The Long Ecological Revolution

[blindpig]

Ecocide, war and the “New American Century”
Originally published: Socialist Action on July 15, 2023 by Charlie Wilson (more by Socialist Action) (Posted Jul 21, 2023)

Ecocide is the deliberate destruction of an environment so that it can no longer sustain life.

The attempt by the United States to maintain its global domination and its fatally outmoded model of modernity for others to emulate could commit this in two ways.

(1)Ecological collapse through climate breakdown
(2)War

The former is already taking place and accelerating; providing a medium to long term prospect of civilisational collapse if we just carry on as we are. But it is also having an immediate and increasingly severe impact now and addressing it can’t be put off. The latter is a clear, present and growing danger built into the U.S. attempt to reassert its slipping economic grip through increased military aggression.

And the two ways are linked. The civil war that has devastated Syria since 2011 was partly caused by the mass displacement of rural communities into the cities by a prolonged drought that made farming impossible. The current El Nino is leading to a sharp upward spike in global temperatures that has seen heatwaves so severe that two workers in Milan and Texas have dropped dead in the street; heralding the prospect that capacity for outdoor work across the world could be cut 40% by mid century. These heatwaves are likely to lead to problems with harvests in the next eighteen months; which could produce famines in the most vulnerable areas, but are likely to lead to shortages and increased costs everywhere.

Even without the additional destruction caused by warfare, the ongoing normal functioning of capitalism is already committing ecocide on a planetary scale. This can be seen in the two thirds collapse of vertebrate wildlife species since 1970 (84% for freshwater species) and the similarly alarming drop in insect populations; on which plants, wild and cultivated, depend for pollination. The definition of a mass extinction is that 75% of species die out within two million years. While the decline in animal life since 1970 is in overall numbers rather than species, 69% in fifty years is terrifyingly fast.

Given that ecosystems rely on a complex web of diverse interactions to stay viable, all of this is pulling the web of life apart to a point that it is breaking in places. The replacement of the complex diversity of rain forests by palm oil monocultures, or soya farming, does enormous damage even before the residual forests degrade to savannah or desert.

This cannot be separated from economic viability either. According to an analysis by the Swiss Re Institute in 2020,

*Over half (55%) of global GDP, equal to USD 41.7 trillion , is dependent on high-functioning biodiversity and ecosystem services
*But “a staggering fifth of countries globally (20%) are at risk of their ecosystems collapsing due to a decline in biodiversity and related beneficial services

The analysis went further in assessing which countries have the highest proportion of degraded, fragile, vulnerable ecosystems. 39 countries have ecosystems in a fragile state on more than a third of their land—Malta, Israel, Cyprus, Bahrain and Kazakhstan have the lowest Biodiversity and Ecosystems Services (BES) ranking. The most degraded among the G20 economies are.

*South Africa 40% of land area is fragile
*Australia 32% fragile
*India 28% fragile
*Turkey 24% fragile
*Mexico 24% fragile

If South Africa, with 61 million people, or Australia, with 26 million, were to face partial or total ecological breakdown that would be disastrous enough; but if India, with 1.4 billion people, did, the global impact would be uncontainable.

Combine this with the impacts of global heating and we have a prospect of countries collapsing. Not all at once, but weakest links first.

The U.S. military assessment of the security implications of climate change posits large areas of Africa, Asia and the Middle East becoming unstable because of water shortages—and it is making contingency plans to ensure a supply of bottled water for U.S. forces they presume will intervene there. They also recognise that beyond a certain point, the stress on infrastructure of extreme weather events will not be containable, that social collapse, even in the United States, will follow infrastructure collapse, and the army itself will be called upon to take the place of a no longer functioning civil society, and will itself fall apart under the strain of trying to do so. Having sketched out this prospect, they also plan to be ready to intervene in parts of the Arctic; to take advantage of new sources of the fossil fuels, that are causing the climate crisis, once the melting ice sheets expose them. The cognitive dissonance is almost dizzying.

And the resources that are urgently needed to put limits on the increase in global temperatures, roughly $4 Trillion a year globally, are increasingly being diverted into military spending precisely by the countries with the greatest technological and economic capacity, led by the U.S. Instead of genuinely “leading the world”, the “West”, the “Global North”, the “International Community” (call them what you will) are putting their resources into sharply increasing their military capacity; when they already account for two thirds of global military expenditure. See Fig 1.

To unpack this.

*In 2021, NATO, the core military alliance of the Global North, already accounted for 55.8% of global military spending
*Other direct U.S. allies—with a mutual defence pact—accounted for another 6.3%

So, the direct U.S. centred military alliances account for three fifths of global military spending and yet they are now raising it further at unprecedented rates.

Specifically.

*The U.S. has raised military spending to $858 billion this year; up from $778 billion in 2020
*France has announced an increase from a projected E295 billion to E413 billion in the next seven years (an average of E59 billion a year)
*German spending is rising sharply, from E53 billion in 2021 to E100 billion in 2022 and is set to go further
*Japan aims to double its military spending by 2028 and is also debating whether to start deploying nuclear weapons
*The UK government’s aim is to increase military spending from 2.1% of GDP to 2.5% by 2030 even though it already has among the highest per capita military spends in the world

These are the world’s dominant imperial powers, acting in concert to sustain a “rules based international order” in which the rules are written in, and to suit, the Global North in general and Washington in particular. There are increasing tensions between them, as the particular benefits to Washington are imposing increasing costs on its subordinate allies, but this is a secondary contradiction.

The scale of the prioritisation of the military over environmental survival is measurable.

The United States spends more than 18 times as much on its military as it does on domestic green transition. The agreed U.S. military budget for 2023 is $858 billion. The investment in green transition earmarked by the Inflation Reduction Act is $369 billion between now and 2030. 858 multiplied by 8 years gives a total spend of $6864 billion by 2030. Divide that by the 369 billion to be invested in green transition and you get a ratio of 18.6 to 1. So, for every dollar spent on green transition in the United States, $18.60 is spent on preparing for war.

And this is seventy eight times the annual amount they have pledged to the Global South for climate impacts by 2024.

The contrast with China is instructive. China’s military budget for 2022 was $229 billion, according to Janes. The investment earmarked for green transition—for a carbon peak before 2030 and neutrality by 2060—is $450—570 billion a year, according to China Briefing. That gives a ratio of between just under 2 to 1 and 2.5 to 1: so, on average more than twice as much being invested in green transition as on the military.

That contrast is not much noted in the peace and climate movements inside the Global North, and it needs to be if we are to avoid being disoriented.

And that is simply the impact of military spending. The best that can be hoped for this expenditure is that it remains “dead weight” and doesn’t get used; because war itself is a form of ecocide. Nuclear war would not simply destroy human civilisation, but viable human life. John Bellamy Foster’s essay on Exterminism for the 21st Century is essential reading for anyone who has become blase about what might happen in such a war, or has argued themselves into a state of denial that “tactical” use of these weapons is viable, can be limited and not have a rapidly escalating dynamic to a global holocaust in a matter of hours.

U.S. nuclear war fighting doctrine aims for a massive “First Strike” to knock out retaliatory capacity in Russia or China. This is suicidal even if successful. As Bellamy Foster notes;

The outcome of a global thermonuclear exchange resulting in megafires in a hundred or more cities, it was discovered, could enormously reduce the average temperature of the earth by pushing soot and smoke into the atmosphere and blocking solar radiation. The climate would be altered much more abruptly and in the opposite direction from global warming, introducing a rapid global cooling causing global (or at least hemispheric) temperatures to drop by several degrees or even “several tens of degrees” Celsius in a matter of a month, with horrific consequences for life on Earth. Thus, although hundreds of millions, perhaps even a billion or more people, would be killed by the direct effects of a global thermonuclear exchange, the indirect effects would be far worse, annihilating most people on the planet, even those not caught up in the direct effects of nuclear firebombs, via starvation.

The drive to rearm goes along with a drive to provoke wars. We have seen this in Ukraine. We can see it in the South China Sea. Pushing back against the U.S. war drive must be a central task for the climate, as well as, peace movement. Concrete demands to measure the global military carbon footprint, include it in the Paris Agreement, for freezes and limits and agreed reductions are all necessary to pull ourselves back from the brink of being killed by war before climate breakdown has the time to finish the job; and help provide the resources to stop it doing so.

In any war, every side will cause environmental damage. Accusing one side of committing ecocide while the other is presumed to fire shells that have no impact, is logically absurd. The Commission set up with the support of Greta Thunberg and Mary Robinson that seeks to “hold Russia accountable” for all ecological damage in Ukriane, regardless of who causes it, is dangerous. It gives a politico-military blank cheque to NATO. It will help prolong the war.

The way to stop the ecocide being caused by the Ukraine war is to stop the war. Stop sending weaponry and start sending peace negotiators.

Imperialism’s failure to act on climate change and the wars it has unleashed have already destroyed so much of the environment that many species have become extinct. It is urgent that climate action is taken and wars stopped, otherwise the degraded environment will increasingly be unable to sustain life.

https://mronline.org/2023/07/21/ecocide ... n-century/

******

Africa is Burning! DRC in Environmental Crisis
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on JULY 20, 2023
Jody Roumain



“No matter what they say now about highways and hospitals and penicillin, whatever was done in those colonies was not done for the natives. And the Belgians may not know this, but the natives do. What happened was very simple.”

“You cannot walk into a country and stay there as long as the Europeans did and dig coal and iron and gold out of the earth and use it for yourself…By and by, it’s inevitable that someone will make a connection between the machines you have and the power you have.”

James Baldwin, 1961

Much attention is paid to the ongoing environmental crises engulfing the regions of South Asia, North America, and Europe, and rightfully so. The global climate crisis—as well as environmental injustice generally—is contiguous and virulent. But much less attention, however, is paid to the ongoing ecological crisis of Africa; the mother of all civilization. This is true as it pertains to scholarship, as well as in media coverage. Only 3.8% of global funding for climate change research is spent on topics concerning Africa, and 78% of such funding is given to institutions based in North America and Europe. Only 14.5% of such funding is given to institutions based in Africa. It is almost as if the ecological crisis of the present does not exist on the African continent.

Except it does. Despite barely contributing to global greenhouse gas emissions, Africa is the continent most susceptible to the impacts of climate change, and is warming faster than most other world regions. In addition to this, various communities in the regions of East Africa, North Africa, and Central Africa are suffering from drought and famine, whether through the intentional manipulation of embargoes or through environmental struggles. The mechanisms of capitalism’s industrial extraction are amplifying this duress. Neocolonialist extraction of African material resources is exhausting not only African labor, but also African land. For the purposes of clarifying the West’s relationship to the increased exhaustion of the African environment, this essay will take two specific examples in which the exploitation of labor is concerned with environmental degradation: West African cocoa and cobalt mining in the Democratic Republic of The Congo (DRC). These are not the only examples of labor exploitation and land degradation on the continent, but they are two particularly prominent examples.

The Cocoa Crop, Deforestation, and West Africa

One striking example of Western corporations exploiting Africa’s material resources and human labor can be found in the region of West Africa, Ghana and the Ivory Coast specifically, which contain two-thirds of the world’s cocoa supply. The farming and production of cocoa in the West African region contributes to a rapid deforestation of the land. In 2017, the equivalent to 40 football fields of tropical forests were lost each minute due to demand for cocoa, ​​palm oil, soybeans, timber, beef and rubber. The Ivory Coast, specifically, has lost 80% of its forests in the past 50 years. The deforestation of West African forestland reduces the ability of such forests to absorb dangerous materials such as carbon dioxide, generate rainfall, and also severely decreases the biodiversity of the region.


Figure of Ivory Coast’s Deforestation, Taken From Urban Forest BNP in Abidjan, by Kouadio Kouakou Ignace and Ripudaman Singh

In recent decades, the effects of global warming and deforestation have caused areas in West Africa to become hotter and dryer, making it harder for African cocoa farmers to effectively farm cocoa whilst simultaneously putting pressure on the environment. Chocolate has remained a highly valued commodity in the West, and large chocolate corporations such as Mars Inc., have refused to raise the inhumane wage given to cocoa farmers of roughly $5/day. West African labor essentially funds the $100 billion dollar industry of chocolate, and receives just a fraction of the revenue, at the expense of their own environmental degradation, and the exploitation of child labor.

“We do all the work manually and we get just a small amount of money,” one Côte d’Ivoirian farmer, Coulibaly Abou said. “When these kids do not go to school, they start asking us why we are not sending them. It is so hard for us.”

To be clear, the solution to change these conditions rely on the doctrines of pan-Africanism and scientific socialism. What needs to occur is:

(1) withholding African cocoa and labor from Western corporations, and organizing/protecting the farmers of this industry,

(2) ceasing the deforestation of West African lands and instituting reforestation projects, and

(3) the nationalization of the cocoa industry under a socialist state

This cannot be achieved without unification in the objectives of African governance. For example, if the government of Ghana were to cease participation in the cocoa industry, the Ivory Coast would be able to capitalize on this absence in participation, at the expense of Ghanaian workers, and vice versa. This is why it is imperative that Africans unify in their goals.

The DRC, Cobalt Mines, and Toxic Waste

It is almost commonly known at this point in time that the lithium-ion batteries that power Apple and Tesla products are made available due to the extremely grotesque and exploitative process of cobalt mining in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). The DRC produces an estimated 70% of the world’s cobalt, and most of it is extracted from one city—Kolwezi.

As demand has increasingly grown for lithium-ion batteries, the size of the cobalt mines in Kolwezi have risen with them. “The mines aren’t only growing around the city, they are often creeping into people’s neighborhoods,” an article by Victoria Beaule of ABC reads. “These satellite images of the west of the city reveal entire streets have disappeared over the last few years.”
GIF showing the growth of artisanal cobalt mines in Kolwezi. | via ABC

In addition to the cobalt industry’s gradual destruction of everyday citizens’ homes and neighborhoods, it is estimated that millions of trees have been cut to make way for cobalt mines, leading to deforestation. In addition, the toxic waste that is dumped through the mining of cobalt in these areas is contributing to a decreased biodiversity in the Congo: swaths of fish have disappeared from streams, and crops & worms that are vital to the fertility of the soil have died as well. The toil endured by humans’ bodies is no small cost either: the air quality that surrounds the mines is destructive enough to cause birth defects when parents live or work near the Congo’s cobalt mines.

Similar to the situation in the Ivory Coast & Ghana, the laborers of these cobalt mines, children and adults alike, suffer from unlivable wages, only receiving between $0.75 – $3 per day for the extremely dangerous labor they undertake day by day.

The solutions to the issues here are similar to the first, except the fact that modern mining can cause permanent landscape damage. In the continent of Africa, rich in resources, wealthy in human life, workers must unite. It is the responsibility of African peoples in the global north to fight against imperialism, both economic and political in nature. A united Socialist Africa is the only pathway for the continent to regain its righteous control over its natural materials & for African workers to maintain their integrity.

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2023/07/ ... al-crisis/

[blindpig]

IAEA report wrong: Nuclear scientist
Updated: 2023-07-24 07:07


Foreign journalists inspect the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant on Friday. Plans are afoot to release nuclear-contaminated water from the plant into the sea. KIMIMASA MAYAMA/GETTY IMAGES

ISLAMABAD — The International Atomic Energy Agency's report on Japan's planned discharge of nuclear-contaminated water into the Pacific Ocean is wrong, a Pakistani nuclear scientist says.

"I think it's a very favorable treatment to Japan by the IAEA," Zafar Koreshi, dean of graduate studies at Air University Pakistan, said in an interview with Xinhua News Agency.

"It ignored the interests of the local people who are affected by this and of the regional countries who are going to be affected by this."

So it is legitimate for China, South Korea and other regional countries to demand a joint mechanism to have their concerns addressed, he said.

The Fukushima disaster, like the one in Chernobyl in 1986, was a level-7 nuclear accident, the highest on the International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale.

Japan's plan to dump nuclear-contaminated water into the sea is extremely dangerous and harmful to fish, because it contains cesium, strontium, iodine and tritium, carbon-14 and cobalt 60, with some of them being radioactive, Koreshi said.

The Chernobyl accident caused a very high level of radiation damage to the fish, he said, and if people eat this kind of contaminated food, it would affect the health of millions of people for many years.

"It goes deep into the human DNA and affects medical structure inside our body, and is transmitted through generations," he said.

The biggest loser from Japan's nuclear-contaminated water discharge will be Japanese fishers, Japanese people and the entire country itself, Koreshi said.

The Pacific is a big ocean, in which the dumping of nuclear-contaminated water would potentially affect all the regional countries heavily dependent on the fish and plants that grow beneath the water, he said.

Koreshi urged Japan to immediately cease its dumping plan and work with its neighbors to conduct scientific research and simulations to study the potential effects on marine life.

http://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/20230 ... 17fec.html

******



The struggle for environmental justice in Africa
Originally published: Countercurrents on June 30, 2023 by Nnimmo Bassey (more by Countercurrents) | (Posted Jul 26, 2023)

This article was produced by Earth | Food | Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute. This article is an edited version of a speech the author delivered at Health of Mother Earth Foundation’s 10th Anniversary Conference with the theme ‘Advancing Environmental Justice in Africa’ held in June 2023 in Abuja, Nigeria.

The struggle for environmental justice in Africa is complex and broad. It is the continuation of the fight for the liberation of the continent and for socio-ecological transformation. It is a fact that the environment is our life: The soil, rivers, and air are not inanimate or lifeless entities. We are rooted and anchored in our environment. Our roots are sunk into our environment and that is where our nourishment comes from. We do not see the Earth and her bountiful gifts as items that must be exploited, transformed, consumed, or wasted. The understanding of the Earth as a living entity and not a dead thing warns that rapacious exploitation that disrupts her regenerative powers are acts of cruelty or ecocide.

We bear in mind that colonialism was erected on the right to subjugate, erase, or diminish the right to life and the right to the unfettered cultural expression of the colonized. In particular, the colonized were dehumanized and transformed into zombies working for the benefit of the colonial powers. Ecological pillage was permitted as long as it benefited the colonizers. This ethos has persisted and manifests in diverse forms. Grand theft by the colonial forces was seen as entrepreneurship. Genocide was overlooked as mere conquest. Slavery was seen as commerce. Extractivism was to be pursued relentlessly as any element left unexploited was considered a waste. What could be wasted with no compunction was life. So most things had to die. The civilizers were purveyors of death. Death of individuals. Death of ecosystems.

Thus, today, people still ask: What would we do with the crude oil or fossil gas in our soil if we do not exploit them? In other words, how could we end poverty if we do not destroy our environment and grab all it could be forced to yield? We tolerate deforestation, and unregulated industrial fishing, and run a biosafety regulation system that promotes the introduction of needless genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and by doing so, endanger our biodiversity and compromise our environment and food systems.

Plunder is presented as inescapable and desired under the cloak of foreign investment. Political leaders in despoiled regions offer ease of doing business, tax holidays, sundry lax rules, and other neocolonial governance policies.

The reign of exploitation and consumption without responsibility has driven Africa and indeed the world to the brink. The current civilization of death seeks ready investment in destruction through warfare and extractivism rather than in building resilience and adapting to the environmental changes that result from corporate and imperial misadventures.

We are in a reign in which condescension is the hallmark of multilateralism. The collective action needed to tackle global warming has been reduced to puny “nationally determined contributions” that add up to nothing. Rather than recognizing and paying a clear climate debt, we expend energy negotiating a loss and damage regime to be packaged as a humanitarian gesture. Pray, who negotiates what is offered as charity?

Today, Africa is facing multiple ecological challenges. All of these have resulted from the actions of entities that have seen the continent as a sacrificial zone. While the world has come to the conclusion that there must be an urgent shift from dependence on fossil fuels, we are seeing massive investments for the extraction of petroleum resources on the continent. And we must say that this investment comes with related infrastructure for the export of these resources out of the continent in a crass colonial pattern. A mere 1 percent of the labor force in the extractive sector in Africa are Africans. A mere 5 percent of investment in the sector is in Africa. More than 85 percent of the continent’s fossil gas infrastructure is for export purposes.

The shift to renewable energy brings the same old challenges to Africa. Extraction of critical minerals for renewable energy is done without prior consultation with and consent of our people. The continent’s environment is being degraded just as it has been with the extraction of oil, gas, gold, diamond, nickel, cobalt, and other solid minerals. The array of solar panels and wind turbines could well become markers of crime scenes if precautionary measures are not taken now.

Are we against renewable energy? No. They provide the best pathway toward ending the energy deficit on the continent. However, this should be pursued through discrete, autonomous, and socialized ownership schemes.

While the world knows that we must rebuild our biodiversity, what we see is the push towards more deforestation in Africa and for monoculture agriculture, all of which are against our best interest and that of the world. A sore issue, land grabbing has not disappeared with the coming innovations.

As Chinua Achebe writes in his classic 1958 book Things Fall Apart about Eneke the bird, “Since men have learned to shoot without missing, he has learned to fly without perching.” For us, until the despoilers of our environment halt their destructive acts, we will intensify our resistance and never give in to their designs. We believe this conference will not only break the yoke of colonialism but will also puncture the hold of coloniality. Our book, Politics of Turbulent Waters, is one of the tools toward these ends.

Every African nation should:

(1)Commit to issuing an annual State of Environment Report to lay out the situation of things in their territories.
{2}End destructive extraction no matter the appeal of capital.
(3)Demand climate debt for centuries of ecological exploitation and harm.
(4)Require remediation, restoration of all degraded territories, and pay reparations to direct victims or their heirs.
(5)Support and promote food sovereignty including by adopting agroecology.
(6)Adopt and promote African cultural tools and philosophies for the holistic tackling of ecological challenges and for the healing and well-being of our people and communities.
(7)Promote and provide renewable energy in a democratized manner.
(8)Recognize our right to water, treat it as a public good, and halt and reverse its privatization.
(9)Recognize the rights of Mother Earth and codify Ecocide as a crime akin to genocide, war crimes, and other unusual crimes.
(10)Ensure that all Africans enjoy the right to live in a safe and satisfactory environment suitable for their progress as enshrined in the African Charter on Peoples and Human Rights.

https://mronline.org/2023/07/26/the-str ... in-africa/

*****

Decades of Public Messages about Recycling in the US Have Crowded Out More Sustainable Ways to Manage Waste
Posted on July 26, 2023 by Yves Smith

Yves here. Those who remember Jerri-Lynn Scofield’s work on the war on plastic and fast fashion may recall her discussing how some of the countries she visited often, such as Turkiye and India, did vastly less in the way of packaging of goods, and that it was also typical for consumers to bring their own carry bags and even collapsable cups for buying drinks. I cringe particularly when I buy electronic products which seem to be housed in big thick plastic shells. And then it’s frustrating for packaging that does lend itself to recycling, like aluminum cans, when the locals seem to have given up on it.

By Michaela Barnett, Founder, KnoxFill, University of Virginia; Leidy Klotz, Associate Professor of Engineering and Co-Director, Convergent Behavioral Science Initiative, University of Virginia; Patrick I. Hancock, Postdoctoral fellow, University of Virginia, and Shahzeen Attari, Professor of Public and Environmental Affairs, Indiana University. Originally published at The Conversation

You’ve just finished a cup of coffee at your favorite cafe. Now you’re facing a trash bin, a recycling bin and a compost bin. What’s the most planet-friendly thing to do with your cup?


