China’s Capitalism and the Climate

By Robert Hunziker
Dissident Voice
December 22nd, 2012

China’s three-decade-old conversion to state capitalism has radically transformed the country. As a result, more than one-half of China’s population now lives in an urban setting versus 26% in 1990, and China has 19 mega cities each with over 10 million population. This vast undertaking has become a way forward for a population of 1.4 billion people (a population larger than the United States, the European Union, and South America combined) to conduct business on the world stage, and the ramifications are felt all across the planet.

As China increasingly adapts to capitalism, conflict arises within its own society as well as beyond its borders. Capitalism’s penchant for conflict goes back as far as the middle of the 19th century when Karl Marx was the first economist in the world to notice how “boom & bust” economic cycles were largely unknown to the world until capitalism hit the scene. These boom & bust cycles may be unique to capitalism, but China, outside of the past three decades, for a thousand years was quiet, pastoral, and self-sufficient, ignoring the outside world. However, nowadays China has come face-to-face with the world like a fire-eating dragon.

New book from NYC - No Expectations: A Memoir

From Next Year Country Books  



NO EXPECTATIONS by James N. McCrorie is a brief memoir of a Montreal working class kid, the son of Scottish immigrants, who lowered his sights, abandoning a lively ambition to either go to sea or become a railroader, and settling for the life of an academic.

The choice did not keep him out of some of the historical struggles of his time, including the fight for medicare in Saskatchewan in 1962, the wild cat strike of 1964, when CN railroaders shut down the railroad, paralyzing the nation, and university reform, which dominated campus life throughout the 1970s.

Click HERE to purchase this book.

Read excerpts from his book HERE and HERE.

Climate Change: The Tragic Farce At Doha

Solidarity Ecosocialist Commission

Europe Solidaire Sans Frontieres
11 December 2012

Activists demand action on climate change at a protest march on Saturday. Article HERE.

As the Doha COP18 climate talks draw to a close, they have unfortunately confirmed The Economist’s description of the event as a “theater of the absurd.” Even as the World Bank has released a report describing a rise in average global temperatures by a catastrophic 4 degrees Celsius over the course of this century, no greater sense of urgency emerged at the talks, largely due to the obvious futility of trying to formulate global policy without a serious commitment by Washington to reduce its own gargantuan carbon footprint. Meanwhile, the effects of climate change have accelerated with the ferocious global warming-fueled superstorm Sandy and the enormous Typhoon Bopha that has ravaged the southern Philippines, to mention only the most recent and dramatic that have ravaged communities as a result.

A Marxist Ecological Vision

By Nicolas Davenport
Solidarity
1 November 2012

The following article is adapted from a presentation at the Solidarity summer school in August 2012. Nicholas Davenport is a member of the newly formed Ecosocialism Working Group of Solidarity. The editors of Against the Current view this contribution as part of an urgently needed discussion.

The questions facing environmental activists, and socialists in particular, range from the sheer scale of the environmental disasters already underway to the problems of beginning a transition from a system organized around massive consumption of fossil fuels, vast megacities and global agribusiness.

In the process of doing so, how will an ecosocialist movement and society address the crisis of global inequality and the need to “develop the productive forces” without pushing the planet and human civilization over the environmental cliff? We look forward to explorations of these questions from a variety of angles and viewpoints. — David Finkel, for the ATC editors

THE ECOLOGICAL CRISIS presents the starkest possible example of both the necessity of and opportunity for revolutionary change. Nothing but a radical transformation of basic social relations can prevent the worst possible outcomes of the crisis. In spite of its overwhelming and frightening magnitude, the ecological crisis presents a moment to revitalize the world revolutionary movement.

However, much of the socialist response to the ecological crisis so far has been inadequate. When we talk about the ecological crisis, socialists often fail to integrate it into our general analysis of the trajectory of bourgeois society and the opportunities for revolution.

