ecosocialism canada

Climate skeptics gathering influence in Tory Senate seats

2012-01-23T13:27:00.001-06:00

BY MIKE DE SOUZA
Post Media News
January 21, 2012

Sen. M. LeBreton (R) pins new Conservative Sen. Bert Brown

Some of Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s newly-appointed senators are emerging as global-warming skeptics in the wake of aggressive government positions to abandon the Kyoto Protocol, slam environmentalists and downplay potential damage caused by Canadian oil and gas exploration.

“I felt like it is kind of an insult to be a denier for a long time,” said Sen. Bert Brown, last month at a parliamentary committee studying energy policies. “It feels pretty good this morning.”

Brown made the comments as the committee heard from four well-known academics who don’t believe humans are playing a major role in warming the planet. The session took place three days after Harper’s government confirmed it would withdraw from the Kyoto Protocol, the world’s only legally-binding agreement that requires countries to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

“I want to say that the real deniers in this whole thing are the people who started out with Al Gore’s movie and said that global warming was the problem of the world, and in less than two years, it became climate change,” said Brown. “It was not climate change in the beginning; it was about global warming. I also read something from the NASA people, who said that so far, it has warmed four-tenths of a Farenheit degree.”

Environment Canada has told the government that the science overwhelmingly concludes that the Earth is “locked in” to a warmer world, but that it can avoid “dangerous” climate change by scaling back emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that trap heat in the atmosphere. The department’s scientists also say that recently observed evidence of warming falls within the range of predictions made by climate scientists in the past.

Brown, jokingly described by the committee chairman, Conservative David Angus as the “resident denier,” is among several members of the Conservative caucus, including elected MPs, such as cabinet minister Maxime Bernier, who have openly suggested climate change scientists from around the world are involved in a conspiracy to exaggerate warnings about the dangerous impacts of fossil-fuel consumption and rising greenhouse gas emissions.

Bernier has suggested the government’s reluctance to introduce strong climate-change policies is based on its skepticism of the science.

“Every week that goes by confirms the wisdom of our government’s modest position,” wrote Bernier, in a letter before he was invited back into cabinet as junior minister for small business and tourism.

“There is, in fact, no scientific consensus. What’s certain is that it would be irresponsible to spend billions of dollars to impose unnecessarily stringent regulations to resolve a problem whose gravity we still are not certain about. The alarmism that often characterized this issue is no longer at stake. Canada is right to be cautious.”

Apart from the government’s decision to withdraw from Kyoto, Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver has slammed environmentalists as “radicals” while touting the virtues of industrial development in the oil and gas industry.

But Harper, who once questioned the credibility of scientific evidence linking human activity to global warming, more recently has acknowledged that the science is actually legitimate.

“I have said many times that climate change is a great problem for the world,” Harper said, in response to questions about the withdrawal from Kyoto from interim Liberal leader Bob Rae in the House of Commons on Dec. 13.

At the same time, Harper is accusing the previous government of signing onto “stupid targets” when it agreed to ratify the Kyoto agreement, while his own government promotes more industrial expansion, without any new regulations to cap pollution.

The committee itself decided to give the four skeptics a platform following a request from former Olympic alpine skiing champion, Nancy Greene Raine, another senator appointed by Harper.

“I have to admit that what I read tells me that there is not a consensus among scientists,” Greene Raine, another senator appointed by Harper, told the committee when it heard from Environment Minister Peter Kent, earlier last fall. “There are many different points of view and different kinds of research happening out there. One of the things that I am starting to see now is quite a few studies showing that we may be heading into a period of global cooling, which would maybe be a lot more problematic for Canada than global warming. Our country is on the cool side.”

Andrew Weaver, a Canadian climate scientist at the University of Victoria who publishes research in peer-reviewed journals, noted that the skeptics who appeared at the committee in December were all over the map in terms of making arguments about warming, cooling, warming from the sun, or cosmic rays.

“It was like a shotgun of inconsistent arguments,” said Weaver, noting that evidence from research must be proven by science, without opinions involved.

Paul Boothe, deputy minister for Environment Canada, has defended scientists in the department, noting they must face a rigorous and challenging process among their international peers, but have still become the largest producer of environmental science in the world, outside of the United States.

“They have to defend themselves in the scientific community and they have to be open to all the different kinds of criticisms in order to get their publications in top journals,” Boothe had told the same committee in October.

He said they are encouraged to maintain that strong science and their open minds.

“The minister and I rely on their advice,” said Boothe. “They are not saying (climate change) is the Icelandic volcanoes, but they are saying that it is real, and that is the best science that we have to work on. That is what we base our advice to the minister and the government on.”

But Liberal leader Bob Rae isn’t convinced the government is listening to its own scientists.

“I thought it was a socialist conspiracy,” said Rae, tongue in cheek. “That is what the prime minister said the last time we talked about it.”

Stephen Harper and the Big Oil Party of Canada

2012-01-18T22:40:00.001-06:00

By Murray Dobbin
January 17, 2012

Where will you be and what will you be doing when the first giant oil tanker, (there will be two plying the waters every three days) carrying over 200,000 gallons of tar sands goop diluted with solvent, spills its load into the pristine waters of the northern BC coast? We often remember catastrophic events by recalling exactly what we were doing and where we were when we first heard the news, I guess because they were so unthinkable they brought us to a halt, emotionally and psychologically – time stopped. I was driving down a street in Waterloo, Ontario when I heard the news of the Montreal Massacre and I can still vividly recall my stomach turning as disbelief turned to revulsion. I will never forget that moment – and you will never forget the oil spill moment, if we let it happen.

When the global oil companies run your country – when they own your government – economic and environmental catastrophe are literally guaranteed. In Canada the oil companies and the Harper government know with a sinister certainty that an oil spill catastrophe is coming. The precautionary principle, rooted in the notion of the common good and established on a foundation of science, has no place in the calculations of global capital. It is replaced by risk assessment, cost/benefit analysis. But the assessment isn’t aimed at ensuring something bad won’t happen as it seems to imply. It is based on a cost/benefit analysis. How much will the oil spill cost? That it will happen is actually part of the calculation. Remember the Ford Pinto?

Stephen Harper muses about the evil being practiced by environmental and “other radical groups” as they engage in the democratic process provided to them (the hearings on the Enbridge pipeline) by his government. It’s as if by doing exactly what they are called upon to do, they are endangering the nation. This follows Harper’s repeated talk about the pipeline being necessary for the good of the country and the economy – and his declaration that anyone who criticizes the tar sands or the pipeline is sabotaging the economy. He calls then “ideological.” But ideology is meaning in the service of power – and all of it to date is coming from Harper and Big Oil.

This spinning is part of the preparation his government needs as it plans to first, denigrate, and second ignore, the environmental panel set to spend 18 months examining the pipeline and its impacts. He needs to undermine the panel’s work because we already know the project’s impact. The opposition will be backed by science and popular opposition. Any panel decision that gives the go-ahead for Gateway will be one that ignores virtually all the evidence. To maintain its credibility the panel may well rule against it and force Harper to reject its findings. And without a massive public campaign that can actually threaten Conservative-held ridings in BC, that is what will happen.

Harper’s dogged dedication to the oil patch could be his undoing as it privileges one sector of the economy at the expense of virtually all the others (except the financial sector which with government borrowing and the CMHC ensuring mortgages, never loses). This puts the Harper government in a different category than previous neo-liberal governments of Mulroney, Chretien and Martin. All of these governments and their leaders developed most policy positions at the behest of the Business Council on National Issues, now the Canadian Council of Chief Executives.

By delivering on the list of priorities (Paul Martin was presented with an even ten in 1994 and delivered on them all) Canadian governments pre-Harper actually balanced their promotion of corporate interests. This was, said the 150 CEOs, good for the economy – that is, their economy. The BCNI/CCCE represented the biggest players in all the key sectors and their policy interests were balanced by the time the package of preferences (demands?) were presented to the sitting finance minister.

That practice, where no budget was ever presented to Parliament before being vetted by the most powerful CEOs in the country, effectively ended when Stephen Harper became prime minister. The smartest man in the room does not take kindly to being told what to do even by the most powerful. It might have something to do with the fact that they can’t buy favours any more with the new election financing rules.

But actually it goes back twenty years to the formation of the Reform Party where Stephen Harper, as Manning’s policy director, blended neo-liberal policies with culturally conservative policies to create a wholly new phenomenon: a right-wing libertarian party posing as populist to ensure a loyal and generous base. Of course it was Preston Manning who led the party. He had carefully chosen the timing (having got it wrong once before) to coincide with a growing populist discontent amongst prairie and Alberta Conservatives who felt betrayed by Mulroney.

But he and his party needed a kick start. And fortunately for him the oil companies were eager to find someone who could put together just such a party – one that would never mess with them again. The national energy policy of Pierre Trudeau still traumatized them and they wanted insurance that no one would ever get their hands on their oil. One renegade oil man told me, laughing, that people in the oil industry really, really believe that because they found it, it belongs to them – any tax paid or royalty extracted is simply theft.

The oil men knew Manning having researched him and believed he might just fit the bill. But seeing as they were paying the tab to get the party off the ground (an expensive proposition) they wanted Manning close by where they could keep an eye on him, and they wanted him to immerse himself in oil industry political culture to make it the dominant driver of the party. So they insisted that he move from Edmonton to Calgary. Manning obliged. And that was the beginning of the Big Oil Party, brilliantly peddled as a party of the little man all the while planning policies that would impoverish him.

And by declaring themselves a Western party – the slogan was “The West wants in” – Manning and Harper reinforced the importance of Alberta, its American-inspired sense of hyper-independence and, of course, its oil. Indeed, this sense of profound difference that dominates the ruling political elite – reflected in the “firewall letter” penned by Harper and others – that contributes to the privileging of the oil industry in Canada. Not only was Alberta the most “free market” province of all, it was the one that resisted most vigorously the social democratic state that evolved in the 1960s.

Many people from all sides of the political divide – including Peter Lougheed – have pointed out that the rapid expansion of the tar sands is just really bad economic and energy policy. It is also extremely bad national security policy. Most of Quebec and the Maritime provinces rely exclusively for their oil on the Middle East producers – the so-called “unethical oil” of Harper’s spinmeisters. Sending oil to China that could otherwise make the whole country self-sufficient is not just an absence of a national energy policy – it is a declaration the national government simply isn’t national and has no intention of becoming so.

But for all Harper’s touted strategic genius he sometimes seems perversely stuck to a policy that will actually hurt him. He couldn’t resist bashing culture in the middle of the 2008 election and infuriated Quebec, probably losing a majority. This time he is tying his political future in a high-stakes fight (it will dwarf anything seen before) for a pipeline which the majority of oiligarchs thinks is not even needed. Maybe he likes fighting with one hand tied behind his back.

There seem to be three fronts in this battle, each of them distinct and each playing a key and overlapping role with the others. The first comprises the scores of NGOs, First Nations and community groups (and individuals) who will bury the assessment committee in first rate evidence of the madness of the project and its looming, serial disasters. Then comes the provincial government of BC which, under the Liberals, is schizophrenic on then issue but may yet come out against the project. But under the NDP, who I predict will win handily in 2013 as the panel reports, the provincial government must be persuaded to use every power at its disposal to halt this monstrosity. And lastly, folks in the formal political arena (with the help of the NGOs) have as their task identifying 10 or 12 or more Conservative MPS for defeat on this issue.

All of this is on-going at different levels and speeds. And if you are not a part of any of these political fronts you need to take out you checkbooks or credit cards and ask yourself how much it is worth to not experience that horrible moment you will never forget. Not sure of who to give to? Here are five groups which my sources suggests are using their resources and strategic intelligence most effectively: West Coast Environmental Law, Headwaters Initiative, Dogwood Initiative, Friends of Wild salmon and the Wilderness Committee. They – though not just them – are your voice. Make it powerful.

What's radical about the controversy over Northern Gateway?

2012-01-17T14:58:00.001-06:00

By Jim Harding
No Nukes
January 17, 2012

The Syrian regime blames its domestic uprising on “foreign-supported terrorists”. The Harper regime joins the international chorus condemning Syria’s suppression of the democracy activists. Then the Harper regime blames “foreign-funded environmentalists” for trying to stop Canadian jobs from Enbridge’s Northern Gateway pipeline. The oppositional activists, whether environmental, Indigenous, or ecumenical are lumped together as being “anti-Canadian radicals”.

Such phony nationalist hyperbole has been a steadfast propaganda tool for authoritarian governments and under Harper, Canada is now on a slippery slope.

This skirmish began when Harper’s Natural Resources Minister, Oliver, released an open letter attacking those opposing the Northern Gateway pipeline. He tried to backtrack a little when facing the TV cameras, saying he didn’t mean all environmentalists and Indigenous people “were radicals”, but his letter says otherwise. “…There are environmental and other radical groups that would seek to block this opportunity to diversify our trade” it reads, and continues: “Their goal is to stop any major project no matter what the cost to Canadian families and lost jobs and economic growth.”

ENEMIES OF…

The Harper government is using the same kind of “attack ads” on Canadian citizens that it has already used to discredit opposition political leaders. Who knows what linguistic twists Harper’s propaganda team will come up with next; perhaps those supporting sustainability will soon be called “enemies of economic growth”. Or perhaps, “enemies of the nation”!

To defend democracy and sustainability we must deconstruct Harper’s manipulation of language. Oliver’s letter sets out a complete attack-narrative on pipeline opponents before the review by the National Energy Board had even started. It is reminiscent of Harper’s Environment Minister Kent attacking proposals to replace the Kyoto Accord before the international conference to establish a climate treaty had even started. Harper got his majority through such pre-emptive strikes on opposition leaders. He apparently wants to rule the whole country using similar combative tactics.

Oliver’s letter says “These groups threaten to hijack our regulatory system to achieve their radical ideological agenda. They seek to exploit any loophole they can find, stacking the public hearings with bodies to ensure that delays kill good projects.” This discredits citizens who have a right to appear before the Panel which reviews and recommends on the pipeline. It discredits a rational, democratic, discussion about the benefits and burdens of the pipeline by attributing hidden motives to all critics. Involvement in the regulatory process is equated with “hijacking” it, which is a means for Harper to discredit the federal environmental review process itself. Oliver’s twisting can easily be turned back on his boss, for Harper’s preemptive strike can be seen as an attempt to undermine the regulatory process itself, to achieve his “radical ideological agenda”.

WHAT IS RADICAL?

David Suzuki and Green Party Leader Elizabeth May were quick to respond, arguing that those opposing the pipeline were the antithesis of “radical”. May went so far as to quote the Webster dictionary which says “radical” is “relating to or affecting the fundamental nature of something; far-reaching or thorough”. They are right that environmentalists and indigenous communities are actually against “radicalism” in that they don’t desire to alter “the fundamental nature” of eco-systems. Harper’s quest for Canada to be an Energy Superpower, apparently at any cost including undermining the environmental review process, is what is “radical”.

Radical can be defined slightly differently, drawing on the phrase “far-reaching or thorough”; it’s about trying to understand something by “going to the roots”. In this sense good science is radical. Harper’s goal is clearly not towards enhancing intelligent public participation by “going to the roots”.

DEFINING NATIONAL INTEREST

Oliver’s letter continues its attack, claiming these “radical” groups “…use funding from foreign special interest groups to undermine Canada’s national economic interest”. Think about that, an environmental group like the Sierra Club which exists in both the U.S. and Canada is undermining “Canada’s national interest”. Meanwhile a multi-national corporation like Enbridge, which wants to export unprocessed bitumen across Western Canada and the Pacific Ocean, is not. As Harper presents himself as the savior of Canadian workers, the biggest energy union estimates that Enbridge’s export of unprocessed bitumen will cost us 40,000 jobs. And as Green Party leader May points out, Canada still has “no energy policy. We are still importing more than half the oil we use.”

Mindless rhetoric about “economic growth” undercuts the careful weighing of options. In the big picture, as we plan towards a sustainable economy, protecting the Great Bear Rainforest from massive oil spills would be in the fundamental national interest. Perhaps laying a 1,200 km , three foot round pipeline from Edmonton to Kitimat, that moves 250,000 gallons of raw tarsand oil a day across 600 creeks and rivers, including some where threatened salmon spawn, is not in the fundamental national interest. Perhaps, as May says, overturning “the current moratorium on oil tanker traffic on the B.C. coastline”, and allowing huge Chinese tankers to use the “300 km of perilous navigation in highly energetic tidal conditions is a bad choice”.

MOTIVES REVEALED

Harper is not interested in reasonably reconciling ecological and economic concerns. It’s full-steam ahead with his radical agenda to gut environmental protection in the interest of energy corporations like Enbridge. This is why his government has consistently sabotaged international attempts to get an effective climate treaty. His destructive approach will never create sustainable energy or sustainable economic policy.

The motive for Harper’s attacks on democratic public participation is becoming clear. On a CBC Power Point panel, Harper spokesperson MP Stella Ambler expressed concern about letting “the environmental process kill the project”. It’s environmental protection itself, not “radical environmental and indigenous groups” that Harper is targeting. Harper not only wants to side-step the federal responsibility to consider the ecological impacts of mega-energy projects, but the federal “duty to consult” with First Nations who would be directly affected. Environmentalists and First Nations are all marginalized and demonized as opponents to “Canada’s national interest”. Ambler’s reiteration that this decision must be “made by Canada and not foreign interests” is a smack in the face of the many thousands of Canadians who registered to speak at the Gateway Hearings.

KEYSTONE WHISTLE BLOWER

Oliver and Harper are trying to push the Gateway Pipeline through because the proposed Keystone Pipeline from Alberta to the U.S. has been held up due to public concerns about contaminating a huge aquifer in Nebraska. We’ve already had a warning about how the Keystone Pipeline puts the environment at great risk. On Jan. 3rd Canadian Press reported on a pipeline engineer who had been fired by Bechtel Corp for his whistle blowing; he had written of, “Cheap foreign steel that cracked when workers tried to weld it, foundations for pump stations that you would never consider using in your own home, fudged safety tests…short cuts on the steel and rebar that are essential for safe pipeline operation, and siting of facilities on completely inappropriate spots like wetlands.”

With the U.S. market now so uncertain, Harper is pushing for Alberta’s tarsand oil to go to China, regardless of the risk to our national-environmental interest. China, along with the U.S., is the world’s largest producer of greenhouse gases. That the Kyoto Accord did not require China to meet targeted reductions has always been the main reason Harper used to justify his government not following through with the Kyoto Accord. Now he wants to make China one of our biggest customers of the greenhouse gas-laden tarsand oil. Hopefully connecting these dots will help Canadians better see through Harper’s spin-propaganda.

A Darker Shade of Green: REDD and the Future of Forests (Trailer)

2012-01-12T16:43:00.001-06:00

Climate Connections
January 12, 2012

As policies and programs to Reduce Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD) and to enhance forest carbon stocks (REDD+) are promoted around the world by global and national elites, Indigenous Peoples and other forest-dependent communities are raising the alarm that these programs will have serious negative impacts — and will not reduce the cascading threats of the climate crisis.

Soon to be released, this critical 28-minute documentary, introducing concerns about REDD from the perspective of the people who are most impacted, was co-produced by Global Justice Ecology Project and Global Forest Coalition.

Fighting for a Real Green Economy

2012-01-12T16:00:00.001-06:00

By Anil Naidoo
Council of Canadians
January 12th, 2012

Dear Friends,

The Zero Draft document was released this week and this will be the starting point for negotiations at the Rio+20 Earth Summit. It is a very general document and seems to be fairly non-threatening, but please do not be fooled!

If you have been following Rio+20, you will know that the Green Economy is being heavily promoted for Rio. We understand that our current actions are unsustainable and so most of us would welcome a Green Economy, but as Maude Barlow and Pablo Solon have articulated in the book “The Rights of Nature: The Case for a Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth”, this proposed Green Economy is very dangerous. Passages from both are attached below….

What is being considered and proposed for this Rio summit is very different than anything we have seen and represents an attempt to effect the last enclosure of the commons – that of nature itself.

This is what is embedded in what is being called the Green Economy but is more accurately called the false Green Economy.

This Rio Green Economy (Rio GE) is a bold attempt to overlay the dominant paradigm of markets, property and commodification to this final frontier by attempting to put a price on water, the air, land, forests etc. It presents a very compelling narrative of moving away from subsidizing dirty industry to green industry, by suggesting pricing and privatization will save us from unfettered environmental destruction, by making a case for added revenues when governments are suffering a debt crisis and by promising growth and expansion through a transition to green. It also focuses very much on ‘innovative’ financial instruments and on partnerships between the state and private corporations.

The reality of the Rio GE will be far different from what is being suggested in the Zero Draft. At its core, the Rio Green Economy is poison for all the things it pretends to value. It suggests that the very thing that is stressing all the systems of the planet - unfettered capitalism, markets, pricing, and absurd private property rights regimes – is what will save us. Proponents explicitly invoke the discredited ‘Tragedy of the Commons’ as rationale for legitimizing the Green Economy.

In the midst of an unprecedented, capital-created, financial cum social crises in which the world finds itself, this should be seen as a call for social movements to come together to challenge the false Rio Green Economy being promoted in this draft document and call for a Real Green Economy. To do this we must come together quickly and also be prepared to challenge those who are promoting this destructive agenda.

While it may not be readily apparent in reading this somewhat bland and vaguely positive sounding document why this Rio Green Economy is false and a Trojan Horse that will do irreparable damage to our environment and communities, it is important to look at it critically. Who is proposing this initiative, what is their agenda, and who benefits from the Rio Green Economy. The reality is that after you get past the wrapping, what is inside the Rio Green Economy is a neo-liberal agenda predicated on markets, pricing, commodification and trading for air, water and even land.

It is important to know that the roots for this GE are from the G8 and G20 looking at the 2007/2008 global financial crisis and deciding that the reason for that catastrophic failure of capitalism lay in nature and natural resources not being valued in economic terms or owned. The World Economic Forum, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank are all proponents as are the leaders of some specialized UN agencies like UNEP. Aquafed, the global water lobby, promotes the Green Economy as do most of the major corporate lobby organizations globally. Powerful countries of the G8 will no doubt financially support the Rio GE because they will want to use it to create the mechanisms to price nature, create markets and to promote private property rights over nature. Again, this is clearly an attack on the commons and I would suggest on sovereignty of states and communities because this Green Economy will become part of the global financial system which is being lead by the WTO (another GE supporter).

We also can see that all the initiatives are explicitly focused on voluntary measures rather than promoting binding mechanisms that can be monitored and where obligations can be made accountable.

There are some things that would be viewed positively coming out of the Rio+20 Zero Draft. Sustainable Development Goals are being promoted, but again, these are in line with the non-binding Millennium Development Goals. A Council on Sustainable Development will probably be agreed upon and report to the General Assembly. Maybe there will be a High Commissioner for the Environment or for Sustainable Development, but I believe that any positives would be outweighed if this negative false Green Economy gets implemented.

This draft Rio document does not encompass the whole false Green Economy agenda, but it is clear that the false Green Economy is based on fear and using that fear to promote even further neo-liberal goals. In a world built on the need for limitless growth, it terrifies many to consider a no-growth or even a low-growth scenario, let alone a de-growth scenario. What does capital do when faced with such limits?

The answer is that you find new horizons, new mechanisms and new frontiers. Nature itself is now being viewed as a frontier for capital investment and the climate change negotiations and Rio negotiations are the vehicles being used to promote this agenda.

What do you do when resources around the world are peaking and it is not clear how to ensure access to continue feeding the capitalist engine?

You implement a scheme to privatize and enclose the last remaining commons, Nature itself, and ensure it is put under a tradable market model so that you can have access over those who cannot pay or compete. Human Rights, Community Rights and the Commons are all dispensable and secondary in a system where the market makes decisions based on scarcity, pricing and supply and demand.

At its core, the false Green Economy’s greatest threat is that it will implement a model of governance and management that is based on property rights, pricing and markets and this will deeply impact our environment, economy and ultimately our societies. Make no mistake, this model is not sustainable and it means that people and communities would no longer be able to control their own destinies or be able to rely on access to the resource heritage that they have enjoyed for generations. In fact, we are already seeing in the climate negotiations that REDD (reduced emissions from deforestation and forest degradation) represents a precursor to a full blown false Green Economy. This is a system which uses offsets and trading to give corporations and the North a way out of their obligations. It also has the perverse impact of pushing people off their land resulting in unsustainable forest management.

The false Green Economy means an over-exploitation of what it is ostensibly meant to protect, a degradation of the environment that will leave us all poorer and a model that leaves no room for other values beyond economic. We must press strongly to apply our own counter vision to this bold but desperate gambit by the pro-corporates (including the governments, and NGO’s who work in concert with them…)

What the Real Green Economy represents is one that is based on respecting the commons, rights of nature and collective/community and human rights is a vision that directly challenges the false GE. At its core, the Real GE must contrast with the false GE and promote a vision that challenges a control and management system for nature that will ensure market mechanisms divert scarce water, air and land to corporate ‘high’ value interests.

The Real GE of the commons/rights of nature/community and human rights framework is about a vision of governance and management of ‘resources’ that asserts different values than the seemingly impartial markets with its ‘invisible hand’ that oppresses the poor and marginalized. Our counter system is based on justice, human rights, equity, sustainability etc. not on profit, growth and property. In our world, economies are not separate from people and the environment the way markets are, instead our system is organic and imbedded in communities, ecosystems etc.

We clearly have a lot of work to do to come to a consensus and framework to propose a positive solution to the immense challenges we face, but the good news is that there are many working examples to inspire us that we need to draw upon. These are under attack but for generations the norm has been a world that was more cooperative, more caring and more in harmony with nature. There are many factors as to why people lived this way in more traditional societies, but we can draw many lessons from these models.

Strategically, if we do not present a strong alternative to the false GE then we are stuck playing defense in Rio and beyond. This means we would be seen as trying to undermine the very concept of a Green Economy because we are not pressing for something positive. This is dangerous and may not work because the false GE will be presented with financing for implementation, just as the climate fund was used to get Southern governments to let the North off the hook with Kyoto. If we are weak and inarticulate, then the false GE with funding becomes the only shiny object to show that Rio has moved something forward - which will be difficult for governments to resist as they virtually all want and need to show progress and have that reported back to their citizens.

20 years ago, at the first Rio summit, despite immense odds and powerful resistance, activists were able to win the launch of global initiatives to address Biodiversity, Deforestation, Desertification and Climate Change. A new Commission on Sustainable Development was struck and a plan called Agenda 21 was put forward. These were all positive steps. Even the one major gap of water not being addressed at a UN institutional level got a boost in July 2010 when the General Assembly recognized the human right to water and sanitation!

Unfortunately, we know that in the past 20 years powerful governments and corporations have actively worked to erode the progress made in Rio. Today we have a system which prefers voluntary and vague, non-binding agreements which use market mechanisms and the promise of funding to replace legally-binding agreements with hard targets. This strategy of seeming to do something has been very successful in climate negotiations recently and we can expect more of the same in Rio. If we are strong we can counter these false solutions and choose the right path, the one that leads to a Real Green Economy.

The Zero Draft for Rio signals the first clear indication of a possible catastrophic failure in Rio and it must be a call to action for all civil society, social movements and those governments which share our concerns.

There is still time to work together to promote positive solutions in Rio but we need to begin now to pull together a consensus among social movements and to open a dialogue with supportive UN Member States. We must work together to achieve the better world we know is possible. The World Social Forum, late January in Porto Alegre, will be an important moment for us to come together and move the work forward towards Rio.

Finally, as promised, here are excerpts from Maude Barlow and Pablo Solon’s chapters in ‘The Rights of Nature’ book:

False solution

Protecting the Rights of Mother Earth will also challenge the current trend to commodify Nature in the name of the green economy. While there are many definitions of what a green economy could look like that fit very well with an Earth-centered vision, many in power now use the term to essentially protect the current economic system that promotes more growth, production and global trade. There is no need to change our lifestyle or to curb global production and trade, goes the argument; we simply have to replace bad technology with good technology and we can keep our economic and development models intact.

Let’s be clear; no amount of talk of green futures, green technology, green jobs and a green economy can undo the fact that most business and nation state leaders, as well as UN and World Bank officials, continue to promote growth as the only economic and development model for the world. Until the growth model is truly challenged, great damage to the Earth’s ecosystems will continue. Further, much of their false green vision is based on a market model to save Nature and create new opportunities for growth and profit.

Maude goes on to give specific examples of the false vision in the chapter…..

Ambassador Pablo Solon also writes against this Green Economy:

The green economy may sound like an attractive notion, but it has serious implications for the expansion of capitalism into all corners of the globe….

From the point of view of these proponents of the green economy, in order to re-establish equilibrium with Nature, we must assign an economic value to the environmental ‘services’ nature provides. An underlying assumption is that only which can be owned and profited from deserves stewardship. But the green economy goes beyond putting a price on the things we consume such as wood, fish, or cattle. It also puts a price tag on ‘services’ like the pollination of plants by insects, the biodiversity of coral reefs, or the capacity of forests to act as carbon sinks…

In sum, under the concept of the green economy we are seeing the promotion of the kind of capitalism that is ever more aggressive toward Nature and that privatizes and commercializes everything it can (even the advocates of the green economy recognize that not all of Mother Earth’s environmental services can be measured and monetized).

Amb. Solon goes on to outline a much more positive vision of a different path and finally says “The future of humans and Nature depends on the path humanity chooses.”

In Solidarity,
Anil Naidoo
Blue Planet Project
Council of Canadians

The Rights of Nature: The Case for a Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth - can now be purchased on-line at canadians.org/rightsofnature.

Leaked Rio+20 document outlines 10 sustainable development goals

2012-01-12T04:09:00.003-06:00

By Brent Patterson
Council of Canadians
January 10th, 2012

The Guardian reports, “Countries will be asked this summer to sign up for 10 new sustainable development goals for the planet and promise to build green economies… According to a leak of the draft agenda document seen by the Guardian, they will also be asked to negotiate a new agreement to protect oceans, approve an annual state of the planet report, set up a major world agency for the environment, and appoint a global ‘ombudsperson’, or high commissioner, for future generations.”

“Governments will (also) be expected to strengthen the Nairobi-based UN Environment Programme body which is widely thought to be underfunded and unable to address the growing threats to ecosystems. UNEP is likely to be put on the same level as the World Health organisation (WHO) and the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO). …(And) although the agenda could change in the next six months, it looks likely they will be asked to pledge to use stretched resources better and reform the subsidy system of fossil fuels which encourages climate change.”

“The exact content of the new global sustainable development goals (SDGs) will be decided by governments before the Rio meeting and will not be introduced until 2015. However, they are expected to cover ‘priority’ areas such as oceans, food, energy, water, consumption and sustainable cities. Countries will have their progress measured. They will not replace the 10 millennium development goals set by the UN in 2000 which promised to free people from extreme poverty and multiple deprivations.”

“Unlike the 1992 earth summit when over 190 heads of state set in motion several legally binding environment agreements, leaders this time will not be asked to sign any document that would legally commit their countries to meeting any particular targets or timetables. Instead, they will be asked to set their own targets and work voluntarily towards establishing a global green economy which the UN believes will reduce poverty and slow consumption.”

