Re: [Marxism] Climate experts call for 'dangerous' Michael Moore film to be taken down | Environment | The Guardian

[Ralph Johansen via Marxism]

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Louis Project wrote

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/apr/28/climate-dangerous-documentary-planet-of-the-humans-michael-moore-taken-down

Richard Heinberg, who is featured in the film as interviewee but who is 
not identified with its production or construction of its story line, 
gives a more balanced picture in this review 
https://www.filmsforaction.org/articles/richard-heinberg-review-planet-of-the-humans/. 
I agree with him that over all, given the limited exposure available for 
any documentary critical of prevailing convention, and the depth of the 
crisis, this documentary is worth watching. It does without question 
open up a lot of areas that most people, if not the more-or-less 
informed who are providing these critiques, are still gulled and totally 
uninformed about.


Of course he's right about facile technofixes and the ominous overtones 
of production for profit taking over the environmental movement; but my 
flesh creeps every time someone brings up overpopulation, as Heinberg 
does here and as also does this documentary, as a main problem, without 
more. It's left up in the air, to float around and collect all kinds of 
toxic reactions.


First of all, the population has increased virtually exponentially for 
reasons that need to be aired and explored, so that the right wing and 
their liberal cohorts (even some on the left) don't prevail in 
identifying victims as cause and being complicit in one way or another 
in elimination of the poor and those least able to protect themselves.


Just to review some of the considerations:

Reasons for the population explosion include of course advances in 
sanitation and healthcare and the fact that, until very recently, most 
of the world's people were in rural, peasant, farm-based communities, 
where the life they lived became increasingly at risk as capital drove 
them to the wall by monopolizing the best land and by producing massive 
quantities of cheap agricultural goods; and with the continuing poverty 
and high mortality rates, historically and concurrently and among other 
cultural reasons they produced more children to provide for reproduction 
of the products of their land and for their old age in regions with no 
public provision for the elderly.


Then it's readily evident that, as more fortunate nations produced more 
adequate foodstuffs for much of their populace, the birth rate in those 
places rapidly dropped, as it would anywhere, given more adequate 
satisfaction of needs.


And needless to say, the poor in the world are not at all the consumers 
of diminishing resources responsible for per capita overconsumption - 
rather, it's the upper and middle classes, who remain largely in denial, 
oblivious and culpable in these and related crimes against humanity.


Distribution of what's now produced is so skewed across the planet, so 
much of the arable land is given over to livestock, biofuels and other 
superfluouscommodities, or otherwise occupied with useless or 
dispensable luxury and sprawling conurban complexes, and is abused by 
mono-cropping, fossil fuel-based fertilizers and pesticides and 
clear-cut forests and dead soil. How would we know how much is enough or 
how many people is really too much? Certainly not by divination or by 
sputtering old Malthusian misconclusions.


That's not covered in the comments on this documentary that I have seen.

And the discussants don't grab on and hold fast to the ineluctable 
conclusion that it is neither technofixes nor even solar and wind 
alternatives nor individual adjustment in consumption that will solve 
our problems; again, it's root and branch extirpation of capital as the 
primary (dis)organizer of production of our needs.


I kind of identify with Vijay Prashad, that we should no longer 
juxtapose ourselves as the "left" against some balancing "right": we 
have proceeded way beyond that - capital as solution is dead, and so 
figuratively are its apologists.

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[Marxism] Climate experts call for 'dangerous' Michael Moore film to be taken down | Environment | The Guardian

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/apr/28/climate-dangerous-documentary-planet-of-the-humans-michael-moore-taken-down

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[Marxism] Climate Change at the Movies - CounterPunch.org

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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By Manuel Garcia Jr.

Here are some movies and videos about climate change and human society, 
which I found interesting and recommend.


https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/01/03/climate-change-at-the-movies/
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[Marxism] Climate Change and Political Chaos: A Deadly Mix in Honduras Dengue Epidemic

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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NY Times, Dec. 30, 2019
Climate Change and Political Chaos: A Deadly Mix in Honduras Dengue Epidemic
By Kirk Semple

CHOLOMA, Honduras — More than 400 people died this year as one of the 
worst dengue epidemics on record swept through Central America — a type 
of outbreak that some scientists and public health officials are warning 
is likely to become more frequent and more widespread because of climate 
change.


But while climate change is threatening to increase the spread of dengue 
worldwide by expanding the range of the mosquitoes that carry the virus, 
the disease has already found an especially fertile breeding ground in 
Honduras, for reasons that go beyond the environment.


In Honduras, which accounted for more than 40 percent of the dengue 
deaths in Central America this year, according to the Pan American 
Health Organization, the effects of climate change have been compounded 
by government dysfunction, political tumult and public apathy.


Dengue has hit the country hard. This year, it had more than 107,000 
cases of the viral disease — more than 13 times the number recorded last 
year — and at least 175 deaths. In 2018, only three people in Honduras 
died from the disease, according to the Pan American Health Organization.


