Climate Crisis: Our Last Chance
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Penning the words isn’t the same as the Party delivering and conveying the message to its audience and I believe that was Dave’s main message.
As for being busy on other forums, a good defence. I know comrades are very active on Quora. I’m not on Facebook or Twitter, so unable to judge those and you may well be right. But….the silence on social media from all the rest of the membership? We are a voluntarist organization and cannot command and instruct members to participate and order their involvement but this is a long way from the days we asked (and got) members to stand on wintry windy street corners selling the Standard as our teeth chattered. All i’m expecting is some armchair revolutionary activity and solidarity from the comfort of ones own home. Is that too much to ask?
My apologies about saying conference not featuring anything about the climate crisis. For some reason I no longer receive e-mails from Spintcom or Spopen although it says the notifications is enabled.
My comments to the discussion item will come as no surprise to the many posts I have already made.
Perhaps there are regions of the world’s population that will escape the worse of the calamities of climate change but for many more people the alarm bells should be ringing because it will have an existential threat to their communities and livelihood and personal lives. And the side-effects of the climate crisis will be as destructive as the after-shocks of an earthquake.
We aren’t concerned with the fortunate few living in countries with GDP economies to take defensive measures but the unlucky many and all predictions suggest that serious social ruptures will be inflicted on those developing and undeveloped countries that are already suffering the consequences of capitalism. If they are already being left to the ravages of capitalism, we cannot have any expectation that capitalism will change its spots and rescue them from the worse of climate change will offer.
When those small island nations present firm evidence for their eventual actual disappearance can they rightly be accused of alarmism? Is bringing home what the supporting statement explains as “disastrous” events going to be egg on our face by its under-statement?
Barring miracles, the planet for many of its inhabitants will face a threat to their existence and many will witness the end of their civilization. We cannot risk presenting an “I’m alright, Jack” narrative.
Citing Debs out of context but in defence of world socialism.
“If Socialism, international, revolutionary Socialism, does not stand staunchly, unflinchingly, and uncompromisingly for the working class and for the exploited and oppressed masses of all lands, then it stands for none”
A disappointing read from a supposedly very radical eco-socialist – radical reformism, perhaps but revolutionary change – no.
https://jacobinmag.com/2019/02/kali-akuno-interview-climate-change-cooperation-jackson
“…I’m not arguing for a return to the centralized state-capitalist economies of the twentieth century, but the democratic socialization of the emergent information-based exchange economies, and that would utilize technological innovations to create a regenerative economy.
This would entail, at least in its early stages, various rules and limits, to make sure that exchanges stay within scientific and social limits related to resource extraction and energy utilization, until they become normative — which would take a few generations to undo the century of conspicuous consumption that has been advanced and promoted by late capitalism….”Reading through the gobblygook, he suggests we practice frugality
Nationalization is also on offer, naturally
If this is the best eco-socialism has to offer, then we have out work cut out to change the current understanding and re-focus the goals. He has not heeded any of the critiques of Earth First! from the likes of Bookchin
But to end on a “positive” note
“…We are at the midnight hour, and it’s eco-socialism or death…”
😛
To return to plastics, BP would say that wouldn’t they? Though I don’t suppose too much of their profits comes from selling oil to make plastic bags (only about 4% of oil production is currently used to make plastics). Actually, using it to make plastics is a more rational use of oil than burning it to generate electricity or power transport. Just because oil is a villain in global warming doesn’t mean it should be blacklisted from being put to other uses. A lot more things are made of plastics than throwaway bags. Pipes, solar panels and wind turbines contain plastics. And when we’ve all got 3D printers we’ll need them. They will survive into socialism. We can no more do without plastics than we can without metals. Just because some of them are a source of pollution under capitalism is no reason to abandon them nor oil, their main raw material. Just cut back and eventually phase out burning oil (in socialism).
Yes also medical uses. The Many Different Materials Used in Hip Replacement Devices. … Polyethylene and Metal on Polyethylene (MOP) – Polyethylene is basically plastic, so these hips usually have metal structural pieces and a plastic liner where the ball and socket meet. They can also have a metal ball meeting a plastic socket liner.
