth going to the working class. Capitalism has suppressed wages, gutted public services, eroded economic security. Inequality has exploded as the gains of economic growth congealed at the top. At the same time, the capitalists have promoted more and more consumption fueled in significant measure by debt. This means that today capitalist economic growth often means little real gain for working class people.

The recovery from the great recession of ’08 was largely a joyless one. This was illustrated graphically here in Ireland in the 2020 election when the establishment did not benefit from any “feel good” factor whatsoever–in fact suffering a historic defeat. This was despite nominally impressive growth rates in the preceding years. The recovery did not alter the reality of low pay, precarity and housing distress. In Britain, the Office of National Statistics found that, despite a decade of “growth”, real wages only recovered to the level of 2008 at the end of 2019–just in time for the next crisis! At the same time, the numbers on zero hours contracts were the highest on record, at just under a million workers.1

Meanwhile, the mounting burden of ecological breakdown will not be shared equally; as those with wealth move to insulate themselves from the consequences of the economic system they have profited from. As unprecedentedly low temperatures drove catastrophic power outages in Texas, working-class, poor and minority neighborhoods bore the brunt of the power cuts while empty skyscrapers lit up the city skyline.

Karl Marx said that under capitalism: “Accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite pole.”2 This sums up the capitalist economy today. At the same time, of course, workers are still liable to pay the price when the system goes into recession. The reality is that at no stage in its cycle of boom and bust, does the capitalist economy operate in the interests of the working class.

An economy for need, not greed

While economic growth undoubtedly drives carbon emissions and all forms of environmental destruction, contraction on a capitalist basis does not deliver an equivalent let up in environmental intensity. According to one study, examining 150 countries over the period of 1960-2008, a 1% increase in GDP meant on average a 0.73% increase in carbon emissions, while a 1% decline in GDP meant only a 0.4% decrease in carbon emissions.3 This is because the environmentally inefficient goods and infrastructure created during a boom generally continue in use during a downturn. Less consumption in itself can never deliver the necessary reduction in carbon emissions. Instead we need a fundamental change in how we produce.

This means that without a planned transition to a sustainable means of life the tendency will be for ever increasing emissions. So the debate about growth and degrowth is useless unless linked to the need to bring an end to the chaos of the capitalist market.

The purpose of the capitalist economy is to deliver increased profit for the bosses. The purpose of the economy under socialism would be to fulfill human need in a sustainable way. This means taking the key sectors of the economy out of the hands of big business and bringing them into public ownership, under democratic control. This means we can reorganize the energy industry, transport, agribusiness and production overall on a planned basis, in the interests of both people and the planet.

Socialists want a better life for the vast majority on this earth. We know many, even in the richer countries, are in poverty or barely keeping their heads above water, do not have access to decent housing or healthcare, or have no economic security for the future. We believe this to be completely unjustifiable in a world of incredible abundance. For this reason, we reject attacks on working-class living standards, even those that are introduced with an environmental veneer, e.g. water charges, or carbon taxes.

The vast majority of the world’s population is responsible for very little in terms of carbon emissions. A recent UN report shows that globally the top 1% of earners are responsible for a yearly per capita average of 74 tons of C02 per year. Meanwhile for the bottom 50% of earners the figure is 0.7 tons.4 In much of the world a socialist system would need to increase production on a sustainable basis and redistribute wealth. Even in the wealthier capitalist countries many sectors that are not prioritized for capitalist investment would need to be expanded under a socialist system, not reduced–healthcare, housing, renewable energy for a start.

A world of waste

At the same time, capitalist production involves enormous waste. We should not underestimate the extent of this:

*690 million people around the world went hungry in 2019, with the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation projecting that the impact of the pandemic could add a further 132 million people to that number.5 Yet, during the pandemic, the closure of restaurants and other disruptions cause the widespread dumping of perfectly good produce. Even in “normal” times, while the world already produces enough food to feed everyone, a minimum of one third of this food is lost or wasted. Many things cause this but the status of food as a commodity to be sold for profit is at the centre of the problem. Agribusiness leaves food to rot in the fields to keep prices high, supermarkets throw out edible food they don’t think they can sell, good food is even discarded because its size or shape makes it “unmarketable”.6

*In 2020, approximately $569 billion was spent on advertising, projected to grow to $612 billion this year.7 You can add to this, the resources spent on sales promotion, public relations, “direct marketing” and other forms of corporate self-promotion. The vast bulk of this money is wasted, spent not to inform us but to convince us to buy as much as possible or to buy one identical brand of a product over another, often preying on our anxieties and insecurities in order to create false needs in our minds that can be “solved” through consumption.

*Because capitalism doesn’t produce for need but for profit, advertising and marketing become bound up with the process of production itself. The packaging industry is now the third largest on earth and much packaging is not mainly functional but a form of product promotion. Packaging costs amount to somewhere between 10% and 40% of total product cost.8

*Planned obsolescence means that products are consciously not built to be durable and must be frequently replaced by consumers. This includes fast fashion made from low quality material and electronics with batteries that can’t be replaced, contributing to 500 million tonnes of E-waste in 2019.9

*There are a plethora of other industries and products of no use to working-class people: from the armaments industry producing weapons of death, to luxury goods like private jets–an industry which has benefitted from a raft of new, wealthy customers seeking to avoid commercial flights during the pandemic. As a result of yet another capitalist speculative bubble, the cryptocurrency Bitcoin now consumes more energy than all of Argentina, a country of 45 million people.

*Competition between firms means that research and development efforts are often duplicated.

As we can see, the mountains of waste produced under capitalism are not a product mainly of the demands of consumers, but instead serve the needs of capitalist profiteering. The structure of capitalist society itself also partly conditions our consumer needs. Those who don’t live near reliable public transport “need” to buy cars, people on low incomes will “choose” to buy fast fashion etc.

To create more and more products that aren’t needed or will be sent rapidly to landfill, or to generate more and more artificial demand is all “growth” in capitalist terms, but it isn’t human progress. A democratic, planned economy could do “more with less” as part of a planned ecological transition–retooling useless or destructive industries, eliminating duplication, overproduction and planned obsolescence, focusing on fulfilling needs not generating artificial wants and transforming agriculture, transport and energy production on a sustainable basis. In such a system whole industries, communities and cities would be planned democratically and on a completely different basis, putting an end to capitalist overproduction and waste and allowing for a more rational allocation of resources.

Sustainable future means socialist planning

Some argue that a simple transition to renewable energy will solve the ecological problems we face. This transition is both necessary and possible, but won’t be done under capitalism that will extract every source of fossil fuels down to the last, so long as there is profit to be made from them.

But even if this were achieved, we would still face a range of looming ecological catastrophes. The fact is that capitalism is already exceeding a number of planetary boundaries for safeguarding a safe environment for human civilization on earth.

These include species extinction, soil degradation and deforestation, to name only a few. Their common source is the increasing scale and intensity of humanity’s incursions into nature, which are now undermining the basis of our own existence on the planet.

Nor will technological changes alone solve the problem of a sustainable relationship with nature. Under capitalism, the opposite is the case: while technological changes result in the more efficient use of energy, this then creates the basis for further expansion and so paradoxically technological development often results in a net increase in the amount of energy used.10

While technology may alter to some degree what the limits are, we have to accept the reality that “you can’t have infinite growth on a finite planet”. Capitalism means an increasingly destructive and frantic search for resources that can be extracted and land which can be developed, with the benefits of this activity more and more concentrated in the hands of the few.

Socialist planning can ensure the rational development of the quality of our lives without increasing environmental intensity. Only on this basis can we restructure our society around need, not profit, creating countless socially necessary jobs in pursuit of building a sustainable system.

Socialists stand for massive investment in low carbon jobs and sustainable infrastructure, as well as the introduction of a four-day work-week with no loss of pay. This would not only solve the problem of permanent unemployment under capitalism by distributing work to all those who need it, but would also free workers up to participate in political and economic decision-making, and would achieve a better balance between work, our social lives and leisure.

This will still pose complex questions about how products, industries and practices can be maintained, but these are best resolved on the basis of democratic discussion in a society founded on equality and solidarity.

Conor Payne and Chris Stewart, Socialist Party (ISA in Ireland)

Notes:
↩ Richard Partington, Feb 18, 2020 “Average Wages Top Pre-Financial Crisis Levels”, The Guardian, www.theguardian.com
↩ Karl Marx, Capital Volume 1, www.marxists.org
↩ Richard York, Oct 7, 2012, “Asymmetric effects of economic growth and decline on CO2 emissions”, Nature Climate Change, www.nature.com
↩ UN Environment Program “Emissions Gap Report 2020”, Dec 9, 2020
↩ UN Food and Agriculture Organisation, July 13, 2020, “As more go hungry and malnutrition persists, achieving Zero Hunger by 2030 in doubt, UN report warns”, www.fao.org
↩ Andrew Smolski, Mar 29, 2017, “Capital’s Hunger in Abundance”, Jacobin, jacobinmag.com
↩ Brad Adgate, Dec 14, 2020, “Ad Agency Forecast: Expect The Advertising Market To Rebound In 2021”, Forbes, www.forbes.com
↩ John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark, 2020, The Robbery of Nature: Capitalism and the Ecological Rift, Monthly Review Press, p. 364
↩ John Harris, Apr 15, 2020, “Planned obsolescence: the outrage of our electronic waste mountain”, The Guardian, www.theguardian.com
↩ Foster and Clark, 2020, p.352-3.

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Re: The Long Ecological Revolution

Post by blindpig » Tue Aug 17, 2021 1:36 pm

GLOBAL HEATING ACCELERATES
July was Earth’s hottest month on record
August 16, 2021
July is usually the warmest month, but this year it went over the top

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July 2021 has earned the unenviable distinction as the world’s hottest month in 142 years of record keeping, according to new global data released on August 13 by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

“In this case, first place is the worst place to be,” said NOAA Administrator Rick Spinrad in a press release. “July is typically the world’s warmest month of the year, but July 2021 outdid itself as the hottest July and month ever recorded. This new record adds to the disturbing and disruptive path that climate change has set for the globe.”

July 2021 by the numbers

Around the globe: the combined land and ocean-surface temperature was 1.67 degrees F (0.93 of a degree C) above the 20th-century average of 60.4 degrees F (15.8 degrees C), making it the hottest July since records began 142 years ago. It was 0.02 of a degree F (0.01 of a degree C) higher than the previous record set in July 2016, which was then tied in 2019 and 2020.
The Northern Hemisphere: the land-surface only temperature was the highest ever recorded for July, at an unprecedented 2.77 degrees F (1.54 degrees C) above average, surpassing the previous record set in 2012.
Regional records: Asia had its hottest July on record, besting the previous record set in 2010; Europe had its second-hottest July on record—tying with July 2010 and trailing behind July 2018; and North America, South America, Africa and Oceania all had a top-10 warmest July.
Extreme heat and global climate change

With last month’s data, it remains very likely that 2021 will rank among the world’s 10-warmest years on record, according to NCEI’s Global Annual Temperature Rankings Outlook.

