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climate change
A lesson from Seattle for Copenhagen: Vigorous activism can defeat the denialists
By Patrick Bond
December 1, 2009 -- Preparations for the December 7-18 Copenhagen climate summit are going as expected, including a rare sighting of the African elites' stiffened spines. That's a great development (maybe decisive), more about that below.
While activists help raise the temperature on the streets outside the Bella Centre on December 12, 13 and 16, inside we will see global North elites defensively armed with pathetic non-binding carbon emissions cuts (US President Barack Obama's promise is a mere 4% below 1990 levels) and carbon trading, but without offering the money to repay the North's ecological debt to the global South.
The first and third of these are lamentable enough, the second is the most serious diversion from the crucial work of cutting greenhouse gas emissions. A nine-minute film launched on the internet on December 1, The Story of Cap and Trade, gives all the ammunition climate activists need to understand and critique emissions trading, and to seek genuine solutions.
Video: `The Story of Cap and Trade' (aka carbon trading), from the makers of `The Story of Stuff'
The Story of Cap & Trade from Story of Stuff Project on Vimeo.
December 1, 2009 -- The Story of Cap & Trade is a fast-paced, fact-filled look at the leading climate solution being discussed at the climate talks in Copenhagen. Cap and trade is also variously described as ``carbon trading'' and ``emissions trading''. In Australia, the federal Labor government is trying to push a variation of this through the Senate called the ``Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme''.
Britain: One million climate jobs now!
By the Public and Commercial Services Union (Britain)
November 15, 2009 -- Earlier this year, Britain's Campaign against Climate Change (CaCC) trade union group set up a commission to produce a detailed plan for a million ``climate'' jobs.
The commission includes academics and environmental groups as well as several unions including the Public and Commercial Services Union (PCS).
In November 2009 the CaCC trade union group published a pamphlet, One million climate jobs NOW!, which sets out how this can be achieved. The pamphlet is the first stage in a national campaign to get the government to employ a million unemployed workers to save the climate. It contains the arguments workers need for building the campaign.
You can download the pamphlet here: One million climate jobs PDF or read on screen below.
Socialists, the environment and ecosocialism: a view from South Africa
By Trevor Ngwane
November 19, 2009 -- There is an ecological crisis in the world and this crisis can be traced to capitalism. There is deforestation due to the trade in timber. There is climate change due to unsafe production methods.
The working class is the class that suffers the most from the ecological crisis. Working-class people are in the majority and their life conditions make them more vulnerable. Workers live in flimsy houses and shacks that are easily washed or swept away by strong rains and winds. When workers are sick or injured there is always not enough medical help for them.
Over the years not enough attention has been paid to this problem by socialists. What is worse is that some people who call themselves socialists have added to the ecological crisis, for example, the Soviet Union was responsible for one of the biggest nuclear accidents in human history in Chernobyl. The Chinese Communist Party continues to supervise the destruction of nature through its single-minded and ruthless adoption of capitalist production methods.
Britain: The Lucas Aerospace workers' plan -- A real Green New Deal
By Hilary Wainwright and Andy Bowman
October 9, 2009 -- Red Pepper -- Thirty-five years ago, workers at the Lucas Aerospace company formulated an ``alternative corporate plan'' to convert military production to socially useful and environmentally desirable purposes. We consider what lessons it holds for the greening of the world economy today
There are moments when a radical idea quickly goes mainstream. A cause for optimism but also caution; an opportunity for a practical challenge. The ``Green New Deal'’, a proposal for a green way out of recession, is such an idea (see interview with Green Party leader Caroline Lucas, Red Pepper, June/July 2009). It has now been adopted in some form, in theory if not in corresponding action, by governments across the world.In Britain, the workers’ occupation of the Vestas wind turbine factory on the Isle of Wight – supported by green, trade union and socialist campaigners across the country – has provided a practical challenge to the government. The Vestas workers’ argument, committed as ministers say they are to green investment, is that here is an exemplary case: so intervene and save green jobs, creating a base and a beacon for further action in the same direction.
Convert the ailing car industry to socially necessary production!
With the economic recession and environmental crisis alternative plans for socially useful, sustainable production have never been more relevant argues Lars Henriksson.