Many of us would opt for the recycling bin – but that’s often the wrong choice. In order to hold liquids, most paper coffee cups are made with a thin plastic lining, which makes separating these materials and recycling them difficult.

In fact, the most sustainable option isn’t available at the trash bin. It happens earlier, before you’re handed a disposable cup in the first place.

In our research on waste behavior, sustainability, engineering design and decision making, we examine what U.S. residents understand about the efficacy of different waste management strategies and which of those strategies they prefer. In two nationwide surveys in the U.S. that we conducted in October 2019 and March 2022, we found that people overlook waste reduction and reuse in favor of recycling. We call this tendency recycling bias and reduction neglect.

Our results show that a decadeslong effort to educate the U.S. public about recycling has succeeded in some ways but failed in others. These efforts have made recycling an option that consumers see as important – but to the detriment of more sustainable options. And it has not made people more effective recyclers.



Recycling rules vary widely across the U.S., leaving consumers to figure out what to do.

A Global Waste Crisis

Experts and advocates widely agree that humans are generating waste worldwide at levels that are unmanageable and unsustainable. Microplastics are polluting the Earth’s most remote regions and amassing in the bodies of humans and animals.

Producing and disposing of goods is a major source of greenhouse gas emissions and a public health threat, especially for vulnerable communities that receive large quantities of waste. New research suggests that even when plastic does get recycled, it produces staggering amounts of microplastic pollution.

Given the scope and urgency of this problem, in June 2023 the United Nations convened talks with government representatives from around the globe to begin drafting a legally binding pact aimed at stemming harmful plastic waste. Meanwhile, many U.S. cities and states are banning single-use plastic products or restricting their use.

https://theconversation.com/decades-of- ... ste-208924

On March 30, 2023, the UN declared the first International Day of Zero Waste to raise awareness of the importance of zero waste and responsible consumption and production.

Upstream and Downstream Solutions

Experts have long recommended tackling the waste problem by prioritizing source reduction strategies that prevent the creation of waste in the first place, rather than seeking to manage and mitigate its impact later. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and other prominent environmental organizations like the U.N. Environment Programme use a framework called the waste management hierarchy that ranks strategies from most to least environmentally preferred.


The U.S. EPA’s current waste management hierarchy (left, with parenthetical explanations by Michaela Barnett, et al.), and a visual depiction of the three R’s framework (right). Michaela Barnett, et al., CC BY-ND

The familiar waste management hierarchy urges people to “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle,” in that order. Creating items that can be recycled is better from a sustainability perspective than burning them in an incinerator or burying them in a landfill, but it still consumes energy and resources. In contrast, reducing waste generation conserves natural resources and avoids other negative environmental impacts throughout a product’s life.

R’s Out of Place

In our surveys, participants completed a series of questions and tasks that elicited their views of different waste strategies. In response to open-ended questions about the most effective way to reduce landfill waste or solve environmental issues associated with waste, participants overwhelmingly cited recycling and other downstream strategies.

We also asked people to rank the four strategies of the Environmental Protection Agency’s waste management hierarchy from most to least environmentally preferred. In that order, they include source reduction and reuse; recycling and composting; energy recovery, such as burning trash to generate energy; and treatment and disposal, typically in a landfill. More than three out of four participants (78%) ordered the strategies incorrectly.

When they were asked to rank the reduce/reuse/recycle options in the same way, participants fared somewhat better, but nearly half (46%) still misordered the popular phrase.

Finally, we asked participants to choose between just two options – waste prevention and recycling. This time, over 80% of participants understood that preventing waste was much better than recycling.


Recycling Badly

While our participants defaulted to recycling as a waste management strategy, they did not execute it very well.

This isn’t surprising, since the current U.S. recycling system puts the onus on consumers to separate recyclable materials and keep contaminants out of the bin. There is a lot of variation in what can be recycled from community to community, and this standard can change frequently as new products are introduced and markets for recycled materials shift.

Our second study asked participants to sort common consumer goods into virtual recycling, compost and trash bins and then say how confident they were in their choices. Many people placed common recycling contaminants, including plastic bags (58%), disposable coffee cups (46%) and light bulbs (26%), erroneously – and often confidently – in the virtual recycling bins. For a few materials, such as cardboard and aluminum foil, the correct answer can vary depending on the capacities of local waste management systems.

(Interactive chart at link.)

This is known as wishcycling – placing nonrecyclable items in the recycling stream in the hope or belief that they will be recycled. Wishcycling creates additional costs and problems for recyclers, who have to sort the materials, and sometimes results in otherwise recyclable materials being landfilled or incinerated instead.

Although our participants were strongly biased toward recycling, they weren’t confident that it would work. Participants in our first survey were asked to estimate what fraction of plastic has been recycled since plastic production began. According to a widely cited estimate, the answer is just 9%. Our respondents thought that 25% of plastic had been recycled – more than expert estimates but still a low amount. And they correctly reasoned that a majority of it has ended up in landfills and the environment.

Empowering Consumers To Cut Waste

Post-consumer waste is the result of a long supply chain with environmental impacts at every stage. However, U.S. policy and corporate discourse focuses on consumers as the main source of waste, as implied by the term “post-consumer waste.”

Other approaches put more responsibility on producers by requiring them to take back their products for disposal, cover recycling costs and design and produce goods that are easy to recycle effectively. These approaches are used in some sectors in the U.S., including lead-acid car batteries and consumer electronics, but they are largely voluntary or mandated at the state and local level.

(Chart at linl.)

When we asked participants in our second study where change could have the most impact and where they felt they could have the most impact as individuals, they correctly focused on upstream interventions. But they felt they could only affect the system through what they chose to purchase and how they subsequently disposed of it – in other words, acting as consumers, not as citizens.

As waste-related pollution accumulates worldwide, corporations continue to shame and blame consumers rather than reducing the amount of disposable products they create. In our view, recycling is not a get-out-of-jail-free card for overproducing and consuming goods, and it is time that the U.S. stopped treating it as such.

This entry was posted in Doomsday scenarios, Environment, Guest Post, Media watch, Politics, Regulations and regulators on July 26, 2023 by Yves Smith.

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2023/07 ... waste.html

How “Big Ag” Pollutes America’s Water, and Makes Money Doing It
Posted on July 24, 2023 by Yves Smith

Yves here. Among other things, this post illustrates how much inertia drives business behavior (and even small farmers are businesses). Many operations would rather stick with settled practices, even when as shown here, they result in waste, undue cost, and damage to critical resources, here water.

By Keith Schneider, a former New York Times national correspondent, and senior editor for Circle of Blue who has reported on the contest for energy, food, and water in the era of climate change from six continents. Originally co-published at the New Lede with Circle of Blue, and was made possible and also co-published by the Alicia Patterson Foundation

It’s been 33 years since an Iowa State University agronomist named Fred Blackmer thought he’d struck gold for Midwestern corn farmers. Using a fairly simple three-step method, Blackmer developed an analytical tool that could accurately tell farmers exactly how much fertilizer their fields needed to produce abundant harvests each season.


The analytics Blackmer perfected showed not only how much fertilizer the corn crops would need to meet production targets, but also exposed how much could be wasted. Blackmer ultimately determined that farmers were applying a staggering 500 million excess pounds of nitrogen each year, a practice that not only wasted farmers’ money but also wreaked havoc on the environment as the nitrogen not taken up by plants drained from farm fields to contaminate rivers, lakes, and streams.

Despite what Blacker saw as obvious benefits to producers, not to mention the environment, his method failed to gain significant traction in farm country. Farmer allegiance to the excessive fertilizing practices pushed by the so-called “Big Ag” industry and aligned academic institutions left Blackmer’s common sense approach on a shelf gathering dust. He died in 2006.

State and federal data now show that since 1990, nitrogen spread on fields in Iowa and nine other major US corn-growing states has increased 26%, with more nitrogen than ever pouring off the land and polluting US waters. Demand for corn is high, both to supply ethanol refineries and to feed industrial livestock operations that add to water contamination themselves through manure runoff, according to the US Department of Agriculture.

In Iowa alone, according to state research, farmers apply about 2 billion pounds of commercial nitrogen annually to corn fields, and much of it is ending up in waterways that flow all the way to the Gulf of Mexico, worsening the conditions in a 6,500-square-mile “dead zone” where the waters are so oxygen-deprived that they can’t sustain marine life. Iowa contributes almost a third of the nitrogen scientists say causes the dead zone.

“Ground Zero”
“Iowa is sort of ground zero for the interface between ag and environment,” said Matt Liebman, a former colleague of Fred Blackmer’s who retired as a professor of agronomy at Iowa State University (ISU) in 2021.

“There’s a lot of money involved. The people who sell inputs and the people who process and distribute commodities, livestock and crops are very interested in making sure that the system is arranged so that money flows in particular ways,” Liebman said. “One side is real small and the other side is very well funded. It can get pretty ugly.”

In Iowa, as in other corn-growing states, many farmers often apply nitrogen in quantities not necessarily aligned with crop needs but in amounts designed to overload the soil in case heavy rains wash away needed nutrients. Farmers will apply fertilizer to fallow fields in fall when there is nothing growing, hoping the ground will absorb and hold on to the nutrients, and then spread fertilizer again on the same fields in the spring. The goal is to maximize yield – how much corn they can produce per acre.

A 2014 ISU farmer survey underscored how dependent growers are on over-applying fertilizer. “The perceived economic risks of under-application are high,” the survey reported. “These results likely reflect a reality that the practice of “insurance” over-application is simply a part of staying in business.”

In contrast, Blackmer’s research showed that applying more fertilizer than plants needed had no effect on yield. “What we’ve found is that farmers can substantially reduce their average rates of fertilization and actually end up with higher yields,” he said in a 2002 interview with an Iowa media outlet.

Blackmer also recognized that over-fertilizing was causing an ecological calamity. “What we’re finding is some farmers can lose 70, 80 or 90% of what they put down. One of the most surprising things is many times these farmers don’t even know that they have lost it,” Blackmer added.

A Simple Concept

Blackmer’s “late spring nitrate test” was simple in concept. His test focused on one essential data point: the optimum amount of nitrogen in soil to grow the most corn. His science showed that optimum soil concentration is 20 to 25 parts per million.

Blackmer developed three steps to get there. First, he took soil samples from farm fields, which typically showed background nitrogen levels at under 10 parts million. Second, he developed calculations to add fertilizer in precise amounts to increase soil nitrogen concentrations to the optimum level and sustain it to meet the farmers’ yield goal, whether it was 150, 200 or 250 bushels per acre.

Then he recruited farmers to apply a little bit of fertilizer at planting and a precisely measured volume of fertilizer at least 30 days later, when fast-growing plants were 6 to 12 inches tall. In most cases the test results indicated farmers should spread 60 pounds per acre to grow 150 bushels per acre, or as much as 80 pounds per acre to achieve 250 bu/acre of corn. Corn growers typically apply double that amount.

Among the farmers that experimented with Blackmer’s nitrate test, was Larry Neppl, an Iowa corn grower who saw firsthand that that applying 60 pounds of nitrogen per acre on part of his crop translated to better production than applying double that amount.

“It told me we did not need that extra nitrogen,” Neppl said.

The amount of money wasted by farmers on unneeded fertilizer, at the current price of $1,100 per ton, is estimated at over $400 million annually.

But the over-fertilization of US corn country is not only costly for farmers. The United States has spent over $500 million since 1997 to reduce the expanse of the ocean dead zone that is fed in large part by the nitrogen contamination flowing from Iowa and the other Corn Belt states.

That same tide of nutrients is also expensive for local and state governments with fertilizer-related contamination affecting more than 7,000 drinking water wells in Iowa and an estimated 30,000 private wells in Minnesota, 42,000 in Wisconsin, and thousands more in Illinois, Nebraska, and Missouri. Corn Belt cities are forced to spend tens of millions of dollars and raise residential and business water rates in order to drill deeper wells or install and maintain nitrate removal and filtration systems to protect municipal drinking water.

There is also a cost to human health. The nitrates from the fertilizers also are implicated in the rising rates of cancer in the Corn Belt. In Nebraska scientists have linked exposure to nitrates to a number of soft tissue malignancies. Nebraska has one of the highest rates of pediatric cancers in the US. Iowa announced in February that it now ranks second in the incidence of cancer, and is the only state where incidences increased from 2015 to 2019.

“The heart of what is causing all of this is a cropping system and an economy that is inherently polluting,” said Kamyar Enshayen, director of the Center for Energy and Environmental Education at the University of Northern Iowa, “It’s not something a conscientious farmer can fix. We have all these incentives coming in to keep doing more of this.”

Print Friendly, PDF & Email
This entry was posted in Doomsday scenarios, Environment, Guest Post on July 24, 2023 by Yves Smith.

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2023/07 ... ng-it.html

It's the capitalism.

[blindpig]

Another northern summer of climate catastrophe
Originally published: Red Flag on July 29, 2023 by Nick Brown (more by Red Flag) | (Posted Aug 02, 2023)

“This could be the coolest summer of the rest of your life”, reads the headline of a recent Vox article, posted on 6 July, the same day the Earth experienced its hottest day ever according to the U.S. National Center for Environmental Prediction. The symptoms of global warming are appearing everywhere.

Canada is experiencing a wildfire season like never before. Huge blazes have reduced more than 10 million hectares of forest to ash. They have surpassed the North American record of almost 2 million hectares destroyed during the 2020 Californian fires. More than 120,000 people have been forced to evacuate their homes under a blanket of smoke.

The fires began to appear as early as May this year. Summer as we know it is getting longer, keeping the soil and the fallen plant debris drier for longer and creating huge loads of tinder.

There was no reprieve across the Atlantic as the heatwave hit Europe. Ground temperatures of up to 60C have been recorded in some locations across Spain. Nine countries across the Mediterranean are now ablaze.

Last year, an EU study estimated that more than 60,000 people across Europe died due to heat. This year is likely to be even worse. The vulnerable will be particularly at risk—the elderly and those who cannot afford to keep the air conditioning running.

The changing climate is not just producing heatwaves, but weather extremes. Residents of Italy’s Emilia-Romagna region are only just recovering from severe flooding, which claimed fourteen lives and left 36,000 people homeless.

“Six months’ worth of rain fell within 36 hours across Emilia-Romagna, one of Italy’s most important agricultural regions”, the Guardian reported.

The floods were preceded by a drought that had dried out the land, reducing its capacity to absorb water. More than 305 landslides were caused by the latest floods, which in turn either damaged or closed off 500 roads.

Yet, in the face of this catastrophe, the so-called leaders of our society—politicians, billionaires and government bureaucrats—seem to be on another planet. According to a 2021 Al Jazeera investigation, approximately 200,000km of oil and gas pipelines are planned for construction globally in coming years—costing a staggering USD$1 trillion.

There is too much money to be made from fossil fuels for those in charge to change course. The “big five” oil and gas companies—Exxon, Chevron, Shell, BP and TotalEnergies—made a combined profit of USD$200 billion last year alone. The rest of the industry made another USD$200 billion. For capitalists there is a relentless drive to “grow the business”. Apparently, USD$55.7 billion last year—or around USD$6.3 million profit taken every hour—was not enough for Exxon.

There are better ways to spend $400 billion, such as transitioning to renewables or repairing ailing healthcare systems. Instead, the money is going straight into the pockets of the wealthiest in our society to fund their private jet and super yacht acquisitions.

The entire global system of capitalism relies on the extraction of oil and natural gas to keep the wheels of profit turning. It’s not only the sale of these carbon-emitting resources, but they also provide the fuel for almost every other industry.

Perversely there are opportunities to profiteer from the changing climate. The latest boom in the industry has been north of the Arctic Circle, where permafrost, or soil that is usually permanently frozen, is rapidly melting due to rising temperatures. In 2008, the U.S. Geological Survey estimated that 13 percent of the world’s undiscovered oil and 30 percent of the undiscovered gas are in the Arctic region.

The changing Arctic landscape is an ecological disaster, but it is stimulating the expansion of fossil fuel projects in the U.S., Canada, Russia and Scandinavia. Projects such as ConocoPhillips’ Willow 30-year oil drilling lease or the new $45 billion LNG megaproject in British Columbia, green lit by Biden and Canadian PM Justin Trudeau, seek to take advantage of the new opportunities opened up by collapsing ecosystems.

The grotesque logic could not be clearer. Amid an ecological crisis of its own making, and which threatens the existence of human society as we know it, capitalism continues to profiteer even from the symptoms of the crisis.

https://mronline.org/2023/08/02/another ... tastrophe/



The eco collapse we were warned about has begun
Originally published: The Bullet on July 30, 2023 by José Seoane (more by The Bullet) (Posted Aug 02, 2023)

This article was produced by Globetrotter.

In 2023, different climatic anomalies have been recorded that set new historical records in the tragic progression of climate change at the global level. Thus, in June, the surface temperature in the North Atlantic reached the maximum increase of 1.3 degrees Celsius with respect to preindustrial values. In a similar direction—although in lower values—the average temperature of the seas at the global level increased. On the other hand, the retraction of Antarctic ice reached a new limit, reaching the historical decrease of 2016, but several months earlier in the middle of the cold season.

The combination of these records has led scientists who follow these processes to warn of the danger of a profound change in the currents that regulate temperature and life in the oceans and globally. The heat waves recorded on the coasts of a large part of the world—in Ireland, Mexico, Ecuador, Japan, Mauritania, and Iceland—may, in turn, be proof of this.

These phenomena, of course, are not limited to the seas. On Thursday, July 6, the global air temperature (measured at two meters above the ground) reached 17.23 degrees Celsius for the first time in the history of the last centuries, 1.68 degrees Celsius higher than preindustrial values; last June was already the warmest month in history. Meanwhile, temperatures on the continents, particularly in the North, also broke records: 40 degrees Celsius in Siberia, 50 degrees Celsius in Mexico, the warmest June in England in the historical series that began in 1884.

Higher Temperatures and Droughts
And its counterpart, droughts, such as the one plaguing Uruguay, where the shortage of fresh water since May has forced the increasing use of brackish water sources, making tap water undrinkable for the inhabitants of the Montevideo metropolitan area, where 60 percent of the country’s population is concentrated. This is a drought that, if it continues, could leave this region of the country without drinking water, making it the first city in the world to suffer such a catastrophe.

But the stifling heat and the droughts also bring with them voracious fires, such as the boreal forest fire that has been raging across Canada for weeks, with more than 500 outbreaks scattered in different regions of the country, many of them uncontrollable, and the widespread images of an apocalyptic New York darkened and stained red under a blanket of ashes.

This accumulation of tragic evidence, against all the denialist narratives, makes it undeniable that the climate crisis is already here, among us. It also indicates the absolute failure of the policies and initiatives adopted to reduce the emission or presence of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. In this direction, in May of 2023, the levels of carbon dioxide (CO2) measured at NOAA’s global reference observatory in Hawaii reached an all-time high of 424 parts per million (ppm), becoming more than 50 percent higher than before the beginning of the industrial era and, those of the period January—May 2023, 0.3 percent higher than those of the same period of 2022 and 1.6 percent compared to that of 2019. According to the latest report of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the global surface temperature has risen faster since 1970 than in any other 50-year period for at least the last 2,000 years, the same period in which international agreements and national initiatives to combat the causes of climate change were deployed. The failure of these policies is also reflected, in our present, in the persistence and strength of a fossil capitalism and its plundering and socio-environmental destruction.

Not only have these so-called mitigation policies failed, but also the so-called adaptation policies aimed at minimizing the foreseeable impacts of climate change are weak or even absent.

In the same vein, the annual report of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO, Global Annual to Decadal Climate Update) released in May 2023 warned that it is very likely (66 percent probability) that the annual average global temperature will exceed 1.5 degrees Celsius in at least one year of the next five years (2023-2027), it is possible (32 percent probability) that the average temperature will exceed 1.5 degrees Celsius, and it is almost certain (98 percent probability) that at least one of the next five years, as well as the five-year period as a whole, will be the warmest on record; The IPCC has estimated serious consequences if this temperature is exceeded permanently.

El Niño
How close to this point will the arrival of the El Niño phenomenon place us this year and possibly in the coming years? El Niño is an event of climatic origin that expresses itself in the warming of the eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean and manifests itself in cycles of between three and eight years. With antecedents in the 19th century, in 1924 climatologist Gilbert Walker coined the term “Southern Oscillation” to identify it and in 1969 meteorologist Jacob Bjerknes suggested that this unusual warming in the eastern Pacific could unbalance the trade winds and increase the warm waters toward the east, that is, toward the intertropical coasts of South America.

But this is not simply a traditional meteorological phenomenon that recurs in irregular annual periods. It is not a natural phenomenon; however many attempts are made, time and again, to make invisible or deny its social causes. On the contrary, in recent decades, the dynamics of the climate crisis have increased both in frequency and intensity. Already in early 2023, the third continuous La Niña episode concluded, the third time since 1950 that it has extended over three years and with increasing intensity. Likewise, in 2016, El Niño led to the average temperature record reached by the planet. And different scientists estimate today that this Super El Niño may be repeated today with unknown consequences given the levels of greenhouse gases and the dynamics of the current climate crisis.

The banners of a change inspired by social and climate justice and the effective paths of this socio-ecological transition raised by popular movements are becoming more imperative and urgent today. It is possible to propose an emergency popular mitigation and adaptation plan. But to make these alternatives socially audible, to break with the ecological blindness that wants to impose itself, it is first necessary to break the epistemological construction that wants to inscribe these catastrophes, repeatedly and persistently, in a world of supposedly pure nature, in a presumably external field, alien and outside human social control.

This is a matrix of naturalization that, while excluding social groups and the mode of socioeconomic organization from any responsibility for the current crises, wants to turn them into unpredictable and unknowable events that only leave the option of resignation, religious alienation, or individual resilience. The questioning of these views is inscribed not only in the discourses but also in the practices and emotions, in responding to the catastrophe with the (re)construction of bonds and values of affectivity, collectivity, and solidarity—indispensable supports for emancipatory change.

https://mronline.org/2023/08/02/the-eco ... has-begun/

All policies are bound to fail unless they make the rich richer. Capitalism is doom.

******

Energy Destinies – Part 8: Pathways
Posted on August 3, 2023 by Yves Smith

Yves here. In his penultimate post in his series on the prospects for success in moving to new energy sources, Satyajit Das noted that most green energy programs assumed energy use drop by roughly 25%, and why history and trends suggested that that premise was very sketchy. Here, he gives a more complete discussion of the potential for demand reduction. He also provides a taxonomy of the overlapping phases of responses. Some cynics speculate that what looks like incompetence is actually a covert effort to curb energy uses. For instance, I gather that a right wing trope is that widespread US flight cancellations are to deter consumer air travel.

Das asked me to put this thank you at the top:

The author would like to thank readers and commentators, especially
engineers and scientists whose perceptive analysis on technical issues was
most helpful.