Honduras’s notorious criminality has worsened matters, too, as public 
health teams, already stretched thin by budget cuts and a lack of 
trained personnel, have been blocked by gangs from entering some of the 
most severely afflicted neighborhoods to educate residents and fumigate 
against mosquito infestations.


Dengue is transmitted to humans by a type of mosquito called Aedes, 
which thrives in urban areas of the world’s tropical and subtropical 
regions. Tens of millions of cases occur each year in more than 100 
countries, and symptoms may include fever, internal bleeding and shock. 
Inadequately treated, the illness can quickly kill.


In Honduras, health officials trace the start of the current epidemic to 
the fall of 2018. The number of incidents then rose sharply during the 
first half of 2019, hitting a peak this summer before falling off as the 
year ended. A nationwide health emergency declared in July by the 
administration of President Juan Orlando Hernández remains in effect.


The outbreak struck during a time of political turbulence in Honduras, 
with violent street protests against Mr. Hernández and calls for his 
ouster. Some of the protests have been driven by fears the government 
planned to privatize the health and education sectors.


The nation also suffers from high murder rates and widespread poverty, 
which have combined to drive tens of thousands of Hondurans in recent 
years to emigrate, with many trying to make it to the United States.


The dengue outbreak has met little resistance from a public health 
system gutted by budget cuts and pervasive corruption, analysts and 
officials said.


“It’s a collapsed system, an inefficient system,” said Ismael Zepeda, an 
economist with Fosdeh, a research group in Tegucigalpa, the capital.


Surveillance programs intended to detect outbreaks of mosquito-borne 
diseases were feeble. The nation’s poorly supplied and understaffed 
medical facilities lacked the capacity to adequately handle even the 
nation’s normal demands, much less an epidemic of historic proportions 
requiring a fast, highly organized response.


“In another country there would be many sick but not as many deaths,” 
said Eduardo Ortíz, an adviser on sustainable development and 
environmental health for the Pan American Health Organization in 
Honduras. “The cure for dengue is political.”


The epidemic in Honduras has been particularly brutal in the northern 
department, or province, of Cortés, the industrial heartland of 
Honduras. It got started early in this region and spread quickly through 
its main cities, San Pedro Sula and Choloma.


Cortés then became a kind of engine for the national crisis, officials 
said, as its large migratory population of factory workers helped spread 
the disease to other regions on visits home, officials said.


The epidemic has had a particularly devastating impact on Cortés’s 
low-income neighborhoods, which suffer from overburdened and 
ill-equipped public services and poor health care resources.


The epidemic caught Wendy Carcamo and her family unaware early this year.

Though the outbreak had already begun to bedevil Honduras, Ms. Carcamo 
said she knew little about it. Then one day in February, her son, Jostin 
Pineda, 7, suddenly fell ill.


“All day he was happy,” Ms. Carcamo recalled of her son. But by 
nightfall he was suffering a brutal headache and a high fever.


In

[Marxism] Climate tipping points — too risky to bet against

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-03595-0
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[Marxism] Climate Change Protesters Disrupt Yale-Harvard Football Game

[Dennis Brasky via Marxism]

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>
> Demonstrators stormed the field during halftime, causing the game to be
> delayed for about an hour. The Yale police issued 42 summonses for
> disorderly conduct.
>
> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/23/us/harvard-yale-game-protest.html
> 
>
>
>
> NEW HAVEN, Conn. — Climate change activists stormed the field at the
> Yale-Harvard football game on Saturday afternoon, disrupting the game at
> halftime in a protest to call attention to the universities to divest their
> investments in fossil fuels.
>
> A group of about 70 protesters took to the field just before 2 p.m. after
> the game’s halftime show. They were then joined by others from the stands.
>
> At its peak, the demonstration drew up to 500 people, packing about 45
> yards of play between the large numbers that marked yardage, and delaying
> the game for roughly an hour.
>
> Players from both schools warmed up as police and security officers
> surrounded the demonstrators and announcements were made on the public
> address system imploring protesters to clear the field.
>
>
>
> The game was being aired live on cable television
> , with ESPNU
> switching to another game during the delay while periodically checking on
> the efforts of officials to clear the field.
>
> As the protesters sat at midfield chanting and clapping, players retreated
> indoors. Then, to the tune of John Denver’s “Take Me Home, Country Roads,”
> hundreds of fans rushed to join the protesters on the field as it became
> clear the game would not resume as scheduled.
>
> Reactions from the crowd were mixed; some attendees began booing and
> others shouted “Drag them off the field!” One sign in the stands read
> “Harvard & Yale Complicit.”
>
>
>
> As more police officers surrounded the demonstrators, the crowd on the
> field thinned. Police officers urged the remaining protesters to leave,
> saying they had succeeded in drawing attention. Some activists were
> arrested, though an exact tally was not immediately available. A Yale
> spokeswoman said that the Yale police issued 42 misdemeanor summonses for
> disorderly conduct. Caleb Schwartz, a senior at Harvard, was among those
> who was issued a summons for running onto the field.
>
>
>
> “It felt really good because we know that people support divestment but
> now we know that people will take extra action to support this cause,” he
> said. “It was energetic. It was both scary and exhilarating.”
>
>
>
> Supporters of the demonstration said they knew firsthand about the effects
> of climate change.
>
> “My country is on fire right now,” Akio Ho, a student at Yale said,
> referring to Australia. “Unprecedented wildfires are ripping through homes
> right now. Climate change and the climate crisis is an extremely urgent
> problem.”
>
> Harvard has declined to divest for years
> 
> . Yale has made some divestment pledges
> ,
> but got into trouble with its activists over a $122 million investment in a
> fracking-related company, Antero; after a protest in December, the school
> dropped much of that investment.
>
> The fossil fuel divestment movement, which started small at schools like
> Swarthmore
> 
>  around
> 2011, is now a global movement  with
> commitments from more than a thousand organizations and tens of thousands
> of individuals controlling some $8.8 trillion in combined assets.
>
> At the end of last year, Lawrence Bacow, the president of Harvard, told
> The Harvard Crimson that there were more effective ways to “bring about
> meaningful change” than divestment.
>
> In a statement on Saturday, Harvard said its climate action plan
> “explicitly recognize what the science has made clear: the world must move
> quickly to end its use of fossil fuels.”
>
>
>
> “While we agree on the urgency of this global challenge, we respectfully
> disagree with divestment activists on the means by which a university
> should confront it,” the statement continued. “Universities like Harvard
> have a crucial role to play in tackling climate change and Harvard is fully
> committed to leadership in this area through research, education, community
> engagement,