When the financial shit hit the fan last year the overproduction in the auto industry became visible. In the Swedish auto industry the proportions between fan and shit was especially problematic. The crisis involved two of the world’s smallest mass producers, both owned by troubled US corporations, and both producing large, fuel consuming semi-luxury cars. In a country of 9 million it was like having two bankrupt car companies and their chain of sub contractors plus two crisis-hit truck companies in London.
The auto crisis of course became a big political issue in Sweden and still is. As elsewhere in the world there were two principle lines of argument in the mainstream discussion about what should be done.
John Bellamy Foster: `The roots of the world ecological crisis'
October 29, 2009 -- "We have no other word but crisis to describe it, really. It's very different than the economic crisis that we are now in, in the sense that even a very, very severe economic crisis, such as the one that has been present since late 2007 ... still is, in many ways, a cyclical event... These crises are periodic -- it's part of the nature of capitalism...
Fourth International debates `ecosocialism'
By Michael Löwy
International Viewpoint -- October 10, 2009 -- Daniel Tanuro’s report on climate change [Report on climate change at the IC of the Fourth International] is one of the most important documents produced by our movement in recent years. It is an invaluable contribution to the political arming of revolutionary Marxists and to making them capable of facing up to the challenges of the 21st century.
Climate change: The carbon trading debacle
By Carter Burke
October 28, 2009 -- The next major international summit on climate change will be held in Copenhagen in early December, 2009. The position of the United States in these talks remains ambiguous. The latest climate legislation to move through the US Congress is H.R. 2454, the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009. It passed the US House of Representatives in June 2009, mostly along party lines, to the applause of President Obama and house speaker Nancy Pelosi.
Asia: NGOs display `lobby cretinism' over ASEAN human rights commission
By Giles Ji Ungpakorn
October 25, 2009 -- The Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN) is made up of Thailand, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Burma, Brunei and Singapore, which are all authoritarian states. It also includes the semi-democratic Malaysia, along with the Philippines and Indonesia, which are more or less democratic. Would anyone expect a gathering of government leaders from these countries to set up a genuine human rights commission? Apparently, some NGOs from the region did think so.
However, they got snubbed. Not only did the governments decide to appoint the human rights commissioners themselves, they also refused to meet with half the NGO delegates, and allowed only Dr Surichai Wangaeo of Chulalongkorn University to speak on behalf of the NGO delegation. Who is Dr Surichai? He supported the 2006 military coup in Thailand and was an appointee to the military junta’s parliament. The Thai NGO team that was involved in so-called “civil society” discussions also included people who supported the military coup.
When the climate change centre cannot hold
By Patrick Bond
October 26, 2009 -- After the October 24-25 weekend in which 350.org and thousands of allies around the world valiantly tried to raise global consciousness about impending catastrophe (see slideshow below, photos from 350.org), we can ask some tough questions about what to do after people have departed and the props packed up. No matter the laudable big-tent activism, let's face it: global climate governance is gridlocked and it seems clear that no meaningful deal can be sealed in Copenhagen on December 18.
Philippines socialists: `Moratorium on foreign debt to pay for a modern weather forecasting service'
Scenes from Manila in the aftermath of Typhoon Ondoy. Photos: Vitamin OC.
By Partido Lakas ng Masa
Moratorium on foreign debt servicing to pay for essential and basic services! Upgrade Pagasa’s equipment now!
London climate justice conference: A model of ecosocialist collaboration
By Ian Angus
September 17, 2009 -- Climate and Capitalism -- On September 12, about 100 people attended “Climate and Capitalism”, a one-day conference in London, England, organised by Green Left and Socialist Resistance.
I was invited to participate as editor of the Climate and Capitalism website, and as editor of The Global Fight for Climate Justice, published this summer by Resistance Books (Britain). (The meeting was in part a launch event for the book.) I spoke at the opening plenary [see Ian Angus' presentation below] and in a workshop on the global South.
Australian socialists demand `green jobs'
By the Socialist Alliance
[The following leaflet was distributed at the ``switch off Hazelwood'' power station protest in Victoria on September 12 and 13, attended by more than 300 people.]
September 13, 2009 -- The transition from a fossil fuel dependent society to renewable energy is perhaps the most urgent question facing humanity. The public debate about climate change has shifted from a discussion about the reality of global warming to a discussion focused on how to transition to renewable energy.