Extreme heat detailed in NOAA’s monthly NCEI reports is also a reflection of the long-term changes outlined in a major report released this week by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Scientists from across the globe delivered the most up-to-date assessment of the ways in which the climate is changing,” Spinrad said. “It is a sobering IPCC report that finds that human influence is, unequivocally, causing climate change, and it confirms the impacts are widespread and rapidly intensifying.”

Other notable highlights from NOAA’s July global climate report

Sea ice coverage varied by hemisphere: The Arctic sea ice coverage (extent) for July 2021 was the fourth-smallest for July in the 43-year record, according to analysis by the National Snow and Ice Data Center. Only July 2012, 2019 and 2020 had a smaller sea ice extent. Antarctic sea ice extent was above average in July — the largest July sea ice extent since 2015 and the eighth highest on record.
The tropics were busier than average: In the Atlantic basin, the season’s earliest fifth-named storm, Elsa, formed on July 1. The Eastern North and Western Pacific basins each logged three named storms. Overall, global tropical cyclone activity this year so far (through July) has been above-normal for the number of named storms.
(Adapted from materials provided by NOAA.)

https://climateandcapitalism.com/2021/0 ... on-record/

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Climate change: the fault of humanity?
Posted Aug 16, 2021 by Michael Roberts

Originally published: Michael Roberts Blog (August 12, 2021 )

The sixth report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) runs to nearly 4,000 pages. The IPCC has tried to summarise its report as the ‘final opportunity’ to avoid climate catastrophe. Its conclusions are not much changed since the previous publication in 2013, only more decisive this time. The evidence is clear: we know the cause of global warming (mankind); we know how far the planet has warmed (~1C so far), we know how atmospheric CO2 concentrations have changed since pre-industrial times (+30%) and we know that warming that has shown up so far has been generated by historical pollution. You have to go back several million years to even replicate what we have today. During the Pilocene era (5.3-2.6 million years ago) the world had CO2 levels of 360-420ppm (vs. 415ppm now).

In its summary for Policy makers, the IPCC states clearly that climate change and global warming is “unequivocally caused by human activities.” But can climate change be laid at the door of the whole of humanity or instead on that part of humanity that owns, controls and decides what happens to our future? Sure, any society without the scientific knowledge would have exploited fossil fuels in order to generate energy for production, warmth and transport. But would any society have gone on expanding fossil fuel exploration and production without controls to protect the environment and failed to look for alternative sources of energy that did not damage the planet, once it became clear that carbon emissions were doing just that?

Indeed, we now know that scientists warned of the dangers decades ago. Nuclear physicist Edward Teller warned the oil industry all the way back in 1959 that its product will end up having a catastrophic impact on human civilization. The main fossil fuel companies like Exxon or BP knew what the consequences were, but chose to hide the evidence and do nothing–just like the tobacco companies over smoking. The scientific evidence on carbon emissions damaging the planet, as presented in the IPCC report, is about as inconvertible as smoking in damaging health. And yet little or nothing has been done, because the environment must not stand in the way of profitability.

The culprit is not ‘humanity’ but industrial capitalism and its addiction to fossil fuels. At a personal level, in the last 25 years, it is the richest one percent of the world’s population mainly based in the Global North who were responsible for more than twice as much carbon pollution as the 3.1 billion people who made up the poorest half of humanity. A recent study found that the richest 10 percent of households use almost half (45 percent) of all the energy linked to land transport and three quarters of all energy linked to aviation. Transportation accounts for around a quarter of global emissions today, while SUVs were the second biggest driver of global carbon emissions growth between 2010 and 2018. But even more to the point, just 100 companies have been the source of more than 70% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions since 1988, according to a new report. It’s big capital that is the polluter even more than the very rich.

The IPCC material distils a massive pool of data into a report that it hopes is irrefutable and alarming enough to force more radical change. And it provides various scenarios on when global temperatures will reach the so-called Paris target of 1.5c degrees above average pre-industrial levels. Its main scenario is called the Shared Socioeconomic Pathway (SSP1-1.9) scenario in, in which it is argued that if net carbon emissions are reduced, then the 1.5C target will be reached by 2040 at the latest, then breach the target up to 2060 before falling back to 1.4C by the end of the century.

But this is the most optimistic of five scenarios on the pace and intensity of global warming in the 21st century and it’s bad enough! The other scenarios are way bleaker, culminating in SSP5-8.5 which would see global temperatures rise 4.4C by 2100 and continuing upward thereafter (Inset 1). There isn’t a scenario better than SSP1-1.9 and these are ignored by the IPCC.

Shared socioeconomic pathways

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SSP1-1.9 is the most optimistic scenario, global CO2 emissions are cut to net zero by 2050. There is a huge shift to sustainable development, with well-being prioritised over pure economic growth. Investments in education and health rise and inequality falls. Extreme weather continues to increase in frequency, but the world avoids the worst impacts of climate change. Global warming is kept to around 1.5C, stabilising around 1.4C by the end of the century.

SSP1-2.6 is the next-best scenario, global CO2 emissions fall but net zero is not reached until after 2050. It assumes the same socioeconomic shifts as in SSP1-1.9 are met. But temperatures are left 1.8C higher by 2100.

SSP2-4.5 is the “middle of the road” scenario (i.e. the most likely). CO2 emissions hover around current levels before starting to fall mid-century, but do not reach net-zero until nearer 2100. Shifts towards a more sustainable economy and improvements in inequality follow historic trends. Temperatures rise 2.7C by the end of the century.

SSP3-7.0 is one where emissions and temperatures continue to rise steadily, ending at roughly double current levels by 2100. Countries become more competitive national and food security is prioritised. Average temperatures rise by 3.6C.

SSP5-8.5 is the apocalyptic scenario. CO2 emissions roughly double by 2050. The global economy continues to grow quickly by exploiting fossil fuels, lifestyles remain energy intensive and average global temperatures are 4.4C higher as we enter the 22nd century.

No probabilities are offered for any of these scenarios–just the hope and expectation that SSP1 will happen. But the pace of emissions growth and temperature is already on a much faster trajectory. The planet has already warmed 1.0-1.2C depending on how you want to measure it (current or 10-year average). The trend is well established and is tending to surprise on the upside, not the downside. Furthermore, the rate of change in atmospheric chemistry is unprecedented and continues to accelerate.

Even at 1.5o C, we will see sea level rises of between two and three metres. Instances of extreme heat will be around four times more likely. Heavy rainfall will be around 10 percent wetter and 1.5 times more likely to occur. Much of these changes are already irreversible, like the sea level rises, the melting of Arctic ice, and the warming and acidification of the oceans. Drastic reductions in emissions can stave off worse climate change, according to IPCC scientists, but will not return the world to the more moderate weather patterns of the past.

Even if we assume the SSP1-1.9 objectives can be met by 2050, cumulative global CO2 emissions would still be a third higher than the current 1.2trn tons of CO2 emitted since 1960. That would push atmospheric CO2 beyond 500ppm, or 66% higher than where things stood in the pre-industrial period. That pathway implies 1.8C of warming by 2050, not 1.5C.

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The reality is that the IPCC’s very low emissions scenario is improbable: and the global temperature is likely to hit 1.5C much earlier than 2040 and reach a much higher level, even with the conditions of SSP1 in place, namely a 50% reduction in CO2 emissions by 2050.

More likely, global warming will reach around 1.8C by 2050 and 2.5C by the end of the century. That means even more drought and flood events than currently forecast and so even more suffering and mounting economic losses from the mix–a loss in world GDP of 10-15% on current trajectories and double that in the poor Global South.

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António Guterres, the secretary-general of the United Nations, responded to the report by taking aim at the fossil fuel industry: “This report must sound a death knell for coal and fossil fuels, before they destroy our planet.” But how? First and foremost, it’s not enough to end the government subsidies and financing of fossil fuel sectors by governments around the world (and that is still going on). Instead, there must be a global plan to phase out fossil fuel energy production.

Left Democrat Robert Reich, former official in the Clinton administration, reckons the answer is to stop oil company lobbying, oil exploration, ban oil exports and make the oil companies pay compensation. He stops short of public ownership. But how can a really successful plan to stop global warming work unless the fossil fuel companies are brought into public ownership? The energy industry needs to be integrated into a global plan to reduce emissions and expand superior renewable energy technology. This means building renewable energy capacity of 10x the current utility base. That is only possible through planned public investment that transfers the jobs in fossil fuel companies to green technology and environmental companies, where there will be many jobs.

Second, public investment is needed to develop the technologies of carbon extraction to reduce the existing stock of atmospheric emissions. The IPCC says that going beyond net zero by removing large quantities of carbon from the atmosphere “might be able to reduce warming”, but carbon removal technologies “are not yet ready” to work at the scale that would be required, and most “have undesired side effects”. In other words, private investment is failing to deliver on this so far.

Decarbonizing the world economy is technically and financially feasible. It would require committing approximately 2.5 percent of global GDP per year to investment spending in areas designed to improve energy efficiency standards across the board (buildings, automobiles, transportation systems, industrial production processes) and to massively expand the availability of clean energy sources for zero emissions to be realized by 2050. That cost is nothing compared to the loss of incomes, employment, lives and living conditions for millions ahead.

End fossil fuel production through public ownership and a global investment plan–this is just utopia, critics may say. But then, market solutions of carbon pricing and taxation, as advocated by the IMF and the EU, are not going to work, even if implemented globally–and that is not going to happen.

There is less than three months before the delayed COP26 conference in Glasgow. The previous two major conferences produced nothing at all: COP15 in Copenhagen in 2009, and COP21 in 2015 (the Paris Agreement) only committed nations to voluntary emissions reductions targets that would lead to about 2.9o C of warming if achieved. Glasgow is shaping up to be no less of a failure.

https://mronline.org/2021/08/16/climate ... -humanity/

How ya gonna expropriate a major chunk of the means of production without a revolution?

I don't think ya can, short of revolution such musing are a distraction, academics shouting into the night and waving their tiny fists.

Socialism or barbarism. Nothing less will do.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: The Long Ecological Revolution

Post by blindpig » Wed Aug 18, 2021 2:10 pm

THERE IS TOO MUCH CAPITALISM

The Cayapo

17 Aug 2021 , 11:29 am .

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Capitalism is the system responsible for the enjoyment of minorities at the expense of the suffering of the majority (Photo: Sin Permiso)

The only universal truth on the planet is that if there is no water, shelter, food, shoes and clothing for the majority of the species, it is because there is too much capitalism.

TANGLE ONE

Capitalism is egalitarian, it evenly distributes the garbage among all.

