tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-81711196699881583552024-03-12T22:55:07.422-06:00ecosocialism canadaNext Year Countryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08057931166900219143noreply@blogger.comBlogger1305125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8171119669988158355.post-7742300426268266532014-02-14T07:55:00.000-06:002015-06-26T16:26:24.935-06:00We have moved!<h2>
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<b><span style="font-size: large;">The new Ecosocialism Canada website is<br /><a href="http://ecosocialism.ca/">http://ecosocialism.ca</a></span></b><br />
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<b>No new posts will appear here, but the archive will remain online, in memory of Doug Taylor</b><br />
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<b><a href="http://ecosocialism.ca/">Click here for the new Ecosocialism Canada site</a></b><br />
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Climate and Capitalismhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04913344826857300241noreply@blogger.comCanada55.7765730186677 -101.601562530.254538518667697 -142.9101565 81.2986075186677 -60.2929685tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8171119669988158355.post-33472669248869416912014-01-21T12:03:00.000-06:002014-01-21T12:03:00.197-06:00Doug Taylor, 1956 - 2014Dear friends:<br />
I am sorry to have to report that Doug Taylor passed away on January 13, with his family at his bedside. I visited him just hours before he left us. He was in very good spirits, was not at all afraid of death, and still had his sense of humour and hearty laugh. We discussed books we liked. His funeral was held at Lakeview United Church on January 17. Doug spent his adult life doing everything he could to improve the lives of those less fortunate, to expand the democratic movement, and to try to save the environment from human destruction. We will surely miss him.<br />
John W. WarnockNext Year Countryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08057931166900219143noreply@blogger.com43tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8171119669988158355.post-65578552553586610802013-11-21T21:43:00.001-06:002013-11-21T21:43:36.925-06:00For a Left Strategy on Climate Change<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b><i>The Editors</i></b></span><div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><i><u><a href="http://monthlyreview.org/" target="_blank">Monthly Review</a></u></i></span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiaLwbTUqwyP0GCYuoMHsMPct3PxN3DKZYNaEbX9qKYDcvKtK5pBpuOLR_wws-gvn29odTzmi8xETcaR9BWHQphAGd4aDd6fuTQOYWmhadY4y0xX35VfRhFGq84DMJNZjVABiSgGMsOaiLC/s1600/mr-065-06-2013-10-133x200.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiaLwbTUqwyP0GCYuoMHsMPct3PxN3DKZYNaEbX9qKYDcvKtK5pBpuOLR_wws-gvn29odTzmi8xETcaR9BWHQphAGd4aDd6fuTQOYWmhadY4y0xX35VfRhFGq84DMJNZjVABiSgGMsOaiLC/s320/mr-065-06-2013-10-133x200.jpg" width="212" /></a>November<span style="font-family: inherit;"> 2013<br /><br />There is a pressing need for a coherent left strategy on climate change and in relation to the planetary environmental threat in general. The current scientific consensus indicates that we have at best several decades before the earth’s average surface temperature rises by 2°C, viewed as the point of irreversible climate change. This means that decisive action must be taken quickly if the world is not to go off the planetary climate cliff.<br /><br />We therefore read with considerable interest Christian Parenti’s article, “<a href="http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/a-radical-approach-to-the-climate-crisis">A Radical Approach to the Climate Crisis</a>” in the Summer 2013 issue of Dissent. Parenti’s main thesis is that since the time with which to address the climate change problem is so short, “it is this society and these [existing capitalist] institutions that must cut emissions. That means, in the short-term, realistic climate politics are reformist politics, even if they are conceived of as part of a longer-term anti-capitalist project of total economic re-organization.”</span></div>
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<br /><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a name='more'></a>Parenti follows this up with a discussion of what he considers the practical measures that might be pushed in the United States as part of rational climate politics, including: (1) a carbon tax; (2) barring that, the EPA using the Clean Air Act to impose a “de facto climate tax”; and (3) what he calls a “Big Green Buy” in which federal-government purchases of green technology and goods serve to create a market for alternative, low-carbon energies.<br /><br />In the final section of his article Parenti refers to Marx’s theory of metabolic rift and its application to our major environmental problems. He recognizes on this basis that capital accumulation may ultimately face insurmountable natural and social limits. Nevertheless, he insists that capitalism has been successful in the past in addressing “specific environmental crises” and that this will also likely be the case with respect to climate change. He concludes: “Anyone who thinks the existing economic system must be totally transformed before we can deal with the impending climate crisis, is delusional or in willful denial of the very clear findings of climate science”—which point to the immediacy and overwhelming seriousness of the present crisis.<br /><br />In our view Parenti’s argument here is partly correct (some limited reforms to slow climate change are conceivable in the system and should be pursued), partly incorrect (capitalism if allowed to operate according to its own logic does not offer a solution to the climate problem, but only a path to destruction), and the overall conclusion to which it leads is wrong (realistic climate politics are not reformist politics). Perhaps the best way to explain this is to counterpose what we think would be a more appropriate statement on the nature of a revolutionary strategy. It would read as follows: Anyone who thinks that it is conceivable to counter climate change (and the planetary environmental crisis as a whole) without opposing and in part superseding the logic of capital accumulation is in denial of the very clear findings of climate science and critical social science—which point to the immediacy and unprecedented scale of the present epochal crisis and thus the need for truly revolutionary social change.<br /><br />A revolutionary approach in this area is one that does not simply stop with whatever limited reforms are easily conceivable within the present system, but also: (1) seeks to accelerate the shift to a substantively equal and ecologically sustainable (global) society; (2) involves the mobilization of the entire population (and entire peoples), culturally, socially, and economically in the process of transformation; (3) prioritizes conservation of human and natural resources; (4) seeks to transform infrastructure and technology on a massive, democratically planned basis to meet ecological and social ends; and (5) opposes the logic of profit-making at every point along the line, substituting the alternative logic of people and the planet.</span></div>
Next Year Countryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08057931166900219143noreply@blogger.com13tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8171119669988158355.post-61440286455055122172013-11-14T17:31:00.001-06:002013-11-14T17:31:12.036-06:00Thompson, William Morris and Ecosocialist Tasks<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b>By Rafael Bernabe</b></span><div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><i><a href="http://www.solidarity-us.org/site/" target="_blank">Solidarity</a></i></span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjN6rTd5ZOYwa_CvzcRgSvRbPPC1PkXNToVy0y-bNFNIVqJARqStLG1YQoEjTbwoszKcqxDpgbJvsWAUjNhQVHT2v50cYaL8B03WqTgQKqHyp2bb-ZhN5-Lf8-JyzTSSICilrgrpVyy3cT9/s1600/clip_image003.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjN6rTd5ZOYwa_CvzcRgSvRbPPC1PkXNToVy0y-bNFNIVqJARqStLG1YQoEjTbwoszKcqxDpgbJvsWAUjNhQVHT2v50cYaL8B03WqTgQKqHyp2bb-ZhN5-Lf8-JyzTSSICilrgrpVyy3cT9/s400/clip_image003.jpg" width="286" /></a><span style="font-family: inherit;">Nov./Dec., 2013<br /><br />AS I LOOK back on E.P. Thompson’s work and the impact it had on me, his biography of William Morris — William Morris, From Romantic to Revolutionary (1977) — stands out brighter than all other texts, including his deservedly acclaimed The Formation of the English Working Class.<br /><br />It was the genius of William Morris to prefigure and express many concerns that today must be part of an ecosocialist synthesis, and it was the genius of E.P. Thompson to detect the originality and relevance of this 19th century poet, craftsman, designer, conservationist and socialist for the present.<br /><br />Ecosocialism today, as the term indicates, implies a fusion of ecological and anti-capitalist perspectives. To be truly meaningful, this encounter must be not a mere mechanical addition, but a transformative integration: neither partner can or should emerge the same from the encounter.<a name='more'></a><br /><br />Socialism can no longer be conceived as just the liberation of the existing productive forces from the fetters of capitalist social relations, nor an expansion of consumption as defined by them, nor as an acceleration of quantitative growth, but rather as a redefinition of quantitative into qualitative growth, and a remaking of existing forms of production and consumption, with the extraordinary scientific, technological and engineering effort that this implies.<br /><br />To what extent this is already present, either implicitly or explicitly, in the work of Marx himself is, of course, a point of considerable debate. I, for one, think it is present, in many cases explicitly.<br /><br />Think of the aspiration in the 1844 Manuscripts to a fuller life of the senses beyond the reduction by capitalism of all enjoyments to the joys of possession; of Marx’s description of the “rift” provoked by capitalism in the “metabolic interaction” of humanity with nature (and the duty of socialism to restore it); of the more specific denunciation of the destruction of the soil by capitalist agriculture; of the warning by Engels that lording over nature as a conquering army rules a subjugated people will bring unexpected and destructive consequences; and of the admonishment that no generation owns the planet and its resources but only holds them in trust for those that will follow, to mention just a few examples.<br /><br />The writings of John Bellamy Foster have explored this extensively. Yet it must be admitted that much of this lay buried in Marx’s work until the ecological movement came along. The fact that Foster and others have had to dedicate so much effort to unearth “Marx’s ecology” is an indication of this. But independently of where we stand on that debate, the practical conclusion stands: Marxism must insist that labor’s struggle against capital cannot but have an ecological dimension, without which it cannot claim to be the bearer of a full break with the exploitive and destructive consequences of capitalism.<br /><br />But this is a two-way street: The ecological movement needs to recognize that capital’s inherent tendency to enclose, commodify and consequently turn all aspects of nature within its reach into a source of private profit places it in irreparable contradiction with natural rhythms and cycles.<br /><br />Ecology speaks of material limits that we must take into account, but capitalist accumulation is limitless. This refers to fundamental longterm tendencies, beyond the daily misuses of the environment by capital in the pursuit of an extra ounce of profit.<br /><br />To the extent that the ecological movement fails to recognize this and to extract the logical anticapitalist conclusion, to that extent it turns its back not only on socialism but on the environment it seeks to protect. The destiny of the labor movement is as central to the future of ecologism as it is to the future of socialism.<br />William Morris’s Message<br /><br />Where does William Morris come into this picture? It was not the relations of exploitation at the center of capitalism that first fueled Morris’s indignation, but the base material surroundings it created: its “sordid, aimless, ugly, confusion” in which “the pleasure of the eye was gone from the world.”<br /><br />In his essay “How I became a socialist,” Morris proclaimed that “Apart from the desire to produce beautiful things, the leading passion of my life has been and is hatred of modern civilization…” Here, “civilization” refers not only to capitalist social relations but to many of the physical structures and formations erected by it: the extreme polarization of city and country, the degraded urban landscape, the shoddy individual buildings, the poisoning of water and air.<br /><br />The consummation of such a civilization would be “a counting-house on the top of a cinder-heap.” This aversion to the assault of industry on all the senses, on nature and on the past built environment fueled Morris’s attempts to protect or revive endangered skills (book printing, decorative arts) or structures (he founded the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings).<br /><br />Yet he went beyond this, to understand that behind this bulldozer “civilization” stood the basic tendencies of capitalist production. The “counting-house” at the top of the growing “cinder-heap” could only be dismantled by the collective hands of organized labor. He became a socialist militant.<br /><br />This is a reminder of the centrality of labor for all of those concerned with the environment in all its dimensions, and of the importance of environmental, urban, engineering and architectural concerns for those seeking to turn the labor movement into the agent of a radical social transformation.<br /><br />This in no way exhausts the wealth of Thompson’s William Morris. To include a personal reference: my work on the romantic anti-capitalist dimension of Puerto Rican literature is much indebted to Thompson’s discussion of the passage from Keats, to Ruskin and Carlyle (who shared Morris’s aversion to industrialism) to Morris’s own socialism, which differentiated him from them.*<br /><br />One can confidently say about Thompson’s recuperation of Morris what he would have said about Morris himself: we ignore it at our own expense.</span></div>
Next Year Countryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08057931166900219143noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8171119669988158355.post-36880698315105722052013-11-13T23:01:00.000-06:002013-11-13T23:01:56.292-06:00Canada reveals climate stance with praise for Australian carbon tax repeal<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b><i>Canada discourages other industrialised nations from following through on their own climate change commitments</i></b><br /><br /><a href="http://www.theguardian.com/profile/suzannegoldenberg">Suzanne Goldenberg</a> </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">US environment correspondent<br /><a href="http://www.theguardian.com/">theguardian.com</a>, </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Wednesday 13 November 2013</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /><img src="http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2013/7/10/1373435085703/2566ddf7-41cf-4467-8f56-a5c6e0ad97a8-460x276.jpeg" /><br /><i>A protester holds a placard during a rally in Sydney against carbon tax. Photograph: Greg Wood/AFP/Getty</i></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><i><br /></i></span><a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/canada" style="font-family: inherit;">Canada</a><span style="font-family: inherit;"> has dropped any remaining pretences of supporting global action on </span><a href="http://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-change" style="font-family: inherit;">climate change</a><span style="font-family: inherit;"> by urging other countries to follow </span><a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/australia" style="font-family: inherit;">Australia</a><span style="font-family: inherit;">'s example in gutting its climate plan.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: inherit;">In </span><a href="http://news.gc.ca/web/article-eng.do?mthd=tp&crtr.page=1&nid=790619&crtr.tp1D=4" style="font-family: inherit;">a formal statement</a><span style="font-family: inherit;">, the Canadian government said it "applauds" </span><a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/nov/13/abbott-begins-dismantling-carbon-tax" style="font-family: inherit;">the move by Australia this week to repeal a carbon tax on the country's 300 biggest polluters</a><span style="font-family: inherit;">.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: inherit;">"Canada applauds the decision by prime minister Abbott to introduce legislation to repeal Australia's carbon tax. The Australian prime minister's decision will be noticed around the world and sends an important message," the formal statement from Paul Calandra, parliamentary secretary to Canada's prime minister, Stephen Harper, said.</span><br />
<a name='more'></a><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /><br />The <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2011/dec/13/canada-withdrawal-kyoto-protocol">Harper government withdrew from the Kyoto protocol on climate change in 2011</a>and Canada has failed to meet its own international emissions to cut greenhouse gas emissions – almost entirely because of its mining of the carbon-heavy Alberta tar sands.<br /><br />But the praise for Australia marked the first time Canada has actively sought to discourage other industrialised countries from following through on their own climate change commitments.<br /><br />On a more combative note, Canada on Wednesday went on the attack against the European Union's move to class carbon-heavy Alberta crude as a dirty fuel,<a href="http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/nov/13/canada-attacks-eu-data-tar-sand-dirty"> labelling the finding as "unscientific"</a>.<br /><br />Calandra, in his statement congratulating Australia, went on to claim that Canada is reducing greenhouse gas emissions. But that claim was at odds with the latest finding from the government's own Environment Canada that the country would blow through its international climate commitments by the end of the decade.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: inherit;">Under Canada's current trajectory, emissions were projected to be 734 mega tonnes – or 122 megatonnes higher than Canada's target of 612 tonnes under the international accord the country agreed in 2009.</span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /><br />Canada had agreed at the time to align its climate plan with America's and cut emissions 17% from 2005 levels by 2020.<br /><br />But Environment Canada in its latest report projected that the country's greenhouse gas emissions by 2020 would amount to barely a 3% drop compared with the promised 17% cut.<br /><br />Greenhouse gas emissions from Bitumen production are expected to rise four-fold by the end of the decade, according to Environment Canada.<br /><br />Australia is the developed world's worst polluter per head of population, but Canada, under the Harper government, is close behind at 16.2 tonnes .</span></div>
Next Year Countryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08057931166900219143noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8171119669988158355.post-76055586313391946922013-11-12T20:59:00.000-06:002013-11-12T20:59:42.833-06:00Capitalism and the destruction of life on earth: Six theses on saving the humans<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b>By Richard Smith</b></span><div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="http://rwer.wordpress.com/2013/07/02/issue-no-64-of-real-world-economics-review/"><i>Real World Economics Review, Issue 64, July, 2013</i></a><br /><br /><b>‘Today, the world’s richest 1% own 40 percent of the world’s wealth. Tell me again where Karl Marx was wrong?’</b><br /><br /><a href="http://www.rogerannis.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/Smokestacks2.jpg"><img height="282" src="http://www.rogerannis.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/Smokestacks2-300x212.jpg" width="400" /></a></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">When, on May 10, 2013, scientists at Mauna Loa Observatory on the big island of Hawaii announced that global CO2 emissions had crossed a threshold at 400 parts per million for the first time in millions of years, a sense of dread spread around the world – not only among climate scientists.<br /><br />CO2 emissions have been relentlessly climbing since Charles David Keeling first set up his tracking station near the summit of Mauna Loa Observatory in 1958 to monitor average daily global CO2 levels. At that time, CO2 concentrations registered 315ppm. CO2 emissions and atmospheric concentrations have been climbing ever since and, as the records show, temperatures rises will follow. For all the climate summits, the promises of “voluntary restraint,” the carbon trading and carbon taxes, the growth of CO2 emissions and atmospheric concentrations has not just been relentless, it has been accelerating in what scientists have dubbed the “Keeling Curve.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b>Read more <i><u><a href="http://www.rogerannis.com/capitalism-and-the-destruction-of-life-on-earth-six-theses-on-saving-the-humans/" target="_blank">HERE</a></u></i>.</b></span></div>
Next Year Countryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08057931166900219143noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8171119669988158355.post-87238214281901727892013-11-12T20:52:00.000-06:002013-11-12T20:52:33.551-06:00As COP19 Gets Underway: Time for a Revolution to Save Ourselves from Fossil FuelBy <a href="http://sacsis.org.za/s/stories.php?iUser=7">Glenn Ashton</a><br />
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The South African Civil Society Information Service<br />
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12 Nov 2013</div>
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<a href="http://sacsis.org.za/s/story.php?s=1839"><img height="266" src="http://sacsis.org.za/a/image.php?i=2013/11/183944d19daafb5277391240e6f047308b32.jpg&min=2&w=300&h=300" width="400" /></a><br />
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<i>Picture credit: cuipo</i></div>
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This week the latest round of climate negotiations, the <a href="http://www.cop19.gov.pl/">19th Conference of the Parties (COP19)</a> is meeting in Warsaw Poland, to grapple with the stalled Climate Change Convention. At the opening of the conference Dr Alicia Illinga, a Filipina delegate highlighted how her country had already been hit by 22 typhoons this year. The devastating Typhoon Haiyan, the most powerful typhoon to have ever made landfall, hit the Philippines on the eve of the conference, causing over 10 000 fatalities and affecting up to 10 million people. Climate change <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/nov/11/typhoon-haiyan-climate-change">is implicated</a> in these events, despite ill-informed denials. Natural weather disaster costs are <a href="http://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/business/Natural_disasters_cost_insurers_$17_billion.html?cid">at record levels</a>. So why are we so slow to take action on climate change?</div>
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The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a collection of over 750 of the world’s brightest and best climatologists, oceanographers, chemists, physicists, mathematicians and other specialists have recently released their latest report after a rigorous international review process. This, the <a href="http://www.ipcc.ch/">Fifth Assessment Report</a>, conservative as it may be, provides some exceptionally sobering reading. These experts insist that previous assessments actually understated the extent of the problem and that the debate about human impact on our climate is essentially over.<br />
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As a consequence we face possibly the greatest crisis in our history, one we are responsible for creating and which we are capable of at least partially curing. This is the crisis of anthropogenic (human caused) climate change. Although we have been aware of it for more than 40 years we have achieved almost nothing to mitigate it. This is because we, and our leaders, have been intentionally misled by a barrage of disinformation from those who stand to lose the most from regulation of greenhouse gas emissions.<br />
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This disinformation is served up by a professional army of <a href="http://www.merchantsofdoubt.org/">merchants of doubt</a>, industry shills and ideologues who proclaim this extensive body of science to be unfounded. They even state that climate change does not exist. They abuse the legal concept of “audi alteram partem”, hearing the other side. They insist that the media gives equal consideration to both judge and murderer, in a crime where guilt has already been proven.<br />
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These contrarians are fantastically well resourced. Their profits are dependent on business as usual, burning oil, gas and coal. Their ecocidal, sociopathic opinions and half-truths – for they are certainly not facts - have disastrous implications for future generations of humans, along with our planetary health, if they are not exposed for what they are. Even basic research <a href="http://www.skepticalscience.com/oneliners.php">readily exposes their lies</a>.<br />
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The IPCC shows that greenhouse gasses have increased 40% over pre-industrial levels, to the highest levels for 800 000 years, by burning fossil fuels. The sea level has already risen over seven inches (190mm) in the past century and this rise is accelerating in tandem with unequivocal global shrinkage of ice and snow cover.<br />
