The Long Ecological Revolution

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Re: The Long Ecological Revolution

Post by blindpig » Fri Dec 13, 2019 2:10 pm

Quote of the day:

"Ecology without class struggle is gardening" - Rita Rato.

Ms Rato is a Portuguese Communist & member of National Assembly

courtesy squareroot @zeke_zak
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Re: The Long Ecological Revolution

Post by blindpig » Tue Dec 17, 2019 2:28 pm

At the close of COP25, large economies do not show much interest in global warming

December 15, 2019 | 1 |

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The UN climate summit is nearing its end on Sunday after being postponed, with major economies reluctant to issue a bold new call to action to combat global warming , causing strong criticism from smaller states and of environmental activists.

The Madrid summit was considered as a test of the collective will of governments to follow the advice of scientists to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in time to prevent the rise in global temperature from reaching an irreversible turning point.

But with the summit on track to approve only a modest statement lacking a clear and unambiguous message for countries to raise their emission reduction goals next year, the mood was rather muted when the different delegates attending the event The final procedures began.

"These conversations reflect how disconnected the leaders of the countries are from the science ads and the demands of their citizens on the streets," said Helen Mountford, vice president of climate and economics at the World Resources Institute ideas lab . "They need to wake up in 2020."

The summit was to end on Friday after two weeks of meetings, but it has finally lasted two more days, which is a long delay even for the usual climatic summits.

Previously, the country that presides over the talks, Chile, caused outrage at the summit (known as COP25) after preparing a text that activists rejected for considering it so unimportant that it was a betrayal of the spirit of the 2015 Paris Agreement .

The process established in that agreement depends on countries increasing their emissions reduction next year.

A subsequent draft published by Chile expressed the "urgent need" for these new country commitments to close the gap between the current ones and the objective of the Paris Agreement to prevent global temperatures from rising by more than 1.5 degrees Celsius.

Even so, it was still received as a weak response to the sense of urgency felt by communities around the world affected by floods, droughts, forest fires and cyclones that, according to scientists, are becoming more intense as the Earth heats up quickly.

" COP25 demonstrated the lack of collective ambition of the world's largest emitters (of greenhouse gases)," said Greenpeace political advisor for East Asia, Li Shuo.

Scientists argue that the world will only have an opportunity to avoid catastrophic warming if countries undertake large emissions reductions under the Paris Agreement, which enters a crucial phase of implementation next year before another summit to be held in Glasgow .

The talks in Madrid were involved in disputes over the rules that should govern international carbon trade, favored by the richest countries to reduce the cost of reducing emissions.

Brazil and Australia were among the main opponents, the delegates present at the meetings said, it seems likely that the summit will postpone major decisions on carbon markets for further talks.

Smaller nations also hoped to obtain assurances that they will receive financial assistance to deal with climate change. The island of Tuvalu, in the Pacific, accused the United States, which began the process of withdrawing the Paris Agreement last month, from blocking any possible progress.

"There are millions of people around the world who are already suffering the consequences of climate change," said Ian Fry, representative of Tuvalu, to the delegates. "Denying this fact could be interpreted by some as a crime against humanity."

http://www.cubadebate.cu/noticias/2019/ ... fjkypNKiM-

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Courtesy Miguel Díaz-Canel Bermúdez @DiazCanelB
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Re: The Long Ecological Revolution

Post by blindpig » Sat Dec 21, 2019 1:58 pm

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Surprise! Greta Thunberg BIOPIC reveals cameras were rolling from day one of her ‘viral’ rise
December 20, 2019 orinocotribune
By Helen Buyniski

Teenage environmental activist Greta Thunberg is the subject of a forthcoming documentary film – made by a crew that has followed her since the early days of her school strike. Still believe her rise to fame was an accident?

Thunberg, recently crowned Time magazine’s Person of the Year, can add documentary film subject to her burgeoning resumé. The film, tentatively titled ‘Greta,’ was announced by Deadline on Monday for a 2020 Hulu premiere. Director Nathan Grossman has followed the young climate prodigy to the ends of the Earth, from her school-striking on the sidewalk in front of the Swedish Parliament, to the high seas aboard the $4mn racing yacht Malizia II. Grossman’s only other IMDB credit to date is a Swedish film titled “Köttets lustar” (or “Lusts of the Meat”), which, while it sounds pornographic, purports to be the story of one man “looking over his life as a carnivore.”

One might ask why, if Thunberg’s meteoric rise from her lonely sidewalk protests to hectoring the rulers of the world about her stolen future was as organic as it is presented, a documentary crew was already present to film her sitting alone on the pavement? It’s not like her parents have been trying to make her a celebrity since she was just 12 years old, only to have their exploitative TV show idea rejected by Swedish broadcaster SVT. Never mind, all thatdid happen.

Thunberg’s parents, opera singer Malena Ernman and actor Svante Thunberg, are both famous in their own right, and it’s not difficult to see how their connections might have expedited the process through which Thunberg became the ubiquitous symbol of climate change. Her rise has been meticulously choreographed, her school strike made famous on its first day by Ingmar Rentzhog of the climate change social network ‘We Don’t Have Time.’ Rentzhog, already friends with Thunberg’s parents, has already been accused of using the girl’s image to raise millions of dollars for his company – making her a household name in the process.

A year later, her larger-than-life image graces four stories of a wall in San Francisco, cafeterias in Tel Aviv (where her disapproving gaze is supposed to shame eaters away from plastic utensils), and London’s Trafalgar Square, where an ice sculpture carved in her likeness was raised in October as a teaser for what a trio of “creatives” hope will be a permanent statue of the climate crusader. A colossus bestriding the English Channel can’t be far behind.

There are already signs all is not well in Thunberg’s world, however. Even as hundreds of thousands of people took part in a school strike in Madrid to mark her appearance at the recent climate conference and the EU finally declared a climate emergency last month, solutions lag far behind the declared scale of the problem.

Thunberg herself lamented that a year of school striking has essentially accomplished nothing, emissions-wise – that the planet is no further from certain doom than it was before she began her remarkably successful campaign to shame world leaders into caring. Indeed, as more countries are pushed to declare “climate emergencies” and “do [a never specified] something” to get emissions down to zero yesterday, with no concrete solutions presented, the less likely they are to be able to produce the desired cuts.

Instead, they fall back on magical thinking – carbon offsets, cap and trade, carbon taxes, and other schemes and scams that essentially amount to bribing the climate into staying put – or, more specifically, bribing climate authorities into looking the other way while the polluting continues. Panicking never yields wise decisions, yet global authorities are taking to heart Greta Thunberg’s advice to act as if the house was on fire. If they aren’t careful, it will be.

Featured image: © Global Look / Sven Simon

Source URL: RT News

https://orinocotribune.com/surprise-gre ... iral-rise/
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Re: The Long Ecological Revolution

Post by blindpig » Sat Jan 04, 2020 12:43 am

CLIMATE AND WAR: BILL MCKIBBEN’S DEADLY MISCALCULATION
Wrong Kind of Green Nov 06, 2019 Whiteness & Aversive Racism
November 6, 2019

By Luke Orsborne

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Source: British Psychological Society

In late June 2019, author and founder of 350.org Bill McKibben produced an article for the New York Review of Books whose headline echoed a growing awareness of the significant role of US militarism in our current ecological crisis. The hook, unfortunately, appeared to be little more than a ruse to entice those who harbor legitimate concerns about the military’s role in the climate crisis in order to then minimize those concerns. What followed was a presentation of selective information, including a superficial critique of US military energy efficiency, that in the end only obfuscates the true cost and context of US militarism as it applies to the health of people and the planet. The result was that rather than highlighting the need for deep structural change which involves putting an end to aggressive US foreign policy, McKibben came across as a cautious cheerleader for the continued centrality of US militarism in global affairs as we enter into an increasingly chaotic, climate destabilized world. This dangerous stance only bolsters the propaganda of so-called “humanitarian interventionism” and a world order built upon violent, neoliberal imperialism.



June 12, 2019: “Since the beginning of the post-9/11 wars, the U.S. military has emitted 1.2 BILLION metric tons of greenhouse gases. The Pentagon is the world’s single largest consumer of oil and a top contributor to climate change.” [Source]

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McKibben begins his article by admitting that the US Department of Defense is a major consumer of fossil fuels, but then makes the deceptive claim that the “enormous military machine produces about 59 million metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions annually.” Using selective information from a paper entitled Pentagon Fuel Use, Climate Change, and the Costs of War by Professor Neta Crawford of Boston University, a paper which he references heavily for his piece, McKibben goes on to dishonestly downplay the role of the US military in the climate crisis. According to McKibben, this average of 59 million tons of greenhouse gas emissions (which according to Crawford’s paper, the figure between 2001-2017 is actually closer to 70 million) “is not a particularly large share of the world’s, or even our nation’s, energy consumption.” McKibben adds, “Crawford’s careful analysis shows that the Department of Defense consumes roughly a hundred million barrels of oil a year. The world runs through about a hundred million barrels of oil a day. Even though it’s the world’s largest institutional user of energy, the US military accounts, by Crawford’s figures, for barely 1 percent of America’s greenhouse gas emissions.”

In fact, this was not at all the conclusion that Crawford drew from her research. While McKibben mischaracterizes Crawford’s paper as “comprehensive,” Crawford is, by contrast, careful to note that there are in fact several unknowns and unexplored areas when it comes to calculating the fuel use of the military, all of which suggest that the total usage is likely significantly higher than McKibben concludes. She spells out the various sources of military emissions clearly, both those considered and those left unknown, in list form toward the beginning of her paper:

“1. Overall military emissions for installations and non-war operations.

2. War-related emissions by the US military in overseas contingency operations.

3. Emissions caused by US military industry—for instance, for production of weapons and ammunition.

4. Emissions caused by the direct targeting of petroleum, namely the deliberate burning of oil wells and refineries by all parties.

5. Sources of emissions by other belligerents.

6. Energy consumed by reconstruction of damaged and destroyed infrastructure.

7. Emissions from other sources, such as fire suppression and extinguishing chemicals, including Halon, a greenhouse gas, and from explosions and fires due to the destruction of non-petroleum targets in warzones.”

Crawford then clarifies by stating that her focus is “on the first two sources of military GHG emissions—overall military and war-related emissions” and that she will “briefly discuss military industrial emissions.” According to Department of Energy data used in Crawford’s analysis, the total greenhouse gas emissions from the DOD between 2001-2017 was approximately 1.212 billion metric tons. But in the very next section, which McKibben fails to mention, Crawford estimates what the emissions burden of the industrial production of military hardware and munitions might entail. Her calculations are perhaps somewhat rudimentary, but they nonetheless suggest a much greater potential for military produced GHGs than McKibben is willing to admit. If Crawford’s estimates are correct, the combined total of industrial production related emissions and commonly measured military operating emissions would triple the amount of greenhouse gases that are emitted in sustaining our current military infrastructure. Crawford states:

“The estimate above focuses on DOD emissions. Yet, a complete accounting of the total emissions related to war and preparation for it, would include the GHG emissions of the military industry. The military industry directly employs about 14.7 percent of all people in the US manufacturing sector. Assuming that the relative size of direct employment in the domestic US military industry is an indicator for the portion of the military industry in the US industrial economy, the share of US greenhouse gas emissions from the US based military industry is estimated to be about 15 percent of total US industrial greenhouse gas emissions. If half of those military related emissions are attributable to the post-9/11 wars, then US war manufacturing has emitted about 2,600 million megatons of CO2 equivalent greenhouse gas from 2001 to 2017, averaging 153 million metric tons of CO2e each year.”

Furthermore, Crawford goes into more detail in the Appendix as to why the estimates of CO2e impacts are likely understated. Firstly, she notes that the military documents the impact of methane released from fuel consumption as 25 times as potent in its warming potential as compared to CO2, but the IPCC puts this number at 35. In fact, on shorter time scales, scientists have shown that methane is 85 times or more as powerful a greenhouse gas as CO2.

Secondly, she draws attention to the fact that the additives in jet fuel are not accounted for when tabulating the effects of GHG emissions, suggesting significant unknowns. She states that “While the Department of Energy figures and the calculations here include nitrous oxide and methane, it is possible that the additional effects of high altitude water vapor and additives for jet fuel combustion, which are not included in these calculations, may be significant.”

The third point she brings to bear is the lack of inclusion of all the sources of fuel used by the military in their bookkeeping. One of these sources is known as bunker fuel which, as Crawford writes, is excluded from emission accounts as part of the Kyoto Protocol.

Barry Sanders, author of The Green Zone, The Environmental Costs of Militarism, has also written about bunker fuel. Along with this “off the record, ghost stuff,” as he refers to it, Sanders has enumerated various other ways in which the military has been able to underplay its fossil fuel usage. Among these are the unaccounted for fuel used by interdependent contractors in increasingly privatized warzones, and the no cost fuel provided at times by partner nations like Kuwait.

According to the high end of Sanders’ estimates, which do not include the emissions incurred from weapons manufacture, the total percentage of military emissions from the direct burning of fossil fuels may be more like 5 percent of total US emissions. This figure also does not take into consideration other factors touched upon by Crawford, mentioned above, like emissions from ongoing oil fires, which lasted in some cases for months, and the effect of cement production and equipment operation during post war reconstruction, a significant contributor to atmospheric greenhouse gases. Crawford also recognizes that the militaries of all parties drawn into US-led wars have an unaccounted for carbon footprint when honestly examining the total emissions costs of the American war machine.

These additional factors make calculating the true cost of war next to impossible but, in pure greenhouse gas emissions terms, the numbers are clearly significantly higher than what McKibben has suggested. The counter to this conclusion is that even if the military GHG emissions were in the neighborhood of 5 percent of total US emissions (and it’s possibly higher than this), this is still a much smaller number than the rest of the US economy, which is essentially the argument that McKibben has already made. While 5 percent is not an insignificant figure, this line of argument fails to understand the systemic nature of our problem by making the common mistake of focusing narrowly on GHG emissions. It is an entirely reductive and simplistic lens that dangerously distorts, rather than clarifies humanity’s global, interconnected crisis.


