BRICS cook the climate

By Patrick Bond

Pambazuka News
2013-03-27, Issue 623

The 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.

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.

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.

Ecological Marxism in China

Two Articles from MR
February Issue, 2013

What Does Ecological Marxism Mean For China?

Questions and Challenges for John Bellamy Foster

Zhihe Wang, Meijun Fan, Hui Dong, Dezhong Sun and Lichun Li

Toward a Global Dialogue on Ecology and Marxism

A Brief Response to Chinese Scholars

John Bellamy Foster

China’s Capitalism and the Climate

By Robert Hunziker
Dissident Voice
December 22nd, 2012

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

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

China’s Nexen Deal Tangled Up With Keystone Pipeline

By Peter Lee

Asia Times

October 6, 2012

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

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

Ecosocialism and Deglobalization

By Aurélien Bernier

Le Journal des Alternatives

September 3, 2012

This is a google translation of the original article

"Wild industrialization that accumulates pollution, urbanization out of scale that dislocates communities, no longer meet the needs and aspirations of present time. The time has come to define a new growth. "[...]

"I insist, in fact, for several years, and in various circumstances, the need for a different kind of growth, more humane and economically. This new growth is not only a concept, something to think about or dream, it can actually draw. In environmental matters, it means first "zero growth" of pollution. "[...]

"In traditional economic indicators that measure only the expansion of commodity production, it will be necessary to add additional criteria that reflect also the changes of life and are a currently registered in any of our statistical elements . In tomorrow's world, the increase in public parks, the largest clean air and water, the decline in accidents or road signs must be measurable and measured progress. '

This quote is not from the book of the Left Front in environmental planning. She dated 29 October 1975 and was delivered by the President of the French Republic, Valéry Giscard d'Estaing. This shows how the recovery of ecology by the ruling classes is not a new thing.

Weapons for the Weak in the Climate Struggle

By Walden Bello
Foreign Policy in Focus
August 16, 2012

This past month was the hottest July in the United States ever recorded. In India, the monsoon rains are long delayed, resulting in the country’s second drought in four years. Triple-digit temperatures in New Delhi and other cities have already provoked the worst power outages in the country’s history and the expected bad harvest is likely to slice at least 5 percent from GDP growth.

In Beijing, which usually suffers from a shortage of water, a storm on July 21 resulted in the worst flooding since recordkeeping began in 1951, according to theEconomist. Meanwhile, here in the Philippines, a protracted, weeklong rainstorm plunged Metropolitan Manila into a watery disaster that is probably the worst in recent history.

If there is any doubt that the abnormal is now the norm, remember that this is shaping up to be the second straight year that nonstop rains have wreaked havoc in Southeast Asia. Last year, the monsoon season brought about the worst flooding in Thailand’s history, with waters engulfing Bangkok and affecting over 14 million people, damaging nearly 7,000 square miles of agricultural land, disrupting global supply chains, and bringing about what the World Bank estimated to be the world’s fourth costliest disaster ever.

What Cuba Can Teach Us About Food and Climate Change

After the Cold War, Cuba faced many of the agricultural challenges that the rest of the world is now anticipating. 

By Raj Patel

Slate

Wednesday, Aug. 15, 2012

Cuban farmers sowing sweet potatoes. Photograph by STR/AFP/Getty Images. 

The Studebakers plying up and down Havana’s boardwalk aren’t the best advertisement for dynamism and innovation. But if you want to see what tomorrow’s fossil-fuel-free, climate-change-resilient, high-tech farming looks like, there are few places on earth like the Republic of Cuba.

Under the Warsaw Pact, Cuba sent rum and sugar to the red side of the Iron Curtain. In exchange, it received food, oil, machinery, and as many petrochemicals as it could shake a stick at. From the Missile Crisis to the twilight of the Soviet Union, Cuba was one of the largest importers of agricultural chemicals in Latin America. But when the Iron Curtain fell, the supply lines were cut, and tractors rusted in the fields.

Unable to afford the fertilizers and pesticides that 20th-century agriculture had taken for granted, the country faced extreme weather events and a limit to the land and water it could use to grow food. The rest of the world will soon face many of the same problems: In the coming decade, according to the OECD, we’ll see higher fuel and fertilizer costs, more variable climate patterns, and limits to arable land that will drive cereal prices 20 percent higher and hike meat prices by 30 percent—and that’s just the beginning. Policymakers can find inspirational and salutary ideas about how to confront this crisis in Cuba, the reluctant laboratory for 21st-century agriculture.

French Left Front: "There Is A Good Common To All of Humanity"

Translated by Henry Crapo and reviewed by Bill Scoble
l'Humanite
15 March 2012

Jean-Luc Melenchon, the Left Front candidate in the presidential election, received us at his headquarters in les Lilas [1], to share with us his political project. As his campaign is taking off, he took the opportunity provided by our meeting to send to the youth a message of optimism.

Huma: Why don’t you devote more time to ecology in your campaign?