“Ruth Davis, chief policy adviser at Greenpeace UK, said: ‘This Rio summit comes after two decades of delays and broken promises on sustainable development which has left millions in poverty and pushed ecosystems to the brink of collapse. Whilst this draft text covers the key issues, it also demonstrates a dismal lack of urgency in tackling them. Goals to end destruction of ancient forests, tackle over-fishing, phase out dirty energy subsidies, and deliver access to clean energy for the poor are either open-ended or pushed back for years. …There are certainly important and useful proposals here - not least, the plan to negotiate a new agreement on protecting oceans - which could see an end to the wild-west plundering of the high seas. But for Rio to be more than an elite talking shop, world leaders need to inject some ambition into the negotiation, right now. A vague commitment to act at some point in the future will no longer cut it with the millions of people who have become rightly cynical about voluntary pledges and empty words.’”

To see the Council of Canadians Rio+20 campaign web-page, with numerous blogs and updates, please go to http://canadians.org/rio20. There is also a new Rio+20 fact sheet that the Council of Canadians contributed to at http://documents.foodandwaterwatch.org/Rio20.pdf.

Click images below to enlarge.

Call for building and mobilizing for Peoples Assembly at Rio+20

2012-01-12T03:54:00.003-06:00

Climate Connections
January 11, 2012

We call organizations, Networks and movements in the struggle for Environmental Justice, against the greening of capitalism and mercantilization of life and in defence of common goods, to join this call and the process of building and mobilizing for the Peoples Assembly at the Peoples Summit during Rio+20, between 15 and 23 June 2012 in Rio de Janeiro.

An assembly of peoples affected, oppressed and aware of the structural causes of systemic crisis and related social and environmental injustices; of peoples affected, indignant, critical and resistant to the new forms of reproduction, militarization and greening of capitalism; of peoples that mobilize and transform, protect traditional knowledge, create and recreate real solutions and no capitalist alternatives, defend the common goods and claim for the Right of Mother Earth.
-----
To join this call, send an email with the name of the organization and country until 21/01/2012 to: movilizacion.rio20@gmail.com
-----
Continental Cry of the Excluded, Convergence of Movements of the Peoples of the Americas, Coordinator of Andean Indigenous Organizations, Friends of the Earth Latin America and the Caribbean, Grassroots Global Justice, Jubilee South/Americas, Oilwatch, Southern People’s Ecological Debt Creditors Alliance, La Vía Campesina, World March of Women, World Rainforest Movement

David Suzuki: Northern Gateway pipeline project is about profits versus environment

2012-01-11T00:52:00.002-06:00

By David Suzuki

Straight.com

January 10, 2012

The battle lines are drawn, and Northern B.C.’s pristine wilderness is the latest front. With hearings underway into the proposed $5.5-billion, dual 1,172-kilometre Enbridge Northern Gateway pipeline project to transport bitumen from the Alberta tar sands to Kitimat and imported condensate to dilute it from the coast back to Alberta, the fossil fuel industry and its supporters have stepped up the rhetoric. Environmentalists and people in towns, rural areas, and First Nations communities in B.C. have lined up in opposition.

It’s not just about potential damage from an oil spill along the pipeline route or from a supertanker plying the precarious fiords and waterways along our northern coast —as critical as those concerns are. The larger issues are about our continued reliance on polluting fossil fuels and the economic impact of rapidly exploiting and selling our resources and resource industries.

It’s about Canada’s national interest. With lax royalty structures and massive subsidies to the fossil fuel industry, not to mention foreign ownership of tar sands operations and lobbying by foreign companies, Canadians are not enjoying the real benefits of our oil industry. In fact, increasing reliance on the tar sands is hurting other sectors of the economy, manufacturing in particular.

Thanks to the government’s support for the fossil fuel industry, ours is a petro dollar that rises and falls with the price of oil. The high price of oil has increased our dollar’s value, and that has hurt the more labour-intensive manufacturing sector, which relies on exports. Not only have hundreds of thousands of manufacturing jobs been lost over the past few years, Canada has also been missing out on opportunities to join the boom in production of renewable-energy technology.

And when we build infrastructure such as pipelines to support the fossil fuel industry, we increase the incentive to use fossil fuels for a longer time and decrease the incentives to invest in cleaner energy.

Industry adherents have come up with many arguments supporting the Northern Gateway project. Some have more holes than an oilfield.

Take the jobs argument. Even Enbridge admits that most would be in short-term construction work. Only about 35 to 40 long-term jobs would be created at the Kitimat marine terminal, with some additional jobs in pipeline maintenance. It hardly seems worth risking tens of thousands of jobs in tourism and the fishing industry, among others, for a few short-term and even fewer long-term positions.

Most economic benefits from increased tar sands production would go to the companies and their shareholders, including firms from the U.S., Korea, and China. In fact, state-owned PetroChina, which already operates in the tar sands, has just bought 100 percent of the MacKay River project.

The “ethical oil” argument is so absurd as to be hardly worth mentioning, but it’s one the government has latched onto. Oil can’t be ethical or unethical. People, and by extension the companies they own and operate or the governments they represent, can behave in ethical or unethical ways, but a product can’t.

The Northern Gateway project, and much of the recent and pending tar sands expansion, will help companies owned by the government of China dig up the bitumen and send it there for refining and use. The ethical oil folks admit that China is a police state, so why do they support selling them our industry and resources? Canadian tar sands companies also do business in the countries tagged by the ethical oil folks as being unethical – often in partnership with state-owned companies.

The anti-American conspiracy theories are even more absurd. Saying that opposition to the Northern Gateway is a plot by U.S. funding agencies to protect America’s access to Canadian oil is just idiotic in light of the fact that many of the same groups and funders also oppose the Keystone XL pipeline project that would carry oil from the tar sands to Texas. It’s odd to see such anti-Americanism coming from conservatives who apparently support Communist China!

The only real argument for Northern Gateway is that it will increase profits for the oil industry, and hand over more of our resources and the associated profits and jobs to China. The arguments against it are so numerous we’ve barely touched them here.

Written with contributions from David Suzuki Foundation Editorial and Communications Specialist Ian Hanington.

PipeUp Against Enbridge Campaign

2012-01-10T10:13:00.001-06:00

Click HERE for more information.

2012: The Coming Shift in Worldview

2012-01-10T09:31:00.001-06:00

By Jim Harding
No Nukes
January 9, 2012

Traditional end-of-year recaps highlight events in isolation. Much is taken for granted and many stones are left unturned. This won’t do as we enter 2012. I’m not talking about cataclysmic changes because of the Mayan calendar; I’m talking about a necessary shift in how we connect things in our worldview. While the global economic downturn has been a “big story” in 2011, we enter 2012 largely ignorant of the roots of the economic crisis or its role in the ecological crisis.

Events build-up! There is a crescendo effect. The dots must be connected and history itself must be explored. We are reaching this point in our collective consciousness and it’s long overdue.

2011 saw mounting extreme weather events, including here; these are continuing. The climate crisis can’t be grasped without looking at the economy through a new lens. It’s a crisis stemming from economic growth, tied to an unsustainable energy system that isn’t geared to meeting human needs.

We in Saskatchewan are among the highest per capita fossil fuel polluters on earth. And while provincial governing politicians brag of our economic boom, inequality abounds, especially in the north. The vast majority of this fossil fuel pollution comes from industry itself, from coal-fired electricity and from agrobusiness and private transportation.

Many of us kept our heads in the sand about this in 2011. Will this continue in 2012, if economic growth from the resource boom holds? We are repeatedly told that we can’t change our ways without undercutting our economic security. This view is what got Premier Wall his huge majority, though many more voters stayed home this time round. Playing “the economic card” still mostly works. It also worked for Harper in 2011. But will this half-hearted thinking continue working in 2012?

THE REAL ECONOMY

With all the talk about saving “the economy” it’s a little ironic that there’s so little exploration of how the economy works. On a global scale, especially since the 2008 financial meltdown, we see growing signs of systemic economic dysfunction. In Europe politicians are scrambling over their “debt crises”, doing what they think the market wants rather than being accountable to the needs of those who elected them.

If we continue to keep our heads in the sand, and to blindly depend on growing exports of non-renewable resources for our economic wellbeing, we may also be in for a big shock. The Saskatchewan economy increasingly depends on resource exports tied to traditional economic growth elsewhere, yet that growth is no longer assured. In the long run that might actually be a good thing.

In an energy-starved world you might believe there would always be demand for oil, gas and uranium from Saskatchewan. Really? Fukushima’s nuclear disaster has already reduced uranium demand. You might also think there would be an even more secure market for our grain and pulse crops, but the dominant economy isn’t actually based on production for need.

CONSUMERISM

Humanity grew to 7 billion persons in 2011, adding a billion since 1999. One billion of us remain on the edge of starvation and yet our food doesn’t get to the hungry. They remain candidates for unreliable charity and food aid; according to the workings of our economic system, without income, they don’t qualify to consume.

Endless consumption is crucial to preserve the economic system. Domestic consumption makes up the bulk of the economic activity in our economy. Consumption is economic growth. And, to encourage perpetual consumption and growth we have all been encouraged to live on credit, which was very profitable for the financial institutions but ultimately made us all vulnerable, after the 2008 crash. Many hard-working people ended up losing nearly everything.

Making things even stranger, consumption isn’t directly tied to wellbeing. Since the 1970s, corporate globalization has promoted the myth that people in developing countries will become healthier if they consume more like us. I suspect that most of us still buy into some version of this.

Yet in 2011 several studies showed that more people are now dying from diseases linked to “over-consumption” than to malnutrition. Food security should exist for the billion people on the edge of starvation, but the major causes of death in the so-called “developed countries” – cancer, heart, disease, diabetes, etc., are now all tied to unhealthy, high consumption. Eating in a consumer society can even be considered an addiction. These diseases continue to rise elsewhere as global markets spread the same unhealthy “food” products.

HUMAN NEED

Today’s economic growth isn’t primarily intended to meet human needs and increases in human illness can actually be “good” for the economy, for this creates a new and very lucrative market; look at the profits of the medical-pharmaceutical industry. The epidemic in anxiety is also profitable for investors and owners.

The pattern is getting clearer. Continued economic growth built upon the fossil-fuel industry brings us escalating extreme weather events. Growth in agro-business and the big food chains brings ill health. The economy is not evaluated by its consequences but only by its ability to be lucrative, for some.

You’d think this huge disconnect would be enough to motivate most of us to question the rationality and morality of the economy. This started to happen more widely in 2011. But not much here! Why is that? Will 2012 be different?

OCCUPY MOVEMENT

2011 saw the birth of the Arab Spring, which will continue to challenge colonial structures of the fossil-fuel economy. The sleeper in 2011 may have been the Occupy Movement. It was mostly comprised of upcoming generations who already face the brunt of growing inequality, the shrinking middle class and may face irreversible climate change. The way the corporate-run economy mal-distributes “wealth” is getting some attention: the 99% and the 1%! The Canadian Taxpayer’s Association has received much press about how many days work it takes for the average person to earn what they pay as taxes. We now know that for most of us it takes a year to earn what the top CEO’s earn in a day.

The myth that corporate economic growth benefits us all is starting to collapse. In just one decade, with the recession and many market bubbles bursting, the output of the global economy still doubled from $35 to $70 trillion. Did human wellbeing double? Of course not! Nor will it if fossil-fuel driven economic growth is allowed to double yet again. Growing concentration of wealth and inequality went hand in hand with this “economic growth” as did the rise in carbon in the atmosphere. It’s time we looked at outcomes, and stopped believing in endless promises. We owe this to our grandchildren.

With globalization the world has become even more precarious for people who have been dislocated from local, more sustainable economies, and must look for any paid work as a means to survive. Meanwhile, people continue to lose jobs due to corporate mergers and downsizing. More and more do temporary work with no prospect of job or income security. Those who gave their working lives to corporations are finding that their pensions and their prospects of old-age security are shrinking. Even after the sacrifices made by labour after the 2008 taxpayer bailout of banks, workers are being asked to take new wage cuts so that corporations can maintain their greedy bottom-line.

Is it any wonder we saw such “youth riots” in 2011? Will these just increase among those being marginalized in 2012? Or will other generations join with youth in envisaging a new kind of economy, where production is tied to human need and geared to sustainability? Politicians trying to maintain the status quo have not been able to give the necessary leadership. Each of us has a big choice to make in 2012, or we’ll find ourselves in an even greater fix come 2013.

A reply to Alan Thornett's review of "Too Many People?"

2012-01-09T22:18:00.003-06:00

By Ian Angus and Simon Butler
Climate and Capitalism
January 9, 2012

[On January 2 Ecosocialism Canada re-posted an article by Alan Thornett reviewing Too Many People? Ian and Simon's response is below]

We were pleased to learn that Alan Thornett, whose record as working class and socialist leader we respect, had reviewed our book, Too Many People? Population, Immigration, and the Environmental Crisis. We didn’t expect him to agree with all of it, but we were looking forward to an open and comradely discussion.

Unfortunately, his review misrepresents our views and issues a sweeping condemnation that ignores most of what we wrote. No one who read only his article would have any idea what the book is about.

As a result, our reply has to focus on setting the record straight, rather than, as we would prefer, on deepening and extending the debate on population and the environment.

+++++

Since our book is about population and the environment, we were surprised to read, in the second paragraph of Thornett’s review, that we believe the subject is irrelevant. In fact, the word “irrelevant” appears in regard to population growth only once in our book – in the Foreword by noted ecosocialist Joel Kovel:

“while population is by no means irrelevant, giving it conceptual pride of place not only inflates its explanatory value but also obscures the essential factors that make for ecological degradation and makes it impossible to begin the hard work of overcoming them.” (p. xvi, emphasis added)

That sentence, which says just the opposite of what Thornett claims, concisely sums up our core argument – an argument that Thornett never mentions in his review. We wish that were the only case where he grossly misrepresents our views, but it isn’t.

For example, he accuses us of lumping everyone who disagrees with us – from some ecosocialists to reactionaries and despots – into “a highly objectionable amalgam … referred to throughout the book as ‘the populationist establishment’.”

In fact, we use the term “population [not populationist] establishment” just twice (pp. 98, 103), not “throughout the book.” And contrary to Thornett’s charge, in both cases it refers to the rich Western foundations and agencies that finance Third World population reduction programs, not to environmentalists of any political stripe.

But more important than specific phrases is the fact that in Too Many People? we consistently “distinguish between the reactionaries who promote population control to protect the status quo and the green activists who sincerely view population growth as a cause of environmental problems.” (p. 5) Thornett offers no evidence that we failed to make that important distinction.

We could continue, but even a summary list of his misreadings would require too much space. We’d rather discuss political issues.

Numbers versus social analysis

Thornett’s most important disagreement with our book is evident in his warning that world population “has almost tripled in just over 60 years – from 2.5bn in 1950 to the recently reached figure of 7bn. According to UN figures it will reach between 8bn and 11bn (with 9.5bn as the median figure) by 2050.” Such growth, he says categorically, is “unsustainable.”

In other words, he agrees with the populationist view that where human numbers are concerned, big is bad and bigger is worse. Although he says that capitalism is the real environmental problem, he accepts an argument that separates population growth from its historical, social, and economic context, reducing humanity’s complex relationship with nature to simple numbers.

We, on the other hand, agree with Mexican feminist and human rights activist Lourdes Arizpe:

“The concept of population as numbers of human bodies is of very limited use in understanding the future of societies in a global context. It is what these bodies do, what they extract and give back to the environment, what use they make of land, trees, and water, and what impact their commerce and industry have on their social and ecological systems that are crucial.” (p.193)

Thornett’s simplistic number-slinging is particularly problematic in a review of a book that explains why such statistics are misleading and unhelpful. Simply re-stating some big is bad numbers, while refusing to respond to or even mention our criticisms and counter-arguments, doesn’t advance the discussion one inch.

Is birth control an environmental issue?

But what seems to upset Thornett most is our criticism of environmentalists who believe it is possible to reverse decades of horrendous experience by combining Third World population reduction programs with respect for human rights. He endorses the argument of liberal feminist Laurie Mazur, that “We can fight for population policies that are firmly grounded in human rights and social justice.”

We, on the contrary, argue that “population policies not only don’t pave the way for progressive social and economic transformation, they raise barriers to it.” (p. 105)

To Thornett, that means that we oppose empowering Third World women, and that we unfairly label supporters of voluntary family planning programs as advocates of “population control.”

In what he seems to think is a challenge to our views, Thornett describes the oppression and restrictions faced by Third World women who want to control their fertility. He insists that ecosocialists must support the provision of contraception and birth control, and oppose any measures or policies that would restrict women’s reproductive rights.

You’d never know from his account that we make the same point several times in Too Many People? Far from considering these, as Thornett claims, “as secondary, as issues already dealt with” our book explicitly includes “ensuring universal availability of high-quality health services, including birth control and abortion” as priority measures that ecosocialists should fight for. (p. 199) Once again, what we actually wrote was the opposite of his charge.

Thornett’s false claim that we oppose empowering Third World women avoids our real argument: that Third World birth control programs are not an appropriate or effective way to fight the environmental crisis.

In the first place, as we show in Too Many People?, Third World population growth is not a significant cause of the environmental crisis – so focusing on population reduction would divert the environmental movement’s limited resources into programs that just won’t work.

And, as supporters of women’s rights, we oppose birth control programs that are motivated by population-reduction goals because they so often undermine the very empowerment they are said to promote. In Chapter 8, we discuss coercive measures found in supposedly voluntary programs around the world, ranging from the crude (denial of financial, medical or social benefits to women who refuse to be sterilized) to the relatively subtle (mandatory attendance at population-reduction lectures as a condition of receiving health care).

A recent article by noted feminist and population expert Betsy Hartmann explained the dangers of population-motivated birth control programs this way:

“Equally troubling about overpopulation propaganda is the way it undermines reproductive rights. While its purveyors claim they support family planning, they view it more as a means to an end – reducing population growth, rather than as a right in and of itself.

“The distinction may seem subtle, but it is not. Family planning programs designed to limit birth rates treat women, especially poor women and women of color, as targets rather than as individuals worthy of respect. Quality of care loses out to an obsession with the quantity of births averted.” (Climate & Capitalism, August 31, 2011)

Sadly, Thornett brushes these important concerns aside, calling them “sleight of hand,” and insisting that the term “population control” only applies when there is “enforced contraception.” That’s an astonishing statement for any supporter of women’s rights to make. Formally speaking, there is no “enforced contraception” in the United States, but, as feminist lawyer Mondana Nikoukari points out, there are “gradations of coercion” that cause women of color to be sterilized twice or even three times as often as white women. (p. 101-2)

Our comment: “If that’s true in the United States, how can we imagine that in countries where legal protections are much weaker, population-environment programs will truly respect women’s rights?” (p. 102)

We don’t doubt the sincerity of those who support what Thornett calls an “empowerment” approach to limiting population growth. We know that they oppose coercive population control. Unfortunately, their sincerity won’t protect poor women from the unintended consequences of the policies they advocate. Nor will it address the real causes of our mounting ecological crises, which – although Thornett doesn’t mention it – are discussed at some length in Too Many People?

Should we discuss population … or adapt to populationism?

In the Introduction to Too Many People?, we explained why we wrote the book:

“Our goal is to promote debate within environmental movements about the real causes of environmental destruction, poverty, food shortages, and resource depletion. To that end, we contribute this ecosocialist response to the new wave of green populationism …” (pp. 4-5)

So once more we were surprised to be accused of opposing discussion of population and its relationship to ecology. We clearly call for more debate, but Thornett claims we believe “that even discussing it is a dangerous or even reactionary diversion – a taboo subject,” and that “the left should leave this subject alone, keep out of the debates, and insist that there is nothing to discuss.”

On its face, this is an improbable charge. We have written an entire book and dozens of articles on population and the environment. We have spoken at public meetings, debated populationists in person and on radio, and participated in innumerable online discussions. Would we have done any of that if we thought the left should leave the subject alone?

Only in the very last paragraph of his review does it become clear that he doesn’t really think we oppose discussion. Rather, he wants us to stop criticizing the “too many people” argument – the discussion he wants is not about whether overpopulation is a major environmental problem, but about how to reduce birth rates.

Our failure to do this, he says, is “not only wrong but dangerous,” because “the field is left open to reactionaries” who will use our absence from intra-populationist debates as an opportunity to promote “some very nasty solutions indeed.”

Liberals often urge socialists to moderate their political views, to avoid strengthening the right. We did not expect to hear such an argument from Alan Thornett. In reply, we can only repeat what we said in Too Many People?

“The real danger is that liberal environmentalists and feminists will strengthen the right by lending credibility to reactionary arguments. Adopting the argument that population growth causes global warming endorses the strongest argument the right has against the social and economic changes that are really needed to stop climate change and environmental destruction.

“If environmentalists and others believe that population growth is causing climate change, then our responsibility is to show them why that’s wrong, not to adapt to their errors.” (p. 104)

Ian Angus is editor of climateandcapitalism.com. Simon Butler is co-editor of Green Left Weekly. Their book, Too Many People? Population, Immigration, and the Environmental Crisis (Haymarket, 2011) can be ordered from most booksellers. A free sample chapter is available online at http://links.org.au/node/2520

Unethical oil and its friends

2012-01-08T20:42:00.001-06:00

By Ian
The Real Story
January 7, 2012

A year ago Enbridge CEO Pat Daniel announced a new foreign partner for its Northern Gateway Pipeline project.

Daniels told a meeting in Whistler, BC that Sinopec, China’s second largest oil company, was investing an undisclosed amount in the pipeline approval process in return for a guaranteed place on the pipeline and the right to pony up for an equity stake in the $5+ billion project.

Enbridge’s Northern Pipeline project is a dual pipeline designed to deliver tar sands oil to tanker ports in Northern BC for delivery by tanker to refineries in China and other points east. The pipeline approval process starts next month in Kitimat and is estimated to take up to 18 months.

Fast forward a year. An oil industry front group headquartered in the office of Alberta tar sands legal specialists McLennan Ross announces it will be launching an advertising campaign attacking Northern Gateway critics. The front group refuses to disclose its funding source for the ad campaign.

The group, Ethical Oil, was set up by refugees from the Tory war room, Sun News and Prime Minister Harper’s office. It’s ad campaign claims that opponents are serving the energy interests of foreign powers and companies with ethically challenged records.

But here’s a question.

If Ethical Oil’s concern is about supporting oil companies linked to hideous and unethical practices like the oppression of women, terrorism and human rights abuses why are they supporting a pipeline being developed in partnership with some of the most unethical companies in the world?

Sinopec is identified by human rights groups as one of the four worst companies operating in the Sudan. Sinopec’s partnerships with the government provides fiscal support for the Sudanese government’s genocidal military operations. The government depends upon oil revenues from Sinopec – which owns three key Sudanese oil companies – to support its military purchases and campaigns against the South.

Sinopec plays a similar role in Myanmar (formerly known as Burma), partnering with one of the most oppressive regimes in the world to develop both offshore and land based oil and gas reserves. Revenues from these operations help pay for the government’s extraordinarily repressive internal security operations.

For this Sinopec in 2008 ‘earned’ the second worst rating for a company operating in emerging markets from RepRisk, a company that assesses reputational risk for commercial and investment bankers and asset managers.

Doesn’t Sinopec’s involvement alone in the Northern Gateway Pipeline make the pipeline just another project of unethical oil? You’d think so. But there’s more.

Just this past week new funding partners have declared their investment in the Pipeline project.

MEG Energy is a Northern Gateway investor partly owned by CNOOC, another Chinese company with a poor human rights record in Burma. According to Wikipedia in 2008 the US Treasury Department asserted that CNOOC was cooperating in a Burmese joint venture with a company run by a Burmese family “linked to heroin trafficking”.

According to the Globe and Mail Sinopec and MEG are joined by two more Chinese companies with appalling environmental and human rights records. According to the Globe, “Market sources have said they believe China National Petroleum Corp. (CNPC) also holds an interest in Gateway. Sinochem Group, another Chinese energy firm, is also believed to support Gateway.”

According to RepRisk CNPC in particular “has been heavily criticized for its exploration agreements in Myanmar and alleged support for human rights abuses in Sudan, as well as the proposed Pengzhou petrochemical plant and oil refinery in Sichuan province in China, and relations with its controversial subsidiary PetroChina”. In 2008 RepRisk rated CNPC as the company with the 4th worst reputation in the world.

Partnerships with Myanmar and Sudan… links to Burmese heroin traffickers… With this cast of characters partnering in the development of the Northern Gateway, you’d think Ethical Oil would be at the front of the line condemning the pipeline.

That is if you think Ethical Oil’s real purpose is to oppose unethical oil.

If, on the other hand, its real purpose is to front for Enbridge with scurrilous attacks on pipeline opponents…. Well then its actions to date make sense.

The march towards the abyss

2012-01-06T21:16:00.002-06:00

By Fidel Castro Ruz
CubaDebate
Jan 6th, 2012

It is not a matter of being optimistic or pessimistic, knowing or not knowing elementary things, of being responsible or not for events. Those who would like to be thought of as politicians should be thrown onto the trash heap of history when, as the norm goes, they have no idea about everything or almost everything related to it in that activity.

Of course I am not speaking about those who throughout the various millennia turned public affairs into instruments of power and wealth for the privileged classes, an activity where the real records of cruelty have been imposed during the last eight or ten thousand years about those we have certain traces of the social behaviour of our species, whose existence as thinking beings, according to scientists, barely covers 180,000 years.

It is not my purpose to get involved in such topics that would surely bore almost one hundred percent of the people continuously being bombarded with news across the media, going from the written word to three-dimensional images that are starting to be shown in expensive cinemas. The day is not far away when they shall also predominate in the already fabulous television images per se. It is no accident that the so-called leisure industry has its headquarters in the heart of the empire that tyrannizes everybody.

What I would like to do is to rest on the current starting point of our species to speak of the march towards the abyss. I might even speak of an “inexorable” march and I would certainly be closer to reality. The idea of a Last Judgement is implicit in the most practiced religious doctrines among the inhabitants of this planet, without anyone classifying them for that as being pessimistic. On the contrary, I think it is a basic duty of all serious and sane persons, who number in the millions, to fight to postpone and perhaps to prevent that dramatic and imminent event in today’s world.

Numerous dangers threaten us, but two of them, nuclear war and climate change, are decisive and both are ever farther away from coming close to a solution.

Verbose demagoguery, the statements and speeches of the tyranny imposed upon the world by the United States and its powerful and unconditional allies, on both topics, do not admit the slightest doubt in that respect.

January 1st of 2012, the western and Christian New Year, coincides with the anniversary of the triumph of the Revolution in Cuba and the year celebrating the 50th anniversary of the October Crisis of 1962 that put the world on the brink of a nuclear world war and this forces me to write these lines.

My words would be lacking in meaning if they had the objective of blaming on the American people, or on any other country which is an ally of the United States in the unusual adventure; they, like all the other peoples of the world, would be the inevitable victims of the tragedy. Recent events happening in Europe and elsewhere show massive indignation by those who are led to protest by the unemployment, shortages, reductions in their incomes, debts, discrimination, lies and politicking and lead to brutal repressions by the guardians of established law and order.

With growing frequency one speaks of military technologies that affect the entire planet, the only satellite known to be inhabitable hundreds of light years away from any other that may perhaps be suitable if we were to move at the speed of light, three hundred thousand kilometres per second.

We should not ignore that if our marvellous thinking species should disappear, many millions of years would go by before another one capable of thinking would arise, by virtue of the natural principles that rule as a consequence of the evolution of the species, discovered by Darwin in 1859 and which today is acknowledged by all serious scientists, whether they are religious or not.

No other era in the history of mankind has known the dangers that today humanity faces. Persons like me, at 85 years old, had reached our 18th birthdays with high school graduation degrees before the first atomic bomb had been put together.

Today artefacts of this type, ready to be used – incomparably more powerful than those that produced the heat of the sun over the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki─ add up to thousands.

Weapons of this kind that are kept in storage, added to those already deployed by virtue of agreements, reach figures that surpass twenty thousand nuclear missiles.

The use of just one hundred or so of those weapons would be enough to create nuclear winter that would cause a horrible death in a short time for all the human beings living on the planet, as the American scientist and Rutgers University professor Alan Robock has brilliantly explained along with computerized data.

Those used to reading news and serious international analyses know how the risks of the outbreak of war with the use of nuclear weapons increase as the tension grows in the Middle East, where in the hands of the Israeli government hundreds of combat-ready nuclear weapons are accumulated, and whose nature as a strong nuclear power is neither admitted or denied. Likewise, tension grows around Russia, a country with unquestionable capacity for response, threatened by a presumed European nuclear shield.

The Yankee statement that the European nuclear shield is there to also protect Russia from Iran and North Korea is laughable. The Yankee position is so feeble in this delicate matter that its ally Israel does not even bother to guarantee prior consultations on measures that might unleash war.

Humanity, in contrast, does not enjoy any guarantee. Cosmic space, in the vicinity of our planet, is overcrowed by US satellites destined to spy on what is going on even on the roofs of houses in any nation of the world. The lives and customs of any person or family became objects of espionage; listenning to hundreds of millions of cell phones and subjects of conversations by any user anywhere in the world stops being a private matter and becomes information material for the US secret services.

That is the right that is being left to the citizens of our world by virtue of the acts of a government whose constitution, approved by the Philadelphia Congress in 1776, established that men were born free and equal and the Creator has given them all those rights, which they now no longer have, not the Americans themselves or any citizen of the world, not even to communicate by phone with relatives and friends about their most private feelings.

Of course war is a tragedy that can happen and it is very probable that it will happen; however, if humanity were capable of delaying it for an indefinite length of time, another equally dramatic event is happening at an increasing pace: climate change. I shall restrict myself to point out what eminent scientists and world-class exhibiters have explained through documents and films that are questioned by nobody.

It is well-known that the US government was opposed to the Kyoto agreements on the environment, a line of conduct that didn’t even agree with its closest allies whose territories would suffer tremendously and some of which, such as Holland, would practically disappear.

The planet goes on today without a policy to solve this serious problem, while the levels of oceans rise, the enormous ice caps covering Antarctica and Greenland, where more than 90% of the world’s fresh water is accumulated, are melting at a growing pace, and now humanity, on November 30, 2011, officially reached the figure of 7 billion inhabitants which, in the poorest areas of the world grows in a sustained and inevitable manner. Could it be that those who have dedicated themselves to bombing countries and killing millions of persons in the last 50 years could be concerned about the fate of all the other peoples?

The United States today is not just the promoter of those wars, but it is also the greatest manufacturer and exporter of weapons in the world.

As it is well-known, that powerful country has signed a covenant to supply 60 billion dollars in the next few years to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia where the transnationals of the US and its allies extract on a daily basis 10 million barrels of light oil, in other words, a billion dollars in fuel. What will happen to that country and the region when those energy reserves should run dry? It is not possible that our globalized world will accept without a murmur the colossal wasting of energy resources that nature took hundreds of millions of years to create, and whose dilapidation increases essential costs. It would in no way be worthy of the intelligent nature attributed to our species.

In the last 12 months, that situation has worsened considerably because of new technological advances which, far from alleviating the tragedy coming from the squandering of fossil fuels, considerably make things worse.

World class scientists and researchers have been pointing out the dramatic consequences of climate change.

In an excellent documentary film by French director Yann Arthus-Bertrand, entitled Home, and filmed in collaboration with prestigious and well-informed international celebrities, published in mid-2009, he warns the world with irrefutable data about what is happening. Using solid arguments, he shows the deadly consequences of consuming, in less than two centuries, the energy resources created by nature in hundreds of millions of years; but the worst of it is not the colossal squandering, but the suicidal consequences for the human species. Referring to the very existence of life, he admonishes the human species: “…You benefit from a fabulous legacy of 4,000 million years supplied by the Earth. You are only 200,000 years old but you have changed the face of the world.”

