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Post by Admin on May 4, 2021 19:12:03 GMT
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Post by Admin on May 24, 2021 15:01:48 GMT
The Anthropocene Reviewed www.waterstones.com/book/the-anthropocene-reviewed/john-green/9781529109870Inspired by Green’s phenomenally popular podcast of the same name, this eclectic collection of beautifully crafted essays touches on everything from spherical bacteria to Taco Bell breakfast menus – all linked by their relevance to this current, Anthropocene age. A deeply moving and insightful collection of personal essays from #1 bestselling author John Green, adapted from his critically acclaimed podcast. The Anthropocene is the current geological age, in which human activity has profoundly shaped the planet and its biodiversity. In this remarkable symphony of essays adapted and expanded from his groundbreaking podcast, John Green reviews different facets of the human-centered planet - from the QWERTY keyboard and Staphylococcus aureus to the Taco Bell breakfast menu - on a five-star scale. Complex and rich with detail, The Anthropocene Reviewed has been praised as 'observations that double as exercises in memoiristic empathy.' John Green's gift for storytelling shines throughout this artfully curated collection that includes both beloved essays and all-new pieces exclusive to the book. Publisher: Ebury Publishing ISBN: 9781529109870 Number of pages: 304 Weight: 422 g Dimensions: 222 x 144 x 29 mm
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Post by Admin on May 24, 2021 20:10:43 GMT
We Need to Change How We Talk About Climate Action BY HOLLY BUCK The Left needs a message on climate action that’s about giving more opportunities for working-class people rather than restricting individual behavior. jacobinmag.com/2021/05/climate-change-green-new-deal-technology/The prospects for climate action are starting to look more promising. Climate activists have injected the issue into the news agenda and spooked investors. Coal has peaked, and there’s talk of a peak in oil demand later this decade, too. Even the future of gas has come into question. Around the globe, countries, cities, and companies are making net-zero commitments. China has pledged to reduce emissions to net zero by 2060, which would be a hugely important development if realized. There was once a constant stream of bad news on climate, but now there is a mixture of bad news and good news every week. All the white papers, signals from investors, goals and targets, Instagram posts, and other narrative “content” and “deliverables” have created a version of the future that feels both coherent and realistic. Although climate and energy policy advocates recognize that action has yet to fully materialize on the ground, there is a growing consensus that our future is going to be a low-carbon one. We may have ruled out the worst-case existential scenarios and will now have to deal with a horrific 3°C of warming instead of 4, 5, or 6 degrees. Perhaps we can even cap it at 2°C. Can we stop to breathe? And does the turn away from worst-case scenarios mean that we can effectively rule out geoengineering as a necessary tool? It’s complicated. Let’s talk about three challenges we’ll have to navigate during this decade, one possible opportunity, and one near-term obstacle. Understanding Net Zero The first challenge is becoming increasingly clear. Net-zero emissions does not constitute a phaseout of fossil fuel production. Rather, net zero implies there will be some amount of residual, “difficult-to-abate” emissions balanced against some degree of negative emissions. The quantity of this remaining amount is going to be the focus of intense debate during the 2020s. The entire framing of how we think about climate change has been an incredible success for fossil fuel companies. They have drawn our eyes — and regulations — toward emissions rather than production. From this perspective, it’s not pumping the stuff from the ground that’s the problem, it’s combusting it. We now have a Paris Agreement and net-zero targets that are silent on production. The Green New Deal blueprint codified in Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s H.Res. 109 leads with the objective of greenhouse gas emissions reductions and net-zero rather than limits on output.
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Post by Admin on May 28, 2021 15:57:14 GMT
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Post by Admin on Jun 10, 2021 17:19:54 GMT
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Post by Admin on Jun 16, 2021 4:33:44 GMT
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Post by Admin on Jun 23, 2021 20:06:30 GMT
INTERVIEW ENVIRONMENT & HEALTH The Decline of Butterflies May Bring Dire Consequences for Life on Earth truthout.org/articles/the-decline-of-butterflies-may-bring-dire-consequences-for-life-on-earth/Butterflies are a symbol of beauty and metamorphosis, and one of few universally beloved insects. Indeed, few would think twice at squashing a fly or spider, yet butterflies inspire reverence. Both ancient Egyptians and Aztec believed that butterflies would greet the virtuous in the afterlife; multiple cultures around the world associated butterflies with the soul. In Western culture, they’re an eternally popular (if clichéd) tattoo decision. So embedded are butterflies in human culture that it is hard to imagine a planet without them. Yet that seems like the kind of world that we are headed for, at least based on current ecology trends. “In the last 50 years, our moth and butterfly populations have declined by more than 80 percent,” writes Josef H. Reichholf, an entomologist who recently penned a book, The Disappearance of Butterflies. “Perhaps only older people will recall a time when meadows were filled with colorful flowers and countless butterflies fluttered above.” Reichholf’s recent book is a paean to these beloved insects. In