Declaration of the Africa People's Movement on Climate Change
Confronting the climate crisis: Preparing for Copenhagen and beyond
Nairobi, Kenya, August 30, 2009 -- We, the leaders of various people's movements, community-based groups, academia, NGOs and civil cociety organisations, met in Nairobi under the banner of the People's Movement on Climate Change (PMCC) to discuss strategies to confront the climate change crisis for Copenhagen and beyond from August 27 to 28 , 2009.
Do hereby affirm that:
Call for a ‘Seattle’ approach to Copenhagen climate talks, Africans demand reparations
By Patrick
Bond
September 5, 2009 – Durban -- Here’s a fairly simple choice: the global North would pay the hard-hit global South to deal with the climate crisis, either through the complicated, corrupt, controversial ``Clean Development Mechanism’ (CDM), whose projects have plenty of damaging sideeffects to communities, or instead pay through other mechanisms that must provide financing quickly, transparently and decisively to achieve genuine income compensation plus renewable energy to the masses.
The
Copenhagen climate summit in December is all about the former choice, because
the power bloc in Europe and the US have put carbon trading at the core of
their emissions reduction strategy, while the two largest emitters of carbon in
the Third World, China and India, are the main beneficiaries of CDM financing.
`Amanzi Ngawethu' (water is ours); Health and environmental victories for South African activists
On September 2 and 3, 2009, the Constitutional Court of South Africa will hear the final appeal in a case brought by five Soweto residents challenging Johannesburg's discriminatory prepaid water meter system. Their six-year legal battle would reaffirm the constitutional right to water for all South Africans.
Low-income communities in Johannesburg's townships do not have sufficient water resources and do not receive the same water services as residents in wealthier, often white, suburbs. Yet, the Bill of Rights of South Africa guarantees everyone's right to have access to sufficient water.
The false promise of energy efficiency and a real alternative
By Don Fitz
August 22, 2009 -- An action can have opposite effects, depending on it s social contexts. An isolated individual who protests company policy by refusing to go to work could well get fired and become an example used to intimidate others. When an entire workforce stays off the job, it’s called a “strike” and has a very good chance of forcing the company to change its policy.
As positive as they may be for friends and family, individual lifestyles of non-violence do not stop wars from being fought. But a society that eliminates corporate control of the economy gets rid of the need for expansion and takes an enormous step towards non-violence. In this context, non-violent lifestyles solidify non-violent global politics.
It is even more so with “energy efficiency”. It is impossible for individual choices to purchase energy-efficient products to have any positive effect on climate change. But, in a democratically run economy, energy efficiency would be a cornerstone of resolving the catastrophic legacy of production for profit.
Lucas Aerospace -- When workers said `no' to military production, `yes' to green jobs
By Rob Marsden
August 22, 2009 -- Socialist Resistance -- Today, the twin drivers of economic recession and the possibility of catastrophic climate change are beginning to push working people towards action. A series of small-scale but high-profile occupations of threatened factories, not just at Vestas wind turbine plant but also at Visteon car plant, where 600 workers took on the might of Ford and won a greatly enhanced redundancy package, show what is possible. In the 1970s workers at Britain's Lucas Aerospace went even further. We look back at the lessons of Lucas Aerospace.
It is clear that if we are to avert catastrophic climate change by moving rapidly to a low-carbon economy, certain industries will have to be wound down or drastically scaled back, for example, the power generation, aviation and car industries. However, rather than this leading to a net loss of jobs, efforts must be put into creating new green jobs or ``converting'' old jobs.
Climate change: Why population is not the problem
By Jess Moore
August 9, 2009 -- We face a climate crisis and something needs to change. The world’s resources are finite, as is the amount of destruction humans can do to the planet if we are to survive. There is a debate in the environment movement about whether or not curbing population is an essential part of the solution. We have a decade, maybe a decade and a half, to transform our current relationship with the planet. Of course, the starting point for environmentalists cannot be solutions. We first need to identify the cause of the crisis before we can know how to fight it.
People who see limiting population as essential to solving the climate crisis argue the cause of environmental degradation, at least in part, is overpopulation. Most “populationists” argue there are already too many human beings on the planet to provide for everyone’s basic needs. All contend that curbing population growth or decreasing population is some or all of the solution to climate change and to the fact that the basic needs of many people are not satisfied.