By Satyajit Das, a former banker and author of numerous works on derivatives and several general titles: Traders, Guns & Money: Knowns and Unknowns in the Dazzling World of Derivatives (2006 and 2010), Extreme Money: The Masters of the Universe and the Cult of Risk (2011), A Banquet of Consequences RELOADED (2021) and Fortune’s Fool: Australia’s Choices (2022)

Abundant and cheap power is one of the foundations of modern civilisation and economies. Current changes in energy markets are perhaps the most significant for a long time. It has implications for society in the broadest sense. Energy Destinies is a multi-part series examining the role of energy, demand and supply dynamics, the shift to renewables, the transition, its relationship to emissions and possible pathways Parts 1, 2, 3,, 4, 5 and 6 looked at patterns of demand and supply over time, renewable sources, energy storage, economics of renewables, the energy transition and the inter-action between energy policy and emissions. The last two parts outline the energy endgame. Part 7 examined the framework that will shape events. The final part looks at possible trajectories.

The world simultaneously faces two problems – dwindling fossil fuels and emissions. These can be addressed by reducing demand as well as increasing or managing supplies including the shift to lower emission renewable sources.

Demand Modification

Energy demand is a function of a number of factors: population, energy consumption per capita, and energy density relative to GDP. A critical externality is the emissions per capital or unit of GDP.

Unfortunately, there is little impetus to manage many of these variables. Political constraints around forced population control and expectation of perpetual improvements in living standards mean curtailing demand is not on the policy agenda.

But there is potential for greater efficiency of energy use. The Second Law of Thermodynamics, first identified by the French scientist Sadi Carnot in 1824, states that it is impossible for the energy from a single source to be converted into work without other effects, that is, some waste of energy is inevitable. This can be illustrated simply. Fossil fuel driven internal combustion engines have a thermal efficiency of around 40-50 percent for a petrol engine and slightly higher for a diesel. In normal use, the typical efficiencies are at the lower end of theoretical levels with much of the energy released dissipated mostly as waste heat. Land, sea and air transport combined have an average efficiencies of around 20 percent.



Cars are over-sized given that frequently it transports a single passenger in many cases for short distances. Sport-Utility Vehicles (SUVs) speak to vanities, insecurities and fears rather than practical need. Used for a small portion of their lives, the embedded energy in the materials used to construct vehicles is similarly wasted.



Heating and cooling building, which constitutes a significant proportion of power consumption, is wasteful due to poor energy efficiency. While newer designs have improved energy use, older buildings, which make up the bulk of housing and office stock, are difficult and expensive to retrofit.

Eating habits in many countries which seek produce which is out-of-season or must be transported across often large distances is similarly wasteful. With food waste running at around one-third of total production, significant amounts of the embedded energy in agricultural production and distribution is lost.

Power generation is similarly inefficient. US coal- and gas-fired power plants achieve average thermal efficiency of 32 percent and 44 percent respectively. Combined-cycle gas turbines, which use recovered waste heat to drive a steam turbine, have higher efficiencies of about 62 percent. Perhaps as much as two-thirds of primary fuel inputs end up as waste with only one third being used to power activities.

Unfortunately, there seems little interest in addressing demand which would, most likely, adversely affect living standards and levels of economic activity. Improving efficiency would be insufficient on its own and in any case is not exciting enough for many. This means that the primary focus is heavily skewed toward maintaining or increasing energy supply, with a heavy reliance on renewable technology. Given the limited window available to address issues of adequate supplies and emissions, this entails risk. It also may lock society into a spiral of disorder and decline.

The exact energy trajectory is affected by unpredictable events, such as the attempts to exclude Russian oil and gas from global markets. But like Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’ different stages of grieving , the likely pathway will have several phases – deals, disillusion and desperation, divides and disorder, and finally decline- though denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance will feature as well.

Energy Pathway – Stage 1 Deals

The initial phase, underway since the late 1980s/ early 1990s, is focused on problem identification, evidence gathering, analysis and attempts to establish a framework for action. Starting with the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, the process became locked around reducing carbon dioxide emissions without a parallel consideration of energy needs.

The emphasis was on obtaining agreement without understanding of energy markets, physics and economics. Achievement was measured in dubious treaties. Politicians and lawyers compromised on hard parameters, accounting, funding and enforcement to maintain an appearance of progress. Generous government funding and subsidies combined with private funds from well-meaning philanthropists and individuals encouraged the usual grifters – investors, tech-entrepreneurs, NGOs and consultants – to dominate the process.

With energy supply continuing to flow at acceptable prices, at least until the Ukraine conflict, most citizens were marginally interested. With the ultimate consequences still far into the future, they placed faith in policymakers and belief that technological solutions which did not impinge on living standards were merely a matter of time.

This phase is now drawing to a close.

Energy Pathway – Stage 2 Disillusion and Desperation

In the second phase, a number of events coincide.

First, a realisation that things are slipping out of control emerges. The optimism built around “ what about” solutions evaporates in the face of the inescapable reality of the predicament. Like a terminally ill patient, denial and hope is replaced by other emotions.

Some manifestations are visceral – extreme climate events and interruptions to normal activities. Coastal communities and low lying areas face constant inundation. The areas of the earth which are difficult to inhabit expand. Climate refugees multiply. Other indicators are financial – rising food, energy, insurance and building costs. Vulnerability to things outside ordinary people’s control such as the Ukraine war and shortages of fuel and food become palpable.

Second, the lack of progress on slowing emissions and climate change are exposed. The realisation dawns that current plans will not limit carbon dioxide concentration to 450 parts per million from the current 410 because it would require an unlikely elimination or meaningful reduction in annual emissions within relatively short time frames. In July 2023, James Hansen, Makiko Sato and Reto Ruedy posted a new brief entitled – “The Climate Dice are Loaded. Now, a New Frontier?” The paper anticipated a more rapid pace of global warming given the acceleration of the Earth’s energy imbalance which was highly unpredictable in its consequences.

Third, the risk of an energy disruption becomes real. The slow roll-out and the efficacy of promoted solutions – solar and wind energy, batteries, EVs and hydrogen- is questioned. The much touted S curves of technological improvement and innovation prove illusory.

Fourth, there is increasing concern about slowdowns or peaking hydro-carbon production. Conventional oil production may be approaching its zenith. Surging production from non-conventional oil sources, such as US shale liquids and Canadian oil sands, helped offset this but these sources, especially US shale, may be depleting faster than anticipated. This would set in train a chain of events ultimately leading to much higher prices and supply shortfalls. The prospect of energy shortages begins to be understood as brownouts or load shedding become more likely.

Fifth, business and investor support for the energy transition diminishes.

In 2021, former Bank of England governor Mark Carney announced a much touted coalition of international financial companies to tackle climate change. The Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ) included more than 450 banks, insurers and asset managers across 45 countries representing 40 percent of global financial assets. It was claimed that this coalition could deliver $100 trillion of private capital committed to hitting net zero emissions targets by 2050. By late 2022, a year after the original announcement, the alliance showed signs of strain as it failed to meet promises. Major banks and pension funds threatened to leave. By 2023, several participants had departedraising questions about its future. In June 2023, a GFANZ sub-group consisting of insurers withdrew after 23 US Republican state attorneys-general wrote to members alleging that the commitments violated antitrust laws.

The reduction in enthusiasm is apparent elsewhere. Only around 10 percent of investors at the annual general meetings of ExxonMobil and Chevron voted in favour of aligning emissions targets with the Paris agreement of 2015 although European fossil-fuel firms have been more supportive of similar proposals. Only a small majority (59 percent) voted in favour of a referendum in Switzerland for a new climate bill designed to cut fossil fuel use and reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. Investor environmental and social activism is fading generally.

In parallel, businesses exposed to climate change adjust their models. For example, banks stop lending to certain borrowers and insurers refuse to underwrite some risks. Prices adjust, sometimes dramatically.

Sixth, tensions between advanced and emerging nations boil over. Rich counties cutting their own emissions cannot halt global warming. Major reductions in emissions from countries like China and India are needed for progress. The reluctance of emerging countries to sacrifice their own economic development and the unwillingness or inability of advanced economies to pay appropriate compensation means progress stalls. An acrimonious rupture of global agreements or non-compliance is possible.

Finally, the cost becomes apparent. People question the spending in the light of its lack of success in generating the expected reduction in global carbon emissions. Write-downs of investments and bankruptcies highlight the mal-investment of private and public funds. The increased strain on public balance sheets to finance the energy transition in the face of other spending pressures becomes even more relevant.

The concatenation of factors affects the political sphere. In environment conscious Germany, the Green Party’s electoral position is increasingly affected by two opposing dissatisfied groups: one believes that the party, which is part of the governing coalition, is doing too much pushing up costs; the other takes the view that it is not doing enough – “green is getting too brown”. In mid-2023, voter support in percentage terms for the Greens had fallen from the low 20s to the mid-teens.

Policy makers most likely double down increasing funding for renewables and energy storage. Added resources for carbon capture and storage are provided. Lottery tickets for new technologies, such as geo-engineering, are purchased at huge cost.

In 2023, the European Union called for international efforts to assess climate interventions, including solar radiation modification. This would include stratospheric aerosol injections involving a vehicle around 20 plus kilometres above the earth shooting out micron-sized particles to reflect sunlight. Other idea include thinning cirrus clouds to allow infrared radiation to escape and launching sunshades or giant mirrors in space to deflect solar radiation. The technology for these solutions does not currently exist. The risk of side effects, such as changing weather patterns, damaging the atmosphere and redistributing the impact of climate change across ecosystems, are unknown.

The general attitude is that technology can solve all the problems created by technology, ignoring mankind’s indifferent ability to truly understand, anticipate or control the side-effects.

Many promoters glibly choose to forget that the current problems are actually the result of technological innovation, such as the use of hydro-carbons and the internal combustion engine. As the chaos theorist, played by Jeff Goldblum muses in Steven Spielberg’s original Jurassic Park scientists preoccupied with theoretical possibilities are oblivious to whether they should do something that is feasible irrespective of the consequences.

Anybody who questions the faith or points out the nudity of scientific emperors is vilified as backwards and engaged in linear, non-futurist thinking. In a reversal of physicist Richard Feynman’s belief, most prefer answers that cannot be questioned rather than questions that cannot be answered.

As desperation mounts, investment in energy sources such as nuclear may enjoy a resurgence as a source of cleaner power superior to fossil fuels as other options dwindle. In June 2023, Sweden’s parliament altered its energy plan to 100 percent fossil-free electricity from 100 percent renewables moving to build new nuclear plants. This reversed a vote 40 years ago to phase out atomic power. The US too is supporting nuclear power through tax credits through The Inflation Reduction Act. The 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act created a $6 billion fund to keep existing plants running. The US government also offers developers a tax break to build reactors in fossil-fuel areas, such as coal-mining towns.

Newer, more compact modularised reactor technology offers promise although much of it is recycled older concepts. It must still overcome technological problems (fission plants remain basically military designs adapted for civilian use), sourcing fuel (uranium processing is dominated by Russia), and storage of radioactive waste. The debate around the release of radioactive waste water from the damaged Fukashima nuclear plant highlights the issues. Other issues include lengthy approval processes, shortages of skilled labour and cost. The US Department of Energy estimates that the costs of nuclear reactors at $6,000 to $10,000 per kilowatt-hour are well above the $3,600 per kilowatt-hour required to be competitive.

Safety issues remain. In his 2014 book Atomic Accidents: A History of Nuclear Meltdowns from Ozark Mountains to Fukashima, James Mahaffey, a long-time advocate of nuclear energy, argued that despite the belief, promoted by the industry and people including Bill Gates, that the risk of accidents in new generation nuclear reactors “would literally be prevented by the laws of physics …. trying to build something that will work perfectly for all time is a noble goal, but it is simply not possible”.

Another issue is proliferation and weaponization. Given that the demand for nuclear power will be greatest in emerging countries who need additional energy sources to achieve consumption and production targets to boost living standards to that already enjoyed by advanced countries, the problems of securing and controlling the use of fissile material is underestimated.

Accelerated development of fast breeder reactors, which generate more fissile material than they consume, is likely. Added efforts and investment in fusion technologies are made despite indifferent results over the last half a century.

The lengthy time needed to implement these projects, even if they are feasible, mean there is little or no immediate impact. Carbon dioxide emitting older fossil fuel driven generation facilities are placed on standby ‘just-in-case’ and eventually re-activated where possible.

Frenzied exhortations from people as varied as the UN Secretary General, climate scientists and Greta Thunberg disturb the sublime apathy of day-to-day life and generate an atmosphere of anxiety. The usual collection of snake oil salesmen appear. Given that hydrogen as an inexhaustible source of fuel was described in the late 19th century by Jules Verne’s in his 1894 novel Mysterious Island, the search for energy sources turns to sci-fi literature.

Facing deterioration in material conditions, the population rails against the lack of solutions ignoring that there may not be an easy answer to the dilemma? Facts do not depend upon the recipients ability to stomach it. With bromides and comfort blankets running out and a restive populace, desperation sets in as many governments struggle to keep energy supplies available and costs down to maintain electability. As Gray Davis, former Governor of California, once observed: “It’s a bummer to govern in bad times”.

Energy Pathway – Stage 3 Disorder and Divides

Stage 2 drifts into disorder as the ability to meet expectations of energy supplies and prices fracture. The forces identified in the previous stage intensify. Added pressures come from the need to prioritise essential services such as hospital and industries. National security requirements now become firmly entangled with other concerns.

The security apparatus globally is amongst the largest single consumers of energy. The US defence forces use vast amounts of electricity. It has large needs for hydro-carbon fuels to power its fleet of aircraft, ships and land vehicles. In 2016, for instance, its consumption was about 86 million barrels of fuel for operational purposes. Military aircraft are particularly thirsty. A B-2 stealth bomber carries nearly 100,000 litres (25,600 gallons) of jet fuel which is burnt at a rate over 15 litres (4 gallons) per mile. AKC-135R aerial refuelling tanker essential to extend the range of combat and transport aircraft consumes about 18 litres (4.9 gallons) per mile. Given the high power needs, electrification of these craft is unlikely with existing technology.

Other specific priorities come to the fore. Saudi Arabia uses 15 percent of the oil it produces to power desalination facilities which provide for roughly half its requirement of water.

Government must allocate an increasingly scarce resource between competing uses. Policy makers have to grapple with limiting demand outside of genuine need. Unfortunately, the definition of essential and wasteful depends on the viewpoint and especially the resources of the influential and how these can be mobilised.

The increasing shift to maximise energy security highlights differences between the energy rich and energy poor.

Domestically, energy poor nations face difficult choices. They can ration energy eliminating non-essential uses directly or use punitive taxes to discourage certain activities like car ownership, travel, air-conditioning, certain non-essential foods or large living spaces. Schemes may include replicas of Singapore’s Certificate of Entitlement (COE), a licence for owning a vehicle obtained by successfully bidding in an open bid uniform price auction. It grants the legal right of the holder to register, own and use a vehicle in Singapore for a period of 10 years. The cost of a COE can exceed the value of the car itself when demand is high.

Even energy rich nations institute similar policies to conserve resources although to a lesser extent. Internationally, energy rich countries have to decide whether to export energy, especially scarce hydro-carbons, or hoard them for future needs. Energy becomes weaponised in geo-political terms to an unimaginable degree.

The measures risk societal order and re-shape international relations.

Energy Pathway – Stage 4 Decline

In the final stage, energy demand must fit available supply, from whatever sources are available, as radical conservation is dictated by circumstances. Sir David King, a former UK chief scientist who once placed his faith in carbon capture, and the Cambridge Centre for Climate Repair now advocates the three R’s – reduction and removal of emissions and repair of damaged eco-systems, although the practicality of measures such as refreezing the Arctic are contentious.

The world must operate on the ‘theory of constraints’, developed by management theorist Eliyahu M. Goldratt building on the ideas of Wolfgang Mewes. It expands the cliché that no chain can be stronger than its weakest link. The theory of constraints emphasises identification of the constraint – the resources which cannot match the demands placed on it. The aim is then to work around this critical limitation. Adapted to the current context, as energy availability and cost becomes crucial, everything must recognise and accommodate that fact.

In the longer term, nation states must arrive at a sustainable energy equilibrium. Logically, this necessitates working out the available energy from a mix of nuclear, renewables and hydro-carbons then shaping energy demand around these constraints with a mix of regulations and taxes. Proper pricing of energy, taking into account long-term effects (such as depletion) and by-products (such as carbon emissions) is forced. Assuming the population cannot be reduced, at least in the short run, power usage per person must adjust.

The dynamics of Stage 4 depend on the speed of implementation and success of earlier actions to secure energy sources, such as nuclear power plants or fossil fuel supplies. To the extent that countries have failed to secure adequate energy supplies, emergency measures to balance supply and demand may entail restrictions on usage or out-right power shutdowns.

Unless the available energy sources are sufficient to accommodate normal demand and the cost does not rise significantly, a decline in economic activity would be expected. The magnitude of change will affect income levels, ability to meet commitments and also the stability of financial systems. For countries dependent on hydro-carbon export revenues, the falls in revenues may be significant affecting their prosperity.

If the per capita energy rations are lower than current levels and the cost significantly higher, then living standards and lifestyles will need to adjust. It may mean sacrificing the convenience of private cars for public transit and inefficient large homes in suburbia for smaller apartments located near workplaces. Other limits on power usage will need to be considered. Populations preoccupied with individuality and trust in techno-faith may find these choices unpalatable.

An energy divide within societies will emerge as a dangerous sub-set of inequality. As John Kenneth Galbraith observed in the Age of Uncertainty:

People of privilege will always risk their complete destruction rather than surrender any material part of their advantage. Intellectual myopia, often called stupidity, is no doubt a reason. But the privileged also feel that their privileges, however egregious they may seem to others, are a solemn, basic, God-given right.

Societies will struggle to maintain cohesiveness and order as accumulated expectations prove beyond the reach of most.

Globally, the risk of conflict over scarce energy rises. In the film Three Days of the Condor, an older more cynical CIA operative (Cliff Robertson) tells a younger researcher (Robert Redford) why Americans, or citizens in advanced economies, will support murder for petroleum: “Ask’em when they are running out. Ask’em when there’s no heat in their homes and they’re cold. Ask’em when their engines stop. Ask’em when people who have never known hunger start going hungry. You wanna know something? They won’t want us to ask’em. They’ll just want us to get it for ‘em.”

Whether our national and international political systems are capable of managing such stresses remains unknown.

Endgame

Just as the ready availability of cheap energy underpinned the rapid growth and improved living standards of the last two centuries, reduced supplies and higher costs will force a retrenchment. The exact configuration of the changes will differ between countries reflecting their unique circumstances. The overarching picture is a reversion to an earlier era when energy was more expensive and less plentiful. It will be complicated by a changed environment as higher temperatures will affect other essentials of survival such as food and water.

Our current civilisation was founded on both the past and the future. It was built on stored energy from sunlight. One gallon (3.78 litres) of gasoline requires around 1.5 gallons (5.7 litres) of crude oil which represents 89,000 kilograms (196,000 pounds) of ancient plant matter compressed by pressure and heat over millions of years. This precious resource accumulated over billions of years will have been consumed over a relatively short period of the planet’s history. It cannot be replaced in the span of our species.

At the same time, since the 1970s, modern economies have relied on ever larger amounts of debt. Such borrowings accelerate current consumption and spending against the promise of repayment. As debt levels have risen, more and more future income must be committed to paying it back. Higher levels of debt helped fund demands on available real resources, which are, in some cases, reaching the limits of supply.

The simultaneous pressures from the world’s energy and debt trajectories now shape the future. There is a subtle difference between the resource and financial economy. The former may decline gradually as supplies are used up. In contrast, the financial economy which inherently deals in current values of future cash flows discounted for timing may feel the pressures much earlier.

Author Jared Diamond, writing in 1999, argued that the worst mistake humans made was switching to agriculture. The addiction to fossil fuels and profligate energy consumption may prove equally catastrophic. It benefited a cohort of lucky sperm who were able to enjoy its bounty but leaves behind a toxic and uncertain legacy.

Future generations may look back at the era of fossil fuels with nostalgia and curse its legacies which they must navigate. They will bear the burden of the naïve belief that the climate problem can be solved by the energy transition financed by printing money or borrowing from those that will come after us. Former malapropism-prone Russian Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdim’s prognosis may be fateful: “We will live so well that our children and grandchildren will envy us!” All ages ultimately die by their own hand.

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2023/08 ... hways.html

[blindpig]

There Are Enough Resources in the World to Fulfil Human Needs, But Not Enough Resources to Satisfy Capitalist Greed: The Thirty-First Newsletter (2023)

AUGUST 3, 2023
Español Português हिन्दी Italian German


Kurt Nahar (Suriname), Untitled 2369, 2008.

Dear friends,

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

On 20 July, the United Nations (UN) released a document called A New Agenda for Peace. In the opening section of the report, UN Secretary-General António Guterres made some remarks that bear close reflection:

We are now at an inflection point. The post-Cold War period is over. A transition is under way to a new global order. While its contours remain to be defined, leaders around the world have referred to multipolarity as one of its defining traits. In this moment of transition, power dynamics have become increasingly fragmented as new poles of influence emerge, new economic blocs form and axes of contestation are redefined. There is greater competition among major powers and a loss of trust between the Global North and South. A number of States increasingly seek to enhance their strategic independence, while trying to manoeuvre across existing dividing lines. The coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic and the war in Ukraine have hastened this process.

We are, he says, in a moment of transition. The world is moving away from the post-Cold War era, in which the United States and its close allies, Europe and Japan, (collectively known as the Triad) exerted their unipolar power over the rest of the world, to a new period that some refer to as ‘multipolarity’. The COVID-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine accelerated developments that were already in motion before 2020. The gradual attrition of the Western bloc has led to contestation between the Triad and newly emerging powers. This contestation is most fierce in the Global South, where trust of the Global North is the weakest it has been in a generation. The poorer nations, in the current moment, are not looking to yoke themselves to either the fragile West or the emergent new powers but are seeking ‘strategic independence’. This assessment is largely correct, and the report is of great interest, but it is also weakened by its lack of specificity.


Gladwyn K. Bush or Miss Lassie (Cayman Islands), The History of the Cayman Islands, n.d.

Not once in the report does the UN refer to any specific country, nor does it seek to properly identify the emergent powers. Since it does not provide a specific assessment of the current situation, the UN ends up providing the kind of vague solutions that have become commonplace and are meaningless (such as increasing trust and building solidarity). There is one specific proposal of great meaning, dealing with the arms trade, to which I shall return at the end of this newsletter. But apart from showing concern over the ballooning weapons industry, the UN report attempts to erect a kind of moral scaffolding over the hard realities that it cannot directly confront.

What then are the specific reasons for the monumental global shifts identified by the United Nations? Firstly, there has been a serious deterioration of the relative power of the United States and its closest allies. The capitalist class in the West has been on a long-term tax strike, unwilling to pay either its individual or corporate taxes (in 2019, nearly 40 percent of multinational profits were moved to tax havens). Their search for quick profits and evasion of tax authorities has led to a long-term decrease in investment in the West, which has hollowed out its infrastructure and its productive base. The transformation of Western social democrats, from champions of social welfare to neoliberal champions of austerity, has opened the door for the growth of despair and desolation, the emotional palate of the hard right. The Triad’s inability to smoothly govern the global neo-colonial system has led to a ‘loss of trust’ in the Global South towards the United States and its allies.