[Marxism] Climate Change’s Great Lithium Problem | The New Republic

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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It seems like an impossible bind: Even if the global economy manages to 
transition off of fossil fuels it will simply sub out one kind of 
harmful extraction for another. The future of technology metal mining in 
South America and elsewhere could look eerily similar to centuries of 
colonial exploitation, dressed up as environmentalism: American highways 
could buzz with Teslas traveling between sprawling suburban rooftops and 
office parks decked out in solar panels, all premised on capitalist 
profiteering and disregard for indigenous rights. Moreover, given 
Chinese firms’ domination of the lithium industry, we could see 
geopolitical conflicts akin to previous ones over oil.


https://newrepublic.com/article/155753/climate-changes-great-lithium-problem
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[Marxism] Climate change and overfishing boost toxic mercury levels in fish

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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https://climateandcapitalism.com/2019/11/09/climate-change-and-overfishing-boost-toxic-mercury-levels-in-fish/
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[Marxism] climate change and racial/class discrimination

[Dennis Brasky via Marxism]

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>
> But there isn’t enough money in the federal coffers to move every resident
> away from the risk of rising waters, and people can’t apply directly for
> buyouts from the federal government. Instead, local elected officials must
> successfully navigate the Kafkaesque bureaucracy of such programs and also
> decide which homeowners can participate. Troubling new data show that
> buyouts have disproportionately benefited wealthy counties.
>
>
>
> As a broader solution to the thorny problem of relocation, Rush proposes
> we institute a nationwide property tax of one cent per square foot per
> year: the “Seas Are Rising and So Are We Tax.” She argues that without an
> eco-socialist policy to address the ways in which sea level rise will
> exacerbate economic and social inequality (while also displacing and
> possibly drowning half the currently endangered species), we risk even more
> segregation, exclusion, and extinction. In the recent grim wake of
> Hurricane Dorian, for instance, 119 Bahamian evacuees were ordered off a
> ferry to Florida because they didn’t have visas, which they did not legally
> need. Not only did Dorian’s devastation demonstrate that the most
> vulnerable populations with the smallest carbon footprints are hit hardest,
> it also offered a nightmare picture of “climate apartheid,” wherein the
> rich can move to safety while the poor may be excluded, refused, or killed
> at the borders of privileged nations like ours.
>
>
>
>
> https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2019/11/21/climate-race-resilience-lessons-survival/
> 
>
>
>
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[Marxism] Climate Change: Russia's Oil and Gas Heartlands Are Under Threat - Bloomberg

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-09-29/climate-change-russia-s-oil-and-gas-heartlands-are-under-threat?cmpid=socialflow-facebook-view
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[Marxism] Climate

[Ken Hiebert via Marxism]

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Today, in my dentist’s office, I was looking at Readers Digest.  I was struck 
to see articles acknowledging the seriousness of climate change.
Below see a communication from a BC, Canada, school board.
ken h