Pipeline politics — Can popular protest stop the tar sands leviathan?

By Richard Fidler 

Life on the Left

December 8, 2012

Petroleum giant Enbridge Inc. has taken huge strides in recent weeks to complete its plan to transport tar sands oil to eastern Canada and from there to foreign markets.

Already assured of support from the Harper government, the company is rapidly lining up further backing from provincial politicians and industry players, including a key trade union. And it is fast-tracking the regulatory approval process.



Enbridge’s project entails reversing the flow of an existing pipeline circuit across southern Ontario to Montréal, Quebec and from there through New England states to Portland, Maine. At present imported oil is carried from Portland to Sarnia, Ontario, where existing refineries already process dirty tar sands oil piped from Alberta. Enbridge also plans to increase the pipeline’s capacity from 240,000 barrels per day to 300,000 bpd.

New study states that climate change may not be reversible

All Voices

December 2, 2012

The threat of global warming is quite an immediate one, having a potential to not only cause irreparable damage to global ecology but also, if left unchecked, to make the planet earth unliveable. Visible effects of global warming have already been felt, with scientists recently collating data on the rise in sea levels because of global warming, noting the increase to be around 11 millimeters. Of course the issue of whether or not the effects of global warming climate change can be reversed has been a hotly contested subject for many years now with conventional wisdom urging that regardless of the damage done so far, carbon emissions, which contribute directly to global warming, must be cut down upon.

However a new study suggests that perhaps it is too late, that carbon emissions are now too high for humanity to turn back the tide of climate change. Researchers at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at the University of East Anglia in Britain have found that it is unlikely that global warming, which stands at 2C above pre-industrial levels, will ever be reverted, saying that carbon emissions had gone beyond a level to control.

The research, published in the journal, Nature Climate Change stated that carbon dioxide emissions had reached 35.6 billion tons this year, an increase of 2.6 percent from last year and an alarming 58 percent increase since the 1990s.

Tyndall's director, Corinne Le Quere, said, "These latest figures come amidst climate talks in Doha, but with emissions continuing to grow, it's as if no one is listening to the scientific community. I am worried that the risks of dangerous climate change are too high on our current emissions trajectory. We need a radical plan."

Read more HERE.

A Plea for an Ecological Reconstruction of Marxism

By Daniel Tanturo

Presentation at the Historical Materialism Conference

London

November 10, 2012

For the first time in history, humanity has to conceive our emancipation under a global ecological constraint, unsurpassable by an increase in labor productivity.

Global warming exemplifies this constraint. In order to stabilize the climate system, the final energy consumption should fall by 50% in the European Union, and 75% in the US, by 2050 (UN, World Economic and Social Outlook 2011). Such objectives cannot be achieved without a reduction in material production and transportation, at least in the so-called “developed” countries. It’s not enough to limit growth.

At the most, the energy system based on fossil fuels must be replaced by another one, renewable, completely new and different. A huge mutation must be carried out within two generations. It requires investments and thus additional energy consumption. In other words, the transition itself, at least in the beginning, will be an additional source of emissions and these must absolutely be compensated. Therefore, a plan is necessary, based on energy efficiency, not cost-efficiency.

Canada, the surprise 'pariah' of the Kyoto protocol

Some Canadians doubt whether their country should have any say in negotiating the second Kyoto protocol after it became the only nation to reject the first one

By Isabeau Doucet in Montreal
guardian.co.uk

26 November 2012 

Oil city: steam rises from refineries outside Edmonton, Alberta. Photograph: Andy Clark/Reuters

Of all the delegations in the room in Doha, the Canadians adopt the lowest profile. Some question whether they should be there at all: The country's first and only Green party MP, Elizabeth May, said: "HavingCanada in the room negotiating to weaken the second Kyoto, when we have already signalled that not only will we not be participating in taking on new targets in the second period but we're legally withdrawn from the protocol, should make us pariahs."

"I can't imagine how anybody would want us in the room."

