Naomi Klein explains the right's successful anti-climate framing

Real climate solutions depend on 'seizing economic terrain from the right', framing discussion around 'enlightened economic system'.

By Naomi Klein
The Nation

Excerpt

There is a question from a gentleman in the fourth row.

He introduces himself as Richard Rothschild. He tells the crowd that he ran for county commissioner in Maryland's Carroll County because he had come to the conclusion that policies to combat global warming were actually "an attack on middle-class American capitalism". His question for the panelists, gathered in a Washington, DC, Marriott Hotel in late June, is this: "To what extent is this entire movement simply a green Trojan horse, whose belly is full with red Marxist socioeconomic doctrine?"

Here at the Heartland Institute's Sixth International Conference on Climate Change, the premier gathering for those dedicated to denying the overwhelming scientific consensus that human activity is warming the planet, this qualifies as a rhetorical question. Like asking a meeting of German central bankers if Greeks are untrustworthy. Still, the panelists aren't going to pass up an opportunity to tell the questioner just how right he is.

System Change - Patrick Bond

Council of Canadians

Patrick Bond is the Director of the Centre for Civil Society, University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban, South Africa

Patrick describes why he takes hope from the growing climate justice movement going into the UN climate negotiations in Durban, South Africa (December 2011).

One Year Since Cancun and Just Days Away from Durban: MORE THAN 4°C

By Pablo Solon 
Hoy es Todavía
November 2011

Balance sheet and perspectives on the climate change negotiations (Part I)

Pablo Salon in Cancun

Almost a year has gone by since the results of the climate change negotiations in Cancun were imposed with the objection of only Bolivia. It’s time to take stock and see where we are now.

In Cancun, the developed countries listed their greenhouse gas emission reduction pledges for the 2012-2020 period. The United States and Canada said they would reduce emissions by 3% based on 1990 levels, the European Union between 20 and 30%, Japan 25%, and Russia from 15 to 25% [1]. Adding up all the reduction pledges of the developed countries, the total reduction in emissions by 2020 would be 13-17% [2] based on 1990 levels.

Conservative free trade agenda low on jobs, environmental protection

Council of Canadians
November 15, 2011

Free trade agreements with Panama and Jordan, legislation for which was announced today by International Trade Minister Ed Fast, will have little effect on jobs or the economy while putting Panamanian workers, Indigenous peoples and environmental protections at risk, says the Council of Canadians and MiningWatch Canada.

"The amount of trade Canada does with either Panama or Jordan is minimal and the Canadian experience shows just having a free trade agreement in place does not encourage exports," says Stuart Trew, trade campaigner with the Council of Canadians. "What's worse about these deals is that they place the rights of Canadian investors in these countries above the rights of workers and Indigenous peoples, the right to protect the environment, and the ability of governments to support local economic development and create jobs."

Cuba Shares Its Experiences in Agroecology

By Dalia Acosta
Havana Times
November  16, 2011

Farmers and experts on agriculture from Haiti, Guadeloupe and Martinique are touring fields in Cuba this week, along with local colleagues, to exchange experiences to foment ecological fruit growing on Caribbean islands.

“I’m leaving with a different take on things,” Audrey Retory, who grows fruit and vegetables and raises barnyard fowl in Guadeloupe, told IPS. “There’s no reason for there to be an antagonistic relationship between agricultural production and nature.

“From now on I’m going to use vermiculture (composting using earthworms), which does not require a major investment, and I know that many people will see what I’m doing and want to replicate it,” she said.

Unravelling Carbon Markets

By Ed Lewis, Larry Lohmann
New Left Project
November 15, 2011

Larry Lohmann is a scholar and activist who works with The Corner House, a UK-based NGO that supports democratic and community movements for environmental and social justice. As part of NLP’s series of pieces around this year’s Socialist Register – The Crisis and the Left – Lohmann spoke to Ed Lewis about his contribution to the volume, “Financialization, commodification and carbon: the contradictions of neoliberal climate policy”.

The image of carbon markets that still seems to prevail in the minds of many is that of ‘cap and trade’ – governments set overall limits on the amount of greenhouse gases that may be emitted and permits to the right to emit are then traded amongst different economic actors. With this image in mind, many see the key issue as being whether states are able to agree amongst themselves a sufficiently low limit of GHG emissions and question of whether or not there is a carbon market in place to distribute the emissions as a secondary issue.

What do you see as being wrong with this picture? What are the intrinsic problems with carbon trading?

The carbon market creates new asset classes (and opportunities for accumulation) at a time of profit crisis. It is part of a "new phase of accumulation" that is also reflected in -- to take two other prime examples -- the trends in public service commodification described in Ursula Huws' chapter in this year's Socialist Register[1], and the growing global trade in "ecosystem services" generally.