it, he regards butterflies not merely as a symbol for sensuality or visual splendor, but as animals with personalities. As Reichholf explains, they experience a complicated life cycle, their bodies constantly transforming and changing, an existential ordeal likely incomprehensible to the human mind. They are also, Reichholf says, astonishingly sophisticated in unappreciated ways. For instance: their penchant for drugs. “Butterflies can get drunk to some degree by sucking substances with psychopharmacological effects,” he told Salon. I interviewed Reichholf over email about his book and the future of butterflies. As always, our interview has been condensed and edited for print. Can you explain the contrast between butterfly populations when you started studying them in the late 1950s with what they are now? What have you personally observed? Quite vividly. I remember the lots of butterflies flying over the meadows when I was walking towards the river to observe birds [at] the River Inn in southeastern Bavaria in the early 1960s. The butterflies were of all the different kinds, from swallowtails to the then-very abundant blues, not only cabbage whites as now it is the case. However, studying diversity and abundance of night-flying Lepidoptera, the “moths,” revealed the ongoing trends over the next decades. While average species diversity decreased roughly by half in the last ten years, abundance fell to a level as low as 15 percent, compared to the numbers of the years from 1969 to 1979, at the margins of the village in the southeastern Bavarian countryside. Whereas this place of study borders directly the agricultural landscape, which had been exposed to extensive changes in use and input of fertilizers as well as in agrochemicals, there happened no significant changes in species diversity and abundance of Lepidoptera and other insects in the river and forest close by, where I kept running the same type of light traps in the same nights from the early 1970s onwards. And similar investigations which I made in the city of Munich in the 1980s and from 2002 to 2010 revealed no decrease despite some major fluctuations in the abundance of night-flying insects. It is important to note that now in Munich the level abundance of insects is higher than on the countryside dominated by the agricultural landscape. At one point you describe how purple emperors get drunk, literally, on toad poison. Can butterflies get “drunk” in the same way that we do? Why do they do this? Not only butterflies can get drunk to some degree by sucking substances with psychopharmacological effects, but as it is well known also to beetle collectors that many beetle species can be lured with alcohol-containing saps, some of which develop naturally if sugar-containing sap ferments by virtue of microbes present in nature. A number of mammals “like” alcohol-containing fruits, and birds do that as well. They have an enzyme in their livers which enables the decomposition of the alcohol, called alcohol-dehydrogenase. Can you break down the life cycle of the average butterfly? Most people believe that it’s as simple as a caterpillar creating a cocoon and transforming into a butterfly, but your book complicates that a bit. We have to look a bit closer into the life cycles of the butterflies and moths, which are much more dominated by the needs of the caterpillars than by those of the adult flying stage. The caterpillars are the “feeding stage,” which precedes the “mating stage” of moths and butterflies when they emerge from the pupae. There are two very basic requirements of the feeding stage — namely the proper food plants, as many Lepidoptera are quite specialized in their food choice; and a favorable microclimate in their habitat, conditions of which can be very different from that officially measured at the meteorological stations. For completing the annual cycles, the different species also must be able to survive through the winter, which may be in either stage as an egg, a caterpillar, a pupa or even as a hibernating butterfly (like the brimstone). General meteorological trends, therefore, reveal little about the weather’s real influence on the insects. Like so many ecological catastrophes, this one can be linked to industrial agriculture. What can we do to save them? My studies reveal, like so many others, the overwhelming influence of agriculture on insect populations. It is better now for butterflies and moths to try to live in cities than on a countryside dominated by agriculture. Reducing the amount of pesticides, however, as necessary and desirable as it certainly is, will not be followed closely enough to become convincing by increases of insect abundance. The predominating factor, at least here in Central Europe, is the over-fertilization of the landscape. The availability of nitrogen compounds in wide excess of the real demand favors the growth of a few plant species besides the field crops, thus reducing food plant diversity, and creating much wetter and cooler microclimates than normal for the sites due to the excessive growth of vegetation. Greatly reduced food plant diversity and too cold a microclimate are the key factors in the demise of butterflies and of most moth species and a lot of other insects, which aren’t agricultural pests. Reducing the amount of fertilizers, therefore, would be paramount in the political strategy for more insect conservation. Our nature reserves are too small and too subject to side effects from the modern agriculture to enable thriving populations of butterflies, moths and other desirable insects. Confronted with the fact, that more than a third of the agricultural products which people in Germany by in the supermarkets are disposed into the garbage, a lowering of the agricultural production level by some 25 per cent would not influence the food security for people, but greatly reduce the amount of fertilizers and pesticides used for maintaining the now so extremely high production level.