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The contrarian perspective that global warming has halted, or is absent, fails to differentiate between weather and climate, the former short, the latter long term. The latest IPCC report clearly shows how each of the past three decades have been warmer than the previous; the 12 hottest years since accurate records have been recorded occurred within the last 15 years.<br />
Instead of looking at the big picture, contrarians cherry pick isolated data, such as an apparent slowing of terrestrial temperature increases since the late 1990’s. This ignores the fact that the oceans have absorbed most of the extra heat, particularly into their upper levels. 90% of planetary warming has been absorbed by our oceans, 60% of this into the upper 700 meters, the balance into deeper water.<br />
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Looked at the other way, only 10% of the impact of warming is apparent on land and in the atmosphere. Instead of being placated we should become more alarmed than ever at the extent to which global warming has been masked. Fact is, the overall level of oceanic warming is <a href="http://www.sciencemag.org/content/342/6158/617.short">unprecedented in the past 10 000 years</a>.<br />
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A further extremely worrying impact of increased atmospheric CO2 levels is how they have rapidly increased oceanic acidity. Our seas act as a sink, absorbing half of atmospheric carbon dioxide. Thus increased atmospheric CO2 levels<a href="http://globalchange.gov/HighResImages/18-Coasts-pg-151.jpg">increase oceanic acidity</a>.<br />
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This increased acidity has particularly serious implications for some of the most important creatures on earth, the microscopic plankton. Their calcium based skeletons cannot form, or are dissolved by acidity, killing them. Plankton is the foundation of the oceanic food chain. They are also responsible for around 20% of global oxygen production.<br />
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This is not a distant, imaginary problem. Oyster spat, microscopic young oysters <a href="http://e360.yale.edu/feature/northwest_oyster_die-offs_show_ocean_acidification_has_arrived/2466/">have already fallen victim</a>. Oyster farms are now growing spat in artificial ponds because of this problem. We don’t yet understand the full implications of increased oceanic acidification but they appear dire.<br />
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Climate change has profound consequences for all life on earth, not only humans. Life may continue even if people and other large species become extinct; after all life on earth has survived previous massive extinctions. The real tragedy is that we, as a sentient species, are capable of preventing a series of potentially catastrophic events which will render further debate pointless, except to decide whether the earth is to warm 2 or 7 degrees by 2100. The former may be partially manageable; the latter will be <a href="http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2012/10/14/1009121/science-of-global-warming-impacts-guide/">utterly catastrophic</a>.<br />
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While the impending climate crisis is temporarily attenuated by the massive natural sink of our oceans, this cannot last. Tipping points have been reached. We must ponder whether we can continue to permit to have global policies that dictate our collective survival strategies, set by selfish vested interests like the fossil fuel lobby which holds our political system to ransom. Unprecedented wealth has become increasingly concentrated in the hands of an extremely limited number of individuals, exacerbating inequality. The rich profit from the destruction of our natural support system while the poor will continue to carry the greatest burden.<br />
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One solution is to draft international laws defining and criminalising culpability for climate change. Those responsible for profiting from exacerbating climate change, or preventing solutions being implemented, must be held fiscally and individually responsible. Thus coal and oil company executives, along with their lobbyists and shareholders, must have their assets stripped so we can begin to deal with their mess.<br />
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If we do actually live in the responsible democratic system that we are told is better than all the rest, then we need to regain control from those who would destroy us all to satisfy their short term greed. If this requires a revolution, then it would be a revolution for the better. Enough time has been wasted attempting to reason with those who will not listen. Let the revolution begin.</div>
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<i><br />Ashton is a writer and researcher working in civil society. Some of his work can be viewed at <a href="http://www.ekogaia.org/">www.ekogaia.org</a>. </i></div>
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Next Year Countryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08057931166900219143noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8171119669988158355.post-58410104592218333462013-11-01T12:07:00.000-06:002013-11-01T12:07:26.058-06:00Naomi Klein: How science is telling us all to revolt<i><b>Is our relentless quest for economic growth killing the planet? Climate scientists have seen the data – and they are coming to some incendiary conclusions.</b></i><div>
<br /><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span class="submitted" style="background-color: white;"><span class="link_col"><b>By <a href="http://www.newstatesman.com/writers/naomi_klein" style="color: black;" title="View author posts.">Naomi Klein</a> </b></span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span class="submitted" style="background-color: white;"><span class="link_col"><span class="published_date"><i><a href="http://www.newstatesman.com/" target="_blank">NewStatesman</a></i></span></span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span class="submitted" style="background-color: white;"><span class="link_col"><span class="published_date">29 October 2013 </span></span></span><span style="background-color: white;"></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Is our relentless quest for economic growth killing the planet? Climate scientists have seen the data – and they are coming to some incendiary conclusions.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Waste land: large-scale irrigation strips nutrients from the soil, scars the landscape and could alter climatic conditions beyond repair. Image: Edward Burtynsky, courtesy Nicholas Metivier Gallery, Toronto/ Flowers, London, Pivot Irrigation #11 High Plains, Texas Panhandle, USA (2011)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">In December 2012, a pink-haired complex systems researcher named Brad Werner made his way through the throng of 24,000 earth and space scientists at the Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union, held annually in San Francisco. This year’s conference had some big-name participants, from Ed Stone of Nasa’s Voyager project, explaining a new milestone on the path to interstellar space, to the film-maker James Cameron, discussing his adventures in deep-sea submersibles.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">But it was Werner’s own session that was attracting much of the buzz. It was titled “Is Earth F**ked?” (full title: “Is Earth F**ked? Dynamical Futility of Global Environmental Management and Possibilities for Sustainability via Direct Action Activism”).</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Standing at the front of the conference room, the geophysicist from the University of California, San Diego walked the crowd through the advanced computer model he was using to answer that question. He talked about system boundaries, perturbations, dissipation, attractors, bifurcations and a whole bunch of other stuff largely incomprehensible to those of us uninitiated in complex systems theory. But the bottom line was clear enough: global capitalism has made the depletion of resources so rapid, convenient and barrier-free that “earth-human systems” are becoming dangerously unstable in response. When pressed by a journalist for a clear answer on the “are we f**ked” question, Werner set the jargon aside and replied, “More or less.”</span><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span><span class="print-footnote" style="font-family: inherit;">[2]</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">There was one dynamic in the model, however, that offered some hope. Werner termed it “resistance” – movements of “people or groups of people” who “adopt a certain set of dynamics that does not fit within the capitalist culture”. According to the abstract for his presentation, this includes “environmental direct action, resistance taken from outside the dominant culture, as in protests, blockades and sabotage by indigenous peoples, workers, anarchists and other activist groups”.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Serious scientific gatherings don’t usually feature calls for mass political resistance, much less direct action and sabotage. But then again, Werner wasn’t exactly calling for those things. He was merely observing that mass uprisings of people – along the lines of the abolition movement, the civil rights movement or Occupy Wall Street – represent the likeliest source of “friction” to slow down an economic machine that is careening out of control. We know that past social movements have “had tremendous influence on . . . how the dominant culture evolved”, he pointed out. So it stands to reason that, “if we’re thinking about the future of the earth, and the future of our coupling to the environment, we have to include resistance as part of that dynamics”. And that, Werner argued, is not a matter of opinion, but “really a geophysics problem”.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Plenty of scientists have been moved by their research findings to take action in the streets. Physicists, astronomers, medical doctors and biologists have been at the forefront of movements against nuclear weapons, nuclear power, war, chemical contamination and creationism. And in November 2012, <em>Nature </em>published a commentary by the financier and environmental philanthropist Jeremy Grantham urging scientists to join this tradition and “be arrested if necessary”, because climate change “is not only the crisis of your lives – it is also the crisis of our species’ existence”.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Some scientists need no convincing. The godfather of modern climate science, James Hansen, is a formidable activist, having been arrested some half-dozen times for resisting mountain-top removal coal mining and tar sands pipelines (he even left his job at Nasa this year in part to have more time for campaigning). Two years ago, when I was arrested outside the White House at a mass action against the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline, one of the 166 people in cuffs that day was a glaciologist named Jason Box, a world-renowned expert on Greenland’s melting ice sheet.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"> “I couldn’t maintain my self-respect if I didn’t go,” Box said at the time, adding that “just voting doesn’t seem to be enough in this case. I need to be a citizen also.”</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">This is laudable, but what Werner is doing with his modelling is different. He isn’t saying that his research drove him to take action to stop a particular policy; he is saying that his research shows that our entire economic paradigm is a threat to ecological stability. And indeed that challenging this economic paradigm – through mass-movement counter-pressure – is humanity’s best shot at avoiding catastrophe.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">That’s heavy stuff. But he’s not alone. Werner is part of a small but increasingly influential group of scientists whose research into the destabilisation of natural systems – particularly the climate system – is leading them to similarly transformative, even revolutionary, conclusions. And for any closet revolutionary who has ever dreamed of overthrowing the present economic order in favour of one a little less likely to cause Italian pensioners to hang themselves in their homes, this work should be of particular interest. Because it makes the ditching of that cruel system in favour of something new (and perhaps, with lots of work, better) no longer a matter of mere ideological preference but rather one of species-wide existential necessity.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Leading the pack of these new scientific revolutionaries is one of Britain’s top climate experts, Kevin Anderson, the deputy director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, which has quickly established itself as one of the UK’s premier climate research institutions. Addressing everyone from the Department for International Development to Manchester City Council, Anderson has spent more than a decade patiently translating the implications of the latest climate science to politicians, economists and campaigners. In clear and understandable language, he lays out a rigorous road map for emissions reduction, one that provides a decent shot at keeping global temperature rise below 2° Celsius, a target that most governments have determined would stave off catastrophe.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">But in recent years Anderson’s papers and slide shows have become more alarming. Under titles such as “Climate Change: Going Beyond Dangerous . . . Brutal Numbers and Tenuous Hope”, he points out that the chances of staying within anything like safe temperature levels are diminishing fast.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">With his colleague Alice Bows, a climate mitigation expert at the Tyndall Centre, Anderson points out that we have lost so much time to political stalling and weak climate policies – all while global consumption (and emissions) ballooned – that we are now facing cuts so drastic that they challenge the fundamental logic of prioritising GDP growth above all else.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Anderson and Bows inform us that the often-cited long-term mitigation target – an 80 per cent emissions cut below 1990 levels by 2050 – has been selected purely for reasons of political expediency and has “no scientific basis”. That’s because climate impacts come not just from what we emit today and tomorrow, but from the cumulative emissions that build up in the atmosphere over time. And they warn that by focusing on targets three and a half decades into the future – rather than on what we can do to cut carbon sharply and immediately – there is a serious risk that we will allow our emissions to continue to soar for years to come, thereby blowing through far too much of our 2° “carbon budget” and putting ourselves in an impossible position later in the century.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Which is why Anderson and Bows argue that, if the governments of developed countries are serious about hitting the agreed upon international target of keeping warming below 2° Celsius, and if reductions are to respect any kind of equity principle (basically that the countries that have been spewing carbon for the better part of two centuries need to cut before the countries where more than a billion people still don’t have electricity), then the reductions need to be a lot deeper, and they need to come a lot sooner.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">To have even a 50/50 chance of hitting the 2° target (which, they and many others warn, already involves facing an array of hugely damaging climate impacts), the industrialised countries need to start cutting their greenhouse-gas emissions by something like 10 per cent a year – and they need to start right now. But Anderson and Bows go further, pointing out that this target cannot be met with the array of modest carbon pricing or green-tech solutions usually advocated by big green groups. These measures will certainly help, to be sure, but they are simply not enough: a 10 per cent drop in emissions, year after year, is virtually unprecedented since we started powering our economies with coal. In fact, cuts above 1 per cent per year “have historically been associated only with economic recession or upheaval”, as the economist Nicholas Stern put it in his 2006 report for the British government.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"> Even after the Soviet Union collapsed, reductions of this duration and depth did not happen (the former Soviet countries experienced average annual reductions of roughly 5 per cent over a period of ten years). They did not happen after Wall Street crashed in 2008 (wealthy countries experienced about a 7 per cent drop between 2008 and 2009, but their CO2 emissions rebounded with gusto in 2010 and emissions in China and India had continued to rise). Only in the immediate aftermath of the great market crash of 1929 did the United States, for instance, see emissions drop for several consecutive years by more than 10 per cent annually, according to historical data from the Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Centre. But that was the worst economic crisis of modern times.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">If we are to avoid that kind of carnage while meeting our science-based emissions targets, carbon reduction must be managed carefully through what Anderson and Bows describe as “radical and immediate de-growth strategies in the US, EU and other wealthy nations”. Which is fine, except that we happen to have an economic system that fetishises GDP growth above all else, regardless of the human or ecological consequences, and in which the neoliberal political class has utterly abdicated its responsibility to manage anything (since the market is the invisible genius to which everything must be entrusted).</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">So what Anderson and Bows are really saying is that there is still time to avoid catastrophic warming, but not within the rules of capitalism as they are currently constructed. Which may be the best argument we have ever had for changing those rules.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">In a 2012 essay that appeared in the influential scientific journal <em>Nature Climate Change</em>, Anderson and Bows laid down something of a gauntlet, accusing many of their fellow scientists of failing to come clean about the kind of changes that climate change demands of humanity. On this it is worth quoting the pair at length:</span><br />
<em><span style="font-family: inherit;"> . . . in developing emission scenarios scientists repeatedly and severely underplay the implications of their analyses. When it comes to avoiding a 2°C rise, “impossible” is translated into “difficult but doable”, whereas “urgent and radical” emerge as “challenging” – all to appease the god of economics (or, more precisely, finance). For example, to avoid exceeding the maximum rate of emission reduction dictated by economists, “impossibly” early peaks in emissions are assumed, together with naive notions about “big” engineering and the deployment rates of low-carbon infrastructure. More disturbingly, as emissions budgets dwindle, so geoengineering is increasingly proposed to ensure that the diktat of economists remains unquestioned.</span></em><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">In other words, in order to appear reasonable within neoliberal economic circles, scientists have been dramatically soft-peddling the implications of their research. By August 2013, Anderson was willing to be even more blunt, writing that the boat had sailed on gradual change. “Perhaps at the time of the 1992 Earth Summit, or even at the turn of the millennium, 2°C levels of mitigation could have been achieved through significant<em> evolutionary changes <strong>within</strong> the political and economic hegemony</em>. But climate change is a cumulative issue! Now, in 2013, we in high-emitting (post-)industrial nations face a very different prospect. Our ongoing and collective carbon profligacy has squandered any opportunity for the ‘evolutionary change’ afforded by our earlier (and larger) 2°C carbon budget. Today, after two decades of bluff and lies, the remaining 2°C budget demands <em>revolutionary change <strong>to </strong>the political and economic hegemony” (his emphasis).</em></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">We probably shouldn’t be surprised that some climate scientists are a little spooked by the radical implications of even their own research. Most of them were just quietly doing their work measuring ice cores, running global climate models and studying ocean acidification, only to discover, as the Australian climate expert and author Clive Hamilton puts it, that they “were unwittingly destabilising the political and social order”.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">But there are many people who are well aware of the revolutionary nature of climate science. It’s why some of the governments that decided to chuck their climate commitments in favour of digging up more carbon have had to find ever more thuggish ways to silence and intimidate their nations’ scientists. In Britain, this strategy is becoming more overt, with Ian Boyd, the chief scientific adviser at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, writing recently that scientists should avoid “suggesting that policies are either right or wrong” and should express their views “by working with embedded advisers (such as myself), and by being the voice of reason, rather than dissent, in the public arena”.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">If you want to know where this leads, check out what’s happening in Canada, where I live. The Conservative government of Stephen Harper has done such an effective job of gagging scientists and shutting down critical research projects that, in July 2012, a couple thousand scientists and supporters held a mock-funeral on Parliament Hill in Ottawa, mourning “the death of evidence”. Their placards said, “No Science, No Evidence, No Truth”.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">But the truth is getting out anyway. The fact that the business-as-usual pursuit of profits and growth is destabilising life on earth is no longer something we need to read about in scientific journals. The early signs are unfolding before our eyes. And increasing numbers of us are responding accordingly: blockading fracking activity in Balcombe; interfering with Arctic drilling preparations in Russian waters (at tremendous personal cost); taking tar sands operators to court for violating indigenous sovereignty; and countless other acts of resistance large and small. In Brad Werner’s computer model, this is the “friction” needed to slow down the forces of destabilisation; the great climate campaigner Bill McKibben calls it the “antibodies” rising up to fight the planet’s “spiking fever”.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">It’s not a revolution, but it’s a start. And it might just buy us enough time to figure out a way to live on this planet that is distinctly less f**ked.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><em>Naomi Klein, the author of “The Shock Doctrine” and “No Logo”, is working on a book and a film about the revolutionary power of climate change. </em><em>You call follow her on twitter <a href="https://twitter.com/NaomiAKlein" style="color: black;">@naomiaklein</a> <span class="print-footnote">[3]</span></em></span></div>
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Next Year Countryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08057931166900219143noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8171119669988158355.post-20530442008547954872013-10-29T15:51:00.001-06:002013-10-29T15:51:49.506-06:00The Epochal Crisis: Converging economic and ecological contradictions<div class="entry-title" style="background-color: #eff1f1; border: none; color: #444444; font-size: 25px; line-height: 30px; margin-bottom: 10px; outline: none; padding: 0px; text-shadow: rgb(204, 204, 204) 1px 1px 1px; vertical-align: baseline;">
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.4em;">By John Bellamy Foster, </span></span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.4em;">Monthly Review, </span></span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.4em;">October 2013</span></span></h2>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEivSYDQPViPhiB7O_HAfkAEvJrOz8mgZ4CRKHLEzF0cWOPRLcFFVJNV66WUOhjs_pRZmqg34ntoKYnz6Vu3DJNT9X8Lup74XCzh22IgBMJ9mGVO9JfzZg978LXAh4IS2iyZpcahZoq1bnrs/s1600/mr-065-06-2013-09-133x200.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEivSYDQPViPhiB7O_HAfkAEvJrOz8mgZ4CRKHLEzF0cWOPRLcFFVJNV66WUOhjs_pRZmqg34ntoKYnz6Vu3DJNT9X8Lup74XCzh22IgBMJ9mGVO9JfzZg978LXAh4IS2iyZpcahZoq1bnrs/s1600/mr-065-06-2013-09-133x200.jpg" /></a><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.4em;">It is an indication of the sheer enormity of the historical challenge confronting humanity in our time that the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, sometimes now called the Second Great Depression, is overshadowed by the larger threat of planetary catastrophe, raising the question of the long-term survival of innumerable species—including our own.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.4em;">An urgent necessity for the world today is therefore to develop an understanding of the interconnections between the deepening impasse of the capitalist economy and the rapidly accelerating ecological threat—itself a by-product of capitalist development.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.4em;">Read more <b><i><u><a href="http://monthlyreview.org/2013/10/01/epochal-crisis" target="_blank">HERE</a></u></i></b>.</span></span></div>
Next Year Countryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08057931166900219143noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8171119669988158355.post-40811569893158287862013-10-28T21:05:00.001-06:002013-10-28T21:12:26.567-06:00MEJA Declaration 2013MEJA Website <u><b><i><a href="http://motherearthjusticeadvocates.com/" target="_blank">HERE</a></i></b></u>, Facebook page <b><i><u><a href="https://www.facebook.com/groups/158222590888992/" target="_blank">HERE</a></u></i></b>.