He didn’t blame nor could he blame anyone up to that time, he was simply pointing out an objective reality. However, today we have to blame ourselves for what we know and we are doing nothing to try to fix it.

In their images and concepts, the authors of that work include memories, data and ideas that we have the duty to know and take into account.

In recent months, another fabulous film was Oceans, made by two French film-makers, considered to be the best film of the year in Cuba; perhaps, in my opinion, the best film of this era.

This is amazing material because of the precision and beauty of the images never before filmed by any camera: 8 years and 50 million Euros were invested in the making of it. Humanity must thank that proof for the way in which the principles of nature adulterated by man express themselves. The actors are not human beings: they are the inhabitants of the world’s oceans. An Oscar for them!

What inspired me with the duty to write these lines did not arise from the events referred to up till now, which in one way or another I have commented on previously, but others that, managed by the interests of the transnationals, have been coming to light sparingly in the last few months and in my opinion serve as definitive proof of the confusion and political chaos rife in the world.

Just a few months ago I read for the first time some news about the existence of shale gas. It was stated that the US had reserves to supply their needs for this fuel for 100 years. Since I now have time to do research on political, economic and scientific topics that could be really useful for our peoples, I discretely got in touch with several people living in Cuba or abroad. Oddly, none of them had heard a word about the matter. Of course, this wasn’t the first time that happened. One is amazed about important facts that are hidden in a veritable sea of information, mixed in with hundreds or thousands of news items that circulate the planet.

Nevertheless, I persisted in my interest on the subject. Only a few months have gone by and shale gas is no longer news. Just before the new year enough information was known to clearly see the world’s inexorable march towards the abyss, threatened by risks of such great seriousness as nuclear war and climate change. I have already spoken of the first of these; about the second one, in the interest of brevity, I shall restrict myself to reveal known data and some to be known, that no political cadre or sensible person should ignore.

I don’t hesitate saying that I am observing both facts with the serenity imparted by the years I have lived, in this spectacular phase of human history, that have contributed to the education of our brave and heroic people.

The gas is measured in TCF, which can be referred to in cubic feet or cubic metres – it is not always explained whether they are dealing with one or the other – it depends on the system of measurement that is used in certain countries. On the other hand, when they speak of billions they tend to refer to the Spanish billion that means a million millions; that figure in English is called a trillion, and we must keep that in mind when analyzing the references to the gas which tend to be copious. I shall try to point that out when necessary.

The American analyst Daniel Yergin, author of a voluminous classic on the history of oil stated, according to the IPS news agency, that now a third of all the gas produced in the US is shale gas.

“…exploitation of a platform with six wells can consume 170,000 cubic metres of water and even create harmful effects such as influencing seismic movements, polluting surface and groundwaters and affecting the landscape.”

The British BP group informs us that “proven reserves of conventional or traditional gas on the planet add up to 6,608 billion ―million millions― of cubic feet, some 187 billion cubic metres, […] and the largest deposits are in Russia (1,580 TCF), Iran (1,045), Qatar (894), and Saudi Arabia and Turkmenistan with 283 TCF each”. We are dealing with gas that is being produced and marketed.

“An EIA study ―a US government energy agency ― published in April of 2011 found practically the same volume (6,620 TCF or 187.4 billion cubic metres) of recoverable shale gas in just 32 countries, and the giants are: China (1,275 TCF), United States (862), Argentina (774), Mexico (681), South Africa (485) and Australia (396 TCF)”. Shale gas is gas de esquisto. Take note that according to what is known, Argentina and Mexico have almost as much as the United States. China, with larger deposits, has reserves that equal almost the double of those and 40% more than the United States.

“…countries secularly dependent on foreign suppliers shall count on an enormous base of resources in relation to their consumption, such as France and Poland which import 98 and 64 percent respectively of the gas they consume, and in shale or lutite rocks they would have reserves greater than 180 TCF each”.

“To extract it from the lutite ― IPS points out― they resort to a method called ‘fracking’ (hydraulic fracturing), with the injection of great amounts of water plus sand and chemical additives. Carbon traces (proportion of carbon dioxide that is released into the atmosphere) are much greater than those generated in the production of conventional gas.

“Since we are dealing with bombarding layers of earth crust with water and other substances, the risk of damaging the subsoil, soil, surface and groundwater tables, the landscape and communication channels is greater if the facilities for extracting and transporting the new wealth presents handling defects or errors.”

Suffice it to point out that among the numerous chemical substances that are injected with the water to extract this gas we have benzene and toluene, substances that are terribly carcinogenic.

Lourdes Melgar, expert from the Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores of Monterrey, has the opinion that:

“‘It is a technology generating much debate and they are resources located in zones where there is no water…”.

“Gas-bearing lutites ― IPS states― are unconventional hydrocarbon quarries, encrusted in rock that protects them, therefore fracking is used to release them on a grand scale.”

“Generation of shale gas involves high volumes of water and the excavation and fracking generates great amounts of liquid waste that may contain dissolved chemicals and other pollutants that require treatment before they are disposed.”

“Production of shale leaped from 11,037 million cubic metres in 2000 to 135,840 million in 2010. In the event of expansion following this pace, in 2035 it will cover 45 percent of the demand of general gas, according to EIA.

“Recent scientific research has warned on the negative environmental profile of lutite gas.

“Professors Robert Howarth, Renee Santoro and Anthony Ingraffea from Cornell University in the US have concluded that this hydrocarbon is a greater pollutant than oil and gas, according to the study ‘Methane and the traces of greenhouse effect gases from natural gas coming from shale formations’ published in April last year in the Climatic Change review.

“‘Carbon trace is greater than that from conventional gas or oil, seen on any time horizon, but particularly within the lapse of 20 years. Compared to carbon, it is at least 20 percent greater and perhaps more than double in 20 years’, the report underlined.”

“Methane is one of the most polluting greenhouse effect gases, responsible for the rise in the planet’s temperature.”

“‘In active extraction areas (one or more Wells in one kilometre) average and maximum concentrations of methane in wells of drinking water increased with proximity to the closest gas well and were a danger for potential explosion’, states the text written by Stephen Osborn, Avner Vengosh, Nathaniel Warner and Robert Jackson, from Duke State University.

“These indicators put into question the industry argument that shale could replace carbon in generating electricity and, therefore be a resource for mitigating climate change.

“‘It is an adventure that is far too premature and risky’.”

“In April of 2010, the US State Department started up the Shale Gas Global Initiative to help countries seeking to use that resource in order to identify and develop it, with the eventual economic benefit for US transnationals.”

I have been inevitably extensive, I had no other option. I write these lines for the Cubadebate website and for Telesur, one of the most serious and honest channels in our long-suffering world.

In order to deal with the subject, I let the holidays of the old and the New Year slip by.

Fidel Castro Ruz
January 4, 2012.

In Nigeria, Shell causes worst oil spill in a decade

2012-01-05T21:29:00.000-06:00

By Blake Deppe

People's World

January 5, 2012

In Nigeria, coastal and fishing communities are worried, as Shell has admitted to causing the worst oil spill there in ten years, said a report, which was closely followed by a second disaster.

Last Wednesday, 75 miles off the coast of the Niger delta, up to 40,000 barrels of crude oil were spilled, poisoning the water, during an attempted transfer from an oil platform to a tanker.

As of that night, all production from the Bonga field - which typically produces about 200,000 barrels of oil a day - was halted.

Satellite images showed that the spill spread over 356 square miles. Shell responded by spraying dispersants on the oil and deploying booms to stop its spread. Regardless, Nigerian villagers note that oil is still washing up on the coast.

Moreover, Nnimmo Bassey, head of Environmental Rights Action, remarked that Shell's statements about the amount of oil spilled and the supposed subsequent clean-up are not to be trusted, and that other local activists do not buy the company's 'facts.'

"Shell says 40,000 barrels were spilled and production was shut," said Bassey, "But we do not trust them because past incidents show that the company consistently underreports the amounts and impacts of its carelessness."

"We are alerting fisher folks and coastal communities to be on the lookout," he added. "This just adds to the list of Shell's environmental atrocities in the Niger delta."

Jacob Ajuju, a local villager, said, "When this spill occurred, we called on Shell to come and do a clean-up, but since then, they did not turn up, so we the communities had to do it instead."

And now, Shell is trying to plug a second leak caused by a shut down pipeline in the Niger delta's Nembe Creek. The pipeline was reportedly sabotaged, after the Bayelsa State Ministry of Environment noted that oil thieves had installed valves on it.

Oil theft - or 'bunkering' - is often the source of blame when Shell is linked with destructive oil spills in this region, reported Reuters. However, human rights groups like Amnesty International often find a much more appropriate source to blame - Shell itself, for its negligence in its continuous greedy pursuit of oil, which has resulted in troubling developments in other parts of the world.

These latest disasters in Nigeria come after Shell admitted in August 2011 that it was responsible for "two major spills in the Bodo region of the delta that took place in 2008," which it has "yet to pay compensation for," according to the The Daily Activist.

Shell has also admitted that it closed a Gulf of Mexico deep drilling operation after reportedly spilling 319 barrels of contaminated fluids - and that spill, reports the Telegraph, came less than a week after the U.S. conducted its first auction for drilling leases in the Gulf of Mexico since the infamous 2010 oil disaster. That auction drew opposition from many concerned environmental groups and, as this 319-barrel spill proves, rightly so.

Photo: "Overhead view of Shell's oil spill in the Niger Delta region." Sunday Alamba/AP Photos

Canada: Climate Criminal

2012-01-04T19:38:00.001-06:00

By Rex Weyler
Green Peace International
January 4, 2012

At the dawn of the 21st century a new political regime has transformed Canada from global hero – once standing up for peace, people, and nature – to global criminal, plunging into war, eroding civil rights, and destroying environments.

What happened to Canada? Oil. And not just any oil, but the world’s dirtiest, most destructive oil. Canada’s betrayal at the Durban climate talks – abandoning its Kyoto Accord commitments – is the direct effect of becoming a petro-state.

By the late 20th century, oil companies knew that the world’s conventional oil fields were in decline and oil production would soon peak, which it did in 2005. These companies, including sovereign oil powers such as PetroChina, turned their attention to low-grade hydrocarbon deposits in shale gas, deep offshore fields, and Canada’s Alberta tar sands. Simultaneously, inside Canada, oil companies began promoting the political career of the son of an Alberta oil executive, the conservative ideologue Stephen Harper.

Shell Oil opened operations in the tar sands in 2003. In 2004, the same year Canada signed the Kyoto Accord, committing to reduce carbon emissions, oil companies began to form “think tanks” and astroturf groups in Canada to establish the oil agenda and promote Harper as Conservative Party leader. Two years later, in 2006, Harper’s Conservatives formed a minority government with 36% of the popular vote and launched Canada’s petro-state era, slashing environmental regulations, joining US Middle East wars, and launching a tar sands campaign, one of the most ecologically destructive industrial projects in human history.

In Durban, in December 2011, after mocking climate science and common decency, Canada’s Environment Minister, Peter Kent announced that Canada would abandon the Kyoto deal, abrogating a legally binding international agreement, which Canada had signed seven years earlier.

The Canadian government has become the policy arm and public relations voice of the international oil industry, discarding its reputation as an ethical country. Millions of Canadians have expressed outrage at the government that abandoned them and shamed Canada on the world stage. These voices are rarely heard in Canada’s corporate media. Meanwhile, Canadians witness an erosion of free press and civil rights within their own nation. They should not be surprised.

Life as an oil resource colony

“Oil and democracy do not generally mix,” explains Terry Karl in The Paradox of Plenty: Oil Booms and Petro-States. Oil is a “resource
curse” for local populations, as experienced by Nigeria, Indonesia, Venezuela, Iran, Algeria, Saudi Arabia, and other nations. Oil rich nations attract oil industry patrons, who tend to support dictators. Petro-states often lose local economic sovereignty, suffer human rights atrocities, and see their environments devastated.

In the 1970s, the UK and Dutch economies experienced the oil curse as the North Sea oil and gas boom gave the illusion of prosperity while eroding sovereign economic capacity. Britain’s petro-state leader Margaret Thatcher used oil revenues to wage war, create banking empires, and subsidize elite society, while plundering the environment and leaving common citizens dispossessed of their own national heritage.

In 1977 The Economist magazine coined the term “Dutch disease” to describe the social and manufacturing decline caused by extreme resource exploitation. Oil revenues make a nation's currency appear stronger for a while, but this makes their exports more expensive and undermines manufacturing and local economy.

In 2011, the Montreal Macro Research Board warned that the “petrolization” of Canada had created “A severe case of Dutch Disease,” weakening Canadian business sovereignty, “hollowing out manufactured goods exporters” and making Canada “increasingly reliant” on oil and coal exports.

Like Thatcher's England Canada launched a scheme to privatise profits and socialize the costs of oil development. In the last decade, Canada has handed out over $14 billion in tax subsidies to oil, coal, and gas companies, while losing over 340,000 industrial jobs. A University of Ottawa study shows that oil colony economics is the largest factor in these job losses.

“Petro-states,” writes Terry Karl, become “unaccountable to the general population.” To impose the oil company agenda on their citizens, petro-regimes tend to centralize power, avoid transparency, and create a politics of lies and deceit.

Politics as war

Twice, in 2008 and 2009, Harper shut down the Canadian Parliament to avoid inquiries into his international deals, finances, and scandals including abusive treatment of Afghanistan detainees. Canada now ranks last among industrial nations in honouring freedom of information requests.

Harper’s perverse secrecy is typical of oil politics. “This is how petro states are made,” writes Andrew Nikiforuk in one of Canada’s best news sources, The Tyee; “with a quiet infection that eats away a nation's entire soul.”

In March 2011, as Harper ran Canada from secret cabinet meetings, 156 members of the government found Harper and his minority regime in contempt of Parliament for its refusal to share legislative information with other elected members.

In April 2011, Canadians learned that Harper’s liaison to the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers had previously been convicted of defrauding two Canadian banks, a car dealer, and his own law clients, and had lobbied the Canadian government on behalf of his ex-hooker girlfriend.

The convicted felon, Bruce Carson, served as chief tar sands promoter, claiming “The economic and security value of oil sands expansion will likely outweigh the climate damage that oil sands create.” Carson also opposed “clean energy efforts in the U.S.” Canadian lobbyists undermined US low-carbon fuel standards by lobbying the US government.

In June 2011, on national television, another Harper henchman, Tom Flanagan, advocated assassinating WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange: “I think Assange should be assassinated,” he told Canada’s CBC. Flanagan has been one of the lead architects of Harper’s war on his own people. Before the 2011 election, in Canada’s Globe and Mail, Flanagan wrote, “An election is war by other means.” He compared an election campaign to Rome’s destruction of Carthage, whereby they “razed the city to the ground and sowed salt in the fields so nothing would grow there again.”

Alan Whitehorn of the Royal Military College of Canada wrote, “This suggests a paradigm not of civil rivalry between fellow citizens, but all-out extended war to destroy and obliterate the opponent. This kind of malevolent vision and hostile tone seems antithetical to the democratic spirit.” Harper’s government is now constructing barricades around the Parliament buildings, erecting more jails, and passing tougher criminal codes. The Canadian people, who once felt proud of their democratic institutions, now feel like the “enemy” of their own government.

Canada against the world

Outside Canada, the Harper regime has dismissed the United Nations and international opinion. Canadian government officials called the UN a “corrupt organization.” Former Canadian senior UN official Carolyn McAskie wrote in Canada and Multilateralism: Missing In Action that Canada, once respected as a UN leader, is now “spurning a whole system of organizations critical to world peace, security and development.”

Economic analyst Jim Willie wrote that Canada has “followed the Goldman Sachs path to the fields of corruption and fealty… Canada followed the Bush Doctrine of fascism, embracing the war footing … and tightening the security vice. Next they will become a Chinese commercial colony.”

When citizens around the world objected to the climate impact of the tar sands, Harper’s government attempted to rebrand the notorious carbon bomb as “ethical oil,” shamelessly ignoring the facts. The tar sands crimes against humanity and nature begin with obliterating boreal forests and soils, creating massive open-pit mines, and removing two tons of sand and soil for every barrel of oil. The thick bitumen is melted with natural gas, which requires one-third of the energy in tar sands oil to remove it. The project uses about 150-million gallons of water each day from the Athabasca river and aquifers, and the black waste turns boreal lakes into sludge pits, kills birds and other wild life, and contaminates the local ground water. Pollutants from tar sands smoke stacks have caused lung disease throughout the region and a 30% increase in cancers over the last decade. Mike Mercredi from the indigenous Fort Chipewyan Cree Nation calls the impact “slow industrial genocide.”

The crime continues with pipeline oil spills and oil tankers that threaten the entire coast of North America. Meanwhile, the tar sands project emits more that 45-million tons of greenhouse gases each year. NASA climatologist James Hansen has warned that if the tar sands are fully exploited, “it is game over for the climate.”

The French Foreign Ministry called Canada’s decision to renege on its Kyoto climate commitments, “bad news for the fight against climate change.”

Representative Ian Fry from the Pacific island nation of Tuvalu called Canada’s reversal “an act of sabotage ... a reckless and totally irresponsible act.”

The China news agency, Xinhua, called Canada’s decision “preposterous,” and China's Foreign Ministry urged Canada to “face up to its due responsibilities and duties... and take a positive, constructive attitude towards participating in international cooperation to respond to climate change.”

UN climate chief Christiana Figueres warned that Canada “has a legal obligation under the convention to reduce its emissions, and a moral obligation to itself and future generations to lead in the global effort.” UN Advisor on Water, Maude Barlow, called the tar sands “Canada’s Mordor.”

After Canada’s shameful showing in Durban, a Canadian businessman wrote to national newspaper, The Globe & Mail: “The pride of wearing the maple leaf on the lapel or backpack is gone. It's best hidden now. .. not one person in any country I have visited has been complimentary. Harper and his sheep will deny or ignore such facts while people like me lose business.”

Inside Canada, people are rising up, lead by The Wilderness Committee, Greenpeace, Council of Canadians, the Indigenous Environmental Network, the Yinka-Dene Alliance, and others. These groups need international support to halt the tar sands crime and help Canada recover its lost reputation.

-Rex Weyler, November 2011

Deep Green is Rex Weyler's monthly column, reflecting on the roots of activism, environmentalism, and Greenpeace's past, present, and future.

The Biggest Story of 2011 for Me? Canada’s Failure on Climate Change

2012-01-04T14:57:00.000-06:00

By Maude Barlow
Council of Canadians
December 26th, 2011

The biggest story of 2011 for me was the national and international attention given to the environmental dangers of Canada’s tar sands, and the failure of the Harper government to meet our obligations to combat climate change. Until this year, most criticism of Canada’s climate policy was restricted to Canadian and some international environmentalists. But three events of 2011 caused Canada’s energy and climate policies to come under intense scrutiny here in Canada and around the world.

The first was the surprisingly passionate and bitter debate in the U.S. over the Keystone Pipeline, meant to carry Alberta bitumen - the dirtiest oil on earth - over an endangered aquifer to be refined in Texas. A noisy and organized opposition that included environmentalists, Native Americans, ranchers, and even Republican politicians sounded the alarm. They made daily national and international news in the late summer when over 1,200 people got arrested in front of the White House. That inspired a more active movement in Canada.

On September 26, over 200 people crossed an arrest barrier in a similar demonstration on Parliament Hill. This too made national and international headlines. On November 6, 12,000 people surrounded the White House to call for a halt to Keystone and solidarity demonstrations were held that day in front of the Canadian High Commission in London and a number of other cities around the world. Soon after, in a very public display of concern, President Obama ordered a halt to the project while an environmental review assesses an alternative route.

The second event was the news that the European Parliament will likely brand Alberta’s bitumen as a “high emission crude oil” when it adopts its Fuel Quality Directive, a new agreement to promote the use of cleaner fuels in European transport. Their researchers have reported that emissions from tar sands oil production produces 23% more greenhouse gases and has recommended closing off tar sands oil to Europe’s markets. Although Europe uses very little Canadian oil currently, the Harper government hopes that will change if Europe and Canada sign their proposed trade deal called CETA. A possible ban on tar sands oil is a huge trade irritant between Canada and Europe. As well, a negative rating for Canada’s tar sands exports could have a ripple effect and curb sales in other countries. Certainly, this move by the European Parliament has shone a European spotlight on the tar sands of Alberta and helped make this story one of international importance.

The third was the role played by Canada at the December climate summit in Durban and the announcement immediately following it that Canada was pulling out of the Kyoto Accord. Environment Minister Peter Kent announced even before going to Durban that Kyoto was a creature of the “past” and set out to destroy it. Once again, for the fifth year running, Canada won Climate Action Network International’s Fossil of the Year Award, and this too was reported around the world. But the biggest scorn was saved for Minister Kent’s withdrawal from Kyoto on the day after his return to Canada. Headlines around the world blared the news and linked the government’s decision to Canada’s refusal to curtail the growth of the booming tar sands. Environmental groups were outraged. Christina Figueres, UN climate chief, said the move was “regrettable,” and several governments, including China, Japan, and France, voiced strong disapproval. An animated cartoon on national Taiwanese TV reported the story, showing a cartoon Steven Harper figure spitting oil in the face of critics.

So, I submit that Canada’s reputation as a responsible country that keeps its word, cares about its neighbours, and walks a moderate path on the world stage took a beating in 2011. Although flawed, Kyoto was the only legally binding climate agreement ever adopted. Harper and Kent saying they would not agree to another deal until all countries agree is like saying “I won’t drive safely until my neighbour does, even though I have a more expensive car, the money to keep it tuned, and have been driving unsafely before my neighbour even got his driving licence.”

What happened to leadership? What happened to setting goals? What happened to my country?

Let’s hope 2012 is better, but I am not holding my breath.

Bolivia’s law gives nature equal rights to humans

2012-01-02T21:25:00.000-06:00

By Blake Deppe
People's World

January 2, 2012

Bolivia is set to pass the Law of Mother Earth, (in Spanish La Ley de Derechos de la Madre Tierra) which will grant nature the same rights and protections as humans, according to PV Pulse.

For the South American country's leaders, this legislation is part of an unprecedented move to promote a major shift in conservation attitudes aimed at stopping environmental destruction.

The legislation will give new legal powers to the government, allowing it to monitor and control industry in the country.

It will create 11 distinguished rights for the environment, which include: "the right to life and to exist; the right to continue vital cycles and processes free from human alteration; the right to pure water and clean air; the right to balance; the right not to be polluted; and the right to not have cellular structure modified or genetically altered," said a report by the Huffington Post.

But out of the 11, the measure that is potentially the most controversial to some and the most essential to others is "the right to not be affected by mega-infrastructure and development projects that affect the balance of ecosystems and the local inhabitant communities."

Last year Bolivian Foreign Minister David Choquehuanca said, "the situation was serious."

Choquehuanca expressed his concern over the "inadequacy of the greenhouse gas reduction commitments made by developed countries in the Copenhagen Accord." He claims experts forecasted a temperature increase "as high as four degrees above pre-industrial levels." He added, "An increase of temperature of more than [just] one degree above pre-industrial levels would result in the disappearance of our glaciers in the Andes, and the flooding of various islands and coastal zones."

But perhaps no one currently defends the environment in Bolivia with more conviction than the country's first indigenous president, Evo Morales. A known fighter for environmental protection, Morales addressed the press in 2009 stating, "If we want to safeguard mankind, then we need to safeguard the planet. That is the next major task of the United Nations."

Morales's words had immediately followed the resolution of the General Assembly to declare April 22nd "International Mother Earth Day."

Morales's party, the Movement Towards Socialism, holds a majority in both houses of parliament. Strong opposition to the new legislation is not expected.

Meanwhile, Undarico Pinto, leader of the Confederacion Sindical Unica de Trabajadores Campesinos de Bolivia (a group that helped draft the law) highlighted how important it is to "allow people to regulate industry at national, regional, and local levels. Existing laws are not strong enough. [This] will help."

The law's ripple effect is apparent in the words of Canadian activist Maude Barlow, who said, "It's going to have a huge resonance around the world. It's going to start first with these southern countries trying to protect their land and their people from exploitation, but I think it will be grabbed onto by communities in our countries, for example, fighting the tarsands in Alberta."

For Bolivia, environmental concern runs very deep, and given its place in indigenous beliefs there, the Law of Mother Earth is not simply a piece of legislation, but an idea of utmost significance.

"Our grandparents taught us that we belong to a big family of plants and animals," said Choquehuanca. "We believe that everything on the planet forms part of a big family. We indigenous people can contribute to solving the energy, climate, food, and financial crises with our values."

Too many people? A critical review

2012-01-02T06:54:00.001-06:00

By Alan Thornett
Socialist Resistance
January 2, 2012

As a long-time comrade of Ian Angus, a fellow ecosocialist, and an admirer of his work on Marxism and ecology, I am disappointed by the tone he has adopted in his new book on population Too Many People?—which he has authored jointly with Simon Butler, co-editor of the Australian publication Green Left Weekly.

The thesis they advance is that the population of the planet is irrelevant to its ecology, and that even discussing it is a dangerous or even reactionary diversion—a taboo subject. They even argue that such discussion is divisive and detrimental environmental campaigning. [page 97]

The book appears to be a response to Laurie Mazur’s very useful book published last year A Pivotal Moment— Population, Justice and the environmental challenge. This was reviewed by Sheila Malone in SR (July 2010), as part of a debate on the issue.

Mazur argues that it is not a matter of choosing between reactionary policies from the past but that “we can fight for population policies that are firmly grounded in human rights and social justice”. I agree with her on this point, though not with everything in her book.

I didn’t expect to agree with Ian’s book as such, since I have differed with him on this issue for some time. I did expect, however, an objective presentation of the debates without the ideas of fellow ecosocialists being lumped together with those of reactionaries and despots.

What we have is the branding (in heavy polemical tones) of anyone with a contrary view to the authors as ‘Malthusianist’—i.e. supporters of the 18th century population theorist the Reverend Thomas Malthus who advocated starving the poor to stop them breeding—or more precisely as ‘populationist’, by which the authors mean neo-Malthusianist.

They explain it this way: “Throughout the book we use the term ‘populationism‘ to refer to ideologies that attribute social and ecological ills to human numbers and ‘populationist’ to people who support such ideas.” They go on: “We prefer those terms to the more traditional Malthusianism and Malthusian, for two reasons”. The first is because not everyone is familiar with Malthus and the second is because most of their protagonists don’t actually agree with what he wrote. The “more traditional term”, however, never goes away. [page XX1]

This leaves the book stuck in the past, more concerned with rehashing the polarised conflicts of the last 200 years than engaging with the contemporary debates.

The authors are right to say that population is not the root cause of the environmental problems of the planet. It is capitalism. They are also right to say that stabilising the population would not in itself resolve them. But they are wrong to say that it is irrelevant. The fact is that current rate of increase is unsustainable were it to continue—and whether it will continue or for how long no one knows. What we do know it that it has almost tripled in just over 60 years—from 2.5bn in 1950 to the recently reached figure of 7bn.

According to UN figures it will reach between 8bn and 11bn (with 9.5bn as the median figure) by 2050. After that it could begin to stabilise—possibly doing so by the end of the 21st century. Even this, however, is highly speculative. Long-term population predictions, as the authors themselves acknowledge, are notoriously inaccurate. Meanwhile nearly half the current world population is under 25—which is a huge base for further growth.

Yet throughout the book the charge of ‘Malthusianism’ or ‘populationism’ is aggressively leveled against anyone who suggests that rising population is a legitimate, let alone important, subject for discussion. These range from those who do indeed see population as the primary cause of the ecological crisis to those who blame capitalism for it but see population as an important issue to be addressed within that.

This is reinforced by a sleight of hand by the authors over the term population ‘control’. They refuse to draw any distinction between control and empowerment and then brand those they polemicise against—including fellow ecosocialists who advocate empowerment—as being in favour of population ‘control’. This allows them to create a highly objectionable amalgam between every reactionary advocate of population control they can find—and there is no shortage of them including Malthusians—and those who are opposed to such control. This is then referred to throughout the book as “the populationist establishment”.

My own views would certainly fall within this so-called establishment. Yet I am opposed to population control and support policies based on empowerment—policies based on human rights and social justice, socially progressive in and of themselves, which can at the same time start to stabilise the population of the planet.

Such policies involve lifting people out of poverty in the poorest parts of the globe. They involve enabling women to control their own fertility through the provision of contraception and abortion services. It means challenging the influence of religion and other conservative influences such as patriarchal pressure. They involve giving women in impoverished communities access to education.

These are major strategic objectives in their own right, with the issue of rising population giving them an additional urgency. Yet the book dismisses them as secondary, as issues already dealt with! This reflects the fact that the book has nothing at all to say on the substantive (and huge) issue of women and population.

Some important progress towards empowerment policies was made at the UN conference on population and development held in Cairo in 1994. This, for the first time, pointed to the stabilisation of the global population through the elimination of poverty, the empowerment of women, and the effective implementation of basic human rights. That its proposals were sidelined by a vicious pro-life backlash and the arrival of George W Bush on the world stage does not invalidate the contribution it made.

The above approach, however, along with the Cairo Conference, is heavily slapped down in the book. In fact this is one of the author’s principal preoccupations. Empowerment is presented as the slippery slope to not only population control but “at its most extreme” to programs, human rights abuses, enforced or coercive sterilization, sex-selective abortion, female infanticide, and even to ethnic cleansing! [page 94]

The authors put it this way:

“Most supporters of population control today say that it is meant as a kindness — a benevolent measure that can empower women, help climate change, and lift people out of poverty, hunger, and underdevelopment. But population control has a dark past that must be taken into account by anyone seeking solutions to the ecological crisis.”(page 83) They go on: “…At its most extreme, this logic has led to sterilisation of the ‘unfit’ or ethnic cleansing. But even family planning could be a form of population control when the proponents aim to plan other people’s families.” [page 84]

The term population ‘control’ is again perversely attributed to anyone with contrary views and we are again warned of the ‘dark past’ of population debates and the dangers of engaging in them—and anything can be abused, of course, including family planning. But only enforced contraception, which we all oppose, could rationally be seen population control—not the extension to women of the ability to control their own fertility.

Equally mistaken is the crass assertion that to raise the issue of population under conditions where fertility levels are highest in the global south and declining in the north is in some way to target the women of the south and to blame them for the situation. For Fred Pearce, who endorses the book, makes advocates of empowerment into “people haters”: “How did apparently progressive greens and defenders of the underprivileged turn into people-haters, convinced of the evils of overbreeding amongst the world’s poor”.

What the empowerment approach actually targets, of course, is the appalling conditions under which women of the global south are forced to live and the denial basic human rights to which they are subjected. It demands that they have the same opportunities and resources as the women of the global north.

Even more confused is the allegation that the provision of contraception to women in the global south is in some way an attack on their reproductive rights; an attempt to stop them having the family size they would otherwise want — a view which appears to be endorsed in the Socialist Review review of the book. If that were the case, of course, it would not be the right to choose but enforced contraception.

In any case the proposition that most women in the global south, given genuine choice, would choose to have the large families of today is not supported by the evidence. Over 200m women in the global south are currently denied such services and there are between 70m and 80m unintended pregnancies a year—of which 46m end in abortions. 74,000 women die every year as a result of failed back-street abortions—a disproportionate number of these in the global south.

After attacking empowerment from every conceivable angle the authors then appear to accept at least the possibility that not all of us who think population is an important issue to discuss support enforced sterilisation and human rights abuses:

“We are not suggesting that everyone who thinks population growth is an ecological issue would support compulsory sterilisation or human rights abuses. Most modern-day populationists reject the coercive programmes of the 20th century, but that does not mean that they have drawn the necessary lessons from those experiences.” [page 95]

Unfortunately it is the authors themselves who continue to draw false lessons from the past: i.e. that the left should leave this subject alone, keep out of the debates, and insist that there is nothing to discuss.