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Mosaic Solar. Further reading: From Stable to Star – The Making of North American “Climate Heroes”

After completely misrepresenting the calculations found in Crawford’s paper and restricting debate to the evaluation of deflated GHG emissions figures, McKibben takes a further misstep by having us believe that rather than being a hindrance to resolving the climate crisis, the military can actually be a vital asset. While admitting that the military absorbs a massive amount of money each year from American taxpayers, even going so far as to repeat the widely circulated statistic that the US spends as much as the next seven countries combined on its massive defense budget, McKibben seems to believe in some ways this could in fact be a good thing. He suggests that the technologies developed by the military’s R&D could be utilized in the civilian sector, saying that “The military-industrial complex may not be the single best place to conduct R&D, but given current political realities, it is likely to be one of the few places where it’s actually possible.”

In fact, any genuine grassroots movement that is interested in tackling issues as large as the collapse of human civilization and the destruction of global biotic communities would be less interested in acquiescing to “current political realities” which include a $1.25 trillion war budget, and more interested in engendering the kind of struggle needed to define those realities along the lines of an actually livable, equitable future.


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The text reads “The Navajo Nation encompasses more than 27,000 square miles across three states – New Mexico, Utah + Arizona – and is the largest home for indigenous people in the U.S.. From 1944 to 1986, hundreds of uranium and milling operations extracted an estimated 400 million tons of uranium ore from Diné (Navajo) lands. [1][Source: jetsonorama: stories from ground zero, August 31, 2019]

Military R&D is not geared toward saving the planet from human destruction. Any overlaps with so-called green technological development is secondary to its primary, narrow framework of creating efficient systems of killing to protect a national agenda set by the interests of the wealthy elite. This framework, more often than not, runs contrary to environmental protection. From the radioactive contamination of people and land caused by the use of depleted uranium, to the pollution of drinking water, to the creation of hundreds of superfund sites across the US, America’s military is well understood to be not just a massive source of greenhouse gases, but one of the largest polluters on the planet.

Furthermore, military R&D is often more about lining the pockets of weapons manufacturers than simply developing an effective end product. Waste and cost overruns are a regular feature in the development of military hardware. The F-35 fighter jet, for example, is expected to cost over a trillion dollars over the course of its sixty year lifespan. In a movement that is looking to maximize efficiency of resource usage, it would clearly make more sense to directly fund efforts to that end, rather than relying on the tangential work of an institution engaging in the most unsustainable activities ever conceived: spending trillions of dollars directly destroying land and infrastructure which is then rebuilt.

What McKibben further fails to acknowledge in his article is that the US military has fostered an atmosphere for intensified global destabilization, international distrust, and environmental degradation at a time when the need for global cooperation and environmental stewardship has never been more clear. Accepting the prioritization of US military spending over the dedication of national resources toward environmental research, habitat restoration, and climate mitigation, as McKibben does, is worse than defeatism. It is ultimately a collusion with the most murderous institution in living memory at the expense of genuine social progress or even human survival. While mainstream environmental groups often shun or disavow direct action that involves property destruction or widespread social disruption used as a tactic to secure the survival of the species, a tactic which is increasingly viewed through the lens of a militarized state as a form of terrorism, these nonprofits often have no qualms about tacitly, or even explicitly, supporting an institution that uses organized mass violence in order to further the very political ends which have brought humanity to the brink of extinction.


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November, 2016, Standing Rock: The U.S. Army attempts to evict Oceti Sakowin encampments from treaty lands. Photo by Rob Wilson Photography [Source]

What this translates to is perhaps the most critical point presented in this article, which is that as corporate controlled governments and the officials within them are unable to come to meaningful agreements that could at least slow the process of ecological collapse, Bill McKibben is giving a pass to an institution whose job directly involves sowing violent discord around the world. Military adventurism is part and parcel to a world that is enmeshed in competition for resources, power, and strategic high ground rather than cooperation. To not point this out, and to instead highlight the supposedly positive role that the military will play, represents the betrayal of any vision of a decent future for life on earth under the cover of “current political realities”, which in fact is the reality of collective annihilation. The millions of victims of countless forms of Western imperial aggression stand as a testament to that fact, and the distortions and omissions of Bill McKibben cannot be tolerated by people who stand for justice and a livable future.

And while McKibben praised the military for “doing a not-too-shabby job of driving down its emissions—they’ve dropped 50 percent or so since 1991,” he neglected to mention in his article that it was this hyper competitive culture of US militarism that helped turn up the pressure on negotiators for the 1997 Kyoto Protocol in order to exempt militaries around the world from greenhouse gas accounting. The author of the paper Demilitarization for Deep Decarbonization, Tamara Lorincz, described the successful efforts of government officials, military brass, and oil industry insiders working together to keep military carbon pollution off the ledgers. She quotes lead Kyoto negotiator Stuart Eizenstat, then Under Secretary for Economic, Business, and Agricultural Affairs at a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing:

“We took special pains, working with the Defense Department and with our uniformed military, both before and in Kyoto, to fully protect the unique position of the United States as the world’s only super power with global military responsibilities. We achieved everything they outlined as necessary to protect military operations and our national security. At Kyoto, the parties, for example, took a decision to exempt key overseas military activities from any emissions targets, including exemptions for bunker fuels used in international aviation and maritime transport and from emissions resulting from multilateral operations.”

Rather than standing up for environmental protection, the military, as one would expect, sought to preserve not simply US supremacy, but a global order in which militarism in general continues to play a central role in the affairs of humanity. Fewer regulations are better for weapons manufacturers around the globe, and the US is also the leading weapons exporter on the planet.

In her paper, Lorincz goes on to quote President Clinton appointee, Secretary of Defense William Cohen who said, “We must not sacrifice our national security… to achieve reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.” In 2015, the non-binding Paris Climate Accords put an end to the accounting exemption set forth in Kyoto, but without an enforcement mechanism to ensure compliance, it did not explicitly mandate military reductions, leaving it up to individual nations to address those concerns as they saw fit. The priorities of the nation were further clarified when in 2019, in a paper about the grave danger posed by climate change, published by the US Army War College, the military’s role as protector of a pathological order again came on display. The paper stated, “The U.S. military must immediately begin expanding its capability to operate in the Arctic to defend economic interests and to partner with allies across the region…This rapid climate change will continue to result in increased shipping transiting the Arctic, population shifts to the region and increased competition to extract the vast hydrocarbon resources more readily available as the ice sheets contract. These changes will drive an expansion of security efforts from nations across the region as they vie to claim and protect the economic resources of the region.” There is no call in these words to change the kind of thinking that would have nations fighting over the last barrels of oil in a climate destabilized world. There is no reason to believe that a nation that learned nothing positive from the genocide it was founded upon will relinquish its death grip on power, even if it brings the entire planet into ecological chaos.

One of the interesting developments under Trump, the belligerent corporatist who walked away from an ineffectual Paris Climate Accord on the heels of pipeline expansionist and drone warrior Barack Obama, is the fact the military’s attention to climate change is not confined to just one paper. Members of the military community have continued to point out the looming danger of climate change. Even into the strange days of Trump, climate has been an ongoing concern from more vocal members of the Pentagon, and has led to figures like Bill McKibben pointing to their role as advocates for addressing the climate. “…the Pentagon, when it speaks frankly,” McKibben opined, “has the potential to reach Americans who won’t listen to scientists.” Perhaps it is this understanding of the pro-military psyche of the highly propagandized American populace that led him several years earlier to pen an article for The New Republic entitled “A World at War” in which he proclaims “We’re under attack from climate change—and our only hope is to mobilize like we did in WWII.”

In his opening commentary, he attempts to capture our militarist imagination with images of a supposed war that greenhouse gases are waging against us and the planet as a whole. “Enemy forces have seized huge swaths of territory; with each passing week, another 22,000 square miles of Arctic ice disappears,” he tells us. Instead of listening to scientific and military experts, “we chose to strengthen the enemy with our endless combustion; a billion explosions of a billion pistons inside a billion cylinders have fueled a global threat as lethal as the mushroom-shaped nuclear explosions we long feared.” When McKibben assures us that this comparison is not some figure of speech, he reveals another facet of his dangerous thinking when it comes to climate change and war. “But this is no metaphor. By most of the ways we measure wars, climate change is the real deal: Carbon and methane are seizing physical territory, sowing havoc and panic, racking up casualties, and even destabilizing governments. (Over the past few years, record-setting droughts have helped undermine the brutal strongman of Syria and fuel the rise of Boko Haram in Nigeria.)”

McKibben’s primary intent appears to be one of mobilizing the American people to rise to the challenge of facing climate change, as if we are preparing for World War II. But by framing greenhouse gases, or the combustion of fossil fuels, as a wartime enemy, he commits several grave mistakes. The primary mistake is the reality that wars are not waged by greenhouse gases or machines, but by the people who produce and control the profit and power driven systems that enable their proliferation. While McKibben perceives that the image of war is useful in that it provides an opportunity to appeal to America’s wartime nostalgia and perhaps mobilize those “Americans who won’t listen to scientists,” it falls short of the more accurate perspective that it is the belief in the actual economic system and technologically driven framework which organizes the institutions of power into a war on humanity and the planet.

McKibben can’t bring himself to call capitalism, militarism, and technologically centred consumerism as enemies of the people to be resisted. To excuse him for his particular framing as a kind of practical rhetorical decision is to overlook the dangerous obfuscations that arise and tendencies which are amplified as a result of such a framework. While McKibben nurtures our dangerously sanitized vision of patriotic history, he simultaneously lets off the hook and further empowers some of the most significant perpetrators of the crisis by maintaining our faith in a mythic US military practicality. As previously mentioned, it is not simply the significant and under reported greenhouse gas emissions of the military that is the problem. It is also the diversion of needed resources to unsustainable war making. It is the creation of a global order based in mistrust and brutal competition that fuels consumerism. It is the dangerous empowerment of militarized and paramilitary security forces at a time when the world is becoming increasingly unstable.

And when McKibben characterizes President Assad as the “brutal strongman of Syria”, rather than describing his more nuanced role as a popularly supported leader in the face of US, Israeli, and Gulf State directed aggression, he moves beyond the abstractions of WWII imagery and into direct support for American imperialist interests. His tacit support for the US war machine was further evidenced when he concluded that with the emergence of “green” tech, “The day will come when blocking the strait of Hormuz or blowing up a petrol station will be an empty threat – and that will be a good day indeed.” This of course is a shot at the enemy of American and Israeli elite, Iran. What such a remark avoids is any pretense of a future without US foreign meddling, whether that be in the form of toppling leaders like Iran’s former Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh at the behest of oil interests, or the US implementation of destabilizing sanctions in more recent years. While McKibben might lament the oil wars, his alignment with popularly held US prejudices is right out of the same neoconservative playbook which spawned George Bush’s axis of evil. In a world where the destabilizing climate will become one of many factors that both increase the likelihood of war and provide opportunities to devise profit-garnering narratives of so-called “humanitarian intervention,” McKibben is making it clear that his trust ultimately lies not with the people who suffer under the boot of military aggression and capitalist exploitation, but rather with a power structure that is quite literally killing us.


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Kids in Hanano, East Aleppo, 24 hours after liberation from Nusra Front-led occupation, by the SAA and allies. December 2016 [Photo: Vanessa Beeley, Source]

Playing fast and loose again with the reality of the linkages between war, environmental exploitation, and climate change, McKibben declared in an opinion piece for The Guardian: “No one will ever fight a war over access to sunshine – what would a country do, set up enormous walls to shade everyone else’s panels? …A world that runs on sun and wind is a world that can relax.” Beyond the obvious fact that wars were fought long before oil became a hot commodity, perhaps the most glaring deception in McKibben’s arsenal is that war will be significantly reduced simply by the widespread adoption of “green” tech. But if you examine McKibben’s phrasing, he doesn’t say “no one will ever fight a war over access to the components needed to manufacture green technology.” Rather, it is access to sun or wind, he says, that won’t spur bloodshed. This may be true, but he is implying for the casual reader that access to sun and wind is the same as access to raw materials and technological products that transform wind and sun into electricity. Nothing could be further from the truth, and his careful word choice is extremely deceptive. It is a bit like the kind of lie one might tell if one were operating from a war mentality, justifying the creation of false propaganda meant to rally people around a national cause that is sold as being for the greater good. “Wars can’t be fought over sunshine” makes for a clever, if duplicitous, slogan in a nation whose populace has grown less supportive of the oil wars they are funding with their tax dollars. But perhaps a bit of sleight of hand is good for the cause. The ends justify the means, as the saying goes. But do they really?

Another saying is that truth is the first casualty of war. If you are waging a war against amorphous greenhouse gases rather than acknowledging the war that has been initiated against life by technology and profit centred networks of capitalists, security forces, and politicians of all stripes, then your distorted framework sets the tone for more distortions. But as Medea Benjamin points out in her critique of McKibben’s call for a kind of wartime climate mobilization, “Some of the worst state responses to climate disruption already look like war.” As a means to demonstrate the ugliness of actual wars rather than promulgating simplistic, mythologized narratives, she refers to the Congolese forced labor which was used during WWII to extract uranium that went into the atomic bombs that would needlessly kill over one hundred thousand Japanese civilians.

McKibben assures us “…it’s important to remember that a truly global mobilization to defeat climate change wouldn’t wreck our economy or throw coal miners out of work. Quite the contrary: Gearing up to stop global warming would provide a host of social and economic benefits, just as World War II did.” As a reactive, crisis induced scramble for solutions from the same mindset that produced our problems, this kind of blind triumphalism has no time to soberly internalize both the hard limits of a growth-based economic system on a finite planet, and the deep tragedy of a world which had plunged itself into the bloodiest war in human history. Such triumphalism is ultimately incapable of seeing how the true lessons of war and the belief in a mythological progress continue to be ignored as we move into climate chaos.