S. Sudjojono (Indonesia), Di Dalam Kampung (‘In the Village’), 1950.

Secondly, it was astounding to countries such as China, India, and Indonesia to be asked by the G20 to provide liquidity to the Global North’s desiccated banking system in 2007–08. The confidence of these developing countries in the West decreased, while their own sense of themselves increased. It this change in circumstances that led to the formation of the BRICS bloc in 2009 by Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa – the ‘locomotives of the South’, as was theorised by the South Commission in the 1980s and later deepened in their little-read 1991 report. China’s growth by itself was astounding, but, as the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) noted in 2022, what was fundamental was that China was able to achieve structural transformation (namely, to move from low-productivity to high-productivity economic activities). This structural transformation could provide lessons for the rest of the Global South, lessons far more practical than those offered by the debt-austerity programme of the International Monetary Fund.

Neither the BRICS project nor China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) are military threats; both are essentially South-South commercial developments (along the grain of the agenda of the UN Office for South-South Cooperation). However, the West is unable to economically compete with either of these initiatives, and so it has adopted a fierce political and military response. In 2018, the United States declared an end to the War on Terror and clearly articulated in its National Defence Strategy that its main problems were the rise of China and Russia. Then-US Defence Secretary Jim Mattis spoke about the need to prevent the rise of ‘near-peer rivals’, explicitly pointing to China and Russia, and suggested that the entire panoply of US power be used to bring them to their knees. Not only does the United States have a vast network of roughly 800 overseas military bases – hundreds of which encircle Eurasia – it also has military allies from Germany to Japan that provide the US with forward positions against both Russia and China. For many years, the naval fleets of the US and its allies have conducted aggressive ‘freedom of navigation’ exercises which encroach upon the territorial integrity of both Russia (in the Arctic, mainly) and China (in the South China Sea). In addition, provocative manoeuvres such as the 2014 US intervention in Ukraine and massive 2015 US arms deal with Taiwan, further threatened Russia and China. In 2018, the United States unilaterally withdrew from the Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty (which followed the 2002 abandonment of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty), a move which upset the apple cart of nuclear arms control and meant that the US contemplated the use of ‘tactical nuclear weapons’ against both Russia and China.


Enrico Baj (Italy), Al fuoco, al fuoco (‘Fire! Fire!’), 1964.

The United Nations is correct in its assessment that the unipolar moment is now over, and that the world is moving towards a new, more complex reality. While the neo-colonial structure of the world system remains largely intact, there are emerging shifts in the balance of forces with the rise of the BRICS and China, and these forces are attempting to create international institutions that challenge the established order. The danger to the world arises not from the possibility of global power becoming more fragmented and widely dispersed, but because the West refuses to come to terms with these major changes. The UN report notes that ‘military expenditures globally set a new record in 2022, reaching $2.24 trillion’, although the UN does not acknowledge that three-quarters of this money is spent by the member states of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO). Countries that want to exert their ‘strategic independence’ – the UN’s phrase – are confronted with the following choice: either join in the West’s militarisation of the world or face annihilation by its superior arsenal.

A New Agenda for Peace is designed as part of a process that will culminate at a UN Summit for the Future to be held in September 2024. As part of this process, the UN is gathering proposals from civil society, such as this one from Aotearoa Lawyers for Peace, Basel Peace Office, Move the Nuclear Weapons Money campaign, UNFOLD ZERO, Western States Legal Foundation, and the World Future Council, who call on the summit to adopt a declaration that:

Reaffirms the obligation under Article 26 of the UN Charter to establish a plan for arms control and disarmament with the least diversion of resources for economic and social development;

Calls on the UN Security Council, UN General Assembly and other relevant UN bodies to take action with respect to Article 26; and

Calls on all States to implement this obligation through ratification of bilateral and multilateral arms control agreements, coupled with progressive and systematic reductions of military budgets and commensurate increases in financing for the sustainable development goals, climate protection and other national contributions to the UN and its specialised agencies.


This newsletter is dedicated to the memory of our comrade Subhash Munda (age 34), a leader of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), who was shot dead in Daladli Chowk (Ranchi, Jharkhand) on 26 July. Subhash, a fourth generation communist, was a leader of the Adivasi (indigenous-tribal) community and was killed for his fight against the land mafia. There are not enough resources in the world to satisfy the greed of the land mafias and the capitalists. But there are enough resources to fulfil human needs, as Subhash Munda knew and for which he fought.

Warmly,

Vijay

https://thetricontinental.org/newslette ... nda-peace/

**********



Anxious about the climate? there’s a solution
Originally published: OtherWords on August 2, 2023 by Fatima Gutierrez (more by OtherWords) (Posted Aug 05, 2023)

I remember being a young girl, no more than seven, and older people telling me: “Sorry we destroyed the planet. Now it’s your responsibility to fix it.” At such a young age, I didn’t understand what those words meant. But it wouldn’t be the last time I heard them.

I live in New Mexico. In my 22 years, I’ve seen our winters becoming less and less white, each summer getting hotter, and the water slowly disappearing from the great Rio Grande. It’s a story my peers in other states could tell just as well.

The continuous occurrence of these events–and the lack of meaningful action by our representatives to stop them–have been a source of constant stress. I’ve spent years of my young life battling intense feelings of uneasiness, dread, and fear–all of which would become exaggerated whenever I read about a natural disaster or an oil spill.

For many years I felt alone with these feelings. But then I learned that they had a name: “climate anxiety.”

It turns out I’m not alone.

In one large study of 10,000 children and young people in 10 countries, 45 percent of respondents said their feelings about climate change negatively impacted their daily functioning. Another 75 percent found the future frightening–and 83 percent said that they think people have failed to take care of the planet.

A Yale and George Mason report called “Climate Change in the American Mind” said that about one in ten Americans report having experienced anxiety because of global warming for several or more days out of the last two weeks. Almost as many report experiencing symptoms of depression for the same reason.

These feelings are valid. But we can’t let them overpower our desire to see a future in which renewable energy is flourishing and fossil fuel pollution is a thing of the past.

So how do we keep going? By turning climate anxiety into climate action.

And fortunately, there’s promising research in that area, too. A 2022 study published in Current Psychology suggested that collective action could bring a sense of community, connection, and social support.

“Engaging in collective action can have a multitude of benefits including social connectedness with people who share similar goals and values,” study coauthor Sarah Lowe told Yale Sustainability.

We also thought that individuals who engaged in collective action–particularly if they saw those actions as having an impact–could have a stronger sense of self-efficacy and hope for the future.

Proponents of a mental health approach called “ecotherapy” have suggested that developing an environmental identity and engaging in environmental conservation may be another effective approach to treating climate anxiety.

What we’re seeing is a pressing need for people to connect and become active in their communities–for the health of their communities as well as their own mental health. The possibility of hope begins when you can see paths for change, however small, in your own community.

Over the years my own waves of climate anxiety have been eased by watching climate organizations like YUCCA and New Mexico Climate Justice demand just energy transitions in my home state and across the country.

I’ve felt the crippling effects of climate anxiety. But we must be able to use our emotions to fuel positive change. I’ve learned these feelings can help us create communities focused on empowering and motivating each other to stand up to those who disrespect and pollute the earth.

The greatest strength of humanity lies in our ability to come together, support each other, and fight for the future that we and future generations deserve.

https://mronline.org/2023/08/05/anxious ... -solution/

******

Let Them Eat Bugs: Challenging the WEF’s Corporate-Driven Food Reset
AUGUST 7, 2023


A farm in China's southern Yunnan province. File photo.

By Colin Todhunter – Jul 31, 2023

The prevailing globalized agr0-industry food model is built on unjust trade policies, the leveraging of sovereign debt, population displacement, and land dispossession. It fuels commodity mono-crops and food insecurity as well as soil and environmental degradation.

It is responsible for increasing rates of illness, nutrient-deficient diets, a narrowing of the range of food crops, water shortages, chemical runoffs, increasing levels of farmer indebtedness, the undermining and destruction of local communities, and the eradication of biodiversity.

The model relies on a policy paradigm that privileges urbanisation, global markets, long supply chains, external proprietary inputs, highly processed food and market (corporate) dependency at the expense of rural communities, small independent enterprises and smallholder farms, local markets, short supply chains, on-farm resources, diverse agricultural and ecologically-sustainable crops, nutrient dense diets, and food sovereignty.

It is clear that there are huge environmental, social, and health issues that stem from how much of our food is currently produced and consumed and that a paradigm shift is required.

So, some optimists – or wishful thinkers – might have hoped for genuine solutions to the problems and challenges outlined above during the second edition of the United Nations Food Systems Summit (UNFSS) that took place last week in Rome.

The UNFSS has claimed that it aims to deliver the latest evidence-based, scientific approaches from around the world, launch a set of fresh commitments through coalitions of action and mobilize new financing and partnerships. These “coalitions of action” revolve around implementing a ‘food transition’ that is more sustainable, efficient, and environmentally friendly.

Founded on a partnership between the UN and the World Economic Forum (WEF), the UNFSS is, however, disproportionately influenced by corporate actors, lacks transparency and accountability, and diverts energy and financial resources away from the real solutions needed to tackle the multiple hunger, environmental, and health crises.

According to a recent article in The Canary website, key multi-stakeholder initiatives (MSIs) appearing at the 2023 summit included the WEF, the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research, EAT (EAT Forum, EAT Foundation and EAT-Lancet Commission on Sustainable Healthy Food Systems), the World Business Council on Sustainable Development, and the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa.

The global corporate agro-industry food sector, including Coca-Cola, Danone, Kelloggs, Nestlé, PepsiCo, Tyson Foods, Unilever, Bayer and Syngenta, were also out in force along with Dutch Rabobank, the Mastercard Foundation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation.

Through its “strategic partnership” with Coca-Cola, Danone, Kelloggs, Nestlé, PepsiCo, Tyson Foods, Unilever, Bayer and Syngenta, the UN and the WEF regards capitalist industry as key to achieving its vision of a “great reset” – in this case, a food transition. The summit comprises a powerful alliance of global corporations, influential foundations, and rich countries that are attempting to capture the narrative of “food systems transformation.” These interests aim to secure greater corporate concentration and agribusiness leverage over public institutions.

Hannah Sharland, the author of The Canary article writes,

“the UN is knowingly giving the very corporations sponsoring the destruction of the planet prime seats at the table. It is precisely these corporations who already shape the state of global food systems.”

She concludes that solutions to a burgeoning world crisis cannot be found in the corporate capitalist system that manufactured it.

During a press conference on 17 July 2023, representatives from the People’s Autonomous Response to the UNFSS highlighted the urgent, coordinated actions required to address global hunger. The response came in the form of a statement from those representing food justice movements, small-scale food producer organizations, and indigenous peoples.

The statement denounced the United Nations’ approach. Saúl Vicente from the International Indian Treaty Council said that the summit’s organisers aimed to sell their corporate and industrial project as “transformation.”

The movements and organizations opposing the summit call for a rapid shift away from corporate-driven industrial models towards bio-diverse, ecological, community-led food systems that prioritize public interest over profit making. This entails guaranteeing the rights of peoples to access and control land and productive resources while promoting agro-ecological production and peasant seeds.

Their response to the summit adds that, despite the increasing recognition that industrial food systems are failing on so many fronts, agribusiness and food corporations continue to try to maintain their control. They are deploying digitalization, artificial intelligence, and other information and communication technologies to promote a new wave of farmer dependency or displacement, resource grabbing, wealth extraction, and labor exploitation to re-structure food systems towards a greater concentration of power and ever more globalized value chains.

Shalmali Guttal, from Focus on the Global South, says:

… people from all over the world have presented concrete, effective strategies… food sovereignty, agroecology, revitalization of biodiversity, territorial markets, and a solidarity-based economy. The evidence is overwhelming – the solutions devised by small-scale food producers and Indigenous Peoples not only feed the world but also advance economic justice, youth empowerment, social, gender, and workers’ rights, and real resilience to crises.

Guttal asks why are policy makers not listening to this and providing adequate support?

That’s easily answered. The UN has climbed into bed with the WEF and unaccountable corporate agro-industry food and big data giants, which have no time for democratic governance.

A new report by FIAN International was released parallel to the statement from the People’s Autonomous Response. The report – Food Systems Transformation – In which direction? calls for an urgent overhaul of the global food governance architecture to guarantee decision-making that prioritizes public good and the right to food for all.

Sofia Monsalve, secretary general of FIAN International, says,

“The main stumbling block for taking effective action towards more resilient, diversified, localized, and agro-ecological food systems are the economic interests of those who advance and benefit from corporate-driven industrial food systems.”

“These interests are promoting multistakeholderism: a process that involves corporations, their front groups, and armies of lobbyists co-opting public bodies to act on their behalf in the name of “feeding the world” and “sustainability.”

A process that places powerful private interests in the driving seat, steering policy makers to facilitate corporate needs while sidelining the strong concerns and solutions being forwarded by many civil society, small-scale food producers, and workers’ organizations, and indigenous peoples as well as prominent academics.

The very corporations that are responsible for the problems of the prevailing food system offer more of the same, this time packaged in a bio-synthetic, genetically-engineered, bug-eating, eco-modernist, fake-green wrapping (see the online article “From Net Zero to Glyphosate: Agritech’s Greenwashed Corporate Power Grab.”).

While more than 800 million people go to bed hungry under the current food regime, these corporations and their wealthy investors continue to hunger for ever more profit and control. The capitalist economic system ensures they are not driven by food justice or any kind of justice. They are compelled to maximize profit, not least, for instance, by assigning an economic market value to all aspects of nature and social practices, whether knowledge, land, data, water, seeds, or systems of resource exchange.

By cleverly (and cynically) ensuring that the needs of global markets (that is, the needs of corporate supply chains and their profit-seeking strategies) have become synonymous with the needs of modern agriculture, these corporations have secured a self-serving hegemonic policy paradigm among decision makers that is deeply embedded.

It is for good reason that the People’s Autonomous Response to the UNFSS calls for mass mobilization to challenge the power that major corporate interests wield:

[This power] “must be dismantled so that the common good is privileged before corporate interests. It is time to connect our struggles and fight together for a better world based on mutual respect, social justice, equity, solidarity, and harmony with our Mother Earth.”

This may seem like a tall order, especially given the financialization of the food and agriculture sector, which has developed in tandem with the neoliberal agenda and the overall financialization of the global economy. It means that extremely powerful firms like BlackRock – which holds shares in a number of the world’s largest food and agribusiness companies – have a lot riding on further entrenching the existing system.

But hope prevails. In 2021, the ETC Group and the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems released a report “A Long Food Movement: Transforming Food Systems by 2045.“ It calls for grassroots organizations, international NGOs, farming and fishing groups, cooperatives, and unions to collaborate more closely to transform financial flows and food systems from the ground up.

The report’s lead author, Pat Mooney, says that civil society can fight back and develop healthy and equitable agro-ecological production systems, build short (community-based) supply chains, and restructure and democratize governance structures.

https://orinocotribune.com/let-them-eat ... ood-reset/

******

Amazon Summit To Begin in Brazil


River on the Amazon forest. Aug. 8, 2023. | Photo: Twitter/@EPA_Images

Published 8 August 2023 (3 hours 34 minutes ago)

"...Various representatives of different nations and international entities, including the Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization (ACTO), are also invited to the Summit....."


The Amazon Summit, called by Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, will start today in the northern state of Pará to establish a common agenda for cooperation and development of the biome.

Called the IV meeting of the presidents of the States Parties to the Amazon Cooperation Treaty, the meeting in Belém, capital of Pará, will be attended by the eight signatory countries of the instrument (Brazil, Bolivia, Colombia, Guyana, Ecuador, Peru, Suriname and Venezuela).

Various representatives of different nations and international entities, including the Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization (ACTO), are also invited to the Summit.

The presidential meeting was preceded by the Amazon Dialogues (August 4-6), whose program included more than 300 civil society events.

The results of the discussions will be presented to the heads of state or government of the Amazon countries, in an initiative that promotes social participation in the highest level segment of the summit.


As part of the forum, a meeting of Ministers of Foreign Affairs and Environment was held the day before, as a preparatory event for the presidential convocation.

The Brazilian Foreign Minister, Mauro Vieira, said at the end of the summit that the Amazonian territories will adopt the so-called Declaration of Belém, which establishes a new common agenda for regional cooperation in favor of the sustainable development of the rainforest.

Such a position that conciliates the protection of the biome and the hydrographic basin, social inclusion, the promotion of science, technology and innovation, stimulus to the local economy and valorization of the indigenous peoples and their ancestral knowledge.


Another objective of the meeting, which will last until Wednesday, is to strengthen ACTO so that it has the capacity to support the nations of the region in carrying out the initiatives and projects necessary for the sustainable development of the area.

The summit seeks that the Amazonian countries consolidate a unified position on the preservation of the biome to be presented at the next world climate summit (COP28), scheduled to be held in November in the United Arab Emirates.

According to Vieira, since its first day, the Lula government has been acting decisively to reverse the humanitarian disaster caused in recent years by the advance of illegal mining in Yanomami indigenous territory.

He said that with the meeting "we want to reactivate the channels of dialogue" and "through cooperation, we can find solutions together to our common challenges."



https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/Ama ... -0005.html

[blindpig]

Declaration of Belém Do Pará: A Roadmap to Save the Amazonia
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on AUGUST 10, 2023
Yoselina Guevara López



On Tuesday, August 8, the Amazonia Summit and the IV Presidential Meeting of the member countries of the Amazonia Cooperation Treaty Organization (ACTO) began in Brazil. As the first contribution of the Summit, the Declaration of Belém Do Pará was issued and signed by the leaders attending the summit, which consists of 113 points aimed at agreeing common goals for 2030, among which stand out “the fight against deforestation, eradicate and stop the advance of illegal extraction activities of natural resources”. This declaration will be submitted to the United Nations and will serve as a point of discussion for future international meetings on the effects of climate change on the planet, including COP 28 to be held in Dubai, United Arab Emirates.

Reactivation of ACTO

This is the first Summit in 14 years of this group of eight nations, created in 1995 by the South American countries that share the Amazonia basin: Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana, Peru, Suriname and Venezuela. But this alliance began with the Amazonia Cooperation Treaty (ACT) on July 3, 1978, signed by the eight Amazonian countries, which is aimed at promoting the harmonious development of the Amazonian territories. The Belém do Pará Declaration establishes a section for the “institutional strengthening of ACTO and specifically for the expansion of its areas of coordination, cooperation and means of implementation as an instrument for the sustainable, harmonious and inclusive development of the Amazonia and the improvement of the national capacities of the States Parties”. In this sense, improvements at the institutional level of ACTO will make it possible to coordinate regional policies on the Amazonia more effectively. Undoubtedly, ACTO thus becomes an integration mechanism that goes beyond environmental issues and involves the political, social and economic spheres.

Disagreements: fossil energy versus green energy

During this first day of the Amazonia Summit, dissent emerged among the countries that make up ACTO regarding the implementation of a greener energy agenda; not all members seem to have the same priorities. For example, Brazilian President Lula Da Silva does not seem to be aligned with the global policy of phasing out fossil fuels. Brazil still has plans for a huge offshore oil drilling project at the mouth of the Amazonia River. A position that contrasts starkly with that of Colombian President Gustavo Petro, for whom the elimination of fossil fuels is essential for the protection of forests, who stated “Even if we kept deforestation under control, the Amazonia would be seriously threatened by the increase in global warming”.

The consensus among the signatory countries of the ACTO was maintained in the corresponding to reach the objective of “Zero Deforestation”; an issue on which President Lula Da Silva and the Venezuelan President, Nicolás Maduro Moros, who was represented for health reasons by Vice-President Delcy Rodríguez, coincided.

The destroyers of the rainforest are the large agro-industrialists, who burn the trees to gain land for agriculture or cattle raising, illegal prospectors of gold and other precious metals, the timber industry and extractive activities. Daily life in these regions of the Amazonia is often dominated by criminal mafias that make large profits from these illicit activities or use the river and air corridors for drug trafficking, human trafficking and the transport of smuggled goods. Hence, “deforestation” is a first step that would prevent and control a number of criminal activities.

Challenge for the economy: change the model

Venezuela proposed a 9-point road map, some of which are included in the Belém Do Pará Declaration. In the presentation of this proposal made by Vice President Delcy Rodríguez, the need to change the global model of exploitation towards a sustainable development that curbs environmental degradation that leads to social inequality, the violation of human rights and the destruction of ecosystems, especially of indigenous peoples and local communities, was highlighted.

Brazil, which owns 60% of the Amazonian territory, has for decades developed its economy on a system of intensive exploitation of the Amazon, which has led it to become the world’s leading producer of soybeans, grown in monocultures, and the second largest producer of beef, produced in intensive farms. Two podiums that have made its economy flourish, although the nine regions of the Brazilian Amazonia are still among the poorest in the country, creating enormous economic and social imbalances. The need for economic growth has justified the unlimited exploitation of environmental resources, creating a parallel between Brazil’s GDP growth and the deforestation of the Amazonia.

If the agreements reached in the Belém do Pará Declaration are fulfilled, Brazil will have to change its growth model through more sustainable agriculture and a production system that is not based exclusively on raw materials. However, according to various studies (World Resource Institute, World Bank), this drastic change will not prevent the South American giant from continuing to grow economically while preserving its forests and biodiversity.

An end to the terror and persecution of Amazonian indigenous peoples

Among the interesting agreements of the Belém Do Pará Declaration are those corresponding to indigenous peoples, which in its paragraph number 44 states “To guarantee the rights of indigenous peoples and local and traditional communities in line with the different normative frameworks of the States Parties and in particular through the application, monitoring, reporting and verification of social and environmental safeguards”. With which would establish the end of the persecution of native peoples, especially in Brazil, which during the nefarious government of former President Jair Bolsonaro lived the consequences of a political agenda that openly violated the constitutional rights and freedoms of the indigenous peoples of Brazil, which are enshrined in Article 231 of the Brazilian Constitution.

Furthermore, during Bolsonaro’s presidency, organized crime in the Amazonia, which promotes illegal land grabbing, timber sales and mining, grew exponentially, damaging indigenous territories as a consequence.

Time is running out for future generations

This Amazonia Summit is taking place at a crucial time for our planet and for the fight against climate change. Last July record temperatures were recorded with numbers that make us fear that, without global action, this warming could become the new normal for the world’s climate with the proliferation of climatic phenomena such as torrential rains, cyclones, etc.

According to experts, there is only time until 2029 to save the Amazonia, after which date humanity could reach the so-called “point of no return”. This is the verdict of the scientists of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), who are keen to point out that much can be done and that, if we act quickly, it is possible to save a large part of the largest tropical rainforest on the planet.