Jean-Luc Mélenchon: Ecology occupies a place for us that it has never found in any program of the traditional left. Check: the economic program of the Left Front is built around the concept of ecological planning. There is an intuition of communism which is verified by political ecology, namely that there is a common good of humanity. If we consider only what is good for us, we will include corporatisms, but if we think about what is good for everyone, we will have a chance to get hold of an effective solution. This is what lies at the foundation of the Republic: the common good, that which is good for all. So political ecology is the reforming paradigm of communism, of socialism, and of humanist universalism. We carry its ideas because we are the voice of the social class which, by its material conditions of existence, has no particular interest other than the public interest.

Unveiling Canada's Role in Chile’s Environmental and Political Conflicts

By Cyril Mychalejko
Toward Freedom
15 March 2012

Environmental justice march in Aysén, Chile  

A new report reveals the Canadian mining industrial complex's responsibility for social discord and environmentally-destructive policies in Chile's Patagonia region.

“Far away, on the southern cone of South America in Chilean Patagonia, exists one of the most beautiful, still-virgin territories on Earth. There, an intense struggle is taking place that most Canadians have never heard of, but that intimately involves the Canadian mining industry, the Canadian government, and millions of Canadian pensioners and investors,” notes Council of Canadianschairperson Maude Barlow in the report's introduction.

The report, Chilean Patagonia in the Balance: Dams, Mines and the Canadian Connection, asserts that Canada's mining industry, which leads the world in mining investment with more than half of its assets in Latin America, accounts for 33 percent of electricity demand in Chile while advantageously exercising enormous influence in setting government policy there.

Carbon Blood Money in Honduras

By Rosie Wong
Foreign Policy in Focus
March 9, 2012

With its muddy roads, humble huts, and constant military patrols, Bajo Aguán, Honduras feels a long way away from the slick polish of the recurring UN climate negotiations in the world’s capital cities. Yet the bloody struggle going on there strikes at the heart of global climate politics, illustrating how market schemes designed to “offset” carbon emissions play out when they encounter the complicated reality on the ground.

Small farmers in this region have increasingly fallen under the thumb of large landholders like palm oil magnate Miguel Facussé, who has been accused by human rights groups of responsibility for the murder of numerous campesinos in Bajo Aguán since the 2009 coup. Yet Facussé’s company has been approved to receive international funds for carbon mitigation under the UN’s Clean Development Mechanism (CDM).

The contrast between the promise of “clean development” and this violent reality has made Bajo Aguán the subject of growing international attention — and a lightning rod for criticism of the CDM.

Growing Change: A Journey Inside Venezuela's Food Revolution

A documentary by Simon Cunich

If current trends continue, global food crises will become more frequent and more severe. Today's food systems already leave hundreds of millions of people in hunger and are rapidly depleting the soil fertility on which long-term food security depends. Add to this mix the convergence of climate change and peak oil and it's clear we need major changes to the way food is produced and distributed.

Growing Change looks at one of the most exciting experiments in the world to turn this around - efforts to grow a more fair and sustainable food system in Venezuela. From fishing villages to cacao plantations to urban gardens, this growing social movement is showing what's possible when people, not corporations, start to take control of food.

For more info’ about the film, visit HERE.

One Year after Fukushima Nuclear Disaster

By Kenji Kunitomi
ESSF
6 March 2012

One year have passed since tremendous scale of earthquake and tsunami catastrophe which severely attacked and destroyed towns and villages in North-East coastal region of Japan. Nearly 20,000 people were killed and missing, 341,000 have been evacuated, and many people lived in affected zones lost their fundamental basis of daily existences, such as houses, public transport, health care, jobs, and their communities.

Furthermore, the worst nuclear accident of Fukushima Dai-ichi(No1) have caused increasingly devastating situations among population in Fukushima prefecture. The number of evacuee from towns and villages near the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant is reaching 100,000. They will be not able to return their hometown for several decades, in fact indefinite period, because of radioactive contamination of land, river, sea and air.

Iran, Canada and the Petro State

By Andrew Nikiforuk

TheTyee.ca

March 5, 2012

Whenever North Americans fill up their vehicles with gasoline these days they should reflect on their ongoing contribution to the dysfunctional status of petro states and the Islamic Republic of Iran in particular.

Iran's civilian nuclear power ambitions, of course, have set off a grand political tiff with the United States and Israel. Both suspect the nation wants to make atomic weapons too.

The United States, which pioneered the globe's oil addiction, has imposed trade sanctions while pundits have begun to beat war drums. Israel, which has quietly eliminated a few Iranian nuclear engineers, has hinted about pre-emptive strikes.

As a consequence, North American motorists, whose driving habits and penchant for cheap oil transformed Iran, Mexico, Nigeria, Venezuela and Saudi Arabia into bona fide petro states decades ago, are now paying a higher price at the pumps for the most volatile of global commodities.