Capitalism, with its industrial systems of warfare, agriculture, drugs, footwear, clothing, construction, transportation, commerce, finance, entertainment of all kinds, art, education, produces 270 billion tons of garbage every year that is generated from murder. of all forms of life on the planet, be it mountains, lakes, lagoons, rivers, oceans, seas, wetlands, meadows, savannas, jungles, forests, viruses, bacteria, people and other animals. The good news for green recycling entrepreneurs is that this garbage of capitalism will double by 2025.

If we divide this volume by the approximate number of inhabitants that we are on the planet, we will realize that capitalism overwhelms each person with 36 tons of garbage a year, but the bottom line is that the very reputable businessmen say that we are the ones who produce it. , as if we were the owners of mines, factories, industries, transportation, finance, shopping centers.

But don't worry, not everything is crime, since the green and ecological entrepreneurs invented the recycling industry under the slogan "Destroy and dirty, we are going behind cleaning the cheeks", and in pursuit of them, an infinite line of volunteers collect garbage on behalf of ecology and other stupid things that make capitalism produce more plastic bags and more plastic coppers and more trucks and more and more and more and more to infinity, where we will all become ecologically garbage with the whole planet turned into a garbage dump, because never we wanted to think but to follow after an illusory dove that capitalism painted us as pretty.

Capitalism produces all the drugs in the world, it is an addiction business; Police, banks, judicial powers, armies and other industries are added, be they weapons, clothing, footwear, fodder, fuel, sports, education, arts or entertainment. Any ill-intentioned person can say that we should review those actions, but without news, since the industrialists of the spirit created the recovery centers; We can consume until we overdose because there is always someone who will get us out of the crisis and we can continue to consume until we die happily.

If buses, vans, trucks or cars emit polluting smoke, it is the fault of those who drive for not buying the necessary additives to avoid pollution. If we go to the market and use plastic bags to carry the groceries, we are guilty of contaminating with plastic. If we wear clothes we are guilty, if we eat we are guilty, if we drink we are guilty, and if we do nothing we are also guilty.

According to the latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), humanity is the cause of all the evils that we are suffering. For these wise men, scientists, intellectuals, academics, capitalism does not exist, nor do the owners who pay them the reports where we are the culprits exist and the governments have to solve the problem once again without a solution.

If this report were written with intellectual honesty and scientific rigor, then it would be written this way:
The greenhouse gas emissions produced by the profit motive of the capitalists who own factories and industries that pollute the environmental space where we live as a species, come from the industrial activities of capitalism all over the planet and are responsible for a warming of about 1.1 ° C from 1850-1900, and the global average temperature over the next 20 years is projected to reach or exceed 1.5 ° C warming.

Likewise, we can firmly affirm that changes in the ocean, such as the warming and acidification of the ocean, the increase in the frequency of marine heat waves and the reduction of oxygen levels are clearly related to the accelerated installation of industries, buildings , highways, which generate the great profits of capitalism.

The actions of capitalist industries, say destruction of natural spaces, diversion of rivers, generation of garbage, pollution of all waters, massive emission of gases, and everything already known, can still affect the future course of the climate. There is clear evidence that carbon dioxide (CO2) is the main cause of climate change, although other polluting gases, produced massively by capitalist industry, can affect the climate even more.

We can certify as a conclusion that the only way to solve this problem is not by blaming the people or governments, but by directly holding the capitalist system and all its aggregates responsible for all environmental disasters, therefore all people must agree to a once and for all begin to think about the best way to get rid of this system, which since its creation has impoverished life on the planet, with the aim of generating pleasure for minorities without taking into account the great sufferings of the majority.
How do we poor people create a life plan if we are not aware of our slavery?

This, nor any other government, has the ability to solve the problem of consumption and service to the people, that is, the illusion that capitalism sells us, the big telephone, the big car, the big swimming pool, the woman with all the toys, the guy with all the toys, the great drink, the great space for fun invented, because it is not that we are going to bathe in a river or a beach quietly, walk a mountain: these are not spaces for fun or knowledge, nor of anything, nobody thinks that this is a diversion: to go to a river, to a beach; When they talk to us about the beach, we understand the case of beer, cocaine, rum, the rumba: it is not the beach, it is what happens there as consumption, that is what we understand as fun, not the beach itself, not the connection with she.

Sometimes we observe, in front of the sea, rows of large, very expensive trucks loaded with parakeets and immense sound equipment, drilling at everything that it gives, competing to see which of them is the one that sounds the most. These are too high levels of consumption that cannot be sustained, unless we are in the act of theft of surplus value.


No government has the capacity to fulfill the illusory offer of capitalism to the people, no government can satisfy that hunger, that anxiety to the people, that state of drug addiction, of consumption overdose. We no longer eat the arepa because of hunger, we eat it because of the brand, because of the propaganda of the flour with which it is made. We consume because what we have in the brain is much greater than the elemental consumption that we really require.

Capitalism has turned all consumption into a single drug, where the agencies, be they food, health, sports, education, entertainment or whatever, that depend on the financing of capitalism, call them UN, OAS, NGOs, governments and their derivatives, dedicated to each topic, all its wise men, experts, professionals, act according to the fact that, the more we work and consume, the better we will do.

And when we get sick with an overdose, then the recovery agencies for addicts appear in all branches of consumption, we see recovery centers, be they alcoholics, obese, compulsive hoarders, marijuana addicts, opiate addicts, cocaine addicts, trolley addicts, telephone users and etc., who like zombies We roam the entire planet in an infinite anguish and anxiety, absolutely dissatisfied, which leads us into the hands of professional scammers such as psychiatrists, psychologists, promoters of drugs of various kinds, with which they experiment with us without telling us the truth and keep the flourishing industry of legal laboratories, producers of highly dangerous drugs for the life of the species.

All this occurs in the midst of the propaganda that invades all the senses, the organs, even the most recondite ones, disguising the entire offering with health, food, fun, knowledge, personal growth, pleasure and permanent happiness for each one.

For this, they place governments as responsible for satisfying even the last consumer desire in its maximum expression, but the reality is that no government can satisfy it, regardless of their sign of governments. Because governments are only fire extinguishers for the excesses and disasters that capitalism leaves in its wake, and one of those misfortunes is the insatiability of the people, promoted by the propaganda apparatus of the capitalist industrial empire.

In history, the attempts of governments or the intentions to establish socialism on the planet have fallen into this trap of believing that they must solve the calamities generated by capitalism. They believe they are guilty of the past, that we do not have a car, house, food, health, employment, entertainment, to the extent that capitalism has offered it, and socialist governments try to make up for these deficiencies by increasing production, developing forces to the maximum. productive and trying to distribute wealth equitably, all without realizing that these productive forces are capitalist and that these wealth therefore are capitalist as well.

Worse still, to the extent that productivity increases, poverty also increases, because this wealth generated brings as a consequence the accelerated impoverishment of the producers that capital needs to exist.

These attempts by socialist governments are motivated by that religious desire to save people from evil, for people to eat, study, be well, without understanding that this is not natural, that there is a system that makes us poor at all the consequences that this entails and we know very well.

The long-term result of those actions is disappointment. People, as they do not know the reasons for their troubles, end up believing in the old advice that it is the governments who have to solve the problems and not their joint acts preceded by the knowledge of what are the real causes of the misfortunes of the species, because in the end it is the traditions, the force of habit, the magic of illusion, the hope in the higher being, which makes us believe that in this way problems are solved and we end up in those false beliefs, making wrong decisions against ourselves. In this way, making the government an enemy, in this case that of Venezuela, the only friend we have had in the war that capitalism has waged against us.

As fighters, thinkers, social activists, we are forced to come together to think about how we separate ourselves from capitalism, how to value ourselves, how to name ourselves, how to replace capitalism. We cannot continue stretching the crumbs that capitalism drops us from time to time, and believing that the more we stretch them by requesting rights from capitalism, we will stop being poor.


TANGLE 2

Let no one whine!

Twenty years after the enabling laws were promulgated and capitalism declared war on us, in 2021 we have been recognized as an independent country in the concert of nations. It is a colossal triumph, as a people we are once again writing a new page for posterity. Today as yesterday, we have defeated in battle the most powerful imperialism that is capitalism, thus fulfilling the dream of Bolívar and the Commander.

After twenty years of hard struggles, the capitalist empire could not force the Chavista government to get out of the mold of the Constitution, a strategy they applied to achieve the objective of leading Venezuelans into a civil war. Our strength, under the wise direction of the military political team, initially led by Commander Chávez and later by President Maduro, led us to avoid the undermined path that capitalism carpeted us.

During these twenty years we have suffered irreparable losses in lives, including that of the Commander and other leaders, betrayals, sabotage, assassinations, theft of resources, but the fifth columns have also been disrupted and knowledge has been strengthened, we have fought and trusted our military political leadership that, in turn, has trusted us.

The enemy forces in the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela today are broken and dispersed. This does not mean that we should trust and underestimate them, on the contrary we must be vigilant because what we have won is a very important battle, not the war.

In the Mexican negotiations we all already know who the real enemies are, we know that they are not the puppets of the Lima Group, that they are not the rusty Almagro, that they are not the drug traffickers of Uribe and Duque, much less the murderous Colombian oligarchy, all of them puppets like Piñera, Moreno, Macri, Bolsonaro. But even less so the so-called Venezuelan opposition, ashamed of themselves and admirers of those who invaded us, because they have always hated the territory where they were born and the people they have helped enslave for centuries. Opposition that for crumbs crawled at the feet of the owners refusing to the unspeakable.

Today we know that those who were and are behind the shed are the owners and their followers of the capitals settled in Europe and the United States, which even defeated for now, intend to impose conditions that our Chancellor has answered very well : "Criminal sanctions from the United States cause suffering to the Venezuelan people and have blocked political dialogue, they are not imperial concessions, they must be eliminated due to their illegality and perversity, blackmail and pressure must stop. "

We have won, even if the "sanctions" are never lifted, because beyond the political struggle we have gained knowledge and the ability to reflect. This battle is one more demonstration that when the peoples prepare to fight, no empire can defeat them, no matter how powerful it is. But this lesson is not enough and even less today, when there is an empire that dominates everything, such as the capitalist empire, which does not respect homeland or nation, but understands the planet as a land mine to plunder.

As a people, we must prepare ourselves to replace capitalism with another means of production that generates another culture that does not allow it to regenerate, that cuts its way of life at its roots.

The species has nothing to lose and everything to gain. The time to think collectively is the order of the day, let's not waste it in the pride of the battle won.

https://misionverdad.com/chavismo/sobra ... apitalismo

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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 » Sat Aug 21, 2021 1:06 pm

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On the brink–the scenario that the IPCC is not modelling
Originally published: Anti-Capitalist Resistance by Daniel Tanuro (August 11, 2021 ) | - Posted Aug 21, 2021

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Working Group 1 has presented its Physical Basis Report as a contribution to the Sixth Assessment Report on climate change, due in early 2022. The report and its summary are written in the precise style and vocabulary of scientific publications that make ‘objective’ statements. However, never before has a report by global warming experts given such an impression of the anguish caused by the analysis of the facts in the light of the inescapable laws of physics.