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<script async="true" src="//e.issuu.com/embed.js" type="text/javascript"></script>Next Year Countryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08057931166900219143noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8171119669988158355.post-81131742920769735192013-04-28T20:22:00.002-06:002013-04-28T20:22:46.782-06:00What Would an “Eco-Socialist” Politics Look Like?<br />
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<a href="http://d3n8a8pro7vhmx.cloudfront.net/dsausa/pages/380/attachments/original/1366382763/EcolRiftCover_(2).jpg?1366382763" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><br /></a><i style="color: #0c343d; font-size: xx-large;">Thoughts on The Ecological Rift: Capitalism’s War on the Earth by John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark and Richard York</i><br /><br /><b>By Andy Feeney </b><br /><div>
<i><a href="http://www.dsausa.org/" target="_blank">Democratic Socialists of America</a></i></div>
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As many Americans prepare to observe Earth Day this year, democratic socialists who are paying attention might want to contemplate two possibly disagreeable questions.<br /><br />The first is: what if anything can we contribute to the understanding of climate change and other urgent environmental problems that countless green activists haven’t already discovered themselves – and long before us? The second is: what unique contribution can socialists make – if any – toward fixing what’s wrong?<br /><br />When around 17 million Americans attended the first Earth Day events some 43 years ago, an easy answer to both questions was: “not much.”<a name='more'></a><br />With some exceptions, socialists and others on the U.S. left gave environmental issues little heed, and some in fact denounced pollution concerns as “petit bourgeois” compared to, say, the urgency of halting the Vietnam War or combating police brutality towards black youth in the cities.<br /><br />Also, with a few exceptions, most leaders of the U.S. environmental movement in 1970 were lukewarm or antagonistic to socialism. In fact some green critics charged – with some justification -- that the style of “socialism” embodied by the old Soviet bloc was a worse environmental nightmare than western capitalism. <br /><br />The 1970s incubated radical and indeed “revolutionary” movements for change, but most leftists charged – with some justification – that the style of “socialism” embodied by the old Soviet bloc was a worse environmental nightmare than western capitalism. <br /><br />Socialism in western Social Democratic guise, the critics further noted, seemed addicted to what leading green thinkers considered ecologically ruinous forms of economic growth. And many critics argued that socialism’s environmental flaws were hardly accidental, but instead rooted in Marx’s radically mistaken loyalty to a “labor standard of value” – although both the critics of the “labor theory” and some of its self-styled Marxist defenders were often rather vague on what exactly it meant.<br /><br />For these and other reasons, including disputes over the legacy of population theorist Thomas Malthus and the mainstream environmental lobby’s understandable search for political respectability in Washington, open cooperation between American environmentalists and American socialists was rare in 1970. It continues to be extremely rare today, although eco-anarchist and eco-feminist ideas seem to have flourished in the U.S., while new movements combining green and socialist perspectives have emerged in other societies.<br /><br />Despite this problematic history, a variety of socialists have struggled for the past generation to address the global environmental challenge, both politically and theoretically And on the occasion of Earth Day 2013, democratic socialists who haven’t followed their debates too closely may want to familiarize ourselves with an increasingly impressive green socialist literature.<br /><br />One theoretically interesting, but sometimes frustrating, place to start our reading is a recent book from Monthly Review Press, The Ecological Rift: Capitalism’s War on the Earth. Coauthored by John Bellamy Foster, current editor of Monthly Review magazine, and two fellow environmental sociologists, Brett Clark and Richard York, Ecological Rift is arguably a bit too ambitious in its scope.<br /><br />Addressing climate activists as well as socialists, taking sides in complex academic debates within both environmental sociology and biological ecology, and striving to integrate Marx’s intellectual legacy with recent environmental reports by global scientific bodies, this book sprawls at times. Several of its chapters (closely based on previously published journal articles) also are somewhat repetitive. It’s not a book that most people will read in one sitting, or in two.<br /><br />A major strength of Ecological Rift, however, is that it rescues Marx’s reputation from misunderstandings about the labor theory of value and in fact demonstrates how Marx’s acceptance of Adam Smith’s earlier distinction between the “exchange values” – monetary values – of commodities and their physical “use values” helps to explain why capitalist societies are chronically driven to plunder the planet, for nothing more solid than mere money.<br /><br />The authors also employ Marxist economics to explain how the compulsion to “accumulate” capital, by repeatedly investing money to generate profits, then reinvesting the proceeds in the search for even higher profits, drives capitalist economic systems to expand beyond all conceivable social and natural boundaries – towards long-term ecological ruin.<br /><br />A third major environmental flaw in capitalism, as the book’s title suggests, is the geographical “rift” it has historically made in natural ecological processes, notably the circulation of nutrients between human civilization and the soil. <br /><br />As famed German chemist Justus von Liebig observed in the 1850s and as Marx noted afterwards in Capital, early industrial capitalism, by uprooting rural peasants and converting them into a landless “proletariat” in large industrial cities where they depended on food imported from the countryside, broke the traditional pattern of nutrients being returned to their places of origin through human excretion. <br /><br />Capitalist agriculture instead “robbed the soil” by extracting minerals like nitrogen, phosphorous and calcium from place A and transporting them long distances to city B, von Liebig and Marx note. There they eventually reentered the environment in the form of water pollution – thus perpetuating environmental destruction at both ends of the food chain.<br /><br />The development of a huge artificial fertilizer industry since Marx’s day means today agribusiness doesn’t destroy soil productivity nearly as fast as it once did, but severe pollution of lakes, rivers and even “dead spots” in the ocean from excessive fertilizer runoff has become a global problem, if not a crisis. And this “ecological rift” created by agribusiness seems likely to worsen as global capitalism ships foodstuffs increasingly long distances from the growers to the ultimate consumers.<br /><br />Unfortunately the global “rift” in nutrient recycling and the crisis in global emissions of anthropogenic greenhouse gases represent just two out of 11 different ways in which today’s civilization is pressing dangerously past key environmental boundaries, the authors report. The acidification of the oceans from excessive CO2 levels in the air, increasing extinction rates leading to global losses in biodiversity, excessive levels of freshwater use and the conversion of natural landscapes to other uses are some of the other effects of our capitalist global economy and its relentless expansionary drives.<br /><br />Yet many existing and proposed environmental reforms aimed at curbing the global crisis are almost certain, because of the laws of capitalist growth and accumulation, to make it worse, according to The Ecological Rift.<br /><br />The authors at the end of this long book then go on to outline the kind of eco-socialist revolution that they believe is ultimately necessary to stop the damage, through the “associated producers” (to quote Marx’s words in Capital Vol. 3) governing “the human metabolism with nature in a rational way, bringing it under their collective control … accomplishing it with the least expenditure of energy and in conditions most worthy and appropriate for their human nature.”<br /><br />The strategy by which Foster, Clark and York believe an “ecological proletariat” can accomplish this revolutionary goal is too complex (and in places fragmentary) to summarize easily here and is likely to strike at least some DSA members as unsatisfactory. The book suggests, for example, that Asian peasants with Maoist politics and South American followers of Hugo Chavez, Evo Morales of Bolivia and Rafael Correa of Ecuador are likely to be more pivotal to eco-socialist transformation than European-style social democrats. <br /><br />Whether or not socialist history – including the checkered history of Leninism – truly justifies this focus on more Third World revolt is debatable. In any event, it’s to be hoped that democratic socialists will find some ways to make a global eco-transformation attractive to unionized US workers as well, even including some older white men, or the book’s vision of eco-socialist revolution could be a little too late in arriving to avert global disasters. <br /><br />Yet regardless of whether all socialists agree with each detail in The Ecological Rift, the book represents a bold advance in progressive attempts to grapple with the theoretical causes as well as practical consequences of global environmental crisis. It will be good if DSA members can read it and learn from it in that light.<br /><br /><i>Andy Feeney is a member of the Metro Washington DC Chapter of DSA.</i></div>
Next Year Countryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08057931166900219143noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8171119669988158355.post-9816030420166847592013-04-23T23:03:00.000-06:002013-04-23T23:05:01.920-06:00Eco-Feminism for Another Possible World<i><span style="color: #274e13; font-size: x-large;">A rich exchange is required between ecology and feminism</span></i><br />
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<b><i><u><a href="http://www.pressegauche.org/index.php" target="_blank">Presse-Toi A' Gauche</a></u></i></b><br />
April 23, 2013<br />
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<i>Puleo Alicia García Doctor of Philosophy at the University Complutense of Madrid, Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University and Board Member of the Chair of Gender Studies at the University of Valladolid. She recently published "Eco-feminism for another possible world", Madrid, Cátedra, 2011.</i><br />
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<b>Juan Tortosa - </b>What is eco-feminism?<br />
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<b>Alicia García Puleo </b>- I understand that as the encounter between feminist consciousness, environmental, animal rights and peace in the twenty-first century, when it becomes necessary to revise our understanding of the place of humanity in our land.Eco-feminism is not only the conservation of endangered species. Eco-feminism combines the concern for justice for the human social ecology. I must, however, emphasize that I answer the question from my proposal eco-feminist. But there are different ways of thinking about eco-feminism, for example, some do not care about the "other animals."<br />
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That everyone shares is the concern for environmental issues that affect mostly women. We women are biologically and hormonally vulnerable to toxic chemicals currently in use, and we are concerned both as consumers as producers.<br />
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For example, farmers and even women who live in nearby areas of crops, they are highly exposed to herbicides and pesticides in these areas. Toxic chemicals used in farming are endocrine disruptors, chemicals similar to estrogen, can produce specific female pathologies. Obviously, this does not mean that men are immune to chemical attack. But the multiple chemical sensitivity syndrome affects especially women and many studies confirm that the increase of breast cancer in recent decades is due to exposure to toxic agricultural, dioxins released into the environment by the furnaces of incineration, synthetic resin paints, etc..<br />
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On the other hand, as already pointed Vandana Shiva, the situation of rural women and the poor called "Third World" has worsened with the "bad development". The Green Revolution (not "green" in an ecological sense, because this name was given to discuss the intensification of industrial production of monocultures) destroyed the peasant family production. With the globalization of capitalism, was converted large wild areas. One reason for the birth of eco-feminism in the South is just the large decline in the quality of life for millions of women who now have to walk many kilometers to find water or wood for their homes because their land is devoted to the global market. The mega mining or destruction of land by the transgenic soybean require from human and destroy "non-human". Stocking water, land and air is the new and latest form of colonization. Most monstrous and most complete we've ever seen. Eco-feminism is a form of resistance against domination, lust and limitless fantasy of omnipotence that makes a human being totally different and detached from nature.<br />
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<b>What are the contributions of eco-feminism feminism and ecology?</b><br />
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Feminism is enriched by the environmental sensitivity and understanding of the serious ecological crisis we are going through. It also opens doors to the critique of extreme anthropocentrism which sees human beings as worthy of moral consideration. It helps to see an ecological dimension exists in some problems plaguing the female group, as in solutions.Feminism has always been open to new theories and themes. It is not surprising that now opens to ecology.<br />
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Ecology wins both because key analytical feminism finds useful and equality claims make it more attractive for women. One of the fears aroused by the ecological discourse among women, is to see their poor living conditions still péjorées. Ecology must be clear and reflect the rights of women and should be ready to work against sexism and androcentric.<br />
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Finally, I would note that there are similarities between what has been called "ecological citizenship" as a desirable form of living in the world and the "ethics of care" studied by feminist theory in recent years. Both are models of cooperation, responsibility, and both offer the abandonment of the selfish and the tyranny of market logic.<br />
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<b>You support an eco-feminism Illustration. What is it?.</b><br />
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I spoke of "critical eco-feminism" or shown to define my theoretical position. This involves a review of the legacy of the Enlightenment (Enlightenment), which distinguishes between what is needed to turn and what to keep. For example, we can not deny human rights, the triad of liberty, equality and fraternity are the source of emancipation movements as socialism, anarchism, feminism or consideration of animals "non-human" in the Western world.<br />
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We try to apply critical thinking shown in Illustration even without coming to erosion. The illustration has a dual heritage, as evidenced by denouncing feminism forms of fraternal patriarchy that arise with the bourgeois revolutions. Or, for example, the practices of domination over nature.<br />
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<b>Eco-feminism that you defend and one defend women in the south have in common, or eco-feminism in Illustration speaks only women in the North?</b><br />
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Of course the critical eco-feminism that I support has in common with eco-feminism in the South. Indeed, the Women's Manifesto for Food Sovereignty (Nyeleni Mali, 2007) seems to me a text completely in line with our ideas. For example: "Signing up our struggle for equality between the sexes, we no longer want or suffer the oppression of traditional societies, or those of modern societies, or those of the market. We want to take this opportunity to leave behind all the gender bias and to develop a new vision of the world based on the principles of respect, equality, justice, solidarity, peace and freedom. "They recognize two types of oppression of women and express the need to fight against both. There is no mystification of the past, nor uncritical vision of "development" destructive. Eco-feminist North and South must be united in international solidarity to build the joint of another possible world.<br />
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<b>Why is there so much resistance in feminist sectors and social movements to appropriate it?</b><br />
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I think, for the majority, there is a lack of knowledge most recent constructivist currents. It identifies eco-feminism with a polarizer bi spirit equality without informing that there are other options. Many feminists believe that eco-feminism is synonymous with identification of women with nature and motherhood. For a long time I fight to show that this is not true.There is also the fear of the sacredness of this life, this could endanger the sexual and reproductive rights, especially the abortion. One of the critical areas of eco-feminism that I propose, is the recognition of the rights won with much effort by generations of women who fought for it. I'm not the only eco-feminist who has this. The same eco-feminist Latin American spiritualists Con-Spirando network are part of "Catholics for the right to decide."<br />
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<b>Is it possible for a man to defend eco-feminism?</b><br />
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Of course yes! Eco-feminism, as I present, if not a constructivist essentialist philosophical anthropological basis. We, men and women are individuals with social identities change over time and improve. A key point is the adjustment of attitudes and practices of care, widespread in the non-human world and its universality. Men and women, we are able to develop. This is why environmental education is needed, especially to fight against stereotypes disconnected manly feelings like empathy and compassion, destructive stereotypes in the history of hegemonic domination. Today there are many men who are critical of these models and want to change. Eco-feminism can be their choice!<br />
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<i>Interview: Juan TORTOSA, Committee for the Cancellation of Third World Debt (CADTM) and the Third World Commission of the Catholic Church (COTMEC-Geneva) 23.02.2012.</i><br />
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* Translation Ines Calstas.</div>
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Next Year Countryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08057931166900219143noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8171119669988158355.post-324494803582944102013-04-18T22:17:00.004-06:002013-04-18T22:18:20.195-06:00Calgary muzzles artists critical of tar sandsBY <a href="http://artthreat.net/author/rob-maguire/">ROB MAGUIRE</a><br />
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<i><u><a href="http://artthreat.net/" target="_blank">Art Threat</a></u></i></div>
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April 17, 2013</div>
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<i style="text-align: center;"> Eeny, Meeny, Miny by Bill Helin</i><br />
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<span style="font-size: x-large;">T</span>he <a href="http://www.raincoast.org/">Raincoast Conservation Foundation</a> had a permit from the City of Calgary to display their travelling art exhibition, <a href="http://www.raincoast.org/oil-free-coast/artists-for-an-oil-free-coast/">Artists for an Oil-Free Coast</a>, at city hall. However, once the show opened, a backlash from conservative politicians caused the city to revoke the permit, arguing the show was too “political” and violated municipal bylaws banning demonstrations inside the building.<br />
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Despite the show’s unambiguous title, the city claims they “weren’t aware there was a specific political agenda or cause associated with the art exhibit,” <a href="http://www.calgaryherald.com/news/calgary/City+pulls+permit+anti+pipeline+show/8251765/story.html">according to Sharon Purvis</a>, the city’s director with corporate properties and buildings.<br />
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While the city is allowing the work — largely comprised of landscapes and nature scenes — to stay up until Wednesday, they have banned exhibition organizers conducting media interviews or speaking about politics to the public.<br />
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In an interview with the Globe and Mail, renowned painted <a href="http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/anti-pipeline-art-exhibit-stirs-controversy-at-calgary-city-hall/article11299560/">Robert Bateman</a>, who contributed artwork to the show, welcomed the hostile reaction.<br />
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“I’m sympathetic to the councillors that want to ban it. They’re actually helping the cause of raising the profile of the show, which is OK, because otherwise the show might get ignored.”<br />
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More information about the Artists for an Oil-Free Coast, including future tour dates, can be found at the <a href="http://www.raincoast.org/oil-free-coast/artists-for-an-oil-free-coast/">Raincoast website</a>.</div>
Next Year Countryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08057931166900219143noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8171119669988158355.post-27976085951348564582013-04-18T22:10:00.000-06:002013-04-18T22:25:38.372-06:00Ecological Transition of the Economy: A Giant Step Beyond Capitalism<b><i><a href="http://www.pressegauche.org/index.php" target="_blank">Presse-Toi A' Gauche!</a></i></b><br />
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April 16, 2013</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg6yL0YI8hCmO3xO1TcTgVvHnjhkII1PkJmHdHvXBOhnJF5WK60IewJVBY1yt_Zmrb2epHPKQBupUaRjDDFDRU1qwywxpUWg7DOW7_hsH2hzP5K9gFPSsM2DeZjSSPEfGgc-fjW6hKRAV4-/s1600/macarons.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg6yL0YI8hCmO3xO1TcTgVvHnjhkII1PkJmHdHvXBOhnJF5WK60IewJVBY1yt_Zmrb2epHPKQBupUaRjDDFDRU1qwywxpUWg7DOW7_hsH2hzP5K9gFPSsM2DeZjSSPEfGgc-fjW6hKRAV4-/s320/macarons.jpg" width="320" /></a>(Google translation)<br />
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<i>Québec solidaire, in the wake of the 2007-2008 crisis, launched a manifesto on May 1, 2009, entitled to recover from the crisis: dare beyond capitalism? This question has animated all the reflection of our party in the issue 2 (economics, geography, employment).</i></div>
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<b>Québec solidaire to the crisis of capitalism and the ecological crisis</b><br />
