Ian Angus: Dissecting those ‘Overpopulation’ Numbers (part one)

Is global warming caused by too many people? This begins a series of articles in which Climate & Capitalism editor Ian Angus shows that population numbers can conceal far more than they reveal.

Excerpt: “At some point in every introductory statistics course, the instructor tells students about a European city where increases in the stork population were supposedly matched by increases in the number of new babies. The point is, that correlation isn’t causation – storks don’t bring babies, no matter what the numbers say.

This lesson is all too rarely applied to debates on population and emissions. To determine whether population growth really drives emission levels, or if the correlation is a coincidence, or if the numbers are in some other way misleading, we need to go beyond big numbers and examine real connections and relationships.”

(FULL ARTICLE AT CLIMATE AND CAPITALISM)

Full text of `People’s Agreement’ from Bolivia climate summit

From Links – International Journal of Socialist Renewal:

“Today, our Mother Earth is wounded and the future of humanity is in danger.

“If global warming increases by more than 2 degrees Celsius, a situation that the “Copenhagen Accord” could lead to, there is a 50% probability that the damages caused to our Mother Earth will be completely irreversible. Between 20% and 30% of species would be in danger of disappearing. Large extensions of forest would be affected, droughts and floods would affect different regions of the planet, deserts would expand, and the melting of the polar ice caps and the glaciers in the Andes and Himalayas would worsen. Many island states would disappear, and Africa would suffer an increase in temperature of more than 3 degrees Celsius. Likewise, the production of food would diminish in the world, causing catastrophic impact on the survival of inhabitants from vast regions in the planet, and the number of people in the world suffering from hunger would increase dramatically, a figure that already exceeds 1.02 billion people…” (full text here)

Debate – Green New Deal: Dead end or pathway beyond capitalism?

Full article posted in Turbulence – excerpts:

“Frieder Otto Wolf, an eco-socialist and early member of the German Green Party, argues that the challenge for the global movements is to hijack the Green New Deal, rather than reject it. Tadzio Mueller, an editor of Turbulence, and involved in the Climate Justice Action network, begs to differ. He looks instead to an emerging movement for ‘climate justice’.”

Mueller: “Of course, it is theoretically possible to conceive of a capitalism whose economic growth is powered by carbon-neutral fuels. But in the world of actually-existing capitalism, growth has always meant more energy use, more greenhouse gases, and more environmental destruction. Take the issue of climate change: the last 30 years have seen only two cases of significant reductions in CO₂ emissions. First, the collapse of the growth-oriented, state-socialist economies of Eastern Europe – greenhouse gas emissions from the Soviet economy fell by 40%; and second, the current global recession, which is reducing the consumption of oil and gas, and resulting in a 5% fall in global emissions levels. I am not saying that an uncontrolled collapse of the world economy, with all the social upsets that this might bring with it, is desirable… So I do not believe that supporting a Green New Deal is a good opportunity for the left, because this project is fundamentally about restarting capitalist growth…”

Wolf: “Without the capability of effectively indicating a significant and achievable first step, radical visions remain impractical, nothing more than a pie-in-the-sky ideal sustaining your hopes for a better future. And such visions and hopes far too often provide the basis for a ‘revolutionary quietism’, which prefers doing nothing (except writing theoretical treatises), in order to avoid getting one’s hands dirty in the vicissitudes of actual political practice. Accepting this idea of the first step in no way obliges us to refrain from elaborating our socialist, eco-socialist and eco-feminist visions more concretely. On the contrary, no significant advances ever occur within theoretico-political debates without an underlying urgency. It is precisely now that we find ourselves confronted with the productive challenge of deepening our ecological, feminist, and socialist/communist vision. Only by way of such a deepening will we be able to critically distinguish positive first steps from false steps.”