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Post by Admin on Jul 2, 2021 7:07:18 GMT
This Isn’t a Heatwave — It’s a Dying Planet Our Civilisation is Boiling Alive in the Fumes of its Own Waste eand.co/this-isnt-a-heatwave-it-s-a-dying-planet-ac1c9eb529d1It was my lovely doctor wife who leaned over to me and said: “Did you know scores of people in Canada are dead because of the heat? Near Vancouver?” Suffering a severe case of brain fog thanks to being in a pandemic for a year and counting now, I was tuned out. “Hmm,” I replied, absently. And then I woke up, suddenly hearing the words. “Wait, what?” Canada’s not exactly a place you associate with “people dead from the heat.” And yet it’s a grim tale of what’s to come. This isn’t a heatwave. It’s a dying planet. Much of the Pacific Northwest is trapped under what climate scientists are calling a “heat dome.” It stretches up and down the coast. Temperatures have rocketed off the charts. It was 115 degrees in Portland, Oregon. That’s hotter than Cairo, Egypt, or Karachi, Pakistan. This is a region of the world that should be temperate and cool — not boiling hot. But it’s trapped under a “heat dome,” which is a huge region of high pressure, that creates an effect literally akin to a pressure cooker. Yesterday’s “heat waves” — a few days of higher than normal temperatures are giving way to “heat domes” — something much more catastrophic, as the planet warms beyond all recognition, in ways profound hostile to us. Why do I say “dangerous”? Well, what is life under extreme heat like? The day before, I’d read an article about the hottest place on earth, which is Jacobabad, in Pakistan. It claims that title because average temperatures go beyond 52ºC. Remember, the heat dome in the Pacific Northwest has already pushed temperatures there almost within striking distance of that — the 115 Fahrenheit is 46 degrees Celsius. Portland and Seattle reached temperatures that are approaching the hottest city on earth. That’s “climate change,” or far more accurately put, global warming. We are beginning to be boiled alive. If you think that’s an exaggeration, consider life in Jacobabad. People don’t leave the house much when it’s that hot. They stay inside, trying to stay cool however they can. Business, commerce, trade, social events — all these things come to a halt. What does that sound like to you? It sounds a lot like lockdown. If you want to understand what the world will look like a few years or decades hence, the last year is — grimly — a very good guide. Extreme heat is a lot like pandemic lockdown, because these are both catastrophes that are on the verge of being unsurvivable. Jacobabad broils for months. Portland and Vancouver and Seattle’s heat dome will go away. But that’s a distinction without much of a difference. Because chances are the heat dome will be back next year, for longer. And so too the year after that. This is what living on a planet that’s heating rapidly is. What happens when Jacobabad gets even hotter? What happens as the Pacific Northwest experiences heat domes for longer, more frequently? For that, you need to understand the notion of “wet bulb temperature.” It accounts for heat stress to living things. When you cover a thermometer with a wet cloth, you record the temperature at which sweat cools the body with evaporation. Here’s how climate scientist Simon Lewis puts it. “Humans cannot survive prolonged exposure to a wet-bulb temperature beyond 35ºC because there is no way to cool our bodies. Not even in the shade, and not even with unlimited water. Did you get that? Beyond 95 degrees Fahrenheit — which is what 35ºC is — at 100% humidity, you’re dead. Fast. Bang. You can’t cool yourself. You go into organ failure, and literally boil alive from the inside, as your proteins denature (you can think my doctor wife for that lovely description.) Now, that wet bulb temperature has only been reached in a few places, for a few hours — so far. But we are now experiencing dramatic, massive warming as a globe. Warming which only, frankly, extremists and idiots can go on denying. You only have to think about how much hotter summer’s gotten wherever you are to literally feel how much our planet’s heating. We’re going to cross that line. Nobody can say for sure when. But what we can say is that we’re heading towards it at light speed, faster than anyone thinks. Portland and Vancouver being as hot as the hottest places on earth? As we cross the wet-bulb threshold of about 35ºC, places simply become unlivable. Lewis says “something truly terrifying is emerging: the creation of unliveable heat.” What happens as we cross that line? Well, you might think: I’ll just run my AC harder! Bzzt, wrong. ACs need lower humidity to work well, and the more humid conditions get, the harder they need to work. Meanwhile, the harder you work your AC, the more the power grid, stressed by demand, unable to cope, will crash regularly — just as it does in Jacobabad, or it did in Portland and Vancouver. We don’t have a technology that’s going to allow us to live comfortably on a boiling planet. I know that you might think we do, because, like me, you’re used to the luxury of air conditioned bliss. The truth is that technology only works in a profoundly narrow range of environmental conditions, maybe from 50 to 100 Fahrenheit, with relatively low humidity. We aren’t going to be able to air-condition our way out of being boiled alive. Instead, entire regions of the planet will simply become, as Lewis says, unlivable. Some place will suffer regular heat domes. Some, like Jacobabad, will just be too hot, period, year round. And some will have a drier heat that produces megafires, over and over again. There a lot of ways — too many — that you get to “unlivable.” Those places are also going to be a lot more numerous than we think. All those air conditioned glass towers in Miami? Good luck with that as the planet warms. All those steel and glass luxury skyscrapers in Manhattan? Have fun with a power grid that needs more juice than the entire East Coast can supply. What happens as a place becomes unlivable? Massive levels of disruption do. People have already fled Jacobabad. As “human capital flight” ensues, disruptions happens on three levels. The place people are fleeing from gets poorer and more unstable. The place they’re fleeing to usually doesn’t want them there, especially if they’re coming with nothing. And they will be coming with nothing, all these climate refugees and migrants, because, well, most of us have just one real asset, if we’re lucky, and that’s our homes. But if you have to leave a place because it’s gotten too hot to live there…nobody’s buying your home. It’s worthless. Congratulations, now you’re something like a war refugee — fleeing with the clothes on your back, and the money you can take with you. As societies face these kinds of obstacles, they tend to destabilize. Let’s talk about another effect of extreme heat and warming for a moment — the megadrought the