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This exciting approach has resulted in a transition program to define the foundations of a new post-capitalist society. While the crisis has unveiled the power of the financial oligarchy, against the backdrop of global ecological crisis, this program allows us to identify the necessary exercise of genuine sovereignty economic conditions marked by the limits of the environment.<br />
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<b>The "Green Plan": a transition program</b><br />
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The Green Plan Québec solidaire is a summary of this ambitious project that involves the initiation of major ecological work (public transport, renewable energy, energy conservation, agriculture centered on food sovereignty), while preserving our natural resources . As against the neo-colonial plunder proposed Plan Nord, as an economic plan is based on the respect for local communities, including indigenous peoples, as well as ecosystems.<br />
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While the PQ dream of opening the oil sector, Québec solidaire is proud to seek the definitive abandonment of oil by 2030.While our opponents argue that such measures would only mean unemployment and impoverishment, we must remember that this plan is estimated at 166,000 the number of newly created jobs and viable. While the Conservative government made Canada a shameful example of environmental economics, the Green Plan is an ambitious ecological society resolutely turned towards the future. Could become a model inspired by the world, it is more or less realistic and desirable economic plan that the sustainability of our ecosystems and thereby our societies.<br />
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<b>Demand a future for our region</b><br />
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Quebec regions are hit by deindustrialization, the source of countless economic insecurities. In addition, they are disfigured by a dubious marriage between tourism overdevelopment, harnessing our last pristine rivers, polluting mining projects and agro-business. Is this the future of our region? In Québec solidaire, a central pillar of our economic policy is the second and third processing of natural resources. This should enable us to be more immune to speculation in international commodity markets.<br />
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In addition, the sector of green energy and transit electrified contribute to a diversified economic base and hopeful for our regions. To go further, it would be desirable QS engages in a thorough review of a policy of industrial restructuring, to give meaning to a socially sustainable diversified manufacturing, and environmentally. A key purpose is to focus more on short circuits, instead of a system of dependence unbridled imports-exports. It might even be an opportunity to reflect on the repatriation of sectors that have been outsourced to countries where the rule of law "cheap labor."<br />
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Finally, countless local and regional initiatives should receive greater support from the State through decentralization of economic management, guaranteed by adequate financial resources. Moreover, such a policy can only be based on a substantial reform of our economic and financial institutions.<br />
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<b>Rethinking finance as a public service</b><br />
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It is time to put finance at the service of the real economy and not the other. A proposal that we put forward in Québec solidaire is the revision of the mandate of the Caisse de depot et placement du Quebec, so that it contributes directly to the development of collective enterprises and ecological purposes. In addition to investments in major structural projects Green Plan, it may, for example, support workers who wish to return in the form of a cooperative businesses relocated.<br />
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On the other hand, Québec solidaire proposed in its program the establishment of a state-owned bank, is the creation of a new institution or by the partial nationalization of the banking system. This bank will be essential to support multiple projects to be developed in the context of a green economy. In addition, a study is needed to return to the original mission of credit unions, which now act as a private bank among others. The prohibition of several adverse financial practices also be essential (eg various forms of speculation, including currencies, etc..) To restore the mission of a public service finance.<br />
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<b>To real economic democracy</b><br />
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Québec solidaire is ultimately the socialization of certain economic sectors, combining public ownership of state and development of the cooperative sector, recognizing the legitimacy of the SME sector. In this sense, Québec solidaire offers a progressive nationalization of critical economic sectors, primarily in the areas of energy and natural resources. It is not only moving from one form of private property as a form of public ownership, but fundamentally transform our production processes and economic decision. That is why these nationalizations will be under the democratic model, in which the voices of workers and communities will be at the center of economic decision-making.<br />
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Indeed, democracy stops too often the doors of workplaces in which a large part of our time unfolds. Thus, it is high time that democracy is established in the heart of our economic life, so that the economy finally serve a real social project.<br />
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<b>A comprehensive and compelling vision</b><br />
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Québec solidaire proposed by the project approach contrasts with dimensional and short-term typically found in politics.Instead, we want to work with all segments of our society to build an economy that takes into account the diversity and dynamism found in our region, both at the ecological level at human level. By all forces to use in a real democratic cooperation, we can and we out of the doldrums imposed by capitalism and ecological crisis that worsens at a breakneck pace.</div>
Next Year Countryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08057931166900219143noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8171119669988158355.post-37957427939786817772013-04-06T20:39:00.000-06:002013-04-06T20:42:39.225-06:00Unity Statement on Ecological Justice <div>
<b>By <a href="http://www.freedomroad.org/">FRSO/OSCL</a> </b></div>
Tuesday February 5th, 2013<br />
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<i><span style="font-size: x-large;">T</span>he following unity statement on Ecological Justice — the first new unity statement for FRSO/OSCL since 1991 — was adopted at our January 2013 Congress. With a strong focus on ecology and the necessity of left analysis and practice that centers and emphasizes ecology, the statement is the outcome of the last three years of summation, study, and practice, as well as countless years of experience in environmental justice and ecological work by a number of our members. </i><br />
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In 2010 we embarked on a multi-part national study of ecological crises, social movements that center ecology, indigenous struggles, eco-socialism, eco-feminism and much more. We engaged our membership around key ideas, questions and contradictions facing the left and humanity in relationship to ecological crises as they intersect with economic and political crises in the 21st century. We also prioritized, as an organization, sending members and leaders to retreats hosted by the Movement Generation Justice and Ecology Project. <br />
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Out of the national study and the work of the Ecology Workteam of FRSO/OSCL, we drafted a statement, looking towards the adoption of a unity statement at our 2013 Congress. We had four major re-writes of the statement, countless discussions, debate, regional workshops and political education sessions with members in order to reach a place of agreement and unity as members of FRSO/OSCL. <br />
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We look forward to continuing to deepen our understanding of the key importance of ecology in this period, to engage in work that centers ecology and to engage with those we work with outside of the organization around the ideas and analysis laid out in this statement. Planeta o muerte!<br />
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<li>The following are principles that unify our organization as we embark on this new arena of struggle: Capitalism, its growth imperative and search for ever-expanding markets, is fundamentally detrimental to and incompatible with the health of our people and planet. </li>
<li>The United States was set in place by conquest and settler colonialism. It is held in place by modern versions of the instruments of death that slaughtered the First Peoples. There can be no solution to the ecological crises caused by this system unless we come to terms with the totality of this ecological history. </li>
<li>Dialectical and historical materialism can help us as Marxists understand the current ecological crises, how and where we must intervene, and how to begin to lay the foundations for a fundamentally different society that resolves the metabolic rift on which capitalism is based. </li>
<li>The earth’s planetary system is in crisis. US capitalism, or as it is commonly known throughout the world, US imperialism, is at the center of interconnecting crises of toxics and waste, biological and cultural extinction, food and agriculture, clean water, and energy and climate. </li>
<li>It is our revolutionary obligation to expose and oppose capitalist “false solutions” that are marketed to address climate change and to benefit the community, but are actually short-term “fixes” and ecologically unsustainable. </li>
<li>A revolutionary collective solution including the seizure of state power must be a part of any real answer to the ecological crises. The US ruling class will not stop destroying air, water and soil unless we make them do so, and until we bring about a system whose imperative is meeting the needs of people and of the earth, rather than maximizing profits. </li>
<li>While we are organizing to achieve a truly fundamental and revolutionary social transformation, we must work for reforms that advance the interests of the working class and oppressed nationality communities and that begin to redress the worst effects of the ecological crises. Fighting the fossil fuel industry and cultivating our resilience to the worst effects of climate change are key examples. </li>
<li>During the period of socialist transition the state must play three key roles: protecting natural resources, redressing and preventing the impacts of pollution, and monitoring and planning industrial processes that recognize ecological boundaries. This includes developing an ecologically sound approach to the development of productive forces, rectifying errors committed in the course of 20th century socialist experiments, and prioritizing the long-view of integrity of the Earth’s ecosystems. </li>
<li>The society we want to build must reverse the growth imperative and system of private ownership upon which the capitalist economy is predicated, make work life affirming and restorative, and create an economy based on community, cooperation, sharing, and a system of production that takes into account our impact on ecological systems. Technology will inevitably be part of our solution, but we must use and re-purpose science and technology to serve these revolutionary priorities. </li>
<li>Millions of people and countless communities around the world–particularly women, land-based peoples, indigenous peoples, migrants, poor people in the Global South, communities on the front lines of extraction, production, and waste disposal, and working class oppressed nationality communities in the Global North–are not only on the frontlines of these crises but have also taken leadership in confronting them. We must learn from them, build with them, and celebrate their leadership. </li>
</ol>
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<div>
<b>HISTORICAL ROOTS</b></div>
<br />
The ecology of North America, the variety, complexity, beauty and unpredictability of this planet, is history writ deeply in its air, land, and waters. For thousands of years, that ecology — that history — developed largely in accord with its own imperatives and in its own time. The peoples who populated the Americas taught themselves to survive and often to thrive by integrating with these rhythms and imperatives. <br />
<br />
But that history was diverted from its evolutionary path little more than half a millennium ago when colonialism landed its jackboots on the shores of El Caribe, first the Spanish, and then the British. History then took a much darker turn as what is now the United States scribed the new historical period in the genocide of the indigenous inhabitants — driven by the strictly economic imperatives of acquisition, conquest, and commerce. Genocide was followed by enslavement as millions of Africa’s peoples were stolen to create the wealth of cotton, textiles, sugar, and tobacco, to construct the early economic infrastructure of the British colonies, and then the southeast of the new United States Republic. Enslavement was followed by annexation (from Mexico), colonization (Hawai’i and Puerto Rico), and the super-exploitation of Chinese and Filipino labor. <br />
<br />
This entire history, shrouded in the horrendous “cowboy” mythologies of white supremacist individualism and patriarchy, was accompanied at every painful step by the conquest, enslavement, and exploitation of the earth. There is no understanding today of the loss of our forests, the contamination of the soil, the pollution of the skies, or the poisoning of the waters, without understanding the mass murder, the slavery, the destruction of hundreds of cultures and languages that became interwoven with the new ecology of the Americans five centuries ago. <br />
<br />
In the latter half of the 19th century two factors converged to establish the foundations for an energy system capable of fueling the transition to industrial capitalism, two world wars, and subsequent US imperial hegemony. First in 1848, Indian lands were stolen when the Southwestern US was annexed from Mexico. These Southwestern territories contained enormous and seemingly endless deposits of coal, oil, and natural gas. Approximately twenty years later, after the Civil War’s conclusion early industrial capitalists from the Northeast, Midwest, and South descended on the Southern Appalachian region in droves establishing the highly destructive coal-mining industry. The cycle of fossil fuel consumption established during this period–extraction, production, transportation, combustion and waste disposal—is a central aspect of the current ecological crises we face. <br />
<br />
What this history tells us is that capitalism, its growth imperative and search for ever-expanding markets, is fundamentally detrimental to and incompatible with the health of our people and planet. The global ecological crisis is centered in the United States, the superpower of endless consumption and accumulation, the center of a world empire set in place by conquest and settler colonialism and held in place by modern versions of the instruments of death that slaughtered the First Peoples. Consequently there can be no solution to these ecological crises that now threaten the very life of our planet, unless we come to terms in the deepest and most profound way with the totality of this ecological history. <br />
<br />
If we have learned anything from US history it is truly that “power concedes nothing without a demand.” A mass movement for revolutionary socialism, one that holds resolving the great blood debt of this white supremacist capitalist system as central, is necessary. In the US, this includes ensuring genuine sovereignty for the Native American nations, guaranteeing African American self-determination and reparations, recognizing the national rights of the Chicano-Mexicano people in the Southwest, ending the colonial status of Puerto Rico and other occupied territories, and restoring the national rights of the Indigenous people of Hawai’i. <br />
<br />
<b>THEORETICAL FOUNDATIONS</b> <br />
<br />
As Marxists we base our practice in a scientific view of our world, dialectical and historical materialism. Dialectical and historical materialism is an important theoretical tool that can help us as Marxists understand the current ecological crises, as well as how and where we must intervene. <br />
<br />
Marx and Engels arrived at their major theoretical contribution – a critique of the capitalist political economy – through an application of the theory of dialectical change to the material world and then by applying dialectical materialism to human history. This laid the groundwork for understanding both the capitalist system and its potential undoing. The dynamics of class struggle in many ways mirror processes of tension and change in the natural world. While capitalism requires ever-increasing inputs, uniformity, and accumulation, the earth’s ecosystems function through regenerative cycles, a fundamentally incompatible logic. Ecosystems adapt to change and flourish through diversity and interdependence and recurring processes of restoration (water cycles, nutrient cycles, and energy flows). <br />
<br />
John Bellamy Foster, a leftist who has long written about the ecologically destructive impacts of capitalism, coined the term “metabolic rift” to refer to Karl Marx’s identification of the origins of modern ecological degradation in his systematic critique of capitalism. Marx specifically wrote about soil exhaustion under capitalist agriculture as an example of the “irreparable rift in the interdependent process of social metabolism.” The origins of capitalism were based in large part on severing people’s ties to the land, and therefore their ability to provide for their own social reproduction. Today an example of an unchecked metabolic rift is evident on a global scale in the form of our current climate crisis. <br />
<br />
<b>CURRENT PERIOD –PLANETARY CRISIS </b><br />
<br />
The interconnected environmental crises of toxins and waste, biological and cultural extinction, food and agriculture, clean water, and energy and climate together make up the ecological crisis which literally threatens all life on the planet. Quantitative changes we see now are heading towards ‘tipping points’ after which we will experience qualitative changes including rapid desertification, mass extinctions, famine, and widespread displacement. Consider that: <br />
<ul>
<li>We are losing plant and animal species at the greatest rate in 65 million years. </li>
<li>Eleven of thirteen global fisheries are either depleted or near depletion. </li>
<li>Global warming has increased since the Kyoto protocol was initially adopted by the United Nations in 1997 (with the US as the only UN member country that has still not signed onto it). </li>
<li>The majority of the world’s forests are gone — devastated by relentless industrial consumption. </li>
<li>Every new climate study indicates that the crisis is moving on faster and a broader scale than all previous scientific studies had predicted. </li>
</ul>
While the science behind understanding these planetary systems is very complicated it is increasingly clear and pretty widely accepted at this point that if we continue on this path, humanity will experience a series of cascading and devastating consequences. To make matters worse these consequences are exceedingly difficult, perhaps impossible, to predict because of the interdependent nature of the systems under threat and the dialectical nature of change. <br />
<br />
What is clear however is that these interconnected crises are felt in an acute and ongoing way by millions of people and countless communities around the world, particularly women, land-based peoples, indigenous peoples, migrants, poor people in the Global South, communities on the front lines of extraction, production, and waste disposal, and working class oppressed nationality communities in the Global North. In the United States, they are the reality for the Indigenous nations, and working class communities of color, as well as poor whites. Their neighborhoods, communities, villages, or towns are enveloped by a stream of toxins from freeways, rail yards, ports, power plants, oil refineries, factories, meat packing plants, giant warehouses visited by hundreds of diesel trucks around the clock, waste dumps, land-fills, auto and shipping container graveyards. In Southern Appalachia it’s the toxic sludge and massive destruction of mountain-top coal removal. For indigenous territories in the Southwestern US it’s the poisonous rubble from uranium mining. Recycling operations spew glass, aluminum, or metal particulate matter into the air supply. Farm workers often absorb a steady barrage of pesticides and herbicides, agents that poison the land, waters, the air and the people who harvest our crops. <br />
<br />
The language of life and death is not poetic rhetoric — it is the reality of cancer clusters, of miscarriage, of choking asthma attacks. This is capitalism in its naked essence — willing to destroy both the natural and human source of its obscene super-profits. This should not only cause us to despair but rather should motivate all of us to join the struggle to solve the ecological crisis in the only way it can ultimately be resolved — through the revolutionary transformation of our society. <br />
<br />
<b>CAPITALIST FALSE SOLUTIONS </b><br />
<br />
Unfortunately for most of humanity, the US capitalist ruling class is more concerned with maintaining its position at all costs than with ensuring that the planet can still sustain human life. The United States is home to many false solutions to the crisis: cap and trade pollution trading, carbon sequestration, offsets, nuclear power, “clean coal”, natural gas, and the super-hyped “green economy”. Each of these prescriptions is defined by its reliance on individualism, market-mechanisms, and a short-sighted desperation to maintain the US consumer lifestyle. They are based on the assumption that capitalism– which caused, sustains, and drives the crisis– can “invent and invest” its way out of this mess. These are the only “answers” the capitalist system is willing and able to accept, and they are nowhere near adequate for the task at hand. It is our revolutionary obligation, then, to expose these proposals as false solutions, marketed to address climate change and to benefit the community, but actually doing more harm than good. <br />
<br />
<b>A SOCIALIST RESPONSE </b><br />
<br />
While it is true that the individual behavior of US consumers must change as part of our solution, given the scale of these crises, a revolutionary collective solution including the seizure of state power must be a part of any real solution. The US ruling class will not stop destroying air, water and soil unless we make them do so, and until we bring about a system whose imperative is meeting the needs of people and the earth, rather than maximizing profits. <br />
<br />