Agrofuels: Industrial Agriculture's Latest Attack on the People and the Planet

Climate Change and Indigenous Movements

By Ben Powless
New Socialist webzine
07 November 2011

Climate change: you can't get away from it these days.

Except for a few die-hard holdouts, the scientific argument has carried the day in most places. It is now recognized as an international priority, though you wouldn't know it from the actions of our so-called leadership. That urgency is being felt by nobody more than Indigenous Peoples, who happen to live in the most diverse and fragile ecosystems remaining in the world. In Canada, the Inuit are experiencing some of the greatest temperature changes in the whole world, disrupting a traditional culture that depends on the cold as much as the Amazon does on the rain.

We won one battle against big oil, but not the war

Statement of the Indigenous Environmental Network
November 11, 2011

Mother Earth Achieves a Victory Today with Obama Administration Decision to Delay the Keystone XL Pipeline Decision

The United States Department of State and President Barack Obama announced they would seek a new environmental review of the Keystone XL pipeline. This will delay and hopefully stop the Trans Canada Corporation from pursuing to build the 1,700 mile long Keystone XL pipeline. The pipeline is part of the expansion of the flow of dirty oil from the tar sands of Canada. The Indigenous Environmental Network, through its Canadian Indigenous Tar Sands Campaign and its Keystone XL Pipeline organizing work has successfully put an indigenous and human rights face to this dangerous and environmental destructive tar sands pipeline.

Soviet environmentalism: The path not taken

Arran Gare

Marxismo Ecológico

November 2, 2011

INTRODUCTION

Capitalism is a system that by its very nature must expand until it destroys the conditions of its own existence. It IS hardly surprising then, that Marxists in the Soviet Union argued that in the current environmental crisis lay the ultimate reason for replacing capitalism with socialism: As A. D. Ursal, the editor of Philosophy and the Ecological Problems of Civilization, argued:

The crisis of the environment, which is reaching extreme development almost everywhere, coincides with the last stage of the general crisis of capitalism. A conviction is growing throughout the world that only collapse of the capitalist system and victory of Socialism throughout the world will create a general, fundamental, social opportunity for rational use of natural resources and the highest degree of optimum interaction with nature. . . . Convincing evidence that socialism is a necessary condition for optimizing relations between society and nature is Socialism as it actually exists, and the policy of socialist countries in respect of the environment.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, however,. all hope that Soviet communism might be transformed into a more attractive, less environmentally degraded social order than the liberal democratic societies of the West has been destroyed. The description of the modern predicament by Alvin W. Gouldner has become even more poignant: "The political uniqueness of our own era then is this; we have lived and still live through a desperate political and social malaise, while at the same time we have outlived the desperate revolutionary remedies that had once been thought to solve them.,, If this is the case, there is reason to examine the environmental failures of the Soviet Union more closely. Was it possible that things might have worked out differently?

If so, does this provide any orientation for the present? In this chapter, I will show how an alternative path for Soviet society had been charted and partly implemented in the 1920s by the radical wing of Bolshevism, a path that made environmental conservation a central issue. And I will suggest that this is the path that holds most hope for the future.

Read more HERE.

Who profits from the 7 billion population frenzy?

By Vanessa Baird
New Internationalist Blog
November 1, 2011

So, now we are 7 billion. Or maybe not.

Maybe we will be 7 billion next March – or maybe we already were last July.

Because if you read the small print from the United Nations, the week’s landmark date – October 31 – is ‘symbolic’.

But the frenzy in the build-up to the big day has had effects that should alarm anyone concerned with equality, human rights and the real causes of climate change. Even serious media outlets resorted to the 1960s language of ‘overpopulation,’  ‘explosion,’ ‘overcrowding’. Spectres of hunger, poverty and global turmoil were paraded as the products of population growth.

Wanted: Good green energy jobs

Wind and solar energy projects don't create a lot of jobs and the ones they do create don't pay all that well

By Marjorie Griffin Cohen and John Calvert
Vancouver Sun
October 27, 2011

The energy sector is often promoted as an area where a "winwin" situation exists for labour and climate change policy. The prevailing view is that the economy will create many good new jobs as it shifts from dirty energy production to clean, renewable energy.

We wish this were so, but our study of employment in the energy sector finds that these claims are largely wishful thinking. While there are new developments, overall Canadian energy policy is "more of the same." It is explicitly driven by private-marketbased decisions, rather than careful planning by governments to ensure both good environmental and labour outcomes. To the extent that there is public planning, it is focused on delivering outcomes the energy industry wants. This planning failure has implications both for the lack of greening of the energy sector, and the types of jobs being created.