Can I be directed to a source that is saying that ALL uses of plastic should be banned.
It is the extensive use of throwaway plastic where alternatives exist which is the issue for environmentalists.
I have been to a beautiful cliff-top resort and when you first arrive you see from a distance white flowering bushes….until you get closer and see all these white plastic bags hanging from the bushes. A few hundred miles away another tourist spot has banned shops from using plastic and all kinds of ingenious and attractive packaging has arose.
But there is the hype.
“…Banning plastic bags is more about driving profits than saving the planet, a marketing expert says. University of Auckland head of marketing Bodo Lang said most companies wanted to be perceived as a “good corporate citizen” because it helped attract, and retain, customers and workers….”
However, even when plastic can be re-cycled, it still ends up in land-fill
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-wales-47238220
But my point was not about any lifestyle choice on the use of plastic but the glaring omission by such a global giant with a host of experts at their call not to include the re-usables in its calculations. This was surely not an accidental lapse but as I said a deliberate attempt to confuse the issue by creating fake facts. This is much more serious a transgression of science than any hyperbole you have previously pointed to, ALB. It is a study designed to deceive.
“What we are now witnessing is extremely worrying. It is particularly alarming because we are still not sure why atmospheric methane levels are rising across the planet.”
“…we do not really know why.”
“We don’t know exactly what is happening.”
Looking through past posts I thought this link was useful
And the thread it provoked
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/feb/20/manifesto-youth-climate-strikers-win-fight
George Monbiot’s version.
A central task for any campaign is to develop a narrative: a short, simple story explaining where we are, how we got here and where we need to go. Using the narrative structure common to almost all successful political and religious transformations, the restoration story, it might go something like this.
“The world has been thrown into climate chaos, caused by fossil fuel companies, the billionaires who profit from them and the politicians they have bought. But we, the young heroes, will confront these oligarchs, using our moral authority to create a movement so big and politically dangerous that our governments are forced to shut down the fossil economy and restore the benign conditions in which humans and other species can thrive.”
Here is mine
“The world has been thrown into climate chaos, caused by capitalism and the politicians they have bought. But we, the younger generation will change the economic system by advocating the socialist alternative to create a movement so big it will end capitalism and then we can restore the benign conditions in which humans and other species can thrive.”
I’m sure others can express the narrative story so lets hear it and base our approach to communication upon it.
Another article that focuses on approaches to giving messages
“…the climate movement has suffered from a debilitating self-inflicted wound: the assumption that “we can’t tell the public the truth” about the urgency of the crisis, or the scale and speed of the necessary solution. Many climate scientists joined forces with professional “climate communicators” and corporate philanthropies to decree: Fear doesn’t work as a motivator! Only hope “works,” so let’s keep things positive and promote gradualist policies like carbon pricing! This counterproductive mentality is finally changing…”
truth-telling to spur sufficient action.
“…Wallace-Wells describes how even the best-case scenarios for climate change will involve millions of deaths, and tens or hundreds of millions of refugees. We are looking at a “best-case outcome … death and suffering at the scale of twenty-five Holocausts.”…Those calling for mass mobilization, starting today and no later, remember — they can be counted as environmental technocrats. To their left are those who see no solution short of political revolution.”
The confidence that human activities were raising the heat at the Earth’s surface had reached a “five-sigma” level, a statistical gauge meaning there is only a one-in-a-million chance that the signal would appear if there was no warming. Such a “gold standard” was applied in 2012, for instance, to confirm the discovery of the Higgs boson subatomic particle, a basic building block of the universe.
“Humanity cannot afford to ignore such clear signals”
“The narrative out there that scientists don’t know the cause of climate change is wrong”
Today’s papers are reporting on a study, based on data for the period 2005 to 2015, which shows that “CO2 emissions are falling in 18 countries“.