Dear Parents and Guardians: These past few months, conversations about the 
global climate crisis have been occurring more often in the classroom, at all 
levels of government and in mainstream media. Tomorrow, there are rallies 
expected around the world. Already, students in B.C., some here in Nanaimo, 
have staged climate strikes to raise awareness about this very important issue. 
As a district, we applaud and encourage all students in this type of social 
action, as it helps build confidence to speak on matters most important to 
them. They are our future leaders. We are witnessing a growing intolerance by 
our youth pertaining to the inaction of corporations and governments in making 
significant changes in policies and business practices. Led primarily by Greta 
Thunberg, a 16-year-old from Sweden, climate advocates across the world point 
to scientific evidence that climate change is real and should be taken 
seriously. I am happy to share that the district has taken steps to address 
this issue. Last night, the Board of Education approved a Strategic Plan in 
which one of its goals is to be a leader in environmental stewardship and 
sustainability. The Board also updated its administrative procedure on 
environmental initiatives to focus on the stewardship of the land. Your child 
may feel the need to participate in one of tomorrow’s various climate strikes 
across the region which will be held during or after school hours. We invite 
you to have these important conversations with your child. I write this letter 
to assure you that your child will be supported in an excused absence, provided 
we have your expressed permission for them to miss school. 
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Re: [Marxism] Climate action

[Chris Slee via Marxism]

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Photos: Australia’s largest ever climate mobilisation

https://www.greenleft.org.au/content/photos-australia-largest-ever-climate-mobilisation


From: Marxism  on behalf of Ken Hiebert 
via Marxism 
Sent: Saturday, 21 September 2019 8:58 AM
To: Chris Slee 
Subject: [Marxism] Climate action

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I was able to be at this action today.
https://www.cowichanvalleycitizen.com/news/climate-strike-draws-huge-crowd-in-duncan/
 
<https://www.cowichanvalleycitizen.com/news/climate-strike-draws-huge-crowd-in-duncan/>

Also, for musicians, there will be Ode to Joy flashmobs in many places on 
September 26.

ken h
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[Marxism] Climate action

[Ken Hiebert via Marxism]

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I was able to be at this action today.
https://www.cowichanvalleycitizen.com/news/climate-strike-draws-huge-crowd-in-duncan/
 


Also, for musicians, there will be Ode to Joy flashmobs in many places on 
September 26.

ken h
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[Marxism] Climate Change Threatens the World’s Food Supply, United Nations Warns

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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NY Times, Aug. 8, 2019
Climate Change Threatens the World’s Food Supply, United Nations Warns
By Christopher Flavelle

Want climate news in your inbox? Sign up here for Climate Fwd:, our 
email newsletter.


The world’s land and water resources are being exploited at 
“unprecedented rates,” a new United Nations report warns, which combined 
with climate change is putting dire pressure on the ability of humanity 
to feed itself.


The report, prepared by more than 100 experts from 52 countries and 
released in summary form in Geneva on Thursday, found that the window to 
address the threat is closing rapidly. A half-billion people already 
live in places turning into desert, and soil is being lost between 10 
and 100 times faster than it is forming, according to the report.


Climate change will make those threats even worse, as floods, drought, 
storms and other types of extreme weather threaten to disrupt, and over 
time shrink, the global food supply. Already, more than 10 percent of 
the world’s population remains undernourished, and some authors of the 
report warned in interviews that food shortages could lead to an 
increase in cross-border migration.


A particular danger is that food crises could develop on several 
continents at once, said Cynthia Rosenzweig, a senior research scientist 
at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and one of the lead 
authors of the report. “The potential risk of multi-breadbasket failure 
is increasing,” she said. “All of these things are happening at the same 
time.”


The report also offered a measure of hope, laying out pathways to 
addressing the looming food crisis, though they would require a major 
re-evaluation of land use and agriculture worldwide as well as consumer 
behavior. Proposals include increasing the productivity of land, wasting 
less food and persuading more people to shift their diets away from 
cattle and other types of meat.


“One of the important findings of our work is that there are a lot of 
actions that we can take now. They’re available to us,” Dr. Rosenzweig 
said. “But what some of these solutions do require is attention, 
financial support, enabling environments.”


The summary was released Thursday by the Intergovernmental Panel on 
Climate Change, an international group of scientists convened by the 
United Nations that pulls together a wide range of existing research to 
help governments understand climate change and make policy decisions. 
The I.P.C.C. is writing a series of climate reports, including one last 
year on the disastrous consequences if the planet’s temperature rises 
just 1.5 degrees Celsius above its preindustrial levels, as well as an 
upcoming report on the state of the world’s oceans.


Some authors also suggested that food shortages are likely to affect 
poorer parts of the world far more than richer ones. That could increase 
a flow of immigration that is already redefining politics in North 
America, Europe and other parts of the world.


“People’s lives will be affected by a massive pressure for migration,” 
said Pete Smith, a professor of plant and soil science at the University 
of Aberdeen and one of the report’s lead authors. “People don’t stay and 
die where they are. People migrate.”


Between 2010 and 2015 the number of migrants from El Salvador, Guatemala 
and Honduras showing up at the United States’ border with Mexico 
increased fivefold, coinciding with a dry period that left many with not 
enough food and was so unusual that scientists suggested it bears the 
signal of climate change.


Barring action on a sweeping scale, the report said, climate change will 
accelerate the danger of severe food shortages. As a warming atmosphere 
intensifies the world’s droughts, flooding, heat waves, wildfires and 
other weather patterns, it is speeding up the rate of soil loss and land 
degradation, the report concludes.