This belief in a technologically driven progress which can be found in McKibben’s writing, and which often centers the discussion on an unerring belief in green jobs and economic prosperity over the reality that continued economic growth disrupts global ecologies, mirrors the kind of post WWII optimism which accompanied the so-called Great Acceleration. The Great Acceleration refers to the rapid economic growth seen during the war and the years following, which had an enormous impact on the environment. Ecologist and cellular biologist Barry Commoner concluded that, “The chief reason for the environmental crisis that has engulfed the United States in recent years is the sweeping transformation of productive technology since World War II. … Productive technologies with intense impacts on the environment have displaced less destructive ones. The environmental crisis is the inevitable result of this counter-ecological pattern of growth.” If one considers the radical changes humans have made to the planet on a geological timescale, it is easy to recognize that rather than representing a fundamental break from an older mindset, the rapid push for so called renewables is simply the machine of planetary consumption shifting gears.

In a critique of one aspect of this intensifying technological paradigm, Bill McKibben warns about the potential dangers of things like artificial intelligence in his book Falter, but when he calls the military industrial complex one of “the few places where it’s actually possible” to conduct research and development, his warnings ring hollow. In this world of great acceleration, cultures that value their modern consumerist lifestyle over unbroken forests, that don’t put up serious objections to continued growth and warfare, issue in the next wave of technological “innovation” which further speeds up the process of planetary destruction. If McKibben believes that the military will help develop the next generation battery technology to power electric cars, he should be aware those batteries emerge from a larger gestalt of full spectrum dominance, where better and faster applies first to maintaining a kind of material superiority that, if taken to the logical extension of automated warfare, threatens to launch our technosphere past the ability for humans to meaningfully react. The crisis, then, when seen through the lens of technological innovation and war, only accelerates the destruction of life.

It is in this reality, where violence and exploitation undergirds the accelerations of modern consumer society, and green tech in fact relies on raw materials lying in often contested ground, that the US Department of the Interior finalized a list of thirty five “critical minerals” in 2018. In the Summary for the final document, the department declared that “The United States is heavily reliant on imports of certain mineral commodities that are vital to the Nation’s security and economic prosperity. This dependency of the United States on foreign sources creates a strategic vulnerability for both its economy and military to adverse foreign government action, natural disaster, and other events that can disrupt supply of these key minerals.” Among the thirty five minerals considered to be part of this “strategic vulnerability” were indium, tellurium, lithium, cobalt, and the rare earth elements, all of which are important components of corporate manufactured “green” technology.



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What this translates to, of course, is that while wars won’t likely be fought over sunlight, the materials needed to produce “green” technology may indeed be the subject of significant future conflicts. This becomes increasingly clear when one looks more closely at the reality on the ground. For example, the very same nation which contained the highly concentrated uranium ore exploited for the atomic bomb, a nation with a legacy of Western colonial oppression and violent internal conflict, also produces over 60 percent of the world’s supply of cobalt, which is used in the cathode of lithium ion batteries. In 1961, shortly after gaining its independence from nearly 80 years of Belgian colonial rule, the newly elected Prime Minister of the Republic of Congo, Patrice Lumumba, was assassinated with direct assistance from the United States. The result would be a decades-long rule by a US-friendly autocrat followed by his overthrow and subsequent mass violence that intersected with the Rwandan genocide in which millions of people were killed.

Violence within the Congo has long relied on the control of mines for sources of income with which to pay fighters and buy weapons and supplies. One study showed the direct correlation between mineral prices, which went up with growing consumer demand, and the rise of violence. The understanding of this connection between mining operations and violent conflict led to the creation of Section 1502 of the 2010 Dodd Frank Act, which stipulated that companies refrain from purchasing minerals sourced from conflict areas. A Global Witness study, however, found that almost 80% of companies “failed to meet the minimum requirements of the U.S. conflict minerals law.”

With the majority of large mines in the Congo currently owned by China, a nation whose supposed threat to the US was emblazoned in Obama’s strategic Asia Pivot, competition for these resources will likely only go up at a time when “green” tech is being demanded with the urgency of human survival. With an estimated 30 percent of global reserves, and 95 percent of current global production, China is also the global leader in the highly polluting regime of rare earth mineral extraction and processing. To think conflict will simply decrease at the same time there is an increased dependency on unevenly distributed “critical minerals” is beyond naive. Growing competition between the US and China in exploiting Africa’s resources are an indication of one potential conflict that lies ahead. While China increases its investment on the continent, dozens of private military contractors from countries such as the US, the UK, France, Russia, and the Ukraine are operating in a variety of African nations, protecting mines, serving as bodyguards, as well as a multitude of other security related missions.

Among those looking to capitalize on both security contracts and the increased interest in minerals is the founder of the infamous private mercenary group Blackwater, Erik Prince, who has reportedly expressed his desire to profit from cobalt mines in the Congo as well as rare earth minerals in Afghanistan.

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Erik Prince: founder and former CEO of the private mercenary company Blackwater, now known as Academi



Prince has been embroiled in numerous controversies, and his involvement in the minerals trade is highly suggestive of the troubling world order McKibben is trying to gloss over. In 2007, Blackwater contractors killed 17 Iraqi civilians during what has come to be known as the Nisour Square Massacre. Three contractors involved in the killing were sentenced to thirty years in prison, one of whom would go on to serve a life sentence for murder. In 2010, Blackwater would go on to pay a $42 million settlement to the State Department which, as reported in the New York Times, was in response to crimes that “included illegal weapons exports to Afghanistan, making unauthorized proposals to train troops in south Sudan and providing sniper training for Taiwanese police officers…”.

In 2014, Prince went on to oversee the illegal creation of retrofitted crop dusting planes that could be used as part of a private aerial attack force to be contracted in Africa. As part of a counterinsurgency effort in Sudan to protect oil fields, detailed in the Intercept, “Prince’s $300 million proposal to aid [Sudan President] Kiir’s forces explicitly called for ground and air assaults, initially to be conducted by a 341-person foreign combat unit. Prince’s forces would conduct “deliberate attacks, raids, [and] ambushes” against “rebel objectives,” to be followed by “continuous medium to high intensity rapid intervention”, which would include “search [and] destroy missions.” These proposed operations, which were never fully implemented, were done under the cover of various front companies and were hidden from other executives of Prince’s own company, Frontier Services Group (FSG), who believed the contract would merely entail surveillance services.

More recently, Prince made a pitch to the Trump administration to send 5,000 contracted mercenaries to topple the government of Venezuela.

It is against this backdrop that Erik Prince announced in 2019 the formation of an investment fund that will capitalize on the increased demand for electric car batteries. Looking to bring cobalt and other minerals to market, Prince told the Financial Times, “For all the talk of our virtual world, the innovation, you can’t build these vehicles without minerals that come from generally weird, hard-to-access places.” According to Reuters, by mid-2019, a subsidiary of Frontier Services Group, in which Erik Prince serves as executive director and deputy chairman, filed with the Congolese business registry for the purpose of “‘the exploration, exploitation and commercialisation of minerals’, forest logging, security, transport, construction and ‘all financial, investment and project financing operations, both public and private.'”

In addition to looking to further exploit labor in the Congo, Prince has also reportedly been exploring the potential to profit from the spoils of a war-torn Afghanistan. Expressing a desire to privatize the war in Afghanistan, an effort which would be funded in part by increased mining operations, the details of his plan were further revealed in a BuzzFeed article, where Prince was quoted as advancing “a strategic mineral resource extraction funded effort that breaks the negative security economic cycle.”

His interest rests on a backdrop in which Afghan president Asraf Ghani in 2017 gave the green light for US corporations to begin developing the country’s mineral supply, including rare earth elements, which are used in wind turbines and LED lights. In response to the president’s enthusiasm for incoming US investment, Donald Trump’s White House issued the following statement: “They agreed that such initiatives would help American companies develop materials critical to national security while growing Afghanistan’s economy and creating new jobs in both countries, therefore defraying some of the costs of United States assistance as Afghans become more self-reliant.” Trump was counting on America’s longest war to finally begin paying off, and Erik Prince, a significant financial contributor to the Trump campaign, whose sister Betsy Devos was subsequently appointed as Secretary of Education, may end up being one those beneficiaries.

This is the reality of resource exploitation and war, where large corporations and privatized military forces work as adjuncts to the wars of nation states, reaping multi-million dollar contracts, profiting from natural resources whose sale does little to benefit the impoverished citizens of the nations they are stolen from. The economic disparity engendered by such free market predation can only lead to greater sources of conflict. And now we are being told by the IPCC that in order to have a chance at avoiding the 1.5°C aspirational target set in the Paris Climate Accord, we need to some how scale up “green” technology in order to reduce global carbon emissions to the tune of 45% by 2030. Under such seemingly impossible circumstances, one can’t help but wonder how many of the jobs to be created by the Green New Deal’s push for mass renewable energy development will include private military contractors guarding mineral mines and supply chains in order to keep profitable the nearly unquestioned human and environmental exploitation which powers our unsustainable lifestyles.

"The so-called ‘Greta Scenario’ describing net 0 carbon emissions by 2025... the demand outlook for copper is going to be significant. What’s more incontrovertible is security of supply... success in finding new sources of copper is declining. In fact, much of the known copper resources today represents 'the work of our grandfathers.'"
“The so-called ‘Greta Scenario’ describing net 0 carbon emissions by 2025… the demand outlook for copper is going to be significant. What’s more incontrovertible is security of supply… success in finding new sources of copper is declining. In fact, much of the known copper resources today represents ‘the work of our grandfathers.'”

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While images of indigenous resistance to oil pipelines have captured the imagination of the environmental left, the reality is that land grabs in the name of “green” infrastructure is also a growing reality. The new rush to exploit the minerals of Africa is one such example. Another involves the Saami people, whose protest of a copper mine in Norway that would disrupt the land and traditional lifestyles of indigenous herders and fishers, was ignored. With the decision to permit the mine, Trade and Industry minister Røe Isaksen said, “Obviously, most of the copper we mine in the world today is used for transporting electricity. If you look at an electric car for example, it has three times the amount of copper compared to a regular car”.

While demand for access to land rich with minerals will rise, most of the pathways mapped out by the IPCC for limiting global temperature to 1.5°C incorporate the unrealistic use of massive tracts of land for capturing carbon out of the atmosphere. This is the response to a projected timeline in which emissions are not adequately brought down, and the resulting carbon overshoot must be compensated for with so called negative emissions technologies. Such scenarios paint a picture in which areas twice the size of India must be cultivated for biomass. The question is, whose land will be used? Who will be forcibly removed? Taken together, this so-called fourth industrial revolution of “green” technology has all the hallmarks of a militarily-enforced manifest destiny, in which the technologically advanced, hyper consumptive way of life for wealthy nations is violently preserved at the expense of both the planet and lives of impoverished people around the globe. In reality, the likely failure of such hail mary carbon reduction schemes will affect everyone in a rising tide of scarcity and violence, as the global elites rely upon these same kinds of security and military institutions they’ve always turned toward in order to maintain hold on a crumbling order that they packaged as our salvation.

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A WKOG parody advertisement that is more and more difficult to detect in the year 2019. NGOs and “environmental leaders” are more and more, openly functioning as key instruments of US imperialism.

In addition to the fact that contested land and minerals needed for a world powered by “green” tech could easily play a role in future conflicts, so long as militaries are economically supported and culturally celebrated, fossil fuels will remain a strategic commodity for armies around the world. As a dense, portable, and storable source of energy, fossil fuels will continue to be the central source of power for military vehicles. Imagine trying to run tanks, destroyers, and fighter jets on solar or wind charged batteries. While the notion of using biofuels in the military is increasingly gaining traction, most vehicles will not run on 100% biofuels, instead requiring a mixture with a standard petroleum derivative. For example, jet fuel made from biomass, known as bioject, can only be mixed at up to a 50% blend. Furthermore, the production of biofuels remains largely energy inefficient and land intensive. The mass adoption of biofuels would likely displace arable land at a time when global population is growing, droughts and extreme weather is increasing, and fantastical schemes to sequester carbon through the cultivation of massive carbon sinks will already be driving up food prices. Rising food prices, of course, is yet another potential source of conflict, so “greening” the military is no surefire method to reduce global tensions.

And so long as militaries, whether American or otherwise, have a critical need for fossil fuels, petroleum will remain a strategic commodity. This means that even if the United States were able to somehow convert its military to be entirely fossil fuel free, if other nations remain reliant upon the use of fossil fuels even if only for their military, control of the world’s oil supply will remain a strategic objective. What all of this suggests is that far from being a preventative measure for military violence, a switch to “green” tech, will likely have little if any impact on war, and in some cases may in fact become a pretext for colonialist land grabs and armed conflict. Only a dedicated anti-war, anti-imperialist movement that intersects with environmental protection, that loudly condemns the crimes and excesses militarism and consumer culture, rather than seeing them as constructive platforms for our future on earth, can have any hope in bringing about peace, and a stable, livable world.

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In April 2016, The Climate Mobilization published the paper Leading the Public into Emergency Mode: A New Strategy for the Climate Movement. The paper weighs heavy with American exceptionalism. Notes of nationalism and cultural superiority waft throughout the document. [Source]

Many Westerners have bought into the “war propaganda” of this global push for a “green” tech fueled, militarily enforced capitalism. As both the economic and environmental situations deteriorate, perhaps the push for widespread adoption will indeed reach the kind of fevered pitch Bill McKibben advocates. This could very well come at a time when the militaries which avoided substantive critique and were instead elevated as potential allies in the “climate fight” come on full display. In this future where comforting narratives like McKibben’s steer the populace away from the much darker truth, manufactured humanitarian disasters provide the palatable cover for the dirty work of securing access to raw materials needed for battery production and wind turbines by armies whose bases are hardened for sea level rise, yet whose tactical vehicles are still necessarily dependent upon dense fossil fuel power. At this time of great uncertainty, a genuine dissent which had languished under the spell of false promises of “green” technology and ignored the mass violence that underpins modern industrial society, emerges out of necessity from the growing direness of global crop failures and economic breakdown. This growing dissent, which threatens the illegitimate power held by the global elites, is met with heavy repression that draws upon decades of unimpeded surveillance tech implementation, the militarization of global police forces, and the use of private security. The participants in such a movement would have done well to have heeded the reality that the private contractor TigerSwan, which had operated inside of Afghanistan and Iraq in support of the US war efforts, had been mobilized against protesters during the militarized crackdown at Standing Rock under the watch of President Obama. Nations which had celebrated their institutions of violence while dismissing the real threats such a framework posed, would fall under the shadow of the very security forces they had funded to the detriment of systemically oriented solutions.

