environment
G8: Rich countries retreat from action on climate change
G8 Action Network statement
July 9, 2008 -- The G8's communique regarding their action on climate is actually inaction being masked as movement. It is a great fraud being perpetrated on the global community that would significantly reduce its capacity to contain climate change. We fully agree with the statement of the Government of South Africa that "[W]hile the Statement may appear as a movement forward, we are concerned that it may, in effect, be a regression from what is required to make a meaningful contribution to meeting the challenges of climate change." [Click pic for BBC footage of G8 protests.]
Retreat from Bali
Political activism, class struggle -- not markets -- will save the planet
July 5, 2008 -- A political economist and activist who directs the Centre for Civil Society at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban, South Africa, Patrick Bond was a featured guest speaker at the Green Left Weekly Social Change — Climate Change conference held in Sydney, Australia, in April.
Author of a range of books, including Climate Change, Carbon Trading and Civil Society, Looting Africa: The Economics of Exploitation, and Walk Left, Talk Right: South Africa’s Frustrated Global Reforms, Bond is a long-time advocate for radical solutions to the climate and social catastrophe wraught by global capitalism.
Lauren Carroll Harris spoke to Bond at the conference about responses to climate change.
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What has been the response of the market to the crisis of climate change and what role does carbon trading play?
Can carbon trading solve global warming?
Larry Lohmann, the Corner House, UK
Towards climate action in Copenhagen 2009
Climate Network 09 | 23.05.2008 23:39 | Climate Chaos | Ecology
We invite you to join the 1st international planning meeting in Copenhagen from
the 13-14th of September 2008. The meeting aims at preparing a large
mobilisation for direct action against the root causes of climate change in
Copenhagen and throughout the world during the UN Climate Conference (30 Nov-11
Dec 2009).
Towards climate action in Copenhagen 2009
First international planning meeting
We stand at a crossroads in history. The facts are undeniable. Global climate
change, caused by human activities, is happening. We all know that, world over,
we're facing a manifold and deepening crisis: of the climate, energy, food,
livelihoods, and of political and human rights. Scientific, environmental,
social and civil society movements from all over the world are calling for
action against climate change.
Massive consumption of fossil fuel is one of the major causes of global
warming, a problem that threatens the lives of hundreds of millions of people
Nationalise big oil, enemy of the planet and its people
By Dick Nichols
June 17, 2008 -- The latest surge in the spot price of crude oil (to US$139 a barrel—87.4 cents a litre) dramatises the urgent need for society to wean itself off “black gold”. The longer we remain hooked the greater the devastation both to our environment and to the living standards of billions, especially the poorest peoples of the planet.
The challenge is huge. The response must combine defence against the threat to livelihoods from price rises with a plan to restructure economies and ways of living so that oil-intensive production and transport becomes a thing of the past.
Scottish Socialist Party: Free public transport for all: travel doesn't have to cost the Earth
The Scottish Socialist Party’s campaign for free public transport is an ``audacious, eye-catching idea'' according to Douglas Fraser, political editor of The Herald newspaper.
In the Belgian city of Hasselt, which covers an area double the size of Dundee, congestion was eliminated in the late 1980s after the introduction of a totally free public transport system.
Free public transport would be the biggest single pro-environment policy enacted by any national government anywhere on the planet, dramatically slashing car use and CO2 emissions.
Free fares would represent a major shift of wealth in favour of the many thousands of people who currently pay sky-high fares to subsidise the transport companies.
Cuba's vice-president: `We can confront the food crisis'
Address by José Ramón Machado Ventura, vice-president of Cuba’s Councils of State and Ministers, to the high-level conference on World Food Security: The Challenges of Climate Change and Bioenergy.
(English translation by Climate and Capitalism, from Juventud Rebelde, June 4, 2008)
Two years ago, in this very hall, the international community agreed to eradicate world hunger. It adopted a goal of halving the number of malnourished people by 2015. Today that modest and inadequate goal seems like a pipe-dream.
The world food crisis is not a circumstantial phenomenon. Its recent appearance in such serious form, in a world that produces enough food for all its inhabitants, clearly reveals that the crisis is systemic and structural.
Germany: Climate camp in Hamburg - August 15-24, 2008
Let's change the climate!
Climate Camp in Hamburg, 15th-24th August 2008
It's too hot! - The climate is changing!
The atmosphere is getting hotter. Even the most sinister prognoses of the World
Climate Council of the United Nations of the year 2007 in the meantime appear
to have been too optimistic. Climate change is more than melting polar caps,
drowning polar bears and hurricans of up to now unknown magnitudes. Climate
change is a social catastrophe. The global changes of the ecosystems are
exacerbating social contrasts world-wide. Because the effects of warming are
unequally distributed - between North and South, but also within societies,
between rich and poor.
The warming of the atmosphere is not an accident, but the result of an economic
system relying on profit and growth. Due to this higher-faster-forward logic,
capitalism burns enormous amounts of mineral ressources, for instance for the
production and selling of products with the help of a world-encompassing
logistics network. And even though almost everybody in the meantime wants to
Cuban VP: `Sustainable development requires a revolution in our values'
Address by José Ramón Machado Ventura, First Vice-President of Cuba’s Council of State, at a session on ``Sustainable Development: the Environment, Climate Change and Energy'', during the 5th EU/LAC (European Union/Latin America and Caribbean) summit meeting in Lima, Peru, May 16-17.
Your Excellency:
At the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development held in Rio de Janeiro 16 years ago, Fidel Castro issued a prophetic warning, stating that ``an important biological species is at risk of disappearing as a result of the rapid and progressive destruction of its natural living conditions: humanity''.
Time has proven him right.
Let us not mince our words: we won’t attain sustainable development, the negative impacts of climate change will not be halted or reversed, and the environment will not be preserved for future generations, if the irrational patterns of production, distribution and consumption imposed upon us by capitalism prevail. The globalisation of neoliberal policies has drastically exacerbated the crisis.
A brief socialist history of the automobile
By Rob Rooke
Global food crisis: Capitalism, agribusiness and the food sovereignty alternative
By Ian Angus
[Second of two articles. Click here for part one.]