Higher concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere — a greenhouse 
gas put there mainly by the burning of fossil fuels — will also reduce 
food’s nutritional quality, even as rising temperatures cut crop yields 
and harm livestock.


Those changes threaten to exceed the ability of the agriculture industry 
to adapt.


In some cases, the report says, a changing climate is boosting food 
production because, for example, warmer temperatures will mean greater 
yields of some crops at higher latitudes. But on the whole, the report 
finds that climate change is already hurting the availability of food 
because of decreased yields and lost land from erosion, desertification 
and rising seas, among other things.


Overall if emissions of greenhouse gases continue to ri

[Marxism] Climate Crisis: Central banks and the "macroprudential greening" of finance – ADAM TOOZE

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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https://adamtooze.com/2019/07/20/climate-crisis-central-banks-and-the-macroprudential-greening-of-finance/
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[Marxism] Climate change as seen in two popular comic strips

[Ken Hiebert via Marxism]

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These links will soon lead to more recent cartoons, but for the moment.
ken h

https://www.gocomics.com/pearlsbeforeswine 


https://www.creators.com/features/the-other-coast 

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[Marxism] Climate, communism and the Age of Affluence?

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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A review of Aaron Bastani, ‘Fully Automated Luxury Communism: A 
Manifesto’ published on 11 June 2019 by Verso Books.

by Gareth Dale

As the title suggests, this is a breathless manifesto. Its descriptions 
of technologies are gushing. Innovations are “dizzying", progress is 
“exponential". Plaudits are showered on any firm or state that has 
invested in solar photovoltaics, lab-grown meat, or asteroid mining.


Without hesitation or irony, Saudi Arabia is extolled for its 
solar-energy plans. They demonstrate “precisely the scale and ambition 
that is needed to move the world beyond fossil fuels by 2040".


With a steady patter of quotes from CEOs, the tone is often less 
manifesto than marketing brochure for SpaceX and other “disruptive” 
corporations. We are whisked from one marvellous fact or promise to the 
next. New medical technologies could “spell the end of age-related and 
inherited illness altogether", rockets can be 3D-printed using “lasers 
that melt a steady stream of aluminium wire into liquid metal", and so on.


Such gadgets may be cutting-edge but the tune is old. We hear the same 
notes as in Erasmus Darwin in the eighteenth century, Charles Babbage 
and John Ramsay McCulloch in the nineteenth, and we might almost hear 
Lenin’s adage—Communism is “Soviet power plus electrification”— except 
that in this manifesto the pylons are towering, the rest is secondary.


full: 
https://theecologist.org/2019/may/29/climate-communism-and-age-affluence

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[Marxism] Climate change: 'We've created a civilisation hell bent on destroying itself – I'm terrified', writes Earth scientist

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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https://theconversation.com/climate-change-weve-created-a-civilisation-hell-bent-on-destroying-itself-im-terrified-writes-earth-scientist-113055
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[Marxism] Climate, communism and the Age of Affluence?

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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https://theecologist.org/2019/may/29/climate-communism-and-age-affluence
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[Marxism] Climate policy implications of nonlinear decline of Arctic land permafrost and other cryosphere elements

[Greg McDonald via Marxism]

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https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-09863-x

Arctic feedbacks accelerate climate change through carbon releases from
thawing permafrost and higher solar absorption from reductions in the
surface albedo, following loss of sea ice and land snow. Here, we include
dynamic emulators of complex physical models in the integrated assessment
model PAGE-ICE to explore nonlinear transitions in the Arctic feedbacks and
their subsequent impacts on the global climate and economy under the Paris
Agreement scenarios. The permafrost feedback is increasingly positive in
warmer climates, while the albedo feedback weakens as the ice and snow
melt. Combined, these two factors lead to significant increases in the mean
discounted economic effect of climate change: +4.0% ($24.8 trillion) under
the 1.5 °C scenario, +5.5% ($33.8 trillion) under the 2 °C scenario, and
+4.8% ($66.9 trillion) under mitigation levels consistent with the current
national pledges. Considering the nonlinear Arctic feedbacks makes the 1.5
°C target marginally more economically attractive than the 2 °C target,
although both are statistically equivalent.
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[Marxism] Climate Change Denial of the Progressive Democratic Type | Washington Babylon

[Andrew Stewart via Marxism]

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https://washingtonbabylon.com/climate-change-denial-of-the-progressive-democratic-type/


Best regards,
Andrew Stewart 
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[Marxism] Climate change is pushing Central American migrants to the US | Lauren Markham | Opinion | The Guardian

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/apr/06/us-mexico-immigration-climate-change-migration
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[Marxism] Climate Tipping Points

[Greg McDonald via Marxism]

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https://arctic-news.blogspot.com/2019/03/climate-tipping-points.html?m=1

*Anthropocene tipping points*

“During the late Anthropocene³, accelerating since about 1960, the rise of
radiative forcing due mainly to increasing greenhouse gas concentration
above >457 ppm CO₂-equivalent, accounts for a rise of mean global
temperatures by 0.98°C since 1880 *(NASA (2018) *A further rise by more
than >0.5°C is masked by aerosols, mainly sulphur dioxide and sulfuric
acid *(Hansen
et al., 2011)*.