The Link between Emission Cuts, Right to Development and Transformation of Capitalist System

By Pablo Solon

Pablo Solon holds at COP 17 protest banner

Focus on the Global South

Humanity is running out of time. If there are no deep and real cuts in the next five years the impacts of climate change will lead to a situation ten times worse than what we have seen with hurricane Sandy and other climate change related events in India, Russia, Philippines and Africa in this past year.

That’s what happens with 0.8ºC of global warming, and the current climate negotiations are leading us to a 4ºC to 8ºC scenario.

More than two-thirds of coal, oil and gas should be left under the soil

Different studies say that to limit the increase in temperature to 2ºC, all countries can only emit 565 gigatons of CO2 between 2010 and 2050[1]. At the current rate of 31 gigatons of global CO2 emissions per year, we are going to expend that budget in 15 years.

New NYC Booklet on Medicare

NYC

Medicare's Birth in Saskatchewan: 50th Anniversary of a People's Victory

The two articles re-published in this pamphlet were written to address the 50th anniversary of North America's first public healthcare system for all citizens initiated in Saskatchewan on July 1, 1962.

We were researching the prolific resources and books available on the subject in preparation for a forthcoming book on the fight for medicare in Saskatchewan and wanted to raise the profile of the anniversary as the actual anniversary approached.

This pamphlet is intended as a short and quick resource for labour and health care activists as we celebrate 50 years of medicare.

- Lorne Brown, Doug Taylor

Purchase HERE.

Recovering Bookchin: Social Ecology and the Crises of Our Time

By Andy Price
New Compass

Buy this book from Amazon

Buy this book from Createspace

Through an extensive body of political and philosophical ideas he called social ecology, Murray Bookchin (1921-2006) elucidated one of the first intellectual responses to the ecological crisis. However, over the last two decades of his life Bookchin’s ideas slipped from focus, obscured by the emergence of a crude caricature that portrayed him as a dogmatic sectarian who intended to dominate the radical left for his own personal motivations.

In Recovering Bookchin, Andy Price revisits the Bookchin caricature and critically discounts it as the product of a largely misguided literature that focused on Bookchin the individual and not his ideas. By looking afresh at Bookchin’s work, Price argues that his contribution can be seen to provide a coherent practical and theoretical response to the ecological and social crises of our time.

Dr Andy Price is Senior Lecturer in Politics at Sheffield Hallam University, UK. He has written articles on both Bookchin and social ecology and on contemporary radical movements for the academic and popular press.

This is a work of “recovery” in the best sense, a lucid, sympathetic yet critical account of Bookchin, demonstrating his continuing relevance in the face of ecological catastrophe. Andy Price’s insightful treatment goes beyond the polemics surrounding Bookchin to illustrate the richness and depth of his ecological philosophy, which should do much to revive interest in this bold thinker.
— Jules Townshend, Professor Emeritus, Manchester Metropolitan University

A trenchant and much-needed reassessment of this singular and all too often misrepresented anarcho-green theorist, and of his contribution to social theory. Price indeed “recovers” Bookchin; he does so with admirable verve and analytical rigour, cutting through the myriad distortions surrounding him and providing us with a new framework for understanding social ecology today.
— Dr Chris Ealham, author of Anarchism and the City (AK Press, 2010).

China’s Nexen Deal Tangled Up With Keystone Pipeline

By Peter Lee

Asia Times

October 6, 2012

An interesting side product of globalization is how China bashing has become a staple of domestic politics in nations around the world, from America to Zambia, from Sydney to Tokyo. Best practices also propagate with remarkable speed and efficiency.

It may not be a coincidence that, just as the United States finally gets the memo that the Chinese currency is no longer significantly undervalued, the commentariat turns on a dime (or jiao, if you prefer) to announce that the real problem is the market-distorting, security-undermining shadow of China’s state-owned enterprises (SOEs) over the world economy.