A Roundtable for Ecosocialism - by the Parti de Gauche

The Friends of the Left Front Association (UK)

January 10, 2013

On December 1st 2012 the Parti de Gauche organised a round table to discuss the Ecosocialist project. This gave us the opportunity to debate our "Ecosocialist Manifesto ” around 18 themes. Please visit ecosocialisme.com for practical information.

Building a new left wing political synthesis

We now know that human emancipation cannot be achieved by never ending growth: the ecosystem does not allow it. This forces us to reconsider our production and trading system, and generally speaking the entire social and political organisation. Under these circumstances, we propose Ecosocialism as a new reading of our strategy for the future of humanity.

Ecosocialism implies the use of practical radicalism, environmental planning, and a citizens’ revolution. Its means are based on a redistribution of wealth that would take into account environmental constraints, the rejection of all kinds of domination and oppression, and popular sovereignty within a democratic, republican and secular state.

Canada's environmental activists seen as 'threat to national security'

Police and security agencies describe green groups' protests and petitions as 'forms of attack', documents reveal

By Stephen Leahy 
guardian.co.uk

Thursday 14 February 2013

Monitoring of environmental activists in Canada by the country's police and security agencies has become the "new normal", according to a researcher who has analysed security documents released under freedom of information laws.

Security and police agencies have been increasingly conflating terrorism and extremism with peaceful citizens exercising their democratic rights to organise petitions, protest and question government policies, said Jeffrey Monaghan of the Surveillance Studies Centre at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario.

The RCMP, Canada's national police force, and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) view activist activities such as blocking access to roads or buildings as "forms of attack" and depict those involved as national security threats, according to the documents.

50,000 protest against the Keystone XL pipeline in Washington

By Brent Patterson
Council of Canadians
Feb. 17, 2013

It was a massive and vibrant #ForwardOnClimate protest today in Washington, DC, with an estimated 50,000 people present. Families with small children, Occupy, First Nations, young people, and a broad cross-section of people were here to send a clear message to President Obama - reject the Keystone XL pipeline. Speakers included 350.org founder Bill McKibben, former presidential adviser Van Jones, Chief Jackie Thomas of the Saik’uz First Nation in British Columbia, and Crystal Lameman of the Beaver Lake Cree First Nation in Alberta.

Initially, it was believed that 35,000 people were present, but 350.org organizer Joshua Kahn Russell writes this afternoon, “Earlier numbers announced were low - after aerial shots, official estimate of #ForwardOnClimate rally is 50,000 people.”



European and US coverage

Agence France Presse reports, “Tens of thousands of protesters gathered in Washington Sunday to generate pressure on President Barack Obama to take concrete measures to fight global warming. Waving banners and signs with slogans like ‘What will be your climate legacy?’ the protesters called on Obama to reject the $7 billion Keystone XL pipeline that would bring oil from Canada to Texas…”

Canada Lobbying US to Approve Keystone XL Pipeline

By Yves Engler
Dissident Voice
February 15th, 2013

On Sunday tens of thousands are set to converge on the White House in what organizers are promoting as “the largest climate rally in U.S. history.” The protesters will be calling on Barack Obama to reject the Keystone XL pipeline.

Alongside one of this country’s biggest corporations, Stephen Harper’s government has entangled Canada in one of the most controversial decisions of Obama’s presidency. The Conservatives have lobbied vigorously in support of Calgary-based TransCanada’s plan to build a $7 billion pipeline to take up to 800,000 barrels of oil a day from Alberta to refineries on the Gulf Coast. The prime minister has pressed Obama to approve Keystone XL while his ministers have visited Washington to pursue the matter with the Secretary of State. During two visits to Washington in recent weeks foreign minister John Baird said Keystone XL was his main priority.

James Hansen and the Climate-Change Exit Strategy

By John Bellamy Foster
Monthly Review
February, 2013

Humanity is not a bunch of lemmings marching unstoppably toward a cliff. There is such a thing as free will…. People please wake up! For the sake of young people, future generations, and other life on our planet, don’t settle for what some “experts” say is the best we can do.
— James Hansen

The Climate Cliff

The world at present is fast approaching a climate cliff. Science tells us that an increase in global average temperature of 2°C (3.6° F) constitutes the planetary tipping point with respect to climate change, leading to irreversible changes beyond human control. A 2°C rise is sufficient to melt a significant portion of the world’s ice due to feedbacks that will hasten the melting. It will thus set the course to an ice-free world. Sea level will rise. Numerous islands will be threatened along with coastal regions throughout the globe. Extreme weather events (droughts, storms, floods) will be far more common. The paleoclimatic record shows that an increase in global average temperature of several degrees means that 50 percent or more of all species—plants and animals—will be driven to extinction. Global food crops will be negatively affected. For example, a 2011 report of the National Resource Council indicates that the U.S. corn (maize) crop, which accounts for 40 percent of the world’s total, will experience a 25 percent decline in average yield with a 2°C rise in temperature.

Read more HERE.

Global Resource Depletion: Is Population the Problem?

By Fred Magdoff
Monthly Review

January, 2013

Environmentalists and scientists often refer to the two different ends of the environmental problem as sources and sinks. Thus the environmental limits to economic growth manifest themselves as either: (1) shortages in the “sources” or “taps” of raw materials/natural resources, and thus a problem of depletion, or (2) as a lack of sufficient “sinks,” to absorb wastes from industrial pollution, which “overflow” and cause harm to the environment.1 The original 1972 Limits to Growth study emphasized the problem of sources in the form of shortages of raw materials, such as fossil fuels, basic minerals, topsoil, freshwater, and forests.

Today the focus of environmental concern has shifted more to sinks, as represented by climate change, ocean acidification, and production of toxics. Nevertheless, the problem of the depletion of resources used in production remains critical, as can be seen in discussions of such issues as: declining freshwater resources, peak (crude) oil, loss of soil fertility, and shortages of crucial minerals like zinc, copper, and phosphorus.

Read more HERE.

Fred Magdoff is professor emeritus of plant and soil science at the University of Vermont. He is coauthor with John Bellamy Foster of What Every Environmentalist Needs to Know About Capitalism (Monthly Review Press, 2011)

China’s Capitalism and the Climate

By Robert Hunziker
Dissident Voice
December 22nd, 2012

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

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

New book from NYC - No Expectations: A Memoir

From Next Year Country Books  



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

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

Click HERE to purchase this book.

Read excerpts from his book HERE and HERE.

Climate Change: The Tragic Farce At Doha

Solidarity Ecosocialist Commission

Europe Solidaire Sans Frontieres
11 December 2012

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

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

A Marxist Ecological Vision

By Nicolas Davenport
Solidarity
1 November 2012

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Richard Fidler 

Life on the Left

December 8, 2012

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

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



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

New study states that climate change may not be reversible

All Voices

December 2, 2012

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

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

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

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

Read more HERE.