The temperature rise is potentially further enhanced by amplifying
feedbacks from land and oceans, including infrared absorption by water
surfaces following sea ice melting, reduction of CO₂ concentration in
warming water, release of methane and fires. However, climate change
trajectories are likely to be highly irregular as a result of stadial ocean
cooling events affected by flow of ice melt. Whereas similar temperature
fluctuations including stadial events have occurred during past
interglacial periods *(Cortese et al. 2007; figure 1)*, with a further rise
in atmospheric greenhouse gases the intensity and frequency of extreme
weather events would enter uncharted territory unlike any recorded during
the Pleistocene, potentially rendering large parts of the continents
uninhabitable *(Wallace-Wells, 2019)*.“
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Re: [Marxism] Climate Politics after the Yellow Vests | Colin Kinniburgh | Dissent Magazine

[DW via Marxism]

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A strange article because nowhere in the article does it actually discuss
the carbon foot print of France! If you look at the electricitymap.com site
and click on France, you will see it has a carbon footprint about 8 times
lower than that of renewable energy heavy Germany. It is among the lowest 3
in Europe (hydro heavy Norway and hydro/nuclear heavy Sweden). They could
de better by phasing out natural gas, which is about 10% of their grid at
various times. But that would piss off the Green Party as they are heavily
invested politically in gas as the back up for the increased renewables the
gov't has committed to increases, against France's massive nuclear grid
(and the basis for their low GHG footprint). The best thing immediatly
would be for an incentive program to deploy more electric vehicles at this
point.

David
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[Marxism] Climate Politics after the Yellow Vests | Colin Kinniburgh | Dissent Magazine

[Kevin Lindemann and Cathy Campo via Marxism]

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https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/the-yellow-vests-uncertain-future


Sent from my iPhone
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Re: [Marxism] Climate change: ‘It is worse, much worse, than you think’ | Interview with David Wallace-Wells | Ian Sinclair | The Morning Star

[Greg McDonald via Marxism]

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It’s even worse than that. As evidence mounts of massive methane deposits
in Siberia and the Eastern Arctic, some arctic experts predict Michael Mann
and a few others will continue to lie, just more profusely:

https://robinwestenra.blogspot.com/2019/03/a-paper-published-in-geosciences.html?m=1
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[Marxism] Climate change: ‘It is worse, much worse, than you think’ | Interview with David Wallace-Wells | Ian Sinclair | The Morning Star

[Kevin Lindemann and Cathy Campo via Marxism]

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https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/f/climate-change-its-worse-much-worse-you-think


Sent from my iPhone

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[Marxism] Climate Forecast: World Is "Sleepwalking into Catastrophe" - Scientific American

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/climate-forecast-world-is-sleepwalking-into-catastrophe/
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[Marxism] Climate Justice standpoint Re: France’s protesters are part of a global backlash against climate-change taxes - The Washington Post

[Patrick Bond via Marxism]

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 Forwarded Message 
Subject: 	[REDlistserve] Yellow vests movement: Macron’s fuel tax was no 
solution to climate chaos

Date:   Wed, 5 Dec 2018 13:43:58 +0100
From:   Maxime Combes 




For your information, please find below a piece published two weeks ago 
in a French media now available in English


*/A few words on the situation in the country : /*
The situation in the country is moving up quite quickly: the yellow 
vests movement was initially seen as a "No-Tax right-wing movement" but 
it is much more complicated. Most of them are fighting against tax 
injustice and Macron's decisions in favor of the richs / TNCs / 
capital-owners. That doesn't mean that far-right wing groups are not 
infiltrated in the movement, but that does mean this is a complex social 
movement with more and more references to social and leftists demands 
(rising up of the minimum salary, etc). Macron government annoucements 
that they did yesterday are far to calm dow the situation. People feel 
flouted and the mobilisation coming on saturday is a key, since this is 
also a big climate day of mobilisation, and, with some others, we are 
trying to make some links. Not an easy task, but since we have now 
under-18 students in the streets, we hope to get some good news in the 
coming days.
(you may all know that all French revolutions came first through 
"anti-tax movements" - not saying that we are about to get a new 
revolution, but these are very important days in our country and 
definetely key to get a left answer to all of this)


Please feel free to share widely and to come back to us. (I have a lot 
of info - materials, but only in French)


Yellow vests: Macron’s fuel tax was no solution to climate chaos 


By
Maxime Combes 
-
4 December 2018


/The French government has now decided to suspend a planned eco-tax on 
fuel in response to mass protests. While the movement of the ‘yellow 
vests’ (gilets jaunes) has turned into a broader revolt against 
inequality and Macron’s neoliberal reforms, e/conomist and climate 
activist *Maxime Combes* (Attac France) argues that as a way to tackle 
climate change, the tax is neither fair nor effective. //


//Analysis originally published on the daily internet journal of ideas 
AOC 
 and 
translated by *Taisie Tsikas*.//


It is in the name of “ecological transition” and the need to “liberate 
households from dependence on petrol” that French Prime Minister Edouard 
Phillippe justified the status quo: no new proposal was announced the 
day after the “gilets jaunes” protests. By making the carbon tax, and 
hence the rise in fuel prices, the central plank of its policy to reduce 
fossil fuel consumption – a legitimate objective in itself – the 
government, blinded by an ideological and narrow understanding of the 
role that ecological fiscal policy can and must play, are leading the 
transition to a dead-end.