The problem with this is that it is not just wrong but dangerous. If socialists have nothing to say about the population of the planet the field is left open to the reactionaries, and they will be very pleased to fill it. And one thing the authors are certainly right about is that there are plenty of such people out there with some very nasty solutions indeed.

The World Left After 2011

2012-01-01T23:53:00.001-06:00

Immanuel Wallerstein
Jan. 1, 2012

By any definition, 2011 was a good year for the world left – however narrowly or broadly one defines the world left. The basic reason was the negative economic conditions from which most of the world was suffering. Unemployment was high and becoming higher. Most governments were faced with high debt levels and reduced income. Their response was to try to impose austerity measures on their populations while at the same time they were trying to protect their banks.

The result was a worldwide revolt of what the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movements called “the 99%.” The revolt was against the excessive polarization of wealth, the corrupt governments, and the essentially undemocratic nature of these governments whether or not they had multiparty systems.

It is not that the OWS, the Arab Spring, or the indignados achieved everything they hoped for. It is that they managed to change world discourse, moving it away from the ideological mantras of neo-liberalism to themes like inequality, injustice, and decolonization. For the first time in a long time, ordinary people were discussing the very nature of the system in which they lived; they were no longer taking it for granted.

The question now for the world left is how it can move forward and translate this initial discursive success into political transformation. The problem can be posed quite simply. Even if, in economic terms, there exists a clear and growing cleavage between a very small group (the 1%) and a very large one (the 99%), it does not follow that this is the political division. Worldwide, right-of-center forces still command something like half of the world’s populations, or at least of those who are politically active in any way.

To transform the world therefore, the world left will need a degree of political unity it does not yet have. Indeed, there are profound disagreements about both long-range objectives and short-range tactics. It is not that these issues are not being debated. To the contrary, they are being debated heatedly, and little progress is occurring to overcome the divisions.

These divisions are not new. That doesn’t make them the easier to resolve. There are two major ones. The first has to do with elections. There are not two, but three, positions concerning elections. There is one group that is deeply suspicious of elections, arguing that participating in them is not only politically ineffectual but reinforces the legitimacy of the existing world-system.

The others think it’s crucial to take part in the electoral process. But this group is divided in two. On the one hand, there are those who claim to be pragmatic. They want to work from within – within the major left-of-center party when there is a functioning multi-party system, or within the de facto single party when parliamentary alternance is not permitted.

And of course there are those who decry this policy of choosing the so-called lesser evil. They insist that there is no significant difference between the principal alternative parties and support voting for some party that is “genuinely” on the left.

We are all familiar with this debate and we have all heard the arguments over and over. However, it is clear, at least to me, that if there isn’t some coming together of the three groups concerning electoral tactics, the world left does not have much of a chance of prevailing either in the short or the longer run.

I believe there is a mode of reconciliation. It is to make a distinction between short-term tactics and longer-term strategy. I very much agree with those who argue that obtaining state power is irrelevant to, and possibly endangers the possibility of, the longer-term transformation of the world-system. As a strategy of transformation, it has been tried many times and it has failed.

It does not follow from this that short-run electoral participation is a waste of time. The fact is that a very large part of the 99% are suffering acutely in the short-run. And it is this short-run suffering that is their principal concern. They are trying to survive, and to aid their families and friends to survive. If we think of governments not as potential agents of social transformation but as structures that can affect short-term suffering by their immediate policy decisions, then the world left is obligated to do what it can to get decisions from them that will minimize the pain.

Working to minimize the pain requires electoral participation. And what of the debate between the proponents of the lesser evil and the proponents of supporting genuinely left parties? This becomes a decision of local tactics, which vary enormously according to many factors: size of country, formal political structure, demographics of country, geopolitical location, political history. There is no standard answer, nor can there be. Nor is the answer of 2012 necessarily going to hold for 2014 or 2016. It is not, for me at least, a debate of principle but rather of an evolving tactical situation in each country.

The second basic debate that consumes the world left is that between what I call “developmentalism” and what may be called the priority of civilizational change. We can observe this debate in many parts of the world. One sees it in Latin America in the ongoing and quite angry debates between left governments and movements of indigenous peoples – for example, in Bolivia, in Ecuador, in Venezuela. One sees it in North America and in Europe in debates between environmentalists/Greens and the trade-unions which give priority to retaining and expanding available employment.

On the one side the “developmentalist” option, whether put forward by left governments or by trade-unions is that without such economic growth, there is no way to rectify the economic imbalances of the present-day world, whether we are talking about the polarization within countries or the polarization between countries. This group accuses their opponents of supporting, at least objectively and possibly subjectively, the interests of right-wing forces.

The proponents of the anti-developmentalist option say that the concentration on the priority of economic growth is wrong on two grounds. It is a policy that simply continues the worst features of the capitalist system. And it is a policy that causes irreparable damage – ecological and social damage.

This division is even more passionate, if that is possible, than the one about electoral participation. The only way to resolve it is by compromises, on a case-by-case basis. To make this possible, both groups need to accept the good faith left credentials of the other. It will not be easy.

Can these divisions on the left be overcome in the next five to ten years? I am not sure. But if they are not, I do not believe the world left can win the battle of the next twenty to forty years over what kind of successor system we shall have as the capitalist system collapses definitively.

Quebec on the verge of catastrophic climate change, expert says

2011-12-29T21:38:00.002-06:00

By William Marsden
The Gazette
December 29, 2011

Richelieu River Flooding

Record floods, melting permafrost, shoreline erosion and intense winds caused havoc for thousands of Quebecers as 2011 proved to be yet another year of higher than normal temperatures.

These higher temperatures add to the credibility of climate models that have predicted the march of global warming will accelerate the more greenhouse gases we pump into the atmosphere, scientists say.

“It is striking that over the last 10 to 15 years we didn’t have a single season colder than normal,” said Alain Bourque, director of climate change impacts and adaptation at Quebec’s climate change research institute Ouranos. “That is a clear indication that Canada’s climate is heating up beyond any reasonable doubt.”

While most Quebecers may cheer the warmer winters, Bourque warns it is already endangering coastlines, the northern communities that are built on permafrost and our forests, which probably will not be able to adapt fast enough to a warmer climate.

He said warmer temperatures for pretty well all seasons indicate Quebec is well on its way to meeting the climate-model predictions that we are fast closing in on the 2C mark many scientists claim is the tipping point that will plunge the globe into catastrophic climate change.

The models indicate mean temperatures in the southern half of Quebec will be 2C to 3C higher than normal by 2020. In northern Quebec, the warming will be even higher. And at the present rate of warming as tracked since 1948, we are on track to be well over 4C by 2050 and as high as 7C to 9C by 2080.

“We are halfway along this timeline and are well on our way to achieving what the model says we will achieve in 2020,” Bourque said. “So for the experts such as me who study the impact of climate change, essentially everything is happening as predicted.”

According to Environment Canada, spring temperatures in the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence River region, which includes Montreal and Quebec City, were 54 per cent higher than normal. This is the highest percentage deviation from the norm recorded since 1948.

Montreal temperatures in October, November and December were well above normal. Temperatures for the first two weeks of December were on average 3.8C above normal. Not a single daily maximum fell below zero despite the fact the normal maximum daily for this time of year in Montreal is below freezing, according to Environment Canada.

Bourque said the data over the last 62 years indicates climate change is beginning to speed up.

What worries him is the effect on ecosystems that cannot adjust fast enough to the new climate.

“For fauna it is not too big of a challenge,” he said. Most animals can move quickly into a more optimal climate. He noted, for example, that southern Quebec is seeing a wider variety of birds previously common only to more southerly regions.

“In the ’50s and ’60s cardinals were occasionally seen in the Montreal area,” he said in an interview. “Now there are tons of cardinals and they are moving more toward the Trois Rivières area. In Quebec City, you never really saw cardinals and now they are there.”

He said the ability to adjust to a warmer climate is much more difficult for plants.

The optimal climate envelope in which maple trees can thrive has been steadily moving north and by 2050 will be 500 kilometres north of the townships, he said.

“So if you do the calculation this makes 100 km for 10 years which means 10 km per year,” he said.

To keep up with its climate envelope, maple trees would have to move about 27 meters a day. In other words, Bourque said, they’d have to start walking.

Climate change is happening too quickly for trees and other flora to go through the natural regeneration process fast enough to keep up with their moving climate envelope, he said.

“Let’s say the maple is absolutely unable to move northward. Then in 2050 the current maples are going to be in an area where it is not optimal with the climate. It depends on the resistance of the different trees, but it is pretty clear that it is not going to be optimal. So the future for trees looks worrisome.

“It is likely that it is going to be negative, very negative (for flora),” he added. “Globally on the planet experts agree that it is going to be negative especially because of the rate of climate change. It is just happening too quickly.

Heavy winter storms have been eroding the coastline east of Quebec City, he said.

“When you got to Sept Îles, Rimouski, Percé, there is almost on a weekly basis major media articles and all kind of problems of people losing their houses, people having to be moved in crisis situations because of storms,” he said.

Rising sea levels play a part, but the main cause is the loss of sea ice, he said.

“The ice cover used to protect the coastal areas. Now you have waves of a few meters reaching the shores during the big winter storms.”

Mayor Serge Lévesque of Sept Îles said his city has seen several homes destroyed. In addition, he said, “there are about 10 residents who have had to be relocated to avoid having their homes destroyed.”

He added a lot of land has been lost in a sector about 15 kilometres east of the city and also in a residential area about 25 kilometres west of the city.

“It’s been going on since the 1980s,” he said. “The main cause is the almost complete lack of ice in the winter and the fact that our coastline is mainly sand.”

A Sept Îles native, he predicts the way things are going he will have to move his home within the next eight years.

The damage is already costing taxpayers. The province has a new program to pay homeowners forced to move away from the coast compensation of up to $150,000.

“It may sound like a lot but you can’t build a new home in Sept Îles for that money,” Levesque said.

In northern communities such as Salluit, permafrost has become an issue of survival. Salluit is a community of 1,500 people and its population is expanding. It is located in a river valley of ice and mud on the Hudson Strait.

“There was some question at some point of moving the entire village because the spot is too risky,” Bourque said. “But they came to the conclusion that it was manageable if they inspected the land regularly and built new infrastructure in safe places where there is more rock and less mud.”

Scientists say they cannot relate single events such as this year’s record flooding in the Richelieu Valley to climate change. But the heavy rains and fast snowmelt in Vermont that caused the early spring flooding is becoming more frequent.

“This is where the costs become very significant,” Bourque said. “Historically we have rejected these events as freak events and we won’t see them for the next 100 years. But now that is not the way it is happening and it’s happening everywhere. People are flooded for weeks and then it takes a year to return to normal life. They last so long they become permanent.”

The Richelieu flood cost governments at least $22.3 million in emergency costs and home repairs. That does not includes the costs many homeowners were forced to bear themselves.

A study released in November by the National Round Table on Environment and the Economy, called Paying the Price: The Economic Costs of Climate Change for Canada, warns that annual costs could rise to $43 billion by the 2050s.

“Where costs are estimated at $43 billion in the high climate change – rapid growth scenario, there is a five per cent chance that the costs could be at least $91 billion per year,” the study states.

The true colors of green economy

2011-12-29T10:51:00.001-06:00

By Silvia Ribeiro
América Latina en Movimiento
December 19, 2011

Twenty years after the UN Conference on Environment and Development (World Summit or Eco ‘92) a new world conference will take place in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in June 2012. Rio+20, as it is known, will be set in the midst of the greatest global crises in the century: environmental devastation, biodiversity erosion, climate crisis, economic and financial crisis, food crisis, and health crisis.

Although Rio+20 was supposed to review the commitments made, the state of the real problems and the strategies to resolve them, the issues on the agenda are green economy and new forms of global environmental governance. If the term “sustainable development” was ambiguous and was profusely manipulated, the substitution for green economy points to an even more restrictive approach, which privileges those who dominate the markets.

Far from an anodyne meeting at the UN, Rio+20 is announced as the stage of dispute because it could be a key moment in a rearrangement of discourse and global geopolitics. This would consolidate new financial markets with nature and more oligopolistic control of natural resources, legitimize new high-risk technologies, and lay the foundation of new global environmental governance that will ease the advance of a green economy in tune with corporations.

What does green economy refer to?

For many people and organizations, the term “green economy” can have a positive meaning, associated with organic farming production, renewable energies, and clean technologies. In the movements there is a diversity of alternative economic proposals, socially just, culturally correct and sustainably environmental. However, the concept of “green economy” that is being handled by governments is going along a different path. It is basically about renewing capitalism amid this crisis, increasing the bases of exploitation and the privatization of nature.

Back in Eco’92, transnational companies were already using “green make-up”. The concept of green economy follows this path, but it is more worrying, both due to the expansion of the mercantilization of nature and ecosystems —and the impact on the peoples that rely on them— and because the new technologies that they now refer to, be it explicitly or not, imply huge risks.

Officially green

The concept of “green economy” is ambiguous and there is no consensus among governments. A recurrent precedent in the official discussions leading up to Rio+20 is the Green Economy Initiative of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). It outlines the “Global Green New Deal” proposed by the organization in 2008 and which Obama and other heads of state mentioned as a win-win response to the crises. It suggests confronting the financial and climate crises by redirecting investments to “natural capital”, by giving tax incentives to companies that produce clean energy (such as agrofuels) and expanding the carbon markets. Brazil, which already had a lot of investment in these areas and abundant natural resources to place in the markets, suggested that green economy be a central issue in Rio+20, which was later endorsed by the UN.

The main issues of the green economy stand on three main pillars: a) a greater mercantilization and privatization of nature and ecosystems, integrating its roles as “services” to the financial markets, b) the promotion of new technologies and a broad expansion of the use of biomass, and c) a policy framework that will allow and reward all that, i.e., what governments and societies should do in order that corporations can make a profit with the first two.

Privatizing air

One of the early components of the package proposed by the green economy is the payment for environmental services (PES) or ecosystem services. These include the payment for environmental, forestry, hydrologic, landscape, and bioprospecting (biopiracy) services. They imply the redefinition of the roles of nature and biodiversity as “services” in order to be able to turn them into merchandise. The PES have entailed many conflicts between indigenous groups and peasants, within and among communities, since they promote competition to see who gets there first to trade the shared goods. The PES schemes call for inventing “owners” of the ecosystem roles, of the knowledge of biodiversity, of the traditional protection of water, basins, and forests, since they have always been shared and collective goods that could not be turned into a merchandise.

The PES means that a transnational corporation —which might have never been on the terrain— may end up deciding on the territory, the water, or the biodiversity of indigenous and peasant communities in southern countries.

Based on these experiences, the REDD programs (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and avoided Forest Degradation) have come into existence. The approval of such programs at the Climate Change Convention in December 2010 opened up all the forests of the world to the speculative financial markets in one fell swoop.

The hypothesis behind REDD is that in order to stop deforestation —a serious factor in the climate crisis— those who deforest must be economically compensated. The idea is not to halt deforestation, but instead to pay off those who deforest. That’s why it is called “avoided” deforestation: first comes deforestation, then comes the selling of the interruption of the activity.

Later additions to the original program include compensation payments for “increasing the inventories of carbon” and for “conservation” and “sustainable forest management”. The former involves monoculture tree plantations after deforestation has taken place, which has a huge impact on the environment and on the communities. But the most sinister thing about this mechanism is the so-called “conservation and sustainable management” because they directly aim to divest indigenous and forest communities of their rights and territories in exchange for payment for the air of their forests.

Because REDD is paid, what is done with the forest and its capacity to absorb carbon dioxide must be verifiable, that is say, it must be demonstrated by expensive external agents who the communities must hire to be told what they can do with their own forests and territories. The highly contaminating corporations and the great producers of greenhouse emissions buy the carbon absorption capacity of forests so that they can keep on polluting. However, now they have the justification —which has never been scientifically proven but is otherwise very lucrative— that somewhere in the world some forest will absorb the corporation’s emissions. At the same time, the carbon bonds obtained enter the secondary market where the same corporation can sell them to others at a higher price, recover its investment, as well as make some extra money. The greatest volume of the carbon markets takes place in secondary speculation, that is to say, the sale and re-sale of, literally, pure air.

In general, all the carbon trading schemes are directed at the speculative markets, a much larger market than the primary markets. Currently in the Climate Change Agreement, what is at stake is the inclusion of the soil and agriculture —the foundation of the world’s food— as a great carbon sink to be tossed into financial speculation.

Some organizations believe these programs are an acknowledgement of the contribution that indigenous and peasant communities make to take care of the environment and to stop climate change. Hence, it is good these programs exist. Experience shows that the impact of these schemes of mercantilization of nature and its roles has been much worse than any payment that some people might get.

With this system, indigenous, peasant and local communities have received no real social recognition for the fundamental role they have played historically and at present in taking care of biodiversity and in producing diverse and healthy food for mankind. This recognition could take the form of supporting the effective exercise of the communities’ integral rights —including the right to their own land and territory, their cultures, and their different economies and politics. Instead, the green economy is privatizing and turning nature into merchandise, as it replaces the communities’ rights with commercial transactions, and what should be public policies with market competition.

Green Technological Tsunami?

The other pillar of the green economy is the use of new technologies. The technological proposition is particularly important in the face of the current crisis because it downplays the high-earnings productive industry and strengthens the illusion that we need not examine the causes of the crisis: everything can be solved with more technology.

Almost all technology patents— including those necessary for renewable energy sources, such as wind and solar energy— are in the hands of the large corporations, which defend monopolies ferociously and are not willing to discuss the cancellation of these patents under any economic system, be it green or any other color. Let alone if it means broadening their markets.

In any case, not even these so-called environmentally-friendly energy sources are suitable for all parts of the world, let alone when they are implemented as mega-projects conducted by transnationals, abusing the indigenous territories. Besides, these projects usually require the use of nanotechnologies, a highly widespread industry. And despite the hundreds of research studies showing the toxicity of nanoparticles and nanocompounds to health and environment, these technologies are not regulated anywhere in the world. Moreover, the real energy cost of the complete lifecycle of nanotechnology products and the toxic waste they generate, among other factors, remain unknown.

Another underlying technology to the green economy is biotechnology. This kind of technology ranges from more transgenic crops for agrofuels and which are “climate resistant” to synthetic biology, that is, labs that build genes, metabolic steps, or entire synthetic microbes in order to produce new industrial substances. The most immediate uses refer to the processing of cellulose, which earlier was unviable because it was inefficient and costly. With the microbes resulting from synthetic biology, it is possible to process any source of carbohydrates —such as cellulose— in order to build polymers that can be turned into fuels, pharmaceuticals, plastics, and other industrial substances. Suddenly all nature, everything living or that has been alive, is seen as “biomass”, the new universal raw material to process with synthetic biology. The dispute to hoard any source of natural or grown biomass is underway and it has become one of the new major threats to nature and peoples.

Also technologies like geo-engineering, that is, the deliberate manipulation of the planet’s climate, converge in the green economy with some of its technologies, such as the massive use of biomass to burn and fertilize the soil as a carbon sink (biochar), vast monoculture plantations, or the fertilization of the seas in order to absorb carbon.

Considering the risks of these new technologies, the ETC group proposes establishing a multilateral mechanism of environmental, social, economic, and cultural pre-evaluation of the technologies. These evaluations should be conducted with the participation of civil society and the affected stakeholders before these technologies reach the markets. Technologies which are extremely dangerous or which have a high warfare potential must be forbidden.

Instead of this “green economy”, what we need is social and environmental justice. All over the world, social movements have a variety of proposals to make it effective. And in addition to proposals, conclusive practices, for example that of the indigenous and peasant production that feeds most of the world and is already “cooling” the planet.
Translation: Germán Warckmeister.

- Silvia Ribeiro is a member of the ETC Group.

(This article was first published in Spanish in América Latina en Movimiento, No. 468-9, “El cuento de la economía verde”, http://alainet.org/publica/468-9.phtml.

Can Bolivia become a green energy superpower?

2011-12-29T10:07:00.005-06:00

Bolivia has vast reserves of lithium, one of the largest reserves of clean energy future, and wants to exploit it alone. But lithium is enclosed under a salt of about 10,000 square kilometers

The Guardian

December 29, 2011

Google translation

Bolivia's lithium lies beneath its vast salt flats

Bolivia has more lithium than any other country in the world but its battery power potential "lithium ion" for electric cars is in danger of not materialize.

The vast reserves of lithium are dissolved in a saltwater lagoon below the layer of the highest salt lake in the world, which has led to all kinds of superlative comparisons, one of the most memorable is that the landlocked country to become the "Saudi Arabia of lithium."

There is a comparison that pleases the Socialist government of President Evo Morales. The first indigenous leader of the nation has promised that Bolivia exploit lithium reserves alone, in a sustainable manner for the benefit of all Bolivians.

But nearly four years since the start of the project to exploit the reserves of lithium in the Salar de Uyuni - an amount that could exceed 100 million tons - no impatience about when the Bolivian people will feel the benefits of its immense potential .

Lithium is considered a green energy future, empowering iPods, cell phones, laptops and electric cars. But Bolivia's reserves are locked up under a salt of 10.000 square kilometers. While thousands of tourists are welcomed to look at the bright white area of the sea surrounded by mountains on the horizon, foreign investors have to wait.

"There are many people who think that the Bolivian government is too slow to industrialize these reservations and will miss the train," says Guillaume Roelants, the chief project scientist lithium Comibol, the Mining Corporation of Bolivia . "That is totally false because international demand for lithium is still low despite much speculation. So I think we have time."

The lithium project is still in the "pre pilot" and the industrial production of about 30,000 tons of lithium carbonate per year is not expected until early 2015, Roelants said. "The plan as an industry is to supply batteries for the world to hundreds if not thousands of years, then a month will not be a big problem," he adds.

The trauma of the Spanish conquest has left many Bolivians very suspicious of multinational companies, whom they accuse of plundering its natural resources. Morales has used this feeling nationalizing the electricity and hydrocarbon sectors in one of the poorest nations in South America. Also changed the constitution to correct historical inequities in the country.

But Bolivia may be losing a historic opportunity, says Juan Carlos Zuleta, a Bolivian who is an expert in the economics of lithium. "I think this government is not interested in developing this important resource, not only good for Bolivia but for the whole world," he says.

He insists that Bolivian scientists are still struggling to find a way to industrialize the mineral and suggests that the country urgently seek input from countries with more experience in the production of lithium. For example, neighboring countries, Chile and Argentina, have become established producers of lithium, although large reserves are much less than Bolivia's.

"There is already a career in the world for lithium and Bolivia is not part of this race," adds Zuleta.

General Motors, Hyundai and Nissan are just some of the automakers that are to launch new electric or hybrid cars in 2012.

Bolivia will be "indispensable for the electric car market by the amount of resources you have," said Zuleta. "If the world can have an electric car era, we need to Bolivia," he adds.

But it is a three step process, and Bolivia is only found in the first. Already built a processing plant at a cost of $ 5m in a remote corner of Salt is extracted cloridrato lithium carbonate and potassium - used for fertilizer - from solar evaporation ponds.

The Central Bank of Bolivia will contribute $ 500m in the process of industrialization in 2015 with the possibility of making lithium batteries. From this time the Bolivian government will accept foreign technical assistance, according to official sources.

Bolivia has already held talks with China, Japan, South Korea, France and Finland on "strategic alliances" for this final stage, says Freddy Beltran, vice-minister of the ministry of mining.

Beltran conceded that there have been delays due, according to him, the bureaucratic system. But he said not impact the long-term national challenge to become an "exporter of raw materials to (a country) that can industrialize their own resources."

While mining is this nation adapting to the new challenges of evaporite minerals such as lithium will you be able to leave traditional resources - such as zinc and tin - and move toward clean, renewable energy? And if that were the case, will improve the lives of millions of Bolivians?

"There is much poverty in Bolivia and we need a new source of income," says Zuleta. A ton of lithium carbonate is worth about $ 5,500, and some experts estimate that Bolivia's reserves could be worth more than $ 1 trillion.

In Venezuela and Iran - two countries rich in oil and closest ideological allies to the Bolivian government - perhaps not appropriate to cover the full potential of clean energy from the battery. But right next to Bolivia, the regional superpower, Brazil, is already using ethanol as fuel in their cars. While biofuels compete with food production, Brazil would have to seek new sources of energy to fuel the growing number of car owners in a middle class is expanding exponentially.

It's a business opportunity that Bolivia can become a clean energy superpower, says Zuleta.

Corporations, climate and the United Nations: How big business has seized control of global climate negotiations

2011-12-27T21:21:00.000-06:00

Polaris Institute
December 2011

In time for COP 17 in Durban, South Africa, the Polaris Institute prepared a report outlining how multinational corporations and their lobbyists have infiltrated the United Nations and are influencing the outcomes of climate negotiations. The report uncovers and describes where corporations influence the United Nations in the build up to and during climate change negotiations and how this corporate interest is the driving force behind the preferred market based initiatives that are emerging from the UNFCCC process.

Examples of corporate infiltration of the UNFCCC process are presented in order to highlight how multilateral and national level climate change policies carry the fingerprints of corporate interests. The corporate control of agendas inside the UN is not new and the report is framed within the historical roots of the access business and industry enjoy inside the United Nations.

This report exposes and critiques the corporate powers that influence the UNFCCC and use the United Nations to mask damaging operations. In conclusion, the report calls on activists to bring these corporate powers to account along with a UN system that has spent far too long working in partnership with destructive corporations instead of regulating their troublesome behaviour.

For the full report, go to http://www.polarisinstitute.org/files/CorporationsClimateandtheUN.pdf

Joel Kovel at Occupy Wall Street: Ecosocialism and OWS

2011-12-23T22:42:00.001-06:00

mfoxus's channel

Part One

Part two

An assessment of the failure of the Durban summit on the climate: no more "green capitalism"

2011-12-23T14:36:00.002-06:00

By Josep María Antentas, Esther Vivas
International Viewpoint
December 2011

We will save the markets, not the climate. That is how we can summarize the outcome of the 17th Conference of Parties (COP17) to the United Nations Framework on Climate Change (UNFCC) which took place in Durban, South Africa between 28 November and 10 December 2011. There is a striking contrast between the rapid response by governments and international institutions at the onset of the economic and financial crisis of 2007-08 in bailing out private banks with public money and the complete immobility they demonstrate in response to climate change. Yet this should not surprise us, because in both cases it is the markets and their accomplices in government who come out as winners.

There were two central themes at the Durban summit; first, the future of the Kyoto Protocol which expires in 2012 and the ability to put in place mechanisms to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and, secondly, the launch of the Green Climate Fund approved at the previous summit in Cancun (Mexico) with the theoretical aim of supporting the poorest countries to face the consequences of climate change through projects of mitigation and adaptation.

After Durban, we can say that a second phase of the Kyoto Protocol remains empty of content. They postponed any real action until 2020 and ruled out any binding regulations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. It was the representatives of the most polluting countries, headed by the United States, who argued for an agreement based on voluntary reductions and opposed any binding mechanism. The Kyoto Protocol was already inadequate, and its strict application would lead to a small slowdown of global warming. But now we are on a path that can only make the situation much worse.

With regard to the Green Climate Fund, as a first step, rich countries pledged to contribute up to $ 30 billion in 2012 and 100 billion per year until 2020. In the first place these amounts are insufficient. Further, no source of public funds has been identified. Therefore, the doors are wide open to private investment run by the World Bank. As has already been noted by social movements, this is a strategy to "transform the Green Climate Fund into a greedy employers’ fund". Once again they are making profits from the climate crisis and environmental pollution (investment banks have already developed a range of financial instruments to intervene in what is called the carbon market, emissions, etc.)

Another example of the commodification of the atmosphere was the endorsement by the United Nations of capture and storage of CO 2 as a mechanism for so-called clean development, whereas this procedure is not intended to reduce emissions and will help to seriously deepen the environmental crisis, especially in developing countries that are candidates to become cemeteries of CO 2 in the future.

The results of the Summit therefore cause an increase in green capitalism. South African activist and intellectual Patrick Bond denounced it like this: "The trend towards commodification of nature has become the dominant philosophical point of view in environmental governance. " In Durban, we repeated the scenario of the previous summits, such as Cancun in 2010 and Copenhagen in 2009, where the interests of large transnational corporations, international financial institutions and the elites of the financial world, both North and South, are given priority over the collective needs of the people and the future of the planet.

In Durban, not only our future was at stake, but also our present. The effects of the ravages of climate change are already being felt; including the release of millions of tons of methane in the Arctic, a gas 20 times more potent than CO 2 in terms of atmospheric warming. Then there are the melting glaciers and ice caps which is resulting in a rise in sea level. These effects are already increasing the scale of forced migration. In 1995 there were approximately 25 million climate migrants; that number has doubled now, with 50 million. In 2050, this number could be between 200 million and 1 billion people displaced.

All indicators show that we are moving towards an uncontrolled global warming of more than 2 °, which could rise to about 4 ° at the end of the century. Scientists believe this will most likely trigger unmanageable consequences such as a very significant increase of sea level. We cannot wait until 2020 to start taking action.

But with the lack of political will to tackle climate change, resistance does not, however, dry up. In a movement parallel to Occupy Wall Street and the wave of indignados which has reverberated round Europe and the world, many activists and social movements met in a daily forum a few meters from the official conference centre with their initiative called "Occupy COP17." Participants ranged from farmers struggling for their rights to representatives of small island states like Seychelles, Grenada and the Republic of Nauru (Oceania, Micronesia) who are threatened by an imminent rise in sea level, to activists against debt who are demanding the repayment of ecological debt from the north to the south.

The movement for Climate Justice shows the need to focus our lives and the planet against the commodification of nature and the commons. Capitalism and its elites are unable to provide a comprehensive response to the socio-climate crisis which has led us to a productivist and predatory system. If we are not to exacerbate the climate crisis with all its consequences we must fundamentally change this system. The well-known environmental activist Nnimmo Bassey said very clearly: "The summit amplified climate apartheid, where the 1% richest in the world decided it was acceptable to sacrifice the remaining 99%."

-Josep María Antentas is a member of the editorial board of the magazine Viento Sur, and a professor of sociology at the Autonomous University of Barcelona.

-Esther Vivas is a member of the Centre for Studies on Social Movements (CEMS) at Universitat Pompeu Fabra. She is author of the book “En pie contra la deuda externa” (Stand Up against external debt), El Viejo Topo, 2008, and co-coordinator of the books also in Spanish “Supermarkets, No Thanks” and “Where is Fair Trade headed?” among other publications, and a contributor to the CIP Americas Program www.cipamericas.org. She is also a member of the editorial board of Viento Sur.

An ecosocialist proposal to the global crisis

2011-12-23T14:24:00.001-06:00

By Fernando de la Cuadra
EcoPortal.Net (google translation)
30/03/11

A set of environmental indicators show that if mankind does not change his style of development, less than a century will put at serious risk the survival of the planet and mankind. Mészáros reminds us, each new phase of forced postponement, the contradictions of the capitalist system can only worsen, bringing with it a greater danger to our own survival.

Contemporary Ecosocialism arises precisely as a response to this self-destructive dimension of capitalism and is seen as a rational and feasible alternative to the social and environmental crisis facing civilization and humanity.

