Climate Crisis: Our Last Chance
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Isn’t this getting back to what Sussex and i are saying, ALB?
We have to bring a sense of urgency to the fact that socialism as the ONLY immediate solution by highlighting the risks and dangers that the Greens keep pointing out and are guilty of being complicit in. For the doomsters, why not agree with them and challenge them on their solutions, the timescale, the degree of effectiveness, the existence of loop-holes and get-out clauses and outright cheating. We accuse them of relying on the goodwill of governments and CEOs and not proposing genuine social change but a modified capitalist society but providing a palliative of cosmetic changes.
Maybe i’m pushing on an open-door, preaching to the converted, singing from the same hymn sheet. But where is this issue on our priority list for our campaigns?
I just think the party can use this issue as a tool for explaining our position effectively tied into something real and everyday – highbrow academic arguments don’t resonate with your average Joe (whomever that is) but at the moment there are millions of people seriously concerned about global warming and the end results but also the causes. They are so close as a massive group to grasping the failure of capitalism to deal with it and seeing the need to change to socialism, we’d be foolish not to do something to keep nudging them in the right direction. I look on a lot of these things as ‘ins’ as a way of bringing the subject of wholesale transformation of society into the everyday consciousnesses, and after all isn’t that the entire point of the party?
I don’t think it is reformist or betrayal to agree with some points the Greens make whilst simultaneously asserting that only genuine socialism can cure the disease.
Take plastics for example. The consequences of single use plastics are now becoming serious and life threatening – never has an everyday item been seen by so many as to be symptomatic of a system of organising society that is unhealthy for all. More and more people are demanding change and more and more getting frustrated at the failure of capitalism to deal with it. I tweet on this issue all the time as it is so easy to point the failure out. Reforming pressure groups harangue the shops to sell less and I keep explaining how disinterested the shops are to do this – the profits are in continuing to produce criminal amounts of permanent waste. Rather obligingly the shops keep proving me right with their latest ranges of plastic tat. This is hammering home our message!
A snippet for the blog and a little chink in the curtains to our future…..
Blogged already on this. It is a repetition of Cape Town’s Day Zero and we can expect many more stories of water shortages and droughts
https://socialismoryourmoneyback.blogspot.com/2018/11/indias-water.html
Regard the impacts even the conservative 1.5 egrees is going to seriously effect the countries least able to adapt
Even at 1,5 degrees of warming, there are fears that climate impacts in West Africa would be devastating while wheat yields could fall by up to 25 percent. In sub-Saharan Africa 1,5 degrees warming by the 2030s could lead to about 40 percent of present maize cropping areas being no longer suitable for current cultivars, and significant negative impacts on sorghum suitability are projected. Under warming of less than 2 degrees by the 2050s, total crop production could be reduced by 10 percent, said Oxfam.
Coincidental to my earlier comment on my exchanges with over-populationists, this report has appeared today – the problem is falling numbers of people
https://www.bbc.com/news/health-46118103
But facts mean little to dogmatists.
Fossil fuel promoter, ex-miner Dave Douglass had this to say
“…The truth is, humanity has survived by constant adaptation – that is what we do. The degree to which we do this is entirely political and based upon the balance of social classes. Running about shouting, ‘We’re all doomed, the sky is falling in and a great flood is coming’, or calls to ban industry, kill coal and oil, and go back to wicker and wood. will not in my opinion take us anywhere.”
https://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1226/letters/
Regardless if you agree with his conclusion, IMHO, if you read the rest of the letter, his arguments are similar to Nigel Lawson and others. Has anybody ever argued a return to wicks and wood as energy sources (with the exception of Cde. DC here). In fact, that is the last option being recommended
Under warming of less than 2 degrees by the 2050s, total crop production could be reduced by 10 percent, said Oxfam.
I assume this refers only to sub-Saharan Africa and not the whole world?