American West faces. Right about now, most of us are pretending that it isn’t a big deal. That’s because there are still a few meagre resources left to tap. But once what’s left of the water’s gone, it’s gone. For good. How are cities like Las Vegas and Los Angeles going to survive? The classic pattern goes like this: the rural hinterlands suffer the effects of drought and famine first, and then it creeps inwards, towards richer, more developed urban centres. Right about now, the West’s mega drought is felt in California’s once-lush farming valleys. But as it spreads east and west, like a cancer, as it’s sure to do — what then? Then…bang. Catastrophe. There’s another whole category of refugees you might never have considered. Not people fleeing from extreme heat, but people fleeing for fresh water. What do we even call these new categories of migrants and refugees? We don’t even have names for them — and yet these changes are already upon us. And that’s the point. We are now living on a dying planet. It’s not dying in an ultimate and final sense — probably not, anyways, although there’s still some chance we end up with a cycle of runaway warming so severe we end up like Venus. We’re living on a dying planet in the sense that it’s heating up incredibly fast, faster than it has for hundreds of millions of years, quite possibly the fastest it’s ever heated up. And as the planet continues warming, faster and faster, living things are going to die. Lots of lots of them. Trillions upon trillions of them. Trees, insects, animals, fish. Rivers, oceans, skies, if you think of those as living things, too. And us. What’s certain not to survive is this way of life. We can’t use the technologies we have now to fight the Existential Threats already on our doorstep. You can’t air condition way out of a boiling planet. We can’t use the cultural mores, values, norms, and institutions we have now to fight them, either — materialism, greed, selfishness, carelessness, indifference, and so on. Where does that leave us? You probably already suspect my answer. This isn’t a heatwave — it’s a dying planet. Our civilisation is now beginning to collapse. When Portland and Seattle are almost as hot as Jacobabad — the hottest place on earth — which itself is becoming so that that soon it will literally be unsurvivable…then, my friends, we are a civilisation that has literally cooked itself alive. In the combustion and fumes of its own addiction to exploitation, stuff, toys, hate, rage, all the ways we try to escape from our own demons of loneliness, despair, ignorance, and powerlessness. We’re living on a dying planet. I guess the question then is: who gets to survive? Umair June 2021
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Post by Admin on Jul 2, 2021 7:43:44 GMT
The crisis of climate breakdown presents opportunities for the far-right. So how can progressives respond? theecologist.org/2021/jun/25/threat-ecofascismApocalypse has often been a fascist narrative. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t coming. Climate breakdown will be a source of enormous stress on the global economy, culture, and our collective life support systems. Some parts of the globe will become uninhabitable. Violence will become an increasingly major part of billions of people’s lives worldwide. It seems likely that some parts of Europe will be sheltered from the worst of the immediate climate impacts by virtue of their wealth, political power, and the comparatively mild climate. Predicament But the vast majority of people in Europe and North America will not be spared the sudden, unpredictable and irreversible contraction of their standards of living, instigating unprecedented climate migration. Across the globe, in highly uneven ways, it will begin to look a lot like the end of the world. If this seems alarmist, consider that the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 was almost certainly the first of many increasingly damaging environmental crises. Climate breakdown will not be a single event, but a series of highly complex stressors on society: broken supply chains; alienation; shelter-in-place orders; intrusive state interventions into life; emergency legislation; and racism. These waves of shock will be highly unpredictable, but their overall frequency and intensity is likely to increase. Eventually the pattern of social shocks will shift over into turbulence, and each crisis will become indistinct from the last, their effects rapidly spiralling beyond control. As narratives of long-term material progress face their self-evident refutation and atrophy even further, people in Europe and North America will support whoever promises to extricate them from their predicament. Geopolitical Indeed, the struggle to articulate and explain the unfolding disaster of anthropogenic climate breakdown might well be the central challenge of political narrative-making in the 21st century and beyond. Why are we saying all this? In part, because the far right will almost certainly be well positioned to provide a compelling, if entirely false, narrative about both the breakdown’s causes and its drastic solutions. In the long term, this might coalesce into any number of movements and political formations that could be labelled in advance as ‘ecofascism’. What is perhaps so worrying about the relationship of fascism to the climate crisis is how well they seem to fit together: the collapse of a ‘natural order’ through unstoppable and catastrophic ‘decadent’ growth seems to lead inexorably to the opportunity for a racist ‘palingenetic’ movement of national or civilizational rebirth. Fascism requires a sense of crisis, one that needs immense violence to prevent or reverse. Again, climate change, which seems insoluble within both the current economic system of capitalism and with the current geopolitical order of – as the far right sees it – compromise, hedging and mediocrity, might be just such a crisis. Roots There are multiple strands to far-right thinking about the environment, which we can separate into three groups: far-right political parties; a variety of movement-based identitarian approaches; and "blackpilled collapsists". The first group contains some parts which are explicitly strategising around our climate-breakdown future and some which will opportunistically push through their existing policies in times of crisis. This might include the New Ecology initiative of the Rassemblement National in France; the coalition of the right-wing Austrian People’s Party and the Green Party and the Fidesz government in Hungary. Environmental politics have been alloyed with anti-immigrant and far-right policies in the Five Star Movement in Italy and have been cynically used by the US Center for Immigration Studies to promote anti-immigration policies. The deep institutional roots of these organisations and their ability to organise politics at the scale of the nation-state will likely make them key players in the early right response to climate