Recent events have shaken the world clearly demonstrate a phenomenon that has been presented and discussed for several decades. The depletion of predatory productivist model and threatening with increasing intensity the material basis of life on the planet. Climate change is a fact that at this point can not deny. Although there is almost global agreement between the scientific world on its inevitability, there is still considerable uncertainty about the actual consequences it may entail. In Latin America it is estimated that the greatest impacts of these changes are beaten down especially on agriculture, fishing and access to drinking water. This situation becomes even more evident the second contradiction of capitalism, that is, that in addition to the classic contradiction between capital and labor, poses a prominent contradiction between the destructive forces of capital and predatory nature.

The theme of ecological limits to economic growth and the interrelationships between development and environment were reintroduced in Western thought [1] in the sixties and early seventies by a large group of theorists, which can be highlighted Georgescu-Roegen , Kapp, Naess, Sachs and Schumacher. For example, in a pioneering work of Ernst F. Schumacher "Small is beautiful" (Small is Beautiful) published in 1973, Germano-British economist makes a compelling critique of the productivist model Western societies would lead to environmental disaster and life itself, to try to understand how humanity whole problem and start seeing new ways to develop new production methods and consumption patterns in a lifestyle designed to last and be sustainable. Despite differences in approach and more or less militant position of each of these thinkers, which looms as an aspect common to all is the vehement criticism of production and consumption model inherent to capitalist development.

This model, which has generated an exponential growth in exploitation of natural resources and encourages reckless spending, especially in the northern hemisphere countries, is responsible for both causing a depletion of resources and produce tons of garbage daily pollute water, air and earth. [2] Each year we lose 14.6 million hectares of forests and thousands of species, reducing and irreversibly eroding biodiversity. Continues the devastation of the forests, which the world loses annually about 17 million hectares, equivalent to four times the size of Switzerland. And since no trees to absorb excess CO2, the greenhouse effect and global warming worsen. The ozone layer, despite the Montreal Protocol, will not recover until mid-century. Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere (370 parts per million) has increased by 32% from the nineteenth century, reaching the highest concentrations of the last 20 million years ago, and today we add to the atmosphere annually more than 23,000 million tons of CO2, accelerating climate change. It is expected that carbon dioxide emissions increase by 75% between 1997 and 2020. Each year we issue about 100 million tons of sulfur dioxide, 70 million of nitrogen oxides, 200 million of carbon monoxide and 60 million particles in suspension, compounding the problems caused by acid rain, tropospheric ozone and pollution Local air.

In short, a set of environmental indicators studied in recent decades seem to reveal ever more clearly that if mankind does not change his style of development, less than a century will put at serious risk the survival of the planet and mankind. Mészáros reminds us, each new phase of forced postponement, the contradictions of the capitalist system can only worsen, bringing with it a greater danger to our own survival.

Subsequent environmental catastrophes and "weather" that has suffered the world since Chernobyl and the recent tragedy of the Fukushima plant, substantiate without exaggeration that we are in an advanced stage of risk manufactured or structural crisis, not only of capital but sustainability of the species. XXI Century has begun with a catastrophic imprint, with a degree of ecological and natural disasters unprecedented in world history. [3] Given this situation uncertain and bleak have been a number of initiatives (such as the World Conference of Peoples on Climate Change Climate) seeking to build alternatives to the productivist model, currently prevailing predatory and exploitative. Contemporary Ecosocialism arises precisely as a response to this self-destructive dimension of capitalism and is seen as a rational and feasible alternative to the social and environmental crisis facing civilization and humanity.

As stated in the Manifesto Ecosocialist Kovel and Löwy written by "the ecological crisis and the crisis of social decline are deeply intertwined and should be viewed as different expressions of the same structural forces that shape the dynamics and expansion of the world capitalist system. This crisis would have its origin, first, the rapid industrialization process that exceeds the capacity of the land for processing, buffering and content, and, with it, as part of the process of globalization, with all the consequences and disintegrative effects on the societies where it is imposed. (...) The current capitalist system can not regulate the crisis that he has put in place, much less overcome. The system can not solve the ecological crisis because to do so requires setting limits on the accumulation, which is an unacceptable option for a social system supported on the imperative to grow or die. In short, the capitalist world system is historically bankrupt and in ecological terms is profoundly unsustainable, must be changed or replaced if it is to make the future worth living. "

Thus, ecosocialism seeks to break dramatically with the destructive practices and predatory forms derived from a mode of production and consumption of highly demanding natural and human resources. Ecosocialist response represents a break with an expansionist capital model as productivist perspective of 'real socialism'. For ecosocialists either the logic of market and profit, as well as bureaucratic productivism vulgar economistic Marxism, models are considered absolutely incompatible with the urgent and urgent need for environmental preservation.

Some critics have pointed out that this current conception is an eco-socialist utopia, a fantasy, creative writing or viability unscientific to be put into practice. However, even if we do a quick read on the future of the planet, we can directly reach the conclusion that there is an urgent rethink, first, the current energy mix used to "flush" the land. Dependence and excessive use of fossil fuels have disastrous effects not only directly on ecosystems, but also cause permanent and bloody conflict over control of oil resources. Then ecosocialism necessarily incorporates a proposal for clean energy sources and renewable myth and radically alter the relationship of domination / enjoyment / destruction of man over nature.

Furthermore, the use of alternative energy (geothermal, solar, wind, etc..) Must be accompanied by a broad discussion about the very notion of progress / development based preferably on economic growth. [4] The idea of the decrease can also be considered illusory, a kind of naive and retrograde philosophy, but recent evidence of the devastation of the planet may point in another direction: the alternative for the decrease and discussion about the power and the unequal distribution of natural resource use should be with security essential part of any agenda that seeks to discuss the future of humanity. In this sense, the debate over the decline may also be considered part of the construction of an ecological and social projects, since it includes in its heartwood conception of the need to move towards a different mode of functioning of society, more democratic, egalitarian, participatory and dramatically redefine the current model of production and consumption, trying to achieve the welfare of all within the framework of a new relationship between humanity and nature.

Thus, both ecological socialism as the prospect of the decline represents a reorganization of life in many areas, use artificial means giving the consumer to undertake a self-limited and appropriate to the real needs of people, supposed to think about the use alternative energy and clean, pose ecological footprint through local activities and more equitable relations between members of a community.

In short, eco-socialism, decrease or Sumak Kawsay seek centrally reflect on the strategies that have been built in function to reverse the deleterious consequences of the current pattern of production and consumption, to make a change at the level of civilization that enable them to pursue a "good living "in a framework of respect for people and nature. www.ecoportal.net

Fernando de la Cuadra - Chilean sociologist. A graduate of the University of Chile. Doctor in Social Sciences from the Federal Rural University of Rio de Janeiro. Consultant to the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture, IICA. Member of the University Network of Researchers on Latin America (Rupal). -22 March 2011 - http://fmdelacuadra.blogspot.com/

Notes:
[1] We refer to a reintroduction, because we believe that the origin of these concerns is the anticipatory work of a contemporary of Marx, William Morris, which had already introduced eco-socialist elements of a vision in his writings, especially his novel utopian News from Nowhere.
[2] For example, it is estimated that if the average power consumption of the United States was generalized to the entire world population, known oil reserves would be exhausted in just 19 days.
[3] A report from the International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (ISDR) United Nations agency, said that 2010 was the year when there were as many natural disasters in the past three decades, and the number of people who lost their lives for these losses amounted to 300 000 victims.
[4] For a decade, there was a debate that has been gaining ground in academic circles and civil society on the urgent need to replace the current growth pattern in effect for a model of 'decline' sustainable.

Border Security Deal's Ugly Twin Carries Major Energy and Environmental Implications for Canada

2011-12-21T10:27:00.002-06:00

By Nelle Maxey
The Common Sense Canadian
December 19, 2011

Harper's government officially announced in recent weeks a new Border Security deal with the US. However, little press space was given to the ugly twin of this deal - the Canada-United States Regulatory Cooperation Council (RCC) and their "Joint Action Plan". The RCC was set up to "streamline" regulations in four economic sectors engaged in cross-border trade. These sectors are Food &Agriculture, Transportation, Energy and Environment and Personal Care Products.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the press release for the RCC's Joint Action Plan. The word "Energy" was dropped from the Energy and Environment sector. That's right. Never mind that energy, including oil, natural gas and hydroelectricity, is arguably the most important sector of Canada-US trade in today's constrained energy supply world.

Mounting opposition to pipeline development on both sides of the border make the Energy word a bit loaded politically for Harper and especially Obama right now. (Visions of the protesters surrounding the White House and the BC First Nations announcement of opposition to the Northern Gateway pipeline float in my head as I write this). At any rate, it was conveniently dropped. The new Environment-only sector in the Action Plan concerns itself with fairly benign co-operation on air quality standards for emissions from light duty vehicles and trains and levels of particulate matter in air.

To understand what poison pills may await us in the not-talked-about-but-still-there Energy trade sector, a look at the RCC Consultation Report released in February of this year is required.

This document is important in that it contains the complete consultation list of regulatory harmonization items to be considered for implementation. That is the basis of Action Plan items, which is clear from the page 5 Action Plan statement: "Stakeholder input was key in developing this initial Joint Action Plan, which represents a first set of actions and initiatives that will begin the process of developing more closely aligned regulatory systems between the U.S. and Canada."

And also from the page 9 Statement: "...there were a number of suggested initiatives that were considered but not included in the initial Joint Action Plan. The RCC will continue to examine these suggestions as it develops areas for future work."

Of the eight suggested initiatives which the government chose to list in the Consultation Report's Energy and Environment section (Appendix B, page 22) consider the following three:

Streamline permissions for and construction of new cross-border energy infrastructure, e.g.,a single Canada–U.S. regime for permitting oil and gas pipelines.

Ensure common approaches to nuclear liability in the event of litigation arising from nuclear incidents.

Avoid policies that discriminate against particular fuel sources, such as low-carbon fuel standards (for types of crude oil) or renewable electricity standards (for large-scale hydro).

As is always the case, the public is the last to find out the government's plans, but it takes only a modicum of common sense to see that Harper's moving of the Environmental Assessment Process to the National Energy Board from the Ministry of Environment, the subsequently announced streamlining of the Environmental Assessment Process, and the budget cuts to the Ministry Environment resulting in fewer and fewer monitoring facilities and scientists to staff them or to write reports on environmental implications of resource extraction are all related to establishing a "single Canada–U.S. regime" for pipelines and other cross-border infrastructure.

In the wake of both the Fukushima disaster in Japan and the privatization of the Canada's nuclear industry, the limiting of liability in the wake of nuclear accidents is particularly chilling. One expects that like the US (which, for example, limits liability on the costs of oil spills to a ridiculously low amount in dollar terms), we can expect to see similar regulations in Canada regarding nuclear accidents.

And finally, neither Tar Sands oil nor hydroelectricity will be "discriminated" against in the future by regulations in either country. The term "Large-scale" hydro projects remains undefined in the document. But surely Site C Dam would qualify for non-discrimination and perhaps some of the larger ruin-of-the-river projects.

The RCC documents are all written with the outdated and disproven arguments of increased "customer choice" and "decreased customer cost", hand-in-hand with public safety and environmental protection enhancement. The public knows none of this is true. But Harper marches on, head down and in step with his corporate buddies, to the beat of the trickle-down economics drum, while global markets implode, citizens arise en masse and peak everything envelopes the world. No wonder he and Obama need to continue to build a police security state to enforce their policies on us.

Nelle Maxey is a grandmother who lives in the beautiful Slocan Valley in south-eastern BC. She believes it is her obligation as a citizen to concern herself with the policies and politics of government at the federal, provincial and local level.

World’s poor pay for Harper's policies

2011-12-19T22:40:00.001-06:00

By Linda McQuaig
TheStar.com
Dec 19 2011

In a review last week of the year’s best and worst, Rex Murphy offered up his choice for the most overrated politician of the year: Stephen Harper.

Speaking on the “At Issue” panel on CBC-TV’s The National, Murphy mused that the Prime Minister is not nearly as menacing a character as his enemies make him out to be: “He doesn’t have the power that they think he has. He doesn’t have the depth of animus against all the rest of the world that he’s painted as.”

Murphy, for all his posturing as an independent-minded contrarian, was delivering a message the governing Conservatives would dearly love to plant in the minds of Canadians: that Harper is not an extremist.

Rather, Murphy suggested, it’s Harper’s “enemies” — those who are “radically against him” — who are the extremists.

Since Harper’s “enemies” — arguably about 60 per cent of the Canadian public, judging by the popular vote in the last election — are given little airtime on The National these days, let’s at least take a moment here to consider their “radical” viewpoint.

We’re all familiar with Canada’s obstructionist role at international climate talks and our bulging collection of “Fossil of the Year” prizes, awarded in disdain by environmentalists. All this culminated in Ottawa’s actual withdrawal this month from Kyoto accord, the only remotely plausible worldwide effort underway for tackling climate change.

A fierce, longtime opponent of Kyoto, Harper has recently been peddling a new kind of climate denial. Teaming up with oilsands giant Suncor, the Harper government has been promoting “climate prosperity” — the notion that, in addition to the well-known negative impacts, there may be some benefits to climate change, and Canada should try to cash in.

This might be regarded as merely making the best of a bad situation — if we were merely passive victims of that bad situation, rather than one of the world’s leading contributors to it.

While distracting Canadians with this feel-good approach to the issue, the Harper team has wreaked havoc with the international process of trying to stop climate change, thereby virtually eliminating the slender prospect that the world might actually come together to rein in fossil fuel consumption.

What the Harper government is doing is disastrous for Canadians, but even more disastrous for those most directly under the heel of climate change — notably the one billion Africans who will be the first and hardest hit by climate change, according to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

So the Harper government, working arm-in-arm with some of the world’s least vulnerable people — international oil interests — has done its best to sabotage a process aimed at preventing the catastrophic climate impacts that particularly threaten the world’s most vulnerable people: food and water shortages, crop reductions, flooding and loss of land.

Such callous disregard for the plight of the globe’s most defenceless citizens — it’s not really a stretch to label this an “animus” toward the world — is distinctly out of line with Canada’s traditional approach as a leading nation working with other nations to advance international goals.

Veteran Canadian diplomat Carolyn McAskie argues that the Harper government has largely abandoned this kind of multilateralism and the UN, and instead focuses on advancing the government’s narrow short-term objectives.

“Compromise, coordination and consensus, Canadian values which gave us influence, are seen as contrary to a new aggressive Canadian posture,” she wrote in a paper for the McLeod Group, a new association of diplomatic and development professionals seeking to restore Canada’s leadership role.

McAskie notes that, in our earlier incarnation as an admired and skilful middle power, we truly did “punch above our weight.”

Sadly, we’re now using our considerable power to destroy any hope of heading off climate disaster. It turns out that we’re just as effective at undermining attempts to solve the world’s problems as we once were at attempting to find solutions.

Canada is still punching above its weight. But, under the animus of the Harper government, those punches are now low blows, landing on some of the most vulnerable people on the planet.

Is climate change the real ticking time bomb in North Korea?

2011-12-19T22:27:00.002-06:00

By John Parnell
RTCC
19 December 2011

Propaganda from North Korea is frequently mocked in the West. But in between stories about on “the warmongers” and “fascist crackdown”, the state-run news agency KCNA, has also run several pieces on the threat of climate change.

In 2002, KCNA said that: “The repeated natural disasters that hit the DPRK (North Korea) are attributable to the abnormal weather caused by global warming. The speed of warming in Korea at present is three times the average speed of global warming.” They didn’t clarify that last claim but did call for concerted action from all to combat the threat. It even ratified the Kyoto Protocol in 2005.

News of the death of Kim Jong-il was met with predictable televised hysteria on KCNA and equally inevitable media speculation on regional instability in the West. Attention will turn to guesses on how his successor, Kim Jong-un might lead the country through its numerous challenges, including that alarming rate of climate change.

The first hope its 25 million citizens might have for their new leader, may well be concerned with food rather than the nuclear programme or the latest spat with the South. According to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) the country has ordered only 325,000 tons of the 739,000 tons of imported cereals that is required to feed its population.

“This productivity gap represents a potential for the North to increase its farm output and eliminate chronic food shortages by adopting appropriate technology, inputs and measures,” says Kisan Gunjal, FAO economist and co-leader of its mission in North Korea.

Domestic production, though estimated to rise 8.5% this year, faces many challenges. Increased extreme weather events including typhoons and torrential rains have increased as ocean temperatures have risen.

Severe winters and mountainous terrain limit the area of land suitable for agriculture, and the length of the growing season.

From a food security perspective, North Korea has been in trouble throughout Kim Jong-il’s reign. A period of alternating droughts and severe flooding and the collapse of the Soviet Union left the country vulnerable and without its key trading partner to rely on. Three years of famine followed, which the country has barely escaped from since.

To maximise its agricultural output state-run farms have adopted intense farming practices. Despite this, similar land in South Korea produces 40% more food.

Climate change has already been linked to conflict in other parts of the world with pressure on grazing land in parts of Kenya cited often. So how great is the threat of climate change triggering upheaval in North Korea?

“Overall climate change is a driver of insecurity globally,” says Dr Jeffrey Mazo, managing editor of the journal Survival and Research Fellow for Environmental Security and Science Policy at the International Institute for Strategic Studies.

Earlier this year the IISS published a piece looking at the effect of record food prices on the Arab Spring. While acknowledging that these prices were largely the result of climate change, they would not in isolation have been enough to trigger the series of revolutions.

Instead, climate change’s role was as a threat multiplier, an often used phrase (particularly by the US military’s research into climate change) put into practice.

“The existing food stress and political upheaval in North Korea are enough on their own to drive insecurity. The increase in the chance of a bad winter does not represent a tipping point in North Korea in the same way that climate change could prove a game changer in more stable countries such as Indonesia,” says Mazo.

Hungry and angry

While foreign eyes are watching the country’s international relationships, it is this domestic shortfall that could trigger greater insecurity.

Aside from the fact that hungry citizens are not happy citizens, accepting foreign aid flies in the face of the nation’s Juche ideology, which is anchored on the notion of the country’s ability to be entirely self-sufficient.

China currently provides 45% of North Korea’s food supply as state aid. As the adverse effects of climate change continue to drive global food prices up, relying on the charity of others could prove a risky strategy.

This weekend, prior to news of Kim Jong-il’s death, the US was expected to announce a huge food-based aid package for North Korea as part of the six-party international talks designed to dismantle the Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons programme.

Those loyal to the Juche system after Kim Jong-il’s death, might just about be able to accept help from China to stave off famine, but assistance from the States might be too hard to swallow.

Socialism and Ecology

2011-12-18T00:51:00.000-06:00

Socialist Resistance
August 1, 2011

If you don’t like the message, shoot the messenger. That is the response of international capitalism to the threat of runaway global warming. For decades, the green movement, to its credit, has been warning about the threat to the world environment from polluting industries and consumerism. The destruction of the ozone layer due to the use of Chloro- Fluoro-Carbons in aerosol sprays and fridge coolants was identified almost too late for them to be banned. Years later, the effects of this pollutant are still felt in a big way over the north and south poles.

A far greater danger is that of uncontrollable global warming leading to abrupt climate change, all caused by the massive burning of fossil fuels. The likely results of this have been detailed elsewhere and are predicted to be far worse than the destruction of the ozone layer; drought, desertification, floods, melting of the ice caps and the Asian tundra, rising sea levels, inundation, famine, massive population migration and so on. Unless the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere can be reduced from 387 to 350 parts per million in a limited number of years, it may be too late to do anything about it. Even Prince Charles said (a year or two ago) that we had only four years to save the planet.

The message from the international scientific community has been overwhelming. The trends and causes are real and very dangerous. Yet the ideological and energy-company-funded climate change deniers first questioned the evidence, and when that failed, decided to rubbish the scientists themselves.

The ‘climate gate’ scandal provided the excuse for kicking the whole public discourse into the long grass. The scientists at the University of East Anglia had their emails hacked (sounds familiar?), and media outlets such as the Murdoch backed Fox News went into a feeding frenzy over alleged malpractice by the relevant scientists. This conveniently happened just before the Copenhagen summit on climate change in 2009, and this is where Obama, with the help of Ed Milliband, pulled the plug on the whole escalating scandal and effectively removed the issue from the headlines. The finger was pointed at China, but not at the main cause of the problem, the requirement for massive fossil burning to keep capitalist production and growth in the driving seat.

In the past, in the era of the Soviet Union, the phrase “better dead than red” was used. Now it seems that, without being spoken openly, the phrase “better dead than green” is the guiding principle. No matter that the enquiries about the activity of the accused scientists in ‘Climategate’ ended up deciding that the evidence for global warming was as strong as ever, the job of rubbishing had been done, and business could return to normal. Slow – moving technological fixes operating quietly in the background could do the job; the system did not need to be changed. The result is, of course, that Carbon Dioxide emissions are still rising, and not falling.

What a contrast to the frantic moves to save the banks after the crash of 2008! If the environment was treated with the same importance as the banks, it would have been saved a long time ago. But that is not a priority of capitalism. Once, again, we see that we will have to change the system if are to get what we want. The struggle to get rid of capitalism must go alongside the battle to avoid irreversible climate change. Once again, the need for a socialist society is justified.

One of the leading environmentalists in the UK, George Monbiot, came up with a cunning plan a year or two ago to stop global warming; it concerned what to do with fossil fuels, and his answer was? Leave them in the ground. Now, that may have been a bit over the top, for example many pharmaceuticals can be developed from oil, but he was demonstrating the urgency of the problem. He also linked the struggle to save the environment to the “C” word – capitalism, at one of the London climate change demonstrations. When so many other non-socialist ecologists have come to the same conclusion as the scientists, it is the job of socialists to make the link between the problem and the economic system we live under. We link the effect to the cause and then point out the remedy, a red-green remedy.

Eco-Socialism

It is clear that we cannot rely on the system to reform itself. Apart from the sustained political attack on the radical green movement, look at the lengths the state has gone to infiltrate fairly innocuous green activist groups and act as agents provocateurs. The system is not listening. Either it believes its own propaganda or is hopelessly over – confident about saving itself and the ruling classes that administer it. We cannot leave the struggle for a green future to them.

So, the struggle in the here and now for renewable energy production, for public transport to replace private and for a mass programme of green house building must go alongside our struggle for a socialist future. A relentless campaign against advertising-led consumerism, permanent unsustainable growth and polluting industries must be part of the socialist agenda. The details of how all this could be done and how it could reduce unemployment at the same time have been worked out very effectively in the pamphlet “One million Climate jobs”. (see http://www.campaigncc.org/greenjobs)

Nuclear Power

The Fukushima disaster has produced different reactions amongst environmentalists. There has, on one hand, been a powerful condemnation of the whole business; the nuclear industry is inherently unsafe, closely linked to the military and must be shut down. Nuclear power is not a substitute for fossil fuel burning and it is not a viable low-carbon alternative to renewable energy. This is probably the mainstream view. For example, see
http://www.internationalviewpoint.org/spip.php?article2027

On the other hand, George Monbiot has taken the opposite view. Despite the catastrophe, the level of harm done to humans and the environment has been relatively modest, certainly when you compare it to the coal industry, for example. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/mar/21/pro-nuclear-japan-fukushima

The least that can be said is that this powerful and potentially catastrophic source of energy cannot be left in the hands of the capitalists. For them, a reliable source of concentrated energy to feed their industry is as important as the military link. Safety and environmental protection are not at the top of their priorities. The nuclear industry must be fully nationalised and placed under democratic worker, community and social control. New builds must be opposed. Any money for research and investment must go into renewable energy sources instead. End the subsidy to the nuclear power industry.

Under socialism it is possible that a very safe, democratically controlled nuclear power system could form part of the energy production matrix, but in the opinion of this pamphlet, unlikely. We should be looking in different directions.

Cars

Cars are inefficient, oil-guzzling, polluting, congestion and accident causing, individualistic and anti-social. Their hour is up. It is time to move to integrated public transport, free at the point of use. Cars should be relegated to the margins, to be brought onto the roads only for specialist use, such as for the disabled and elderly. Electric cars are an improvement, but are still anti-social in that they will still ferry one or two people about in the main. Compared to a bus, tram or train, this is still highly inefficient.

Already, under capitalism, the problems have been realised and alternatives sought. In Hasselt (Belgium), in Zagreb and Newcastle (Australia), free public transport systems have been introduced. They have cut down congestion and proved viable. Such systems would become the norm under socialism. And once the roads were free of cars, they would become much safer for cyclists and for walkers. George Monbiot had some very novel ideas on how to do all of this in his book “Heat”.

Under socialism, there would be no need for this mega industry, persuading the population of the need to accumulate ever more goods, in order to realise the profits of industrial production. There would be no need for the cultural vandalism of constantly interrupting TV programmes with mindless appeals to buy this or that new junk product. There would be public information items, to be sure, but tastefully inserted at appropriate times. There would not be the pollution of the eye of vast advertising hoardings, or the visual sponsorship of sporting and cultural events. If we end the system of generalised commodity production and its attendant advertising industry, new resources would be released for socially useful activities and goods.

Change the System, not the Climate

In South America and other places, the struggle to save the environment is being led by the indigenous peoples of the forests. They live in pre-capitalist, maybe even pre-class societies, but they can teach us a lot about sustainable living, the value of living the simple life, the importance of preserving the environment from capitalist exploitation and vandalism. They plan what to do with the future of the next seven generations in mind, not the next seven weeks, months or years of your average capitalist. Their fight is our fight.

In the nineteenth century, Engels noted; “At every step we are reminded that we by no means rule over nature like a conqueror over a foreign people, like someone standing outside of nature.” On the other hand, “we have the advantage of all other creatures of being able to learn its laws and apply them correctly.” That is, we can organise society in step with nature’s limits.”

Marx wrote; “From the standpoint of a higher economic formation, the private property of particular individuals in the earth will appear just as absurd as the private property of one man in other men”. He was scathing of the capitalist economic notion that the air, rivers, seas and soil can be treated as a “free gift of nature” to business. “Even an entire society, a nation, or all simultaneously existing societies taken together, are not owners of the earth. They are simply its possessors, its beneficiaries, and have to bequeath it in an improved state to succeeding generations.”

The Indigenous of the Amazon, the Native North Americans and the Aborigines would have sympathy with these sentiments. So should we.

To bring the whole population of the Earth up to the standard of living of the most affluent and continue this capitalist drive for ever higher growth, we would need two or three Earths. For those that sign up to this absurd ideology, why not take a trip to Mars and get to work? For the rest of us, it is time for eco-socialism.

There is no alternative.

How To Save Our Great Lakes

2011-12-17T16:15:00.001-06:00

By Maude Barlow
HuffPost
December 14, 2011

There are huge and growing problems in the Great Lakes.

Water use is growing at a rate double that of the population, and we now know that by 2030, global demand will outstrip supply by 40 per cent. Lack of access to clean water is the greatest killer of children by far.

So we who live around the Great Lakes of North America have a very special responsibility to preserve and care for them in the light of the global reality now so clear.

While there have been some breakthroughs -- on PCBs, acid rain, and Lake Erie for example -- as well as many border treaties to protect air and water quality and fisheries, they are not enough to offset other damage, both existing and new.

Ongoing issues include climate change, over-extraction, non-point pollution, continued high levels of sewage discharge into the Lakes, the loss of wetlands and forests, and invasive species.

New issues include gas and oil exploration, including fracking and the export of bitumen from Canada's tar sands to 17 refineries on the U.S. side of the Great Lakes; new mining operations, including a vast copper and nickel ore deposit that runs from the tip of Lake Superior to Lake Ontario; and possible nuclear waste shipments on the Lakes.

So the question must be: why is the crisis growing?

With so many wonderful people, elected officials and environmental groups working hard to save and protect the Great Lakes, what is the problem?

There are competing visions of what the Lakes are for and who they serve. One vision -- the wrong one -- is winning.

Some see the Great Lakes as a watershed that gives us all life and livelihood and is a living ecosystem to be nurtured, protected and preserved for future generations. But too many others, including some governments, see the waters of the Great Lakes as a huge resource for our convenience, pleasure and profit.

From the building of the St. Lawrence Seaway, to the control of water levels in the Lakes in order to promote shipping and trade, we have predominantly viewed the Great Lakes as an industrial engine for regional growth and prosperity, rather than an endangered watershed.

Ontario has its "Open for Business Act" clearly aimed to use its abundant water as an economic incentive to locate business there.

Milwaukee City Council is promoting a project called WAVE -- Water Attracting Valued Employees -- to use the "comparative advantage" of Lake Michigan to attract water intensive industry from the South with special low water rates.

We also have the case of chronic under funding -- especially on the Canadian side -- and inconsistent enforcement of environmental laws and regulations.

What would happen if the citizens living around the Great Lakes decided to collectively protect them based on the very principles and practices that informed the First Peoples of the region, namely that the Lakes must be shared equitably and responsibly by all who live around them and protected for seven generations to come?

My answer: a new narrative for the Great Lakes to replace the current narrative that they serve predominantly as an industrial engine for growth and prosperity, a narrative I hope elected officials, the International Joint Commission (IJC), and ordinary people will embrace.

This new narrative would declare the Great Lakes to be a lived Commons to be shared, carefully managed, enjoyed by all, and protected by the Public Trust Doctrine.

The Great Lakes could be designated as a bioregion, understanding that while there are many political jurisdictions managing the basin, it is in fact one integrated watershed and must be governed as such.

A Great Lakes Basin Commons would respect and understand the fact that many make their livelihoods from the bounty of the Lakes and would not attempt to shut down industrial activity or food production per se.

But this new narrative would reject the view that the primary function of the Great Lakes is to promote the interests of big industry, big agribusiness and the powerful to the extent that they get preferential access and are often allowed to break environmental laws.

And it would embrace the notion that the Lakes must be carefully managed for the good of the entire community, and that all activity -- public and private -- would come under strict public oversight and accountability and operate within a mandate whose goals are the restoration and preservation of the waters of the basin and justice for all who live around it.

We need a Great Lakes Basin Commons Watershed Plan with basin-wide consistent laws, regulations and definitions to protect these waters as a human right and a public resource, and we need to empower local communities to have a much greater say in all decisions affecting their local watershed.

I understand it would require jurisdictional cooperation that many tell us cannot be done; but I argue that if our governments can cooperate for business-friendly trade and perimeter deals, then they can do it to save the Great Lakes of North America!

Hope in Resistance Conference

2011-12-16T22:50:00.000-06:00

The Council of Canadians and a number of Québec and First Nations peoples, student and labour groups came together for a major conference in Montréal October 21-22.

The conference explored how we can work together as civil society movements in Canada, Québec, and the First Nations to create positive alternatives to a system that makes profits more important than people and the planet.

People joined in a united Call to Action at the conclusion of the conference. The draft statement, in part, reads,

"We stand with each other, with the Indignez movements in Europe, and with the occupiers of Wall Street, Bay Street, Montreal, Vancouver and the thousands of others worldwide. We stand with our trade union sisters and brothers who are fighting to maintain worker rights won many years ago. We are inspired by the Arab Spring to demand real democracy from our leaders. We commit to working with Indigenous peoples to bring about a new society designed to serve our common goals and aspirations. We will strive to live better, to de-globalize, to think strategically and sustainably. We will stand and resist and hope. We will act for justice. We are already building a better world, which we see is possible. We invite you to join us."

Click HERE to read the full draft Call to Action statement.

Our heartfelt thanks to are extended to Alternatives, Eau Secours!, Association québécoise de lutte contre la pollution atmosphérique (AQLPA), and Médecins Quebecois pour la regime publique (MQRP) who joined us in organizing and hosting this event, as well as to CUPE•SCFP and CEP•SCEP for their generous sponsorship.