Terrible prospects…
The anguish stems first of all from the context: the terrible floods and fires that are spreading desolation, death and fear in the four corners of the planet are the very things that the IPCC has been warning against for more than thirty years, and that governments have done little or nothing about. It also stems from the enormity of the fact, mentioned in the report, that even if COP26 (in Glasgow in November) decides to implement the most radical of the stabilisation scenarios studied by climate scientists, i.e. the one that ensures the most rapid reduction in CO2 emissions and cancels net global emissions by 2060 at the latest (while also reducing emissions of other greenhouse gases), humanity would still face terrible prospects.

In summary:

The Paris target would be exceeded. The global average surface temperature would probably increase by 1.6°C (+/-0.4) between 2041 and 2060 (compared to the pre-industrial era) and then decrease between 2081 and 2100 to 1.4°C (+/-0.4);
Note that these are only averages: it is almost certain that the temperature on land will rise faster than on the ocean surface (probably 1.4 to 1.7 times faster). It is also virtually certain that the Arctic will continue to warm faster than the global average (most likely more than twice as fast);
some mid-latitude and semi-arid regions, and the monsoon region in South America, will have the highest temperature increases on the hottest days (1.5 to 2 times the global average), while the Arctic will have the highest temperature increases on the coldest days (3 times the global average);
On land, heat waves that used to occur once every ten years will occur four times every ten years, and those that used to occur only once every fifty years will occur nearly nine times over the same period;
It is very likely that additional warming (compared to the current 1.1°C) will intensify extreme precipitation events and increase their frequency (globally, 7% more precipitation for 1°C of warming). The frequency and strength of intense tropical cyclones (categories 4-5) will also increase. Intense precipitation and associated flooding is expected to intensify and become more frequent in most parts of Africa and Asia, North America and Europe. Agricultural and ecological droughts will also be more severe and frequent in some areas, on all continents except Asia, compared to 1850-1900;
It goes without saying that this additional global heating (of 0.5°C+/-0.4 compared to today) will continue to amplify the melting of permafrost, and thus the release of methane. This positive feedback from global warming is not fully integrated into the models (which, despite their increasing sophistication, continue to underestimate reality);
Ocean warming during the remainder of the 21st century is likely to be 2-4 times greater than between 1971 and 2018. Ocean stratification, acidification and deoxygenation will continue to increase. All three phenomena have negative consequences for marine life. It will take millennia to reverse them;
It is almost certain that glaciers in the mountains and Greenland will continue to melt for decades, and it is likely that melting will also continue in the Antarctic;
It is also almost certain that sea levels will rise by 0.28-0.55m in the 21st century, compared to 1995-2014. Over the next 2,000 years, it will probably continue to rise–by 2 to 3 metres–and then the movement will continue. As a result, at half the places where there are tidal gauges, exceptional tidal events that were observed once a century in the recent past will be observed at least once a year, increasing the frequency of flooding in low-lying areas;
Low likelihood but very high impact events could occur at the global and local level, even if warming remains within the likely range in the radical scenario (+1.6° +/-0.4°C). Even under this 1.5°C scenario, abrupt responses and tipping points–such as increased Antarctic melt and forest die-offs–cannot be ruled out.
One such low probability but possible event is the collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC). Its weakening is very likely in the 21st century, but the magnitude of the phenomenon is a question mark. A collapse would most likely cause abrupt shifts in regional weather patterns and the water cycle, such as a southward shift of the tropical rain belt, weakening of the monsoons in Africa and Asia, strengthening of the monsoons in the southern hemisphere, and drying in Europe.
… in the best case scenario?
This report forces us to face reality: we are literally on the brink of the abyss. All the more so because, let us repeat and insist:

1) the projections for the sea level rise do not include the phenomena of the disintegration of the ice caps, which are non-linear and therefore cannot be modelled, and which have the potential to very quickly turn the catastrophe into a cataclysm;

2) all of the above is what the IPCC believes will happen if the world’s governments decide to implement the most radical of the emission reduction scenarios studied by scientists, the scenario aimed at not going (too far) above 1.5°C.

To detail the impacts of the other scenarios would make this text unnecessarily long. Let’s just give an indication, concerning sea levels: in the business-as-usual scenario, a rise of 2 metres in 2100 and 5 metres in 2150 is “not excluded”. And in the long term, over two thousand years, for a warming of 5°C, the seas would inevitably and irreversibly rise (on the human timescale) by… 19 to 22 metres!

Let’s recap. Implementing the most radical scenario proposed to them is not what governments are doing. Their climate plans (the “nationally determined contributions”) are currently leading us towards a warming of 3.5°C. With less than one hundred days to go until COP26, only a few countries have “upped their ambitions” … but not nearly to the necessary levels of emission reductions. For example, the EU, the “climate champion”, has set a target of 55% reduction by 2030, when 65% is needed.

A simple question of maths, and its political conclusion
Greta Thunberg once said that “The climate and ecological crisis simply cannot be solved under the current political and economic systems. This is not an opinion, it is simply a matter of mathematics.” She is absolutely right. You only have to look at the figures to see that:

1°) the world emits about 40GT of CO2 per year;

2°) the 1.5° “carbon budget” (the total amount of CO2 that can still be emitted globally without exceeding 1.5°C) is only 500Gt (for a 50% probability of success–for 83%, it is 300Gt);

3°) according to the IPCC’s 1.5°C special report, achieving zero net CO2 emissions in 2050 requires reducing global emissions by 59% before 2030 (65% in developed capitalist countries, given their historical responsibility)

4°) 80% of these emissions are due to the burning of fossil fuels which, despite the political and media hype about the breakthrough of renewables, in 2019 still accounted for… 84% (!) of humanity’s energy needs;

5°) Fossil infrastructures (mines, pipelines, refineries, gas terminals, power stations, etc.)–the construction of which is not slowing down, or hardly at all–are major facilities in which capital is invested for some 40 years. Their ultra-centralised network cannot be adapted to renewables (they require another, decentralised energy system): it must be destroyed before capitalists can recoup their investments, and the reserves of coal, oil and natural gas must remain underground.

Therefore, knowing that three billion human beings lack the essentials and that the richest 10% of the population emit more than 50% of global CO2, the conclusion is unavoidable: changing the energy system to stay below 1.5°C while devoting more energy to satisfying the legitimate rights of the poor is strictly incompatible with the continuation of capitalist accumulation that generates ecological destruction and growing social inequalities.

The catastrophe can only be stopped in a manner worthy of our humanity by a double movement consisting of reducing global production and radically reorienting it to serve real human needs, those of the majority, democratically determined. This double movement necessarily involves the suppression of useless or harmful production and the expropriation of capitalist monopolies–first and foremost in energy, finance and agribusiness. It also requires a drastic reduction in the consumption extravagances of the rich. In other words, the alternative is dramatically simple: either humanity will liquidate capitalism, or capitalism will liquidate millions of innocent people to continue its barbaric course on a maimed, and perhaps unliveable, planet.

Robbers unite for “negative emission technologies”
It goes without saying that the masters of the world have no desire to liquidate capitalism… What will they do then? Let’s leave aside the climate deniers like Trump, those followers of Malthus who are betting on a fossil fuel neo-fascism. a plunge into planetary barbarism on the backs of the poor. Let’s also leave aside the Musks and the Bezos, those obscene billionaires who dream of leaving the ship Earth made unliveable by their greedy capitalist parasites. Let’s focus on the other, more cunning ones, those–the Macrons, Biden, Von der Leyen, Johnson, Xi Jiping…–who will fight like brigands for the Glasgow agreement to give them an advantage over their competitors, but will stick together in front of the media to try to persuade us that “everything is under control”.

To escape the above alternative, what do these gentlemen propose? Firstly, of course, making consumers feel guilty and asking them to “change their behaviour”, on pain of sanctions. Then, a set of tricks, some of which are downright crude (the failure to take into account emissions from international air and sea transport, for example), and others which are more subtle–but no more effective (for example, the assertion that planting trees–in the global South–would make it possible to absorb enough carbon to sustainably compensate for the fossil CO2 emissions of the North). But beyond these tricks, all these political managers of capital now believe (or pretend to believe) in a silver bulletincreasing the share of “low-carbon technologies” (code name for nuclear power, especially “micro-power plants”) and, above all, deploying so-called “negative-emission technologies” (NETs–or CDRs, for Carbon Dioxide Removal), which are supposed to cool down the climate by removing huge quantities of CO2from the atmosphere to be stored underground. This is the so-called “temporary overshoot of the danger threshold” of 1.5°C.

There is no need to dwell on nuclear power after Fukushima. As for “negative emission technologies”, most of them are only at the prototype or demonstration stage, and their social and ecological effects promise to be terrifying (more on this later). Nevertheless, we are led to believe that they will save the productivist/consumerist system and that the free market will take care of deploying them. In truth, this science fiction scenario is not primarily about saving the planet: it is primarily about saving the sacred cow of capitalist growth and protecting the profits of those most responsible for the mess: the oil, coal, gas and agribusiness multinationals.

The IPCC between science and ideology
And what does the IPCC think of this madness? Adaptation and mitigation strategies are not part of Working Group 1’s remit. However, it does make scientific considerations that should be taken into account by the other Working Groups. On NETs, it is careful not to rush to the brink. The Summary for Policy Makers states:

Anthropogenic CO2 removal (CDR) has the potential to remove CO2 from the atmosphere and durably store it in reservoirs (high confidence).” The text goes on to say that “CDR aims to compensate for residual emissions to reach net zero CO2 or net zero GHG emissions or, if implemented at a scale where anthropogenic removals exceed anthropogenic emissions, to lower surface temperature. (D1.5, p39)

Clearly, the summary endorses the idea that negative emission technologies could not only be deployed to capture “residual emissions” from sectors where decarbonisation is technically difficult (e.g. aviation): they could also be implemented on a massive scale, to compensate for the fact that global capitalism, for reasons that are not “technical” but profit-driven, refuses to give up fossil fuels. The text goes on to extol the benefits of this massive deployment as a means of achieving net negative emissions in the second half of the century:

Anthropogenic CO2 removal (CDR) leading to global net negative emissions would lower the atmospheric CO2 concentration and reverse surface ocean acidification (high confidence). (D1.5 p39)

The summary makes one caveat, but it is cryptic:

CDR technologies may have potentially widespread effects on biogeochemical cycles and climate, which may either weaken or enhance the potential of these methods to remove CO2 and reduce warming, and may also influence water availability and quality, food production and biodiversity (high confidence).