For now, at the Amazonia Summit, good speeches have been made and many proposals covering different fields have been put in writing. The next step is definitely coordinated action to prevent the death of our Amazonia, the plant lung of humanity, which is home to about 10% of the world’s biodiversity and is a carbon sink that ultimately reduces global warming and guarantees life for our entire planet.

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2023/08/ ... -amazonia/

Amazon Dialogues: Venezuela Made the Voice of the Indigenous Peoples Felt
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on AUGUST 10, 2023
Yoselina Guevara López



This Sunday, August 6, the “Amazon Dialogues” culminated in Belém Do Pará, Brazil, with the participation of more than ten thousand people from eight Amazonian countries: Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Brazil, Guyana, Suriname and Venezuela.

Representatives of the various social movements, research centers, government agencies, indigenous peoples and communities, Afro-descendants and mestizos, held different discussions covering issues of direct concern to the Amazon. They debated climate change, the well-being of Amazonian indigenous communities and projects focused on sustainable and inclusive development in the region. In addition to agroecology, the livelihoods of forest workers and the need to combat illegal mining and deforestation. The results of these discussions will be presented as proposals to the heads of state during the Amazon Summit meeting to be held August 8-9 in Brazil, within the framework of the IV Meeting of the Presidents of the Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization (ACTO).

Venezuela: vindication of indigenous rights



During the Amazon Dialogues, the intervention of the Minister of People’s Power for Indigenous Peoples of Venezuela, Clara Vidal, stood out. During her presentation, she underlined the vindication of the rights of the native peoples that began during the government of Commander Chávez, which continue to be sustained by the current Venezuelan President, Nicolás Maduro Moros.

Minister Clara Vidal made an analogy between the achievements reached in Venezuela and the possibilities of struggle for all the indigenous peoples living in the Amazon, the “Great Shabono”, as she called it, taking as a reference the Yanomami indigenous customs.

One of these rights claimed by the Venezuelan government is the legitimacy of the native peoples to own the lands which, as Minister Clara Vidal pointed out, are territories “where they have lived since time immemorial”. Hence, the current conflict over the demarcation of territories is a debt for some of the States that make up the Amazonian space. Furthermore, land demarcation is one of the main legal tools for establishing a barrier to the advance of deforestation in the Amazon.

In this regard, the official also called for the “eradication of deforestation”. According to the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) report “Amazonía Viva 2022”, 18% of Amazon forests have been completely lost and 17% are almost totally degraded. Hence the urgency to save the Amazon from human depredation, which if this devastation continues would affect the direct livelihood of about 47 million people, would jeopardize food security and would make it impossible to stop the increase in global temperature.

On the other hand, the Venezuelan Minister for Indigenous Peoples, Clara Vidal, denounced how the unilateral coercive measures imposed by the government of the United States on Venezuela have seriously affected the life of the indigenous peoples living within the South American country, as well as in the common border areas of the Amazon. Vidal stressed “despite the fact that the Venezuelan people and the government of President Nicolás Maduro have been subjected in the last 10 years to more than 900 unilateral coercive measures of an economic, financial and political nature issued by the Government of the United States, we continue to work to guarantee the claims of the rights of our native peoples”.

Changing the model to save the Amazon

The fact that the Amazon is a territory rich in resources is directly related to the causes of its plundering and destruction. Its glittering riches in gold, oil, copper, timber, seem today to adopt the somber colors of its ruin, which at the same time is the destruction of all. The exploitation of the natural resources of this area of the planet causes a dramatic plundering of its resources that objectively affects the whole world: for every five glasses of water we drink, one comes indirectly from the Amazon.

Hence the important assertion made by Minister Clara Vidal regarding the “proliferation of a global economic model of exploitation that is aimed not at the protection but at the destruction of the Amazon”. For this reason the alternative may lie precisely in the indigenous peoples and the establishment of sustainable development models that can protect the rainforest and rivers, but also support a vibrant economy and higher standards of living for the Amazonian population. Where science is at the service of ancestral knowledge, complementing in synergy scientific knowledge and the social and cultural practices of indigenous peoples.

The Amazon does not only involve ecology

But the devastation of the Amazon is not only an ecological issue; the social dramas generated by depredation and plundering affect defenseless populations, who in some cases are left at the mercy of the law of the strongest. Minister Clara Vidal made reference to the fact that the Amazon “that natural altar, that ancestral paradise can become a space for drug trafficking, for the establishment of illegal armed groups, for human trafficking and smuggling, for criminality, and in the long run even for the loss of our culture and identity and the extinction of our native peoples”. A real tragedy that intensifies with the savage exploitation of copper mines in the Ecuadorian Cordillera and the trafficking of timber that spills blood in the triple border between Colombia, Brazil and Peru, among other dramas that are lived daily in the Amazon.

These Amazon Dialogues continue to open the windows of the world to a region that is definitely not another world, distant and exotic; on the contrary, it is a mirror of our own, of the space where we live. Let us hope that with the next celebration of the Amazon Summit, the necessary actions will be taken, beyond words, to save and protect the Amazon, which in short we must be aware that it is a matter of life or death not only of biodiversity, but of all of us who inhabit this planet.

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2023/08/ ... ples-felt/

Venezuela Warns Against ‘Commodification’ of Amazon Biodiversity at Rainforest Summit
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on AUGUST 10, 2023
José Luis Granados Ceja


Venezuelan Vice-President Delcy Rodríguez addresses leaders at the Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization summit in Belem, Brazil. (Prensa Presidencial)Venezuelan Vice-President Delcy Rodríguez addresses leaders at the Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization summit in Belem, Brazil. (Prensa Presidencial)

Venezuelan Vice-President Delcy Rodríguez called for countries that are home to the Amazon River basin to declare a regional emergency in order to advance the conservation of the rainforest in the face of growing exploitation of the region’s rich resources.

Rodríguez, heading the Venezuelan delegation at the Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization (ACTO) summit in the northern Brazilian city of Belem, warned of the threat posed by transnational pharmaceutical, energy and industrial companies to the biodiversity of the world’s largest rainforest.

“The path forward is not to reduce the role of states, the path is to strengthen the capacities and functions of the state, not handing these functions over to non-governmental organizations that are ultimately instrumentalized by the large pharmaceutical, food, and energy emporiums, to seize the great biodiversity of the Amazon Basin,” said Rodríguez.

The vice-president’s comments come as a response to recent proposals to have the Amazon River basin be administered by a supranational body, a view widely rejected by the region’s leaders who view it as a threat to their sovereignty. These proposals gained traction outside of South America during the presidency of former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro who oversaw widespread deforestation of the Amazon during his term.

His successor, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, has made it a priority to restore Brazil’s standing in the international community, including on environmental issues. The gathering of leaders came at the initiative of the Brazilian president and marks the first time in 14 years that the ACTO summit was held.

The two-day summit concluded Wednesday with a final joint statement, called the Belem Declaration, that calls for increased cooperation in order to protect the Amazon rainforest, widely seen as a critical buffer against climate change due to its role in absorbing greenhouse gas emissions.

The declaration likewise asserted Indigenous rights, established a scientific body that will meet annually, and called for common negotiating positions at future climate summits. Environmentalists, nonetheless, criticized the joint declaration for failing to commit to ending deforestation by 2030.

“The Amazon is our passport to a new relationship with the world, a more symmetrical relationship in which our resources will not be exploited for the benefit of a few, but valued and placed at the service of all,” Lula told the region’s leaders at the summit.

The use of the region’s resources for the common benefit without infringing on the sovereignty of individual countries was a desire expressed by several representatives at the summit.

“While we recognize the resources we have, the sovereignty of our countries must be respected, and we reject any attempt by foreign countries to dominate them,” said Bolivian President Luis Arce.

Venezuela’s Rodríguez called for ACTO member states to defend the region’s sovereignty and for vigilance in the face of interest by NATO countries in the region’s resources, charging that the foreign powers are seeking the “commodification of the biodiversity of the Amazon basin.”

US Southern Command Chief Laura Richardson has openly expressed her country’s interest in South America’s natural resources. US policy makers have also repeatedly expressed concern over China’s growing cooperation with Latin American countries, positioning control over the region’s resources as part of a broader geopolitical conflict.

The drive to secure access and control to natural resources is seen as part of the motivations behind US sanctions against Venezuela. The Venezuelan government argues that US-led sanctions, which severely limit the country’s ability to sell its resources on the international market, constitute an economic blockade and have hampered the country’s efforts to practice environmental stewardship.

“Hopefully never again will our structures, any institution, be used to undermine legitimate governments, [and] endorse economic blockades that prevent the true defense and protection of the resources of our Amazon,” said Rodríguez.

The Venezuelan government has recently taken steps to address some of the environmental concerns of resource extraction activities in the country. Earlier this month the Nicolás Maduro government put in motion an emergency plan to clean and reduce oil spills in Maracaibo Lake, in western Zulia state.

Additionally, the Venezuelan Bolivarian National Armed Forces recently launched a large-scale operation to clear out illegal mining and other criminal activities that had become widespread in the Yapacana National Park.

Despite sanctions, oil extraction remains the most important industry in the Caribbean country. Venezuela, along with Bolivia, were the only countries that opted not to sign a previous agreement calling for an end to deforestation by 2030.

Leaders at the summit also rejected Colombian President Gustavo Petro’s proposal to end new oil development in the Amazon. At various environmental forums, Global South leaders have repeatedly insisted on further action and compensation from wealthy countries before halting new extraction projects.

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2023/08/ ... st-summit/

[blindpig]

July temperatures break multiple global records
August 11, 2023
June was the hottest month on record … until July


Globally averaged surface air temperature for all months of July from 1940 to 2023. Shades of blue indicate cooler-than-average years, while shades of red show years that were warmer than average. Data: ERA5. Credit: C3S/ECMWF.

Following the hottest June on record and a series of extreme weather events, including heatwaves in Europe, North America and Asia, and wildfires in Canada and Greece, ERA5 data from the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) show that July 2023 was the hottest month on record globally and broke several records within the month.

The month started with the daily global mean surface air temperature record being broken on four days in a row, from 3-6 July. All days throughout the rest of July were hotter than the previous record of 16.80°C, set on 13 August 2016, making the 29 days from 3-31 July the hottest 29 days on record. The hottest day was 6 July, when the global average temperature reached 17.08°C, and the values recorded on 5 and 7 July were within 0.01°C of this. During the first and third weeks of the month, temperatures also temporarily exceeded the 1.5°C threshold above preindustrial level – a limit set in the Paris Agreement, the first time this has happened during July.

C3S data now confirm that July 2023 has been the hottest July and hottest month in the ERA5 data record, which goes back to 1940. The monthly average temperature was 16.95°C, well above the previous record of July 2019 (16.63°C) and virtually identical to our best estimate of the 1.5°C warming above preindustrial level for July (16.96°C).

Contributing to the exceptionally warm July for the globe as a whole is a long period of unusually high sea surface temperatures (SSTs). Since April, the global average daily SST has remained at record values for the time of year. From mid-May onwards, global SSTs values have reached unprecedented levels for the time of year. According to ERA5 data, on 31 July, the daily SST value reached a record high of 20.96°C, 0.01°C above the previous highest value ever recorded, of 20.95°C on 29 March 2016.


Daily global sea surface temperature (°C) averaged over the 60°S–60°N domain plotted as a time series for each year from 1 January 1979 to 31 July 2023. The years 2023 and 2016 are shown with thick lines shaded in bright red and dark red, respectively. Other years are shown with thin lines and shaded according to the decade, from blue (1970s) to brick red (2020s). Data: ERA5. Credit: C3S/ECMWF.

Carlo Buontempo, Director of C3S, comments: “Record-breaking temperatures are part of the trend of drastic increases in global temperatures. Anthropogenic emissions are ultimately the main driver of these rising temperatures. July’s record is unlikely to remain isolated this year, C3S’ seasonal forecasts indicate that over land areas temperatures are likely to be well above average.”

“The extreme weather which has affected many millions of people in July is unfortunately the harsh reality of climate change and a foretaste of the future,” said World Meteorological Organization’s Secretary-General Prof. Petteri Taalas. “The need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is more urgent than ever before. Climate action is not a luxury but a must.”

https://climateandcapitalism.com/2023/0 ... e-records/

Counter-offensive: Fossil fuel giants boost global production
August 14, 2023
After a brief pause, Big Oil has resumed heavy spending on new wells and infrastructure



Christian Zeller teaches Economic Geography at the University of Salzburg, Austria. He is active in the Netzwerk Ökosozialismus and a member of the Global Ecosocialist Network. This article is reposted, with his permission, from the ecosocialist magazine Fight the Fire. A longer version, in German, is available here.

by Christian Zeller

The perspective of green capitalism is based on a comprehensive energy transition from fossil to renewable energy sources. Since the 2009 climate conference in Copenhagen governments, corporations and opposition parties have been relying on the assumption that the energy companies can be persuaded to rethink their business and initiate a transition process towards renewable energy and engagement in the “green” economy. That reliance has only increased since the climate talks in Paris in 2015.

But it’s not just politicians and business. Scientists and important parts of the climate justice movement have also adhered to this idea. Most concepts of a socio-ecological transition and a “Green New Deal” assume that somehow fossil capital can be integrated into a transformation perspective.

Several theoretical arguments speak against this assumption. So does the historical experience of comprehensive social and industrial restructuring processes.

Under what conditions will capital leave fossil sectors and flow into “green” sectors when profitability in non-fossil sectors is lower? This would require a major government investment drive in building renewable energy infrastructure. Covering electricity peaks also requires redundant infrastructure. This is not currently happening anywhere.

In addition, what would governments use to finance these investments? Comprehensive taxation of the wealthy would be tantamount to a declaration of war. The construction of the gigantic infrastructure for energy storage and electric transmission networks will keep energy prices high for consumers for a long time. So here, too, the state would have to intervene to keep renewable energies reasonably cheap.

A look at the investments in different energy sectors in the last years reveals that a transition to renewable energies is taking place only sluggishly. The scale does not correspond in any way to what is needed to slow down global warming. The energy price increases since 2021 were accentuated by the Russian war against the Ukrainian population in 2022. Those prices caused the profit margins in the fossil sector to skyrocket. Prices have fallen again since then, and profitability is unlikely to stay at the 2022 level. Nevertheless, the reports from the headquarters of the major oil companies suggest that a real energy turnaround is even more unrealistic than might have been hoped a few years ago.

In this article, I argue that after several years of restrained investment activity, fossil capital is once again increasingly investing in the renewal and expansion of fossil infrastructure. Coupled with government policies in the major capitalist states, there is even a real fossil backlash.

The reluctance of fossil corporations in the previous period and their renewed confidence now both stem from a combination of political and economic factors. On the one hand, low fuel prices in the aftermath of the 2008 economic crisis and subsequent years caused profit margins to shrink. On the other hand, the strengthening climate justice movement led to expectations that governments would place hurdles in the way of fossil fuel infrastructure investments.

This situation has fundamentally changed. Uncertainty has given way to confidence that fossil infrastructure investments will continue to be highly profitable for many years to come. If stranded assets do pile up, the industry is relying on its own strength to extract large compensation payments from states – and thus societies. The climate justice movement is proving too weak to force corporations to phase out fossil fuels. With energy security fears growing in the wake of Russia’s war on the Ukrainian people, almost all governments are now committed to a major expansion of gas infrastructure. The largest energy companies would not make their renewed investments if they did not have the certainty of profitable returns – or at least the certainty of substantial government subsidies in the event of devaluation.

I will now proceed in three steps. First, I will formulate some observations on the political landscape. Then, I will shed light on the investment behavior of fossil corporations and show some examples to illustrate this behavior. In the conclusion I will name the basic challenges for the climate justice movement and the ecosocialist current.

Political backlash

The mobilizations of the climate movement before the start of the pandemic were huge. And in recent months there have again been broad-based demonstrations and civil disobedience in many countries. Still, there is a critical balance to be made. Jonathan Neale does that in more detail in this issue. I only touch on a few facts here.

The climate justice movement has not been able to get unions in any country to adopt truly substantive climate policies. For example, the recent extensive mobilization of workers and mass strikes in France, Britain and Germany did not integrate the impending climate catastrophe into their demands. Nowhere have unions committed themselves to policies that will ensure that greenhouse gas emissions come down immediately. This inability of the climate justice movement to socially enforce changes in production and transport provides the fossil fuel industry with the certainty that they can extend their development path.

The increasingly severe state repression against activists of the climate justice movement fits into this picture. The activists are to be intimidated and the movement weakened. Moreover, parts of the movement are to be t integrated into the ruling political system.

COP27 took place last November under the patronage of the dictator Sissi in Sharm el Sheik. This year COP28 will be held in the United Arab Emirates under the leadership of Sultan Al-Jaber, the head of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company. The climate conference in Sharm el Sheik already avoided a decision a phase-out of fossil fuels. This will also be the tenor of the next COP in Dubai, which will focus on carbon capture technologies. This is a technological bet, because these CCS technologies do not yet exist on the scale required (Hodgson and Williams 2023).

Numerous governments are now clearly indicating that they are backing away from the resolutions of the Paris climate conference. They also want to extend the fossil fuel development path. Sharpened imperialist rivalry and concerns about energy security are reinforcing this trend. These political changes are closely linked to the resurgent inertia of fossil capital.

Fossil capital starts a new round of investment

According to the IEA’s (International Energy Agency) World Energy Investment Report, some USD 2.8 trillion is expected to be invested in energy worldwide in 2023. Of this, more than USD 1.7 trillion is expected to flow into supposedly “clean” technologies. The IEA includes into this category renewables, electric vehicles, grids, storage, efficiency improvements and heat pumps, as well as so-called low-emission fuels and nuclear power. Just over $1 trillion will be spent on coal, gas and oil. The organization expects annual investment in so-called “clean energy” to increase by 24% between 2021 and 2023, driven by renewables and electric vehicles.

Fatih Birol, chairman of the IEA, says that investment in solar energy will surpass spending on oil production for the first time this year. That, he says, will help reduce global emissions. But the picture conveyed of an energy transition is deceptive.

High prices have led to an increase in fossil fuel investment, which is expected to rise 15% from 2021 to 23. The IEA expects large and medium-sized oil, gas, and coal companies to increase their investment in new fossil fuels by 6% to $950 billion in 2023. Spending on upstream oil and gas production is expected to increase by 7% in 2023, returning to 2019 levels. They already rose by 11% in 2022. Oil companies in the Middle East, in particular, will invest even more than before the pandemic. Investments in fossil fuels – in coal and oil as well as gas – have increased strongly since 2020 {IEA, 2023 #6730: 12-13, 60-62}.

Net revenues for the global oil and gas industry reached a record high of $4 trillion in 2022. Before that, net revenues had been lower between 2015 and 2021 than they were from 2008 to 2014. But in 2022 fossil fuel producers earned ‘windfall profits’ of $2 trillion. That total was over and above their usual 2021 net revenues. The reason was higher prices. Moreover, in the face of feared energy shortages and high prices, governments, especially in rich economies, have so far allocated well over $500 billion to protect consumers from the immediate impact. In other words, fossil fuel subsidies have increased massively (IEA 2022: 19).

In 2022, most of the cash flow generated by the fossil companies went to dividends, share buybacks and debt repayment. Only a tiny fraction of free cash flow was used for clean energy investments. Financial investment capital thus appropriated much of these profits {IEA, 2023 #6730: 61-62}.

Uncertainty is decreasing and profitability is increasing again. A closer look reveals that investments in less profitable network infrastructure have remained largely at the same level since 2015. This means that “green” investments are lopsided. The less profitable grid infrastructure remains deficient and will become a bottleneck factor.

The IEA warns: “If policymakers and regulators do not provide the necessary incentives for investment in grid spending, it could pose a significant obstacle to the clean energy transition.” In contrast, investment in battery storage has increased massively in recent years, with China responsible for a significant portion of this commitment (IEA 2023: 8, 27, 49, 51, 52).

Finance is a central component of the fossil fuel economy. The world’s 60 largest banks have placed about $5.5 trillion in fossil fuel extraction and production since the 2015 Paris Climate Conference. Placement of financial capital into fossil fuels stabilized in 2020, increased again in 2021, and then declined somewhat in 2022 ($669 billion). That decline was due to uncertain geopolitical and economic conditions, not to a change in bank strategy. Given the record profits in the fossil fuel corporations of $4 trillion in 2022, many could easily self-finance. Exxon Mobil and Shell PLC therefore refrained from bank financing in 2022 (Rainforest Action and et.al. 2023: 4, 16).

It is notable, however, that financial placements in companies serving the fracking and LNG (Liquified Natural Gas) sectors increased significantly. The top 30 companies developing LNG received $23 billion in financing in 2022, up 50% from the previous year. Funding for the top 30 fracking companies totaled $67 billion in 2022, 8% more than in 2021. There are currently 170 liquefaction and regasification terminals worldwide. At least as many more terminals are in the project stage (Rainforest Action and et.al. 2023: 5, 72).

The so-called “transition” of the corporations is a long time coming. According to an IEA analysis, the oil and gas industry’s total investment in low-emission energy sources accounts for less than 5 % of total spending on fossil fuel production. Therefore, it is not surprising that global energy-related carbon emissions increased by 0.9 % in 2022 to a record 36.8 billion metric tons. This happened, even though corporations were also spending more money on so-called “clean energy” according to IEA data (Wilson 2023).

Texas and Gulf of Mexico

The general trend described above can be illustrated by two current examples. A comprehensive analysis of the fossil counteroffensive remains to be done. For the first example I will look at the British Petroleum (BP) group, because for some time it has tried to give the appearance of wanting to transform itself “Beyond Petroleum”. But in February 2023, BP CEO Bernard Looney announced that the company planned to reduce its oil and gas production by only 25 % by 2030. By contrast, the target set in 2020 during a historic oil price slump had called for a 40 % reduction. This change in strategy by BP exemplifies the fossil capital’s energetic desire to extend its development path.

BP said goodbye to its plan to cut oil and gas production after rising fossil fuel prices helped the British energy company post its highest annual profit – $28 billion – in its 114-year history. CEO Bernard Looney, however, deflects responsibility for this. “Governments and societies around the world are asking companies like ours to invest in today’s energy system,” he told the Financial Times (7 February 2023).

However, the company is primarily responsible to the financial capital that has been placed. And that capital has called for action. That’s because total shareholder return at BP since February 2020 has been the lowest among Western energy companies. None of the other companies have set a formulated target for reducing oil and gas production. Many investors argue that a shift to renewables hurt profits, and that is why the performance of the company’s shares lagged its peers. Wall Street preferred the strategies of ExxonMobil and Chevron, which are avowedly committed to oil. Thus, the finance capital placed wants BP to also hold on to high-yield fossil fuel projects (Wilson and Dunkley 2023; Jacobs 2023; Jacobs, et al. 2023).

This April BP began pumping crude oil through a new $9 billion Argos offshore platform in the Gulf of Mexico. This is BP’s first new platform and largest investment in the region since the Deepwater Horizon explosion and oil spill in 2010. That took the lives of 11 people and caused the largest environmental disaster in U.S. history. With the commissioning of the huge Argos oil platform, BP clearly marks its departure from “Beyond Petroleum” (Jacobs 2023).