This discourse is intended to be simple and accessible: by increasing 
prices of fuels, consumers can be made to modify their behaviour, 
reducing their use of vehicles and/or buying more fuel-efficient 
vehicles. The same applies to boilers that use oil, in which case the 
emphasis is put on replacing them in favour of wood-burning or gas 
boilers. The case of tobacco is often used as an example: hasn’t its 
increase in price, done in the name of public health, reduced its 
consumption?


*Little impact 

[Marxism] Climate Change and Wildfires: The New Western Travesty

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/11/16/climate-change-and-wildfires-the-new-western-travesty/
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[Marxism] Climate Change Sea Level Rise Will Be Worse Than Imagined – Rolling Stone

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/climate-change-sea-level-rise-737012/
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[Marxism] Climate change and growth – Nordhaus and Romer | Michael Roberts Blog

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2018/10/09/climate-change-and-growth-nordhaus-and-romer/
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Re: [Marxism] Climate Change: What About the Marxists?

[Patrick Bond via Marxism]

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On 2018/09/06 14:28, Louis Proyect via Marxism wrote:
https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/09/06/climate-change-what-about-the-marxists/ 
]


I think what could be added here, is that capital seeks solutions to its 
problems that merely move them around (as Engels remarked about the 
Housing Question). For example, the commodification of the air and 
financialization of emissions mitigation strategies are topics I take up 
in a book: 
http://ggjalliance.org/sites/default/files/Bond%20Politics%20of%20Climate%20Justice%20UKZN%20Press.pdf



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[Marxism] Climate Change: What About the Marxists?

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/09/06/climate-change-what-about-the-marxists/
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[Marxism] Climate Change Bites Big Business | manuelgarciajr

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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https://manuelgarciajr.com/2018/08/14/climate-change-bites-big-business/
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[Marxism] Climate Change Denialists Say Polar Bears Are Fine. Scientists Are Pushing Back

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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NY Times, April 11, 2018
Climate Change Denialists Say Polar Bears Are Fine. Scientists Are 
Pushing Back.

By Erica Goode

Furry, button-nosed and dependent on sea ice for their survival, polar 
bears have long been poster animals for climate change.


But at a time when established climate science is being questioned at 
the highest levels of government, climate denialists are turning the 
charismatic bears to their own uses, capitalizing on their symbolic heft 
to spread doubts about the threat of global warming.


The scientific evidence that the polar bear’s Arctic home is warming 
twice as fast as the rest of the planet is overwhelming, supported by 
reports like the National Climate Assessment, which was compiled by 13 
federal agencies. In some Arctic regions, scientists have documented 
declines in polar bear numbers and disturbing signs of physical 
deterioration linked to the loss of sea ice. And last year, the Obama 
administration called human-driven climate change the biggest threat to 
the bears’ continued existence.


But to hear climate denialists tell it, polar bears are doing just fine. 
On Watts Up With That, Climate Depot and other websites that dispute 
climate science, bloggers insist that the Arctic’s receding ice is part 
of a natural warming cycle unrelated to human activities. Predictions 
about devastating declines in polar bear populations, they say, have 
failed to materialize.


In effect, many scientists say, the bears have been co-opted by climate 
denialists, and in an article published Tuesday in the peer-reviewed 
journal BioScience, 14 prominent researchers argue that denialist blogs 
with wide followings are using the bears to spread misinformation about 
the causes and consequences of climate change.


The researchers also singled out Polar Bear Science, a blog run by Susan 
J. Crockford, a Canadian zoologist, as a primary source of dubious 
information about the status of polar bears. About 80 percent of the 
contrarian websites that the researchers studied referred to Dr. 
Crockford’s blog as a primary source, they said.


The publication of the article is likely to intensify a furor in 
contrarian circles that began four months ago after an “early view” 
version of the paper appeared on the BioScience website.


The reaction was swift and fierce. A post on Climate Audit, a blog 
popular with climate skeptics, called the article “a hit piece” and 
dismissed it as “yet another piece of propaganda to push a Climate 
Change agenda.” The Global Warming Policy Foundation, a pro-fossil fuel 
think tank in Britain that has published briefing papers by Dr. 
Crockford, chimed in with the headline, “14 Climate Bullies Attack Susan 
Crockford for Telling the Truth About Polar Bears.”