breakdown. Hate However, some of these parties have been embroiled for too long in climate denial, and their fundamental interest in maintaining a relatively conventional capitalist modernity will prevent them from taking what will increasingly seem like necessary action. In this they are likely to be understood from their right as simply another instance of the failed political centre. As their supporters withdraw from these groups, they will not automatically join progressive environmentalist movements, which will seem to them too committed to social justice. Where will they go instead? Perhaps, rightwards. The second group – movements and identitarians – are perhaps the most worrying group for the long term. Their main focus – cultural politics and its variations – is flexible enough to produce widespread hate towards refugees, assuming these increase by virtue of climate change. Indeed, versions of far-right environmentalism were adopted by the American Identity Movement, which summarised its connection with environmentalism in one of its sticker campaigns: "Plant trees, save the seas, deport refugees." Survivalist These group’s organisational flexibility, and perhaps even more importantly their relative youth, will let them thrive when the right and far-right parties look, by comparison, like increasingly sclerotic apologists for the liberal capitalist order. Political savvy and ability to translate smoothly between racist fears about migration and the spectacle of a declining natural order make this kind of movement the most serious threat. Presently, these groups - at least their European variants - seek to influence the state, although depending on the success of their broader meta-political strategy, they could come to be a serious alternative to the largely left-leaning mainstream climate movement. The last group are blackpilled collapsists. Blackpilled collapsists are those on the far right who have given up all hope of a conventional political solution to the problems they see, and therefore look to climate change with hope. They reason it might make their wish for a chaotic free-for-all (in which they imagine themselves triumphing) come true. They often deploy survivalist and prepping language and, in America at least, dovetail neatly with existing militia groups. Blackpilled One of the most important cultural changes in the last few years, both on the far right and in the wider culture, is the mainstreaming of prepping. As unexpected breakdown events become more frequent, so the logic goes, so too does the rational case for preparing for them become stronger. In retrospect – writing from the inside of the COVID-19 pandemic – the turn of these blackpilled groups, such as international group The Base, towards recruiting from the ex-military wing of the US prepping scene seems like extraordinary foresight on their part. Climate breakdown, that long dark tunnel into which our planet is heading, has no clear solution, and neither do the distinctions between these three segments have much solidity. There is a tension between deadly violence and movement building but it may not always be so: the contradiction between the two is resolvable. As the 21st century progresses, the currently stark distinction between identitarians and the blackpilled might start to wane. Life In the context of global catastrophe, one central plank of anti-fascist strategy – pointing out the connections between movements and the terrorists they would attempt to disavow – might begin to be less effective. The central argument of anti-fascist opposition to ‘ecofascism’ must be that it is not only likely to be politically catastrophic but also unlikely to solve the climate crisis itself. Indeed, despite the long history of environmental concern on the far right, it has extracted from the box of ‘nature’ a large number of distinct lessons: it has, in power, consistently worked to destroy the natural environment. Ecofascism is not concerned with a biocentrist defence of the sanctity of all life. What it has almost entirely been concerned with, through this history, is not nature but access to nature: preserving both a particular structure within nature and the social relations that allow people to access and engage with it. It is this we call ‘right-environmentalism’. Extreme Right-environmentalism is built around the attempt to stabilise and resolve a contradiction between two opposed conceptions of nature. On the one hand, nature is conceived of something true and eternal, whose ultimate triumph is guaranteed: nature is the central regulatory ideal of society. On the other hand, nature is almost always presented as something that has been obscured in fact. Thus, it must be restored by the deliberate and often extreme acts of its most ardent exemplars - often a particular race. On the one hand, nature is eternal and pure and irresistible. On the other, it has always already inexplicably been resisted by the far right’s enemies. Globalisation Attempting to resolve this underlying contradiction in the ideology of nature is the central task of right-environmentalism. What does this have to do with capitalism? Perhaps such a contradiction simply indexes a deeper ambivalence in far-right politics: a wish to enjoy the spoils of capitalist expansion without the attendant social transformations that such a process has often entailed. Racial domination cannot be achieved without the operations of capitalism. However, capitalism also entails both ever-escalating production and resource extraction, destroying particular aspects of the life-world the far right wants to root itself in. Further, capitalism inexorably tends towards its own globalisation. Rootness - and its attendant social forms - is undercut by the force 0f capitalism that gives that rootness its particular sense of its own superiority. These Authors Sam Moore and Alex Roberts are researchers on the far right and the authors of two forthcoming books, Post-Internet Far Right (Dog Section Press, 2021) and The Rise of Ecofascism (Polity Press, 2021). They host the podcast 12 Rules for WHAT. This essay is an abridged chapter from Post-Internet Far Right.
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Post by Admin on Jul 2, 2021 10:06:55 GMT
ONLY ANTI-IMPERIALISM CAN SAVE US FROM CLIMATE CATASTROPHE By Rania Khalek and Max Ajl, BreakThrough News. July 1, 2021 | RESISTANCE REPORT popularresistance.org/only-anti-imperialism-can-save-us-from-climate-catastrophe/The Green New Deal has become a popular slogan among progressive Democrats in recent years. But we need to be wary of the capitalist class co-opting the energy around climate change to maintain the imperialist global order they benefit from. To discuss this and more, Rania Khalek is joined by Max Ajl, a post doc at Wageningen University and a researcher with the Tunisian Observatory for Food Sovereignty and, relevant to this discussion, he is the author of the new book “A People’s Green New Deal” published by Pluto Press.