The United States has played an obstructionist role, blocking the adoption of any binding international climate treaty. Socialist planning can work to rectify historical injustices and begin to transition our systems to more participatory, genuinely democratic and ecologically viable. This will include significantly reducing greenhouse gas emissions, paying ecological reparations for the tremendous environmental damage caused throughout the world, and transitioning to a more sustainable system through redistribution of resources. The Cuban response after “peak oil’’–mobilizing agronomists and other scientist alongside average Cubans to move away from fossil-fuel-intensive monocultural agriculture towards organic food production–offers a powerful example of the possibilities for re-directing human, scientific and other resources towards more ecologically sustainable practices. <br />
<br />
<b>IMMEDIATE TASKS</b> <br />
<br />
While we are organizing to achieve a truly fundamental and revolutionary social transformation, we must work for reforms that advance the interests of the working class and oppressed nationality communities and that begin to redress the worst effects of the ecological crises. Fighting the fossil fuel industry and cultivating our resilience to the worst effects of climate change are key examples. Given the urgency and scale of the impacts we are facing in the next 50 years we cannot retreat into small-scale prefigurative projects, but must work to ensure that those projects are integral and connected to a larger strategy and program. Nor can we afford to spend all of our energy in resistance battles, elevating resistance work as more important than other aspects of strategic direction and program. We must operate on multiple scales, with short and medium-term goals, a long-term vision, and perhaps most importantly scenarios to help our communities adapt to the coming transitions. <br />
<br />
Climate change is no longer a future consequence. It is a lived reality. CO2 levels in the atmosphere, currently at 385 PPM, continue to rise. They need to be reduced to at most 350 PPM to avoid the worst effects of climate change. Human-induced climate change is already causing catastrophic droughts, floods, wildfires, and other natural disasters. We do not have time to waste. This means we must prevent the expansion of fossil fuel extraction and production. No more deep-water oil drilling. End mountaintop removal coal mining, tar sands extraction, and fracking. Stop the building of refinery capacity to refine dirtier grades of crude oil. End the use of petroleum-based fertilizers. All of these are struggles in which the Environmental Justice and Climate Justice movements have taken a leading role. <br />
<br />
It is also imperative that we challenge the myth that it’s impossible to have both good jobs and a healthy environment. This false dichotomy is a divide-and-conquer tactic manufactured by the capitalist ruling class to divide our forces pitting mainstream environmentalists and environmental justice communities against unions and workers. In fact, it is both possible and necessary to take the health of both people and the environment into account; however this would require a fundamentally different social and economic system. In that sense, a program that advances these demands has kernels of revolutionary potential because it pushes the limits of what’s possible under the current system. <br />
<br />
Such a program of reforms should be centered on creating jobs and an economy aimed at meeting the basic needs of people and restoring our relationship to the ecologies that we are a part of. It should include a plan for a rapid but just transition away from fossil fuels to genuinely renewable energy, and should begin to build a truly democratic infrastructure that gives people the power to make vital decisions about the economy and the environment. We must demand a massive federal climate jobs program centered on repairing environmental damage caused by corporations while also creating this infrastructure for an ecologically sustainable economy. <br />
<br />
<b>SOCIALIST TRANSITION</b> <br />
<br />
Twentieth century socialist models failed to recognize the limits of natural resources and the impacts of industrial development at their own peril. This failure was greatest in societies where the theory of productive forces was in command. This theory, briefly, is that effecting changes in production and technological development can cause changes in social relations. It was the basis of Stalin’s Five Year Plans and in China it was promoted by the faction who led the restoration of capitalism. It has resulted in massive deforestation in China and the plan to reverse the flow of the Volga in the USSR so that the tundra could become productive farmland. While this theory operates under a different logic than capitalism, it should be seen as akin to the capitalist accumulation process in causing widespread ecological destruction and can ultimately only lead to economic and ecological disaster. <br />
<br />
In order to rectify these errors, during the period of socialist transition our socialist state must play three key roles: protecting natural resources, redressing and preventing the impacts of pollution, and monitoring and planning industrial processes that recognize ecological boundaries. This includes developing an ecologically sound approach to the development of productive forces and prioritizing the long-view of integrity of the Earth’s ecosystems. <br />
<br />
<b><i>Protecting and ensuring access to natural resources </i></b><br />
<br />
One of the state’s main roles should be to hold and protect natural resources for the benefits of all peoples. These resources include materials (such as water, air, topsoil, mineral and energy deposits), as well as wild ecosystems and biodiversity. Together these form the basis for sustainable human life, and because of their importance in sustaining human life, they must be held as commons for current and future generations—protected from pollution, overuse, and private gain—while also ensuring all communities access to the natural resources themselves. This is no mean feat. <br />
<br />
Accordingly as socialists we must fight against efforts to privatize natural resources, and fight to re-public-icize/nationalize the natural resources that have been privatized already. When and where possible we should develop infrastructure for local food, water, and energy sovereignty, recognizing that we will need an intricate balance between local production and centralized distribution and reallocation of resources. Developing less destructive methods for transportation and distribution will be an important aspect of this work. <br />
<br />
<b><i>Redressing and preventing the impacts of pollution </i></b><br />
<br />
Another key role for the state is to redress the impacts of “externalities” of industry and development, and to prevent future such impacts on human communities. This includes environmental justice issues such as exposure to toxins, displacement of communities to marginal lands, and employment in hazardous industries, as well as the growing impacts of climate change. <br />
<br />
Even now, socialists can engage in organizing to challenge and change local laws that control both development and pollution, and also engage in community preparation for/response to storm events. <br />
<br />
<b><i>Monitoring and planning industrial development </i></b><br />
<br />
A third major role for the state is to monitor and plan industrial processes so that people can benefit from products without destroying natural systems. This is the global parallel to the second role. One example could be honoring the demand for “free technology transfer” by many movements in the Global South. This act would both acknowledge and work to undo imperialism’s intentional underdevelopment of Africa, Latin America, and parts of Asia. Sharing technologies that can help people in the Global South improve their quality of life while also avoiding the most destructive aspects of industrial development is a form of ecological reparations. <br />
<br />
To carry this out a centralized international body will be needed to intervene in regional planning processes in order to address environmental damage and pollution, to settle conflicting needs between regions, and to act as the steward of the earth’s natural systems. There are decisions that cannot be made on local or regional levels since their consequences obey no borders and affect other regions and, potentially, the entire planet; somehow, we must make these decisions centrally. <br />
<br />
How decisions are made throughout this period of transition will be a key aspect of the struggle. Developing the ability of the working class to rule is an integral part of the socialist transition. Those who live downstream must be as involved in decision making as those upstream. If it’s truly democratic,those who grow food and have been most impacted by the industrial, capitalist approach to agriculture (which includes, but is not limited to, pesticides and poor working conditions), will be making decisions about how that food is grown, harvested, and distributed under socialism. Thus, our self-interest in preserving and regenerating healthy soil, living and working in a way that does not compromise our health as workers, or the health of our children, will become central in making decisions about how food is grown and all other aspects of getting our basic needs met. <br />
<br />
<b>COMMUNIST VISION </b><br />
<br />
Our ultimate solution, our communist society must reverse the growth imperative and system of private ownership upon which the capitalist economy is predicated. A post-capitalist society would uphold as central the concept of “the commons” and living within ecological limits. Human society must live within a commons of air, land, and water, which we all need to survive, and which cannot be parceled out into private property. “Private property” as a legal concept would become subsumed under the older legal concept of “personal property,” that which we can use personally. <br />
<br />
Work should be life affirming and restorative. It should contribute to the betterment of society while allowing each individual to develop to their full potential. A socialist society will begin its work by restoring to the workers the wealth they have created: the land, the factories, the banks, and other primary aspects of production. This economic democracy will create the conditions for building a new type of production system, one based on people’s actual needs, rather than the artificial “wants” generated by a multi-billion dollar advertising industry. We can have housing instead of missiles, true health care instead of bombs, and liberatory schools rather than limos. We can create an economy based on community, cooperation, sharing, and a system of production that takes into account our impact on ecological systems. Technology will inevitably be part of our solution, but we must use and re-purpose science and technology to serve these revolutionary priorities. <br />
<br />
Our communist society will be based on a culture (and a value-system) that privileges “use-value,” and particularly psychological and spiritual dimensions, over the accumulation of things, and a concept of well-being over the capitalist concept of “quality of life” which is equated to owning things. A post-capitalist society would reimagine work as meaningful activities, where each could find meaning in the work they do, and take responsibility for the impact of that work on others and the planet. <br />
<br />
Our notion of “green jobs” would be redefined to include not only work that builds more sustainable transportation and food systems; but also the critical work of individual, family and community skill-building that we need to live and co-exist through ecological transition. This may include everything from organization building, collective work and living, earth-skills, relationship-building, mediation and healing. Ultimately, we envision a social contract that establishes that no one is forced to do work that harms the earth’s ecosystem or each other, and a collective commitment to ‘just transition’ for workers and communities. <br />
<br />
Achieving a society based on a transformation in cultural values and in the economy, to make the commons, meaningful work, and holistic science central foundations, will not happen by itself, by small groups of utopian thinkers and practitioners, or by the self-created implosion of capitalism as it exists today. We must uphold the banner of socialism as we look to transform and recreate society, institutions and relationships, because it demands a collective effort towards that transformation, a revolutionary socialism that is fighting for all of humanity and for the planet that is our home. <br />
<br />
<i>Adopted January 2013.</i>Next Year Countryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08057931166900219143noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8171119669988158355.post-75160027615713785882013-04-06T19:56:00.000-06:002013-04-06T19:56:14.892-06:00Structural adjustment or…. Ecosocialism<div>
<b>By Victor Quintana</b></div>
<a href="http://revolting-europe.com/author/revoltingeurope/">REVOLTINGEUROPE</a> <div>
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg17wVhJuGifnpGIKU-EzZs8wA773BKXdO638zTgBLNgzht_g_7kYzrqSISn45vOyHymzvxqhyphenhyphen23TXT0UCFYBi7Kq07p0igJu3kXihrtH2bbgB9c1SgnAOt1Zc9m5vu18-1IBrtjjoeLSF9/s1600/green3+copy.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg17wVhJuGifnpGIKU-EzZs8wA773BKXdO638zTgBLNgzht_g_7kYzrqSISn45vOyHymzvxqhyphenhyphen23TXT0UCFYBi7Kq07p0igJu3kXihrtH2bbgB9c1SgnAOt1Zc9m5vu18-1IBrtjjoeLSF9/s320/green3+copy.jpg" width="213" /></a>APRIL 7, 2013<br /><br />Like medieval plagues, structural adjustment programmes implemented through southern Europe economies are destroying families, trampling on social rights, eliminating jobs, and making life precarious. Burying the hopes of the populations are the political parties that rotate in equal doses in one failed government after another. Given the right-wing and social democratic alternance it seems that all voters in Southern Europe are deciding is how, and at what speed their social rights are to be liquidated.<br /><br />In this situation, the Left, called by many, the radical left, are adopting a new alternative to meet the challenge of these times that threaten social life, the integrity of the people, the environment, the community of living beings: Ecosocialism. It was presented at the National Congress of the Parti de Gauche (Left Party) held in Bordeaux, France from 22 to 24 March. This party formed the Left Front with the French Communist Party and other smaller parties, in 2012, with Jean Luc Melenchon as presidential candidate and achieved a historic 11% of the votes in the first round.<a name='more'></a><br /><br />The main axes of the Parti de Gauche’s policy ideas, which are seen very favourably by other European and North African parties are: ecosocialism as an objective; ecological planning as a programme; and citizen revolution as a strategy. Ecosocialism seeks to overcome the productivist-consumerist impasses of capitalism that are leading the planet to ecological disaster and social democracy that argues that the problems of social justice and the redistribution of wealth will be solved by increasing production. In other words, the old lure that “to share the cake it is first necessary to make it bigger.” We say this is a dead end because it is for the majority, not the beneficiaries of this exclusive productivist extractive model: international finance capital, and underpinning it, governments, international bodies like the IMF or the European Central Bank, and multinational companies.<br /><br />Ecosocialism is not intended only as a utopia but a concrete radical alternative to the current economic and political system in southern Europe. A humanist alternative, yes, but not only, because the survival of the human species depends on the survival of the entire ecosystem: people, animals, plants and the whole planet are interdependent. It is a project of socialist justice, that puts to one side the productivist logic of industrialism and the polluting experiences of socialism in Eastern Europe. it bases the renewal of socialist thought on the emancipation of the individual, the radical democratization of power and education, and a new way of producing and consuming.<br /><br />The economy that Ecosocialism proposes is focused on human needs, as opposed to the “supply side policies” advocated by neoliberals. It is not just about producing, whatever the cost, and then promoting consumption by inventing need, but to produce according to real human needs. It questions the private ownership of the means of production and labour relations while advocating social ownership and the development of alternatives for a social economy, from auto-gestion to cooperatives.<br /><br />Going against the impositions of the “troika” of the European Central Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the European Commission (all chaired by southern Europeans!), Ecosocialism defends the sovereignty of budgetary policy, and nationalisation of the banks. It raises the question of boosting the economy, and instead of austerity proposes to relaunch it through new economic activities that take into account the ecological footprint, reducing emissions, “descarbonising” industry, generating clean energy. It is also sees it as necessary to break with the free trade agreements that have led to labour and evironmental “dumping” with countries fighting to see who damages the lives of workers the most, and destroys more natural resources.<br /><br />Since Eco-socialism is an urgent project, given the environmental, economic and social and disaster of productivist financial capitalism, it requires an immediate focus of action. It must be built from below, from the convergence of the various struggles of different people. It must act and convince, not preach to the converted. It is about developing, aggregating and multiplying alternative initiatives that are already underway, defend local communities, natural resources, experiences of a social economy, solidarity, non-violence, mutual aid.<br /><br />But above all, it requires a citizen’s revolution, as electoral alternation, the mere change of leadership, is not enough. To counter the power of the oligarchies, alternative centres of power and popular sovereignty must be built in all aspects of social life, in the daily struggles of the people. <a href="http://www.lepartidegauche.fr/educpop/livre/ecosocialisme-premier-manifeste-18-theses-pour-ecosocialisme-20976">The 18 theses of Ecosocialism highlight</a> this very well: “Neither enlightened vanguard, nor green dictatorship, nor ethnocentric introversion (but) the democratic citizen’s revolution.” People are not the problem, but the solution to the current crisis of human civilization.<br /><br />Thus posed, Ecosocialism is a radical and democratic alternative to the crisis now afflicting and undermining the dignity of Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Ireland, Cyprus and, to a lesser degree France. It will be seen how it can be combined with the ongoing experiences in Latin America, both the<a href="http://www.boell.de/publications/publications-buen-vivir-12636.html"> Buen Vivir, or good life</a> of indigenous communities, and the Latin American Socialism of the XXI Century, as well as other communities, organisations and parties across Europe.<br /><br /><i>Victor M. Quintana is an adviser to Democratic Peasant Front of Chihuahua, and researcher / professor at the Autonomous University of Ciudad Juarez, Mexico<br /><br />Translation/edit by Revolting Europe</i></div>
Next Year Countryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08057931166900219143noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8171119669988158355.post-48224546899816472962013-04-06T19:45:00.000-06:002013-04-06T19:45:41.419-06:00Trade Unions in the Green Economy: Working for the Environment<div>
<b>BY DOUGLAS COKER</b></div>
<i><u><a href="http://www.counterfire.org/" target="_blank">COUNTERFIRE </a></u></i><br />
06 APRIL 2013<br />
<br />
<b><i><span style="color: #274e13;">Need there be a conflict between jobs and climate change? The positions of trade unions internationally on problems of climate change and the environment is explored in a varied collection of articles, reviewed by Douglas Coker.</span></i></b><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh1V6QAMoX55tfwIZMWUddjRykz8OIDBJbVJdvbyJJwzm9yBn0GanSBufBcQco_dXCqwyg-E0Ahasc0wyMvfusTbzz0SeFQVwWxQol5gDQdXqhasOiAqw_ytESSiBnvZR1to7HNIkPKKy8K/s1600/9780415529846.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh1V6QAMoX55tfwIZMWUddjRykz8OIDBJbVJdvbyJJwzm9yBn0GanSBufBcQco_dXCqwyg-E0Ahasc0wyMvfusTbzz0SeFQVwWxQol5gDQdXqhasOiAqw_ytESSiBnvZR1to7HNIkPKKy8K/s320/9780415529846.jpg" width="212" /></a></div>
<div>
<span style="color: #274e13;"><b><i><br /></i></b></span><i><u><a href="http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415529846/" target="_blank">Trade Unions in the Green Economy: Working for the Environment</a></u>, eds. Nora Rathzel and David Uzzell, foreword by Tim Jackson (Routledge: Earthscan, 2013), xiv, 238pp.</i><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: x-large;">T</span>he threats from global warming and climate change are well established. Progress on implementing measures to mitigate global warming have been woefully inadequate and currently seem to have stalled completely. Governments at all levels have disappointed, business responses vary with much greenwash evident, so what, one might wonder, have trade unions been doing in response to the threat from global warming? This much needed book, Trade Unions in the Green Economy: Working for the Environment, provides some answers.<br />
<br />
Edited by Nora Rathzel and David Uzzell with a foreword by Tim Jackson, author of Prosperity Without Growth, a wide range of authors contribute eighteen chapters in total. Academics dominate, senior staff from UN and trade union organisations contribute, and we have one contribution from a consultant, and last but not least one contribution from a Swedish autoworker (one of Gramsci's ‘organic intellectuals’?).<br />
<a name='more'></a><br />
The political approaches taken by the authors are diverse, ranging from the light green to the altogether more radical and challenging. Similarly, the reporting on trade union activity and policy is from a wide range of countries including the US, Canada, Australia, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Brazil (the Amazon), Taiwan and South Korea.<br />
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You do not have to read much on global warming to come across some seriously scary information and in that respect this volume does not disappoint. Sean Sweeney in his chapter, ‘US trade unions and the challenge of “extreme energy”’, takes us through the tale of fossil fuel extraction from the Alberta tar sands in Canada, the transportation of this ‘unconventional’ fuel via pipeline all the way to refineries in Texas, the role played by the Tea-Party-supporting and ‘notoriously anti-union Koch Industries’ (p.198), in this process, and the response of the trade unions to all this. Sweeney reminds us that James Hansen, the leading NASA climate change scientist, has warned that exploiting these tar sands will result in an increase of 200ppm (parts per million) of CO2 in our atmosphere making it ‘game over’ with regard to ‘climate stabilisation’ (p.199). No wonder some campaigners demand we ‘leave it in the ground’.<br />
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However, the prevailing view taken by the key trade unions in all this supports jobs in the ‘jobs versus the environment’ debate. As Sweeney has it ‘trade unions’ support for Keystone XL [the tar sands pipeline extension] reflects an explicit industry-labour partnership designed to promote an extreme energy agenda with a public message built around the issue of jobs and energy independence’ (p.201). He continues by arguing that a few unions are working against the interests of ‘most of the world’s workers’ (p.201), and pursuing a course of action which will result in more global warming and more ‘political and economic power’ for big fossil fuel companies (p.201).<br />