Argos can pump 140,000 barrels of oil and gas per day from fields under thousands of feet of water. The platform will increase the company’s production capacity in the region to 400,000 barrels per day, or nearly 20% of the group’s total global production.

CEO Looney affirmed that the commissioning of Argos shows that the company is “investing in today’s energy system.” He said this platform will strengthen the company’s position in the Gulf of Mexico, where it is the largest producer, in the coming years (Jacobs 2023).

“The Gulf of Mexico has some of the best barrels we’ve got and we want to explore and develop more,” Starlee Sykes, head of BP’s Gulf of Mexico business, said in an interview with the Financial Times (Jacobs 2023). BP sees the possibility of increasing oil production in the region for decades to come, she added, even as the company pursues a goal of achieving net zero emissions by 2050.

Stopping oil production now would be “simply impractical”, Looney told the Economic Club of Washington, DC. He suggested that such a move would risk a renewed economic crisis (Jacobs, et al. 2023).

BP is vigorously implementing this counteroffensive. When the corporation scaled back its climate targets in early 2023, it simultaneously announced a dramatic increase in fossil fuel investment and an aggressive plan to increase U.S. oil production. Since that announcement, BP shares have outperformed those of Exxon (Jacobs, et al. 2023).

LNG in the USA and Germany

Building a giant infrastructure for LNG is another area of fossil offensive. Venture Global LNG announced on March 13, 2023, that it would begin the second phase of a giant liquefied natural gas export project in Louisiana. The company plans to massively expand the Plaquemines export facility already under construction on the U.S. Gulf Coast. The total cost of the plant is reportedly $21 billion. It has the capacity to process about 2.6 billion cubic feet of LNG per day, or 2.5% of the U.S.’s gas production of 20 million tons of LNG per year for export. The plant will be among the largest LNG export facilities in the world.

With the approval of the Plaquemines expansion, total U.S. LNG export capacity will exceed 20 billion cubic meters per day in the next few years with projects already committed. This will make the U.S. by far the largest LNG exporter in the world (Brower, et al. 2023).

“It’s a free market and we’re not going to stand in the way,” US Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm told Energy Source, referring to the huge export capacity currently being built. “What’s good is that we’re expanding our ability to help with energy security,” Granholm said.

In fact, this has nothing to do with a free market. Rather, corporations are ramping up capacity in coordination with the government in a planned way.

ExxonMobil and Cheniere Energy are pushing ahead with other major expansion projects. Cheniere Energy is looking to expand its Sabine Pass LNG plant in Louisiana, already the largest in the U.S. Again, expectations from finance capital are driving the expansion. Venture Global LNG says it has received $7.8 billion for the Plaquemines expansion from a variety of lenders, including Goldman Sachs, Bank of China, JPMorgan Chase, MUFG, and Natixis (Brower, et al. 2023).

In March the Biden administration also gave the green light to ConocoPhillips’ Willow project on Alaska’s North Slope. According to ConocoPhillips, Willow will produce a peak of 180,000 barrels of oil per day – about 1.5% of current U.S. production. The company will more than double production nationally this year alone (Brower, et al. 2023).

These recent reports should not make us forget that oil and gas production in the Permian Basin in Texas has been expanding at a gigantic rate. And the Permian Basin was already, one of the most prolific oil producing regions in the world. Between 2018 and 2019 alone, oil production there increased by 44%, according to U.S. company Chevron. The region is also a major supplier of natural gas. About 17% of U.S. gas production now comes from the Permian Basin. Not surprisingly, export capacity for LNG is being massively expanded. The high prices for oil and gas have encouraged corporations to massively increase their investments. Unconventional extraction methods such as fracking allow oil to be extracted from deeper layers (Streeck 2023).

The companies are sitting on immeasurable amounts of capital in the form of oil and gas. They will not voluntarily allow this capital to be depreciated. They will continue to claim the profits from these deposits.

All over the world, the fossil offensive is being led and fueled by government anxious to create competitive conditions for resident corporations. U.S. President Joe Biden, for example, urged domestic oil producers to increase production. All governments in Europe are vigorously building a liquefied natural gas infrastructure. Or they are maintaining purchases of Russian gas, which helps the Putin regime finance its war of conquest against the Ukrainian people. Guaranteed supplies of relatively cheap fossil fuels remain a priority of the ruling policy everywhere.

A brief look at Germany illustrates this tendency. In the wake of the Russian war in Ukraine and energy security fears, European imports of LNG increased by 66% in 2022 (BdEW 2023). Germany previously had no LNG infrastructure because it had benefited from much cheaper pipeline gas from the USSR and then Russia since the early 1970s. This was a key factor in the competitiveness of German industry (Zeller, 2023).

However, even before the Russian war against Ukraine, the German government had laid the groundwork for a massive expansion of LNG even before the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Since the start of the war, the German government has expanded and is rapidly advancing its LNG offensive. By the end of 2026, the government plans to have built a total of eight floating and three fixed LNG terminals. The import capacity of all eleven facilities will amount to around 73 billion cubic meters. This would allow Germany to import about 50% more natural gas than the 46 billion cubic meters it purchased from Russia in 2021.

This suggests that these investments go far beyond replacing Russian gas and aim to develop Germany into a European gas hub with the corresponding power. The German government thus assumes that gas consumption will increase massively. It is ino longer thinking about reducing greenhouse gas emissions in the gas sector to the extent required (Höhne, et al. 2022: 5, 8). The Federal Ministry of Economics plans to have 77 billion cubic meters of import capacity for liquefied natural gas. But only just 7 billion cubic meters of capacity – barely the amount of a terminal ship – would meet “climate targets” (Schlund, et al. 2023; Lohmann 2023).

Conclusion: disempowering and expropriating fossil capital

Recent developments confirm a conclusion that can already be drawn from the entire history of fossil capital. The corporations in the oil and gas business, as well as the closely intertwined downstream sectors, such as the automotive and energy industries, are among the most important and powerful fractions of capital. The coal, oil and gas deposits of the corporations are capital waiting to be turned into value. Even under great political pressure, the corporations will not be willing to give up the value of this capital and the expected profits.

The climate justice movement thus faces a comprehensive challenge of power. But our movement alone will not be able to decide the question of power. Only a socially broad movement that includes large sections of workers will be able to build a social and political balance of power that allows the social appropriation of fossil corporations – and thus the smashing of corporate power.

But this alone would does not solve the problems. It would only create the conditions for the possibility of enforcing comprehensive de-fossilization. Fossil capital is decidedly centralized and organized in large transnational corporations. So, social appropriation is not a trivial matter. Public ownership alone in no way guarantees socio-ecological conversion. We are therefore faced with the challenge of enforcing a real democratic socialization. This cannot stop at the borders of nation states.

Questions arise. How can we in Europe initiate the necessary disempowerment of fossil capital? How can we dismantle and covert the fossil infrastructure? How can we construct an ecological and socially just energy infrastructure in a coordinated manner on the continental level?

But the most urgent task now is to transform the climate justice movement into a comprehensive social movement. We need a movement that also embraces the essential concerns of workers in their workplaces, homes, and everyday lives, in a way that aims for an ecologically compatible social metabolism with nature. To advance this orientation, we need to build a strong revolutionary ecosocialist current that understands these challenges and helps to broaden and radicalize the movement.

Sources

BdEW (2023): LNG: Um 66 Prozent, 13. Januar, Bundesverband der Energie- und Wasserwirtschaft e.V. (BdEW): Berlin. https://www.bdew.de/presse/presseinform ... 6-prozent/.

Brower, Derek; Jacobs, Justin; McCormick, Myles und Chu, Amanda (2023): US set to become world’s largest LNG exporter. Financial Times, March 14, 2023. https://www.ft.com/content/2d78c322-ac8 ... 182d1712d7 Zugriff: May 27, 2023.

Hodgson, Camilla und Williams, Aime (2023): Is COP28 destined to be a flop? Financial Times, March 26, 2023. https://www.ft.com/content/37d14048-f79 ... 1447351da1 Zugriff: May 27, 2023.

Höhne, Niklas; Marquardt, Mat und Feket, Hanna (2022): Pläne für deutsche Flüssigerdgas-Terminals sind massiv überdimensioniert, 13. Dezember 2023, NewClimate Institute: Köln, 10 S. https://newclimate.org/sites/default/fi ... _web_0.pdf Zugriff: 23. Februar 2023.

IEA (2022): World Energy Outlook 2022, November 2022, International Energy Agency: Paris, 522 S. https://www.iea.org/reports/world-energy-outlook-2022.

IEA (2023): World Energy Investment 2023, May 25, 2023, International Energy Agency, 180 S. https://iea.blob.core.windows.net/asset ... nt2023.pdf Zugriff: May 26, 2023.

Jacobs, Justin (2023): BP commits to Gulf of Mexico as $9bn platform comes online. Financial Times, April 13 2023. https://www.ft.com/content/1f785360-d5a ... fb3fdb7c1a Zugriff: May 22, 2023.

Jacobs, Justin; Brower, Derek; Chu, Amanda und McCormick, Myles (2023): BP chief: Fossil fuels have done ‘enormous good’. Financial Times, May 11, 2023. https://www.ft.com/content/c87cc623-0fb ... afddd10684 Zugriff: May 27, 2023.

Lohmann, Björn (2023): LNG-Terminals: Überdimensionierter Flüssiggasausbau gefährdet Klimaziele. Riff Reporter, 19.03.2023. https://www.riffreporter.de/de/umwelt/k ... klimaziele Zugriff: 23.03.2023.

Rainforest Action und et.al. (2023): Banking on Climate Chaos. Fossil Fuel Finance Report 2023, April 12, 2023, Rainforest Action Network (RAN), BankTrack, Indigenous Environmental Network (IEN), Oil Change International (OCI), Reclaim Finance, the Sierra Club, and Urgewald, 104 S. https://www.bankingonclimatechaos.org/w ... -05-08.pdf Zugriff: May 20, 2023.

Schlund, David; Gierkink, Max; Moritz, Michael; Kopp, Jan; Junkermann, Jakob; Diers, Hendrik und Vey, Meike (2023): Analyse der globalen Gasmärkte bis 2035. Szenariobasierte Modellsimulation und Gasbilanzanalyse, 27.01.2023, Energiewirtschaftliches Institut an der Universität zu Köln (EWI): Köln. https://www.ewi.uni-koeln.de/cms/wp-con ... -02-10.pdf Zugriff: 23.03.2023.

Streeck, Johannes (2023): Der Boom von Öl und Gas in den USA. 17. Mai 2023. Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung. https://www.rosalux.de/news/id/50444/de ... in-den-usa. Zugriff 22. Mai 2023

Wilson, Tom (2023): Solar power investment to exceed oil for first time, says IEA chief. Financial Times, March 25, 2023. https://www.ft.com/content/990d3ce2-cdc ... a20e0dcaa4 Zugriff: May 27, 2023.

Wilson, Tom und Dunkley, Emma (2023): BP slows oil and gas retreat after record $28bn profit. Financial Times, February 7, 2023. https://www.ft.com/content/419f137c-3a8 ... b6609bcdf7 Zugriff: May 22, 2023.

Zeller, Christian (2023): Geopolitik zur Geoökonomie. Die langfristige strategische deutsch-russische Energiepartnerschaft und ihr Ende. emanzipation – Zeitschrift für ökosozialistische Strategie 7 (1), S. 69-120. https://emanzipation.org/wp-content/upl ... on_7-1.pdf.

https://climateandcapitalism.com/2023/0 ... roduction/

********

More Than 8,000 Illegal Miners Evacuated in Venezuela
AUGUST 14, 2023


A frame of the video posted to Lárez's X account, which references the evacuation of the miners from Yapacana National Park. Photo: X/@dhernandezlarez.

More than 8,431 illegal miners have been voluntarily evacuated from Yapacana National Park in Amazonas state, Venezuela, since July 1.

The strategic operational commander of the Bolivarian National Armed Forces of Venezuela (CEOFANB), Domingo Hernández Lárez, reported on the evacuation of the 8,431 illegal miners through the Carida—Puerto Ayacucho route.

He wrote on his X account: “More than 8,431 illegal miners have been evacuated from Yapacana National Park since July 1.”


These procedures have been carried out with due respect for human rights and the environment, in accordance with the nation’s fifth historic objective: contribute to the preservation of life on the planet and the salvation of the human species.

This Friday, Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro highlighted the success of the military deployment in several states of the country to combat illegal mining.

He explained that during 2022 and 2023, the FANB has maintained deployment to guarantee the security of Venezuelans and face the different terrorist threats.

Madura emphasized that: “A good part of the illegal mining camps come from Colombia. We have to coordinate with the Colombian government. If illegal mining does not stop (…) then we are not going to stop.”

Likewise, he specified that military presence must be maintained in the border regions of the south of the country in order to combat illegal mining.

Maduro added that operations are especially being maintained in the Venezuelan states of Bolívar, Amazonas, Sucre, Apure, Zulia, Falcón, and Táchira, among others.

The head of state urged that: “We have to completely liberate the Amazon [of illegal mining], as Venezuela committed to at the Amazon summit in Brazil.”

On July 1, the president ordered the FANB to clear the Amazon of illegal mining. As such, the FANB activated Operation Autana 2023, which is aimed at preserving life on the planet, ecosystems, and the environment, as a citizen’s duty and right.

On several occasions, Hernández Lárez has ratified that the FANB will remain deployed until the last predator is expelled (from the Amazon region), to then be able to begin reforestation and in order to apply all the necessary measures for the recovery of the soils and rivers that have been degraded after years of mineral extraction.


(Red Radio Venezuela) by Ana Perdigón

Translation by Orinoco Tribune

https://orinocotribune.com/more-than-80 ... venezuela/

Yes, but what of the legal mines? Does humanity need more gold?

[blindpig]

WHAT THE AMAZON COOPERATION SHOULD TAKE FROM UNASUR
15 Aug 2023 , 3:32 pm .


The Amazon region represents between 4% and 6% of the total surface of the Earth and between 25% and 40% of the surface of the Americas (Photo: iStock)

Recently, in the Brazilian city of Belém do Pará, the IV Summit of the Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization (ACTO) was held. In a context where the climate agenda covers multilateral cooperation spaces, and international relations in general, the management of the Amazon basin is of much more interest than it possibly could have been 10, 20 or 30 years ago when the instance was founded.

In addition, for Venezuela it also meant the return to a space from which it was excluded with the signing of the so-called Leticia Pact, and which became more a declaration of good intentions than effective cooperation, just when the Amazon was suffering the biggest fires registered in the region, during the year 2019.

Attention to the aforementioned basin should not generate doubts or delays, according to ACTO data:

*This biome is fundamental for the maintenance of the global climatic balance since it has a great influence on the transport of heat and water vapor to the regions located at higher latitudes.
*The region represents between 4% and 6% of the total surface of the Earth, and between 25% and 40% of the surface of the Americas.
*The Amazon is home to a great variety of flora and fauna species that has allowed the establishment of world records of biological diversity. It is also an important area of ​​endemism, making it a gene pool of global importance.

Hence the importance of the event, especially in a context in which all the studies and expert opinions with international recognition assure that we are at a turning point in climate matters when , sooner rather than later —as the Venezuelan delegation referred to through of Vice President Delcy Rodríguez—, the Global North will look more aggressively at the management of this natural reserve belonging to the eight Amazonian countries.

VENEZUELA IN THE AMAZON MEETING
Beyond the proposals brought by the Venezuelan representation, clearly detailed by Vice President Delcy Rodríguez, we could summarize that it is a return to the concept of state sovereignty over the Amazon —the States that share the region focused on cooperation and multilateralism decide on the management, planning and control of the biome.

The threats identified by Venezuela, exposed by the official, are striking, with which she invites us to reflect on this natural asset shared by eight South American countries, which has already become a focus of world attention due to the growing worsening of the climate crisis. The threats identified were:

*The presence and voracity of pharmaceutical and food emporiums that concentrate capital and market, that favor very few and that generate deep social inequalities.
*The decentralization and outsourcing of the functions and capacity of the States to hand them over to non-governmental organizations (NGOs), which ultimately end up being instrumentalized by the great emporiums —pharmaceutical, food and energy— in order to seize the biodiversity of Basin.
*The aspirations to the NATOization of the region —presence of US military bases and, consequently, of NATO— to supposedly guarantee the commodification of the biodiversity of the Amazon basin.

As we can see, the risks are synthesized in the weakening of the state sovereignty of the Amazonian countries, which should lead the organization to think about action routes that allow confronting and reversing those processes where they have already been implemented.

Based on this, the experience built in the Union of South American Nations (Unasur) could shed light on how to address a problem of importance to the region and the world, in a context where the planning of joint projects and the collection and management of resources economics are vital.


UNASUR 'S EXPERIENCE
Despite the hegemonic story that is intended to be positioned on Unasur, described as a club of friends where there was no dissent and ideologically aligned, the truth is that a cursory review of its 10 years of existence allows us to affirm that it was a diverse space with different approaches. and nuances, where diametrically different positions such as those of Álvaro Uribe or Rafael Correa managed to coexist on the "left-right" axis, or with gradations within the same affiliation: Chávez-Lula on the left or Alan García-Sebastián Piñera on the right .

The tortuous negotiations to elect the Secretary General and regularly for the construction of the necessary consensus in decision-making, the different approaches with which the relationship with the United States, Russia or China was assumed, and the conflicts that occurred during that time between the member countries —Colombia-Ecuador, Bolivia-Brazil and Argentina-Uruguay, just to name a few— make it possible to ensure that coexistence was not easy, although it occurred because they understood the need to advance together on vital issues for the region.

After the intensive therapy to which it was induced and the not very encouraging prospects for its reactivation, Unasur has a wealth of practices and ways of acting that can guide us towards the old and new challenges that Latin America and the Caribbean as a whole maintain, through the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (Celac), and those that are specifically raised in platforms such as ACTO, where technique and politics necessarily go hand in hand.

When we talk about the heritage, we are referring specifically to the councils and working groups that article 5 of the constitutive treaty of Unasur contemplates, which allowed the formation of 12 sectoral councils that facilitated the joint approach of specific problems in South America.

Special advances were made within the framework of the Defense Council —multilateral collaboration in budgetary matters, training, the fight against drug trafficking and transnational crime, just to name a few—, the South American Energy Council —regional map of resources, reduction of energy asymmetries, etc. — and the South American Council of Science, Technology and Innovation of Unasur (Cosucti) .

It is important to point out that, although an environmental council was not created, given the speed with which the councils were created and the dynamics they acquired, it is not surprising that given the persistence in the region of climatic phenomena such as " El Niño" and "La Niña", direct consequences of the current climate crisis from which South America is not escaping, would very likely have been an area of ​​cooperation where Unasur would have focused its efforts.

DECLARATION OF BELEM DO PARÁ AND THE RELAUNCH OF AMAZONIAN COOPERATION
From the declaration of Belem do Pará with its 113 points and more than twenty recitals, we want to highlight some important aspects for Venezuela and the Amazon region.

In the first place, the explicit condemnation made in its recitals:

*18 on unilateral trade measures that, based on environmental requirements and regulations, result in trade barriers in clear allusion to the new demands of the European Union to the Mercosur countries (Brazil) to sign the trade agreement;
*and 20 on the promotion of international relations free of threats, aggressions and unilateral coercive measures, contrary to international law -specific mention on Venezuela-.

Another aspect to highlight is the recovery of sovereignty (article 1, letter e) as a transversal principle in the implementation of the declaration in general, but also specifically in a new common cooperation agenda in the Amazon. This inclusion is not minor, given the pressures and threats that hang over the Amazon basin, exposed by the Venezuelan delegation.

The institutional reform of the ACTO (article 2) in which the incorporation of an Additional Protocol to the Amazon Cooperation Treaty is proposed, which establishes the Meeting of Presidents of the States Parties to the Amazon Cooperation Treaty as a forum for decision-making and the adoption of strategic political priorities in its field, is a relevant advance for a body that will soon reach its 30th anniversary.

Likewise, the reactivation of the Special Commissions is established, at the ministerial level, in some specific areas such as the environment, indigenous affairs, science and technology, to mention a few, and it is also indicated that new ones may be created, depending on the needs. of the Member States, such as "citizen security", explicitly established (art. 4).

This space, where the experience accumulated in Unasur —of which all the ACTO countries were part (only Argentina, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay are not members)— can serve the purpose of strengthening the Amazonian organization. Especially with regard to police, judicial and intelligence cooperation in the fight against illegal activities, including crimes against the environment (art. 61-67), in which the dynamics that were generated within the framework of the Defense Council could serve as inputs to establish ways of working that contemplate the creation of the Center for International Police Cooperation in the Amazon (art. 65) and exchange of information and police and intelligence cooperation (art. 66 and 67).

The 10 years of validity that Unasur had showed weaknesses that precipitated its decline, but also evidenced the potential that agreement and intergovernmental dialogue have at times when the construction of blocks seems complex, and the need for solutions and approach to strategic matters are pressing It is in this space where the Unasur heritage is especially powerful.

https://misionverdad.com/globalistan/lo ... -de-unasur

Google Translator

[blindpig]

April 2017 – Participants of March for Science in Saint Paul, Minnesota. (Photo: Kids want Climate Justice – Wkicommons / cropped from original / shared under license CC BY-SA 2.0)

We won’t win climate justice in court
Originally published: Counterfire on August 17, 2023 by John Clarke (more by Counterfire) | (Posted Aug 22, 2023)

A court case in the state of Montana has raised considerable hopes about the prospects for addressing the climate crisis through legal interventions. Represented by the non-profit law firm, Our Children’s Trust, sixteen young people brought an action arguing ‘that a provision in the Montana Environmental Policy Act has harmed the state’s environment and the young plaintiffs by preventing Montana from considering the climate impacts of energy projects.’

The Montana First Judicial District Court found in favour of the plaintiffs and deemed the provision to be unconstitutional. The Washington Post, a leading liberal U.S. newspaper, presented this legal victory in very glowing terms. The Post reported that the ‘sweeping win, one of the strongest decisions on climate change ever issued by a court, could energize the environmental movement and usher in a wave of cases aimed at advancing action on climate change, experts say.’

Julia Olson, the executive director of Our Children’s Trust, stated that this ‘is a huge win for Montana, for youth, for democracy and for our climate. More rulings like this will certainly come.’ The court’s favourable decision was delivered after compelling testimony from young people convinced Judge Kathy Seeley ‘that the state’s emissions could be fairly traced to the legal provision blocking Montana from reviewing the climate impacts of energy projects.’

The Judge also found ‘that the state’s emissions and climate change have caused harm to the environment and the youth plaintiffs.’ She wrote in her ruling that ‘every additional ton of GHG emissions exacerbates Plaintiffs’ injuries and risks locking in irreversible climate injuries.’

It should be noted that Montana is an exceptionally significant location to host such a legal challenge. It ‘is home to the largest recoverable coal reserves in the country’ and, according to the plaintiffs in the case, ‘the state has never denied a permit for a fossil fuel project.’

A spokesperson for Montana Attorney General Austin Knudsen described the ruling as ‘absurd’ and stated that ‘their same legal theory has been thrown out of federal court and courts in more than a dozen states. It should have been here as well.’ She also confirmed that the decision will be appealed at the state Supreme Court.

