Canada's Committment to Developing the Tar Sands

By John W. Warnock
May 29, 2012

Over the past few weeks politicians and the mass media have been ranting about the development of the Alberta tar sands. Thomas Mulcair, the new leader of the federal New Democratic Party (NDP), and a number of left leaning economists have argued that the massive investment in the development of the oil industry in Canada has been giving Canada a dose of the Dutch Disease. The influx of foreign investment has boosted the value of the Canadian dollar and has resulted in the steady decline of the manufacturing industry all across Canada. This is what happened to The Netherlands in the 1960s when its government stressed the rapid development of their offshore petroleum industry. In 2008 the Organization of Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) had warned Canada about this development.

There should have been a serious debate on the issue, but the politicians and the mainstream media, including the CBC, shot that down by posing the issue as a conflict between central and western Canada.

 But far more important is the question of whether or not the tar sands should be developed at all. It seems that no one in any position of authority in Canada wishes this issue to be opened up to a general, democratic debate.

Petroleum and Propaganda

The Anatomy of the Global Warming Denial Industry

By John W. Farley
Monthly Review
May 2012

James Lawrence Powell, The Inquisition of Climate Science (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 232 pages, $27.95, hardcover.

James Powell was inspired to write this important new book because of a remarkable paradox: among climate scientists, there is a near-unanimous consensus that global warming is occurring now, is largely human-made, and will cause very severe environmental problems if humanity continues business as usual. However, among the lay public the picture is much more mixed: only about half of the U.S. public agrees with the climate scientists. Why the enormous discrepancy?

Powell argues that “in the denial of global warming, we are witnessing the most vicious, and so far most successful, attack on science in history.” Although Powell himself is not a climate science researcher, he has an appropriate background to understand the field: he holds a doctorate in geochemistry from MIT and became a geology professor, teaching at Oberlin College for over twenty years. He has been a college president at three institutions, and served for a dozen years on the National Science Board. Powell’s book is a sharp attack on the global-warming denial “industry,” a network comprised of corporate funding, think tanks, popularizers, and propagandists, who all work with a compliant mass media.

Read more HERE.

Draining of world's aquifers feeds rising sea levels

Trillions of tonnes of water have been pumped up from deep underground reservoirs in every part of the world, says report

• Damian Carrington
• guardian.co.uk
• Sunday 20 May 2012 

For three decades, Saudi Arabia has been drilling for water from underground aquifers. Engineers and farmers have tapped hidden reserves of water to grow grains, fruit and vegetables in the desert of Wadi As-Sirhan Basin. Photograph: Landsat/Nasa

Humanity's unquenchable thirst for fresh water is driving up sea levels even faster than melting glaciers, according to new research. The massive impact of the globalpopulation's growing need for water on rising sea levels is revealed in a comprehensive assessment of all the ways in which people use water.

Trillions of tonnes of water have been pumped up from deep underground reservoirs in every part of the world and then channelled into fields and pipes to keep communities fed and watered. The water then flows into the oceans, but far more quickly than the ancient aquifers are replenished by rains. The global tide would be rising even more quickly but for the fact that manmade reservoirs have, until now, held back the flow by storing huge amounts of water on land.

Marx’s Ecology and the Understanding of Land Cover Change

By Ricardo Dobrovolski

Monthly Review

May 2012

The spread of humans worldwide, especially in the last two hundred years, has been associated with the growing human domination of the earth. This domination has not only entailed an increasing world population, but also rising and unequal wealth—all of which has been accelerated by the regime of capital. 

Such domination of the environment is expressed by among other things: 

(1) the change in the flux of elements and substances on Earth, i.e., the global biogeochemical cycles (of which the most famous manifestation is the rising level of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases responsible for climate change);  (2) the growing threat of species extinction; and  (3) the huge land cover change (LCC)—the substitution of natural habitats such as forests, swamps, and grasslands by cropland, pasture, roads, and urban areas.