Clearly, it is not clear that NETs are all that effective, as some “effects” could “weaken (their) potential to remove CO2”. The last part of this sentence refers to social and ecological impacts: bioenergy with carbon capture and sequestration (BECCS), the most mature NETs today) could only significantly reduce atmospheric CO2 concentration if an area equal to more than a quarter of today’s permanently cultivated land was used to produce biomass–at the expense of water supplies, biodiversity, and/or feeding the world’s population.1

Thus, on the one hand, the IPCC Working Group 1 bases itself on the physical laws of the climate system to tell us that we are on the brink of the abyss, on the verge of irreversibly tipping over into an unimaginable cataclysm; on the other hand, it objectifies and trivializes the political-technological headlong rush by which capitalism is once again trying to postpone the irreconcilable antagonism between its logic of unlimited profit accumulation and the limits of the planet. “Never before has an IPCC report given off such a strong sense of the anguish caused by the scientific analysis of the facts in the light of the inescapable laws of physics,” we wrote at the beginning of this article. Never before has such a report illustrated so clearly that a scientific analysis that considers nature as a mechanism and the laws of profit as laws of physics is not really scientific but scientistic, i.e. at least partly ideological.

The IPCC WG1 report should therefore be read with the understanding that it is both the best and the worst of things. The best, because it provides a rigorous diagnosis from which to draw excellent arguments for indicting those in power and their political representatives. The worst, because it spreads both fear and powerlessness… from which the powerful benefit from even though the diagnosis accuses them! Its scientistic ideology drowns the critical spirit in the flood of “data”.

It thus diverts attention from the systemic causes, with two consequences:

1) attention is focused on ‘behavioural change’ and other individual actions–full of good will but pathetically insufficient;

2) instead of helping to bridge the gap between ecological and social awareness, scientism maintains it.


Ecologising the social and socialising ecology is the only strategy that can stop the catastrophe and revive the hope of a better life. A life of caring for people and ecosystems, now and in the long term. A simple, joyful and meaningful life. A life that the IPCC scenarios never model, where the production of use values for the satisfaction of real needs, democratically determined in respect of nature, replaces the production of goods for the profit of a minority. This ecosocialist alternative scenario will not be modeled by the IPCC. It is rational and feasible, but can only grow from the solidarity and the self-organised struggles of the exploited and oppressed.

Translated from Gauche anticapitaliste (Belgium)

https://mronline.org/2021/08/21/on-the- ... modelling/

Italics and bolding added.
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Re: The Long Ecological Revolution

Post by blindpig » Mon Aug 23, 2021 1:16 pm

ECONOMIC GROWTH IS NOT BENEFICIAL FOR HUMAN WELL-BEING: STUDY
18 Aug 2021 , 11:59 am .

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An investigation entitled "Socioeconomic conditions to satisfy human needs with low energy use: an international analysis of social provision", by the authors Jefim Vogel and Julia K Steinberger, has yielded results on economic growth that contradict the global consensus of that it is beneficial for human well-being and that it must be promoted.

The text explains that, after analyzing the use of energy and six dimensions of the satisfaction of human needs in 106 countries, "economic growth does not show a significant association with the satisfaction of needs."

On the other hand, the results suggest that economic growth beyond moderate levels of affluence is detrimental, since it has less achievements in the social sphere and implies more energy requirements to satisfy the needs.

The study states that:

Abandoning the pursuit of economic growth beyond moderate levels of wealth therefore seems ecologically necessary and socially desirable. Making a non-growing economy socially sustainable will require a fundamental political-economic transformation to remove dependencies on structural and institutional growth.

By studying the variables, the researchers were also able to confirm that "improving income equality is compatible with rapid climate mitigation." In other words, the relationship between climate change and human beings is in the groups that accumulate wealth and waste energy, not in the great majorities that do not have equal access.

These findings, the text says, are important now that levels of inequality are increasing in most countries.

https://misionverdad.com/el-crecimiento ... no-estudio

Google Translator

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Socio-economic conditions for satisfying human needs at low energy use: An international analysis of social provisioning
Author links open overlay panel

a JefimVogelaJulia K.SteinbergerbaDaniel W.O'NeillaWilliam F.LambcaJayaKrishnakumard


b Sustainability Research Institute, School of Earth and Environment, University of Leeds, UK

c Institute of Geography and Sustainability, Faculty of Geosciences and Environment, University of Lausanne, Switzerland

d Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change, Berlin, Germany

e Institute of Economics and Econometrics, Geneva School of Economics and Management, University of Geneva, Switzerland

Received 26 July 2020, Revised 27 April 2021, Accepted 7 May 2021, Available online 29 June 2021.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2021.102287
Highlights

*No country sufficiently meets human needs within sustainable levels of energy use.

*Need satisfaction and associated energy requirements depend on socio-economic setups.

*Public services are linked to higher need satisfaction and lower energy requirements.

*Economic growth is linked to lower need satisfaction and higher energy requirements.

*Countries with good socio-economic setups could likely meet needs at low energy use.
Abstract
Meeting human needs at sustainable levels of energy use is fundamental for avoiding catastrophic climate change and securing the well-being of all people. In the current political-economic regime, no country does so. Here, we assess which socio-economic conditions might enable societies to satisfy human needs at low energy use, to reconcile human well-being with climate mitigation.

Using a novel analytical framework alongside a novel multivariate regression-based moderation approach and data for 106 countries, we analyse how the relationship between energy use and six dimensions of human need satisfaction varies with a wide range of socio-economic factors relevant to the provisioning of goods and services ('provisioning factors'). We find that factors such as public service quality, income equality, democracy, and electricity access are associated with higher need satisfaction and lower energy requirements (‘beneficial provisioning factors’). Conversely, extractivism and economic growth beyond moderate levels of affluence are associated with lower need satisfaction and greater energy requirements (‘detrimental provisioning factors’). Our results suggest that improving beneficial provisioning factors and abandoning detrimental ones could enable countries to provide sufficient need satisfaction at much lower, ecologically sustainable levels of energy use.

However, as key pillars of the required changes in provisioning run contrary to the dominant political-economic regime, a broader transformation of the economic system may be required to prioritise, and organise provisioning for, the satisfaction of human needs at low energy use.

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1. Introduction
Limiting global warming to 1.5 °C without relying on negative emissions technologies requires not only rapid decarbonisation of global energy systems but also deep reductions in global energy use (Grubler et al., 2018, IPCC, 2018). At the same time, billions of people around the globe are still deprived of basic needs, and current routes to sufficient need satisfaction all seem to involve highly unsustainable levels of resource use (O’Neill et al., 2018). The way societies design their economies thus seems misaligned with the twin goals of meeting everyone’s needs and remaining within planetary boundaries (O’Neill et al., 2018, Raworth, 2017). This study addresses this issue by empirically assessing how the relationship between energy use and need satisfaction varies with the configurations of key socio-economic factors, and what configurations of these factors might enable societies to meet human needs within sustainable levels of energy use.

While these questions are poorly understood and empirically understudied (Brand Correa and Steinberger, 2017, Lamb and Steinberger, 2017, O’Neill et al., 2018, Roberts et al., 2020), the corner pieces of the research puzzle are largely in place. We roughly know the maximum level of final energy use (~27 GJ/cap) that can be globally rendered ecologically ‘sustainable’ (compatible with avoiding 1.5 °C of global warming without relying on negative emissions technologies) with deep transformations of energy systems (Grubler et al., 2018, IPCC, 2018). We understand what defines and characterises human needs, and what levels of which goods, services and conditions generally satisfy these needs (Doyal and Gough, 1991, Max-Neef, 1991, Millward-Hopkins et al., 2020, Rao and Min, 2018a).

We also know the basic characteristics of the cross-country relationship between energy use and a wide range of needs satisfaction indicators, including life expectancy, mortality, nourishment, education, and access to sanitation and drinking water (Burke, 2020, Lambert et al., 2014, Mazur and Rosa, 1974, Rao et al., 2014, Steinberger and Roberts, 2010). While at low levels of energy use, these need satisfaction indicators strongly improve with increasing energy use, they generally saturate at internationally moderate levels of energy use (ibid.). Beyond that saturation level, need satisfaction improvements with additional energy use quickly diminish, reflecting the satiability of needs (Doyal and Gough, 1991).

How much energy use is required to provide sufficient need satisfaction is only scarcely researched, and the few existing estimates are broadly scattered (Rao et al., 2019). Empirical cross-national estimates include 25–40 GJ/cap primary energy use for life expectancy and literacy (Steinberger and Roberts, 2010), or 22–58 GJ/cap final energy use for life expectancy and composite basic needs access (Lamb and Rao, 2015). Empirically-driven bottom-up model studies estimate the final energy footprints of sufficient need satisfaction in India, South Africa and Brazil to range between 12 and 25 GJ/cap (Rao et al., 2019), based on Rao and Min’s (2018a) definition of ‘Decent Living Standards’ that meet human needs. Global bottom-up modelling studies involving stronger assumptions of technological efficiency and equity, respectively, suggest that by 2050, Decent Living Standards could be internationally provided with 27 GJ/cap (Grubler et al., 2018) or even just 13–18 GJ/cap final energy use (Millward-Hopkins et al., 2020). Together, these studies demonstrate that meeting everyone’s needs at sustainable levels of energy use is theoretically feasible with known technology.

What remains poorly understood, however, is how the relationship between human need satisfaction and energy use (or biophysical resource use) varies with different socio-economic factors (Lamb and Steinberger, 2017, O’Neill et al., 2018, Steinberger et al., 2020). A small number of studies offer initial insights. The environmental efficiency of life satisfaction, presented as a measure of sustainability, follows an inverted-U-shape with Gross Domestic Product (GDP), increases with trust, and decreases with income inequality (Knight and Rosa, 2011). The carbon or environmental intensities of life expectancy, understood as measures of unsustainability, increase with income inequality (Jorgenson, 2015), urbanisation (McGee et al., 2017) and world society integration (Givens, 2017). They furthermore follow a U-shape with GDP internationally (Dietz et al., 2012), though increasing with GDP in all regions but Africa (Jorgenson, 2014, Jorgenson and Givens, 2015), and show asymmetric relationships with economic growth and recession in ‘developed’ vs. ‘less developed’ countries (Greiner and McGee, 2020). Their associations with uneven trade integration and exchange vary with levels of development (Givens, 2018). Democracy is not significantly correlated with the environmental efficiency of life satisfaction (Knight and Rosa, 2011) nor with the energy intensity of life expectancy (Mayer, 2017). All of these studies either combine need satisfaction outcomes from societal activity and biophysical means to societal activity into a ratio metric, or analyse residuals from their regression. Hence, they do not specify how these socio-economic factors interact with the highly non-linear relationship between need satisfaction and biophysical resource use, or with the ability of countries to reach targets simultaneously for need satisfaction and energy (or resource) use.