Purely as a matter of interest (and not to be taken as a defence of global warming) global warming by 1.5 or 2 degrees ought to make other areas of the world more suitable for crop production. For instance, vast areas of Canada and Russia. Are there any figures for this?
Top of my head, we need the Taiga and other temperate forests as a carbon sink as important as the rainforests so chopping them down isn’t a cure.
I did a quick google and came up with these
In Iceland rising temperatures had made the widespread sowing of barley possible.
A 2°C local warming in the mid-latitudes could increase wheat production by nearly 10 per cent whereas at low latitudes the same amount of warming may decrease yields by nearly the same amount
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2935125/ [2010 report]
UN researchers forecast that higher temperatures in higher latitude regions will increase harvest. Winners in this model include Canada (2.5 percent) and Russia (0.9 percent) and suggested that even parts of Finland could soon be warm enough to produce cereal.
http://www.fao.org/3/I9542EN/i9542en.pdf [2018 report]
“Has anybody ever argued a return to wicks and wood as energy sources (with the exception of Cde. DC here). In fact, that is the last option being recommended.”
If you’re referring to me I’ve argued nothing of the sort. I simply ‘waxed lyrical’ about sitting “in front of a roaring wood-fire” to which you replied and I then responded.
You really should resist your apparent penchant for distorting or exaggerating what others say.
ALB, further benefits of global warming
http://news.trust.org/item/20181108235833-xw7hq/
” 33,700 hectares of land in Britain could be productive for wine-making as weather gets hotter…Scientists identified Kent, Sussex and East Anglia in east and south-east England, along with Wales, as emerging hotspots that could produce enough wine to rival France’s Champagne region, which sells 310 million bottles of fizz each year….”
Belgium have also noticed the effects of warming weather, with wine production quadrupling since 2006
A warming planet could also bring benefits. Countries in the far north, such as Iceland, have seen valuable fish turn up in waters that were previously too cold.
Despite overwhelming evidence of carbon-fuelled climate change oil is so entrenched in the modern world that demand is still rising by up to 1.5 percent a year.
Sometime in the next few weeks, global oil consumption will reach 100 million barrels per day (bpd) – more than twice what it was 50 years ago – and it shows no immediate sign of falling. If the current mix of policies continues, the IEA expects world oil demand to rise for at least the next 20 years, heading for 125 million bpd around mid-century.
The IEA warns governments that existing plans are unlikely to make a huge dent in carbon emissions, and only a thorough change in energy use will bring down oil demand.
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This recent headline shows why it is impossible to adopt a rational energy policy under capitalism — what is used to generate electricity depends on the relative prices of he alternative methods:
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/old-king-coal-is-back-as-gas-costs-rise-g2zvhclxd
Capitalism will only stop or drastically cut back generating electricity from burning fossil fuels (whether coal, oil or gas) when the cost of this exceeds the cost of using other sources (nuclear, renewables). This hasn’t happened yet and probably won’t for a number of years.
Madness. And I don’t think you’ll have a lot of time to enjoy the wine and fish as mass migration, resultant war and rising/poisonous seas will see to that. There are no benefits to global warming that don’t come with a side order of death…..
Madness. And I don’t think you’ll have a lot of time to enjoy the wine and fish as mass migration, resultant war and rising/poisonous seas will see to that. There are no benefits to global warming that don’t come with a side order of death…..
Only socialism provides the solution, to war and polution.
Alan, I don’t know why you are drawing my attention to the “benefits” of global warming. I only asked about the effect on other parts of the world than sub-Saharan Africa. I was not welcoming global warming because it would bring benefits to people living in the northern part of the northern hemisphere (or parts of Chile and Argentina in the southern hemisphere) !
Having said that, the problem is not so much a rise in average global temperature but the speed at which it is happening and that it is happening under capitalism (which drags its feet over taking steps to slow it down and won’t be able to cope with the consequences such as mass migrations). A warmer world, brought about slowly over centuries, would or should in theory make it easier to grow more food. But that’s not on the agenda.
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