Modern natural sciences have made enormous inroads in understanding both ecological problems and the social drivers of LCC. However, they have been unable to generate a systematic understanding of how the regime of capital has governed LCC. Karl Marx developed more than 150 years ago, in the context of a social-science critique, an unparalleled theoretical approach to environmental crisis based on two concepts: differential land rent and the metabolic rift.

Read more HERE.

Harper and the Environment are Like Oil and Water

By Maude Barlow
Council of Canadians
Friday, May 18th, 2012

The Harper government is waging war on Canada’s freshwater.

We didn’t start with a strong record. Our national water laws are out-dated, we don’t properly enforce the ones we have and we chronically underfund source water and watershed protection. And consecutive governments refuse to consider the effect on freshwater when creating economic, industrial, energy or trade policies.

Yet the Harper government appears intent on systematically dismantling the few protections that have been put in place at the federal level to protect our freshwater heritage.

In its 2011 budget, the Harper government announced a reduction of over $222 million from the budget of Environment Canada and the elimination of over 1,200 jobs in the department. Programs to protect water, such as the Action Plan on Clean Water, which funds water remediation in Lakes Winnipeg and Simcoe among others, were particularly hard hit. Others targeted for deep cuts include the Chemicals Management Plan and the Contaminated Sites Action Plan, both of which are crucial to source water protection.

"DO NOT THINK WE CAN SAVE THE PLANET WITHOUT SOCIAL EMANCIPATION"

By Ulrich Brand
ENTRVISTA:
04/23/2012
Google translation

THE NEW ROLE OF STATE AND SOCIOECOLOGICAL TRANSFORMATIONS

Ulrich Brand is a German political scientist and economist who promotes a critical theory to address what he calls the financialization of nature, the devices of global governance and state  transformations. In this interview, presents the fundamentals of vision and examines the crisis of capitalism, the current challenges in the south and exits found in Argentina.

By Verónica Gago and Diego Sztulwark

How critical is linked to development today and the question of the crisis?

At the 2009 Copenhagen summit on climate change was first made from the social movements and NGOs beyond a very strong criticism by saying just this mode of global management of resources. This is articulated directly with the current crisis, although they are in the nineteenth century debate between Marx and Sismondi referring to what it means growth as a solution to problems. This time, dissent was articulated also among the elites. For example, Amartya Sen and Joseph Stiglitz said he had to acknowledge this criticism against what was proposed as an output dominant revitalize growth. Of course, there is some history and some concern about how we got out of the crisis. Is the neoliberal response, which is now dominant in Europe and that is the prescription of austerity. Then, the Keynesian response, which calls for investment and domestic consumption to drive the economy. And at the margins, is the debate about what we do with growth. Some icons are people like about the Englishman Tim Jackson, who proposed a now famous formula: welfare without growth.

The Quiet Revolution of Our Generation Must be Green and Red

Youth for Real Climate Action
April 21, 2012

The creative, courageous and inspiring Quebec student movement will today weave its way through Montreal's Earth Day rally, mixing red and green, merging demands for a freeze on tuition with respect for the earth and those most impacted by climate change. Let the meeting not remain accidental, but deepen and flourish.

Our country has always been divided by solitudes of nation, religion, and language, but no two solitudes are as important to overcome today as this: the fight against an unjust economy and the fight against climate change.

It has never been more urgent to make the connection. The old mentality may have told us to fight our battles separately: Let environmentalists deal with the environment; let workers and students deal with the economy. But a new mentality tells us this is the same fight, because the crises of the climate and the economy have the same root: putting profits before people and the planet.

This must be our generation's quiet awakening.

Culture, Conflict and Ecology: The Commons in History

By Derek Wall
April 21, 2012

This is the first section of my new book, if any of you would like to see the first draft of the whole thing email me. I have also been lucky enough to spend some time with Elinor Ostrom who won a Nobel Prize for economics for her work on the commons. 

