Climate Crisis: Our Last Chance
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More “good” news – https://www.iflscience.com/environment/the-amazon-is-being-destroyed-at-the-fastest-rate-in-a-decade/
(Links to the Brazilian Ministry of Environment report in Portuguese in article.)
Dave B wrote
The international capitalist class are fragmented into ruthlessly competing economic blocks. They are , or the capitalist economic system, is endemically incapable of co-operating even to prevent their own obvious destruction.
Tony Cliff’s righthand man in the SWP, Chris Harman, came to the same conclusion in this article from 2007:
What applies to the economy applies to the environment. Governments and individual capitalists may be able to see where the pumping out of greenhouse gases is leading, but not one of them is going to sacrifice their own competitiveness to take the necessary countermeasures – even though what comes afterwards will literally be floods in Bangladesh, the Nile Delta, and eventually, London. (http://socialistreview.org.uk/334/slump-boom-and-climate-change)
And then he goes and spoils it by saying something silly like:
To say green investment makes sense in a recession is right, but it is not capitalist sense. People can see better public transport as an alternative to cars. They can see massive insulation programmes as logical at a time of soaring heating bills. And jobs in insulation schemes and alternative energy programmes offer more to construction workers threatened with redundancy than blaming foreign workers who face the same plight. But it is not capitalism that is going to make those alternatives real – it is the struggle against capitalism.
So it’s the “struggle against capitalism” that’s going to impose this on the capitalist class and system. Oh dear.
What about the actual abolition of capitalism and the establishment of socialism as a system of society based on the common ownership and democratic control of the Earth’s natural and industrial resources, with production directly to satisfy people’s needs instead of for profit?
Awake now.
The UNEP report goes some ways to answering that big IF.
“What’s worse, the report notes that there is no sign of reversal of this trend…
Despite, “…surging momentum from the private sector” and “untapped potential from innovation and green-financing” offer “pathways” to bridge the emissions gap globally, the “technical feasibility” of limiting global warming to 1.5°C “is dwindling”.
The prognosis is not a promising one. What’s the odds that “could” does become “will”.
However, they do infer a bright side – the use of fiscal policies, taxation and carbon pricing and subsidies – music to the ears of many in the capitalist class as an opportunity to make profits if they invest green. City of London will be rubbing their hands with glee at the prospect of packaging eco-capitalism. But i think a very early post on the thread about carbon trading showed that such existing business was not having a great effect.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_credit
An article demonstrating the national rivalries
The president of the talks, Poland’s former deputy energy minister Michał Kurtyka, “Only by a miracle can we realise success,” he said last month.
Senior Chinese climate change official Li Gao told reporters last month that some industrialised countries more responsible for climate change were backsliding on the “polluter pays” principle, which “will make it hard to reach a consensus”.
European Commission climate chief Miguel Arias Canete’s call for more ambitious goals was rebuffed by Chancellor Angela Merkel, who said it would be counter-productive because some European countries, including Germany, were struggling to meet their targets.
The United States also plans to promote fossil and nuclear fuels at the talks.
No doubt the coming week will show if these are simply negotiation opening gambit moves. However, like all those COPs, i am sure the final statement will be full of promise and optimism – they always are.
Worth reading because she is the prominent spokesperson for the environmental movement.
No longer pushing a grassroots revolution as i frequently read before in her articles but it appears she is now an advocate for a lobby within the Democratic Party led by a few newly elected radicals like AOC
“…we now have a something that has been sorely missing: a concrete plan on the table, complete with a science-based timeline, that is not only coming from social movements on the outside of government, but which also has a sizable (and growing) bloc of committed champions inside the House of Representatives…”
Another thing i noted was
“…a Green New Deal is that it is modeled after the most famous economic stimulus of all time…”
Well, if my reading of the history of FDR’s New Deal is correct, it was actually failing to fix the economy and it took a world war saved it, so i suggest Klein’s confidence is misplaced.
We now have a great challenge ahead of us, one i hope we can measure up to in our own small way.
Nor is it international rivalries that are proving a hindrance to mitigating the effects of climate change
“Despite promises of “zero tolerance” and a constant effort to name and shame offenders, China has long labored to enforce its environmental laws and ensure violations are properly punished. Many local authorities are determined to protect vital sources of economic growth.”
A gloomy Lancet report on what is the effects of climate change today
And yet another gloomy report on our food and the environment
CCS pitch their solutions for COP24
2018 is set to be the fourth warmest on record, according to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) The long-term warming trend has continued in 2018, with the past four years being the warmest in 138-years of climate record keeping. The past four years have been the hottest on record, and the 20 warmest have occurred in the past 22 years. Average temperatures around the world so far this year were nearly 1C (33.8F) above pre-industrial levels.
“We are not on track to meet climate change targets and rein in temperature increases…Greenhouse gas concentrations are once again at record levels and if the current trend continues we may see temperature increases 3-5 degrees C by the end of the century,” WMO Secretary-General Petteri Taalas said in the statement. “If we exploit all known fossil fuel resources, the temperature rise will be considerably higher.”https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/nov/29/four-years-hottest-record-climate-change
Just read it and it has many useful observations
But when it comes to actual strategies to change things, they like us are imho invisible to the eco-activists
Some of us are old enough to remember the acid rain scare back in the 70’s. The scientific consensus was that by now the forests of Scandinavia would be stone dead and the fjord’s have the consistency of brown windsor soup. It turned out to be a hoax.
As the Good Book says: ‘…there is no new thing under the sun.’ (Ecclesiastes, 1:9.) Today there is a slight difference in that the ‘great scare’ must threaten the entire population. It must be a problem mankind have never faced before. Most importantly it must have a plausible scientific rationale, yet be uncertain and ill-defined, which gives believers maximum scope for alarming speculation ( see a number of posts on this thread ).
The acid rain scare wasn’t a false scare.
The main problem was release of nitrogen and sulphur dioxides which can go on the to form Sulfuric acid and nitric acid, which is much much more acidic than carbonic acid that is formed by CO2.
I suppose they did go on to do something about that but it was a problem that was much easier to deal with than ‘capturing’ CO2.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acid_rain
But are you saying global warming/climate change is also a hoax and scaremongering.
If so, could you offer the reasons for this mis/disinformation.
(Some of us are also old enough to recall the threats of another ice age, more that the media produced the dangers with numerous movies but the scientific opinion never fully accepted Hollywood science)
I suppose after having some fierce arguments of this with some of my climate change denial friends this idea of it being a hoax has to be addressed and can’t just be hand waved away like ‘christian creationism’.
A part of the problem is that a few individual scientists can come up with sensational theories and the press, for a story, will leap all over it.
Often omitting the consensus scientific opinion or more skeptical viewpoints of the majority.
But it can lead to the impression that it is more of a universally accepted theory than it really was.
If this one is a hoax it would be unprecedented in the modern scientific community.
It is not just people from the discipline itself that are raising the alarm but ‘reputable’
scientists from other disciplines that have looked into it accept that there is an issue.
Eg
A lot of people from other disciplines are better qualified to review it than I am and they mix in university staff rooms and have better idea when it comes to self serving sensational hoaxers and sincere scientists.
I think the real problem for climate change deniers is personal and I know them.
A lot of them have money and disposable income and they want to shop; I
think that is a stress relieving neurotic disease and a substitute for having a more meaningful life.
And thus climate change operates for them as a barely subliminal personal criticism of conspicuous consumption and lifestyle choice.
Conspiracy theories themselves in general are a product of a justified, to a considerable extent, belief that the ruling class manipulate and falsify evidence to control us.
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