FULL DEBATE HERE

Brilliant analysis by Jonathan Neale: “Climate politics after Copenhagen”

FROM International Socialism (journal)

Excerpts: “First, the economic crisis has changed the nature of climate politics at the top. From 2005 to 2008 the most influential position on climate among world leaders was that greenhouse gas emissions must be slowly reduced by 60 to 80 percent over the next 40 years. This was to be achieved within the limits of the “free market”. With the economic crisis the pressure of competition between the different corporations and national blocks of capital became severe. The dominant position at the top became that in the next decade the different blocks of capital could not afford the cost of beginning those reductions. The result in Copenhagen was that the US, assisted by China, effectively wrecked the process of international negotiation towards slow but deep cuts in emissions…

“The new movement will be significantly different from the old. It will focus much more on mobilising from below because lobbying makes less sense. And it will have more of the spirit of anti-capitalism, resistance and social justice. In this new movement the left and socialists will have a special, and important, role to play.

“To understand why we must begin with the material problem we face. The starting point is the threat of what scientists call ‘abrupt climate change’. If we do not stabilise greenhouse gas emissions soon, we are very likely to hit a ‘tipping point’ where climate change accelerates fast and extreme weather events are common.”

“The economic crisis has also transformed the political space for this new movement. Fast, effective reductions in greenhouse gas emissions require an enormous investment. On a global scale this requires something in the region of 100 to 200 million new jobs. Even two years ago this would have appeared visionary. But the economic crisis has discredited neoliberalism, making it clear that governments can intervene with enormous sums when they want to. Also mass unemployment has returned. It is now possible to campaign seriously in the unions and among workers for massive government intervention to create climate jobs and save the planet. This creates the possibility of averting catastrophic climate change in this generation.”

FULL ARTICLE HERE

Movement Generation: Earth Day takes on New Meaning in Cochabamba

By Jason Negrón-Gonzales

“Today, Earth Day, was the closing day of the first World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth in Cochabamba.  It occurred to me as I watched participants and organizers streaming into the Félix Capriles Stadium for the closing ceremonies that decades from now I’ll be talking to my children and 2010 will be remembered as the year that Earth Day took on new meaning.  It will be the year that humanity turned a corner in our relationship to Mother Earth and began struggling along a new course.

Over the last week, a lot of information has been exchanged, new relationships were built, points and direction were strongly debated, and a new, shared course is taking shape.  Always present was the role and actions of the US government, the principle polluter of the last century, and the main obstacle to a meaningful response to climate chaos.  It’s been mentioned earlier that the Obama’s Copenhagen Accord, if it were adopted, would create a carbon market which researchers state will decrease global emissions by 2% (of 1990 levels) by 2020, which is less that what countries committed to 10 years ago under Kyoto.  So as the problem has gotten worse, the US administration under president Obama is proposing that the world be less ambitious.” (full article here)

Democracy Now coverage of People’s Climate Summit

FROM DEMOCRACY NOW, APRIL 19:

• Jim Shultz on “Dignity and Defiance. Stories from Bolivia’s Challenge to Globalization”

  Jim Shultz, founder of the Cochabamba-based Democracy Center, gives a snapshot of Bolivia ahead of the World Peoples’ Summit on Climate Change and Rights of Mother Earth. Ten years ago Shultz helped expose the role of Bechtel in the privatization of Cochabamba’s water supply.

• The Cochabamba Water Wars: Marcella Olivera Reflects on the Tenth Anniversary of the Popular Uprising Against Bechtel and the Privatization of the City’s Water Supply

  Ten years ago this month the Bolivian city of Cochabamba was at the center of an epic fight over one of the city’s most vital natural resources–its own water. The Water Wars occurred just months after the Battle of Seattle. The uprising against Bechtel on the streets of Cochabamba was seen as the embodiment of the international struggle against corporate globalization. Over the past week water activists from around the world gathered in Cochabamba to mark the 10th anniversary of the Water Wars.

• Bolivian UN Ambassador Pablo Solon on the World Peoples’ Summit on Climate Change and Rights of Mother Earth.

  Today marks the start of the World Peoples’ Summit on Climate Change and Rights of Mother Earth here in Tiquipaya. Bolivian president Evo Morales called for the gathering to give the poor and the Global South an opportunity to respond to the failed climate talks in Copenhagen. We are joined now by Pablo Solon, Bolivia’s ambassador to the United Nations. Prior to his role in the government, Solon was a social activist who worked for several years with different social organizations, indigenous movements, workers’ unions, student associations, human rights and cultural organizations in Bolivia.