This is the nightmare that any genuine climate movement would openly seek to avoid, but it is a nightmare that is well under way. Rather than obfuscating the multifaceted threat that a culture of tech driven consumerism and militarism plays in an increasingly resource scarce, climate destabilized world, such a movement would seek to highlight those connections between planetary exploitation, violence, and the climate crisis as a means to deescalate the potential for future global wars, all while acknowledging the reality that climate catastrophe is now an inevitability. It is increasingly clear that we will not stay below the 1.5°C aspirational target set forth in the toothless Paris Climate Accords, and the 2°C target will not likely be respected either. Widespread disruption is now an inevitablility. Which begs the question, what sort of framework will humanity adopt in approaching this future? Will it be one of a triumphal war rhetoric, “practical” alliances with the military industrial complex, and the downplaying of the disastrous consequences of militarism?

Clive L. Spash, WU Vienna University of Economics and Business, Vienna, Austria, This Changes Nothing: The Paris Agreement to Ignore Reality, Globalizations, 2016 Vol. 13, No. 6, 928–933

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Climate change at its core is about conflict. It is a conflict between how humans live with each other and with the planet, and this conflict builds on centuries of violence and exploitation that are enmeshed, often unseen by the privileged, within the economic, social, and political systems to this day. We can either face our own discomfort and confront the structures of violence that have brought us to this turning point in human history, or we can soothe ourselves with comfortable narratives and allow the internal conflicts inherent in the system to catapult us far beyond the breaking point. With the primary focus currently being on narrow and insufficient technological approaches to a holistic problem of violence and exploitation, a broad and genuine environmental and social justice movement has yet to materialize. While climate catastrophe is now inevitable, its scale has yet to be determined. The underlying social conflicts we refuse to engage with today become the amplified armed conflicts of tomorrow. Only when people join together, rejecting mass consumer culture embodied in capitalism and enforced through militarism, to instead create leverage through sustained civil disobedience and the creation of ecologically minded communities that view life as sacred, can the kind of radical demands needed for the potential of a livable future be realized.

In all likelihood, such resistance will be met with the kind of structural State (and non State) violence that Bill McKibben ignores, but to refrain from the kind of resistance that opens the door to structural change, and to ignore the reality of deep structural violence, only guarantees a violent collapse, as heavily armed and economically stratified societies run up against the hard limits of physics. Indeed, we are now faced with the potential that no matter how great our efforts, the everyday materialism and violence that makes our system function, and the steepness of the changes now required, may prove too daunting to adequately address. How people choose to deal with this reality is yet to be seen, but it is better to have such conversations now than in the midst of bloody social breakdown. Solace can be found in the solidarity of peers, among those who would both work for a better future or stand at your side when such a future is no longer possible. Rather than masking reality with feel good propaganda that profits the wealthy, it is our decision to move with a fierce and loving intent from within a darkness we are able to acknowledge, that gives us the capacity to be both carriers of genuine transformation in a troubled yet salvageable world, and steadfast companions in one that is doomed.



[Luke Orsborne contributes time to the Wrong Kind of Green critical thinking collective. You can discuss this article and others at the Climate Change and War group on social media.]



[1] Continued: “These mining + processing operations have left a legacy of potential exposures to uranium waste from abandoned mines/mills, homes and other structures built with mining waste which impacts the drinking water, livestock + humans. As a heavy metal, uranium primarily damages the kidneys + urinary system. While there have been many studies of environmental + occupational exposure to uranium and associated renal effects in adults, there have been very few studies of other adverse health effects. In 2010 the University of New Mexico partnered with the Navajo Area Indian Health Service and Navajo Division of Health to evaluate the association between environmental contaminants + reproductive birth outcomes. This investigation is called the Navajo Birth Cohort Study and will follow children for 7 years from birth to early childhood. Chemical exposure, stress, sleep, diet + theireffects on the children’s physical, cognitive + emotional development will be studied. Billboard: JC with her younger sister, Gracie (who is a NBCS participant). #stopcanyonmine” [Source]

http://www.wrongkindofgreen.org/2019/11 ... lculation/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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blindpig
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Re: The Long Ecological Revolution

Post by blindpig » Sat Jan 04, 2020 2:44 pm

'Ecology' and the Modernization of Fascism

anaxarchos
07-26-2007, 03:46 PM
This was posted by chlamor on PI. I reproduce it because ecofascism is also an analogy for an entire spectrum of "left" issues being expropriated by the far-right... and sometimes, addressing exactly the same audience.

http://www.aces.edu/eeaa/images/rojas/o ... lation.jpg
Overpopulation by Victor Cauduro Rojas
(Interesting imagery - a bunch of brown people being carried by a white guy - must be surrealistic art)

'Ecology' and the Modernization of Fascism in the German Ultra-right
Janet Biehl

http://www.spunk.org/texts/places/germa ... janet.html (http://www.spunk.org/texts/places/germa ... janet.html)


It is an incontestable fact that the ecology crisis today is real. In a vast number of ways and places, the biosphere of this planet is undergoing a great deal of damage. Parts of the environment have already been rendered uninhabitable through toxic wastes and nuclear power plant disasters, while systemic pollution, ozone holes, global warming, and other disasters are increasingly tearing the fabric on which all life depends. That such damage is wrought overwhelmingly by corporations in a competitive international market economy has never been clearer, while the need to replace the existing society with one such as social ecology advances has never been more urgent. 1

At a time when worsening economic conditions and strong political disaffection occur along with ecological dislocations, however, nationalist and even fascist ideas are gaining an increasingly high profile in Europe, particularly, but not only, in the Federal Republic of Germany. With social tensions exacerbated, neofascist groups of various kinds are winning electoral representation, even as their loosely linked cohorts commit acts of violence against foreigners. Such groups, both skinhead and 'intellectual,' are part of a 'New' Right that explicitly draws its ideas from classical fascism. They are updating the old nationalist, mystical, and misanthropic themes of the 'Old' Right, writes Jutta Ditfurth, in a "modernization of fascism." Among other things, they are using a right-wing interpretation of ecology "as an ideological 'hinge' for organizing the extreme-right and neofascist scene." 2

Today's fascists have a distinct ideological legacy from their fascist forebears upon which to draw. Indeed, 'ecology' and a mystical reverence for the natural world are hardly new to German nationalism. At the end of the nineteenth century, a cultural revolt against positivism swept much of Europe, as George L. Mosse writes, and in Germany it became infused with both nature-mysticism and racial nationalism. This revolt

became intimately bound up with a belief in nature's cosmic life force, a dark force whose mysteries could be understood, not through science, but through the occult. An ideology based upon such premises was fused with the glories of an Aryan past, and in turn, that past received a thoroughly romantic and mystical interpretation. 3

Culminating in the 1920s, an assortment of occult and pseudo-scientific ideas coalesced around the idea of a German Volk into a romantic nationalism, romantic racism, and a mystical nature-worshipping faith. Indeed, as Mosse observes, the German word Volk

is a much more comprehensive term than "people," for to German thinkers ever since the birth of German romanticism in the late eighteenth century "Volk" signified the union of a group of people with a transcendental "essence." This "essence" might be called "nature" or "cosmos" or "mythos," but in each instance it was fused to man's innermost nature, and represented the source of his creativity, his depth of feeling, his individuality, and his unity with other members of the Volk. 4

The völkisch movement of the 1920s regarded modern materialism, urbanism, rationalism, and science as artificial and evil, alien to this 'essence.'5 In a time of bitter social dislocation, it saw Weimar democracy as the product of Western democratic and liberal ideals and, further, as a puppet regime controlled by people who did not represent German 'essence.' Many alleged that a Jewish world conspiracy lay behind the discontents of modernism, including materialistic consumerism, soulless industrialism, a homogenized commercial culture, and excessive modern technology, all of which were said to be systematically destroying traditional German values. Only true patriots could save Germans from ruin, thought the extreme right -- themselves.

This movement sought to assert a truly Germanic alternative -- one as racialist as it was nationalist in nature. The popular writings of Paul Lagarde and Julius Langbehn favored an aristocratic social order in which Germans would rule the world. It invoked a nature-romanticism in which a closeness to the natural landscape was to give people a heightened sense of aliveness and 'authenticity.' It advanced a new cosmic faith, embodied in 'Aryan' blood, that was to be grasped through intuition rather than science in a plethora of occult and esoteric spiritualistic faiths that abounded in Germany in the 1920s. Mystical belief-systems like Theosophy, Anthroposophy, and Ariosophy (a mystical Aryanism) abounded and were rife with Germanicnationalist components, such that they could be used to mystify an 'ecological' nationalism.

However inadvertently, the romantic nationalists of the völkisch movement became an important source for National Socialist ideology, which ironically drew on its antimodern sentiments even as it built a technologically modern and virulently nationalistic and genocidal totalitarian state. Demagogically appealing to a very real sense of alienation, the Nazis stage-managed indoctrination extravaganzas that promised 'authenticity' in a mystical, romantic nationalism that was 'closer to nature,' even as they engaged in mass murder. Stressing the need to return to simpler, healthier, and more 'natural' lifeways, they advanced the idea and practice of a 'Nordic peasantry' tied organically to the soil -- even as they constructed a society that was industrially more modernized and rationalized than any German society had seen to that time.

The so-called 'New' Right today appeals to themes reminiscent of the völkisch movement in pre-Nazi Germany. It, too, presents itself as offering an 'ecological' alternative to modern society. In the view of the 'New' Right today, the destruction of the environment and the repression of nationalities have a common root in 'Semitic' monotheism and universalism. In its later form, Christianity, and in its subsequent secularized forms, liberalism and Marxism, this dualistic, homogenizing universalism is alleged to have brought on both the ecological crisis and the suppression of national identity. Just as Judeo-Christian universalism was destructive of authentic cultures when Christian missionaries went out into the world, so too is modernity eliminating ethnic and national cultures. Moreover, through the unbridled technology to which it gave rise, this modern universalism is said to have perpetrated not only the destruction of nature but an annihilation of the spirit; the destruction of nature, it is said, is life-threatening in the spiritual sense as well as the physical, since when people deny pristine nature, their access to their 'authentic' self is blocked.

The dualistic yet universalistic 'Semitic' legacy is borne today most egregiously, in 'New' Right ideology, by the United States, in whose 'mongrel' culture -- egalitarian democracy -- all cultures and races are mixed together, forming a crass, soulless society. American cultural imperialism is genocidal of other cultures around the world, and its technological imperialism is destroying the global environment. The fascist quest for 'national identity' and ecological salvation seeks to counter 'Western civilization' -- that is, the United States, as opposed to 'European civilization' -- by advancing a notion of 'ethnopluralism' that seeks for all cultures to have sovereignty over themselves and their environment. Europe should become, instead of a modernized monoculture, a 'Europe of fatherlands,' with autonomy for all its peoples. Just as Turks should live in Turkey and Senegalese in Senegal, Germans should have Germany for themselves, 'New' Right ideologues argue.

Ecology can easily be perverted to justify this 'ethnopluralism' -- that is, nationalism. Conceptions of one's region as one's 'homeland,' or Heimat, can be perverted into a nationalistic regionalism when a region's traditions and language are mystically tied to an 'ancestral' landscape. (The word Heimat connotes as well a turn toward the past, an anti-urban mood, a familiar community, and proximity to nature. For several decades the concept was looked upon with disfavor because the Nazis had used it, but intellectuals rediscovered it in the 1970s, after further decades of capitalist industrialization.) For a people seeking to assert themselves against an outside intruder, an 'ecologized' Heimat in which they are biologically embedded can become a useful tool not only against imperialism but against immigration, foreigners, and 'overpopulation.' Elaborate justifications for opposing Third World immigration are disguised as diversity, drawing on 'ecological' arguments against 'overpopulation.' Today it is not only fascists who invoke Heimat; in September 1989, for example, the head of the respectable League for the Protection of the Environment and Nature (Bund für Umwelt- und Naturschutz, or BUND), environmentalist Hubert Weinzierl, remarked that

only when humanity's main concern, the diminution of the stream of overpopulation, has been accomplished, will there be any meaning or any prospect of building an environment that is capable of improvement, of configuring the landscape of our civilization in such a way that it remains worthy of being called Heimat. 6

An ecology that is mystical, in turn, may become a justification for a nationalism that is mystical. In the New Age milieu of today, with its affinities for ecology, the ultra-right may well find the mystical component it needs to make a truly updated, modernized authoritarian nationalism. As in Germany between the two world wars, antirational cults of the New Age -- primitivistic, esoteric -- abound in both the Federal Republic and the Anglo-American world. Such antirationalism and mysticism are appealed to by the 'New' Right; as anarchist publisher Wolfgang Haug observes, "The New Right, in effect, wants above all to redefine social norms so that rational doubt is regarded as decadent and eliminated, and new 'natural' norms are established." 7

<snip>
anaxarchos
07-26-2007, 03:59 PM
http://www.akuk.com/images_sm/akcat_4332.jpg

Fascist Ecology: The "Green Wing" of the Nazi Party and its Historical Antecedents
Peter Staudenmaier

http://www.spunk.org/texts/places/germa ... peter.html (http://www.spunk.org/texts/places/germa ... peter.html)


"We recognize that separating humanity from nature, from the whole of life, leads to humankind’s own destruction and to the death of nations. Only through a re-integration of humanity into the whole of nature can our people be made stronger. That is the fundamental point of the biological tasks of our age. Humankind alone is no longer the focus of thought, but rather life as a whole . . . This striving toward connectedness with the totality of life, with nature itself, a nature into which we are born, this is the deepest meaning and the true essence of National Socialist thought." 1

In our zeal to condemn the status quo, radicals often carelessly toss about epithets like "fascist" and "ecofascist," thus contributing to a sort of conceptual inflation that in no way furthers effective social critique. In such a situation, it is easy to overlook the fact that there are still virulent strains of fascism in our political culture which, however marginal, demand our attention. One of the least recognized or understood of these strains is the phenomenon one might call "actually existing ecofascism," that is, the preoccupation of authentically fascist movements with environmentalist concerns. In order to grasp the peculiar intensity and endurance of this affiliation, we would do well to examine more closely its most notorious historical incarnation, the so-called "green wing" of German National Socialism.

