environment
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.]
Videos: Cuba's green revolution
A clip from the BBC's Around the World in 80 Gardens (2008) introduces the urban organic food gardening revolution in Havana, Cuba.
Are livable cities just a dream?
By Dave Holmes
Individual versus social solutions to global warming
By Terry Townsend
Climate Crisis — Urgent Action Needed Now!
Statement initiated by participants in the Climate Change|Social Change conference, Sydney, Australia, April 11-13, 2008. The statement is now available at to be signed online at http://www.petitiononline.com/Nelmezzo/petition.html. Please distribute this information to your networks, and get all who are serious about fighting global warming to sign on.
The conference was organised by Green Left Weekly. For video and audio from the conference, please click here.
The following statement was started by the participants in the Climate Change|Social Change conference. It is being distributed to environmental, trade union, Indigenous, migrant, religious and community organisations to help build the movement against global warming.
London, May 8, 2008: Can the free-market stop climate change?
Is big business responsible for dangerously increasing levels of CO2 emissions or can we buy our way out of climate change with market based solutions such as carbon trading?
Take part online or in person.
Speakers:
Caroline Lucas, MEP Green Party
Peter Hardstaff, World Development Movement
Walden Bello, Focus on the Global South
Watch online
This will be streamed below on 8 May 7.30-9pm.
Register for an email reminder of when the event is live
Watch in person
To attend the live event please register for a free place.
Marxism and the environment -- John Bellamy Foster
Marxism and the environment was a workshop given by John Bellamy Foster to the Climate Change Social Change Conference, in Sydney on April 12, 2008.
Climate change solutions: what role for the market? & Equity in energy consumption -- Patrick Bond
Two talks by Patrick Bond, delivered at the Climate Change Social Change Conference, Sydney, April 12, 2008.
Climate change solutions: what role for the market?
Ecosocialism 2025