Follow Cochabamba People’s Climate Summit Live Online!

From OneClimate.Net: “The World People’s Climate Summit, which runs from the 19-22 April in Bolivia, has been touted as an opportunity for ‘ordinary people’ to take the lead in tackling climate change. The good news is you are invited to attend – and you can do so without having to fly.

The pioneering OneClimate Channel has already enabled millions of people around the world to participate in global climate talks – most recently during the Copenhagen Climate Conference in December 2009. But in Bolivia, the promise of an ‘open process’ (there will be no secret discussions behind closed doors) combined with OneClimate’s groundbreaking interactive coverage, means that anyone with access to the internet will have a free pass right to the heart of the summit.

‘This is an unprecedented opportunity for individuals to join with frontline communities, activists and governments in the search for common solutions to the climate crisis,’ says Peter Armstrong, the originator of the live internet video channel. ‘And by participating in the summit virtually, they will be saving carbon, cash and themselves from the hassle of travelling.”

(Full post, links to stream channels here)

Peter Dorman: What’s Missing in Paul Krugman’s Climate Economics Primer

From the Real-World Economics Review blog: “A fundamental limitation to markets emerges in situations characterized by interactions between many individuals and institutions, so that two-by-two adding up is ineffective. An example is the role of cars versus trains in local transportation systems. Markets can do a reasonable job of adjusting the number and quality of cars to the preferences of buyers and the costs of producers, but they cannot coordinate a system-shift from mostly-cars to mostly-trains, since there are so many interactions that are at stake, like urban density, the locations of jobs and residential areas, etc. Markets tell us what people want, two at a time, based on what everyone else is doing, but they don’t coordinate shifts that make sense only if many do them at once.” (full article here)

Marx’s Ecology and The Ecological Revolution – An Interview with John Bellamy Foster

Interview posted in full at MRZine.org.  Excerpts:

“I think it is important to recognize that Marxists and ecologists are not entirely different groups.  Of course it is true that there have been Reds who have been anti-ecological, and Greens who have been anti-Marxist.  But it is not uncommon for the two to overlap, and increasingly to converge.  Many socialists are environmentalists and many environmentalists are socialists.  Indeed, there is a sense in which Marxism and ecology, both classically and today, lead to the same conclusion.”

“The only real solution is to get rid of capitalism and put an egalitarian, sustainable society, run by the associated producers, in its place.  But we have to face the fact that the environmental problem, including climate change, is accelerating, that this is a question of survival for humanity and most species on the earth… Under these circumstances we need both short-term radical responses and a longer-term ecological revolution…  The immediate, short-term response requires, I am convinced, a carbon tax of the kind proposed by James Hansen: a progressively increasing tax imposed at well head, mine shaft, or point of entry with 100 percent of the revenue going back to the population on a monthly basis.”

“The basic point … is the fact that the regime of capital is one of self-expanding value.  Capitalism requires for its very existence constant economic growth and, more explicitly, accumulation of capital.  Such a system can clearly be very effective up to a certain point in promoting production and economic development.  But it also is very exploitative and ultimately leads to the destruction of the environmental conditions of existence.  The only real social and ecological solution is a society not focused on accumulation or economic growth per se, but on sustainable human development.”

Full interview here

Midwest Labor Militants Call for ‘Alliance for Class and Climate Justice’

(Note: I found this initially on Climate and Capitalism)

For Class and Climate Justice

A Working Class Movement For a Peaceful, Sustainable, Full Employment Economy

‘Employer groups such as the National Association of Manufacturers, Chamber of Commerce, American Petroleum Institute, and the National Association of Home Builders, are spending big bucks peddling the lie that global warming is a job-killing false alarm. They are assisted by reactionary media and politicians they have bought and paid for…

‘We believe it is possible to both take effective measures to address the climate change danger–the biggest challenge humanity has yet faced–and simultaneously save and create jobs. This won’t be done by the captains of industry, finance, agribusiness, and commerce with a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. It can only be implemented by an independent mobilization of the working class–the only force in society with both the material self-interest and the economic and political clout to do so.’ …

(FULL STATEMENT AT KC LABOR)