Despite an extensive documentary record, the subject remains an elusive one, underappreciated by professional historians and environmental activists alike. In English-speaking countries as well as in Germany itself, the very existence of a "green wing" in the Nazi movement, much less its inspiration, goals, and consequences, has yet to be adequately researched and analyzed. Most of the handful of available interpretations succumb to either an alarming intellectual affinity with their subject." 2 or a naive refusal to examine the full extent of the "ideological overlap between nature conservation and National Socialism." 3 This article presents a brief and necessarily schematic overview of the ecological components of Nazism, emphasizing both their central role in Nazi ideology and their practical implementation during the Third Reich. A preliminary survey of nineteenth and twentieth century precursors to classical ecofascism should serve to illuminate the conceptual underpinnings common to all forms of reactionary ecology.

Two initial clarifications are in order. First, the terms "environmental" and "ecological" are here used more or less interchangeably to denote ideas, attitudes, and practices commonly associated with the contemporary environmental movement. This is not an anachronism; it simply indicates an interpretive approach which highlights connections to present-day concerns. Second, this approach is not meant to endorse the historiographically discredited notion that pre-1933 historical data can or should be read as "leading inexorably" to the Nazi calamity. Rather, our concern here is with discerning ideological continuities and tracing political genealogies, in an attempt to understand the past in light of our current situation -- to make history relevant to the present social and ecological crisis.

The Roots of the Blood and Soil Mystique

Germany is not only the birthplace of the science of ecology and the site of Green politics' rise to prominence; it has also been home to a peculiar synthesis of naturalism and nationalism forged under the influence of the Romantic tradition's anti-Enlightenment irrationalism. Two nineteenth century figures exemplify this ominous conjunction: Ernst Moritz Arndt and Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl.

While best known in Germany for his fanatical nationalism, Arndt was also dedicated to the cause of the peasantry, which lead him to a concern for the welfare of the land itself. Historians of German environmentalism mention him as the earliest example of 'ecological' thinking in the modern sense. 4 His remarkable 1815 article On the Care and Conservation of Forests, written at the dawn of industrialization in Central Europe, rails against shortsighted exploitation of woodlands and soil, condemning deforestation and its economic causes. At times he wrote in terms strikingly similar to those of contemporary biocentrism: "When one sees nature in a necessary connectedness and interrelationship, then all things are equally important -- shrub, worm, plant, human, stone, nothing first or last, but all one single unity." 5

Arndt's environmentalism, however, was inextricably bound up with virulently xenophobic nationalism. His eloquent and prescient appeals for ecological sensitivity were couched always in terms of the well-being of the German soil and the German people, and his repeated lunatic polemics against miscegenation, demands for teutonic racial purity, and epithets against the French, Slavs, and Jews marked every aspect of his thought. At the very outset of the nineteenth century the deadly connection between love of land and militant racist nationalism was firmly set in place.

Riehl, a student of Arndt, further developed this sinister tradition. In some respects his 'green' streak went significantly deeper than Arndt's; presaging certain tendencies in recent environmental activism, his 1853 essay Field and Forest ended with a call to fight for "the rights of wilderness." But even here nationalist pathos set the tone: "We must save the forest, not only so that our ovens do not become cold in winter, but also so that the pulse of life of the people continues to beat warm and joyfully, so that Germany remains German." 6 Riehl was an implacable opponent of the rise of industrialism and urbanization; his overtly antisemitic glorification of rural peasant values and undifferentiated condemnation of modernity established him as the "founder of agrarian romanticism and anti-urbanism." 7

These latter two fixations matured in the second half of the nineteenth century in the context of the völkisch movement, a powerful cultural disposition and social tendency which united ethnocentric populism with nature mysticism. At the heart of the völkisch temptation was a pathological response to modernity. In the face of the very real dislocations brought on by the triumph of industrial capitalism and national unification, völkisch thinkers preached a return to the land, to the simplicity and wholeness of a life attuned to nature's purity. The mystical effusiveness of this perverted utopianism was matched by its political vulgarity. While "the Volkish movement aspired to reconstruct the society that was sanctioned by history, rooted in nature, and in communion with the cosmic life spirit," 8 it pointedly refused to locate the sources of alienation, rootlessness and environmental destruction in social structures, laying the blame instead to rationalism, cosmopolitanism, and urban civilization. The stand-in for all of these was the age-old object of peasant hatred and middle-class resentment: the Jews. "The Germans were in search of a mysterious wholeness that would restore them to primeval happiness, destroying the hostile milieu of urban industrial civilization that the Jewish conspiracy had foisted on them." 9

Reformulating traditional German antisemitism into nature-friendly terms, the völkisch movement carried a volatile amalgam of nineteenth century cultural prejudices, Romantic obsessions with purity, and anti-Enlightenment sentiment into twentieth century political discourse. The emergence of modern ecology forged the final link in the fateful chain which bound together aggressive nationalism, mystically charged racism, and environmentalist predilections. In 1867 the German zoologist Ernst Haeckel coined the term 'ecology' and began to establish it as a scientific discipline dedicated to studying the interactions between organism and environment. Haeckel was also the chief popularizer of Darwin and evolutionary theory for the German-speaking world, and developed a peculiar sort of social darwinist philosophy he called 'monism.' The German Monist League he founded combined scientifically based ecological holism with völkisch social views. Haeckel believed in nordic racial superiority, strenuously opposed race mixing and enthusiastically supported racial eugenics. His fervent nationalism became fanatical with the onset of World War I, and he fulminated in antisemitic tones against the post-war Council Republic in Bavaria.

In this way "Haeckel contributed to that special variety of German thought which served as the seed bed for National Socialism. He became one of Germany's major ideologists for racism, nationalism and imperialism." 10 Near the end of his life he joined the Thule Society, "a secret, radically right-wing organization which played a key role in the establishment of the Nazi movement." 11 But more than merely personal continuities are at stake here. The pioneer of scientific ecology, along with his disciples Willibald Hentschel, Wilhelm Bölsche and Bruno Wille, profoundly shaped the thinking of subsequent generations of environmentalists by embedding concern for the natural world in a tightly woven web of regressive social themes. From its very beginnings, then, ecology was bound up in an intensely reactionary political framework.

The specific contours of this early marriage of ecology and authoritarian social views are highly instructive. At the center of this ideological complex is the direct, unmediated application of biological categories to the social realm. Haeckel held that "civilization and the life of nations are governed by the same laws as prevail throughout nature and organic life." 12 This notion of 'natural laws' or 'natural order' has long been a mainstay of reactionary environmental thought. Its concomitant is anti-humanism:

Thus, for the Monists, perhaps the most pernicious feature of European bourgeois civilization was the inflated importance which it attached to the idea of man in general, to his existence and to his talents, and to the belief that through his unique rational faculties man could essentially recreate the world and bring about a universally more harmonious and ethically just social order. [Humankind was] an insignificant creature when viewed as part of and measured against the vastness of the cosmos and the overwhelming forces of nature. 13
Other Monists extended this anti-humanist emphasis and mixed it with the traditional völkisch motifs of indiscriminate anti-industrialism and anti-urbanism as well as the newly emerging pseudo-scientific racism. The linchpin, once again, was the conflation of biological and social categories. The biologist Raoul Francé, founding member of the Monist League, elaborated so-called Lebensgesetze, 'laws of life' through which the natural order determines the social order. He opposed racial mixing, for example, as "unnatural." Francé is acclaimed by contemporary ecofascists as a "pioneer of the ecology movement." 14

Francé's colleague Ludwig Woltmann, another student of Haeckel, insisted on a biological interpretation for all societal phenomena, from cultural attitudes to economic arrangements. He stressed the supposed connection between environmental purity and 'racial' purity: "Woltmann took a negative attitude toward modern industrialism. He claimed that the change from an agrarian to an industrial society had hastened the decline of the race. In contrast to nature, which engendered the harmonic forms of Germanism, there were the big cities, diabolical and inorganic, destroying the virtues of the race." 15

Thus by the early years of the twentieth century a certain type of 'ecological' argumentation, saturated with right-wing political content, had attained a measure of respectability within the political culture of Germany. During the turbulent period surrounding World War I, the mixture of ethnocentric fanaticism, regressive rejection of modernity and genuine environmental concern proved to be a very potent potion indeed.

https://web.archive.org/web/20130327214 ... 47880.html
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Re: The Long Ecological Revolution

Post by blindpig » Fri Jan 31, 2020 3:58 pm

Connecting the Dots
by John Steppling / December 20th, 2019

Capitalists are no more capable of self-sacrifice than a man is capable of lifting himself up by his own bootstraps.
— Vladimir Lenin1

Many on the left seem to have forgotten that capitalism is actually bad. That the reason the planet sinks under the weight of pollution and militarism is because of capitalism. Nothing that works within the capitalist system is going to save anyone and will only reinforce the existing problems and further the suffering of the poor and disenfranchised.

Now allow to me first start with a few observations on writers published by leftist sites, in this case Counterpunch, actually. Louis Proyect titles his piece as a question, “If Time Magazine Celebrates Greta Thunberg, Why Should We?” The answer is if TIME celebrates something, if corporate media celebrate someone or thing, the response should logically be INVESTIGATE and be suspicious. Which is what Cory Morningstar has done. But Proyect spends the entirety of his pointless article attacking Morningstar — go figure. He also lies. Morningstar does not attack Greta, she investigates the forces behind Greta. For a guy who wears his Marxism-like placard around his neck, you would think Proyect might grasp the distinction. Cory Morningstar is almost certainly the most important living journalist in the world (next to Assange perhaps).

And just by way of cursory correction, when Proyect writes, “Just two months ago, (Jamie) Margolin joined other young people in suing Democratic Governor Jay Inslee and the State of Washington over greenhouse-gas emissions. Inslee depicts himself as a liberal, environmentalist governor. If Margolin is a Trojan Horse like Thunberg, her choice of a target hardly sounds like she is trying to make it in corporate, Democratic Party, environmentalist circles,” what he fails to recognize is that Margolin is already in the Democratic Party inner circles and served as an intern for Hillary Clinton.

But the bigger problem is that Proyect seems on board with all the activities of Thunberg and her cohorts. Proyect quotes Morningstar:

Today’s climate emergency mobilization must be recognized for what it is: a strategically orchestrated campaign financed and managed by the world’s most powerful institutions – for the preservation of capitalism and global economic growth. This is the launch of a new growth industry in the Global South coupled with the creation of new and untapped markets.

And then writes:

Yeah, who cares about icebergs melting and the Great Coral Reef disappearing? The real problem is capitalism—as if the two phenomena were not related.

The entire point of Morninstar’s work is to bring attention to the fact that Capitalism IS related, not just related but the primary cause of planetary destruction. How does massive PR and billions of marketing stop the death of coral reefs? But again, class analysis is the issue (and perhaps an inability to read carefully). Thunberg has enlisted corporate billionaire backers (well, they enlisted her). That was the goal. If Proyect thinks the capitalists behind Thunberg are about to bring radical change and challenge the status quo, he is for a rude awakening. But then Proyect calls Off Guardian a conspiracy-minded site. Such provincial disdain is all too representative. But more on conspiracy theory below.

Allow me to link to Morningstar’s investigation of We Mean Business, a project that gets the Proyect stamp of approval (We Mean Business, not Morningstar).

I ask the reader to consider the facts. (hint: class analysis, the rich are not there to help anyone but themselves).

Then we have Kirkpatrick Sale and an article (“Political Collapse: The Center Cannot Hold”) that might well have been written by the state department. In this hideously distorted piece Mr Sale also lies. The biggest of his falsehoods is that Venezuela is a failed state. Uh… maybe he has a different definition. But what Sale is really doing is excusing and providing cover for the Imperialist west. Yemen is listed as failed but the reasons for its failures are not really made clear. Global Warming? The correct answer is a vicious, several year long attack by the Saudi monarchy and the US and UK militaries. A genocidal assault that has resulted in mass death and pestilence (180,000 NEW cases of cholera were just reported by WHO). But Mr Sale never mentions that. Not a peep about western militarism. Not a single word. Nor about the orchestrated illegal covert CIA assault against Venezuela, and more recently and successfully, against Bolivia. Imperialism is not touched upon, even once.

Mr Sale writes:

At the moment, there are no less than 65 countries are now fighting wars—there are only 193 countries recognized by the United Nations, so that’s a third of the world. These are wars with modern weapons, organized troops, and serious casualties—five of them, like Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Somalia, and Yemen, with 10,000 or more deaths a year, another 15 with more than 1,000 a year—all of them causing disruptions and disintegrations of all normal political and economic systems, leaving no attacked nation in a condition to protect and provide for its citizens.

But he never explains the role of the US in any of this. Who made the weapons used in these wars? Well, the answer is largely the US, but also Russia, China, Israel and Brazil. But the vast majority are from the US. Also Syria was targeted by the US for a coup (referred to in polite company as regime change, a term created by the marketing arm of the Pentagon). Assad has openly been a target of the US. Who created and funded ISIS, in fact? Answer is the US and Saudi Arabia. Not a word about that fact either.