One of the reasons for this was the slump in production during the Great Recession that followed the Crash of 2008:
the decrease in energy use was partly explained by lower economic growth reducing the demand for energy following the global financial crisis of 2008-2009.
Since capitalism is bound to have 4 or 5 recessions before the end of the century this would help keep global warming down below the worst case scenarios. But what a wasteful way to do it. But then capitalism is not a rational system from the point of view of meeting people’s needs or solving the problems humanity faces.
Ah well ALB, capitalism offers a silver lining in the dark clouds of economic recession…
Another piece of recent research suggests that the world may not have as many clouds in the future
If the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere triples, clouds over the seas will break up and vanish, potentially leading to a disastrous sea level rise. It’s a side-effect of pollution which had never been predicted before – and which could unleash devastating effects. The clouds cover about 20% of subtropical oceans and play an important role in reflecting sunlight back into space.
Tapio Schneider, a scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, said, ‘Our results show that there are dangerous climate change thresholds of which we were unaware. When they disappear, Earth warms dramatically, by about eight degrees Celsius in addition to the global warming that comes from enhanced greenhouse concentrations alone,’ the researchers write.
Extreme CO2 levels could trigger clouds ‘tipping point’ and 8C of global warming
“The Uninhabitable Earth”
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/feb/27/the-uninhabitable-earth-review-david-wallace-wells
Hyperbole or realism? The book might be well worth reading and reviewing.
“…Wallace-Wells identifies a tendency, even among those of us who think we are already sufficiently terrified of the future, to be strangely complacent about the figures…There’s also a temptation, when thinking about climate change, to focus on denialism as the villain of the piece. The bigger problem, Wallace-Wells points out, is the much vaster number of people (and governments) who acknowledge the true scale of the problem, and still act as if it’s not happening…if you are surveying the topic from a privileged western vantage, it’s easy to overlook how bad things have already got, to accept the hurricanes and the heatstroke deaths as simply the unfortunate nature of things. In this way, Wallace-Wells raises the disquieting spectre of future normalisation – the prospect that we might raise, incrementally but inexorably, our baseline of acceptable human suffering… You could call it alarmist, and you would not be wrong. (In the closing pages, Wallace-Wells himself accepts the charge as “fair enough, because I am alarmed”.) But to read The Uninhabitable Earth – or to consider in any serious way the scale of the crisis we face – is to understand the collapse of the distinction between alarmism and plain realism. To fail to be alarmed is to fail to think about the problem, and to fail to think about the problem is to relinquish all hope of its solution…”
Sounds familiarly like the debates we have on this thread, don’t you think?
The worse case scenarios keep on a-comin
http://news.trust.org/item/20190227184955-v8bt6/
A study by the University of British Columbia compared the economic and environmental impact of holding the global average temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius, as agreed in Paris in 2015, versus the current 3.5 degrees warming scenario.
Millions of people could lose their livelihoods, food source, and be forced from their homes if the world does not meet the Paris goal to curb global warming which is endangering fish numbers.
“This can turn into a massive crisis as it could cause forced migration not only locally but globally,” Sumaila told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. “A steady supply of fish is essential to support these jobs, food sovereignty, and human well-being.”
Just how many scientists are sitting there with fingers-crossed, wishing for the best and hoping no unexpected findings are going to be revealed to upset projections?
By coincidence, the latest article by Wallace-Wells
https://www.commondreams.org/views/2019/02/27/our-five-biggest-delusions-about-climate-change
“…We tend to think of global warming as a legacy of the Industrial Revolution. In fact, according to my research, more than half of the carbon exhaled into the atmosphere by the burning of fossil fuels has come in the last 30 years. That is, since Al Gore published his first book on climate, and since the premiere of “Seinfeld.” The United Nations established its Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 1988, signaling to all the world a scientific consensus about the problem. Since then, we have done more damage, knowingly, than we did over preceding centuries, in ignorance… scientists have defined two degrees as the threshold of climate catastrophe, and many of us have treated that level of warming as a worst-case scenario. In fact, it is a best-case scenario…”
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