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Post by Admin on Jul 2, 2021 17:23:21 GMT
The scientists hired by big oil who predicted the climate crisis long ago www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jul/02/scientists-climate-crisis-big-oil-climate-crimesExperts’ discoveries lie at the heart of two dozen lawsuits that hope to hold the industry accountable for devastating damage Supported by guardian.org About this content Emma Pattee Fri 2 Jul 2021 11.00 BST As early as 1958, the oil industry was hiring scientists and engineers to research the role that burning fossil fuels plays in global warming. The goal at the time was to help the major oil conglomerates understand how changes in the Earth’s atmosphere may affect the industry – and their bottom line. But what top executives gained was an early preview of the climate crisis, decades before the issue reached public consciousness. What those scientists discovered – and what the oil companies did with that information – is at the heart of two dozen lawsuits attempting to hold the fossil fuel industry responsible for their role in climate change. Many of those cases hinge on the industry’s own internal documents that show how, 40 years ago, researchers predicted the rising global temperatures with stunning accuracy. But looking back, many of those same scientists say they were hardly whistleblowers out to take down big oil. Some researchers later testified before Congress, using their insider knowledge to highlight the ways in which the oil industry misled the public. Others say they have few qualms with how the petroleum giants handled their research. Few, however, could have predicted the imprint their work would have on history in efforts to hold the fossil fuel industry accountable for our climate emergency. The Guardian tracked down three of those scientists to see how they view their role today.
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Post by Admin on Jul 2, 2021 20:47:25 GMT
This Is Only the Beginning: It's About to Get Much Harder Our planet hasn’t seen temperatures this hot in fifteen million years, when the sea level was forty meters higher than it is today. www.commondreams.org/views/2021/07/02/only-beginning-its-about-get-much-harderThis is just the opening salvo. As the American west is gripped by potentially the worst drought since algebra was invented 1,200 years ago and temperature records are once again shattered on a weekly basis, we are entering into unknown territory. Lytton in Canada reached a staggering 49.6°C on Tuesday which is hotter than Las Vegas has ever recorded. Portland topped 46.7°C and this is higher than anything experienced in Houston, Texas. This has been building for a long time, but things are about to get much much worse. Globally, the planet experienced its second hottest year ever recorded in 2019, just 0.4°C cooler than 2016. If 2019 was feeling a little inferior, 2020 arrived on the scene, full of confidence, to claim the prize of warmest year ever recorded on Earth. The average temperature was 1.2°C above the 1859-1900 level. This was also a year in which our civilization was brought to its knees because of the ongoing pandemic. The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) says that the warmest six years on record have all occurred since 2015. With the carbon already in the atmosphere, the extreme heat we are witnessing now will become the new normal. The impacts of a warming planet will be felt by us all. In fact, they already are. Storms, droughts and heatwaves have increased by a third in just the past ten years. Scientists analyzing models in Switzerland and the UK declared that heat events like that of 2018 were unprecedented prior to 2010 and don‘t occur in historical simulations. As fossil fuels continue to be pumped into the atmosphere, forests are felled and oceanic ecosystems destroyed, the extreme heat we have seen the past five years is only going to get worse in the next decade. Anthony Arguez at NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information in Asheville, North Carolina warns that: “After the last five years, we’ve really separated ourselves from the past,” and he adds, “It looks pretty likely that we’re going to have a whole lot of top 10 years.” In total, natural-disaster loss events have more than tripled in the past forty years. It is debatable whether we can continue to call these events ‘natural’ when they are being fueled by human activity. The world is moving into uncharted territory, and our planet has only warmed by 1.2°C so far. The most likely scenario sees the temperature rising by at least 3°C by 2100, and possibly much more, and possibly sooner. What will the future look like if we continue on our current path? The current trajectory we are on would see temperatures rise by between 3.1°C and 3.5°C by 2100. Try to imagine the storms, wildfires, droughts and floods that will become normal if we allow this to happen. If things are this bad at just 1.2°C of warming, more than 3°C will likely be dire for the future of our species. Also, take into account that these are global average temperatures. At the poles and over land the temperature could be double. For every 1°C of warming, areas affected by heat waves like 2018’s will increase by 16% and are predicted to happen in two out of every three years if temperatures reach 2.7°C, and every year at 3.6°C. Our planet hasn’t seen temperatures this hot in fifteen million years, when the sea level was forty meters higher than it is today. The Arctic and Antarctic were home to vast forests. This warming was caused by volcanic activity in North America and the warming happened 1,000 times slower than the human caused warming we see today. If 2100 seems a long way away, children born today will be in their eighties. If that still doesn’t concern you, we will lose all the world’s coral reefs at 2°C of warming, hundreds of millions of people will be on the move in search of food and water. There will be forty-one more marine heatwaves than now. All the Arctic Sea ice will be gone. The average length of a drought will be ten months. At least 388 million people will be exposed to water scarcity. Maize production will be 9% lower, and wheat 4% lower at 2°C. The population will have risen to around eleven billion. Sea level will have risen by fifty-six cm. Flooding from sea level rise will cost upwards of $11.7 trillion each year at just 2°C. And the most alarming change will be under the ground in the Arctic region where at least 6.6 million km² of permafrost will have thawed. The result of this thawing could trigger the emissions of billions of tons of methane, and what scientists call runaway climate change. “It is worse, much worse than you think,” is the opening line to David Wallis-Well's seminal, but terrifying book, The Uninhabitable Earth. He describes life on our planet at varying degrees of warming. At 5°C, large parts of Earth would be unliveable for humans. At 6°C, New York would be hotter than Bahrain today. At 4°C, wildfires will burn sixteen times more land in the American West. There will be hundreds of drowned cities. Going outside will be a dangerous act across India and the Middle East at just 2°C of warming. Even if we meet the Paris goals, Wallace-Wells says the deadly heatwave that killed thousands in India and Pakistan in 2015 will have become annual events. At 4°C, the 2003 heat wave that claimed the lives of around 2,000 people each day in Europe will be a standard summer event. That means more than 35,000 people will be killed each and every summer by intense heat. Keeping temperatures under 1.5°C, of warming, as opposed to 3°C, will save between 110 and 2,720 heat-related deaths in fifteen American cities. The Union of Concerned Scientists are predicting that hundreds of U.S. cities will experience a whole month above 37.8°C by mid-century. Scientists expect the extreme heat to cause large scale relocation of residents as Boston becomes the new Columbia, South Carolina and Chicago experiences the heat of Lafayette, Louisiana. The pilgrimage to Mecca will become impossible for the two million Muslims currently making the trip. Wallace-Wells adds that even if we keep warming under 2°C, half the population will be exposed to deadly heat waves more than twenty days a year. If we don’t keep warming under 2°C, that number will rise to three quarters. A recent study found that we may be fast approaching the threshold of 1.5°C. Scientists stated that there is a 40% chance that we may temporarily pass this figure by 2025. Our feckless leaders are aiming to halt warming at 1.5°C by 2050 yet we may pass this target twenty-five years earlier. It is abundantly clear that we are not on target to stop the worst from happening and that we need rapid decarbonisation immediately if we are to avoid mass starvation and suffering. We can all make changes to our lives from talking about the crises, only buying things we need, leaving animals off our plates to cycling and growing our own food. It is only coordinated government action that will be enough though, and our leaders won’t act without grassroots pressure. That’s where we all have a part to play. We cannot give up without a fight. The future is worth our sweat and tears now. If it isn’t, there will be blood.
