Heather Rogers: The greening of capitalism? (ISR)

Excerpt: “As these examples, and others in the book, flesh out, the market has a distinct inability to solve environmental crises because it can’t adequately value nature. That doesn’t mean great methods and technologies for balancing out the trauma of the biosphere don’t exist—they do. We don’t see more of the solutions that work, including superefficient architecture and transportation systems, as well as biomimicry and service leasing, because as yet these options aren’t profitable enough. Instead of our greater environmental consciousness transforming the way business is done, what we more often see is the market contorting ecological problems so they fit into some sort of profitable framework. To bring about change we must experience ourselves as political actors and not simply shoppers who are supposed to vote with our wallets.” (full article at International Socialist Review)

Four Principles of Climate Justice (Indigenous Environmental Network)

Document available here:

1. Leave fossil fuels in the ground

2. Demand real and effective solutions / end promotion of false solutions like trading and offsets

3. Industrialized – developed countries take responsibility / burden of adjustment to climate crisis

4. Living in a good way on Mother Earth

Environmental, social contradictions of Bolivian development

Lithium, the gift of Pachamama: “However, the indigenous population of Bolivia’s western areas, who are among the poorest people in the country and who have strong communal traditions, appear to disagree with the policy. The social movements that brought Morales to power have mobilised over recent months around demands for local development, and in defence of water rights. In the mind of many Bolivians, the most important thing is that local communities decide on the uses of resources in their own territory.”

From Time Magazine: ‘Until last week, Juan Pablo Ramos was Morales’ longest-standing highest environmental authority. But Ramos tells TIME that he resigned from his Vice Minister of the Environment post “out of conscience,” leaving an unsigned environmental license for the Isiboro-Sécure highway on his desk on the way out. Ramos says he remains hopeful that the Morales government’s international environmental leadership is more than just talk. But, he says, “we are in a time of great threats. We finally have the entire world discussing how to move forward sustainably, and it’s on all of us to keep the pressure on Morales and all world leaders to make this happen.” ‘

Links from Greenpeace International

A time to act: “The extent of the Arctic sea ice this July is the second lowest on record (for the month of July).

A huge iceberg roughly the size of Manhattan has just broken off Greenland’s Petermann glacier and will soon drift down Nares Strait – an event Greenpeace warned was very likely to happen.

A large part of the Asian continent is facing unprecedented heat waves.

In Russia, this heat wave is partly responsible for unprecendented forest fires that have been chocking the capital, Moscow.”

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Paying for oil spills: “Bloomberg last week revealed that subsidies to fossil fuels worldwide outweigh renewable energy support by a ratio of 12:1. While subsidies for renewable energy worldwide amounted to US$43-46 billion last year, fossil fuels received US$557 billion in 2008 according to a recent IEA report.”

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The Energy [R]evolution: “The Energy [R]evolution demonstrates how the world can get from where we are now, to where we need to be in terms of phasing out fossil fuels, cutting CO₂ while ensuring energy security. This includes illustrating how the world’s carbon emissions from the energy and transport sectors alone can peak by 2015 and be cut by over 80 percent by 2050. This phase-out of fossil fuels offers substantial other benefits such as independence from world market fossil fuel prices as well as the creation of millions of new green jobs.”

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Renewable Energy and the Green Job [R]evolution: “The climate crisis and the financial crisis are not two competing issues that need to be addressed separately by the world community. The solution to one is, in fact, the answer to the other.”

TomDispatch: Bill McKibben, A Wilted Senate on a Heating Planet

Excerpt from TomDispatch: “Step two, we have to ask for what we actually need, not what we calculate we might possibly be able to get. If we’re going to slow global warming in the very short time available to us, then we don’t actually need an incredibly complicated legislative scheme that gives door prizes to every interested industry and turns the whole operation over to Goldman Sachs to run.  We need a stiff price on carbon, set by the scientific understanding that we can’t still be burning black rocks a couple of decades hence. That undoubtedly means upending the future business plans of Exxon and BP, Peabody Coal and Duke Energy, not to speak of everyone else who’s made a fortune by treating the atmosphere as an open sewer for the byproducts of their main business…

“Which leads to the third step in this process. If we’re going to get any of this done, we’re going to need a movement, the one thing we haven’t had. For 20 years environmentalists have operated on the notion that we’d get action if we simply had scientists explain to politicians and CEOs that our current ways were ending the Holocene, the current geological epoch. That turns out, quite conclusively, not to work. We need to be able to explain that their current ways will end something they actually care about, i.e. their careers. And since we’ll never have the cash to compete with Exxon, we better work in the currencies we can muster: bodies, spirit, passion.” (full article here)

Co-optation of the environmental movement

At New Left Project, Michael Barker summarizes (and critiques) the work of scholar Mark Dowie on the history of liberal foundations co-opting popular environmental struggles.  He examines two of Dowie’s works in particular: Losing Ground: American Environmentalism at the Close of the Twentieth Century (MIT Press, 1996) and American Foundations: An Investigative History (MIT Press, 2001).

An excerpt: “Sadly, despite active public resistance to the reformist environmentalism typified by the nationals, little has changed to this day. Liberal foundations still exert a strong hold over not only the mainstream environmental movement, but many of the more radical environmental justice groups as well. A powerful and institutionalized system of grantmaking injustice will inevitably be strongly resistant to any efforts to undermine or democratize its power, but given the growing numbers of people who are becoming aware of the many problems associated with the manipulation of civil society by liberal elites, this need no longer be the case. It is sad, then, that despite his valiant efforts to document the activities of liberal foundations, Dowie sees no alternative to the ongoing efforts by philanthropic elites to engage in social engineering, and certainly recognizes no viable alternative to capitalism.”

The analysis parallels that put forward by James Petras in this 1997 article on the role of NGOs in the Third World: ‘NGOs emphasize projects not movements; they “mobilize” people to produce at the margins not to struggle to control the basic means of production and wealth; they focus on the technical financial assistance aspects of projects not on structural conditions that shape the everyday lives of people. The NGOs co-opt the language of the Left: “popular power,” “empowerment,” “gender equality,” “sustainable development,” “bottom up leadership,” etc. The problem is that this language is linked to a framework of collaboration with donors and government agencies that subordinate activity to non-confrontational politics. The local nature of NGO activity means “empowerment” never goes beyond influencing small areas of social life with limited resources within the conditions permitted by the neo-liberal state and macro-economy.’