Here is another quote from Sale:

These include seven completely failed states—Congo-Brazzaville, Central African Republic, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, South Sudan, and Venezuela—and another seven that are on the edge—Guinea, Haiti, Iraq, Zimbabwe, Afghanistan, Chad, and the Sudan—plus 19 that are in an “alert” category, meaning that some but not all government functions have failed, 15 in Africa and 4 in Asia.

What do these nations have in common? They were targets of the Imperialist West (directly in the cases of Syria, Yemen, Somalia and South Sudan, and Iraq — not to mention the non failed Venezuela, or indirectly in the neo-colonial plunder of Congo, AFR, Guinea, and Haiti). And, as I pointed out, Venezuela is not failed, nor even close to failed. It’s a perfectly functioning country under sanctions by the US. Another fact Sale omits.

Why is Libya not on that list? You know, Libya, where the US destroyed the African nation with the highest standard of living on the continent and reduced it to a slave market run by traffickers.

All in all Sale is either about room temperature IQ or just a liar or politically aligned with the State Department and Pentagon. I have no idea which but I do wonder why his tripe is appearing in a leftist site like Counterpunch. Proyect I understand, because he wears that placard announcing he is a leftist, and because he sort of is an editor at CP. Sale doesn’t and isn’t, so I really do wonder at why this reactionary non article is published by anyone this side of the CATO Institute?

But that brings me to the next point, which is the narcotic like effect that the entire Greta story has had on mostly middle aged white men. If you cannot but see the obvious stage-managed aspect of the Greta story, the marketing and image control involved, then you are blind or possibly caught up in the cult like thinking of much new green activism yourself. For one example, just look at the photo TIME used for its cover. Greta in an oversized sweater, sans make-up —how old does she look? 13, or 14 I’d say. Well, she is, in fact, 17. Her sister is 15 and looks much older and certainly clearly into puberty or even past it. Greta is being presented as the virgin symbol of purity. Now this will be called an attack on Greta — by Proyect anyway. But I am sure there are many others. It’s not. She is simply the actor in all this (though actors are responsible for their choices, too). For her troubles she gets yacht rides and great dining with world leaders. Why wouldn’t she sign on. But the rest of the phenomenon is, in fact, global capital usurping the green movements and activists globally. And the coup in Bolivia is against the indigenous peoples of that nation, many of whom are environmental activists as was President Morales. Which is why the smear campaign (by the same people who help manage Greta) was designed to undermine his environmental work. The biggest thing environmentally that Morales did was to throw out the US military.

But the white men of the West are channeling their disappointments (because capitalism disappoints, at the very least, nearly everyone but the top 3%) into something that resembles a fairy tale narrative of a guardian flock protector (the white guy narrator) defending the honour of blond pre-pubescent teenager (in volkisch pigtails and large sweater). Greta is the virgin queen of the environment. What happens when she gets a boyfriend? I’ll be curious to see. Will the white middle-aged flock protectors feel betrayed? Seems possible. As my friend Hiroyuki Hamada noted, the white male defense of Greta is a reflection of patriarchy and that disappointments today are felt more acutely because they are more flagrant and there are fewer mitigating salves than in the past.

The point here is that why would any socialist or communist sign on to anything supported by the Royal Families of Europe, by global billionaires, and why can’t they see that photo ops with Obama and the Pope are not just accidental. Nobody ever granted Berta Caraces a photo shoot in Vogue. A genuine activist today is at risk of death by the rising tide (rising fast) of fascism. Look at the heroic defense of Bolivia by the indigenous peoples of that nation. So many of whom have fought off western mining interests. And the same in Brazil where today there is a wholesale war on the indigenous. Or the vast western mining interests in Africa, and the forced displacement of entire villages to accommodate those interests — enforced by western security forces.

Much of the climate consensus seems aligned with the ruling class in a fear of a black and Asian planet, and one that is fuelled by the spectre of eugenics (making the world safe for white people). And lest you think that at all hyperbole, just spend some time investigating the activities of the Gates Foundation. It’s curious to me why so many liberals froth in admiration of Gates.

Jimmy Wu writes:

Yet capitalism’s reach extends much further than its economic effects; it also shapes our ideology and how we perceive our place in the world. Modern-day capitalism, with its unshakable faith in deregulated markets, privatization of the public sphere, and austerity budgets, has of course contributed to our financial misery, leading to mass hopelessness and anxiety. But far from being confined to economic policy, contemporary capitalism (often called “neoliberalism”) also embodies a philosophical belief that self-interest and competition, not cooperation, should pervade every aspect of our lives. In short, our world is shaped in the image of the market. For those in distress, Margaret Thatcher’s oft-cited mantra, “There is no such thing as society,” sends the most disturbing possible message: You’re on your own.2

This is the psychology of advanced capitalism. And Hollywood and mass media drive home in obsessively repetitious fashion that message of individualism. Of a ruthless individualism. In the recent V Wars (vampire wars) on Netflix, a doctor struggles valiantly throughout the first season looking for a cure. He fails. His only son abducted. In the last scene we see him, presumably months later, doing chin ups, his rock hard abs and bulging biceps glistening with sweat. He turns to face the camera and slings an AK 47 over his shoulder. He stares at camera; he is ready for season two. And the message is, don’t be a panty waist doctor, they get nothing done. Be a violent sociopathic vigilante.

Richard Slotkin in Gunfighter Nation wrote: “1890, the moment when the landed frontier of the United States was officially declared ‘closed’, the moment when ‘frontier’ became primarily a term of ideological rather than geographical location.”

That remains the principle shaper of consciousness in the US today.

Now one might ask why so many on the left view the Climate discourse without any class analysis. Do you not think that if Prince Charles is supporting a cause that one might be suspicious? I mean would he betray HIS class? Not fucking likely. Would Pierre Omidyar? Would Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson, or Bill Gates?? The answer is no, of course not, and yet I see people lining up to sign on board projects that are endorsed by millionaires and royals. Why? Well, because, partly, of what Jimmy Wu wrote. And I will add another quote from Wu’s piece:

The psychological toll of this market-extremist thinking is ubiquitous and measurable. A long line of social science research has shown that unemployed people are much more likely to become depressed; after all, under the reigning ideology, our self-worth is measured by our economic output. Moreover, since the market is (we are told) a level playing field, with no single actor appearing as the obvious coordinator, those who happen to be losers in this global scramble ostensibly have no one to blame but themselves.2

The same logic applies to those throwing Maduro or Morales under the bus. Or for that matter Assad. Look, if you are a leader targeted by the US there must be a reason. And that reason is independence from the global neoliberal system — and independence is not allowed. Ask the people of Iran or the DPRK or Cuba. Ask Gaddafi. The US does not do things for moral reasons. They are not motivated by ethics or morality.

The rise of fascism is also a reflection of the same conditions that spawned the ‘Greta Defender’ symptomatology.

Fascism is attractive to those who fear being identified as losers. Fascism provides a sense of belonging, of unity and purpose. American democracy does not. The ideological frontier that Slotkin noted is what defines the consciousness of most Americans, certainly white Americans. That rugged individualism that Hollywood continues to spew forth in cop shows and spy shows and lawyer shows and even doctor shows is one that is not real. There is no space, materially or psychologically, for Daniel Boone today. Most of the empty spaces of western America are owned by the federal government.

Most land overall is owned by billionaires. Sixty-one percent of the surface land of America is privately owned. And most of that is empty. The government owns around thirty percent. The working class owns nothing, essentially.

Blacks (13% of the population) own under 1% as of 2016.

But over the past decade, the nation’s wealthiest private landowners have been laying claim to ever-larger tracts of the countryside, according to data compiled by the Land Report, a magazine about land ownership in America. In 2007, according to the Land Report, the nation’s 100 largest private landowners owned a combined 27 million acres of land — equivalent to the area of Maine and New Hampshire combined.
A decade later, the 100 largest landowners have holdings of 40.2 million acres, an increase of nearly 50 percent. Their holdings are equivalent in area to the entirety of New England, minus Vermont.3

80% of the people live on 3% of the land.

Ted Turner owns over 2 million acres. John Malone over 2 million. Stan Kroenke owns over a million-and-a-half acres. The Hadley family, the Galt family, the Lee family…these are the owners of America’s land. Or Anne Marion who owns the 260,000 acre Four Sixes ranch in Texas. Or the Collier family, or the Barta family in Nebraska. All own close to a million acres of land. There are essentially 75 families, maybe a few more, that own the vast majority of land in the U.S. Jeff Bezos owns half a million acres in Texas. The Irving family owns a huge percentage of Maine, or the Reeds, who own vast swaths of northern California and Oregon.

You and I own shit. We are the new serfs in the feudalism of advanced capital. So why defend those who represent the ruling class?

The racial disparity in rural land ownership has deep historical roots based not just in chattel slavery, but in the post-slavery period as well. After emancipation, black farmers tended to be tenants of wealthy white landowners working for sub-poverty wages and doing mostly subsistence farming. Average land ownership for black farmers peaked in 1910, according to the Agriculture Census, with about 16 to 19 acres. In contrast, black farmers owned just 1.5 million acres of arable land in 1997.

In many cases, the land African Americans lost over the 20th century was expropriated in one form or another and not sold freely. In the 2007 documentary, Banished, filmmaker Marco Williams describes numerous examples of white mobs forcing out African-American farmers and taking their land. This outright stealing, intimidation, and violence had a devastating impact on black wealth ownership.4

Just as white America feared black ownership of, well, anything, the white ruling class capitalists today fear the potential for a black planet. America has military bases in all the countries of Africa save one. France and Germany and the US continue to recolonize Africa. And now, the US is directing renewed attention to Latin America where they fear indigenous power and socialist movements.

The international financial institutions, all of them situated in Europe or the US, are the contemporary expression of colonialism, essentially. They discipline and punish the dark skinned peoples of Africa, South and Central America, and many Pacific Islands. And in many cases, too, those countries which were formally part of the Soviet Union.

If you want to grasp the work of Cory Morningstar, this is not a bad place to start for now.

One cannot separate climate change from imperialism. You cannot separate climate change from militarism. If change is going to try to correct global warming, or limit its impact (which honestly nobody knows) then one must learn to read how marketing works. One must question anything applauded by the Royal families of Europe, or by billionaires in general. Those billionaires will not betray their class, rest assured. The billionaires and corporate interests behind Greta Thunberg are not looking to help the poor and working class; they are looking for massive land grabs and further raids on pensions, social security, and what’s left of working class and socialist movements. Maybe Proyect can connect the dots between the coup in Bolivia, the opposition in Venezuela (that failed state per Sale) and the big money orchestrating the Thunberg phenomenon. The ruling class stick together.

Conspiracy theory used to be reserved for invisible helicopters and such, now it’s simply any class analysis. Anytime someone points out who is funding a project there are cries of conspiracy theory.

Why would any rational person look at the Greta phenomenon and not grasp that it is manufactured? There is a lot of money behind this girl. But the non-profit industrial complex, the UN, the World Bank and IMF — they don’t do things altruistically. Capitalism is investment, not virtue. Capitalism created the crisis, it won’t solve it. Greta also retweeted the now sort of infamous Minh Ngo tweet that was part of the smear campaign against Morales. She is linked and backed, additionally, by Purpose and Avaaz — both of whom are connected to US foreign policy in South America. But Morningstar has the details here.

She also endorses and tweets support for Hong Kong colour revolution leader Joshua Wong (yet another US asset). She is, as Club de Cordeliers put it (on twitter), ‘the ruling class poster girl’. And this is not even to get into her comments about holding disobedient leaders up against the wall. The infantilism of the western public is well prepared for child leaders. This is a canny gambit by the marketing apparatus and by all indications (and articles like Proyect’s) it is working to perfection.

Greta is not anti-capitalist. She may say a few things that suggest, vaguely, an anti-capitalist sensibility, but the reality (which is what Morningstar provides) is that she works for big money, corporations and FOR capitalism.

You know when Greta gave her last speech in the US — at the UN, in fact — (where she flubbed her lines, saying creative PR and clever accounting. It was meant to be creative accounting and clever PR, but learning lines is tough) she sailed back to Europe. The captain had been flown in to sail the yacht on its return voyage. The whole thing is so ludicrous and idiotic that one really does wonder if the West is not in some trance state. The inability to read marketing as marketing is at this point inexcusable in someone self identifying as a leftist. The system sails along, like a billionaire’s yacht, increasing profit at the expense of the everyone not of the top 2 or 3%. Greta is a manufactured distraction, and all those protests that her campaign managed to generate are not to help stop war and exploitation. They are pretty much as meaningless as choosing to drive a Prius.

I will end with a quote from Cory Morningstar (from social media):

You are about to get slammed by 2 globally orchestrated campaigns 1. #GlobalGreenNewDeal 2. #NewDealForNature & People
And when I say slammed – I mean slammed. Like a hammer over your head. Another campaign to assist both is #SuperYear2020.
Goal: obtaining the social license required to re-boot / save the failing global capitalist economy. To usher in a new unprecedented era of growth. The monetization of nature, global in scale (new/ emerging markets)(see past posts). That is, the corporate capture of nature. Those with money – will literally buy nature.

The pitch: The ruling class, corporations, capital finance – all those that have happily destroyed the planet in pursuit of relentless profit have learned their lesson.They have magically changed. Those that destroyed the biosphere will now save it. And save you. All they need is your consent. Forget that capitalism devours everything in its path. They can work around this inconvenient truth. But it’s going to take everyone. There are no class divisions, we are all in this “together”. Yesterday’s capitalists are today’s activists. Accept. Join hands.