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Sweeney was writing at the tail end of 2011. There have been major protests against this pipeline extension. However a 15 March, 2013 update from Suzanne Goldenberg, the Guardian’s US environment correspondent, contains the news that ‘on the most immediate environmental decision in his in-tray - the future of the controversial <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/keystone-xl-pipeline">Keystone XL pipeline</a> project - White House officials indicated on Friday that Obama’s green and liberal supporters would be in for a disappointment. Officials <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2013/mar/15/obama-congress-electric-cars-research">signalled that the president was inclined to approve</a>the project’. Oh dear! Big fossil fuel backed by the state and supported by trade unions are taking us down a route which is just plain scary.<br />
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The ‘jobs versus the environment’ frame has featured prominently in recent decades but really does need to be thoroughly examined and interrogated. There are those who argue strongly that a red/green alliance is both possible and can provide us with a more optimistic view of the future. Verity Burgmann addresses this issue in her chapter, ‘From “jobs versus environment” to “green-collar jobs”: Australian trade unions and the climate change debate’. She reminds us that past Prime Minister Kevin Rudd objected to the rhetoric of ‘jobs versus environment’ and adds that it deliberately distracts attention from ‘the fact that capitalism destroys jobs and the environment’ (p.131). In explaining some recent history on the climate change debate she argues that ‘Australian unions were amongst the first in the world to push the issue of green jobs’ (p.133), and reports that ‘today, green employment initiatives are flourishing’ (p.135). Why have these arguments gained traction? In addition to mentioning Al Gore, Nicholas Stern’s Climate Report and Ross Garnaut (the Australian equivalent to Stern), she refers to recent extreme weather, record high temperatures, drought and floods, and adds that the recent financial crisis and recession have eroded trust in neo-liberal and free market solutions. All of which leads to the formulation of green New Deals in one form or another.<br />
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Burgmann draws heavily on documents from the <a href="http://www.actu.org.au/Publications/Other/default.aspx">Australian Council of Trade Unions</a> but in doing so has to admit a watering down of initially strong positions partly as a result of concerns expressed by the Australian Workers’ Union, which represents workers in ‘aluminium smelters and other carbon-intensive industries’ (p.140). Generally, however, she makes a strong case to the effect that, properly addressed, the transition to a low carbon economy can be achieved, and she quotes Climate Connectors: ‘The good news is, it’s not “jobs or the environment”. Cutting pollution creates jobs’ (p.141). In conclusion, she caveats this by admitting that these initiatives do not present ‘any fundamental challenge to capitalism’ (p.144).<br />
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There are a number of other terms in this debate with which we are increasingly familiar but there is a tendency for them to be used as slogans. These need unpacking and interrogating. We need to go beyond the slogans. Dimitris Stevis in his contribution, ‘Green jobs? Good jobs? Just jobs? US labour unions confront climate change’, confirms that there is a very mixed picture with regard to US trade unions’ response to climate change with many negative features. On a more positive note he reports that, for instance, the BlueGreen Alliance supports ‘green jobs’. But in what ways are these ‘green jobs’ green? Stevis argues we need to take into account a range of factors in making our assessments. To what extent does the pursuit of localism help? The impact of supply chains needs to be investigated. Do we take account of the effects on ‘natural’ stakeholders as well as human stakeholders? Do we focus on ‘green processes [as well as] green products’ (p.187)? He continues in this vein with many searching questions including whether green jobs are just. Stevis concludes with this: ‘the US labour movement has not developed a “just transition” strategy that takes into account its structural role in the world economy. Rather, it has adopted a very particularistic approach that may well solve local problems by reproducing global inequalities’ (p.192).<br />
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So let us have a look at the term ‘just transition’. Increasingly widely used, it is an integral part of our own TUC’s approach to climate change. Darryn Snell and Peter Fairbrother in their chapter ‘Just transition and labour environmentalism in Australia’, present their view of what must be incorporated in any ‘just transition’. A return to ‘industrial planning’ is necessary; ‘unions, workers and local communities’ will contribute to this planning and ‘appropriate and decent jobs’ will result, there will be ‘training for displaced workers’ and in addition ‘“just transition” challenges the notion that a market-based solution … is the only solution’ (p.149). They make no claim this will be easy and ask how unions can influence the process. By way of illustrating the difficulty they point out that coal contributes 30% to Australia’s global trade and is also the main fuel used for generating the country’s electricity. They conclude that pursuing necessary and robust climate change policies may result in ‘an unjust outcome for workers and communities who are dependent on ‘polluting industries’. Consequently unions need to pursue a ‘new development model’ which incorporates fairness and equity (p.158).<br />
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Many will find all this seriously challenging. We really do need to consider dramatic changes to the way we live on this planet. Greens are sometimes accused of advocating a return to a lifestyle characterised as living in a cave lit by a candle. This is nonsense of course. However, the wide scope of this book allows the inclusion of perspectives which are not those of relatively comfortable inhabitants of developed western societies. Take Andrew Bennie’s chapter, ‘Questions for trade unions on land, livelihoods and jobs’. In a very detailed case study Bennie explores the tensions between the proposed extraction of minerals from sand dunes in the Eastern Cape Province of South Africa and the ‘local ecosystems and the livelihoods of the affected population’ (p.104). The local population argue that mineral extraction is the ‘wrong kind’ of development (p.104). Further, our (‘western’) definitions and understanding of poverty are challenged. While too lengthy to quote fully here, the exchange between local people and a government minister is well worth reading (p.107). Bennie helps us by referencing the writer Alastair McIntosh’s early life in the Scottish Hebrides: ‘Our “poverty”, if it is that, is a dignified frugality, not the degrading destitution of economies where an elite harbours all the resources to profit from artificially maintained scarcities’ (p.107).<br />
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There are other contributions which explore challenges. Tim Jackson challenges the pursuit of traditional economic growth and his choice as the writer of the foreword is surely significant. What evidence is there that trade unions are paying enough attention to this crucial concern? Lars Henriksson, our ‘organic intellectual’, in his chapter, ‘Cars, crisis, climate change and class struggle’, opens with this blunt statement: ‘When the financial shit hit the fan in 2008, overproduction in the auto industry immediately became visible’ (p.78). Green house gas emissions from vehicles and peak oil mean the days of the automobile are numbered. The ‘… “green car” … is an illusion’ (p.79). Referencing war economies, Henriksson argues that the knowledge and skills of the auto industry could be diverting into sustainable production. He reminds us of the Lucas Aerospace workers who, in 1976, drew up an alternative corporate plan to produce socially usefully products instead of weaponry for the military. He understands that the need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions challenges capitalism and the power of the corporations. Henriksson argues for a radical change in what we produce with a view to dramatically reducing emissions but stops short of addressing the issue of growth per se.<br />
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John Barry in his chapter, ‘Trade unions and the transition away from “actually existing unsustainability”’ does address the need to go ‘beyond economic growth to economic security’. Unfortunately, as his chapter title might suggest, his style is anything but blunt. His terminology is an example of academic obscurantism and his writing is less than transparent. However it is worth persevering because he has much to say that we need to consider. Trade unions have been ‘uncritical [in] embracing orthodox economic growth’ (p.227) and need to undergo a process of ‘repoliticisation, re-radicalisation and revitalisation’ (p.228). Barry then takes us on an excursion based on the writings of a certain Thomas Simon, which some might care to explore but seem to be about ‘reducing harm and focusing on helping the most vulnerable … without the need for some shared “blueprint” or “green-print” …’. However he does not eschew the idea of ‘an alternative economic vision’, (p.237), and admits ‘to pitching his argument at a theoretical and high strategic level’ (p.237). And of course he very usefully draws on the work of the NEF (New Economics Foundation), Wilkinson and Pickett of The Spirit Levelfame, Herman Daly (a proponent of zero growth economic models) and Tim Jackson.<br />
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Jackson’s key argument is that it is not possible to decouple economic growth from the growth of CO2emissions. This could be the most important statement in the whole book, and it is worth quoting Barry on Jackson: ‘For Jackson this decoupling is a “myth” and “assumptions that capitalism’s propensity for efficiency will allow us to stabilise the climate and protect against resource scarcity are nothing short of delusional”’ (p.234). Altogether, Barry is hard-hitting and argues persuasively that Green New Deal policies are ‘necessary but not sufficient’ (p.235). He also argues that the post-growth debate is one in which ‘the trade union and wider labour movements have yet to contribute’ (p.238).<br />
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This is a book best read selectively. The contributions from labour organisation ‘bureaucrats’ (chapters 2, 3 and 4) might be described as worthy but do tend to be somewhat self-serving. There is repetition throughout the book, maybe an inevitable consequence of commissioning eighteen chapters. There are outbreaks of excessive detail and obscure academic language. China (which emits the most CO2 taken by quantity alone) and Russia (which produces large quantities of subsidised fossil fuels) are only referred to in passing. Of course this, no doubt, has something to do with the nature of Chinese and Russian ‘trade unions’. But why also nothing of substance on the UK? This omission is less understandable. This could have been a different book. The authors could have focussed on the most important themes and distilled the best into 150 pages or so making all this more accessible to the general reader.<br />
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So, in conclusion, a couple of final thoughts. Some trade unions are very much aligned with business interests primarily with the aim of securing jobs. At the same time there are positive references to good trade union policy on climate change but how much of this policy translates into serious, concerted, effective action? After all, the biggest climate ‘criminals’ are easy to spot. How are we going to dismantle big finance, big advertising, big fossil fuel, big auto, big tourism, big bling and the rest?<br />
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<i>Douglas Coker is an old lefty who gets the green agenda. He joined the Green Party in 2005 and is also active in The Enfield Alliance Against the Cuts and the United Nations Association.</i><br />
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Next Year Countryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08057931166900219143noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8171119669988158355.post-70363348361438672962013-04-02T08:19:00.001-06:002013-04-02T08:23:11.977-06:00Imperial recipes for a burnt planet<b><u><a href="http://socialistworker.org/" target="_blank">Socialist Worker</a></u></b><br />
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April 2, 2013<br />
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<b><i>Chris Williams, author of <a href="http://www.haymarketbooks.org/pb/Ecology-and-Socialism">Ecology and Socialism: Solutions to Capitalist Ecological Crisis</a>, explains the critical connection between imperialism and ecological destruction.</i></b><br />
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AT THE turn of the 19th century, industrialist and weapons manufacturer par excellence Alfred Nobel, the guilt-ridden inventor of dynamite, established the Peace Prize that carries his name, proposing that it go "to the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between the nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies, and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses."<br />
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Over 100 years later, for the first time ever, a Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to an African woman. The 2004 award was controversial. Politicians from the country responsible for the awards, Norway, wanted to know what this woman from Kenya had done for peace.<br />
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Carl I. Hagen, leader of Norway's Progress Party, whose senior political adviser, Inger-Marie Ytterhorn, was a member of the Nobel Committee, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/10/international/europe/10nobel.html?pagewanted=all">sneeringly dismissed giving the Prize to a mere environmental activist</a>: "I thought the intention of Alfred Nobel's will was to focus on a person or organization who had worked actively for peace...It is odd that the committee has completely overlooked the unrest that the world is living with daily, and given the prize to an environmental activist."<br />
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Former Deputy Foreign Minister Espen Barth Eide felt that widening the Prize to include the environment diminished its importance: "The one thing the Nobel Committee does is define the topic of this epoch in the field of peace and security. If they widen it too much, they risk undermining the core function of the Peace Prize; you end up saying everything that is good is peace."<br />
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What, after all, had the late Wangari Maathai done for peace? <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/10/opinion/10maathai.html?pagewanted=all">Here's how Maathai described her work</a> in forming the grassroots Green Belt Movement (GBM) in the 1970s to empower rural women by employing more than 100,000 of them to plant 15 million trees:<br />
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<i>What we've learned in Kenya--the symbiotic relationship between the sustainable management of natural resources and democratic governance--is also relevant globally. Indeed, many local and international wars, like those in West and Central Africa and the Middle East, continue to be fought over resources. In the process, human rights, democracy and democratic space are denied...<br /><br />Unless we properly manage resources like forests, water, land, minerals and oil, we will not win the fight against poverty. And there will not be peace. Old conflicts will rage on and new resource wars will erupt unless we change the path we are on.</i><br />
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The fact that Maathai saw a clear connection between poverty, the fight for women's rights, political emancipation and ecological justice--in a country that had lost 98 percent of its forest cover since colonization by the British--is what earned her the enmity of the Kenyan government, not to mention beatings and jail time. Though ultimately unsuccessful, in 1985, the Kenyan regime demanded that the women's movement separate from the green movement, so politically effective was their union.<br />
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Lack of tree-cover from ongoing deforestation and loss of topsoil means that in Sub-Saharan Africa, women and girls, who are responsible for over 70 percent of water collection, have to travel further and further to obtain it. The UN estimates that women in this region spend 200 million hours per day collecting water for food and farming purposes, <a href="http://www.ipsnews.net/2012/08/women-spend-40-billion-hours-collecting-water/">or 40 billion hours annually</a>.<br />
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As part of the GBM, collectively empowered women came to understand that the legacy of the savage colonial exploitation of Kenya by Britain and the subsequent neo-colonial and dictatorial policies of Daniel Arap-Moi--aided by international financial bodies like the IMF, which focused on production of cash crops for export, in place of sustainable and ecologically appropriate food farming for domestic use--were promoting the degradation of the environment and providing the fuel for further increases in poverty, inequality and violence.<br />
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FAST FORWARD five years, and 2009 saw the Nobel Peace Prize given to another person of Kenyan descent. This time, there was no controversy, despite his rather flimsy credentials and just-announced escalation of a land war in central Asia. <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/10/world/10nobel.html?pagewanted=all">The Nobel committee chairman, Thorbjorn Jagland, declared</a>, "The question we have to ask is who has done the most in the previous year to enhance peace in the world," before answering: "And who has done more than Barack Obama?"<br />
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When accepting his award for the promotion of peace, the recipient <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/11/world/europe/11prexy.html?pagewanted=all">made a special point of highlighting the moral justification for war, not peace</a>: "We must begin by acknowledging the hard truth: we will not eradicate violent conflicts in our lifetimes...There will be times when nations--acting individually or in concert--will find the use of force not only necessary but morally justified."<br />
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Since then, Barack Obama has set up the White House "kill list," which includes U.S. citizens; justified torture and warrantless wire-tapping; kept Guantánamo Bay open and full of people charged with no crime or access to a court of law; persecuted government whistleblowers and extended a vicious drone war from Pakistan to Africa; and set up new forward bases in some of the most impoverished countries in the world to prosecute Washington's wars more effectively.<br />
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As President Obama gets ready to sign off on final construction of the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline, it behooves environmentalists to understand the guiding principles which motivate a nation state's decisions regarding energy policy. Following the approval of the building of the southern portion of pipeline a year ago, <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/feb/27/obama-transcanada-keystone-xl-pipeline">White House spokesman Jay Carney couldn't have been clearer</a> about the administration's priorities:<br />
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<i>We support the company's interest in proceeding with this project, which will help address the bottleneck of oil in Cushing that has resulted in large part from increased domestic oil production...We look forward to working with TransCanada to ensure that it is built in a safe, responsible and timely manner, and we commit to taking every step possible to expedite the necessary federal permits.</i><br />
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In terms of helping to create the conditions for new resource wars, Barack Obama's much touted "all of the above" energy policy--a critical part of the U.S. ruling elite's imperial foreign policy, which compels other powerful governments to respond in similar fashion--deserves deeper analysis from an ecological viewpoint. Put differently, within the normal operation of capitalism, what structural impediments have prevented an international agreement on climate change for almost two decades?<br />
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DESPITE THE unprecedented injection of trillions of dollars into the economy by the Federal Reserve since 2008 and the globalization of war, it has become fashionable to argue that the power of the state has ebbed in the age of neoliberal deregulation and the massive concentration of global financial and political power in ever-growing, gigantic transnational corporations.<br />
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Yet could the oil and gas companies that are busily drilling holes all over the planet really do what they do on their own? How does an understanding of inter-imperial conflict over resource extraction and the role of the state within capitalist economics help us understand our ecological crisis and possible solutions to it?<br />
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The need for constant growth is endemic to capitalism and therefore makes it impossible to find a permanent solution to environmental degradation within a competitive, profit-driven system. Alongside that is a second fatal--and underappreciated--anti-ecological contradiction of capitalism: the international competition between nation states over resources and political hegemony.<br />
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Republican Rep. Bill Flores from Texas highlighted the main reason for building Keystone XL and the interests driving U.S. energy policy when, as part of a House debate to approve a bill to expedite building the pipeline, <a href="http://thehill.com/blogs/e2-wire/e2-wire/173653-house-passes-bill-to-force-decision-on-keystone-xl-pipeline">he said</a>, "If we do not tap this valuable resource, the Chinese or other countries will."<br />
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The fact that large oil companies work hand-in-glove with the U.S. government to undermine democracy in the interests of resource extraction, profit and inter-imperial rivalry was revealed once again when WikiLeaks published <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2010/dec/08/wikileaks-cables-shell-nigeria-spying">State Department cables describing a memo from Ann Picard</a>, Shell's vice president for Sub-Saharan Africa, to U.S. Ambassador to Nigeria Robin Renee Sanders.<br />