Venezuela's Opec stand is a win for climate change campaigners

Environmentalists who support developing countries' fight against polluters should also back their struggle for control of oil

By Mark Weisbrot
guardian.co.uk
Friday 2 March 2012

Environmentalists seem to realize that they have some stake in a fight such as the Ecuador-Chevron lawsuit. That case, which Chevron has recently moved to an international arbitration panel in an attempt to avoid a multibillion penalty handed down by Ecuadorian courts, is about whether a multinational oil corporation will have to pay damages for pollution for which it is responsible. Most environmentalists figure that would be a good thing.

But what about fights between multinational oil giants and the governments of oil-producing states over control of resources? Do people who care about the environment and climate change have a stake in these battles? It appears that they do, but most have not yet noticed it.

The Olympic taint

By Paddy McGuffin
Morning Star
17 February 2012

The London Olympics risks being toxically tainted by its links to companies responsible for global pollution, environmentalists and human rights campaigners have warned.

Games organisers have rejected grave concerns over the involvement of Dow Chemicals and oil giant BP in the 2012 Olympics.

Amnesty International condemned the International Olympic Committee's (IOC) decision today to reject the India Olympic Association's call to terminate Dow Chemicals' sponsorship deal with the London Games.

Ecological Civilization, Indigenous Culture, and Rural Reconstruction in China

Wen Tiejun, Lau Kinchi, Cheng Cunwang, He Huili, and Qiu Jiansheng

   

Monthly Review, Feb. 2012

Wen Tiejun (wentj [at] ruc.edu.cn) is Dean of the School of Agronomics & Rural Development and Executive Director of the Institute of Advanced Studies for Sustainability, at Renmin University of China. Lau Kinchiis associate professor in the Department of Cultural Studies at Lingnan University, Hong Kong. Cheng Cunwang is assistant to Professor Wen.He Huili is associate professor of the Sociology Department, Humanities and Development College, at China Agriculture University.Qiu Jiansheng is assistant to Professor Wen. This article is sponsored by China National Social Science Foundation (07&ZD048) and the 3rd phase of 985 project at Renmin University of China, and revised from the authors’ presentation to the Crossroads International Conference at Lingnan University, Hong Kong, June 17–21, 2010.

The governments of almost all developing countries are facing the long-term twin problems of capital shortages and high fiscal debts, resulting from their attempts to modernize the state forms and economic and financial relations left by colonialism or copied from western political culture. Whether they claimed to be of the left or the right ideologically, they almost invariably undertook policies to attract foreign investment and encourage domestic private investors to join the global industrialization competition during the twentieth century.

When one looks across many countries, there is a general pattern that seems clear—the greater the reliance on agriculture as the main source of employment, the poorer they are. But such a causal relationship gives a false impression. Up to the present the heavy institutional costs of industrialization with a modernized political superstructure, occurring together with a backward economic infrastructure, have not been recognized. Most developing countries have traveled down this one-way path, and sooner or later they have fallen into the trap of “modernizing” while leaving the institutional cost to the people and the environment.

Continental China, the biggest developing country, with the largest population (but also with significant natural resource constraints) has close to 20 percent of the world’s population, but only 9 percent of its arable land and a mere 6 percent of its fresh water.1 Over the centuries, China had its share of drought- or flood-induced famines. But if not for a 6,000-year history of irrigated agriculture, with its related “village rationality” based on traditional indigenous knowledge—which internalizes risks by its multifunctional rural cultures of sustainable self-reliance—China would have been a land of perpetual hunger.

Cuba on the Road to Clean Energy Development

By Patricia Grogg
IPS

HAVANA, Feb 7, 2012 (IPS) - More than a decade ago, solar electricity changed the lives of several mountain communities in Cuba. Now this and other renewable power sources are emerging as the best options available to develop sustainable energy across the island.

"If the world's clean energy potential exceeds our consumption needs, why do we insist on using the polluting kind?" asked Luis Bérriz, head of the Cuban Society for the Promotion of Renewable Energy Sources and Respect for the Environment (CUBASOLAR), a non- governmental organisation that promotes the use of alternative and environmentally-friendly power sources.

Environmental internationalism: Cuba’s new mission?

BY SAUL LANDAU AND NELSON P. VALDÉS
Canadian Dimension
February 6th 2012
Part 2 of 2

Since 1959 Cuba has played a significant world role, quite a feat for a nation of 5 million—11 million now. Cubans have shown their values, commitment and solidarity in dealing with the aftermath of natural disasters around the world.

Between 1960 and 2011, Cuba sent 45 medical brigades to 30 countries. From 1963 to 2010, 135,000 Cuban health professionals worked in 108 countries. Presently, 80 countries receive the health services of 38,000 Cuban internationalists.

Suffering Pakistanis will long remember their Cuban doctors. The October 2005 Kashmir earthquake killed 75,000, injured 100,000 and left 3-plus million homeless. Even though Cuba’s medical aid team spoke no Urdu, doctors, nurses and technicians of the newly formed Henry Reeve International Team of Medical Specialists in Disasters & Epidemics (created after Hurricane Katrina) reached the stricken region within six days of the quake.

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

Climate Connections
January 11, 2012

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

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

In Nigeria, Shell causes worst oil spill in a decade

By Blake Deppe

People's World

January 5, 2012 

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

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

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