While she is not an ecosocialist and in fact comes from a Hayekian background, she is passionate about commons and support for indigenous and a very open person willing to listen to others (the interview with her will be published in Green World in the autumn).

The book is from an environmental history perspective. 

Chapter One: Commons Ecology. 

What we need to question is bricks, concrete, glass, our table manners, our utensils, our tools, the way we spend our time, our rhythms. To question that which seems to have ceased forever to astonish us. We live, true, we breathe, true; we walk, we go downstairs, we sit at a table in order to eat, we lie down on a bed on order to sleep. How? Where? When? Why? Describe your street. Describe another. Compare.Georges Perec (L'Infra-ordinaire) from Bellos 2010: 521-522. London and its environs would have no parks today if commoners had not asserted their rights, and as the nineteenth century drew on rights of recreation were more important than rights of pasture, and were defended vigilantly by the Commons Preservation Society. We owe to these premature ‘Greens’ such urban lungs as we have. More than that, if it had not been for the stubborn defence by Newbury commoners of their rights to the Greenham Common, where on earth could NATO have parked its Nukes (Thompson, 1993: 126).

Freedom Train Caravan

Victoria rises up against the tar sands, pipelines, tankers, capitalism and colonialism

By Joan.Russow 
Peace, Earth, Justice News
April 15, 2012

Hundreds attended the rally against pipelines and tankers. Victoria, April 15, 2012. Photo: Sandra Cuffe

Over 2000 people rallied at the Legislature and then walked to Centennial Square where there were panels and workshops. It was clear that this event is a beginning and foreshadowing of the solidarity resistance to come. There were passionate speeches from children from the Beaver Creek First Nations school, activists and elders in condemnation of the tar sands the pipe lines the tankers capitalism and colonialism.

Green Dreams: Eco-Comics, Then and Now

Text by Paul Buhle
Comics by Leonard Rifas, Seth Tobocman, and Sabrina Jones
Capitalism Nature Socialism
September 2009

Few readers, outside dedicated comic art fandom, are likely to know that ecologically oriented comics are more than a half-century old. EC, the company that introduced Mad Comics in 1952 (and turned it into Mad Magazine a few years later, amid the Congressional investigation of the comic industry), made its big money on the horror comics that parents often hated. The money on Crypt of Terror and such funded less lucrative but more socially oriented lines with some of the best comic art ever seen to that time (and, at least arguably, even now). Some of the best of the comics treated wars through history in realistic fashion, and in passing, offered readers a gaze at destroyed landscapes in Korea, among other places.

But Weird Fantasy and Incredible Science Fiction are especially interesting to us today because they so often dwelt—in lushly illustrated pages colored to perfection—in post-atomic war stories. In these 8-page sagas, humans struggle to gain some degree of dignity as they come across machines now incomprehensible, cities almost unrecognizable, and whole zones unlivable for plant or animal. A handful of the stories were adapted from the contemporary fiction of Ray Bradbury, who was especially keen on these themes.

In Search of a Broad, Coherent, Social Ecology

Better Worlds, Brighter Futures
April 15, 2012

Recently, someone immersed in Murray Bookchin‘s late-period works asked my definition of social ecology. This brought up an important issue. How is social ecology to be defined generally, taking the entirety of the field and its historical development into account? This implies a broad conception–one that recognizes both Bookchin’s open, early approaches, his later narrower variation, John P. Clark‘s contribution, as well as antecedent and contemporary influences that continue to be discovered.

Investigating the Social Roots of Ecological Crisis

Social ecology is concerned with the social roots and implications of ecological dislocation. Broadly speaking, this interdisciplinary field begins with the scientific fact of ecological crisis, seeking to overcome this crisis through an understanding of its origin(s) within human society. Because this social and scientific exploration seeks to get “to the root” of this problem through an analysis of existing, yet mutable, social institutions, values, and relationships, it is considered one of the three core radical ecological philosophies (along with deep ecology and ecofeminism).