Civil Society, NGOs, and the Public Sphere

2011-12-16T05:31:00.001-06:00

By Emir Sader
MRzine
December 15, 2011

The great turning point in Marx's work is his discovery that class relations traverse the whole capitalist society. After working with categories he inherited from liberalism, such as the state and civil society, he made what he called an "anatomy of civil society" and therein encountered classes and class struggle.

In the last several decades, as democratic struggle gained weight again -- after being underestimated, generally speaking, by the Left -- the category of civil society reappeared. By its very nature, it is opposed to the state and displaces class relations. It is a return to classical liberalism, in parallel to the turn to liberalism on the economic front under the name of neoliberalism.

In the framework of this category, organizations of a distinct type came to take shelter, ranging from those closely tied to social movements and other forms of resistance to military dictatorship, to others that are very much ambiguous. This amalgamation is possible because the category of civil society lends itself to it. It means "what is not the state," including, under this broad umbrella, agribusiness associations and rural workers' associations, bank owners' associations and bank employees' associations, private school operators' associations and student associations -- even aside from other yet more problematic expressions of "civil society," like drug traffickers, militias, etc., all of whom belong to "civil society."

What all of them have in common is the lack of transparency: they proclaim themselves to be representatives of civil society, but they tend not to be transparent in elections of their leaders, origins of their funds, and forms of their decision-making. Suffice it to see how easy it is to found one or more NGOs and file applications to receive public funds or simply to cover up shady business deals.

Besides ambiguity -- not to mention bad faith -- the definition of "non-governmental" is itself a problem. This anti-government position easily joins neoliberal positions. It has no limits in relation to "partnerships" with major private corporations and their foundations, while defining its frontier limits against the state.

With the reappearance of liberalism came the powerful resurgence of its vision of democracy and the state. Democracy came to mean the limitation of and external control over actions of the state, which was said to be, by definition, the central enemy of democracy, whose constitutive elements were made out to be individuals congregated in civil society.

Then the question would be how to control the state by civil society, to guarantee democracy. The more state, the less democracy, which is how neoliberalism sells its theory of the minimal state. Limit the state, so that the market may assume centrality. In theory, the central role would be played by civil society, which, in reality, barely masks the market.

This negative conception of the state abandons the path of democratization of the state. It is a liberal conception, reactivated by the idea of control over the state by civil society -- represented by NGOs and other associations that seek to play the role of representing it.

The most advanced policy for democracy building in Brazil was participatory budgeting, which strengthened the public sphere from within the state itself, to the detriment of commercial interests. Democratic struggle is not external to the state but traverses it. Within the state, distinct, even contradictory, interests are represented, the same contradictory interests that cut across society.

Separating the two, in liberal fashion, misses this fundamental aspect of the reality: everything is traversed by social determinations. Civil society is a fiction, just as the state that is put in opposition to it -- all without class determinations in liberal theory.

To democratize is to decommodify, to affirm the public sphere to the detriment of the commercial sphere. To democratize is to strengthen the role of citizens to the detriment of the role of consumers. To democratize is to bring democratization into the very heart of the state.

Emir Sader is a Brazilian sociologist. The original article "Sociedade civil, ONGs e esfera pública" was published by Carta Maior on 20 November 2011. Translation by Yoshie Furuhashi.

Green capitalism: the god that failed

2011-12-16T04:54:00.000-06:00

By Richard Smith
Real World Economics Review #56

In rejecting the antigrowth approach of the first wave of environmentalists in the 1970s, pro-growth “green capitalism” theorists of the 1980s-90s like Paul Hawken, Lester Brown, and Francis Cairncross argued that green technology, green taxes, eco-conscious shopping and the like could “align” profit-seeking with environmental goals, even “invert many fundamentals” of business practice such that “restoring the environment and making money become one and the same process.”

This strategy has clearly failed. I claim first, that the project of sustainable capitalism was misconceived and doomed from the start because maximizing profit and saving the planet are inherently in conflict and cannot be systematically aligned even if, here and there, they might coincide for a moment. That’s because under capitalism, CEOs and corporate boards are not responsible to society, they’re responsible to private shareholders. CEOs can embrace environmentalism so long as this increases profits.

But saving the world requires that the pursuit of profits be systematically subordinated to ecological concerns: For example, the science says that to save the humans, we have to drastically cut fossil fuel consumption, even close down industries like coal. But no corporate board can sacrifice earnings to save the humans because to do so would be to risk shareholder flight or worse. I claim that profit-maximization is an iron rule of capitalism, a rule that trumps all else, and this sets the limits to ecological reform -- and not the other way around as green capitalism theorists supposed.

Secondly, I claim that contrary to green capitalism proponents, across the spectrum from resource extraction to manufacturing, the practical possibilities for “greening” and “dematerializing” production are severely limited. This means, I contend, that the only way to prevent overshoot and collapse is to enforce a massive economic contraction in the industrialized economies, retrenching production across a broad range of unnecessary, resource-hogging, wasteful and polluting industries, even virtually shutting down the worst.

Yet this option is foreclosed under capitalism because this is not socialism: no one is promising new jobs to unemployed coal miners, oil-drillers, automakers, airline pilots, chemists, plastic junk makers, and others whose jobs would be lost because their industries would have to be retrenched -- and unemployed workers don’t pay taxes. So CEOs, workers, and governments find that they all “need” to maximize growth, overconsumption, even pollution, to destroy their childrens’ tomorrows to hang onto their jobs today because, if they don’t, the system falls into crisis, or worse. So we’re all onboard the TGV of ravenous and ever-growing plunder and pollution. And as our locomotive races toward the cliff of ecological collapse, the only thoughts on the minds of our CEOS, capitalist economists, politicians and labor leaders is how to stoke the locomotive to get us there faster. Corporations aren’t necessarily evil. They just can’t help themselves. They’re doing what they’re supposed to do for the benefit of their owners. But this means that, so long as the global economy is based on capitalist private/corporate property and competitive production for market, we’re doomed to collective social suicide and no amount of tinkering with the market can brake the drive to global ecological collapse.

We can’t shop our way to sustainability because the problems we face cannot be solved by individual choices in the marketplace. They require collective democratic control over the economy to prioritize the needs of society and the environment. And they require national and international economic planning to re-organize the economy and redeploy labor and resources to these ends. I conclude, therefore, that if humanity is to save itself, we have no choice but to overthrow capitalism and replace it with a democratically-planned socialist economy.

Read the full paper HERE (pdf)

Amandla! For Eco-Socialism

2011-12-16T03:04:00.002-06:00

By Ashley Dawson
Social Text Journal
December 1, 2011

Today the Democratic Left Front, a new formation in South African politics, organized a conference on Ecosocialism.

The conference began with a youth delegation arriving on the wings of rousing anti-apartheid choral singing:

There was some difficulty getting the conference going because the singers kept their kinetic chants wheeling round. Makes sense. To sit down and listen is to give up a kind of agency, often to speakers who are older, wealthier, and whiter than they. Sitting here at the beginning of this program, I wonder to what extent the organizers have erred in not including more space for these young people in the conference. But perhaps there will be opportunity for dialogue of some kind during Q&A.

Michelle Maynard of the Pan-African Climate Justice Alliance began the day by talking about the links between human beings and all of the natural systems on the planet. She went on to contrast this with the reified view of the Earth promoted by the Enlightenment and the scientific revolution. Maynard then continued to talk about how this worldview underlies current attitudes towards the commodification of the planet.

Next up, Vishwas Satgar spoke about the need to have this conference in order to arm the comrades against neoliberalism. This kind of capitalism is about chaos, since it is driven by unstable financial speculation. What we've seen in past decades in global South and what we're seeing now in heartlands of capitalism today is global instability of neoliberalism. But capitalism is not surrendering. The current financial crash doesn't mean that capitalism is dead. In the end, the squeeze is on all of us. We have to pay the price of paying the debts of capitalism, just as nature gets squeezed. Other legs of systemic crisis: food crisis resulting from systemic control of food by capitalist corporations, leading to major hunger crises around world; resource peaks, including oil, and the scramble for what's left, as two most populous countries of the world - China and India - scramble for more scarce resources; climate change, and resulting political chaos, leading us into increasingly dangerous period politically; securitization of political life.

What's at the heart of all of this is inability of a civilization to reproduce itself. In this context, what are the ruling classes offering us? What are they putting on the table? They've been talking about addressing the climate crisis through markets. Clean development mechanisms, green markets, Kyoto Protocol, etc. - all these solutions embed the market as center piece. These are all master concepts of green neoliberalism today. All of these solutions are still married to juggernaut of growth and industrialization. But we're at the point where crisis is total. We can't fix the crisis through piecemeal solutions such as decarbonization using markets. We need a total solution. Marketization is also about competitive strategies: taking crisis and turning it into an opportunity for more accumulation. We know that commodification creates enclosures. Green economy does not address the deeper systemic crisis.

In response to this civilizational crisis, we need resistance. We've been living through upswing of resistance over past two decades. Chiapas, Egypt, Occupy Wall Street. But this resistance has to go further. It has to be civilizational resistance. We also need to transnationalize alternatives. The dominant view is that we're an irrational mob. But we have answers and alternatives, and we need to put them forward on transnational level. COP17 isn't going to solve the problem. The battle is in particular national contexts. We need to take the battle forward on this level.

Jacklyn Cock, Professor at University of Witwatersrand, then spoke about how capitalism is responding to the current crisis. Capitalism is responding by saying that it doesn't have to change. It can adapt through three key techniques: new technology, like carbon capture & storage and GMO crops, which have not been adequately tested; expanding markets, particularly through carbon trading; greenwashing.

Using time to make two key points. South African government policy is contradictory, and what links it all together is commitment to green capitalism. Government's recent white paper which pretends to be a green paper. It is based on expanding markets and commodification. We know about this in South Africa because of the history of commodification of water.

Pablo Solon, former Bolivian ambassador to the United Nations, spoke next. He began be talking about the distinction between living for more and living better. Bolivian environmentalists have emphasized the latter, because natural resources are limited. This is why we helped create the Declaration of the Rights of Earth. We have been treating the Earth as if it has no rights, the way we used to treat slaves. Today there is an apartheid against Nature. Need to reject the approach towards the commodification of nature that characterizes contemporary global elites.

Answering some of the questions raised during the teach-in last night, Solon emphasized the absolute need to take power in order to reverse the trend towards commodification of the environment.

This session of the conference ended with a series of heartfelt questions from members of the audience about how climate change is going to effect their health and their livelihoods as rural people.

Indigenous People: A Key to Environmental Rescue

2011-12-15T17:00:00.001-06:00

An interview with Clayton Thomas-Muller

Michael Welch

Canadian Dimension

December 15th 2011

Michael Welsh: Clayton Thomas-Muller, you’re on staff with the Indigenous Environment Network and a founder of Defenders of the Land. What distinguishes them from other Indigenous organizations?

Clayton Thomas-Muller: Defenders of the Land is a new initiative. It was created to provide a forum for the most radical landbased First Nations struggles here in this country. For the last three years we’ve been convening an annual gathering, hosting monthly conference calls, setting up a governance structure comprised of members of frontline First Nations communities that have been engaged directly with the state over land disputes, over asserting treaty rights, Aboriginal rights, over asserting land claims.

The goal has been to develop a grassroots-led base building strategy with our native people to really invigorate a young generation, to connect them with some veterans of the movement, to make some serious moves forward, and to provide an alternative, I think, to the current PTOs and NAOs. By “PTO” I mean Provincial and Territorial Aboriginal Organizations, and, of course, our National Aboriginal Organizations in Ottawa. Many of these organizations, it’s the feeling of a lot of our grassroots people, have become co-opted because of their arms-length relationship with the federal government or the provincial governments in the context of funding. Many people feel that they have become unable to address some of the most critical issues that we’re facing because of the potential for funding cuts and this sort of thing.

Now, the Indigenous Environmental Network, whom I work as their Tar Sands campaigner, has been around for about 20 years, and is an environmental justice network in the United States and more recently in Canada. In recent years, we’ve really taken our work all across the planet supporting Indigenous communities to protect the sacredness of Mother Earth from toxic contamination and corporate exploitation. We do this through grassroots-led strategies around base building. We engage in civil disobedience. Our flagship program is our Native Energy and Climate Program. We work with tribes, Alaska Native Nations and First Nations from the north slope of Alaska all the way to the Gulf Coast of Mexico, fighting against the fossil fuel regime, fighting against the false solutions that are being put on the table by the U.S. government and the Canadian government to try and address climate change, and fighting for climate and energy justice for our people.

Both organizations share a relationship. IEN, as a network, is supporting Defenders of the Land. Many of the groups that are involved in Defenders are also affiliates with the IEN network. The relationship continues to grow and deepen.

MW: Talk about the Tar Sands campaign in particular, about what they’ve been doing to frustrate Tar Sands development.

CTM:The Tar Sands campaign with IEN is part of our Native Energy and Climate Program. I’m one of five staffers spread out across the continent supporting frontline communities fighting against Big Oil. We started about four and a half years ago at the invitation of one of the families in Fort Chipewyan. We were able to visit Fort Chipewyan and get a sense of the immense impacts that downstream communities are facing as a result of living so near the proximity of the world’s largest construction project. Since then we’ve been directly engaged with Fort Chipewyan, as our primary relationship, but also with dozens of other tribal communities that are also impacted by this massive project. Initiating action camps, trainings, lobby trips, whether its to DC or to the Hill here in Canada in Ottawa, bringing community voices all the way up to the halls of the United Nations and the international climate negotiations to exert pressure on the Canadian government over its energy policy and the human rights impacts that that policy has had on local communities in terms of loss of food security, loss of access to traditional hunting and fishing grounds, and the cancer clusters that so many communities in northern Alberta are now having. Fort Chipewyan, for example, has over the last decade lost over 100 of its 1200 citizens to rare forms of cancer and auto-immune deficiencies which independent science commissioned by the community, has proven is directly linked to the Tar Sands, which of course industry and government have been investing millions of dollars in trying to deny. That work has continued to grow and expand and the international movement against the Tar Sands has really gained a lot of speed. I think that’s where Defenders of the Land comes in. There are members fromTar Sands-impacted communities, not just on the frontline of extraction but also from pipeline-impacted communities that are attached to the Tar Sands that are engaging with other communities that in some instances are fighting the same damn companies.

A Multi-Pronged Campaign

MW: Could you provide some examples of the campaign?

CTM: The campaign itself is actually quite sophisticated. It’s multi-pronged in design, and it has to be. The Tar Sands is the world’s biggest mobilization of workers for one project—77,000 workers over an expanse of land in the Athabasca region that’s roughly the size of England and Wales combined. Billions of dollars of capital have gone in already with more coming from all kinds of international markets, so we’ve had to really split up our resources in terms of supporting frontline communities with education strategies that are popular in design. We do a lot of action camps with communities to train up new spokespersons with different skill-shares. We do a lot of non-violent direct action training in communities so that communities can use non-violent direct action in their toolkit when they’re trying to punch holes in the mainstream media and get their voice heard.

We’ve had a lot of success in our financial campaign targeting European-based financial institutions, and financial institutions here in Canada as well, that are invested in the Tar Sands. We’ve been meeting with a lot of international investment firms who manage institutional shareholders like unions— some of the biggest unions on the planet, some of the biggest pension funds on the planet—who are big shareholders in European-based oil companies like BP and Shell, and France’s oil giant Total, and Norway’s Statoil, who all are operating in the Tar Sands. We’ve been really effective at raising the stakes in terms of the risks associated with operating in the Tar Sands and the risks that are posed by direct intervention by First Nations through Canada’s legal institutions or through other means like civil disobedience.

MW: Talk about addressing these international financial investors. What is it that tends to bring them to your viewpoint?

CTM: I think what banking institutions and the financial sector responds to the most is straight economics. What they’re concerned about is project delays, project stoppages, project cancellations. Part of what we’ve been talking to them about is, of course, impending climate policy, which will come down eventually in this country, which, of course, will set a price on carbon and drive up the cost of operating in the Tar Sands, because it’s the most carbon-intensive industry on the planet. The other thing we talk about is Canada’s rapidly changing legal landscape and the emergence of precedent-setting cases around the duty to consult with First Nations—the Haida Gwaii decision, the Delgamuukw decision, the Grassy Narrows decision that happened the other day. Every day we are gaining traction within Canada’s legal framework as First Nations peoples. Aboriginal rights is such a grey area, so one of the things that we’ve been trying to convey to the financial sector is that there are serious liabilities to investing in projects on disputed lands, which, of course, is the large majority of this country.

Whose EndGame?

MW: And that’s a particularly different emphasis than, say, your traditional urban-based environmentalist who says, “We’ve got to stop climate change!” Could you discuss the issue of Indigenous peoples forming those alliances with urban-based environmentalists who want solidarity with the Indigenous peoples? What are some of the challenges that are faced in these sorts of alliances?

CTM: There’s a lot of money being thrown at this issue, which is a good thing. We need more and more resources every day invested into fighting against this project. But one of the challenges that presents is that different conservation groups, different mainstream ENGOs have a different culture of organizing. I think in many instances a lot of these groups haven’t taken the time to truly understand what it means to work with the unique political and legal status that First Nations peoples have. They’re just trying to get the next big story, or stop a particular policy, but it’s not necessarily with an endgame of having First Nations peoples controlling their lands. It has to do with setting up big conservation zones like the Great Bear Rainforest, for example, which severely impacted and eroded the sovereignty of tribes in BC whose lands were turned, essentially, into one of the biggest conservation zones in the country. And now they’re stuck in a situation where, before, they had full control over their unceded territory, and now they’re in a co-management situation with not just industry and the provincial government of BC but also with conservation groups. You have these conflicting intense strategies and that’s what’s playing out in the Tar Sands as well. You have different groups with different agendas and everybody wants to say they work with First Nations, but not everybody understands what the endgame is for First Nations peoples. and how that’s probably, in many instances, at odds with the conservation agenda.

MW: What is the endgame for Indigenous Peoples?

CTM: Well, the endgame for Indigenous Peoples is that we don’t want to have to choose between our way of life and being able to get paid in this cash economy that we’re living in. Over half of First Nations peoples live in urban centres, and that’s not because cities provide such great opportunities. It’s because so many of our communities have been devastated by mega-development, whether it’s the Tar Sands, or hydro, or other forms of development like clear-cut logging. This has severely impeded our ability to continue to practice sustainable economies like we’ve done for thousands of years. In the Tar Sands, what I’ve heard from First Nations is that they want the projects to stop. They want the approvals to stop immediately. They want to be able to continue to hunt, fish and trap. They want their children to have access to the beautiful bounty of that particular part of Mother Earth and the current set-up is quickly eliminating that access. For many of the First Nations in the region their lands are already completely devastated. Fort McKay Cree Nation is a good example. They’re a little sea of green forest surrounded by a wasteland of moonscape in the heart of the Tar Sands mining zone.

MW: At the same time, people, not unreasonably, want to be able to make a good living. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about the pushback, which you pointed to earlier. One of the ways, I imagine, that the people who want to preserve and expand the Tar Sands try to bring Indigenous People on is to try to flash the dollars in front of Indigenous Peoples, Indigenous groups, to say that this is best for their people. Here’s a way of creating jobs and so forth. How do those sorts of potential schisms get dealt with Tar Sands or mega-development in general. You know, people gotta eat. People gotta put food on the table for their kids. And so they’re presented with hard choices. For us at IEN it’s about the system that is being pushed by this Harper majority government, formerly minority, to elevate Tar Sands as the primary backbone of the Canadian economy. In a time of climate change, in a time when science has proven climate change is caused by man-made CO2, here we have our government doing everything it can to stall a post-Kyoto climate treaty, doing everything it can to market dirty oil sands fuel to Europe, to the United States, to Asian markets, and to really stifle the voice of local communities who are dying as a result of this policy. For us, it’s about working with our people to identify alternative economic solutions while addressing the real crisis that’s happening right now in terms of the human health impacts and ecological impacts that the Tar Sands has. For us, the case in BC is a great one to look at. Look at the 81 First Nations, and hundreds of municipalities, businesses, political individuals, institutions that have stood up against the Enbridge Northern Gateway pipeline. I mean, Enbridge has put over a billion dollars on the table to try and buy those First Nations out, but they’re saying no and they’re holding the line because in northern BC, there’s 54 000 workers working in the salmon industry alone. That doesn’t include all the eco-tourism.

On Ezra Levant

MW: There’s this movement called “ethical oil” that’s come up lately largely inspired, it seems, by this book by Ezra Levant. Could you talk about the attempt to brand Tar Sands oil as ethical oil?

CTM: Yeah, of course. Ezra is a nasty, nasty piece of work and I don’t give him the time of day. He’s done everything he can to try and attempt character assassinations of key individuals from First Nations in northern Alberta. He’s just a sensationalist appealing to the hatred in a very ignorant rightwing community here in this country.

Look, it comes down to geo-political education. People always talk about the fact that Canada went into Afghanistan, but we didn’t go into Iraq. What a great decision by Jean Chrétien, blah blah blah. Well, the reality of it is Tar Sands fuel has been powering the Iraq war. There’s already a couple hundred thousand barrels per day that goes into the Tacoma, Washington strategic naval petroleum refinery through the Houston-based Kinder Morgan pipeline infrastructure that goes diagonally across the province of British Columbia, which is powering up war ships and sending warplanes to the Persian Gulf. This has been happening for over a decade.

If you look at the trajectory of the destabilization of the Middle East by US foreign policy, you’ll see that the violence in the Middle East, and the profitability of the Canadian Tar Sands follow a path that is almost identical. It’s the same thing with the health situation playing out in frontline communities in terms of cancer rates going up. All of these trajectories have followed the same path. Canada, being the biggest energy provider to the United States of America, is perpetuating a lot of the violence that they’re seeing in the Middle East. It’s a very distorted analysis that Ezra has put on the table.

The other issue that we have to take a look at that Ezra Levant and all those in that circle don’t talk about is that hundreds of thousands of people every year now are being killed by violent unpredictable weather that’s associated with a rapidly destabilizing climate. Tar Sands oil is the most heavy, carbon intensive fuel on the planet. Canada is ground zero for this stuff. There are twelve countries that have heavy oil deposits that are engaged with the private-sector oil corporations in Canada for technology for profit deals, for transfer deals that want to develop their Tar Sands deposits. What this represents is the hardwiring of the dirtiest, most carbon-intensive fuel on the planet into the planetary economy for the next hundred years by Big Oil. For Ezra Levant or any of these other fools to get up and say that the Canadian Tar Sands are more ethical, I mean, these are genocidal maniacs.

A 60,000-year track record on ecology

MW: You pointed out that we do need to change our whole system, and we need to wean ourselves off of carbon-based fuels and carbon-based energies, but in the mean time, people have to eat, they have to get gas in their cars…

CTM When we look at Canada as a country and see the immense work that we have in front of us to change our infrastructure to be zero-carbon, to introduce technologies that will help us lessen our contribution to global climate change, the economic stimulus attached to that, the job creation attached to that is incredible. If you look at the amount of workers it takes to maintain, say, photovoltaics, sun-farms, wind-farms, versus the amount of workers it takes to maintain a pipeline, it’s 12:1. The green economy, as a transitionary economy to something that’s even better, and more sustainable down the road, is the way out. It presents us with incredible opportunities for each individual citizen to be able to have good work, to be working in unison with the sacred circle of life, to design our local communities’ sustainable economies in a biological, bio-regional way.

MW: I just wanted to also ask about, historically, the role of Indigenous Peoples in these environmental movements and how far back they go. Could you maybe point out what it is about the Indigenous component in particular that may be key to an ultimate victory in this struggle?

CTM: We are the key. Bottom-line, I don’t want to come off un-humble or anything, but Indigenous peoples have a 60,000-year track record on ecology. We know how to take care of this land. We understand our sacred relationship with our plant and animal relatives. Green jobs? Shit, we had green jobs for millennia. I think, eventually, the big, mainstream environmental organizations are going to figure it out. I talked about the legal landscape—we will continue as First Nations and Aboriginal People to acquire more precedent-setting legal victories in the courts of Canada, asserting our rights, and big NGOs, conservation groups, industry, government, I’m putting them all on notice. They’d better get with the frickin’ program and understand that yes, technology and western solutions play a key role in addressing the complex global issues we face today like climate change, like the end of the era of cheap energy, like the loss of natural capital to sustain this economic paradigm we live in called capitalism, but it’s western solutions coupled with Indigenous traditional ecological knowledge that’s going to take us to that future that we all deserve. Until people deal with their race, class, and all these different dysfunctions that keep our movement fractured, until they get over that stuff, they’re going to get left in the dust. Because a lot of people are getting over it and we’re seeing here in North America, and globally, with this global fight against these austerity measures, because the banks have all ripped us off, we’re seeing that social movement rise … and climate change will be one of the catalyst issues within that social movement that will drive a popular uprising. And we will see Indigenous Peoples play a key role in having that vision for that economic paradigm of the future that will allow us once again as human beings to understand our role in that sacred circle of life.

Why Harper’s Kyoto Pullout Is a Death Sentence for Many of World’s Most Vulnerable

2011-12-13T21:16:00.002-06:00

By Mike Hudema
Green Peace Canada
December 13, 2011

For a vulnerable country like Tuvalu, its an act of sabotage on our future.
—Ian Fry, Tuvalu lead negotiator

Yesterday I commented that the Harper government pulling out of Kyoto is essentially a death sentence on vulnerable populations all over the world. Many people online and in press comments said that such a comment is "sensationalist" and "over the top". I wanted to write a short post to show why it's not and why, unfortunately, it's far too accurate.

In order to do this, I will use a simple analogy so all can understand why the Harper government pulling out of Kyoto is not just another political decision, but one with devastating and deadly consequences.

The analogy:

Let's say our climate is a giant room. This collective room started to get pretty messy so we got together and decided to clean it up. A bunch of us made commitments and set deadlines. As time passed, some people started cleaning, but they noticed that we (Canada) weren't cleaning at all. In fact we were making things messier. As the deadline for having our room cleaned approached some countries had met their cleaning commitments, others had far surpassed them. But Canada, rather than trying to do our share, just decided to pull out of their commitments all together to avoid any consequences or reporting on where our room cleaning was at.

Now, what do we think our (Canada's) attitude will do when we want to get more people to help clean? Canada has just demonstrated that you can make commitments, not meet them, reneg at anytime and all you have to do is find a clever way to spin it in the media. Do you think that our actions will get the people who have already done a lot of cleaning to do more or less? Do you think our actions will get more people to join the cleaning effort or less to people to sign-up? I think less.

Now some people will partially agree and say, "Well likely less. But Canada is not signing on because other people aren't signing on and we need everyone to clean the room". I agree with the statement that everyone needs to do their part but what's the best way to get the room clean and to get other people to participate?

The Harper approach is to not meet our current commitments to clean the room, to pull out of our agreements, to point fingers at others who are dirtying the room, and to say we aren't going to commit to cleaning until they do.

The other approach is to meet our current cleaning commitments, to be one of the first people to make more commitments, and to say to other people dirtying the room, 'we need you to make commitments too, but don't worry, we will help you do it.'

Which approach do you think will get the room cleaned faster? Which will get more people to the table to make commitments? The Harper approach or the other approach? Which do you feel shows the type of leadership we need and expect?

To me that answer is pretty easy. The Harper government has made a mockery of the commitment process and made it less likely that people will make the commitments we need to get our global room clean. Their current attitude of finger pointing and being one of the last ones to the table does not create an atmosphere of cooperation. It does not inspire change. It does not encourage trust that everyone will do their part. It does not encourage other to come to the table. Their position instead will just lead to longer delays and perhaps a collapse of the process all together.

Instead of just a messy room, as in our analogy, the longer the global cleaning process takes the greater the number of people that will die or be displaced becomes. This is a dangerous mess to be in.

Harper's actions will cost many lives all over the world. The UN estimates that there are already more than 27 million climate refugees. Every year tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people, die due to climate change. Every year that action is delayed we condemn millions of people to displacement and tens of thousands more to death. Inaction does in fact kill.

It's time to change course.

Don't let Harper get away with this death sentence. We must organize our own communities to make the necessary commitments that the Harper government won't make nationally. We must also make this decision hurt. So write letters, sign petitions, organize locally, provincially and nationally to make the reductions and investments we need, get out into the streets, into the boardrooms and let's ensure that this awful decision becomes the turning point our world needs it to be.

Canada condemned at home and abroad for pulling out of Kyoto treaty

2011-12-13T13:52:00.006-06:00

China calls Canada's decision 'preposterous', while Greenpeace says the country is protecting polluters instead of people

Damian Carrington and Adam Vaughan

guardian.co.uk
13 December 2011

Canada has been condemned at home and abroad as "irresponsible" and "reckless" for pulling out of the Kyoto climate treaty, just a day after committing to a future legally binding deal at a major UN climate summit.

"I regret Canada's withdrawal and am surprised over its timing," said the UN climate chief Christiana Figueres. "Canada has a moral obligation to itself and future generations to lead in the global effort." China, which agreed for the first time to legal limits on its emissions at the summit in Durban, denounced Canada's decision as "preposterous" in its state media and called it "an excuse to shirk responsibility" in tackling global warming.

The domestic reaction was equally fierce with the announcement by Canada's environment minister, Peter Kent, described as "shameful" and "a total abdication of our responsibilities". Under the Kyoto protocol, Canada was committed to cutting its greenhouse gas emissions by 6% by 2012, compared to its 1990 levels. But its actual emissions have risen by over 30%, making failure inevitable. Canada's inaction was blamed by some on its desire to protect the lucrative but highly polluting exploitation of tar sands, the second biggest oil reserve in the world.

Kent claimed that Canada would have to pay billions to meet its Kyoto target in 2012: "To meet the targets would be the equivalent of … the transfer of CAN$14bn [£8.7bn] from Canadian taxpayers to other countries – the equivalent of $1,600 from every Canadian family – with no impact on emissions or the environment." He was referring to the cost of buying carbon emission permits (AAUs) from other countries to compensate for Canada's huge overshooting of its target.

But China dismissed Kent's claim that emission cuts damage economies as a "fallacy". A UK government spokesman said: "It's true that taking action to reduce emissions requires substantial financial investment but it is far less expensive than the cost of inaction." Canada's decision was "deeply regrettable", he added.

Figueres said other Kyoto protocol members such as Australia and the EU had been investing in a green and sustainable future and Canada's rising carbon emissions put it in a "weaker position" to demand carbon limits on fast-growing countries such as China and India. In Durban all countries, including China, India, Canada and the US, agreed for the first time to be legally bound to cut carbon, although Canada was given the "colossal fossil" award by campaign groups in Durban for its "reckless arrogance".

Warren Mabee, director of the Queen's Institute for Energy and Environmental Policy in Ontario, said: "Our economy is becoming ever more dependent upon the riches of the oil sands and other energy products. Ultimately, either we'll run out [of these fossil fuels] or the world will decide that it doesn't want them any more. The latter option is much more likely."

The Canadian government has been lobbying hard against international restrictions on its tar sands fuels, which result in much greater carbon emissions than conventional crudes. The Guardian revealed in November that the UK government had given Canada secret diplomatic help to block proposed European penalties on tar sands.

"The Harper government is more concerned about protecting polluters than people," said Greenpeace Canada's Mike Hudema. Pulling out of Kyoto was "a total abdication of our responsibilities", said Hannah McKinnon of Climate Action Network Canada. "Canada gave its word to the world and Canada broke its word," said the columnist John Ibbitson in Canada's Globe and Mail. "No one should feel anything other than ashamed."