The socio-economic conditions for satisfying human needs at low energy use have been highlighted as crucial areas of research (Brand Correa and Steinberger, 2017, Lamb and Steinberger, 2017, O’Neill et al., 2018, Roberts et al., 2020), but remain virtually unstudied. While the theoretical understanding of this issue has seen important advances (Bohnenberger, 2020, Hickel, 2020, Stratford, 2020, Stratford and O’Neill, 2020, Gough, 2017, Kallis et al., 2020, Parrique, 2019), empirical studies are almost entirely absent. Lamb, 2016a, Lamb, 2016b qualitatively discusses socio-economic factors in enabling low-energy (or low-carbon) development, but only for a small number of countries. Furthermore, Lamb et al. (2014) explore the cross-country relationship between life expectancy and carbon emissions in light of socio-economic drivers of emissions, but do not quantitatively assess how life expectancy is related to carbon emissions nor to socio-economic emissions drivers. Quantitative empirical cross-country analyses of the issue thus remain entirely absent.

We address these research gaps by making three contributions. First, we develop a novel analytical approach for empirically assessing the role of socio-economic factors as intermediaries moderating the relationship between energy use (as a means) and need satisfaction (as an end), thus analytically separating means, ends and intermediaries (Fig. 1). For this purpose, we adapt and operationalise a novel analytical framework proposed by O’Neill et al. (2018) which centres on provisioning systems as intermediaries between biophysical resource use and human well-being (Fig. 1A). Second, we apply this approach and framework for the first time, using data for 19 indicators and 106 countries to empirically analyse how the relationships between energy use and six dimensions of human need satisfaction vary with a range of political, economic, geographic and infrastructural ‘provisioning factors’ (Fig. 1B). Third, we assess which socio-economic conditions (i.e. which configurations of provisioning factors) might enable countries to provide sufficient need satisfaction within sustainable levels of energy use. Specifically, we address the following research questions:

1)What levels of energy use are associated with sufficient need satisfaction in the current international provisioning regime?


2)How does the relationship between energy use and human need satisfaction vary with the configurations of different provisioning factors?


3)Which configurations of provisioning factors are associated with socio-ecologically beneficial performance (higher achievements in, and lower energy requirements of, human need satisfaction), and which ones are associated with socio-ecologically detrimental performance (lower achievements in, and greater energy requirements of, need satisfaction)?


4)To what extent could countries with beneficial configurations of key provisioning factors achieve sufficient need satisfaction within sustainable levels of energy use?

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Fig. 1. (A) Analytical framework for the provisioning of human need satisfaction. Building on the framework by O’Neill et al. (2018), our framework conceptualises provisioning factors as intermediaries that moderate the relationship between energy use and need satisfaction. (B) Qualitative depiction of our analysis. We assess how the relationship between energy use and need satisfaction (B.1) varies with different provisioning factors (B.2, B.3), and which provisioning factors are associated with socio-ecologically beneficial performance (higher achievements in, and lower energy requirements of, need satisfaction; B.2) or socio-ecologically detrimental performance (lower achievements in, and greater energy requirements of, need satisfaction; B.3).

The remainder of this article is structured as follows. We introduce our analytical framework and outline our analytical approach in Section 2. We describe our variables and data in Section 3, and detail our methods in Section 4. We present the results of our analysis in Section 5, and discuss them in Section 6. We summarise and conclude our analysis in Section 7.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/a ... 0662#b0445

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Re: The Long Ecological Revolution

Post by blindpig » Fri Aug 27, 2021 1:53 pm

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| Alisa Singer USA Changing 2021 | MR OnlineAlisa Singer (USA), Changing, 2021. Source: IPCC.

I awakened here when the Earth was new: The Thirty-Fourth Newsletter (2021)
Posted Aug 27, 2021 by Vijay Prashad

Dear friends,

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

In late March 2021, 120 traditional owners from 40 different First People’s groups spent five days at the National First People’s Gathering on Climate Change in Cairns (Australia). Speaking on the impact of the climate crisis on First People, Gavin Singleton from the Yirrganydji traditional owners explained that ‘From changing weather patterns to shifts in natural ecosystems, climate change is a clear and present threat to our people and our culture’.

Bianca McNeair of the Malgana traditional owners from Gatharagudu (Australia) said that those who attended the gathering ‘are talking about how the birds’ movements across the country have changed, so that’s changing songlines that they’ve been singing for thousands and thousands of years, and how that’s impacting them as a community and culture. … We are very resilient people’, McNeair said, ‘so it’s a challenge we were ready to take on. But now we’re facing a situation that’s not predictable, it’s not part of our natural environmental pattern’.

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Arone Meeks (Australia), The Gesture, 2020.

The Yirrganydji traditional owners live on Australia’s coastline, which faces the Great Barrier Coral Reef. That majestic reef faces extinction from climate change: a period of consecutive years of coral bleaching from 2014 to 2017 threatened to kill off the precious coral, during which fluctuating temperatures caused coral to expel symbiotic algae that are crucial to the nutritional health of the coral. Scientists assembled by the United Nations found that 70% of the earth’s coral reefs are threatened, with 20% already destroyed ‘with no hope for recovery’. Of the reefs that are threatened, a quarter are under ‘imminent risk of collapse’ and another quarter are at risk ‘due to long-term threats’. In November 2020, a UN report titled Projections on Future Coral Bleaching suggested that unless carbon emissions are controlled, the reefs will die and the species they support will die out too. The Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority notes that ‘climate change is the greatest threat to the Great Barrier Reef and coral reefs worldwide’. That is why the Yirrganydji traditional owners created the Indigenous Land and Sea Rangers to care for the reef against all odds.

‘Most of our traditions, our customs, our language are from the sea’, says Singleton, ‘so losing the reef would impact our identity. We were here prior to the formation of the reef, and we still hold stories that have been passed down through generations–of how the sea rose and flooded the area, the “great flood”’. The Yirrganydji Rangers, Singleton points out, ‘have their hearts and souls’ in the reef. But they are struggling against all odds.

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Pejac (Spain), Stain, 2011.

Not long after the National First People’s Gathering disbanded, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released its sixth report. Based on the consensus of 234 scientists from over 60 countries, the report notes that ‘multiple lines of evidence indicate the recent large-scale climatic changes are unprecedented in a multi-millennial context, and that they represent a millennial-scale commitment for the slow-responding elements of the climate system, resulting in worldwide loss of ice, increase in ocean heat content, sea level rise, and deep ocean acidification’. If warming continues to reach 3 °C (by 2060) and 5.7 °C (by 2100), human extinction is certain. The report comes after a string of extreme weather events: floods in China and Germany, fires across the Mediterranean, and extreme temperatures across the world. A study in the July issue of Nature Climate Change found that ‘record-shattering extremes’ would be ‘nearly impossible in the absence of warming’.

Importantly, the 6th IPCC report shows that ‘historical cumulative CO2 emissions determine to a large degree warming to date’, which means that the Global North countries have already taken the planet to the threshold of annihilation before countries of the Global South have been able to attain basic needs such as universal electrification. For instance, 54 countries on the African continent account for merely 2-3% of global carbon emissions; half of Africa’s 1.2 billion people have no access to electricity, while many extreme climate events (droughts and cyclones in southern Africa, floods in the Horn of Africa, desertification in the Sahel) are now taking place across the continent. Released on World Environment Day (5 June) and produced with the International Week of Anti-Imperialist Struggle, our Red Alert no. 11 further explains the scientific and political dynamics of the climate crisis, the ‘common but differentiated responsibilities’, and what can be done to turn the tides.

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Frédéric Bruly Bouabré (Ivory Coast), Le serment du Jeu de Paume, 2010.

Governments will gather in October for the 15th Conference of the Parties (COP15) in Kunming (China) to discuss progress on the Convention on Biological Diversity (ratified in 1993) and in November for the 26th UN Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP26) in Glasgow (UK) to discuss climate change. Attention is on COP26, where the powerful Global North will once more push for ‘net zero’ carbon dioxide emissions and thereby reject deep cuts to their own emissions while insisting that the Global South forgo social development.

Meanwhile, there will be less attention paid to COP15, where the agenda will include cutting pesticide use by two-thirds, halving food waste, and eliminating the discharge of plastic waste. In 2019, an Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services report showed that pollution and resource extraction had threatened one million animal and plant species with extinction.

The link between the assault on biological diversity and climate change is clear: the opening of wetlands alone has released historic stores of carbon to the atmosphere. Deep emission cuts and better stewardship of resources are necessary.

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Amin Roshan (Iran), Wandering, 2019.

Strikingly, just as the IPCC released its report, U.S. President Joe Biden’s administration asked the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries to boost output of oil production. This makes a mockery of the Biden pledge to cut 50% of U.S. greenhouse emissions by 2030.

A recent paper in Nature shows that the passage of the 1987 Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer banned the use of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), whose gradual elimination from aerosol sprays, refrigerants, and Styrofoam packaging prevented ozone depletion. The Montreal Protocol is significant because–despite industry lobbying–it was universally ratified. That treaty provides hope that sufficient pressure from key countries, pushed by social and political movements, could result in stringent regulations against pollution and carbon abuse as well as meaningful cultural change.

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Simone Thomson (Australia), Awakening, 2019.

Places associated with global negotiations to save the planet include cities such as Kyoto (1997), Copenhagen (2009), and Paris (2015). First amongst these should be Cochabamba (Bolivia), where the government of Evo Morales Ayma held the World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth in April 2010. Over 30,000 people from more than 100 countries came to this landmark conference, which adopted the Universal Declaration of Rights of Mother Earth. Several points were discussed, including the demand for:

The states of the Global North to cut emissions by at least 50%;
Developing countries to be given substantial assistance to adapt to the effects of climate change and to transition away from fossil fuels;
Indigenous rights to be protected;
International borders to be opened to climate refugees;
An international court to be set up to prosecute climate crimes;
People’s rights to water to be recognised, and that people have the right not to be exposed to excessive pollution.
‘We are confronted with two paths’, former President Morales said: the path of ‘pachamama (Mother Earth) or the path of the multinationals. If we don’t take the former, the masters of death will win. If we don’t fight, we will be guilty of destroying the planet’. Gavin Singleton and Bianca McNeair would certainly agree.

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So would the Yorta Yorta poet and educator Hyllus Noel Maris (1933-1986), whose ‘Spiritual Song of the Aborigine’ (1978) awakens hope and lays the soundtrack for those who march to save the planet:

I am a child of the Dreamtime People
Part of this land, like the gnarled gumtree
I am the river, softly singing
Chanting our songs on my way to the sea
My spirit is the dust-devils
Mirages, that dance on the plain
I’m the snow, the wind, and the falling rain
I’m part of the rocks and the red desert earth
Red as the blood that flows in my veins
I am eagle, crow and snake that glides
Through the rainforest that clings to the mountainside
I awakened here when the earth was new.