“Letters from Afar,” March/April 1917. [↩]
Jimmy Wu, “Capitalism is Dangerous for your Mental Health”, Medium, 2019. [↩] [↩]
Christopher Ingraham, Washington Post, 2017. [↩]
Antonio Moore, Inequality org. [↩]

https://dissidentvoice.org/2019/12/connecting-the-dots/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: The Long Ecological Revolution

Post by blindpig » Mon Feb 03, 2020 2:04 pm

Jorge Paulo Lemann and Itaú are among shareholders of a construction company that scares the Guarani people in Jaraguá, SP
Keeping an eye on Ruralists Keeping an eye on Ruralists
2 days ago

Owner of Ambev is the 42nd richest man in the world; he and the largest bank in the country make up 10% of the Tenda cartel, which started on Thursday to build buildings around villages in Pico do Jaraguá, in the capital of São Paulo; indigenous protest against logging.

By Alceu Luís Castilho

Focused on popular housing, the billionaire Construtora Tenda SA carried out on Thursday (01/30) the following news, summarized in this title of the Indigenous Missionary Council (Cimi): “ Construtora advances over traditional Guarani Mbya area in TI Jaraguá and drops 4 trees “. The indigenous people woke up with chainsaws and performed a funeral ritual, in honor of the destroyed trees, and in protest against the beginning of the construction of five buildings next to their villages, in the west of São Paulo.


Image
Jorge Paulo Lemann, one of the richest men in the world. (Photo: João Neto / MEC)

A few days earlier, on the 24th, the company that is part of the Novo Mercado, the B3 elite, communicated to the market that one of its shareholders, Constellation Investimentos e Participações , increased its participation in the company to 5.36% of the total ordinary actions. One of Constellation's partners is billionaire Jorge Paulo Lemann, owner of Ambev, listed in November by Forbes as the 42nd richest man in the world.

He is also the second richest Brazilian, with a net worth of US $ 23.1 billion . Lemann has alternated the leadership of this ranking with banker Joseph Safra. The former tennis player asserted himself as the most influential figure in AB Inbev, the group that controls the brewery, seconded by partners Marcel Telles and Carlos Alberto Sicupira. But its capital is spread across several branches of activity.

Although he is not a major partner in Constellation, the entrepreneur was the inspiration for his disciple Florian Bartunek , creator of this investment fund. He was Lemann's manager at the Garantia bank. Another minority partner of Constellation is Lone Pine Capital, which in turn is a United States hedge fund.

The information on Constellation's new participation in Tenda's total shares is contained in an institutional presentation by the construction company, updated on Monday (01/27). The contractor - split up in 2017 from another construction company, Gafisa - has spread capital, but it usually highlights the three main shareholders.

Tenda's website still maintains a previous composition on the air, where Constellattion did not appear among the main shareholders. In its place, with 4.74% of the shares, was Itaú , the largest bank in the country, which had a net profit of R $ 25 billion in 2018. Itaú Unibanco SA's participation in the contractor was larger, but was reduced for this percentage on January 3 . The bank held 10% of Tenda's shares.


Image
Constellation increased its stake in Tenda at the end of January to 5.4%. (Image: Reproduction)

Two investment funds, Pátria Investimentos and Polo Capital, are the shareholders with the largest stake in Tenda. They own, respectively, 10.4% and 9.9% of the shares. The percentage of Polo Capital , which commands the construction company's Board of Directors, was reduced in January. This company is managed by Cláudio Andrade and Marcos Duarte. The Homeland Investment by Olimpio Matarazzo Neto, the Pimpo, owner of a house of R $ 20 million in Trancoso (BA) which belonged to Philippe de Nicolay Rothschild.

Tenda announced in January that it had R $ 2 billion in net sales in 2019. The construction company with a focus on nine metropolitan areas has 69 works in progress, more than half of what it had in the previous year. It only loses to MRV and Cyrela. The company - one of the main suppliers of the federal government's Minha Casa, Minha Vida program - has a share capital of R $ 1.1 billion. In 2018, it had a net profit of R $ 200 million . It has one of B3's 100 most traded assets.

INDIGENOUS POINTS 'SORRATEIRO' START OF WORKS
The Guarani people say that the construction company's action was sneaky. In December, according to the indigenous people, Tenda officials said that "isolated trees" would be cut down on February 8. But the action was brought forward. Activist Ana Flavia Carvalho told Jornal GGN that more than half of the trees were felled: “ They are remnants of the Atlantic Forest and the project justified being isolated trees, as if they were just eucalyptus. And this is not the case. It is an area full of native trees and animals ”.


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Guarani people warn of tree destruction in the region. (Photo: Reproduction)

According to indigenists, Convention 169 of the International Labor Organization (ILO) determines that no work less than ten kilometers away from an indigenous community can be started without prior consultation with the original people.

The city, however, approved the project. In an official note, the management Bruno Covas (PSDB) claims that the perimeter is not in an indigenous area and that the land is located in a Special Area of ​​Social Interest (Zeis), “so it should be destined, exclusively, to the construction of housing units for low-income families ”. The plan of the Municipal Secretariat for Green and Environment “envisages altogether the suppression of 528 tree specimens and environmental compensation with the planting of 549 seedlings on site”.

The Indigenous Missionary Council explains why the destruction of the forests structurally affects ethnicity:

- The Guarani Mbya are completely shaken and in mourning due to the illegal action of the Tenda, and manifest themselves in favor of the spirits of the forest, attacked and felled along with the trees that were cut down. Pico do Jaraguá is being devastated in the name of overwhelming progress and extermination. Forests are entities and spirits for strengthening indigenous peoples. For the Guarani Mbya, cutting down a tree is like toppling a relative. On that occasion 4 thousand were executed. A funeral ceremony will be held in the massacred area in the name of an appeal to Nhanderu, the creative god Guarani, for the evil and aggression against the spirits that protect the people of the forest.

In a note, Construtora Tenda "reaffirms its respect for the local community and emphasizes that all the necessary procedures were adopted for the legalization of the enterprise, with the approval of the competent bodies". The speech is aligned with that of the city hall: “The company also points out that, according to the São Paulo Municipality Master Plan, the area in question has an exclusive destination for the low-income population, which is the purpose of the construction. Tenda reinforces that it is at the disposal of the authorities and civil society for any clarification ”.

The indigenous people released a video about the conflict:



https://deolhonosruralistas.com.br/2020 ... ssion=true

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Re: The Long Ecological Revolution

Post by blindpig » Fri Feb 14, 2020 2:02 pm

Against the “Holy Climate Union”
saved in STATEMENTS on 28 DECEMBER, 2019 by EMANCIPACIÓN

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Today over a third of all speculative capital is already involved in projects related to renewable and clean energies. The same companies that recently falsified the pollution indicators in their diesel cars as well as the states that support them, now claim to lead a “movement” to “save the planet” from fossil fuels and climate change.

The greatest transfer of revenue from labour to capital since the last great war
For love of the climate, Humanity and Nature? On the contrary, because they see in the shift of technologies and infrastructures towards electric transport and clean power generation an opportunity for massive placement of invested capital at a time when there is a lack of profitable placements for a huge mass of accumulated capital, a lack which explains the negative interest rates. But to turn these investments profitable, it is not enough to have companies engaged in electric cars and windmills. There has to be a demand that buys the energy, the cars and the services they produce. And the truth is that both road transport and clean electricity generation are still more expensive that the older alternatives. Investments will not be profitable if there is no “state policy”, that is, subsidies to reduce investment risk, taxes both to shorten the cost distance between one power source and the other and to finance the extra costs of “transition” for the state, and regulations to prohibit, for example, the use of coal in power generation.

The change in the power, transport and agricultural production models entails the implementation of a technological shift. But it is crucial to understand that it is not technology per se that will magically enable accumulation, but the transfer of labour income to capital. Technology is purely instrumental and is developed not by the ingenuity of solitary researchers but by the demand and investment of self-serving capital. This is why new, supposedly more “sustainable” technologies are required to be, above all, more productive. This does not mean physical productivity, the amount of product obtained per hour of average work, but productivity for capital: the sum of profit produced by each hour of work contracted. That is why comprehensive state regulation is central to the “ecological transition”: taxes and regulations do not change the physical production capacity but do change the expected profit per hour of exploited social work.

This is the logic of every “technological revolution” in capitalism. The reason is not that capitalism “adapts to new technologies”, but that technologies are not considered viable if they do not increase productivity from the perspective of profit, that is, if they do not serve to increase the percentage of capital’s income over total production.

Capitalism is a system of exploitation of one class by another. Its purpose is not to produce cars and certainly not to safeguard the climate. Its only aim is to increase capital by producing and increasing exploitation at every production cycle. Under the promise of green and utopian digitally modeled urban landscapes, of silent non-polluting electric cars, lurks, as always, the sharp reality of the class struggle. All this global renewal of power sources, transport and industrial production infrastructures that they imagine capable of “restarting” the global cycle of capital is nothing but the greatest transfer of income from labour to capital since the Second World War.

A global ideological campaign
The surge of “yellow vests” in response to Macron’s “green transition law” revealed that “energy transition” policies were not going to be passively accepted by the population. Since then an overwhelming ideological campaign is being waged. First there were the attempts to extend all over Europe the children’s demonstrations organized by the Swedish state schools. From there, Greta Thunberg emerged as a world icon of a ” challenge to governments ” for ” concrete and urgent measures “. The same measures that were violently opposed on the streets by masses of workers and smallholders were denounced as lukewarm and even criticized by the participants of a ghostly “global climate general strike” that newspapers and TV stations around the world reported happening… elsewhere. Orson Wells and Orwell would have felt vindicated. Then the green campaign not only gained TV time until it became overwhelming but turned its focus increasingly to an apocalyptic message: climate change would lead to the extinction of the species within a generation. This is a false conclusion not supported at all by scientific consensus. But it reflected the sense of urgency that drives the bourgeoisie and is not “climatic” at all.

If technology is instrumental, ideology is even more so. Apocalyptic discourses are tools for imposing sacrifices on workers in pursuit of the “common good”, i.e., capital accumulation. The point is to present a situation of exception and alarm that justifies the cuts and the subjugation of the working class in a combined effort to produce new profitable destinations for fictitious and speculative capital so that this capital can evade – temporarily – the tendency to crisis.

A tainted green transition
This “green deal” not only involves a massive redistribution of income in favour of capital, it also increases the pressure exerted on imperialist conflicts. The “green transition” is unfeasible without natural gas and very difficult without uranium. The same people who are threatened with being cut off from trade with the big markets if “carbon footprints” start to be used with all the consequences as a non-tariff barrier, turn out to hold the key to the “transitional” energies that make the move that excludes them from big markets possible. Or at least these countries have the opportunity to fight for transitional energies. As if the cataclysms that accompany trade wars and push them towards militarization were not dangerous enough, the “green way out” imagined by capital will accelerate them even more. The scenario is no longer one of global industrial crisis and recession, trade war, imperialist tensions and increasingly direct attacks on living, retirement and working conditions. To all this must now be added industrial and transport restructuring and its immediate consequence: a new global drive towards imperialist conflict.

Against the “holy climate union”
The “green pact”, the “energy transition” and the “green new deal”, can hardly hide the fact that they are an integral part of capital’s response to the crisis. They are based on increased exploitation, reinforce the tendency towards generalized impoverishment and accelerate the slide towards widespread warfare.

The ecological campaign of fear advances among mystical extolling of extreme austerity falsely “in solidarity with the planet”. In any case, they are in solidarity with a capital that craves every “sacrifice” useful to its profitability. But nothing more. They stigmatize “consumption” because consumption is the social form by which under capitalism the satisfaction of workers’ needs is achieved. To make us feel guilty for consuming and fighting for more wages and defending our living conditions is to blame us for not letting ourselves be exploited more and more intensely.

Under the apocalyptic discourse and the threats of extinction of the species, they try to frame us in a “holy climate union”, to convince us that only by “closing ranks” with the bourgeoisie, by defending the performance of the national capital with new sacrifices, we will be able to “save the planet”. What we have to save ourselves from, by getting rid of it, is a capitalism that is already anti-historical, unnecessary and destructive, and that is not going to be less destructive, but more so, by changing its technological base and painting itself green.

In reality, the only thing that can transform, give solidarity and bring about the future is to affirm, before each demand of “sacrifices for the common good” of capital, our needs as workers, which are generic, universal human needs: living conditions, health, well-being, reduction of the working day, freedom to fight…

http://en.emancipacion.info/against-the ... ate-union/
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Re: The Long Ecological Revolution

Post by blindpig » Sun Apr 19, 2020 5:36 pm

ENVIRONMENTALISM

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Ideology that considers that the main historical contradiction is Humanity-Nature, or in certain versions, capitalism-Nature; proposing as an alternative a range of "reforms" ranging from "green capitalism" to "decrease".

Environmentalism as the ideology of "green" technological change
On one side of the ecological spectrum we would have all the tendencies that present the overcoming of one of these two contradictions as the product of a «technological change» that can be carried out within the system. The problem is that there is no technological change apart from social relations and therefore that it does not affect unequally the situation of the classes that define society. By making the centrality of the class struggle invisible to put environmental damage in its place, environmentalism forgets the necessarily reactionary meaning of any "ecological reform" under capitalism.

The change in the energy, transport and agricultural production model implies starting a technological change. But it is important to understand that it is not technology that would magically allow buoyancy to accumulate, but the transfer of income from labor to capital. The technology is purely instrumental and is developed not by the genius of lone researchers but by the demand and investments of interested capital. This is why the supposedly more "sustainable" new technologies are required to be, above all, more productive. They do not refer to physical productivity, to the amount of product obtained per hour of average work, but to productivity for capital: the amount of profit produced for each hour of labor contracted. This is why global state regulation is central to the "ecological transition": taxes and regulations do not change the physical capacity of production, but the expected profit per hour of exploited social work.

That is the logic of any "technological revolution" in capitalism. It is not that capitalism "adapts to new technologies", it is that technologies are not considered viable if they do not increase productivity from the perspective of profit, that is, if they do not serve to increase the percentage of capital income over the total production.