It is already clear that fossil-fuel interests in Montana and beyond have taken note of this ruling and they can be expected to devote considerable energy to an effort to contain its impact. Immediately after the court reached its decision, Alan Olson, the executive director of the Montana Petroleum Association, declared on cue that ‘if this decision stands, it will cause great economic harm to the state of Montana.’

Relying on the courts

The Montana case does indeed constitute a victory in an ongoing effort to limit the harm caused by climate change by taking up court actions. While, on balance, the results of these have not been favourable, this is by no means the first win in a courtroom that has raised hopes that greater victories are possible through this approach.

In 2019, ‘the Dutch Supreme Court, the highest court in the Netherlands, upheld the previous decisions in the Urgenda Climate Case, finding that the Dutch government has obligations to urgently and significantly reduce emissions in line with its human rights obligations.’ In response, the Dutch government did make substantial commitments to ‘reducing capacity at the country’s three coal-fired power stations’ and took other concrete steps.

Building on the Urgenda decision, ‘Milieudefensie/Friends of the Earth Netherlands and co-plaintiffs served Shell a court summons alleging Shell’s contributions to climate change violate its duty of care under Dutch law and human rights obligations.’ In 2021, ‘the Hague District Court ordered Shell to reduce its emissions by 45% by 2030, relative to 2019, across all activities including both its own emissions and end-use emissions.’

Though the ‘Court made its decision provisionally enforceable, meaning Shell will be required to meet its reduction obligations even as the case is appealed,’ the company has dragged its feet and has continued to fight the decision in court.

There is no doubt that fossil-fuel companies view legal challenges of this kind with very considerable concern. Not only can unfavourable rulings cause them major problems but high-profile court cases focus attention on their role in environment degradation in ways that they don’t at all welcome.

The law firm Dentons rather smoothly advises its corporate clients that ‘managing litigation and regulatory risk must form a key part of any climate strategy.’ In doing this, they are also sagely warned that the ‘need to avoid accusations of climate-washing (or “greenwashing”) has become an increasingly challenging area for businesses across every sector and jurisdiction.’

An examination of the legal strategies that have been pursued on climate change certainly doesn’t point to the conclusion that they have been futile and meaningless. Indeed, it seems reasonable to suggest that such an approach is a legitimate and important method of challenging the climate vandalism of fossil-fuel companies and their enablers in government.

A turn to litigation approaches, however, starts to be problematic when its potential impact is overestimated and it becomes the main focus in trying to address climate change. Even worse, the risk is that social mobilisation will be subordinated to a strategy based principally on legal challenges. In this regard, it is necessary to have a realistic sense of how much is likely to be won in the courts.

Enemy territory

From the cases that have been considered here, we can see a very obvious problem in that court rulings can be appealed and counterclaims can be filed. Fossil-fuel companies have considerable means at their disposal to pursue such options and drag things out interminably. The Montana case, for example, will be appealed, and any concrete measures to limit the destructive activity of oil companies or mining interests that might be obtained are a very long way off.

The judicial wing of the state can and sometimes does bring down rulings that limit polluting companies. However, the ability of those companies and their political allies to delay or even avoid compliance is considerable. Moreover, courtrooms are the most decidedly enemy territory for working-class people seeking to uphold their interests. They uphold a system of law that puts the rights of capitalist property above all else. While some gains are entirely possible, it isn’t realistic to imagine that the weight of judicial rulings is going to go against the class interests of the capitalists.

In the face of the dire threat of climate change and its utterly catastrophic results, there are a couple of inescapable conclusions when it comes to the destructive course we are on. Firstly, the ‘treadmill of production’ that John Bellamy Foster speaks of, including the continued emission of carbon on a vast and lethal scale, flows from the logic of capitalist accumulation itself. We are dealing with the fundamental nature of this social and economic system and not exceptional abuses that require policy adjustments.

That being so, as long years of working-class experience have shown, the most important means by far of limiting the exploitative and destructive power of capital is through mass action and social resistance. There is absolutely nothing wrong with pursuing legal strategies and they can play an important role. However, the fight for climate justice won’t be won in the courtroom and it must be taken out onto the streets.

https://mronline.org/2023/08/22/we-wont ... -in-court/

A-fucking-men. To paraphrase TE Lawrence berating a Bedouin chief, "The NRDC shoot a lot and hit a little." And how much can be expected from an occupation(lawyers & judges) comfortably ensconced in the social order of capitalism? Class might not be decisive each and every time, but it might as well.

******

LandBack or Nothing: Capitalism Is the True Culprit, Not Humanity
AUGUST 19, 2023


Indigenous Land Defenders blocking the road to Mount Rushmore on Friday, July 3, 2020. Photo: Willi White.

By Agonas – Aug 17, 2023

“All human beings are descendants of tribal people who were spiritually alive, intimately in love with the natural world, children of Mother Earth. When we were tribal people, we knew who we were, we knew where we were, and we knew our purpose.”- John Trudell

Land Back involves a collaborative global multipolar process that centers on returning ancestral lands to Indigenous communities and restoring their sovereignty. Climate doomers, often perpetuated by the media, present an exaggerated sense of hopelessness regarding the climate crisis. This narrative can paralyze action by making individuals feel powerless and detached from solutions. Embracing revolutionary optimism is essential to counter this myth, as it empowers people to engage in meaningful action, create change, and work collectively toward mitigating the climate crisis.

The capitalist system which was deliberately created to exploit the Earth’s resources for economic gain, is incapable of providing salvation for our planet. Within the framework of capitalism, we prioritize short-term gains over long-term sustainability. While incremental policy changes may offer temporary solutions, they ultimately fall short of addressing the root causes of environmental degradation. According to climate experts, we have until the year 2030 to stop the continuous global warming of our planet. If we fail to achieve this, they warn of the “irreversible effects” of climate change. A transformation is needed—one that restores the bond between humanity and the Earth, acknowledging the worth of our environment beyond its utilitarian function.

A handful of corporations shoulder the weight of 70% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions since 1988. This groundbreaking study is known as the Carbon Majors Report. Despite being less than 5 percent of the global population, Indigenous Peoples safeguard a remarkable 80 percent of the Earth’s biodiversity. Most of the land in Canada is owned by the government and referred to as Crown lands. These lands account for around 89% of Canada’s total land area, which is about 8.9 million square kilometers. Crown lands can be categorized as either federal (41%) or provincial (48%), with only the remaining 11% being privately owned.

White supremacy has served as a foundation, upholding capitalist systems and enabling exploitation, all while severing our connection to both culture and the Earth. Rooted in colonization, this toxic ideology has been used to justify the domination of Indigenous lands and the extraction of resources for profit. It has created a hierarchical structure that benefits a privileged few at the expense of marginalized communities. “Tribal warfare” is commonly cited as a justification for colonialism, but historically and factually, this claim is inaccurate and perpetuated by Western academia. Recorded history points to two major colonialism waves. The first wave commenced during Europe’s Age of Discovery in the 15th century. European powers such as Britain, Spain, France, and Portugal engaged in the colonization of North and South American lands.

This separation from culture is deliberate, as it weakens collective resistance and allows the preservation of a system that prioritizes economic gain above all else. The Earth has suffered as a result of this disconnect, with ecosystems degraded and resources plundered without regard for long-term consequences. Challenging white supremacy means dismantling its relationship with capitalism, reestablishing cultural bonds, and fostering a deep respect for the planet that sustains us all.

The declaration that “humans are a virus” has its roots in a dangerous ideology known as eco-fascism, which oversimplifies the relationship between humanity and the environment. Rather than viewing humans as an external, destructive force, it is crucial to recognize that we are an inherent part of the Earth’s intricate ecosystems. Vilifying humanity as a virus overlooks the real issue at hand: the unsustainable practices driven by certain systems, such as capitalism, that prioritize profit over ecological harmony. It is not humanity itself that is solely responsible for environmental degradation, but unchecked exploitation.

While colonial powers approached nature as a possession to exploit and resources to commodify, Indigenous Peoples held fundamentally different views. Their understanding revolves around inherent rights with responsibilities toward the natural world. The cornerstone of Indigenous laws is rooted in relationships and reciprocity.

In the book “Prison of Grass: Canada from a Native Point of View”(1975) authored by Howard Adams (1921-2001), a Métis revolutionary activist, Adams argues that Indigenous people must engage in a national liberation movement to challenge the system of settler-colonialism. Adams mentions the potential co-optation of the anti-colonial movement by conservative leaders. He warns that these leaders might attempt to steer the struggle towards depoliticized and reformist paths.

“Before the Europeans arrived, Indian society was governed without police, without kings and governors, without judges, and without a ruling class…There were no poor and needy by comparison with other members, and likewise no wealthy and privileged; as a result, on the prairies there were no classes and no class antagonisms among the people… Indian communal society was transformed into an economic class of labourers by European fur trading companies, particularly the Hudsons Bay Company. …Businessmen of Europe realized that they would need a large supply of labor to obtain resources from the new continents. Natives furnished this large supply of cheap labor. Since labor was an important item of cost in the production of goods, European businessmen wanted to get the greatest amount of labor for the least possible pay, and the purpose of racism was to reduce native people to a subhuman level where they could be freely exploited. Racism therefore arose from economic factors inherent in capitalism.” – Howard Adams

Neo-colonialism weakens people’s connection to their own culture by promoting Western ideals as symbols of progress. Consumerism can lead individuals to view traditional practices as outdated, favoring Western lifestyles. Education systems may prioritize Western colonial knowledge, undermining Indigenous teachings. Economic pressures push people toward capitalism leaving them with little choice. Disrupting intergenerational practices. A detachment from Indigenous roots occurs, eroding cultural identity over time.

Treaties were originally intended to bring mutual benefits, they have, in practice, been exploited by the Crown to further resource extraction on land previously under Indigenous governance. Canada’s execution of the treaties has, in every case, fallen short of upholding that agreement. Conservatives, both from social and political spheres, often depict communists, as extreme authoritarians, driven by an insatiable hunger for power. They associate communism and decolonization with oppressive state leaders, labor camp overseers, and suppressors of opposing voices. These myths against communism are intent on undermining practices present within Indigenous movements striving to decolonize the planet.

https://orinocotribune.com/landback-or- ... -humanity/

[blindpig]

SPEECH: Imperialism is the Arsonist of Our Forests and Savannas, Thomas Sankara, February 5, 1986
Editors, The Black Agenda Review 23 Aug 2023


Thomas Sankara, radical leader and martyr of Burkina Faso, understood that the problem of ecological destruction was rooted in capitalism and imperialism.

Thomas Sankara’s speech,“Imperialism is the arsonist of our forests and savannas,” has resurfaced on the interwebs of late, and with good reason. Apocalyptic, mercurial, and cruelly deadly weather patterns, brought on by the ceaseless malignancy of capitalism and the tireless expansion of imperialism, has produced a planet that is literally on fire, pushing its life forms to the edge of extinction. From Lahaina to Lytton, entire communities have been incinerated, unprecedented wildfires rage from North Africa to Nunavut, and everywhere temperatures rise while air quality declines. Meanwhile, official, governmental efforts to reverse global warming have been half-hearted, hamfisted, or simply non-existent. And in some cases, such as the push for a so-called green-economy, they have merely gussied up old extractive practices with new but empty language. Green capitalism is still capitalism and still based on white imperialism.

Sankara, on the other hand, recognized that the problem of ecological destruction was rooted in capitalism and imperialism. This was the lesson of the experience of the Burkinabe people; this was the vision of the future of the world from the edge of the Sahel, where deforestation and industrial growth had led to the acceleration of desertification and death – and where the solution lay not only in replanting trees, but in revolution. From the perspective of the present, Sankara’s speech is almost visionary. We hope his prophecy doesn’t come to us too late.

Sankara’s “Imperialism is the arsonist of our forests and savannas ” was delivered at the First International Silva Conference on Trees and Forests [1ère Conférence internationale sur l'arbre et la forêt] on February 5, 1986 at the Sorbonne, Paris. It was published in the February 14, 1986, issue of the Ouagadougou journal Carrefour africain and included in translated form in Thomas Sankara Speaks: The Burkina Faso Revolution 1983-1987 . We reprint it below.



‘Imperialism is the arsonist of our forests and savannas’

Thomas Sankara

My Homeland, Burkina Faso, is without question one of the rare countries on this planet justified in calling itself and viewing itself as a distillation of all the natural evils from which mankind still suffers at the end of this twentieth century.

Eight million Burkinabè have painfully internalized this reality for twenty-three years. They have watched their mothers, fathers, daughters, and sons die, with hunger, famine, disease, and ignorance decimating them by the hundreds. With tears in their eyes, they have watched ponds and rivers dry up. Since 1973 they have seen the environment deteriorate, trees die, and the desert invade with giant strides. It is estimated that the desert in the Sahel advances at the rate of seven kilometers per year.

Only by looking at these realities can one understand and accept the legitimate revolt that was born, that matured over a long period of time, and that finally erupted in an organized way the night of August 4, 1983, in the form of a democratic and popular revolution in Burkina Faso.

Here I am merely the humble spokesperson of a people who, having passively watched their natural environment die, refuse to watch themselves die. Since August 4, 1983, water, trees, and lives, if not by survival itself, have been fundamental and sacred elements in all actions taken by the National Council of the Revolution, which leads Burkina Faso.

In this regard, I am also compelled to pay tribute to the French people, to their government, and in particular to their president, Mr. François Mitterrand , for this initiative, which expresses the political genius and clear-sightedness of a people always open to the world and sensitive to its misery. Burkina Faso, situated in the heart of the Sahel, will always fully appreciate initiatives that are in perfect harmony with the most vital concerns of its people. The country will be present at them whenever it is necessary, in contrast to useless pleasure trips.

For nearly three years now, my people, the Burkinabè people, have been fighting a battle against the encroachment of the desert. So it was their duty to be here on this platform to talk about their experience, and also to benefit from the experience of other people from around the world. For nearly three years in Burkina Faso, every happy event, marriages, baptisms, award presentations, and visits by prominent individuals and others, is celebrated with a tree-planting ceremony.

To greet the new year 1986, all the schoolchildren and students of our capital, Ouagadougou, built more than 3,500 improved cookstoves with their own hands, offering them to their mothers. This was in addition to the 80,000 cookstoves made by the women themselves over the course of two years. This was their contribution to the national effort to reduce the consumption of firewood and to protect trees and life.

The ability to buy or simply rent one of the hundreds of the public dwellings built since August 4, 1983, is strictly conditional on the beneficiary promising to plant a minimum number of trees and to nurture them like the apple of his eye. Those who received these dwellings but were mindless of their commitment have already been evicted, thanks to the vigilance of our Committees for the Defense of the Revolution, committees that poisonous touches take pleasure in systematically and unilaterally denigrating.

After having vaccinated throughout the national territory, 2.5 million children between the ages of nine months and fourteen years, children from Burkina Faso and from neighboring countries, against measles, meningitis, and yellow fever; after having sunk more than 150 wells assuring drinking water to the 20 or so districts in our capital that lacked this vital necessity until now; after having raised the literacy rate from 12 to 22 percent in two years, the Burkinabè people victoriously continue their struggle for a green Burkina.

Ten million trees were planted under the auspices of a fifteen-month People's Development Program, our first venture while awaiting the five-year plan. In the villages and in the developed River valleys, families must each plant one hundred trees per year.

The cutting and selling of firewood has been completely reorganized and is now strictly regulated. These measures range from the requirement to hold a lumber merchant's card, through respecting the zones designated for wood cutting, to the requirement to ensure reforestation of deforestation areas. Today every Burkinabè town and village owns a wood grove, thus reviving an ancestral tradition.

Thanks to the effort to make the popular masses aware of their responsibilities, our urban centers are free of the plague of roaming livestock. In our countryside, our efforts focus on settling livestock in one place as a means of promoting intensive stockbreeding in order to fight against unrestrained nomadism.

All criminal acts of arson by those who burn the forest are subject to trial and sanctioning by the Popular Courts of Conciliation in the villages. The requirement of planting a certain number of trees is one of the sanctions issued by these courts.

From February 10 to March 20, more than 35,000 peasants, officials of the cooperative village groups, will take intensive, basic courses on the subjects of economic management and environmental organization and maintenance.

Since January 15 a vast operation called the "Popular Harvest of Forest Seeds" has been under way in Burkina for the purpose of supplying the 7,000 village nurseries. We sum up all of these activities under the label "the three battles."

Ladies and gentlemen:

My intention is not to heap unrestrained and inordinate praise on the modest revolutionary experience of my people with regard to the defense of the Trees and Forests. My intention is to speak as explicitly as possible about the profound changes occurring in the relationship between men and trees in Burkina Faso. My intention is to bear witness as accurately as possible to the birth and development of a deep and sincere love between Burkinabè men and trees in my Homeland.

In doing this, we believe we are applying our theoretical conceptions on this, based on the specific ways and means of our Sahel reality, in the search for solutions to present and future dangers attacking trees all over the planet.

Our efforts and those of the entire community gathered here, your cumulative experience and ours, will surely guarantee us victory after victory in the struggle to save our trees, our environment, and, in short, our lives.

Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen:

I come to you in the hope that you are taking up a battle from which we cannot be absent, we who are attacked daily and who are waiting for the miracle of greenery to rise up from the courage to say what must be said. I have come to join with you in deploring the harshness of nature. But I have also come to denounce the ones whose selfishness is the source of his fellow man's misfortune. Colonial plunder has decimated our forests without the slightest thought of replenishing them for our tomorrow's.

The unpunished disruption of the biosphere by savage and murderous forays on the land and in the air continues. One cannot say too much about the extent to which all these machines that spew fumes spread carnage. Those who have the technological means to find the culprits have no interest in doing so, and those who have an interest in doing so lack the technological means. They have only their intuition and their innermost conviction.

We are not against progress, but we do not want progress that is anarchic and criminally neglects the rights of others. We therefore wish to affirm that the battle against the encroachment of the desert is a battle to establish a balance between man, nature, and society. As such it is a political battle above all, and not an act of fate.

The creation of a Ministry of Water as a complement to the Ministry of the Environment and Tourism in my country demonstrates our desire to clearly formulate the problems in order to be able to resolve them. We must fight to find the financial means to exploit our existing water resources, drilling operations, reservoirs, and dams. This is the place to denounce the one sided contracts and draconian conditions imposed by banks and other financial institutions that doom our projects in this field. It is these prohibitive conditions that lead to our country's traumatizing debt and eliminate any meaningful maneuvering room.

Neither fallacious Malthusian arguments, and I assert that Africa remains an underpopulated continent, nor the vacation resorts pompously and demagogically christened "reforestation operations" provide an answer. We and our misery are spurned like bald and mangy dogs whose lamentations and cries disturb the peace and quiet of the manufacturers and merchants of misery.

That is why Burkina has proposed and continues to propose that at least 1 percent of the colossal sums of money sacrificed to the search for cohabitation with other stars and planets be used, by way of compensation, to finance projects to save trees and lives. We have not abandoned hope that a dialog with the Martians might lead to the re-conquest of Eden. But in the meantime, earthlings that we are, we also gave the right to reject a choice limited simply to the alternatives of hell or purgatory.

Explained in this way, our struggle for the trees and Forests is first and foremost a democratic and popular struggle. Because a handful of forestry engineers and experts getting themselves all worked up in a sterile and costly manner will never accomplish anything! Nor can the worked-up consciences of a multitude of forums and institutions, sincere and praiseworthy they may be, make the Sahel green again, when we lack the funds to drill wells for drinking water a hundred meters deep, while money abounds to build oil wells three thousand meters deep!

As Karl Marx said, those who live in a palace do not think about the same things, nor in the same way, as those who live in a hut. This struggle to defend the trees and Forests is above all a struggle against imperialism. Because imperialism is the arsonist setting fire to our forests and savannas.

Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen:

We rely on these revolutionary principles of struggle so that the green of abundance, joy, and happiness may take its rightful place. We believe in the power of the Revolution to stop the death of our Faso and usher in a bright future for it.

Yes, the problem posed by the trees and Forests is exclusively the problem of balance and harmony between the individual, society, and nature. This fight can be waged. We must not retreat in face of the immensity of the task. We must not turn away from the suffering of others, for the spread of the desert no longer knows any borders.

We can win this struggle if we choose to be architects and simply not bees.[1] The bee and the architect, yes! If the author of these lines will allow me, I will extend this twofold analogy to a threefold one: the bee, the architect, and the revolutionary architect.

Homeland or death, we will win!

https://www.blackagendareport.com/speec ... ary-5-1986

******

Jonesing on Carbon
Posted on August 24, 2023 by Yves Smith

Yves here. It may not be obvious to readers, but even by the standards of rich person largesse, a Boeing 747 as a private jet is really vile. Note that the pictured 747-8 is the biggest 747 Boeing ever made. I had a friend who was a very successful investor and for matters of personal prurient interest as well as being able to banter with prospects much wealthier than he was, kept current on prices for trinkets. It was many many years ago, but then 747s were for sale at $1 million, which seemed implausibly cheap for such a huge plane. The reason was they were fuel hogs. The running costs were enormous, even in an era of cheaper energy and little worry about carbon footprints.

By Thomas Neuburger. Originally published at God’s Spies


Luxury Boeing 747-8 Widebody Private Jet – Forward Dining. Image credit: Greenpoint Technologies


Luxury Boeing 747-8 Widebody Private Jet – Forward Lounge. Image credit: Greenpoint Technologies

And appetite, an universal wolf …
Must make perforce an universal prey,
And last eat up himself.
— William Shakespeare

It’s not about envy; it’s about control.
—Yours truly

We’ve been writing about climate lately — see here for a list of recent climate offerings — and pretty much covered the ground as it lays before us in 2023.

Global warming is accelerating — the global climate will cross +1.5°C next year, and +3°C in the 2070s, an absolute disaster.
Deniers have switched to delay as a messaging tactic.
The wealth that controls both US political parties will not change the way energy is produced or consumed.
Yet the fossil fuel companies must go out of business if we’re not forced to don our lemming masks and march to the cliff.
There’s more to be said, of course, like the recent and scary increase in atmospheric methane, but all that’s left to complete the list above is to identify the leading users of carbon-based fuel, since it’s them we need to stop first of all.

The Leading Users of Global Fossil Fuel

The news: The greatest users of carbon aren’t the middle classes of various countries, including the United States, though their use is still excessive. The greatest users aren’t the struggling poor or the rising workers of developing nations like India and China.

The greatest users by far are the very rich, the top 10% and especially 1%, wherever they’re found. Mostly they’re found in the West.