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Post by Admin on Jul 2, 2021 21:06:15 GMT
Scientists Call Northwest Heatwave the 'Most Extreme in World Weather Records' "Never in the century-plus history of world weather observation have so many all-time heat records fallen by such a large margin." www.commondreams.org/news/2021/07/02/scientists-call-northwest-heatwave-most-extreme-world-weather-recordsA pair of climate scientists on Thursday said the record-high temperatures that have ravaged the northwestern U.S. and western Canada over the past week—killing hundreds and sparking dozens of wildfires—represent the "world's most extreme heatwave in modern history." "Never in the century-plus history of world weather observation have so many all-time heat records fallen by such a large margin than in the past week's historic heatwave in western North America," meteorologist Bob Henson and former National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) hurricane scientist Jeff Masters wrote for Yale Climate Connections. "It's not hype or exaggeration to call the past week's heatwave the most extreme in world weather records," they argued. "The only heatwave that compares is the great Dust Bowl heatwave of July 1936 in the U.S. Midwest and south-central Canada. But even that cannot compare to what happened in the Northwest U.S. and western Canada over the past week." In British Columbia, the chief coroner said her office has received nearly 500 reports of "sudden and unexpected" deaths since last Friday, many of which are believed to be connected to the record temperatures that the region has suffered in recent days. Residents of the small British Columbia village of Lytton—which on Tuesday recorded Canada's all-time high temperature of 121°F—were forced to evacuate Wednesday as a wildfire ripped through the area and quickly engulfed the small town, destroying homes and buildings. "Our poor little town of Lytton is gone," Edith Loring-Kuhanga, an administrator at a local school, wrote in a Facebook post. "Our community members have lost everything."
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Post by Admin on Jul 3, 2021 18:50:03 GMT
INTERVIEW ECONOMY & LABOR Degrowth Policies Cannot Avert Climate Crisis. We Need a Green New Deal. truthout.org/articles/degrowth-policies-alone-cannot-avert-climate-crisis-we-need-a-green-new-deal/The Green New Deal is the boldest and most likely the most effective way to combat the climate emergency. According to its advocates, the Green New Deal will save the planet while boosting economic growth and generating in the process millions of new and well-paying jobs. However, a growing number of ecological economists contend that rescuing the environment necessitates “degrowth.” To the extent that a sharp reduction in economic activity is a positive goal, “degrowth” requires overturning the current world order. But do we have the luxury to wait for a new world order while the catastrophic impacts of global warming are already upon us and getting worse with each passing decade? World-renowned progressive economist Robert Pollin, distinguished professor of economics and co-director of the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, is one of the leading proponents of a global Green New Deal. In this interview, he addresses the degrowth vs. Green New Deal debate, looking at how economies can grow while still advancing a viable climate stabilization project as long as the growth process is absolutely decoupled from fossil fuel consumption. C.J. Polychroniou: Since the idea of a Green New Deal entered into public consciousness, the debate about climate emergency is becoming increasingly polarized between those advocating “green growth” and those arguing in support of “degrowth.” What exactly does “degrowth” mean, and is this at the end of the day an economic or an ideological debate? Robert Pollin: Let me first say that I don’t think that the debate on the climate emergency between advocates of degrowth versus the Green New Deal is becoming increasingly polarized, certainly not as a broad generalization. Rather, as an advocate of the Green New Deal and critic of degrowth, I would still say that there are large areas of agreement along with some significant differences. For example, I agree that uncontrolled economic growth produces serious environmental damage along with increases in the supply of goods and services that households, businesses and governments consume. I also agree that a significant share of what is produced and consumed in the current global capitalist economy is wasteful, especially much, if not most, of what high-income people throughout the world consume. It is also obvious that growth per se as an economic category makes no reference to the distribution of the costs and benefits of an expanding economy. I think it is good to keep in mind both the areas of agreement as well as the differences. But what about definitions: What do we actually mean by the Green New Deal and degrowth? Starting with the Green New Deal: The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) estimates that for the global economy to move onto a viable climate stabilization path, global emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) will have to fall by about 45 percent as of 2030 and reach net zero emissions by 2050. As such, by my definition, the core of the global Green New Deal is to advance a global project to hit these IPCC targets, and to accomplish this in a way that also expands decent job opportunities and raises mass living standards for working people and the poor throughout the world. The single most important project within the Green New Deal entails phasing out the consumption of oil, coal and natural gas to produce energy, since burning fossil fuels is responsible for about 70 – 75 percent of all global CO2 emissions. We then have to build an entirely new global energy infrastructure, the centerpieces of which are high efficiency and clean renewable energy sources — primarily solar and wind power. The investments required to dramatically increase energy efficiency standards and to equally dramatically expand the global supply of clean energy sources will also be a huge source of new job creation, in all regions of the world. These are the basics of the Green New Deal as I see it. It is that simple in concept, while also providing specific pathways for achieving its overarching goals.