Warmly,

Vijay

https://thetricontinental.org/newslette ... te-crisis/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: The Long Ecological Revolution

Post by blindpig » Tue Aug 31, 2021 1:53 pm

Robbing the Soil, 2: ‘Systematic theft of communal property’

August 30, 2021

“The expropriation of the mass of the people from the soil forms the basis of the capitalist mode of production.” (Karl Marx)

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Tenants harvest the landlord’s grain

Part One: Commons and classes before capitalism
Part Two: ‘Systematic theft of communal property’

by Ian Angus
“The ground of the parish is gotten up into a few men’s hands, yea sometimes into the tenure of one or two or three, whereby the rest are compelled either to be hired servants unto the other or else to beg their bread in misery from door to door.” (William Harrison, 1577)[1]
In 1549, tens of thousands of English peasants fought — and thousands died — to halt and reverse the spread of capitalist farming that was destroying their way of life. The largest action, known as Kett’s Rebellion, has been called “the greatest practical utopian project of Tudor England and the greatest anticapitalist rising in English history.”[2]

On July 6, peasants from Wymondham, a market town in Norfolk, set out across country to tear down hedges and fences that divided formerly common land into private farms and pastures. By the time they reached Norwich, the second-largest city in England, they had been joined by farmers, farmworkers and artisans from many other towns and villages. On July 12, as many as 16,000 rebels set up camp on Mousehold Heath, near the city. They established a governing council with representatives from each community, requisitioned food and other supplies from nearby landowners, and drew up a list of demands addressed to the king.

Over the next six weeks, they twice invaded and captured Norwich, repeatedly rejected Royal pardons on the grounds that they had done nothing wrong, and defeated a force of 1,500 men sent from London to suppress them. They held out until late August, when they were attacked by some 4,000 professional soldiers, mostly German and Italian mercenaries, who were ordered by the Duke of Warwick to “take the company of rebels which they saw, not for men, but for brute beasts imbued with all cruelty.”[3] Over 3,500 rebels were massacred, and their leaders were tortured and beheaded.

The Norwich uprising is the best documented and lasted longest, but what contemporaries called the Rebellions of Commonwealth involved camps, petitions and mass assemblies in at least 25 counties, showing “unmistakable signs of coordination and planning right across lowland England.”[4] The best surviving statement of their objectives is the 29 articles adopted at Mousehold Heath. They were listed in no particular order, but, as historian Andy Wood writes, “a strong logic underlay them.”

“The demands drawn up at the Mousehold camp articulated a desire to limit the power of the gentry, exclude them from the world of the village, constrain rapid economic change, prevent the over-exploitation of communal resources, and remodel the values of the clergy. … Lords were to be excluded from common land and prevented from dealing in land. The Crown was asked to take over some of the powers exercised by lords, and to act as a neutral arbiter between lord and commoner. Rents were to be fixed at their 1485 level. In the most evocative phrase of the Norfolk complaints, the rebels required that the servile bondmen who still performed humiliating services upon the estates of the Duchy of Lancaster and the former estates of the Duke of Norfolk be freed: ‘We pray thatt all bonde men may be made Free, for god made all Free with his precious blode sheddyng’.”[5]

The scope and power of the rebellions of 1549 demonstrate, as nothing else can, the devastating impact of capitalism on the lives of the people who worked the land in early modern England. The radical changes known to history by the innocuous name enclosure peaked in two long waves: during the rise of agrarian capitalism in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and during the consolidation of agrarian capitalism in the eighteenth and nineteenth.

This article discusses the sixteenth century origins of what Marx called “the systematic theft of communal property.”[6]

Sheep devour people

In part one we saw that organized resistance and reduced population allowed English peasants to win lower rents and greater freedom in the 1400s. But they didn’t win every fight — rather than cutting rents and easing conditions to attract tenants, some landlords forcibly evicted their smaller tenants and leased larger farms, at increased rents, to well-off farmers or commercial sheep graziers. Caring for sheep required far less labor than growing grain, and the growing Flemish cloth industry was eager to buy English wool.

Local populations declined as a result, and many villages disappeared entirely. As Sir Thomas More famously wrote in 1516, sheep had “become so greedy and fierce that they devour human beings themselves. They devastate and depopulate fields, houses and towns.”[7]

For more than a century, enclosure and depopulation — the words were almost always used together — were major social and political concerns for England’s rulers. As early as 1483, Edward V’s Lord Chancellor, John Russell, criticized “enclosures and emparking … [for] driving away of tenants and letting down of tenantries.”[8] In the same decade, the priest and historian John Rous condemned enclosure and depopulation, and identified 62 villages and hamlets within 12 miles of his home in Warwickshire that were “either destroyed or shrunken,” because “lovers or inducers of avarice” had “ignominiously and violently driven out the inhabitants.” He called for “justice under heavy penalties” against the landlords responsible.[9]

Thirty years later, Henry VIII’s advisor Sir Thomas More condemned the same activity, in more detail.

“The tenants are ejected; and some are stripped of their belongings by trickery or brute force, or, wearied by constant harassment, are driven to sell them. One way or another, these wretched people — men, women, husbands, wives, orphans, widows, parents with little children and entire families (poor but numerous, since farming requires many hands) — are forced to move out. They leave the only homes familiar to them, and can find no place to go. Since they must have at once without waiting for a proper buyer, they sell for a pittance all their household goods, which would not bring much in any case. When that little money is gone (and it’s soon spent in wandering from place to place), what finally remains for them but to steal, and so be hanged — justly, no doubt — or to wander and beg? And yet if they go tramping, they are jailed as idle vagrants. They would be glad to work, but they can find no one who will hire them. There is no need for farm labor, in which they have been trained, when there is no land left to be planted. One herdsman or shepherd can look after a flock of beasts large enough to stock an area at used to require many hands to make it grow crops.”[10]

Many accounts of the destruction of common-based agriculture assume that that enclosure simply meant the consolidation of open-field strips into compact farms, and planting hedges or building fences to demark the now-private property. In fact, as the great social historian R.H. Tawney pointed out in his classic study of The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century, in medieval and early modern England the word enclosure “covered many different kinds of action and has a somewhat delusive appearance of simplicity.”[11] Enclosure might refer to farmers trading strips of manor land to create more compact farms, or to a landlord unilaterally adding common land to his demesne, or to the violent expulsion of an entire village from land their families had worked for centuries.

Even in the middle ages, tenant farmers had traded or combined strips of land for local or personal reasons. That was called enclosure, but the spatial rearrangement of property as such didn’t affect common rights or alter the local economy.[12] In the sixteenth century, opponents of enclosure were careful to exempt such activity from criticism. For example, the commissioners appointed to investigate illegal enclosure in 1549 received this instruction:

“You shall enquire what towns, villages, and hamlets have been decayed and laid down by enclosures into pastures, within the shire contained in your instructions …

“But first, to declare unto you what is meant by the word enclosure. It is not taken where a man encloses and hedges his own proper ground, where no man has commons, for such enclosure is very beneficial to the commonwealth; it is a cause of great increase of wood: but it is meant thereby, when any man has taken away and enclosed any other men’s commons, or has pulled down houses of husbandry, and converted the lands from tillage to pasture. This is the meaning of this word, and so we pray you to remember it.”[13]


As R.H. Tawney wrote, “What damaged the smaller tenants, and produced the popular revolts against enclosure, was not merely enclosing, but enclosing accompanied by either eviction and conversion to pasture, or by the monopolizing of common rights. … It is over the absorption of commons and the eviction of tenants that agrarian warfare — the expression is not too modern or too strong — is waged in the sixteenth century.”[14]

An unsuccessful crusade
Tudor Monarchs
Henry VII 1485–1509
Henry VIII 1509–1547
Edward VI 1547–1553
Mary I 1553–1558
Elizabeth I 1558–1603
The Tudor monarchs who ruled England from 1485 to 1603 were unable to halt the destruction of the commons and the spread of agrarian capitalism, but they didn’t fail for lack of trying. A general Act Against Pulling Down of Towns was enacted in 1489, just four years after Henry VII came to power. Declaring that “in some towns two hundred persons were occupied and lived by their lawful labours [but] now two or three herdsmen work there and the rest are fallen in idleness,”[15] the Act forbade conversion of farms of 20 acres or more to pasture, and ordered landlords to maintain the existing houses and buildings on all such farms.

Further anti-enclosure laws were enacted in 1515, 1516, 1517, 1519, 1526, 1534, 1536, 1548, 1552, 1555, 1563, 1589, 1593, and 1597. In the same period, commissions were repeatedly appointed to investigate and punish violators of those laws. The fact that so many anti-enclosure laws were enacted shows that while the Tudor government wanted to prevent depopulating enclosure, it was consistently unable to do so. From the beginning, landlords simply disobeyed the laws. The first Commission of Enquiry, appointed in 1517 by Henry VIII’s chief advisor Thomas Wolsey, identified 1,361 illegal enclosures that occurred after the 1489 Act was passed.[16] Undoubtedly more were hidden from the investigators, and even more were omitted because landlords successfully argued that they were formally legal.[17]

The central government had multiple reasons for opposing depopulating enclosure. Paternalist feudal ideology played a role — those whose wealth and position depended on the labor of the poor were supposed to protect the poor in return. More practically, England had no standing army, so the king’s wars were fought by peasant soldiers assembled and led by the nobility, but evicted tenants would not be available to fight. At the most basic level, fewer people working the land meant less money collected in taxes and tithes. And, as we’ll discuss in Part Three, enclosures caused social unrest, which the Tudors were determined to prevent.

Important as those issues were, for a growing number of landlords they were outweighed by their desire to maintain their income in a time of unprecedented inflation, driven by debasement of the currency and the influx of plundered new world silver. “During the price revolution of the period 1500-1640, in which agricultural prices rose by over 600 per cent, the only way for landlords to protect their income was to introduce new forms of tenure and rent and to invest in production for the market.”[18]

Smaller gentry and well-off tenant farmers did the same, in many cases more quickly than the large landlords. The changes they made shifted income from small farmers and farmworkers to capitalist farmers, and deepened class divisions in the countryside.

“Throughout the sixteenth century the number of smaller lessees shrank, while large leaseholding, for which accumulated capital was a prerequisite, became increasingly important. The sixteenth century also saw the rise of the capitalist lessee who was prepared to invest capital in land and stock. The increasing divergence of agricultural prices and wages resulted in a ‘profit inflation’ for capitalist farmers prepared and able to respond to market trends and who hired agricultural labor.”[19]

As we’ve seen, the Tudor government repeatedly outlawed enclosures that removed tenant farmers from the land. The laws failed because enforcement depended on justices of the peace, typically local gentry who, even if they weren’t enclosers themselves, wouldn’t betray neighbors and friends who were. Occasional Commissions of Enquiry were more effective — and so were hated by landlords — but their orders to remove enclosures and reinstate former tenants were rarely obeyed, and fines could be treated as a cost of doing business.