Japan, which like Canada had said it would not sign up to an extension of the Kyoto protocol, still condemned Canada's withdrawal from the existing protocol as "disappointing". China's foreign ministry spokesman Liu Weimin said: "It flies in the face of the efforts of the international community for Canada to leave the Kyoto protocol at a time when the Durban meeting made important progress by securing a second phase of commitment."

An official in India said Canada's decision could jeopardise any gains made at the Durban meeting. The climate official Ian Fry, from the tiny South Pacific island nation of Tuvalu, one of those most at risk from rising sea levels, said: "It's an act of sabotage on our future, a reckless and totally irresponsible act."

Canada is within its rights to withdraw from the Kyoto protocol, according to the lawyer Josh Roberts, at the environmental law organisation ClientEarth. He pointed out that article 27 of the protocol allows any country to withdraw three years after the protocol is in force, a deadline that has passed.

Roberts said the get-out clause was fairly standard in international treaties, but was scarcely ever used. "Countries can trigger these release clauses, but it happens very rarely. For example, Japan, Norway and Iceland all left the International Whaling Commission's treaty, but such moves are rare."

In short, Robert said: "The Kyoto protocol has very few teeth beyond international diplomatic censure." But the UK's secretary of state for energy and climate change, Chris Huhne, said: "They are still bound by what was agreed in Durban. They are still part of working towards a legal outcome in 2015."

Capitalism and the Accumulation of Catastrophe

2011-12-12T13:45:00.001-06:00

By John Bellamy Foster
Monthly Review
December 2011

Over the next few decades we are facing the possibility, indeed the probability, of global catastrophe on a level unprecedented in human history. The message of science is clear. As James Hansen, the foremost climate scientist in the United States, has warned, this may be “our last chance to save humanity.” In order to understand the full nature of this threat and how it needs to be addressed, it is essential to get a historical perspective on how we got where we are, and how this is related to the current socioeconomic system, namely capitalism.

Fundamental to the ecological critique of capitalism, I believe, is what world-historian William McNeill called the law of “the conservation of catastrophe.” For McNeill, who applied his “law” to environmental crisis in particular, “catastrophe is the underside of the human condition—a price we pay for being able to alter natural balances and to transform the face of the earth through collective effort and the use of tools.” The better we become at altering and supposedly controlling nature, he wrote, the more vulnerable human society becomes to catastrophes that “recur perpetually on an ever-increasing scale as our skills and knowledge grow.” The potential for catastrophe is thus not only conserved, but it can be said to be cumulative, and reappears in an evermore colossal form in response to our growing transformation of the world around us.

In the age of climate change and other global planetary threats McNeill’s thesis on the conservation of catastrophe deserves close consideration. Rather than treating it as a universal aspect of the human condition, however, this dynamic needs to be understood in historically specific terms, focusing on the tendency toward the conservation of catastrophe under historical capitalism. The issue then becomes one of understanding how the exploitation of nature under the regime of capital has led over time to the accumulation of catastrophe. As Marx explained, it is necessary, in any critique of capitalism, to understand not only the enormous productive force generated by capital, but also “the negative, i.e. destructive side” of its interaction with the environment, “from the point of view of natural science.”

Read more HERE.

A discussion on the term "ecosocialism"

2011-12-12T02:18:00.001-06:00

Alliance Voices
December 2011

In the online newsletter of the Socialist Alliance in Australia, Adam Baker raised an issue of the concept and ideology of "ecosocialism", a term the Alliance has been adopting. Ian Angus from Canada defended the use of "ecosocialism" as it has been developed in the Belem Ecosocialist Declaration. These two articles are linked below as a contribution to the ongoing discussion on ecosocialism. - NYC

Socialism or Ecosocialism?

By Adam Baker, Brisbane branch, Socialist Alliance

If one happens to look up the Socialist Alliance on Wikipedia, one will find several entries under the tag of ideology. According to Wikipedia, the ideology of the Socialist Alliance includes "socialism", "anti-captialism", "far left", "ecosocialism" and "environmentalism". I certainly have no objection to the the first three, and the last one. But ecosocialism? How did ecosocialism come to form a part of our ideology?
Read more HERE.

Ian Angus on the term "ecosocialism

Thank you for calling my attention to Adam Baker’s recent article in Alliance Voices. I’ve written the following notes to correct some of his misunderstandings. You have my permission to share them with Socialist Alliance members.

Read more HERE.

‘Eco’socialism: it’s like ‘democratic’ socialism

By Zane Alcorn, Newcastle

There is an interesting thread in the Alliance Voices blog leading into the 2012 conference regarding ecosocialism.

Comrades Sam Bullock and Adam Baker have advanced an argument for the Socialist Alliance to amend some of our public documents or whatever to say that we are an ecosocialist organisation would amount to some sort of watering down or weakening of our politics.I don’t agree with Sam and Adam - and will proceed to outline why - but I think it is good that they have made their views on this question known.
Read more HERE.

Playing With Fire

2011-12-12T01:54:00.001-06:00

Obama’s Risky Oil Threat to China

By Michael T. Klare
TomDispatch.com
December 6, 2011

When it comes to China policy, is the Obama administration leaping from the frying pan directly into the fire? In an attempt to turn the page on two disastrous wars in the Greater Middle East, it may have just launched a new Cold War in Asia -- once again, viewing oil as the key to global supremacy.

The new policy was signaled by President Obama himself on November 17th in an address to the Australian Parliament in which he laid out an audacious -- and extremely dangerous -- geopolitical vision. Instead of focusing on the Greater Middle East, as has been the case for the last decade, the United States will now concentrate its power in Asia and the Pacific. “My guidance is clear,” he declared in Canberra. “As we plan and budget for the future, we will allocate the resources necessary to maintain our strong military presence in this region.” While administration officials insist that this new policy is not aimed specifically at China, the implication is clear enough: from now on, the primary focus of American military strategy will not be counterterrorism, but the containment of that economically booming land -- at whatever risk or cost.

The Planet’s New Center of Gravity

The new emphasis on Asia and the containment of China is necessary, top officials insist, because the Asia-Pacific region now constitutes the “center of gravity” of world economic activity. While the United States was bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan, the argument goes, China had the leeway to expand its influence in the region. For the first time since the end of World War II, Washington is no longer the dominant economic actor there. If the United States is to retain its title as the world’s paramount power, it must, this thinking goes, restore its primacy in the region and roll back Chinese influence. In the coming decades, no foreign policy task will, it is claimed, be more important than this.

In line with its new strategy, the administration has undertaken a number of moves intended to bolster American power in Asia, and so put China on the defensive. These include a decision to deploy an initial 250 U.S. Marines -- someday to be upped to 2,500 -- to an Australian air base in Darwin on that country’s north coast, and the adoption on November 18th of “the Manila Declaration,” a pledge of closer U.S. military ties with the Philippines.

At the same time, the White House announced the sale of 24 F-16 fighter jets to Indonesia and a visit by Hillary Clinton to isolated Burma, long a Chinese ally -- the first there by a secretary of state in 56 years. Clinton has also spoken of increased diplomatic and military ties with Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam -- all countries surrounding China or overlooking key trade routes that China relies on for importing raw materials and exporting manufactured goods.

As portrayed by administration officials, such moves are intended to maximize America’s advantages in the diplomatic and military realm at a time when China dominates the economic realm regionally. In a recent article in Foreign Policy magazine, Clinton revealingly suggested that an economically weakened United States can no longer hope to prevail in multiple regions simultaneously. It must choose its battlefields carefully and deploy its limited assets -- most of them of a military nature -- to maximum advantage. Given Asia’s strategic centrality to global power, this means concentrating resources there.

“Over the last 10 years,” she writes, “we have allocated immense resources to [Iraq and Afghanistan]. In the next 10 years, we need to be smart and systematic about where we invest time and energy, so that we put ourselves in the best position to sustain our leadership [and] secure our interests... One of the most important tasks of American statecraft over the next decade will therefore be to lock in a substantially increased investment -- diplomatic, economic, strategic, and otherwise -- in the Asia-Pacific region.”

Such thinking, with its distinctly military focus, appears dangerously provocative. The steps announced entail an increased military presence in waters bordering China and enhanced military ties with that country’s neighbors -- moves certain to arouse alarm in Beijing and strengthen the hand of those in the ruling circle (especially in the Chinese military leadership) who favor a more activist, militarized response to U.S. incursions. Whatever forms that takes, one thing is certain: the leadership of the globe’s number two economic power is not going to let itself appear weak and indecisive in the face of an American buildup on the periphery of its country. This, in turn, means that we may be sowing the seeds of a new Cold War in Asia in 2011.

The U.S. military buildup and the potential for a powerful Chinese counter-thrust have already been the subject of discussion in the American and Asian press. But one crucial dimension of this incipient struggle has received no attention at all: the degree to which Washington’s sudden moves have been dictated by a fresh analysis of the global energy equation, revealing (as the Obama administration sees it) increased vulnerabilities for the Chinese side and new advantages for Washington.

The New Energy Equation

For decades, the United States has been heavily dependent on imported oil, much of it obtained from the Middle East and Africa, while China was largely self-sufficient in oil output. In 2001, the United States consumed 19.6 million barrels of oil per day, while producing only nine million barrels itself. The dependency on foreign suppliers for that 10.6 million-barrel shortfall proved a source of enormous concern for Washington policymakers. They responded by forging ever closer, more militarized ties with Middle Eastern oil producers and going to war on occasion to ensure the safety of U.S. supply lines.

In 2001, China, on the other hand, consumed only five million barrels per day and so, with a domestic output of 3.3 million barrels, needed to import only 1.7 million barrels. Those cold, hard numbers made its leadership far less concerned about the reliability of the country’s major overseas providers -- and so it did not need to duplicate the same sort of foreign policy entanglements that Washington had long been involved in.

Now, so the Obama administration has concluded, the tables are beginning to turn. As a result of China’s booming economy and the emergence of a sizeable and growing middle class (many of whom have already bought their first cars), the country’s oil consumption is exploding. Running at about 7.8 million barrels per day in 2008, it will, according to recent projections by the U.S. Department of Energy, reach 13.6 million barrels in 2020, and 16.9 million in 2035. Domestic oil production, on the other hand, is expected to grow from 4.0 million barrels per day in 2008 to 5.3 million in 2035. Not surprisingly, then, Chinese imports are expected to skyrocket from 3.8 million barrels per day in 2008 to a projected 11.6 million in 2035 -- at which time they will exceed those of the United States.

The U.S., meanwhile, can look forward to an improved energy situation. Thanks to increased production in “tough oil” areas of the United States, including the Arctic seas off Alaska, the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico, and shale formations in Montana, North Dakota, and Texas, future imports are expected to decline, even as energy consumption rises. In addition, more oil is likely to be available from the Western Hemisphere rather than the Middle East or Africa. Again, this will be thanks to the exploitation of yet more “tough oil” areas, including the Athabasca tar sands of Canada, Brazilian oil fields in the deep Atlantic, and increasingly pacified energy-rich regions of previously war-torn Colombia. According to the Department of Energy, combined production in the United States, Canada, and Brazil is expected to climb by 10.6 million barrels per day between 2009 and 2035 -- an enormous jump, considering that most areas of the world are expecting declining output.

Whose Sea Lanes Are These Anyway?

From a geopolitical perspective, all this seems to confer a genuine advantage on the United States, even as China becomes ever more vulnerable to the vagaries of events in, or along, the sea lanes to distant lands. It means Washington will be able to contemplate a gradual loosening of its military and political ties to the Middle Eastern oil states that have dominated its foreign policy for so long and have led to those costly, devastating wars.

Indeed, as President Obama said in Canberra, the U.S. is now in a position to begin to refocus its military capabilities elsewhere. “After a decade in which we fought two wars that cost us dearly,” he declared, “the United States is turning our attention to the vast potential of the Asia-Pacific region.”

For China, all this spells potential strategic impairment. Although some of China’s imported oil will travel overland through pipelines from Kazakhstan and Russia, the great majority of it will still come by tanker from the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America over sea lanes policed by the U.S. Navy. Indeed, almost every tanker bringing oil to China travels across the South China Sea, a body of water the Obama administration is now seeking to place under effective naval control.

By securing naval dominance of the South China Sea and adjacent waters, the Obama administration evidently aims to acquire the twenty-first century energy equivalent of twentieth-century nuclear blackmail. Push us too far, the policy implies, and we’ll bring your economy to its knees by blocking your flow of vital energy supplies. Of course, nothing like this will ever be said in public, but it is inconceivable that senior administration officials are not thinking along just these lines, and there is ample evidence that the Chinese are deeply worried about the risk -- as indicated, for example, by their frantic efforts to build staggeringly expensive pipelines across the entire expanse of Asia to the Caspian Sea basin.

As the underlying nature of the new Obama strategic blueprint becomes clearer, there can be no question that the Chinese leadership will, in response, take steps to ensure the safety of China’s energy lifelines. Some of these moves will undoubtedly be economic and diplomatic, including, for example, efforts to court regional players like Vietnam and Indonesia as well as major oil suppliers like Angola, Nigeria, and Saudi Arabia. Make no mistake, however: others will be of a military nature. A significant buildup of the Chinese navy -- still small and backward when compared to the fleets of the United States and its principal allies -- would seem all but inevitable. Likewise, closer military ties between China and Russia, as well as with the Central Asian member states of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan), are assured.

In addition, Washington could now be sparking the beginnings of a genuine Cold-War-style arms race in Asia, which neither country can, in the long run, afford. All of this is likely to lead to greater tension and a heightened risk of inadvertent escalation arising out of future incidents involving U.S., Chinese, and allied vessels -- like the one that occurred in March 2009 when a flotilla of Chinese naval vessels surrounded a U.S. anti-submarine warfare surveillance ship, the Impeccable, and almost precipitated a shooting incident. As more warships circulate through these waters in an increasingly provocative fashion, the risk that such an incident will result in something far more explosive can only grow.

Nor will the potential risks and costs of such a military-first policy aimed at China be restricted to Asia. In the drive to promote greater U.S. self-sufficiency in energy output, the Obama administration is giving its approval to production techniques -- Arctic drilling, deep-offshore drilling, and hydraulic fracturing -- that are guaranteed to lead to further Deepwater Horizon-style environmental catastrophe at home. Greater reliance on Canadian tar sands, the “dirtiest” of energies, will result in increased greenhouse gas emissions and a multitude of other environmental hazards, while deep Atlantic oil production off the Brazilian coast and elsewhere has its own set of grim dangers.

All of this ensures that, environmentally, militarily, and economically, we will find ourselves in a more, not less, perilous world. The desire to turn away from disastrous land wars in the Greater Middle East to deal with key issues now simmering in Asia is understandable, but choosing a strategy that puts such an emphasis on military dominance and provocation is bound to provoke a response in kind. It is hardly a prudent path to head down, nor will it, in the long run, advance America’s interests at a time when global economic cooperation is crucial. Sacrificing the environment to achieve greater energy independence makes no more sense.

A new Cold War in Asia and a hemispheric energy policy that could endanger the planet: it’s a fatal brew that should be reconsidered before the slide toward confrontation and environmental disaster becomes irreversible. You don’t have to be a seer to know that this is not the definition of good statesmanship, but of the march of folly.

Michael T. Klare is a professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College, a TomDispatch regular, and the author, most recently, of Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet. A documentary movie version of his previous book, Blood and Oil, is available from the Media Education Foundation.

Trade Unions, Crisis and Climate Change

2011-12-11T16:11:00.003-06:00

By George Mavrikos
Gen. Sec., WFTU
December 4, 2011
Durban, S. A.

Dear comrades of the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA):

It is a great honor and joy for WFTU being here today with our comrades from South Africa and representatives of the international trade union scene. Our joy is even greater because we participate in an initiative of NUMSA which is a historic, militant, class-oriented organization.

We salute the struggles of NUMSA, which are important not only for the workers of the metalworking sector in your country but also from the wider region.

NUMSA is one of the three organizations that are members of WFTU in South Africa. This year, WFTU celebrated 66 years of class struggle for the interests of the working class worldwide. Another historic event that took place in Athens, Greece this year was the 16th World Trade Union Congress in which more than 828 trade unionists from 101 countries of the world participated.

The Situation Nowadays

Over the last fifty years the environment is receiving increasing pressure from the way the productive forces “develop” in the conditions of the imperialist new order. Moreover, the deep crisis of the capitalist system at the economic, social, cultural and environmental level worsens even more the situation today.

The consequences are more and more intense for the working class, the farmers, the poor and middle strata of the city – in other words - the majority of the planet’s inhabitants whether they belong in the developed or the developing countries.

On the one hand the number of workers who participate in the wealth-producing process is increasing. On the other hand, the number of exploiters who accumulate in their hands the means of production and appropriate the produced wealth is decreasing, as they seek to increase their wealth only for themselves.

The hunt for super-profits by the transnational monopolies causes severe disasters to the planet, condemns the one third of the planet to starve and to live in miserable conditions: lack of protection against natural disasters, global warming, reduction of the productive ozone shield, depletion of natural resources, destruction of forests, desertification, genetically modified organisms, nuclear and toxic waste, dangerous nutritional dependence on transnational monopolies, air pollution, lack of access to clear water.

The Labour Environment

The labour environment continues to be a cause of diseases and death for a big number of working people every year. According to ILO data, more than 1 million working people every year lose their lives because of the unacceptable working conditions. According to the same source, more than 160 million of working people suffer every year from occupational diseases. The generalities [of the ILO slogan] for “decent work” do not stop deaths. Decent work in general -- and as loosely as it is used -- doesn’t mean anything. For WFTU, decent work is stable and full-time work, a good salary, a good pension, social insurance, health and safety measures in the workplaces, and strict punishment of employers.

The Greenhouse Effect

Scientists are sounding the alarm for the rise of temperature that will cause the ice melt at both poles, the sinking of coastal cities and natural disasters. The pollution trade increases severely the threats for the Third World.

Forest Destruction

According to official data, every year, about 200 million acres of tropical forests are being destroyed. It is estimated that byl 2025 large tropical forests in Central and South America and in Asia will be completely destroyed.

Lack of Water

It is common knowledge that millions of people all over the world, amongst them 400 million children, are struggling for their lives without access to clean drinking water. The commercialization of water generates misery and deaths.

Genetically Modified Products

The monopolies and the multinationals from USA and Europe are accelerating and widening the growing and trading of genetically modified products despite the declarations of scientists on the dangers lurking for human lives in the animal and plant environment.

Biodiversity

According to announcements made during the International Conference of the International Union of Environment more than 7000 species of fauna and 8000 species of flora have become extinct.

Imperialist War

A worse result of the imperialist order is the imperialist invasions, wars, and the civil conflicts whose impact will burden the lives and the health condition of many future generations.

During its invasion in Iraq in 1991, in the Gulf War, the USA used 300 tones of depleted uranium missiles and in the 2003 second imperialist invasion in the country the use of depleted uranium reached 1000 tons.

Depleted uranium is the most severe environmental problem that the NATO bombing inherited at Kosovo, Serbia and Bosnia in 1999.

Measurements taken by international foundations, like the UN and other organizations, found that the inhabitants had been exposed to an amount dangerous enough to cause cancer and leukemia. The UN scientists named this phenomenon “the Balkan Syndrome”.

The invasion in Afghanistan in 2001 left the country deserted and the ecosystem destroyed, the environment polluted and the production of opium had ejected in such levels of production that have reached the yearly production of 8.300 in 2007 while the production before the invasion was 180 tones.

In Libya, the NATO bombing with hundreds of Tomahawk missiles was a disaster not only in human lives but also for the ecosystem of the country and the Mediterranean Sea. It resulted in the creation of a “toxic dust” that caused damage in the human organism, carcinogenesis and disorders of the nervous system.

But also, with respect to the rest of Africa, the list of provoked civil wars is endless: Congo, Rwanda, Sudan, Chad with corresponding impact in the people’s lives.

The murderous Israeli air raids against Palestine and Lebanon with the pollution of the water resources and the destruction of the fauna and flora, and at the same time, the embargo of the USA and EU against Cuba continuing now for 51 years, bring us to the following question: What does the environment mean for capital and its political representatives?

It is nothing more than a source of profits and the plunder of the planet’s natural resources.

Who Is to Blame? What Are the Causes?

It is not the fault of human beings, in general, neither their labour and their knowledge nor their scientific and technological achievements who are to blame for the greenhouse effect and the holes in the ozone layer. Humanity in general is not to blame for the immense disaster of the natural environment, the continuous downgrading of the urban environment, the intensifying expansion of the slums, and the intensifying impact of the weather phenomena in burden of the poor popular strata, nor for the lack of clean water and healthy food, nor for the destruction of cultural monuments and the diseases that kill dozens of millions of people every year.

On the contrary, it is the nature of the capitalist system that is to blame, since it generates, reproduces and worsens those problems, with the continuous chase for bigger profit and the ensuring of the most powerful geostrategic position that will provide it. This is the framework of the quarrels between the imperialist centers in the relevant international conferences, such as the one in Copenhagen. Their disputes reflect the intensification of their contradictions for the control of the markets, which is expressed in the determination of the goals as well, the mechanisms of control and the distribution of the funding for the challenge of climate change.

The capitalist system, which is in decay, is also the background for the wars and imperialist invasions that destroy not only the environment but the international cultural heritage and thousands of lives as well. It is the background also for the huge ecological disasters of a technological nature, like the one at the Gulf of Mexico by the monopoly of BP, the recent nuclear accident in Fukushima, Japan, such as the houses of the poor in Turkey that were demolished by the earthquake or the houses of the poor that were drowned by the floods in Asia and Central America. This is why the protection of the environment cannot be confronted in a manner independent of the class mature of the development path followed by each society.

The working class, the popular strata realize this more, year after year, since they gain their own experience for the role these disorienting slogans about the “joint responsibility of all” and for “the people over profit” play. The same as the “voluntary” but highly paid activity of the accredited international and national “Non Governmental Organizations”.

Proposals

The working people cannot be trapped in the slogans for “green economy” which actually means “green business” and new fields of profitability for the monopolies.

Our proposals are:

Immediate measures to be taken for the health and security in the work places.- The obligation of the developed countries for a generous financial aid towards the developing countries and the transfer of useful technology related to the climate change.

The protection of the traditional agricultural production of the indigenous peoples and rural communities and the total respect over their rights.

The proposition to the UN for the adoption of the “Declaration of the Rights of the Mother Earth” which would include our own approaches as well (mainly for the causes of the climate change), policy terms and conditions for its confrontation.

The reexamining of the causes of the climate change to reconfirm that they are related (we say originated) to the capitalist system and the maximizing of its profit, the commercialization of the nature and the exploitation of man-by-man.

The opposition against the production and the use of genetically modified organisms, biofuels and the abuse of pesticides, herbicides, fertilizers etc.

The rejection of the perception of “adapting to the climate change” which means a resignation towards the consequences that were caused by the greenhouse gas emissions of the developed countries.

Policies and measures for the energy saving.

Substantial reduction of the energy losses and the waste.

Improvement of the energy efficiency of thermal plants.

Improvement of the quality of the available fossil fuels.

Designed and rational development of the renewable energy sources with respect to the environment which has nothing to do with the delivering of the energy-producing fields to the private sector.

Growing of the forests and other acres of green, protection of the seas, the lakes and the rivers.

Measures for the protection against the earthquakes and the floods

We believe that imperialism, capital, the monopolies and the governments that serve them do not play without an opponent. They have to deal with the working class, the poor and middle-class peasants, the self-employed, the petty business owners, the labour intelligencia in the developed and developing countries, the vital interests of whom are identical with the need for a harmonic symbiosis between man and nature.

We are all, people of labour and toil; we are the ones who produce the wealth of the world, who realize daily that not only our working place put the planet itself is closely combined with our lives and with the lives of our children and our descendants. It is the place we work in, where we create, we rest, we dream, from where draw power for more achievements.

In this world, the working class, especially the forces of WFTU, we consider as an important tool in our hands, the great historic conquest of our last century, the socialist way of production so that the land, the forests, the coasts, the mineral wealth, the ports, the airports can become social ownership.

The centralized planning of the economy - having in its center the total welfare of the working people- the social ownership of the means of production, the planning of the use of land which belongs to the whole society, the promotion of research and the selection of the best technology according to the long-term and constant combined satisfaction of the people’s needs, these are the only stable bases for a harmonic symbiosis of man and nature, for their common progress and development.

And all of those combined with the elimination of wars, the cultural development, the cultivation of solidarity amongst the people of the planet, highlight from the prospect of the protection of the environment and the saving of our planet, the Mother Earth, not only the timeliness but also the historic necessity for another path of development, for socialism.

This is the target for which we call all the working people in common action, in order to build a better world, a fair world, a world for us and our children without the barbarity of the capitalist system.

Durban, South Africa
December 4, 2011

Canadian churches, climate change and Durban

2011-12-11T15:37:00.003-06:00

By Dennis Gruending
Pulpit and Politics
December 11, 2011

I have at times been critical of Canadian faith communities for failing to make the environment a moral priority. But a good number of religious leaders in Canada and elsewhere, weighed in for the climate talks in Durban, South Africa. I will get to Canadians in a moment but will start with the fireworks that arose from an advertisement in the Globe and Mail newspaper on November 30.

Life and death issue

The ad was signed by a group of people, including Desmond Tutu, the 80-year-old Anglican Archbishop Emeritus and Nobel Peace Laureate. The ad praised Canada for having imposed sanctions against the apartheid regime in South Africa in the 1980s, but then it called into question this country’s current stance on preventing climate change, referred to as “a life and death issue” for Africans.

The ad went on to discuss Canadian energy policy. “By dramatically increasing Canada’s global warming pollution, tar sands mining and drilling makes the problem worse and exposes millions of Africans to more devastating drought and famine today and in the years to come…We call on Canada to change course…to support international action to reduce global warming pollution.”

Shut your trap

The advertisement generated a torrent of exaggerated invective from some of the usual suspects – including CBC Television’s Rex Murphy. The National Post newspaper said, “Archbishop Desmond Tutu should shut his trap when it comes to the oilsands.” The newspaper later removed that sentence — but not before the boorish comment was widely read and re-posted by many news organizations and NGOs.

Peter Kent, Canada’s environment minister, accused Archbishop Tutu of “making unfounded criticisms of our petroleum industry.” Kent, who went to Durban, had the unenviable task of trying to justify Canada’s flawed policy on climate change.

Science of climate change

In June 1988 a NASA scientist named James Hansen testified before Congress in the U.S., saying that the planet was heating up because we were burning too much fossil fuel and emitting carbon dioxide as a waste product. More than 20 years along, we are experiencing the escalating results of human-induced warming: all-time high temperatures in most countries; melting of the ice cap in Greenland and elsewhere; wildfires and drought in locations as widely dispersed as Russia and Australia; mega-floods in Pakistan, Brazil, Sri Lanka, the Philippines and South Africa; beetle infestations that have decimated Canada’s boreal forests. Expert international panels are warning of much worse to come unless we take action.

The Kyoto Protocol in 1997 set binding targets on developed nations to reduce emissions. In Canada, the Chretien government signed the protocol and promised to reduce carbon emissions to six per cent below their 1990 levels by 2012. The Liberals lost power in 2006 but their Kyoto plan would not have met the promised target.

“Socialist scheme”

In opposition, the Conservatives were staunch climate change deniers and Stephen Harper even called Kyoto a “socialist scheme”. Denial has become intellectually untenable but once in power the Conservatives have done everything possible to discredit Kyoto and to ensure that Canada makes no binding commitments on carbon emissions. There is a reason for this, which is, bathed in self-interest. The Conservatives, along with their oil industry backers, are committed to rapid development of the oil sands. But that has created a level of carbon emissions that makes the Kyoto targets impossible to achieve.

Peter Kent said at Durban, and before, that Kyoto is “ineffective and unfair” because it calls on developed countries to make binding commitments to emission reductions, while developing countries, including China and India, were asked to make only voluntary commitments. China called Kent’s bluff on the last day of the Durban Conference, signalling that it would consider a binding target if European Union and developed nations, including Canada, agreed to extend their Kyoto commitments. Kent refused and indicated that Canada will, in fact, pull out of the protocol.

Sowing discord

Joseph Heath, a University of Toronto professor, recently described Canada’s strategy at talks in Durban, and before that in Copenhagen and Cancun. He writes, “it has become clear that so long as we have a federal government whose primary base of power is in the Alberta oil patch, our central objective will be to sow discord, create enmity, introduce unfriendly amendments, dilute the wording of agreements and otherwise do dirty work for the Americans. We are the new Saudi Arabia.”

Interfaith call

Enter the Canadian churches. There has in the past been talk by some among them about climate change, but little concerted action. Others avoided the issue entirely. But there was an historic meeting in Ottawa in October 2011, when about 30 faith communities met and discussed the urgent need for ecological justice — especially regarding the climate change crisis. This was the culmination of a laborious effort to pull together disparate faith groups around an overrding issue, one that they describe in moral and religious terms.

They crafted the Canadian Interfaith Call for Leadership and Action on Climate Change and went public with it in advance of the Durban Conference. They wrote: “Our faith traditions and sacred texts call upon us all – individuals, civil society, businesses, industry, and governments – to consider the spiritual dimensions of the crisis of ocean and climate change; to take stock of our collective behaviour; to transform cultures of consumerism and waste into cultures of sustainability; and to respect the balance between economic activity and environmental stewardship.”

Three demands

It was signed by leaders representing most of Canada’s Christian churches, as well as the Association of Progessive Muslims, the Federation of Hindu Temples, and the Anishnabe First Nation. The Interfaith Call made three demands of Parliament:

sign and implement a binding international treaty replacing the Kyoto Protocol that commits nations to reduce carbon emissions and sets a target to ensure that average temperatures stay below a two degree Celsius increase from pre-industrial levels

commit to national carbon emission targets and a national renewable energy policy designed to achieve sustainability

help to design a Green Climate Fund under United Nations governance, and contribute public funds to assist the poorest and most affected countries to adapt to and mitigate the effects of climate change.

Five assets

What can faith groups bring to the debate and will it matter? No one can yet answer the second question. But Gary Gardiner of the Worldwatch Institute has written that faith communities bring at least five assets to the effort of building a sustainable world: the capacity to shape worldviews; moral authority; a base of adherents; material resources; and a capacity for community building.

Noted American enviromentalist Bill McKibben adds that faith groups are among the only institutions remaining in society that can mount a challenge to the dominant culture, particularly as it relates to environmental responsibility.

The Future Will Be Ecosocialist – Because Without Ecosocialism There Will Be No Future

2011-12-11T00:36:00.003-06:00

By Joel Kovel
Ecosocialist Horizons
November 27th, 2011

Socialism was originally seen as victory in a struggle for justice. The proletarians, concluded the Communist Manifesto, “have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. WORKING MEN[sic] OF ALL COUNTRIES UNITE!”

All this remains true. Working women and men continue to suffer exploitation, in the workplace and throughout a society ruled by capitalism’s money-power. Structural unemployment, along with increasing divisions of wealth and poverty, the curse of indebtedness and the militarism of the capitalist state–all this, and more, continues to afflict the people. Now as in 1848, workers need a revolutionary socialist transformation. They need to unite, and to again quote the Manifesto, achieve “an association in which the free development of each is the condition of the free development of all.”

But the world we have to win is profoundly changed from the world of 1848. It is a world not simply to be won, but also to be saved from a terrible affliction. A day of reckoning has arrived far beyond anything humanity has ever experienced, though it has been building for centuries, indeed, from the beginnings of humanity’s time on earth. For we are the animal who became human by producing. Production is about the transforming of nature—the real physical world that is our legacy and matrix—into the objects we use for our lives.