Capitalism is a system of exploitation of one class by another. Its objective is not to produce cars and, even less, to safeguard the climate. Its sole objective is to produce and increase exploitation with each cycle, increasing capital. Under the promise of green and utopian digitally modeled urban landscapes, of silent, non-polluting electric cars, there is as always the pungent reality of the class struggle. All this global renewal of energy, transport and industrial production infrastructures that they imagine capable of "restarting" the global cycle of capital, is nothing but the greatest transfer of income from labor to capital since the Second World War.

"Against the Sacred Climate Union", Emancipation statement.

Decrementalist environmentalism as a contemporary form of Malthusianism
Another wing of environmentalism, the so-called "extinctionist", "decreaseist" or "deep environmentalism", heir to the "Club of Rome" and neo-Malthusianism, with recognized stars such as Hardin and his famous " tragedy of the commons " (originally written like a racist pamphlet), it will insist again and again on the finite nature of natural resources to ensure a contradiction between them and the current volume of world population. Humanity would be nothing more than an uncontrollable predator species, a plague to contain or eradicate, as in the simple models of ecology classes.

The only alternative would be catastrophe or "decrease", implying a reduction that their own spokespersons estimate at 7/8 of the population. Unlike Malthus, they will try to explain their "sustainability" ratios and for this they will incur all kinds of fallacies. The best known: repeatedly forecasting an energy collapse due to insufficient oil on at least two occasions in the 2000s, and projecting from the global warming data an extinction of the species in 2050.

But the main fallacy of this increasingly numerous and media-promoted branch of environmentalism is that it equates industrialization with capitalism to reaffirm bourgeois morality in its crudest terms, those used by Malthus.

Malthus and bourgeois morality
The UK in the late 18th century was not the most conducive place for industrial enterprise. From the landowning and mercantile aristocracy to the peasants whose community morale had not yet been shattered under the most miserable poverty, they were an obstacle to the industrial bourgeoisie and the liberal luminaries. At the end of the century the Elizabethan "Poor Laws" that forced forced labor still exist, but also provided food and basic support to the large masses of poor people driven from the countryside by the mercantilist greed of primitive accumulation. Revolts against the price of bread occur periodically and the situation in France causes great concern among British elites. Following in Adam Smith's footsteps and closing the Smithian moral treatise below, Thomas Malthus proposes at the most opportune moment a new moral order that breaks with all of the above. Where Smith points out that theFree trade exchange laissez faire leads to the best of results thanks to accumulation, Malthus orders to put into operation what he calls the social "machine" cutting the Speenhamland system of aid and forcing the poor to work at any price to survive. Life is activity, and this activity can only be guaranteed by the threat of the evil of scarcity. All of Malthus's statistical work on the need to control the population, whose famous ratios he never demonstrates, serve as justification for the moral argument that occupies the last two chapters of the treaty.

Malthus began his theodicy with a critical analysis of human nature. As in the Aristotelian theory of movement, the natural state of humanity was rest. Men were "inert, slow and reluctant to work" it was the movement that needed an explanation. Some push was necessary to "awaken inert and chaotic matter in spirit, to sublimate the dust of the earth in soul; to cause an ethereal spark from the pile of clay. " This push was the physical and moral ills caused by the population law. To avoid pain, the men were active.

Avoiding evil, and pursuing good, seems to be the great duty and occupation of man; and this world seems to be peculiarly calculated to offer opportunities for the greatest efforts of this kind; and it is by this exercise, by this stimulation, that the mind is formed.

Men were by nature passive; the discomforts of life caused the movement. Evil was the driving force of the human kingdom. It was therefore the force behind civilization. Malthus confronted this potentially embarrassing problem by transforming it into an incentive theory. At the lowest level hunger or cold forced men to search for food and form a society of cultivators, at the highest levels "some of the noblest exercises of the human mind have been set in motion by the obligation to satisfy human needs ».

DL LeMahieu, "Malthus and the Theology of Scarcity"

To the horror of some of his contemporaries - and the rejoicing of others - Malthus not only tolerates but celebrates evil and scarcity as creative forces. Scarcity, as a guarantee of hunger and torture for workers, must be artificially maintained to ensure the operation of the great hydraulic accumulation machine: capitalism .

And then it is clear that a society constituted according to the most beautiful forms that the imagination can conceive, with benevolence as its driving principle, instead of self-interest and with each predisposition to the evil of its members corrected by reason and not force , would end, by the inevitable laws of nature and not by some original depravity of man, degenerating in a short time in a society governed by a plan not very different from the one that prevails in all the known states today; I mean, in a society divided into a class of owners and a class of workers, and with self-interest as the main mechanism of the great machine.

Thomas R. Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population 1798

Malthus will push back extensions to aid to the poor and become a figurehead of his day, influencing politicians on the islands and training Indian officials who will apply his principles of population control to the British colonies. Malthus and Bentham's morale will underpin all discussions on the laws of the poor and the formation of the new independent proletariat "free to sell its labor power":

The Poor Law Report of 1834, which summarized the results of the Royal Commission, was full of Malthusian language:

We have seen that one of the objectives to which the present administration of the Poor Laws tries to reach is to repel pro so much that law of nature by which the unpredictability or bad behavior of each man must fall on him and his family. The effect of this attempt has been to repel both the law by which each man and his family enjoy the benefits of their own prudence and virtue.

One of the main objectives of the new regime, the report stated was “the decrease in unplanned and spoiled marriages; thus stopping the increase in population ». Abolishing aid to able-bodied men and their families, the New Poor Law, says Dean, revealed his Malthusian goal of "making the ... independent worker solely responsible for the welfare of his wife and children."

James P. Huzel, "The Popularization of Malthus in Early Nineteenth Century England"

Guilt of workers and millenarianism
In the decimationist and extinctionist discourse, individual "unpredictability" has been replaced by collective unpredictability. The development bequeathed by ascending capitalism , from the massification of vaccinations to the growth of agrarian production, not to mention industrialization, would have fueled population growth "beyond the possibilities", "unsustainable". The only possible horizon would be to "decrease" that is, the mass destruction of productive forces with the resulting misery and genocide. They generously offer us that, to do it "little by little", through "transition economies", so that the responsibility of each family prevails and in the face of scarcity the birth rate falls drastically.

As in Malthus, the argument always begins with the prospect of an unappealable catastrophe produced by the growth of consumption. Consumption that would have grown wildly supposedly "in response" to the permanent dissatisfaction of the great social majorities. It is a technique of sectarian shock and blame applied to social communication. In reality, consumption is the form in a mercantile society that satisfies the needs of workers. By attacking its "consumerism" the Malthusianism of today puts the focus in the same place as its predecessors: the voracity and growth of the working classes is the main enemy of the social order. And if Malthus intended to channel - liberalism through - that impulse to growth towards proletarianizationUnder the harshest conditions, Neo-Malthusians simply propose "self-containment" and even more restriction of consumption to save a few in a Morris-like pre-industrial utopia ... that would have to be built now.

What is characteristic of environmentalism and original Malthusianism is the absurdity of its premises. Malthus, after all a pastor, was adamantly opposed to contraception and for him the fecundity of the species was not, but should be, a constant without historical changes. For environmentalists too. The fact is that what is known as «demographic transition», a marked drop in fertility with the economic development of the territories, does not fit with any of the premises of environmentalism. Humanity does not reproduce like rabbits in the rutting season. Much of the population "boom" in so-called "developing" countries is due to a drop in infant mortality thanks to a basic medical improvement that is not yet coupled with a drop in birth ... because families still live in poverty and need as many hands as possible to work (as well as restrictions on access to contraceptives). It is not that humans give us to maximize the number of children regardless of the state of our society. The supposed problem of "overpopulation" is the problem that a good part of humanity is in poverty and more paltry shortages due to capitalism, not to supposed natural tendencies to fill the planet with children. For Malthus this was an inevitable result of his reasoning, since his simple economic model foresaw that wages would not increase withaccumulation (error for which he ended up apologizing at the end of his life), due to which the workers were always going to suffer great shortages and try to reproduce as much as possible. Today the position according to which the consumption of workers must be restricted - it itself causes all the ills - is simply indefensible.

In reality, the discourse is reduced to three movements: threat of catastrophe (peak oil, climate change, extinction, etc.), blaming workers for making the use of resources "unsustainable" for consuming "too much" and exalting pauperization , which should be embraced as soon as possible and voluntarily. Few arguments could better represent what the decline of a mode of production means .

Because the fact is that all modes of production have generated similar movements in their decline. In Rome we discovered a growing popularity of eschatology since the crisis of the Republic: in the mystical cults of Isis, the esoteric -and literally castrating- cults of Ceres and Apis and even in a Hellenized Jewish sect with strong apocalyptic tendencies known as Christianity. , already become a religionOfficial and obligatory will still give mythological framework to the last sectarian movements of the decomposition of slavery, from the Gnostics to the Priscilianists. In the feudal crisis from the 12th century on, there will be no shortage of flagellants, adamites, joaquinistas ... an endless list of pauperizing, caste, penitent and increasingly violent sects that already prelude the millennialism of the Valencian Germanies or the English Puritans.

Today the Apocalypse is called extinction and the "city of god" ecovillage, a productive model that would only feed a seventh, perhaps an eighth, according to its own promoters, of the current world population. The bourgeois classes, linked to a system that no longer produces progress , are unable to imagine a capitalist future in which the entire species will fit. So they fantasize an impossible "backward movement" for the elect imposed by a catastrophe that would make it mandatory. They are right about one thing, there is no longer a future in which the development of Humanity is compatible with capitalism. Abundance goes on the other hand, communism .

Environmentalism as a moral problem
In all forms of environmentalism, including the so-called "ecosocialism" in all its variants, two characteristics coincide: the denial that the capitalism - proletariat contradiction is central or even points to the overcoming of capitalist social relations and the impossibility of imagining an abundant marketless society.

In other words, environmentalism directly attacks the two pillars of communist morality . Therefore, the result of any opportunistic approach , accepting, for example, that the prospect of the extinction of the species by an environmental disaster arises for the next decades, no matter how much capitalism is blamed for it, in addition to not being true, it can only be demoralizing.

There is no possible "common ground" between class interests and environmentalism in any form, which does not mean neglecting the environmental problems caused by capitalism.

https://nuevocurso.org/diccionario/ecologismo/

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Re: The Long Ecological Revolution

Post by blindpig » Wed Apr 22, 2020 2:01 pm

Unhappy Anniversary.

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Oil Pollution Found in Gulf of Mexico Fish 10 Years After Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill
By Ron Brackett16 hours agoweather.com
01:02
Oil Pollution from BP Spill Found in Thousands of Fish in Gulf
Toxic oil pollution has been detected in thousands of fish in the Gulf of Mexico, 10 years after the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill. The spill was the largest in U.S. history and released millions of gallons of oil into the ocean.
At a Glance
Researchers sampled more than 2,500 fish and found signs of exposure to oil in all of them.
The fish with the highest concentrations were found in the northern Gulf, where the spill occurred.
The highest levels were detected in yellowfin tuna, golden tilefish and red drum.

In the 10 years since the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, a team of researchers has sampled 2,503 fish representing 91 species, and found evidence of oil exposure in all of them.

The highest levels were detected in yellowfin tuna, golden tilefish and red drum, according to a study published recently in the journal Nature Scientific Reports. Levels were relatively low in snappers and groupers.

The Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded on April 20, 2010, killing 11 crew members. Over the next three months, more than 205 million gallons of oil spilled into the Gulf.


(MORE: 'Invisible Oil' From Deepwater Horizon Spread as Far as Texas and Key West)

From 2011 to 2018, scientists from the University of South Florida took fish from 359 locations in the Gulf to look for polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), considered the most toxic component of oil, in the bile of the fish. Bile stores waste products until they're excreted out of the fishes' bodies.

In the past, researchers assumed PAHs did not accumulate in fish bodies. Now they know the hydrocarbons can become reabsorbed, recirculated and recycled between the liver, bile and gastrointestinal tract. They can lead to lesions, cancer, mutations and birth defects, the study said.

Fish with the highest concentrations of PAH were found in the northern Gulf of Mexico, where the Deepwater Horizon spill occurred and home to much of the Gulf's oil drilling.

FILE - This April 21, 2010 file photo shows the Deepwater Horizon oil rig burning after an explosion in the Gulf of Mexico, off the southeast tip of Louisiana. Ten years after an oil rig explosion killed 11 workers and unleashed an environmental nightmare in the Gulf of Mexico, companies are drilling into deeper and deeper waters where the payoffs can be huge but the risks are greater than ever. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert, File)
The BP Deepwater Horizon oil rig burns on April 21, 2010, after an explosion in the Gulf of Mexico off the southeastern tip of Louisiana.
(AP Photo/Gerald Herbert, File)
The scientists say sediments on the bottom, where much of the oil settled, are churned up by storms and currents, and fish are re-exposed to the oil.

"We were quite surprised that among the most contaminated species was the fast-swimming yellowfin tuna as they are not found at the bottom of the ocean where most oil pollution in the Gulf occurs," lead author Erin Pulster, a researcher in USF’s College of Marine Science, said in a news release about the study. "Although water concentrations of PAHs can vary considerably, they are generally found at trace levels or below detection limits in the water column. So where is the oil pollution we detected in tunas coming from?"

USF pointed out that despite the study's findings, fish from the Gulf are rigorously tested for contaminants to ensure public safety and are safe to eat because oil contaminants in fish flesh are well below public health advisory levels.

"This was the first baseline study of its kind, and it's shocking that we haven't done this before, given the economic value of fisheries and petroleum extraction in the Gulf of Mexico," Steven Murawksi, head of the international research effort and professor of fisheries biology at the University of South Florida, said in the news release. "Literally all the fish that we've tested have some level of hydrocarbon; there are no pristine fish in this system."

https://weather.com/science/environment ... ears-later

Thanks Obama and the 'environmentally sensitive' Democratic Party. Perhaps one day justice will be served, in glasses of oil/dispersant cocktail. I cannot imagine the current regime doing worse than those scum whom the environmental NGOs champion.

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