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Post by Admin on Jul 5, 2021 21:12:27 GMT
Humanity Needs to Declare Independence From Fossil Fuels We have the technical know-how as well as the available economic resources to make the transition to a clean energy future. Now it must be done. www.commondreams.org/views/2021/07/05/humanity-needs-declare-independence-fossil-fuelsThe Declaration of Independence, the work of a five-person committee appointed by the Continental Congress, but with Thomas Jefferson as the most vocal figure of the values of the Enlightenment on this side of this Atlantic being the primary author and upon the insistence of none other than John Adams himself, is one of the most important documents in the history of democracy and of political progress. Built around Locke’s political epistemology, the Declaration of Independence signaled to the world that the old political order based on the divine right of kings and political absolutism in general was illegitimate and that, subsequently, people have the right to overthrow a regime that fails to protect the "self-evident" rights of every individual, which are "Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness." The Declaration of Independence, the official birth certificate of the American nation and the most progressive document of its time in support of popular sovereignty, was officially approved by the Congress on July 4, 1776, but it would end up eventually becoming an inspiration to future generations both in the United States and around the world. For example, the "Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions" issued by early feminists at the July 1848 Seneca Falls Convention was modeled after the Declaration of Independence. Ho Chi Ming’s speech on September 2, 1945, proclaiming the Independent Democratic Republic of Vietnam, began with nearly an exact quote from the second paragraph of America’s 1776 Declaration of Independence. Today, the United States and the world at large need a new declaration of independence—a declaration of independence from fossil fuels. The planet is on the verge of unmitigated disaster due to global warming. The Industrial Revolution, which began in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, brought about a series of major transformations in energy usage—first from wood to coal and then to oil and gas. And, to be sure, for more than a century, from the 1870s to the 1970s, to be exact, the world experienced unprecedented economic growth, although the relationship between economic growth and fossil fuel energy consumption is not straightforwardly linear for both developed and emerging economies. However, for several decades now, we have also known of the effects of fossil fuels on the environment and climate change. The burning of fossil fuels releases carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide, methane and other greenhouse gasses trap heat in Earth's atmosphere, causing global warming. The Earth’s average global temperature has risen by 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit, according to NASA’s Godard Institute. Some regions of the world, however, have already seen average temperatures rise by more than 2 degrees Fahrenheit because temperatures increase at different speeds, with land areas warming faster than coastal areas. Global temperatures matter. Rising global temperatures have major effects on numerous fronts, ranging from air quality and rising sea levels to the frequency of environmental events such as forest fires, hurricanes, heat waves, floods, droughts, and so on. The climate crisis also impacts on human rights and becomes a driver of migration. And last but not least, there are economic costs associated with the climate crisis as rising temperatures affect a wide range of industries, from agriculture to tourism. It’s estimated that the economic damage caused by natural disasters for the most recent decade (2000-2009) was approximately $3 trillion—more than $1 trillion increase from the previous decade. Make no mistake about it. The world’s most authoritative voice on the climate crisis, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (ICPP) has been warning us for several years now that the world is at serious risk, and that time is running out to save the planet. Yet, very little has been done so far to address our climate emergency, although we know what needs to be done. What needs to be done is to move the world economy to net-zero emissions and 100 clean energy. This requires, starting immediately, to implement a radical plan for the phasing out of fossil fuels and the concomitant implementation of a green global infrastructure development plan. In this massive undertaking, the public sector needs to become the vanguard of the transition to the clean and renewable energy, with the citizenry fully on its corner and against those greedy capitalists who continue to put profits ahead of people and the planet’s future. We have the technical know-how as well as the available economic resources to make the transition to a clean energy future. Details of this undertaking are spelled out, for instance, in the recent publication of Climate Crisis and the Global Green New Deal: The Political Economy of Saving the Planet (Verso 2020) by Noam Chomsky and Robert Pollin. Moreover, the transition to a clean energy future does not mean the end of economic growth. On the contrary, a Global Green New Deal, as University of Massachusetts economics professor Robert Pollin has sketched out in the aforementioned book, will generate millions of new and good-paying jobs in both the developed and the developing countries. The economic benefits of a green new deal are quite significant, while the costs of not doing a green new deal are catastrophic. In sum, the time has come for the people of the United States—and indeed of citizens all over the beautiful blue planet—to announce a new Declaration of Independence: a declaration of independence from fossil fuels. This is our only chance to move towards a sustainable future, our only chance to avoid the highly likely probability of a return to barbarism due to the collapse of organized social order brought about by mitigating global warming.
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