Transforming nature means changing nature; and changes may be harmful as well as beneficial as they build up over historical time. Today, the harm wrought by human production has reached intolerable proportions. Our generation has inherited a world both transformed and deformed, to a degree that raises the question of whether humanity can continue to produce the means of its own survival. We see this taking shape in the menaces of climate change, massive species extinctions, pollution on a scale never before encountered, and more—all signs that humanity has so de-stabilized nature and our relation to it as to raise the real question of whether Homo sapiens, a species that has triumphed over nature to build the mighty civilization that now rules over the earth, has also prepared the ground for its own extinction.

The ecological crisis and capital accumulation

De-stabilization of the natural foundation of society is the supreme question for our age, and because collective survival is at stake, the greatest challenge ever faced by humanity. Because it involves relationships between ourselves and nature, and because the study of relationships between living creatures and their natural environment is named ecology, we can say that what we are going through is an ecological crisis. But whether its meaning is properly understood is another story. Unhappily, despite a vast amount of scientific investigation into the individual disasters that manifest the ecological crisis, there is very little awareness of its causes and real character, or even that it is an ecological crisis, between humanity as part of nature and nature itself. Instead, the dominant opinion, from all points of the political compass from left to right, sees this crisis under the heading of “environmentalism,” which is to say, as something between ourselves and the external things of nature.

Environmental problems appear as a great set of discrete troubles, itemized like a huge shopping list. The movement that attempts to deal with “the environment” also becomes listed among other worthy causes, like jobs, health care, and the rights of sexual minorities. Environmental problems are accordingly dealt with by regulations, legislation, and policy changes under the watchful eye of a host of NGOs dealing with one aspect of the disruption in nature or another. These petition large bureaucracies like the UN carbon regulation system or the EPA. Typically environmentalism seeks technical fixes or personal lifestyle changes, such as recycling and buying “green” products.

There is nothing wrong with environmentalism, except that it completely ignores the root of the ecological crisis by focusing on external symptoms and not the underlying disease. This is as effective in mending the ecological crisis as treating cancer with aspirin for the pain and baths for the discomfort. In other words, the prevailing approach fails to recognize that what is happening is the sign of a profound disorder. Environmentalism cannot ask what can be wrong with a society that so ravages the earth, but simply attempts to tidy up the mess in a piecemeal and fundamentally doomed fashion. Of course, each and every ecological threat must be vigorously met on its own terms. But we need to see the whole of things as well. We cannot put nature on a list, even at the head of a list. Nature is the entirety of the universe. We are a part of nature, and our society reflects whether we are at home in nature or estranged from it. Failure to understand this on the deepest level and to make necessary changes in our relationship to nature puts everything at risk, including, most poignantly, the lives of our children and grandchildren and all future generations.

If the choices embedded in our society lead to ruin and death, then the obligation is to remake society from the ground up in the service of life. And if this be read as a demand for revolution, so be it! But a revolution of what kind?

Look at the society that rules the earth and its guiding inner dynamic, the production of capital. However capitalism may be dressed up as the society of democracy, free markets, or progress, its first and foremost priority is economic Growth, the eternal expansion of the economic product across society, converted into monetary units. The best word for this compulsion is accumulation. The accumulation of capital is the supreme value of capitalists, and all elements of capitalist society—from control over resources, to labor relations, to fiscal and tax policy, to culture and propaganda, to the workings of academia, to war and imperialism, and to be sure, policy towards the natural world–converge to gratify this hunger. Any diminution or even slowing of the rate of accumulation, is perceived as a deep threat provoking the most ruthless, violent, countermeasures to restore order. As Marx vividly wrote in Capital: “Accumulate! Accumulate! That is Moses and the Prophets.” In other words, he saw a religious impulse at work—Satanic in form, no doubt—driving the capitalist system to convert the entire earth, its oceans and atmosphere, everything under the sun, into commodities, to be sold on the market, the profits converted to capital.

Here we arrive at the obvious, straightforward, yet profound explanation of the ecological crisis and its life-threatening character. For though the universe itself may be infinite and have no boundaries, the corner of the universe inhabited by life is quite finite and thoroughly bounded: that, after all, is what ecology as a scientific study is about. So it follows that a system built on un-boundedness and endless growth is going to destroy the ecosystems upon which it depends for energy and other resources, and is also going to destroy the human ecosystems, or societies, that have emerged from nature to inhabit the earth. That this brutally obvious truth is not widely accepted is partly the result of how hard it is to face up to a harsh reality, but chiefly the result of the titanic effort waged by capitalist ideology to deny its responsibility for the ruin of planet earth.

Seen in this light, capitalism is truly pathological; it may well be called a kind of metastasizing cancer: a disease that demands radical treatment, which in this context, means revolutionary change. And since socialism is—or should be–the movement toward the supersession of capitalism, the fact that the present ecological crisis is basically driven by the accumulation of capital puts socialism in a radically different position from that to which we have become accustomed. In this light we see the need to radicalize socialism and turn it to ecological ends alongside, indeed, as part of, the provision of justice to working people.

This means, however, that socialism itself must be transformed and produced anew. It can no longer be the reformist social democracy that has betrayed its promise by seeking to perfect instead of going beyond capitalism. Socialism today must be invigorated by the awareness that its goal is a post-capitalist society serving the well-being of humanity and nature alike. Most critically, because accumulation is the mainspring of capitalist society, the new socialism must respect the notion of limits and see production itself in ecological terms. The test of a post-capitalist society is whether it can move from the generalized production of commodities to the production of flourishing, integral ecosystems. In doing so, socialism will become ecosocialism.

First ecosocialist lessons

Nobody is under the illusion that we are anywhere near these goals. But that does not mean that we lack a mapping of the route toward ecosocialism. Let me give an outline of this, and conclude this brief communication with a sense of how these can be applied to a case of the greatest urgency: overcoming the menace of climate change.

ecosocialism is still socialism. What was stated at the beginning of this article remains. The basic principle of ecosocialism is that of socialism itself: freely associated labor. It is safe to say that application of this is the key to everything else. For ecosocialism, the restoration of nature does not begin with manipulating the external environment, but with the liberation of human beings and faith that women and men in full possession of their powers will use the appropriate technology and make the correct decisions as to how to organize their social relations and self governance in such a way that the integrity of nature is restored and preserved. The principle applies equally to the caring for nature and the provision of a good life for humanity. A common root is the fact that to the degree we are in possession of our creative powers, so also do we move beyond the addictive and false way of being indoctrinated into us from cradle to grave by capitalism and its ideology of consumerism. We break loose from the capitalist rat-race, of trying to fill our inner emptiness with commodities, a motif absolutely necessary to the reproduction of the ecological crisis. Instead, we recognize ourselves as natural creatures, and recognize nature itself, thus positioning ourselves for nature’s restoration. This also applies to the so-called “population problem,” since freely associated human beings, women in particular, will have no trouble at all in regulating their numbers. In sum, we would say that ecosocialism is that form of society animated by freely associated labor and guided by an ethic of ecological integrity such as free human beings would freely choose.

we free ourselves in collective struggle, the meaning of which for ecosocialism is primarily “Commoning.” Commons refers to the original communism of “First Peoples”; and also to the absence of patriarchy and class society among them. The word denotes collectively owned units of production. From the other side, the rise of class society and patriarchy, all the way to the appearance of capitalism and right through to the present day, is a matter of “enclosing” the Commons, which includes separating people from control over their productive activity, thereby alienating them from nature and their own powers. Commoning can be as basic as making a community garden or day-care center. And it extends all the way to building intentional communities, organized democratically, and by extension, to a global society. We see ecosocialism from a twofold aspect, in terms of communities of resistance to capital and the capitalist state, and as communities of production outside of capitalist hierarchical relations between the owners of the means of production and the “wage slaves” who feed the capital-monster. Traditional labor organizing can come under this heading, insofar as it does not reproduce bureaucratic hierarchies; or, from another standpoint, to the degree that it builds authentic “unions” and “solidarity,” both terms drawn from the language of ecology as well as the history of class struggle. The wave of “occupations” washing over the United States as this is being written is very much an example of Commoning along ecosocialist lines, however scattered and reformist many of their immediate demands may seem in this early stage of development. Though the term itself is not applied, the structure is ecosocialist , arising out of the fundamental human drive toward collective control over a Commonly held space, both in terms of resistance—as by disrupting the established governmental and corporate ways; and production—as in providing the means of one’s own subsistence while doing so.

time and space are to be reclaimed through ecosocialist prefiguration. Keeping this term in mind is essential in navigating the great distance between where we are and what we need to become. Seizing a kind of Commons next to Wall Street is both symbolic of immediate demands for economic justice and prefigurative of liberated zones of ecosocialist production through freely associated labor. Our sustainable and worthwhile future will be a network of Commonal zones, beginning small but spreading and connecting across the artificial boundaries set up by class society and capital. Thus ecosocialism is transnational, global in scope, and above all, visionary; and each local moment of Commoning will contain the germ of this imagining. Prefiguration means the emerging of the vision necessary to imagine a world beyond the death-dealing society of capital. We need to see the coming-to-be of the new society in the scattered campgrounds of occupied zones within the capitalist order. Without vision, the people perish, as the saying goes. And with vision—and organizing to match—a new and better world can be won.

Postscript: An ecosocialism beyond climate change.

Nothing stands more for the horrors induced by capital-driven ecological crisis than the specter of climate change. There is no space here for detailing this menace, which, while not identical with the ecological crisis as a whole, suffices to sum up its deadly mechanisms and is full of lessons for how these are to be surmounted. Let me put the matter with extreme brevity to draw out some essentials and the important lessons to be derived from them.

We stand on a kind of crumbling precipice whose “geology” is given by growing atmospheric CO2 loaded by our capitalist-industrial, accumulation-compelled system. The precipice is both a matter of harm already done, and, if successful action is not taken, far worse harm to come from positive feedback loops that will effectively exceed human capacity to contain them, dooming us, perhaps by the end of the century, perhaps sooner, to downfall via catastrophic climate events, rising seas, and associated nightmares like famine and pandemic diseases.

Two configurations are now assembling to do battle over the fate of this future. One is that of capital and the capitalist state: the ancien regime. It is addicted to growth, rapacious for resources, and seeks to finagle its way out of the crisis by an utterly bankrupt system of commodifying nature and trading pollution credits; that is, it seeks more paths of accumulation while continuing its resource extraction, and the future be damned.

The other is ecosocialist in concept and prefigurative in structure. It sets forth from multiple points of resistance, notably combining North and South by bringing together a coalition of ecosocialists, radical climate activists and specialists in renewable energy; these are increasingly working with indigenous folk whose lives are directly threatened by enclosures and ever-more violent methods of hydrocarbon extraction from places as varied as the Gulf of Mexico (deep offshore drilling), Northern Alberta (tar sands extraction), the Niger Delta and Peruvian Ecuadorian rainforests (rapacious oil-drilling), West Virginia (mountaintop removal for coal), and rural New York and Pennsylvania (hydrofracking for natural gas). The list is quite partial, but the scope is global and inherently ecosocialist, by involving Commoning, global resistance, and prefigurative efforts to think the unthinkable: a world actually beyond hydrocarbon-based industrialization, that is, one where the future is really envisioned and the visionary is made real as a mode of production liberated from the compulsion to accumulate and loyal to the ecocentric respect for limit.

The best science tells us that this is the only path of survivability. But the best science cannot be implemented within existing capitalism. It will take freely associated labor, motivated by an ecocentric ethic and organized on a vast scale, to effect these changes—in terms of resistance to the given carbon system and forcing through its alternative; and also in terms of actually building the alternative, a kind of Solar/Wind-based energy economy, including the effort to actually bring down the level of atmospheric CO2 from 395ppm to 345ppm.

Unthinkable, right? Wrong: it is only unthinkable to minds chained to the ruinous and suicidal capital system. Quite possible though fantastically challenging, otherwise—especially if we consider that such a path, once free from bondage to accumulation, will be able to solve the problems of structural unemployment that haunt capitalist society. Imagine the creative possibilities inherent in an ecosocialist energy pathway. Then think, and choose whether to stay with the present system, or to step forth into a renewed world.

Climate Action Network Canada responds to outcome of UN climate talks in Durban

2011-12-10T22:38:00.002-06:00

Climate Action Network Canada
December 11, 2011

(Durban, South Africa) Following an extra day of negotiations, the UN climate change talks in Durban, South Africa have finished. Hannah McKinnon, Campaigns Director of Climate Action Network Canada has responded as follows:

“The most important thing to understand out of Durban is that countries have not yet succeeded in moving the world away from a dangerous trajectory towards well above two degrees of global warming. These UN climate talks are only as strong as the political will that drives them – or drags them. In Durban countries have kept the political space alive, but without a serious ramping up of ambition and action from developed countries, the deal we need will remain elusive and the climate will continue to move from crises to catastrophe.

The Kyoto Protocol has survived in large part because of the positive momentum created by an alliance of the European Union, small island states and the least developed countries. Countries have also agreed on the Green Climate Fund, but critical work still must be done to ensure it is not an empty shell.

The Canadian Government has been the poster child of inaction at these talks, and although they no longer have the global credibility to have a meaningful impact here, they have been constantly singled out as a laggard and even a pariah in these negotiations.

Now more than ever we must create a coalition of the willing in Canada between people, cities and provinces that understand the urgent need for action. The moral imperative for action will not wait for political leaders to finally show leadership – and so we must fill that space with inspiring and meaningful action from the ground up.”

COP17 Update

2011-12-10T21:08:00.005-06:00

3:25am GMT update from Jeffrey Allen

World Development Movement wins the race to declare a verdict. Here are a few choice quotes from the press release that just landed:

"The World Development Movement has slammed the outcome of the UN climate talks in Durban as a ‘spectacular failure’ that will condemn the world’s poorest people to hunger, poverty and ultimately, death.

The world is now on course for devastating temperature rises as a result of the failure of developed countries to act. Instead of coming to Durban to take action, developed countries have stonewalled on the real issues and kicked decisions down the road.

Developed countries have failed to commit to action to curb their emissions, leaving the world to run headfirst towards catastrophic climate change.

The UK and the EU have failed to put their money where their mouths are, and have not committed the money needed to help developing countries cope with climate change. Only agreeing to produce yet another report on financing with no guarantees that anything will come of it, after years of reports, promises and negotiations...

This roadmap is set to undermine the principles of the UN climate talks - that developed countries bear responsibility for causing climate change and must act first. Treating rich industrialised countries and poor developing countries as if they were the same is not a just solution to climate change."

3:00am GMT update from Jeffrey Allen
One Climate
December 11, 2011

"Been downstairs during the break taking the initial pulse of civil society. Let's just say, they're not very happy with what's shaping up here, as the sun begins to rise over Durban.

If you're watching the proceedings, you're seeing high drama, people are patting themselves on the back, and the story of a "historic" agreement seems to be shaping up. But climate activists are talking about a hollow agreement.

Two of the main problems we're hearing are that:

there's no reason to believe emission-cut targets will be increased at all;

there's no reason to believe any significant funds will be committed to help poor countries cope with the impacts of climate change

According to prolific tweeter Murray Worthy of World Development Movement,

We're replacing the Kyoto Protocol with... hope

The bottom line: nothing has been agreed here that moves us off a 4-degree pathway, and as we all know, 4 degrees of warming is catastrophic for the world's vulnerable people and will result in irreversible consequences of climate change."

COP17 Live

2011-12-10T20:12:00.002-06:00

<p>Sorry this browser does not support frames</p>

Canada, the Grave Digger of Kyoto

2011-12-10T14:54:00.001-06:00

Martin Lukacs

HuffPost

December 11, 2011

Few issues have united delegates at the UN Climate Change Conference in Durban, South Africa. But if you walked the halls of the International Convention Centre and mentioned the name of "Canada," the response would be unanimous -- a collective groan and lament. The only time the country elicited anything else was during a silent protest on Wednesday by young Canadian activists, who stood and turned their backs to their environment minister as he addressed the assembled countries in plenary. They were hustled out by security, stripped of their accreditation and booted from the building. But the rousing applause they received well eclipsed the muted claps for the minister.

Canada's global reputation is in tatters, and the reasons why are plain to see. A country with a deep multilateral tradition has become a climate unilateralist like no other. It was the Canadian government that fired the opening salvo of the talks when news broke that they planned to withdraw from the Kyoto Protocol -- the world's only legally binding climate treaty -- before Christmas. They promised to "play hardball" with impoverished, developing countries, and dismissed the demand for industrialized nations to take responsibility for two centuries of emissions as a "historical guilty card." "It poisoned the negotiations," says prominent Nigerian environmental activist Nnemmo Bassey. In a setting in which decisions are made by consensus of all countries, such moves were decisively damaging.

Canada dug the grave for the Kyoto Protocol so the United States could put a bullet in its body. There was speculation that U.S. negotiators came to Durban with the sole aim of preventing any new binding commitments for carbon reductions before 2020, although the U.S. climate envoy denied it. With the crucial help of Canada -- alongside Russia, Japan and Australia -- it has succeeded. They have shredded the possibility of a viable extension of the Kyoto Protocol, leaving in its place a "Durban mandate" -- finalized in secretive side meetings -- that includes only voluntary pledges for reductions. As former Bolivian ambassador to the UN Pablo Solon said in response, Kyoto has turned "into a Zombie without a global figure for reduction of emissions by industrialised countries, and will carry on walking until 2020," when it then dies.

Nothing will be done to stave off climate change this decade on the international scale, while the richest nations will lead negotiations for an even weaker agreement to eventually replace the Kyoto Protocol.

The consequences in planetary suffering and dislocation are incalculable. The delays could assure temperature increases of more than four degrees Celsius, and higher on the African continent. "It is a death sentence for Africa," says Bassey. Already, 350,000 people die each year due to natural disasters caused by climate change; this will increase. By the end of the century, our world will be unrecognizable to many -- conflict-ridden, starved of food and deprived of water, and bursting with millions of climate refugees with no place of their own to call habitable.

If the negotiations spell disaster for the global south, they have been a boon to the richest corporations of the north, whose polluting ways are protected. In a calculated affront to those nations scrambling to create a fair, binding climate agreement, the Canadian government announced the approval of a gigantic, multi-billion dollar tar sands mine. It is the perfect symbol of the dirty industry's absolute capture of a willing government -- the root cause of Canada's obstructionist and subversive negotiating tactics. So long as the world's richest government gave short shrift to their historical responsibility for climate change, but full license to the wishes of wealthy business elites, little can be achieved at international climate talks.

But there are reasons to hope we can still confront climate change and drastically reduce emissions -- on the homefront. Because of the escalating pressure on the Alberta tar sands -- Canada's largest growing source of carbon emissions -- the Conservative government shielded themselves from scrutiny here in Durban. Unlike every other country, which hosted booths and appeared for public media scrums, Canadian negotiators holed away in their hotel a kilometre from the convention centre, where they held exclusive, tightly managed press conferences. By mid-week, they simply stopped holding them altogether.

The Canadian government knows that manifestations of people power are growing across the world and in the country, and it gravely worries them. The power of a burgeoning climate justice movement in the United States forced Obama to delay the Keystone XL pipeline, which would have carried half a million barrels of tar sands oil to Texas per day. The tar sand's industry is now anxiously eying the TransMountain and Enbridge Gateway pipelines to carry oil to the Pacific. But united Indigenous nations, promising a human "wall" of protest, have forced the government regulating body to delay any decision on the Gateway till the end of 2013, in an attempt to wait out growing resistance. Even the Conservative party's most faithful supporters of the tar sands are balking. A former energy minister has conceded that the power of organized opposition is tremendous: "You can't just bulldoze your way from the oilsands to the coast."

In other words, mass civic resistance works. It is in fact the only thing that ever has. The South Africans who overthrew the apartheid regime know it as well as anyone, and so did a young Indian man who settled here in Durban more than a hundred years ago. Mahatma Gandhi honed his theories of non-violent struggle in campaigns against racism and inequality in this town. Then he returned to India, took leadership of a national liberation movement, and changed the world. Those departing South Africa as the UN climate change conference reaches its dismal end must heed a similar challenge.

The Climate Change Revolution Will Not Be Funded

2011-12-10T14:42:00.005-06:00

By Jared Sacks
The Indypendent
December 9, 2011

This past week, world leaders, technocrats, and NGOs descended upon Durban for the 17th Conference of Parties (dubbed Conference of Polluters by its critics). After 17 years of meetings to address climate change, the lack of action from world leaders clearly shows that the biggest polluting nations not only lack the political will to address the issue, but also seem to be actively carrying out the anti-environmental agenda of the largest corporations on this planet.

The sizeable NGOs who have made their name fighting climate change are surely correct when they link the Obama and Harper governments, and indeed the entire COP process, to the likes of Royal Dutch Shell, Eskom and Koch Industries. Some great slogans have come out of this opposition to the conference. Earthlife Africa’s catchphrase on their t-shirts tells us to “never trust a COP” playing off of the duplicity and corruption of both the police and the COP process.

Yet the opposition front of civil society that came together to form C17 and organized this past Saturday’s Global Day of Action, tells only part of the story. The issue that is glossed over relates to the definitions of who is ‘civil society’ and therefore who was really speaking at the myriad events organized by C17 NGOs, such as the International Climate Jobs Conference, the People’s Space at UKZN, Greenpeace’s Solar Tent, and even the 10,000 strong Global Day of Action.

On the Climate Bus Part 1

On the 1st of December, we embarked on a grueling 27 hour trip from Cape Town to Durban. The C17 Climate Bus Caravan was populated mostly by poor activists and lower level NGO workers. The conditions in our two buses coming from Cape Town were less than ideal, especially the hourly pit-stops that resulted from the lack of a toilet on-board. The organizing was also less than ideal; we got lost on the way and did not know where we were staying once we arrived in Durban.

But these were hardcore activists, many who live in shacks or council homes and some who have been shot at and jailed for their activism. Conditions were not the issue. The overriding complaint I heard over and over from fellow travelers was the unfairness of the situation: why were the actual NGO directors who paid for the trip not on the bus with us?

Slumming it at the Refugee Camp

Upon arrival in Durban, we eventually found our accommodation for the next three days: C17’s Climate Change Refugee Camp. As activists, we were willing to make a political statement by living in huge communal tents with sub-par ablution facilities, dirty blankets and conditions mirroring a refugee camp.

As Mzonke Poni from Abahlali baseMjondolo told me: “The camp was a true reflection of a people’s space. The actual People’s Space at UKZN was more of an intellectual space…I enjoyed the experience at the camp.” Indeed, communal spaces where the poor are dumped are often much more open and accessible spaces than the rigidly organized initiatives built to include the poor.

Once again, the underlying grievance behind the majority of participants was that the executives of the C17 social justice NGOs who organized the camp to make a political statement, were sleeping comfortably in beach-front hotels.

Leading silent sheep

What became clear throughout the trip was that we (the thousands of activists brought in from all over the country) were a crowd whose primary purpose was to provide legitimacy to the C17 NGO’s claims that their agendas had popular support. This was why free t-shirts were handed out advertising NGOs and their environmental justice campaigns.

Furthermore, activists’ trips sponsored by C17 NGOs were told to wear Earthlife Africa or Million Climate Jobs shirts instead of those of their own organizations. Activists whose trip was sponsored by the Democratic Left Front (DLF) were encouraged to wear only DLF t-shirts. What this meant is, as Mzonke Poni put it, “the role of community-based organizations (CBOs) have been undermined…the crowd was rented to top up the numbers.”

Indeed, there was effectively no space for CBOs and movements to talk about what climate change actually means to their lived experience. Their anti-climate change agenda was defined on their behalf. Even at the massive march on the 3rd of December, only a couple of high-powered speakers such as COSATU’s Zwelinzima Vavi were given a space to speak.

As Charles Adams from Mitchell’s Plain explained: “They [NGOs] should have involved the community people and given them a space to speak, not just the organisers.”

This was evident not only at the NGO controlled march, but also at all other C17 events. It seems that at times even the Occupy COP17 General Assembly was itself occupied by NGOs, and its agenda set from the top-down by these organizations’ directors.

In one instance, community activists eventually fought back. According to participants, the DLF leadership had placed members in accommodation “not fit for a human being” and given “expired food” while they themselves stayed in much better lodging. Members revolted against the DLF leadership by disrupting a public lecture and shamed them into ensuring that their conditions were improved. Still, members remained angry and unsatisfied at the reproduction of inequality by the DLF leadership.

Sold Out

The end result was not only that C17 NGO autocrats used the bodies of community activists while silencing their voices, they also undermined the entire anti-climate change agenda. A discussion with Melissa Jaxa from the artistic collective Soundz of the South was instructive: “I think we should be consulted as the masses. As we call ourselves socialists, we should make decisions together about who should speak at our events. They [C17] didn’t take us seriously. We are against COP17 but we ended up working with them”.

In fact, anyone present at the Global Day of Action would have clearly seen the ANC supporters donning official eThekwini COP17 uniforms, shouting pro-Zuma slogans, and abusing and assaulting other protesters. How could the C17 organizers have allowed them to participate in the same space as a march meant to call Zuma and other world leaders to account? How did the municipality get away with using public funds to rent an ANC crowd of their own?

In other words, we activists felt that we were sold out by the very NGOs that claim to represent our interests. As INCITE’s The Revolution Will Not Be Funded shows, NGOs have no structural accountability to their so-called beneficiaries. They are externally funded organizations that, like the World Bank, are accountable to outside forces through the power of the purse.

We who feel that another (more just) world is necessary should then look toward the unfunded revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt or the Occupy Movement for reference. We need to support community self-organizing and accept community driven agendas and philosophies. This does not need millions in funding. But it does need painstaking perseverance and commitment to radical democratic politics. In other words, a commitment to building authentic peoples spaces.

On the Climate Bus Part 2

On the road back to Cape Town, the one bus broke down twice while the other’s tire burst. In Colesburg the bus drivers purposely left dozens of activists stranded until those of us still onboard forced the buses to turn back to get them. After spending another 30 hours on the return bus, we finally arrived at the Alternative Information Development Centre (AIDC) in Cape Town at 23h30. However, half of us were stuck once again; someone forgot to organize taxis home.

Because we could not find the C17 representatives who were in charge of organizing transport, we could not fix the situation.

Even something as simple as a bus trip becomes a struggle when we as participants have no say.

Videos: "Marx and Engels on Nature" and "Ecosocialism" (in French)

2011-12-10T14:01:00.000-06:00

Global Justice School
Amsterdam
December 2011

View all the videos HERE.

Marx (and Engels) on nature: Part one from IIRE2 on Vimeo.

Nunavut youth accepts Canada’s “Colossal Fossil” award in Durban

2011-12-09T18:51:00.001-06:00

"The embarrassing part was me being Canadian"

By Frank Tester
Special to Nunatsiaq News
December 9, 2011

Jordan Konek of the Nanisiniq Arviat history project accepts the "Colossal Fossil" award on behalf of Canada on Dec. 9 at the United Nations climate conference in Durban, South Africa. (PHOTO BY FRANK TESTER)

DURBAN, South Africa — Canada picked up an award Dec. 9 at the United Nations climate change conference in Durban: the “Colossal Fossil” award for its poor performance during the past two weeks.

Sponsored by the Climate Action Network, a global coalition of over 700 non-governmental organizations dealing with climate change, a “First Place Fossil” award went to New Zealand for its mixed messages on climate change action.

But the top award went to Canada, which had already picked up six “fossil of the day” awards in Durban.

Inuk youth delegate and member of the Nanisiniq Arviat history project, Jordan Konek, accepted the “Colossal Fossil” award on behalf of the Canadian government.

In a statement explaining the award, the Climate Action Network noted that Canada had “called critical climate financing ‘guilt payments’, bullying least developed countries into leaving the Kyoto Protocol.”

They went on to note that: “Canada remains the only country in the world to have weakened its emissions targets after returning from COP15 in Copenhagen and the only country to have signed and ratified the Kyoto Protocol and then say that it had no intention of meeting its targets.

The government killed the only major federal renewable energy program in the country while plowing over $1 Billion dollars a year of subsidies into the oil sector.”

The award was shared with the United States for what organizers called “its sheer (un)ambition”.

A large crowd of international students, photographers, reporters and delegates attended the ceremony, patterned after the “Occupy Movement” that spread last month across much of North America and Europe.

This saw members of the audience shouting out loud messages conveyed by the speaker.

Asked afterward about how he felt about his participation, Konek said that “while it was a good feeling when people repeated what he had to say, the embarrassing part was me being Canadian and receiving the [colossal] fossil of the year award.”

“I think the important part of this is for the Canadian government to see that we have been given this award, and they should be embarrassed. We need to do something about climate change not only for aboriginal people, but for the whole country,” Konek said.

Konek and Curtis Kuunaq had spent the past week at the Durban conference, hosting a kiosk on the Nanisiniq Arviat history project and speaking on climate change to delegates and journalists.

Negotiators vowed Dec. 9 to work into the wee small hours of the morning of Dec. 10 in a last-ditch attempt to reach agreement on the many accords which have been debated at this year’s conference.

Also during the afternoon of Dec. 9, a huge demonstration, organized by Greenpeace, descended on the conference centre, blocking the concourse where delegates were scurrying from room to room in their final hours of deliberation.

Shouting solidarity with Africa and Canadian youth, who were ejected from the proceedings earlier in the week, they were quickly surrounded by UN security forces.

This prevented them from blocking an entrance to the main theatre where negotiations were taking place.

For more than two hours the mood was tense, with negotiations between protest leaders and UN security staff going back and forth.

Chanting “Climate Justice Now!”, “Act Now!”, and “Listen to the People, Not Polluters,” the demonstrators threatened to drown out the wrangling over words taking place in rooms nearby.

Finally, they were given the choice of leaving peacefully to carry on their protest outside, or to remain behind and be escorted from the building by security forces that would also confiscate their delegate badges and remove them from the site.

A small number chose the latter option.

The demonstration ended peacefully, but not without leaving hundreds looking on from balconies above with impression that climate change is an issue about which youth are increasingly concerned, vocal, and prepared to address with direct action if necessary.

Climate Change: Kyoto Protocol converted into a Zombie

2011-12-09T11:56:00.002-06:00

Pablo Solon

WPCCCRME

December 9, 2011

A few moments ago we found out the decisions that they have been cooking behind the scenes. In Durban they won’t approve a second period of commitments of the Kyoto Protocol. This will happen at the end of next year: in COP18.

In Durban they will only take note of the draft amendments and the “intention” of rich countries to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The Kyoto Protocol will lose its heart. The promises of reductions by rich countries will be incredibly low until 2020 and will lead to a temperature increase of more than 4 degrees C. The Kyoto Protocol will turn into a Zombie without a global figure for reduction of emissions by industrialised countries, and will carry on walking until 2020 just so that carbon markets don’t disappear.

In 2020 “a new legal framework appliable to all” will enter into effect. “To all”, means diluting the difference between developed and developing countries, between countries responsible for climate change and those who are victims. The US managed to eliminate any mention of a “binding” agreement. That means the “new legal framework” will be an empty gesture without any effect. The European Unions is permitting that the Kyoto Protocol is converted to a Zombie. This will become known as the lost decade of the fight against climate change. Genocide and ecocide will reach proportions that we have not yet seen. The Great Escape by the Rich has turned into the Great Swindle.

Pablo Solon is an international analyst and social activist. He was chief negotiator for climate change and United Nations Ambassador of the Plurinational State of Bolivia (2009-June 2011). http://pablosolon.wordpress.com/