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The memo detailed how Shell was trying to outmaneuver efforts by the Russian oil and gas giant Gazprom to enter the Nigerian oil fields and claim a piece of the highly lucrative business that is at the epicenter of a 50-year-long environmental and social catastrophe, but has made Nigeria the eight-biggest oil producer, responsible for 8 percent of U.S. oil imports.<br />
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Shell had been able to find out that the Nigerian government was offering oil concessions to U.S. competitors China and Russia--because, Picard told U.S. officials, the Nigerian government "had forgotten that Shell had seconded people to all the relevant ministries and that Shell consequently had access to everything that was being done in those ministries," according to the cable.<br />
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<a href="http://socialistworker.org/2013/02/08/how-can-we-stop-climate-change">In an earlier article</a>, I described the burgeoning oil and gas boom that is moving the U.S. toward "energy independence"--as highlighted in <a href="http://247wallst.com/2013/02/13/energy-independence-by-2020-citigroup/">Citigroup's 2013 report gloatingly titled "Energy 2020: Independence Day"</a>--based on massive expansion of domestic fossil fuel extraction.<br />
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ENERGY POLICY is at the heart of the capitalist class' global gamble with the laws of nature, as each country attempts to grab as much land, oil, gas and other resources, in the interest of projecting political and economic power around the world. With its focus on the international ramifications of a changing energy outlook, the Citigroup report highlights the newly favorable climate for U.S. power:<br />
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<i>Because of changing dynamics in the geographic spread of production of unconventional, as well as conventional supplies (notably from Iraq), and because of growing inroads that natural gas should have in displacing oil products in the transportation sector, OPEC should find it challenging to survive another 60 years, let alone another decade.</i><br />
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In a further nod to geostrategic priorities, the report continues, "Will the U.S. continue to provide security guarantees for its longstanding allies and sources of supply? Will China step in to buy supplies where the U.S. no longer needs them, strengthening relations with new partners in the process?"<br />
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Despite a convincing study detailing how America's largest city, New York, could be<a href="http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/12/can-wind-water-and-sunlight-power-new-york-by-2050/">entirely powered by wind, water and sunlight by 2050</a>, Obama's "all of the above" means in practice that the emphasis continues to be on maximizing fossil fuel extraction to undercut rival countries and maintain an imperial geostrategic advantage. Indeed, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/05/science/earth/05fossil.html?pagewanted=all">the only sector of the U.S. state that is taking the promise of alternative energy seriously</a> is the one responsible for using the lion's share of fossil fuels in the first place and charged with obtaining more: the U.S. military.<br />
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With Obama's geostrategic "pivot to Asia," designed to contain Chinese economic and political ambitions, Charles Ebinger and Kevin Massy at the Brookings Institute sounded a note of caution in offering advice to President Obama in January, outlining the steps they felt the U.S. needs to take to secure its global interests:<br />
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<i>Irrespective of actions by OECD countries, China, India and other emerging nations will burn oil, gas and coal in ever-greater quantities for the foreseeable future. The main beneficiaries of this demand are likely to be the OPEC nations, Russia, Australia and other oil, gas and coal producers. Given its huge reserves of hydrocarbons, the United States could position itself as perhaps the principal beneficiary of this demand by adopting a near-term policy of full-scale, export-led oil, gas and coal development.</i><br />
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Unlike climate change demonstrators and activists, these are the kind of people someone intent on maintaining an empire listens to. <a href="http://www.brookings.edu/research/papers/2013/01/energy-and-climate-black-to-gold-to-green">In their "Black to Gold to Green" strategy</a>, the "Green" part is there to insulate the U.S. from charges of being "irresponsibly self-interested" with regard to climate change. Furthermore, it's designed to put the U.S. in the forefront of green technology development, by allocating some of the oil and gas bonanza to carbon capture and advanced batteries. Ebinger and Massy are sanguine about the advantages of such a program of accelerated fossil fuel production:<br />
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<i>The resultant surge in production and exports would strengthen both the country's fiscal position through export revenues and job creation; and its political position through weakening the market power and the revenue generation of OPEC nations and Russia. It would also bring geopolitical benefits through the deepening of partnerships with key consumers such as China and India.</i><br />
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In other words, burning more fossil fuels can be good for the planet, while simultaneously fending off new international competitors for the U.S. This would leave the U.S. free to cement its global pre-eminence and solve its balance-of-trade deficit, by increasing exports and creating more jobs in the fossil-fuel sector, despite the dangers of ecological suicide.<br />
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THE U.S. ruling elite has long recognized that maintaining a global reach cannot be left solely to the dominance of the U.S. military, but fundamentally rests on a strong and growing economy. U.S. economic restructuring to take back market share from rising competitors is, therefore, based in large part on a resurgent domestic energy industry, combined with a reversal of the trend for offshoring manufacturing production.<br />
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Progress on this front will be achieved by cutting living standards and wages for U.S. workers to make them competitive with China. The introduction of two-tier wages in the manufacturing sector, the full-frontal assault on the remaining centers of union power, increased productivity and financial incentives through corporate tax breaks are all part of the drive to "onshore" production. <a href="http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/21a46546-78f1-11e1-88c5-00144feab49a.html">As the Financial Times reported</a>:<br />
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<i>"Reshoring" production is a strategy being tried by many American manufacturers, as rapid wage growth in emerging economies and sluggish pay in the U.S. erodes the labor cost advantage of offshore plants. The U.S. has added 429,000 factory jobs in the past two years, replacing almost a fifth of the losses during the recession.</i><br />
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The FT described the three reasons that General Electric executive Chip Blankenship gave for the company's shift of manufacturing facilities back to the U.S.: "the adoption of 'lean' manufacturing and design techniques that made the plant more efficient and took labor content out of production; the move to a two-tier workforce that means new employees are paid $13 per hour compared to $22 per hour for those employed before 2005; and $17 million of government incentives." Another important reason: high energy costs, which affect the cost of transporting goods internationally.<br />
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Thus, such actions--coupled with "full-scale, export-led oil, gas and coal development" to depress energy prices, which are a critical component of production costs in a variety of sectors--are part of the U.S. ruling class strategy to combat economic decline, boost the domestic economy, cut the balance of payments deficit and regain international market share against rising global and regional competitors.<br />
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So while the military-centered strategy of the Bush Doctrine failed in its program of reshaping the Middle East--resulting, for example, in a focus on containing, rather than overthrowing, the Iranian regime--the U.S. state has been considerably more successful elsewhere in repositioning itself economically and politically.<br />
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Allied to these changes, the military might of the U.S. is shifting its focus toward Asia as more of the Navy's fleet is redeployed to the Pacific and Asian theaters. This, in turn, is fueling a game of military brinkmanship in the South China Sea, as U.S. military and political moves unsettle regional allies such as Japan and South Korea, and worry China, North Korea and Russia.<br />
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The U.S.'s proposed new East Asian trading bloc, the Trans-Pacific Partnership--which specifically excludes China from membership, a fact not lost on the Chinese ruling class--is a similar recognition of the realignment of power.<br />
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Naturally, China is not standing idly by as it is surrounded by U.S. imperial might. The Chinese government has responded with a new trading bloc of its own, one that pointedly excludes the U.S.; a substantial increase in its military budget; and new oil and gas deals throughout Africa, the Middle East and even in the U.S.'s own backyard in Latin America.<br />
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In late March, <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/mar/26/ecuador-chinese-oil-bids-amazon">representatives of the Ecuadorian government were in Beijing</a> to negotiate a deal with China to allocate rights to 3 million hectares of undeveloped Amazonian forest--the home to thousands of indigenous people--for oil exploration, along with the construction of a multibillion-dollar, Chinese-financed oil refinery.<br />
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At a protest against the selling of their land, Narcisa Mashienta, a leader of Ecuador's Shuar people, defiantly proclaimed, "What the government's been saying as they have been offering up our territory is not true; they have not consulted us, and we're here to tell the big investors that they don't have our permission to exploit our land."<br />
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Brazil, with its own imperial aspirations for regional dominance, is similarly opting to scale up its exploitation of its natural resources for energy production--specifically in the realm of a truly enormous expansion of hydroelectric power. <a href="http://amazonwatch.org/work/belo-monte-dam">The gigantic 11,000-megawatt Belo Monte dam in the Amazaon</a>--which will require flooding a vast area of forest, displacing tens of thousands of indigenous people, and can't be operated at anything like full power without the construction of several more dams--is still being built despite continual protests and work stoppages by unions and indigenous activists, not to mention a growing international outcry.<br />
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THE FACT that all of these changes aren't just detrimental to indigenous and working people around the world, but are suicidal when it comes to any hope of maintaining a stable climate, should also indicate our natural allies in the fight for an ecologically sustainable and socially just society. Workers, unions, indigenous groups and environmental activists need to form a united front against the planet-wrecking priorities of the 1 Percent.<br />
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Underlying this united front must be a theoretical appreciation for how the laws of motion of capitalism operate inexorably to promote unending growth and international competition over natural resources, factors which will destroy all hope for future generations and lead to the extinction of countless species. In turn, international economic competition threatens constantly to break out into its militarized version, as nation states and antagonistic trading blocs opt for warfare.<br />
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Indeed, Charles Emmerson, <a href="http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/01/04/why_2013_looks_a_lot_like_1913">writing in Foreign Policy, a journal written for the U.S. ruling class</a>, points to the compelling similarities between the worlds of 1913, on the brink of the First World War, and 2013. As the U.S. jockeys for position with China, Emmerson writes, the chances of a global conflagration are all too real:<br />
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<i>In the last year before the Great War, Germany was Britain's second-largest trading partner, leading many in the City of London--and across Europe--to conclude that, despite the rise of Anglo-German antagonism over naval armaments, a war between the two was unlikely. If the international solidarity of the workers did not stop a war, the self-interest of global finance would, it was argued.</i><br />
In another historical moment that resonates acutely today, the cynical realpolitik of the U.S. ruling class was perhaps best summed up in 1948 in <a href="http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Memo_PPS23_by_George_Kennan">State Department Policy Planning Memorandum #23</a>, written by George Brennan. Brennan was a central figure in the group of "wise men" advising U.S. presidents about foreign policy, and his memo formed the basis for what eventually became known as the Truman Doctrine:<br />
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<i>[W]e have about 50 percent of the world's wealth, but only 6.3 percent of its population. This disparity is particularly great as between ourselves and the peoples of Asia. In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security. To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and daydreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives. We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and world-benefaction.</i><br />
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Brennan goes on to give his rationale for a more forthright and unambiguous foreign policy stance:<br />
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<i>We should dispense with the aspiration to "be liked" or to be regarded as the repository of a high-minded international altruism. We should stop putting ourselves in the position of being our brothers' keeper and refrain from offering moral and ideological advice. We should cease to talk about vague and--for the Far East--unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards, and democratization. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better.</i><br />
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We should recognize that our influence in the Far Eastern area in the coming period is going to be primarily military and economic.<br />
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International competition for resources and the hunt for more fossil fuels to burn by competing imperial states is one of the key structural impediments to the adoption of international agreements to address our deteriorating ecological situation.<br />
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TO END where I began, the ties between Maathai and Obama are, on the one hand, greater than a shared Nobel Peace Prize. Maathai and Obama's father both came to the U.S. as two of the 600 Kenyans airlifted under an education program championed by John F. Kennedy program.<br />
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On the other hand, their political outlook and dedication to peace, ecological sustainability and social justice couldn't be more starkly different. Maathai fought empire in the service of the downtrodden and oppressed; Obama seeks to extend it. Where she planted trees to propel her aims, Obama calls forth kill lists and drone strikes to facilitate his.<br />
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In 1996, an agricultural agency blamed poor people in the developing world for deforestation. Maathai responded that the rich were really to blame:<br />
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<i>It is very common for people making such conclusions to blame poor people. Poor people are the victims, not the cause. In Kenya at the moment, we are fighting to protect the remaining very few indigenous forests from some of the richest people in the country.</i><br />
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It's easy to become despondent when assessing the urgency of addressing our ecological crisis--and the plans of the ruling classes around the world to exacerbate it for short-term economic and political gain. But understanding that we face a systemic problem, rather than make the obstacles seem more insurmountable, can offer us a clearer picture of the kind of movement we need to build to take on the entire system. That picture offers us hope, too--because as poet Shelley once wrote, "We are many, they are few."</div>
Next Year Countryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08057931166900219143noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8171119669988158355.post-61187091552291170292013-04-01T20:52:00.000-06:002013-04-01T20:52:21.294-06:00The Tar Sands Disaster<b>BY THOMAS HOMER-DIXON</b><br />New York Times<br />March 31, 2013<div>
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<br /><br />IF President Obama blocks the Keystone XL pipeline once and for all, he’ll do Canada a favor.<br /><br />Canada’s tar sands formations, landlocked in northern Alberta, are a giant reserve of carbon-saturated energy — a mixture of sand, clay and a viscous low-grade petroleum called bitumen. Pipelines are the best way to get this resource to market, but existing pipelines to the United States are almost full. So tar sands companies, and the Alberta and Canadian governments, are desperately searching for export routes via new pipelines.<br /><br />Canadians don’t universally support construction of the pipeline. A poll by Nanos Research in February 2012 found that nearly 42 percent of Canadians were opposed. Many of us, in fact, want to see the tar sands industry wound down and eventually stopped, even though it pumps tens of billions of dollars annually into our economy.<a name='more'></a><br /><br />The most obvious reason is that tar sands production is one of the world’s most environmentally damaging activities. It wrecks vast areas of boreal forest through surface mining and subsurface production. It sucks up huge quantities of water from local rivers, turns it into toxic waste and dumps the contaminated water into tailing ponds that now cover nearly 70 square miles.<br /><br />Also, bitumen is junk energy. A joule, or unit of energy, invested in extracting and processing bitumen returns only four to six joules in the form of crude oil. In contrast, conventional oil production in North America returns about 15 joules. Because almost all of the input energy in tar sands production comes from fossil fuels, the process generates significantly more carbon dioxide than conventional oil production.<br /><br />There is a less obvious but no less important reason many Canadians want the industry stopped: it is relentlessly twisting our society into something we don’t like. Canada is beginning to exhibit the economic and political characteristics of a petro-state.<br /><br />Countries with huge reserves of valuable natural resources often suffer from economic imbalances and boom-bust cycles. They also tend to have low-innovation economies, because lucrative resource extraction makes them fat and happy, at least when resource prices are high.<br /><br />Canada is true to type. When demand for tar sands energy was strong in recent years, investment in Alberta surged. But that demand also lifted the Canadian dollar, which hurt export-oriented manufacturing in Ontario, Canada’s industrial heartland. Then, as the export price of Canadian heavy crude softened in late 2012 and early 2013, the country’s economy stalled.<br /><br />Canada’s record on technical innovation, except in resource extraction, is notoriously poor. Capital and talent flow to the tar sands, while investments in manufacturing productivity and high technology elsewhere languish.<br /><br />But more alarming is the way the tar sands industry is undermining Canadian democracy. By suggesting that anyone who questions the industry is unpatriotic, tar sands interest groups have made the industry the third rail of Canadian politics.<br /><br />The current Conservative government holds a large majority of seats in Parliament but was elected in 2011 with only 40 percent of the vote, because three other parties split the center and left vote. The Conservative base is Alberta, the province from which Prime Minister Stephen Harper and many of his allies hail. As a result, Alberta has extraordinary clout in federal politics, and tar sands influence reaches deep into the federal cabinet.<br /><br />Both the cabinet and the Conservative parliamentary caucus are heavily populated by politicians who deny mainstream climate science. The Conservatives have slashed financing for climate science, closed facilities that do research on climate change, told federal government climate scientists not to speak publicly about their work without approval and tried, unsuccessfully, to portray the tar sands industry as environmentally benign.<br /><br />The federal minister of natural resources, Joe Oliver, has attacked “environmental and other radical groups” working to stop tar sands exports. He has focused particular ire on groups getting money from outside Canada, implying that they’re acting as a fifth column for left-wing foreign interests. At a time of widespread federal budget cuts, the Conservatives have given Canada’s tax agency extra resources to audit registered charities. It’s widely assumed that environmental groups opposing the tar sands are a main target.<br /><br />This coercive climate prevents Canadians from having an open conversation about the tar sands. Instead, our nation behaves like a gambler deep in the hole, repeatedly doubling down on our commitment to the industry.<br /><br />President Obama rejected the pipeline last year but now must decide whether to approve a new proposal from TransCanada, the pipeline company. Saying no won’t stop tar sands development by itself, because producers are busy looking for other export routes — west across the Rockies to the Pacific Coast, east to Quebec, or south by rail to the United States. Each alternative faces political, technical or economic challenges as opponents fight to make the industry unviable.<br /><br />Mr. Obama must do what’s best for America. But stopping Keystone XL would be a major step toward stopping large-scale environmental destruction, the distortion of Canada’s economy and the erosion of its democracy.<br /><i><br /><a href="http://www.homerdixon.com/">Thomas Homer-Dixon</a>, who <a href="http://www.balsillieschool.ca/people/thomas-homer-dixon">teaches</a> global governance at the Balsillie School of International Affairs, is the author of “The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity and the Renewal of Civilization.”</i></div>