From monks to investors

The Tudors didn’t just fail to halt the advance of capitalist agriculture, they unintentionally gave it a major boost. As Marx wrote, “the process of forcible expropriation of the people received a new and terrible impulse in the sixteenth century from the Reformation, and the consequent colossal spoliation of church property.”[20]

Between 1536 and 1541, seeking to reform religious practice and increase royal income, Henry VIII and his chief minister Thomas Cromwell disbanded nearly 900 monasteries and related institutions, retired their occupants, and confiscated their lands and income.

This was no small matter — together, the monasteries’ estates comprised between a quarter and a third of all cultivated land in England and Wales. If he had kept it, the existing rents and tithes would have tripled the king’s annual income. But in 1543 Henry, a small-country king who wanted to be a European emperor, launched a pointless and very expensive war against Scotland and France, and paid for it by selling off the properties he had just acquired. When Henry died in 1547, only a third of the confiscated monastery property remained in royal hands; almost all that remained was sold later in the century, to finance Elizabeth’s wars with Spain.[21]

The sale of so much land in a short time transformed the land market and reshaped classes. As Christopher Hill writes, “In the century and a quarter after 1530, more land was bought and sold in England than ever before.”

“There was relatively cheap land to be bought by anyone who had capital to invest and social aspirations to satisfy…. By 1600 gentlemen, new and old, owned a far greater proportion of the land of England than in 1530 — to the disadvantage of crown, aristocracy and peasantry alike.

“Those who acquired land in significant quantity became gentlemen, if they were not such already … Gentlemen leased land — from the king, from bishops, from deans and chapters, from Oxford and Cambridge colleges — often in order to sub-let at a profit. Leases and reversions sometimes lay two deep. It was a form of investment…. The smaller gentry gained where big landlords lost, gained as tenants what others lost as lords.”[22]


As early as 1515, there were complaints that farmland was being acquired by men not from the traditional landowning classes — “merchant adventurers, clothmakers, goldsmiths, butchers, tanners and other artificers who held sometimes ten to sixteen farms apiece.”[23] When monastery land came available, owning or leasing multiple farms, known as engrossing, became even more attractive to urban businessmen with capital to spare. Some no doubt just wanted the prestige of a country estate, but others, used to profiting from their investments, moved to impose shorter leases and higher rents, and to make private profit from common land.

A popular ballad of the time expressed the change concisely:

“We have shut away all cloisters,
But still we keep extortioners.
We have taken their land for their abuse,
But we have converted them to a worse use.”[24]


Hysterical exaggeration?

Early in the 1900s, conservative economist E.F. Gay — later the first president of the Harvard Business School — wrote that 16th century accounts of enclosure were wildly exaggerated. Under the influence of “contemporary hysterics” and “the excited sixteenth century imagination,” a small number of depopulating enclosures were “magnified into a menacing social evil, a national calamity responsible for dearth and distress, and calling for drastic legislative remedy.” Popular opposition reflected not widespread hardship, but “the ignorance and hide-bound conservatism of the English peasant,” who combined “sturdy, admirable qualities with a large admixture of suspicion, cunning and deceit.” [25]

Gay argued that the reports produced by two major commissions to investigate enclosures show that the percentage of enclosed land in the counties investigated was just 1.72% in 1517 and 2.46% in 1607. Those small numbers “warn against exaggeration of the actual extent of the movement, against an uncritical acceptance of the contemporary estimate both of the greatness and the evil of the first century and a half of the ‘Agrarian Revolution.’”[26]

Ever since, Gay’s argument has been accepted and repeated by right-wing historians eager to debunk anything resembling a materialist, class-struggle analysis of capitalism. The most prominent was Cambridge University professor Sir Geoffrey Elton, whose bestselling book England Under the Tudors dismissed critics of enclosure as “moralists and amateur economists” for whom landlords were convenient scapegoats. Despite the complaints of such “false prophets,” enclosers were just good businessmen who “succeeded in sharing the advantages which the inflation offered to the enterprising and lucky.” And even then, “the whole amount of enclosure was astonishingly small.”[27]

The claim that enclosure was an imaginary problem is improbable, to say the least. R.H. Tawney’s 1912 response to Gay applies with full force to Elton and his conservative co-thinkers.

“To suppose that contemporaries were mistaken as to the general nature of the movement is to accuse them of an imbecility which is really incredible. Governments do not go out of their way to offend powerful classes out of mere lightheartedness, nor do large bodies of men revolt because they have mistaken a ploughed field for a sheep pasture.”[28]

The reports that Gay analyzed were important, but were far from complete. They didn’t cover the whole country (only six counties in 1607), and their information came from local “jurors” who were easily intimidated by their landlords. Despite the dedication of the commissioners, it is virtually certain that their reports understated the number and extent of illegal enclosures.

And, as Tawney pointed out, enclosure as a percentage of all land doesn’t tell us much about its economic and social impact — the real issue is how much farmed land was enclosed.

In 1979, John Martin reanalysed Gay’s figures for the most intensely farmed areas of England, the ten Midlands counties where 80% of all enclosures took place. He concluded that in those counties over a fifth of cultivated land had been enclosed by 1607, and that in two counties enclosure exceeded 40%. Contrary to Elton’s claim, those are not “astonishingly small” figures — they support Martin’s conclusion that “the enclosure movement must have had a fundamental impact upon the agrarian organization of the Midlands peasantry in this period.” [29]

It’s important to bear in mind that enclosure, as narrowly defined by Tudor legislation and Inquiry commissions, was only part of the restructuring that was transforming rural life. W.G, Hoskins emphasizes that in The Age of Plunder:

“The importance of engrossing of farms by bigger men was possibly a greater social problem than the much more noisy controversy over enclosures, if only because it was more general. The enclosure problem was largely confined to the Midlands … but the engrossing of farms was going on all the time all over the country.”[30]

George Yerby elaborates.

“Enclosure was one manifestation of a broader and less formal development that was working in exactly the same direction. The essential basis of the change, and of the new economic balance, was the consolidation of larger individual farms, and this could take place with or without the technical enclosure of the fields. This also serves to underline the force of commercialization as the leading trend in changes in the use and occupation of the land during this period, for the achievement of a substantial marketable surplus was the incentive to consolidate, and it did not always require the considerable expense of hedging.”[31]

More large farms meant fewer small farms, and more people who had no choice but to work for others. The twin transformations of primitive accumulation — stolen land becoming capital and landless producers becoming wage workers — were well underway.

Robbing the Soil is a series of articles on capitalist agriculture, part of my continuing project on metabolic rifts. Your constructive comments, suggestions, and corrections will help me get it right. Part 3 will discuss how English peasants fought back against the theft of communal property.–IA

Notes

[1] William Harrison, The Description of England: The Classic Contemporary Account of Tudor Social Life, ed. Georges Edelen (Folger Shakespeare Library, 1994), 217.

[2] Jim Holstun, “Utopia Pre-Empted: Ketts Rebellion, Commoning, and the Hysterical Sublime,” Historical Materialism 16, no. 3 (2008), 5.

[3] Quoted in Martin Empson, Kill All the Gentlemen: Class Struggle and Change in the English Countryside (Bookmarks Publications, 2018), 162.

[4] Diarmaid MacCulloch and Anthony Fletcher, Tudor Rebellions, 6th ed. (Routledge, 2016), 70.

[5] Andy Wood, Riot, Rebellion and Popular Politics in Early Modern England (Palgrave, 2002), 66-7.

[6] Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, (Penguin Books, 1976), 886.

[7] Thomas More, Utopia, trans. Robert M. Adams, ed. George M. Logan, 3rd ed. (Cambridge University Press, 2016), 19.

[8] A. R. Myers, ed., English Historical Documents, 1327-1485, vol. 4 (Routledge, 1996), 1031. “Emparking” meant converting farmland into private forests or parks, where landlords could hunt.

[9] Ibid., 1029.

[10] More, Utopia, 19-20.

[11] R. H. Tawney, The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century (Lector House, 2021 [1912]), 7.

[12] Tawney, Agrarian Problem, 110.

[13] R. H. Tawney and E. E. Power, eds., Tudor Economic Documents, Vol. 1. (Longmans, Green, 1924), 39, 41. Spelling modernized.

[14] Tawney, Agrarian Problem, 124, 175.

[15] Quoted in M. W. Beresford, “The Lost Villages of Medieval England,” The Geographical Journal 117, no. 2 (June 1951), 132. Spelling modernized.

[16] Spencer Dimmock, “Expropriation and the Political Origins of Agrarian Capitalism in England,” in Case Studies in the Origins of Capitalism, ed. Xavier Lafrance and Charles Post (Palgrave MacMillan, 2019), 52.

[17] The Statute of Merton, enacted in 1235, allowed landlords to take possession of and enclose common land, so long as sufficient remained to meet customary tenants’ rights. In the 1500s that long-disused law provided a loophole for enclosing landlords who defined “sufficient” as narrowly as possible.

[18] Martin, Feudalism to Capitalism, 131.

[19] Martin, Feudalism to Capitalism, 133.

[20] Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, 883.

[21] Perry Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State (Verso, 1979), 124-5.

[22] Christopher Hill, Reformation to Industrial Revolution: A Social and Economic History of Britain, 1530-1780 (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1967), 47-8.

[23] Joan Thirsk, “Enclosing and Engrossing, 1500-1640,” in Agricultural Change: Policy and Practice 1500-1750, ed. Joan Thirsk (Cambridge University Press, 1990), 69.

[24] Quoted in Thomas Edward Scruton, Commons and Common Fields (Batoche Books, 2003 [1887]), 73.

[25] Edwin F. Gay, “Inclosures in England in the Sixteenth Century,” The Quarterly Journal of Economics 17, no. 4 (August 1903), 576-97; “The Inclosure Movement in England,” Publications of the American Economic Association 6, no. 2 (May 1905), 146-159.

[26] Edwin F. Gay, “The Midland Revolt and the Inquisitions of Depopulation of 1607,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 18 (1904), 234, 237.

[27] G. R. Elton, England under the Tudors (Methuen, 1962), 78-80.

[28] Tawney, Agrarian Problem, 166.

[29] John E. Martin, Feudalism to Capitalism: Peasant and Landlord in English Agrarian Development (Macmillan Press, 1986), 132-38.

[30] W. G. Hoskins, The Age of Plunder: The England of Henry VIII 1500-1547, Kindle ed. (Sapere Books, 2020 [1976]), loc. 1256.

[31] George Yerby, The Economic Causes of the English Civil War (Routledge, 2020), 48.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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