Some data:

“[T]he richest 0.1% of the world’s population emitted 10 times more than all the rest of the richest 10% combined, exceeding a total footprint of 200 tonnes of CO2 per capita annually. Within this 0.1% are the billionaires and multimillionaires whose emissions-intensive super-yachts, private jets, and mansions have attracted the attention of climate activists.”
“Globally, the top 10% of emitters were responsible for almost half of global energy-related CO2 emissions in 2021, compared with a mere 0.2% for the bottom 10%.”
“Around 85% of [the top 10% of emitters] live in advanced economies – including Australia, Canada, the European Union, Japan, Korea, New Zealand, United States, and United Kingdom – and also in China.”
“In 2021, the average North American emitted 11 times more energy-related CO2 than the average African.”
Regarding the top 10% of global wealth, here’s a chart of per-capita energy use by income groups in four heavy-use regions, US, EU, China and India:



Regarding the richest 1%, consider this from Oxfam about the increase in carbon emissions:

Annual emissions grew by 60 percent between 1990 and 2015. The richest 5 percent were responsible for over a third (37 percent) of this growth. The total increase in emissions of the richest one percent was three times more than that of the poorest 50 percent. [emphasis added]

The super-rich are hands down the gas-guzzler kings of burning through the remaining carbon budget:

The richest 1% (c.63 million people) alone were responsible for 15% of cumulative emissions [since 1990], and 9% of the carbon budget – twice as much as the poorest half of the world’s population.

If it wasn’t clear before, we have a super-rich problem.



It’s Not About Envy; It’s About Control

The wealthy, of course, will cast this story — that the rich are responsible for half the world’s fossil fuel use — as a tale of envy, ours of their wealth. But that’s a distraction. I would cast this story as a tale of control — taking back rule of the world from those destroying it, including, sadly, themselves.

With apologies to the author for a slight modification:

And appetite, a universal wolf, must make perforce a universal prey, and last eat up himself.

The very rich, the wolves, won’t save themselves. Why would we trust them to care about any of us? Clearly, we have to take control ourselves, be our own Jesus (in this metaphor) and lead ourselves, the lambs, from the infinite appetite of those we gave power to.

That sounds like work, taking control, and it is.

But what’s the alternative? Watch “the game” till there’s no more game to watch? Stream Netflix till their servers all go down? See your children bake and their hatred rise?

Or take this day and act? Your call, humanity. How else do we stop this death machine ruling class? If you see an alternative, say so.

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2023/08 ... arbon.html

All true, but let's not leave the Middle Class off the hook, eh? It seems to me that all of this attention given to the '1%' treats the symptom and not the disease. Can't have capitalism without the rich and vice versa.

[blindpig]

Forest carbon offsets, supposedly worth billions, have no climate benefit
August 26, 2023.

REDD projects combine false emission claims, worthless credits and human rights abuses


Peer-reviewed study concludes that 94% of deforestation credits claimed by the largest offset provider are worthless. (Vyacheslav Argenberg CC BY 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons)

by Chris Lang
Editor, REDD-Monitor

In January 2023, The Guardian, Die Zeit, and SourceMaterial published the results of a nine month investigation into forest carbon offsets. They found massive overestimates of the number of carbon offsets generated from the projects.

The research focused on Verra, the world’s largest carbon standard, and found that “94% of the credits had no benefit to the climate.”

The investigation used the analysis in a preprint paper that had not yet been peer reviewed. The paper has now been peer reviewed and published in the journal Science.

The authors looked at 26 REDD projects in six countries on three continents and found that “most projects have not significantly reduced deforestation.” Some of the projects did reduce deforestation, but “reductions were substantially lower than claimed.”

Keerti Gopal, a journalist with Inside Climate News sums up the findings of the Science paper:

“Only 18 of the 26 projects had sufficient publicly available information to determine the number of offsets they were projected to produce. From project implementation until 2020, those 18 projects were expected to generate up to 89 million carbon offsets to be sold in the global carbon market. But researchers estimate that only 5.4 million of the 89 million, or 6.1 percent, would be associated with actual carbon emission reductions.”

Counterfactual baselines

The problem is the counterfactual baseline, which is a story made up about what would have happened in the absence of a particular REDD project. It’s impossible to check whether the story is accurate or not, because the project did go ahead.

Even REDD proponents agree that this is the case. Everland is a company created by Wildlife Works Carbon, a REDD project developer, to market REDD credits. Obviously, Everland claims that REDD is effective. But Everland also acknowledges that, “fundamentally it is impossible to ‘validate’ a counterfactual simply because by definition it is what did not happen.”

In other words, Everland admits that Verra has been creating carbon offsets out of hot air since it was set up in 2007.

Writing in 2016, Larry Lohmann, who writes about climate justice at The Corner House, highlighted the problem with baselines Lohmann emphasized that this is not a problem with particular REDD projects, but with REDD and all other offsets:

“So when academic and policy authors say that this or that REDD project is bogus or a fraud because it is non-additional, they are talking nonsense. No REDD project could ever be either additional OR non-additional. To put it yet another way, the problem is not ‘bad baselines’ but the concept of counterfactual baselines itself. That reality does more than invalidate any particular REDD project. It invalidates REDD (and all other offsets) as a whole.”

Predictably enough, Verra disagrees with the claims of worthless carbon offsets made by The Guardian, Die Zeit, and SourceMaterial. But not long after the investigations were published, David Antonioli announced that he would be resigning from his US$345,272-a-year job as CEO of Verra.

Prices and sales of REDD carbon offsets have crashed this year. A recent report from Barclays found that the price of carbon offsets has fallen to about US$2, down from about US$9 at the start of 2022. According to Barclays, the overall value of the voluntary carbon market this year is US$500 million, down from US$2 billion in 2021.

The Guardian reported on the Science paper under the headline “Carbon credit speculators could lose billions as offsets deemed ‘worthless’.”

Naomi Klein commented that, “Speculators may lose billions but the rest of us have lost decades to these predictably scam-laden ‘market’ ‘solutions’.”

Human rights and REDD

But it’s not only dodgy baselines, phony carbon offsets, and hot air that bedevil REDD projects. There are also reports of human rights abuses in REDD projects.

In 2017, the Centre for International Forestry Research put out a paper looking at allegations of human rights abuse in relation to REDD. The paper found “multiple allegations of abuses of the rights of Indigenous Peoples in the context of Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation (REDD+) readiness and implementation.”

CIFOR’s paper also noted that, “grassroots and international movements (and related media like REDD-Monitor) have successfully publicized claims of rights abuses, likely preventing others.”

In June 2023, Verra stopped the issuance of carbon credits from the Southern Cardamom REDD project in Cambodia. The suspension followed a letter from Human Rights Watch about the brutal form of fortress conservation imposed by Wildlife Alliance, the project developer, on local communities living in the project area.

Trafigura Group is a multinational commodity trading company incorporated in Singapore. It’s the largest metal trader and the second largest oil trader in the world. It is also the world’s largest trader of carbon removal credits.

Bloomberg reports that Trafigura recently bought carbon credits from the Southern Cardamom REDD project. Trafigura had a contract to sell these to a large retailer.

As a result of the human rights allegations, Trafigura offered its client the option of buying credits from a different project. The client accepted, leaving Trafigura with the Southern Cardamon REDD credits stranded on its books.

Hannah Hauman has been Trafigura’s global head of carbon trading since April 2021. Before that, she was an oil trader, working for Shell, Puma Energy and other oil companies. She joined Trafigura in 2019 as a crude oil trader. She told Patrick Greenfield of The Guardian that, “coming from oil trading, it is strange to see units in carbon markets become invalid overnight. But I think it is in their nature to be constantly evolving with science. It is inherent in the asset class.”

But carbon offsets are not “constantly evolving with science.” They don’t become “invalid overnight.” All carbon offsets are always invalid. Always have been and always will be. It’s time to scrap this dangerous false solution.

https://climateandcapitalism.com/2023/0 ... e-benefit/

Carbon offsets are of a piece with the 'offsets' and mitigation of freshwater habitats, water 'deserts' relative to those habitats which they are "replacing".

British anticapitalist group calls for broad ecosocialist movement
August 23, 2023

Appeal proposes conference to discuss strategy and turn theory into action



This appeal was published on August 23 by the British group Anticapitalist Resistance. This is an important initiative, but its success will depend whether it involves a wide range of ecosocialist currents in launching a non-sectarian and action-oriented coalition.

Capitalism is destroying the planet’s ecosystem for profit, so we must build an international eco-socialist movement rooted in the working class to expropriate businesses, end imperialism and borders, and transform the economy to prioritize human need within planetary limits.

Capitalism is killing the planet. Every day the news gets worse. The desperate drive for profit is tearing apart the ecosystem and now planetary boundaries have been torn down as carbon and other greenhouse gases accumulate.

Internationally millions are aware of the scale of the crisis, but too often people feel paralyzed or helpless to respond. This isn’t the same as removing CFCs or tackling acid rain. The problem of fossil capitalism goes right to the very basis of our society and how the economy is run.

Governments have declared climate emergencies but none are taking the measures needed to overcome this growing crisis. Companies green wash whilst tearing more carbon out of the ground for profits. The Conference of Parties (COP) have been meeting almost every year since 1995 and yet the majority of greenhouse gas emissions has happened since then.

Meanwhile pro-fossil capital lies and false information circulates among conspiracy theorists circles as the far right seeks to transform global warming into a culture war issue which they can then reject as being ‘woke’. Right wing populists take power and accelerate the environmental devastation – the logic of a death cult.

Some environmental activists are focusing on small-scale direct action to raise awareness. Whilst these people are very brave, risking assault and prison, such actions by themselves cannot build a mass movement that can solve the real problem – overthrowing capitalism.

We reject an approach that relies on techno-fixes. As long as technology is in the hands of corporations or billionaires then it will not be used properly to create a better world. We also refuse to collapse into despair. We also reject the view that humanity and the planet is doomed – humans are capable of incredibly wonderful acts that can change the world but as long as we struggle under capitalism we are being crushed and held back.

Anticapitalist Resistance is issuing this call to launch an eco-socialist movement. We are hosting a conference in the autumn to discuss some of these issues and we aim to launch an eco-socialist movement that is rooted in the trade unions, the communities, social movement and our workplaces. Such a movement has to tackle the big issues; expropriation of business and private wealth, socializing housing and land, ending the market economy, dismantling imperialism, fighting for abolition of borders, militarism and policing, social transformation of the economy from the ground up.

Since it is economic activity that is driving Global Warming and other environmental crises, workers will be crucial in not just stopping fossil capital but also building a new economy based on human need within planetary limits. The working class is not just those people in trade unions, it is the billions of people on this planet who rely on their wages to survive, who are exploited and oppressed by capitalists. This includes people who rely on benefits, or are pensioners, or students.

We want to emancipate ourselves and end capitalism as a system which continues to degrade our environment and planet leading to this point of crisis. We recognize that Britain is made of different nations and the environmental struggles will take their own forms. We will need specific demands in the nations as well as international action – none of the problems that global warming raises can be solved nationally.

Ecosocialism 2023 will be held in the autumn, discussing the way capitalism is hostile to the environment, whether we need degrowth and what an eco-socialist movement and strategy will look like. We need to turn theory into action if we are to have any hope of stopping runaway global warming.

If you would like to be involved in helping to organize the conference then please contact us at info@anticapitalistresistance.org

https://climateandcapitalism.com/2023/0 ... -movement/

*******

Eviction of illegal miners continues in Amazonas, Venezuela


Seven mines were destroyed to clear and preserve the ancestral Tepuy of the Yapacana National Park. | Photo: CEOFANB Press
Published 28 August 2023

Hernández Lárez pointed out that the troops "channel the evacuation of the upper ridge of the Yapacana National Park."

Authorities of the Bolivarian National Armed Forces (FANB) continue with the dismantling of the clandestine camps of illegal miners in the state of Amazonas, reported the Venezuelan military authorities.

The Operational Strategic Commander (CEO-FANB), G/J. Domingo Hernández Lárez confirmed on his social networks that together with the Bolivarian National Police Corps (CPNB) seven mines were destroyed to clean and preserve the ancestral Tepuy of the Yapacana National Park.

"FANB and CPNB at the top of Yapacana evicting illegal miners who, regardless of norms, laws, rules, etc., lash out at nature in unconsciously degrading the environment, endangering the existence of man on the planet" , posted the headline.


In this sense, Hernández Lárez pointed out that the troops "channel the evacuation of the upper ridge of the Yapacana National Park and destroy all evidence of predatory constructions of the environment."

“The fact that the Organic Law of Indigenous Peoples and Communities establishes the recognition by the State of indigenous rights and guarantees, does not mean under any circumstances that any action is authorized or encouraged to break or undermine, totally or partially , territorial integrity, sovereignty and political independence of the Venezuelan State”, he highlighted.


In turn, he called on the indigenous peoples to promote, together with the State, the conservation of their ancestral lands and to assist in the conservation effort of Cerro Yapacana, where the remains of their ancestors rest.

On July 10, Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro stated that his administration will evict and dismantle the so-called "Gruñas" of Yapacana and other national parks, where an estimated 10,000 illegal miners operate.

https://www.telesurtv.net/news/venezuel ... -0009.html

Google Translator

Yes, the mining must cease and those people removed from the area unless specifically invited by the indigenous people. That said, why should the oprobium just fall on these workers? Who is supplying the tools and machines? Who has organized what must be a significant supply of 'necessities' and infrastructure? And most importantly, who is buying the gold at source? These people should be persecuted to the full extent of the law.(and then some...imho)

*******



Discovering a Green Marx: Kohei Saito’s ‘Marx in the Anthropocene’
Originally published: Protean Magazine on August 21, 2023 by Ryan Moore (more by Protean Magazine) | (Posted Aug 25, 2023)

It’s always seemed a little strange that less has been said about the final 15 years of Marx’s oeuvre than any other period of his writing. In contrast, his early works—particularly the unpublished texts that came to be known as The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 and The German Ideology—became objects of endless study after they were unearthed by Russian scholars. And equally so, the extensive notebooks that Marx wrote in the late 1850s in preparation for Capital (compiled as the Grundrisse) have proven an intellectual goldmine for those seeking connections between his youthful philosophical musings and his mature economic analysis. Marx published the first volume of his magnum opus Capital in 1867; by then, he had already written the bulk of manuscripts that would be posthumously edited into its second and third volumes.

Yet the years that came after, from 1868 until Marx’s death in 1883, are considered his least productive and consequently least-studied period, though he was still wrestling with urgent theoretical issues. During this time, Marx was focused on questions about potential pathways to communism—particularly after 1871, when the Paris Commune briefly flourished, only to be brutally repressed. A few years later, Marx penned a critique of the program presented in Gotha by the Social Democratic Workers’ Party of Germany, in which he famously invoked the enduring socialist motto:

From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.

In his last years, Marx searched for anthropological evidence of collective social relations in pre-capitalist societies. He read widely about non-Western and Indigenous peoples around the world; the annotations from these texts would later be compiled by the anthropologist Lawrence Krader into The Ethnological Notebooks of Karl Marx. His final intellectual challenge came from Russian revolutionaries who wanted to know if he thought that the rural communes of the tsarist period could provide a foundation for socialism, allowing Russia to bypass capitalism entirely. Marx would reply: he thought this possible indeed.

In Marx in the Anthropocene (Cambridge University Press, 2023), Kohei Saito attributes a newer theoretical framework to this late Marx: that of degrowth communism. Saito analogizes Marx’s thinking of that period to the current degrowth movement, which envisions a post-capitalist economy that can deliver a reconceived standard of social well-being while remaining within the natural limits of the biosphere. A number of books have already been written about Marx’s ecological consciousness and his critique of the “metabolic rift” between nature and society under capitalism. However, Saito’s work—both in Marx and the Anthropocene and his earlier book Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism (Monthly Review Press, 2017)—stands out for its use of a copious collection of notes that Marx took after 1868 from his readings on biology, botany, chemistry, geology, minerology, and other fields of the natural sciences. These notebooks have only become available during the past decade as part of the second Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe (MEGA²). Drawing on these newly discovered late works, Saito illuminates a formerly invisible dimension of Marx’s thought—and not a moment too soon as our world begins to catch flame.

The most controversial of Saito’s arguments (at least among some Marxists) is his assertion that after 1868, Marx ditched his initial conception of historical materialism. Saito maintains that late Marx’s writings reveal a decisive break with any sort of linear, evolutionary metanarrative in which history progresses in stages that are determined by the development of productive forces. This oft-cited thesis, succinctly summarized by Marx in his 1859 preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, posits that a contradiction between the social relations of production and advances in productive forces turns the former into “fetters,” and thus “begins a new era of social revolution.” This emphasis on productivity as the engine of change has been called “Promethean” for its ethos of domination over nature; certainly, it is also Eurocentric in its conception of what constitutes socioeconomic development. At this time, Marx replicated widespread, largely unquestioned assumptions: that progress was the result of technological innovation, and that Western Europe was the model for growth around the world.

Saito maintains that a dramatic about-face is apparent in the post-1868 writings: “Finally discarding both ethnocentrism and productivism, Marx abandoned his earlier scheme of historical materialism.” Saito describes this transformation of late Marx’s thought as a kind of epistemic break, invoking the same term that Louis Althusser used to describe Marx’s original leap in 1845 from philosophy to historical materialism. Marx’s departure from ethnocentric notions of social development was already apparent in his studies of non-Western societies, particularly in the Ethnological Notebooks and his letters on Russian communes. Saito further reveals how, at the same time, Marx was intensifying his study of the natural sciences in order to deepen his critique of capitalism’s metabolic rift with the planet. Pre-capitalist forms of what Marx called “indigenous communism” were coming into focus as small-scale models of egalitarian social relations based on sustainable connections with nature. Having overcome ethnocentrism and productivism, Saito argues, Marx died having reached a position congruent with that of modern degrowth communists.

The modern environmentalist movement, which emerged in the later decades of the 20th century, would widely dismiss Marx as a relic of Promethean thought who erroneously equated social progress with control over nature. Greens generally regarded him as an outmoded figure with unreconstructed views of productivity and technology. It certainly didn’t help that actually existing socialist states had industrialized with a reckless disregard for nature, or that labor unions in capitalist nations prioritized demands for jobs and higher living standards over the environment. Marxism and environmentalism were often assumed to be antithetical political ideologies, reflecting a division between red and green movements that endured through the end of the 20th century.

Even eco-socialists who utilized Marx’s concepts in advocating for alternatives to capitalism were still reluctant to view him as an environmentally conscious theorist whose ideas might inform their movement. It was largely accepted that Marx and Marxism needed an ecological perspective grafted on to the critique of political economy—to be “greened.” One consistent objection was that Marx failed to recognize the natural limits of economic growth and did not account for how resource depletion and ecological devastation can imperil the accumulation of capital. The eco-socialist journal Capitalism Nature Socialism, started in 1988 at the University of California, Santa Cruz, would play a significant part in this greening of Marx and Marxism. The journal’s founding editor, James O’Connor, proposed that a “second contradiction of capitalism” arises when factoring in the rising costs from the exploitation of natural and social conditions of production. The prevailing assumption was that Marx’s ideas on their own were an insufficient foundation for eco-socialism—they needed to be amended with additional sources of contradiction and infused with a green perspective.

The consensus about Marx’s lack of ecological consciousness would be broken by two significant works of scholarship published around the turn of the century. John Bellamy Foster’s Marx’s Ecology (2000) revisited his philosophical turn to materialism in relation to nature and science, an intellectual trajectory Foster traced back to the young Marx’s dissertation on Epicurus. Meanwhile, Paul Burkett’s Marx and Nature (1999) reconstructed the ecological dimension of Marx’s value analysis, emphasizing nature’s contribution to production and the potential for crisis stemming from capitalism’s “externalities.” By drawing out the elements of ecology in Marx’s philosophy and economics, Foster and Burkett issued complementary challenges to their eco-socialist contemporaries. Instead of adding an ecological viewpoint to Marx’s thought, Foster and Burkett insisted it had been there all along.

Following Foster and Burkett’s lead, 21st-century scholarship has fruitfully utilized Marx’s notion of metabolism (Stoffwechsel) to describe the interaction of nature and society, along with the rift opened by capitalism’s robbery of land and labor alike. Marx’s critique of this metabolic rift has since been invoked in numerous studies of urgent environmental issues. Saito’s research using the post-1868 notebooks in the MEGA² has furnished additional material that can offer a deeper understanding of Marx’s ecological thought. The fourth section of the MEGA²—yet to be completed—collects the annotations, excerpts, and comments in Marx’s personal notebooks. Saito estimates that a third of these notebooks were written in the last 15 years of Marx’s life; among those, more than half examine subjects in the natural sciences.

Saito’s findings from these manuscripts were presented in the second half of Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism, which was honored in 2018 with a prestigious award for Marxist scholarship, the Deutscher Memorial Prize. Marx in the Anthropocene also draws on the late notebooks in the MEGA², but it addresses a wide spectrum of issues related to a rapidly growing subfield of literature on Marxism and ecology. Saito initially developed some of these ideas while writing an earlier book published in Japan, Hitoshinsei no Shihonron (Capital in the Anthropocene)—a surprising commercial success that has sold a half million copies. Marx in the Anthropocene engages further with current forms of radical ecological thought, as Saito builds a case for degrowth communism.

Saito begins by tracing the suppression and rediscovery of Marx’s metabolic theory. From his reading of Capital he extricates new concepts of the metabolic rift, lending it three dimensions along with three corresponding methods for shifting (but never resolving) the crises created by these rifts. Saito explains that Marx’s ecological critique was unknown for so long in part because David Riazanov, the Russian editor of the first MEGA, had neglected to publish the late notebooks, dismissing their annotations as “inexcusable pedantry.” He attributes the revival of Marx’s theory of metabolism to the Hungarian political philosopher István Mészáros, initially in his Deutscher Prize Memorial Lecture of 1971, and more systematically in his mammoth tour de force Beyond Capital (1995). Saito also maintains that Rosa Luxemburg correctly utilized the notion of metabolism in theorizing the exploitative relationship between capitalist centers and pre-capitalist peripheries around the world—although she originally presented this as a critique of Marx’s Capital.

(much more...)

https://mronline.org/2023/08/25/discove ... hropocene/

Here I go again....

The promotion of 'de-growth' at this stage of the game is futile at best and increasingly counterproductive too. 'Futile' because capitalists run our society, 'growth' is a pre-requisite of their economic and social organization. Fifty+ years after Earth day1, how much convincing do you need? Counterproductive because convincing the vast majority of humanity that ain't got squat that on appearance they must not expect improved material conditions is an impossible and insulting endeavor.

Ginning up the "Marx Factor' by hunting new interpretations in order to bolster a position is an old and in this case unnecessary game. Foster's work on metabolism was welcome to this lad who struggled through the BSCS Green Version inherited from my cousin while in grade school. But I think Saito tries too hard. And even if she's 100% right it doesn't matter. Ain't nothing more dialectical than ecology.

Marx was first and foremostly a revolutionary, even Marx the economists takes second place to that. Because without a revolution against capitalism, without the adoption of an economy planned to provide necessity to all humans, and by necessity the environment they inhabit, this is just the flapping of gums.

You'll not have a revolution by promising the poor majority less. Which is not to say that we might find that some cut back is necessary, certainly carbon emissions. But first we must see how much economic activity might be redirected to human need. We must quantify exactly how wasteful the capitalist method is. And how much of the labor of humanity is sequestered by the few. How socialist organization and priorities modifies 'need' will also make a difference.

'De-growth' is no hill to die on when we have yet to have a revolution that could make that possible. First things first.