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Next Year Countryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08057931166900219143noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8171119669988158355.post-69021182111086203092013-03-30T23:43:00.000-06:002013-03-30T23:43:12.375-06:00BRICS cook the climate<b>By Patrick Bond</b><div>
Pambazuka News<br />2013-03-27, Issue <a href="http://www.pambazuka.org/en/issue/623">623</a></div>
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<br /><br /><span style="font-size: x-large;">T</span>he BRICS are surpassing the US and the EU in terms of emissions of greenhouse gases. The Durban summit was an opportune moment to ask and answer many questions regarding the BRICS’ economic strategies and to radically reduce their levels of emissions.<br /><br />As they met in Durban on March 26-27, leaders of the BRICS countries – Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa – must own up: they have been emitting prolific levels of greenhouse gases, far higher than the US or the EU in absolute terms and as a ratio of GDP (though less per person). How they address this crisis could make the difference between life and death for hundreds of millions of people this century. <br /><br />South Africa’s example is not encouraging. First, the Pretoria national government and its Eskom parastatal electricity generator have recently increased South Africa’s already extremely high emissions levels, on behalf of the country’s ‘Minerals-Energy Complex’. This problem is well known in part because of the failed civil society campaigns against the world’s third and fourth largest coal-fired power plants (Eskom’s Medupi and Kusile), whose financing in 2010 included the largest-ever World Bank project loan and whose subcontractor includes the ruling party’s investment arm in a blatant multi-billion rand conflict of interest. <a name='more'></a><br /><br /><b>SOUTH AFRICA’S ACCOMPLICES IN POLLUTING THE PLAN</b>ET <br /><br />Other climate campaigns have made little dent against the guzzling mining and smelting industries which chew up South Africa’s coal-fired electricity and export the profits. The same is true for the high-polluting industries of the other BRICS countries, even in China where environmental protests are rising and where it is unsafe to breathe Beijing air on the majority of days so far this year.<br /><br />How bad are the BRICS? The 2012 Columbia and Yale University Environmental Performance Index showed that four of the five states (not Brazil) have been decimating their – and the earth’s – ecology at the most rapid rate of any group of countries, with Russia and South Africa near the bottom of world stewardship rankings.[1] And China, South Africa and India have declining scores on greenhouse gas emissions, according to the EPI.<br /><br /><b>SABOTAGING GLOBAL CLIMATE TALKS</b><br /><br />While BRICS fossil fuel addiction is well known, less understood is how their heads of states consistently sabotage global climate talks hosted by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) by effectively destroying the Kyoto Protocol – in everything but name – starting with the Copenhagen Accord in 2009, picking up the pace with the Durban Platform in 2011, and sealing the deal in 2012 with Russia’s formal withdrawal from Kyoto. <br /><br />In 2009, the ‘BASIC’ (Brazil, South Africa, India, China) countries’ leadership joined with Washington to confirm climate catastrophe at the 15th Conference of the Parties (COP) to the UNFCCC in Denmark. The Copenhagen Accord between Jacob Zuma, Barack Obama, Lula da Silva, Wen Jiabao and Manmohan Singh foiled the UN global strategy of mandatory emissions cuts, thus confirming that at least 4 degrees global warming will occur this century. The Accord is officially non-binding, and in exchange, the Green Climate Fund that Obama promised would provide $100 billion annually has simply not been forthcoming in an era of austerity.<br /><br /><b>CARBON MARKETS </b><br /><br />‘They broke the UN,’ concluded Bill McKibben from the advocacy movement 350.org.[2] Copenhagen was what Naomi Klein called ‘nothing more than a grubby pact between the world’s biggest emitters: I’ll pretend that you are doing something about climate change if you pretend that I am too. Deal? Deal.’[3]<br /><br />A secondary objective of the Copenhagen deal – aside from avoiding emissions cuts the world so desperately requires – was to maintain a modicum of confidence in carbon markets. Especially after the 2008 financial meltdown and rapid decline of European Union Emissions Trading Scheme, BASIC leaders felt renewed desperation to prop up the ‘Clean Development Mechanism’ (CDM), the Third World’s version of carbon trading.[4] Questioning the West’s banker-centric climate strategy – which critics term ‘the privatisation of the air’ – was not an option for BRICS elites, given their likeminded neoliberal orientation.<br /><br /><b>THE SUBIMPERIALIST DRIVE </b><br /><br />By the end of 2012, the BRICS no longer qualified to receive direct CDM funds,[5] so efforts shifted towards subsidies for new internal carbon markets, especially in Brazil and China. In February 2013, South African finance minister Pravin Gordhan also announced that as part of a carbon tax, Pretoria would also allow corporations to offset 40 percent of their emissions cuts via carbon markets. <br /><br />The best way to understand this flirtation with emissions trading is within the broader context of economic power, for it is based on the faith that financiers can solve the world’s most dangerous market externality – when in reality they cannot maintain their own markets. As sustainability scholars Steffen Böhm, Maria Ceci Misoczky and Sandra Moog argue, ‘the subimperialist drive has remained the same: while domestic capital continues to invest heavily in extractive and monocultural industries at home, it is increasingly searching for investment opportunities in other peripheral markets as well, precipitating processes of accumula¬tion by dispossession within their broader spheres of influence. This mode of development can be observed in many semi-peripheral nations, particularly in the BRICS.’[6]<br /><br />For example, according to Böhm, Misoczky and Moog, ‘China’s extensive investment in African arable land and extractive industries in recent years has been well docu¬mented. What is perhaps less well recognized in the development literature, however, is the extent to which financing from carbon markets like the CDM is now being leveraged by elites from these BRICS countries, to help underwrite these forms of subimperialist expansion.’<br /><br />In terms of global-scale climate negotiations, the Washington+BASIC negotiators can thus explicitly act on behalf of their fossil fuel and extractive industries to slow emission-reduction obligations, but with a financial-sector back-up, in the event a global climate regime does appear in 2020, as agreed at the Durban COP17. Similar cozy ties between Pretoria politicians, London-based mining houses, Johannesburg ‘Black Economic Empowerment’ tycoons and sweetheart trade unions were subsequently exposed at Marikana, the site of a massacre of 34 Lonmin platinum workers in August 2012. <br /><br />Other BRICS countries have similar power configurations, and in Russia’s case it led to a formal withdrawal from the Kyoto Protocol’s second commitment period (2012-2020) in spite of huge ‘hot air’ benefits the country would have earned in carbon markets as a result of the industrial economy’s disastrous exposure to world capitalism during the early 1990s. That economic crash cut Russian emissions far below 1990 Soviet Union levels during the first (2005-2012) commitment period. But given the 2008-13 crash of carbon markets – where the hot air benefits would have earlier been realised as €33/tonne benefits but by early 2013 fell to below €3/tonne – Moscow’s calculation was to promote its own oil and gas industries helter-skelter, and hence binding emissions cuts were not in Russia’s interests, no matter that 2010-11 climate-related droughts and wildfires raised the price of wheat to extreme levels and did tens of billions of dollars of damage. <br /><br />The same pro-corporate calculations are being made in the four other BRICS, although their leaders occasionally postured about the need for larger northern industrial country emissions cuts. However, the crucial processes in which UN climate regulatory language was hammered out climaxed at the COP17 in Durban in December 2011 in a revealing manner. ‘The Durban Platform was promising because of what it did not say,’ bragged US State Department adviser Trevor Houser to the New York Times. ‘There is no mention of historic responsibility or per capita emissions. There is no mention of economic development as the priority for developing countries. There is no mention of a difference between developed and developing country action.’[7]<br /><br />The COP17 deal squashed poor countries’ ability to defend against climate disaster. With South African foreign minister Maite Nkoana-Mashabane chairing, the climate summit confirmed this century’s climate-related deaths of what will be more than 180 million Africans, according to Christian Aid. Already 400 000 people die each year from climate-related chaos due to catastrophes in agriculture, public health and ‘frankenstorms’. <br /><br /><b>BRICS MUST AGREE TO EMISSION CUTS</b> <br /><br />What, then, should be done about the BRICS? They have been given a ‘pass’ from many climate activists because on per capita and in historic terms, their industries and agriculture have not been nearly so guilty of greenhouse gas emissions as the rich Western countries. Most recently, the huge increase in emissions by China for the sake of manufacturing production is now understood to be associated with the deindustrialisation of the West: the ‘outsourcing’ of emissions. So emissions from the east coast of China should logically be attributed to Western consumers, in large part.<br /><br />But the pass is over. Pablo Solon and Walden Bello of the Bangkok-based institute Focus on the Global South opened a debate in September 2012: ‘We should demand that China, India, Brazil and South Africa also agree to mandatory cuts without offsets, although of course, these should be lower than the Annex 1 countries, in line with the UNFCCC principles.’ For Solon and Bello, the problem is the BRICS’ ‘high-speed, consumption-dependent, and greenhouse gases-intensive growth paths.’[8]<br /><br />The Durban summit is an opportune moment to ask and answer many questions regarding the BRICS’ economic strategies. With Zuma recently declaring his government ‘anti-imperialist’ on foreign policy,[9] it is appropriate to ask whether this is not merely another case of talk left so as to walk right, because on the most crucial long-term foreign policy of all, climate, BRICS appear distinctly sub-imperialist.<br /><br /><i>* Patrick Bond directs the University of KwaZulu-Natal Centre for Civil Society and recently authored Politics of Climate Justice.</i><br /><br />ENDNOTES:<br />1. Columbia University and Yale University, Environmental Performance Index 2012, New York.<br />2. For more, see P Bond, Politics of Climate Justice, Pietermaritzburg, University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2012.<br />3. N Klein, ‘For Obama, no opportunity too big to blow,’ The Nation, December 21, 2009.<br />4. P Bond (Ed), Durban’s Climate Gamble, Pretoria, University of South Africa Press, 2011.<br />5. P Bond et al, CDMs Cannot Deliver the Money to Africa, Report for the Environmental Justice Organisations, Liabilities and Trade project, December 2012,<a href="http://goo.gl/MsCqU">http://goo.gl/MsCqU</a> <br />6. S Böhm, M Misoczky and S Moog, ‘Greening capitalism?’, Organization Studies, November 2012, 33, 11, p.1629.<br />7. J Broder, ‘Signs of new life as UN searches for a climate accord’, New York Times, 24 January 2012. <br />8. P Solon and W Bello, ‘Why are climate negotiations locked in a stalemate?’, <http: focusweb.org="" node=""> <br />9. J Zuma, ‘ANC January 8 Statement’, Durban, <a href="http://tinyurl.com/cdh2bww">http://tinyurl.com/cdh2bww</a></http:></div>
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Next Year Countryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08057931166900219143noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8171119669988158355.post-59712966476544909342013-03-30T22:41:00.000-06:002013-03-30T22:41:09.565-06:00The fight against climate change takes its space in the World Social Forum<b><i><a href="http://www.pressegauche.org/index.php" target="_blank">PRESSE-TOI À GAUCHE</a></i></b><div>
MARCH 30, 2013</div>
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<a href="http://www.pressegauche.org/local/cache-vignettes/L210xH170/arton13600-6afe1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://www.pressegauche.org/local/cache-vignettes/L210xH170/arton13600-6afe1.jpg" /></a><br />Fight for the environment can be costly. There have been many murders and disappearances of activists environmentalists. Sombath Somphone, Laos is one of those victims. Pablo Solón, director of Focus on the Global South, stated yesterday during the inauguration of the "Space Climate" World Social Forum (WSF) taking place currently in Tunis.<br /><br />For the first time, a WSF account with a specific and permanent space to analyze the causes and impacts of climate change, to exchange experiences and discuss new strategies to confront the ecological crisis. This is the "Space Climate", supported by nearly 40 environmental organizations around the world, such as La Via Campesina, Focus on the Global South, the ETC Group, Ecologists in Action, or ATTAC France, among other.<br /><br />Climate change is a central element in the systemic crisis of capitalism, it threatens the future of life on the planet and clearly highlights the inability of the current model to solve really. Climate change, governments, international institutions and multinational coincide fully depress the accelerator and bet on a series of false technological solutions, instead of solving the crisis, will instead deepen even more. They also promote market solutions to fill their pockets with the purchase and sale of greenhouse gas emissions. Nature becomes a commodity and more a source of profit masked by green rhetoric without real content. A green that looks like the dollar and not that of nature.<br /><br />The organizers of the "Space Climate" do not go around the bush because time is against us and the world: "We have lost too many important battles in the fight for climate justice and we have little time to prevent Mother Earth and humanity rushing into the abyss. Climate change is already causing 400,000 deaths per year. ". But they also highlight the need for hope and mobilization by stating that "we need to act if we want to change the future."<br /><br />We now see how the economic crisis further exacerbates the climate crisis, energy and food. The same people who speculated with mortgages "subprime" venture funds, insurance companies, etc.., Are those today who monopolize land and speculating with food. Everything is good for profit: water, seeds, land, grain. As stated Nnimmo Bassey of Oil Watch International at the end of the inauguration of the Espace Climate: "It is time to intensify the struggle and create alliances."This is also the commitment ratified by numerous assistants. As the song says: "The people united will never be defeated! ".<br /><br />Tunis 28/03/2013.<br /><br />Source: <a href="http://blogs.publico.es/esther-vivas/2013/03/28/la-lucha-contra-el-cambio-climatico-toma-su-espacio-en-el-foro-social-mundial/">http://blogs.publico.es/esther-viva ...</a></div>
Next Year Countryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08057931166900219143noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8171119669988158355.post-9282667019738913062013-03-29T14:26:00.000-06:002013-03-29T14:26:08.825-06:00A Celebration of Tarsands! (oops, oilsands!)<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/rQ-us1jumss?rel=0" width="560"></iframe>Next Year Countryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08057931166900219143noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8171119669988158355.post-35810313263724455172013-03-24T14:58:00.000-06:002013-03-24T14:58:29.960-06:00A critique of the ecosocialist manifesto of the Parti de Gauche<div style="text-align: right;">
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<b>By Daniel Tanuro</b></div>
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<i><a href="http://www.internationalviewpoint.org/" target="_blank">International Viewpoint</a></i></div>
Sunday 24 March 2013<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://ecosocialisme.com/" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" target="_blank"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgliDz-iJUud35AX2hVYVP-2SeldWbMxao5Zu3JyVer7K5g4iibSqKAf6PRl8-SoZuyM7hgw52gju_rbzMeMZKWMF4K72EU8RsgueiqO8D5vyzv3dlgg4kIOtJ5i9tBLfLJzaunXLdx3Sgh/s320/mani-reca.jpg" width="205" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Click <strong><u><a href="http://ecosocialisme.com/" target="_blank">HERE</a></u></strong> for link</td></tr>
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<i>Daniel Tanuro is the author of L’impossible capitalisme vert (“the impossible green capitalism”). In this article, he presents an analysis of the </i><u><b><a href="http://ecosocialismcanada.blogspot.ca/2013/02/a-roundtable-for-ecosocialism-by-parti.html" target="_blank">Ecosocialist Manifesto of the French Left Party</a></b></u><i>. Highlighting the real advances contained in this document, but also its limitations, he contributes to the crucial debate on the necessary ecosocialist strategy.</i><br />
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The Ecosocialist Manifesto of the Left Party (PG) is an important document. For the first time in France, a political force with parliamentary representation adopts the concept of ecosocialism to try and combine social and ecological demands, in a perspective of a break with capitalism. The condemnation of productivism is unambiguous.<br />
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The fact that the document rejects as socially unjust and environmentally criminal the social democratic strategy of relaunching the system (Thesis 6: "We therefore expect neither the resumption of growth nor the beneficial effects of austerity: we believe in neither the one or the other") demonstrates an awareness of the seriousness of the situation and the urgency of the measures that must be taken to confront it. That is to say that the manifesto contributes to a fundamental political debate: what alternative to co-management of capitalism by the Greens and social-liberalism? What programme, what vision of society, what strategy for an anti-productivist socialism?</div>
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<b><i>Read more</i> <a href="http://internationalviewpoint.org/spip.php?article2930" target="_blank">HERE</a>.<span id="goog_2143162648"></span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/"></a><span id="goog_2143162649"></span></b></div>
Next Year Countryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08057931166900219143noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8171119669988158355.post-41645783903249163682013-03-22T19:25:00.001-06:002013-03-22T19:25:36.606-06:00The Relevance of Marxism Today<i><span style="color: #274e13; font-size: x-large;">An Interview With Michael A. Lebowitz </span></i><div>
<br /><b>By Zhuo Mingliang</b></div>
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<i>MRzine</i></div>
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March 21, 2013<br /><br /><b>Do you think Marxism is still relevant today? If so, which parts?</b><br /><br />I think that Marxism is completely relevant for understanding capitalism now. It's an error to think that capitalism has changed and that therefore we have to change Marxism. Marx grasped the nature of capitalism; and, although capitalism has changed in some of its forms, its essence remains the same. Capitalism is a system based upon the exploitation and deformation of wage laborers for the purpose of profits for those who own the means of production. That has not changed.</div>
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<b>Read more <u><a href="http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2013/lebowitz210313.html" target="_blank">HERE</a></u>.</b><br /></div>
Next Year Countryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08057931166900219143noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8171119669988158355.post-48007155061453714802013-03-19T00:20:00.002-06:002013-03-19T00:24:13.007-06:00Stop the Expansion<b><i><u><a href="http://dirtyoilsands.org/" target="_blank">Dirty Oil Sands Watch</a></u></i></b><br />
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<span style="font-size: x-large;">F</span>orty years ago, many Canadians were taught in school that the oil would never be extracted from the tar sands because it was too expensive. But that did not stop the oil sands companies from trying. The first open pit mine began in 1967 and produced 30,000 barrels per day and it took 10 years before the second mine started producing in 1978.<br />
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Thing look very different today. Today there are now 5 mines in operation with 7 more proposed or under construction. There are 9 insitu sites producing with 38 either proposed or in the exploration phase.<br />
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Currently there are 1.7 million barrels per day (mbd) extracted from the tar sands. If all the approved projects are built , there would be 5 mbd extracted. But the companies won’t stop there. They are considering enough projects to bring it to 9mbd.<br />
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That is over 270 million one litre pop bottles per day being produced right now with a goal of over 1.5 billion one litre pop bottles per day in the future.<br />
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In order to get this oil to market, there are plans to have four more pipelines ship the increase oil production to market. This includes:<br />
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<a href="http://dirtyoilsands.org/pipelines#keystone">Keystone XL</a><br />
<a href="http://dirtyoilsands.org/pipelines#gateway">Northern Gateway</a><br />
<a href="http://dirtyoilsands.org/pipelines#kindermorgan">Kinder Morgan</a><br />
<a href="http://dirtyoilsands.org/pipelines#trailbreaker">Trailbreaker</a><br />
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Prime Minister Stephen Harper has made it a priority to expedite the expansion of the tar sands, including the rapid approval of more mines and pipelines. When the Prime Minister found a few obstacles in his way, such as public opposition and regulatory processes designed to protect the environment, he tried to overcome them by attacking nature and democracy. By limiting public engagement in the review of major projects like pipelines, attacking conservation groups, and gutting environmental legislation, Harper and the Government of Canada is determined to expand the tar sands putting at risk communities, land, air, water, the climate, and democracy. This must be stopped.<br />
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Instead of Harper’s petro-state we need to a low carbon economy, creating jobs and economic prosperity based on the development of clean energy. Pessimists say it can’t be done, that it is too expensive, and that we cannot produce enough energy to replace our dependence on oil. But if people were able to extract oil from the tar sands surely we can figure out a way to harness clean energy and protect our land, air, and water.Next Year Countryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08057931166900219143noreply@blogger.com0