Dr. Crockford tweeted that the article amounted to “academic rape” and 
demanded that it be retracted.


Characterizing a professional, respected scientist as an unqualified 
vengeful opinion writer is the same kind of power attack as rape. It’s 
meant to humiliate and intimidate. I said this as part of…


The authors of the paper also came under fire. Freedom of information 
requests were filed at universities for three of the authors’ 
correspondence, with at least one request by Dr. Crockford. (Two of the 
requests have been turned down, while one, at the University of 
California, Davis, is still under review.) And Hans LaBohm, editor of 
the blog ClimateGate.nl, wrote to the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts 
and Sciences demanding that Jeffrey A. Harvey, an ecologist and the 
article’s lead author, be reprimanded for conduct “unworthy of serious 
scientists.”


Dr. Harvey said the paper grew out of the increasing frustration he and 
other scientists felt about the spread of false information, the 
disregard of established evidence and the harassment of researchers that 
has in some cases accompanied the public debate on climate change.


By contesting scientific findings about polar bears, denialists hope to 
instill doubt about climate science as a whole, Dr. Harvey said. “Every 
time these deniers make some outlandish claim in the media and we don’t 
respond to it, it’s like a soccer match and we’ve given them an open 
goal,” he added.


Michael Oppenheimer, a professor of geoscience and international affairs 
at the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton who was not involved with the 
article, said he was not surprised to see scientists banding together 
against climate change denial.


“Some climate scientists basically have had enough of being punching 
bags,” Dr. Oppenheimer said.


He added that scientists have a right to publicly question someone’s 
expertise, as the au

[Marxism] Climate change and the Syrian civil war revisited - ScienceDirect

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0962629816301822
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[Marxism] Climate change's various victims

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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NY Times, Oct. 3 2017
‘We Don’t Exist’: Life Inside Mongolia’s Swelling Slums
By JAVIER C. HERNÁNDEZ

ULAN BATOR, Mongolia — The land beneath Dolgor Dashnyam’s home is wet 
and gritty and smells of decay. Here, atop one of Ulan Bator’s largest 
landfills, Ms. Dashnyam lives under a roof made of soggy mattresses. She 
spends her days rummaging through piles of gin bottles and discarded 
animal bones, picking up pieces of scrap metal to sell in order to buy 
water and bread.


Ms. Dashnyam, 55, was once an ambitious college graduate who dreamed of 
owning a farm and getting rich. But a scarcity of affordable housing has 
pushed her and thousands of low-income residents to the fringes of Ulan 
Bator, the city of 1.4 million that is Mongolia’s capital, where they 
struggle for basic necessities like food and clean water.


“Nobody cares about us,” said Ms. Dashnyam, who makes about $3 a day and 
says she has been unable to obtain government-subsidized housing. She 
was laid off from a job in farming. “We don’t exist.”


Hundreds of thousands of people have flocked to Ulan Bator in recent 
years, drawn by the promise of high-paying jobs and a path to the middle 
class. Many are fleeing harsh conditions in the countryside brought on 
by climate change, with droughts and bitter winters devastating fields 
and livestock.


Ulan Bator, nestled in a valley about 4,400 feet above sea level, was 
never designed to house more than a few hundred thousand residents. Now 
it is on course to expand indefinitely, raising fears that the 
government may not be able to keep up with the influx of migrants.


City officials, citing concerns about a lack of space at schools and an 
overburdened welfare system, said this year that Ulan Bator would not 
accept any more rural migrants. The government has cautioned against 
constructing homes in some areas because of the dangers of overcrowding.


Still, many Mongolians are defiant. On craggy hillsides and rocky 
plains, they are setting up makeshift shacks and gers, or yurts, the 
traditional homes of Mongolian nomads.


On a secluded hill in northern Ulan Bator, Enkh-amgalan Tserendorj, 50, 
washed clothes outside the family yurt, where she and her husband have 
lived since last year. Ms. Tserendorj said she did not want to live so 
far from downtown but had no choice. Under Mongolian law, citizens are 
entitled to claim small plots of land of about 7,500 square feet — about 
700 square meters — leaving many people struggling to find attractive 
spaces.


“It’s unfair,” she said. “Every good piece of land is occupied.”

Ms. Tserendorj’s 26-year-old son has tuberculosis, and she said the 
family’s isolation had made it difficult to find proper medical care. 
She said she was also concerned by a lack of reliable electricity and 
the threat of natural disasters like landslides.


Ulan Bator’s government has vowed to invest billions in affordable 
housing by 2030 and to begin transforming several yurt districts into 
residential complexes. The government hopes to have 70 percent of its 
citizens living in apartments by 2030, compared with about 40 percent 
right now. The city’s population is estimated to increase to 1.6 million 
by 2020, and 2.1 million by 2030, from 1.4 million in 2015.


But advocates say the government’s housing plan falls short. And some 
worry that the city does not do enough to protect residents who are 
forced by the government to leave their homes to make way for new 
construction.


“Families are living in fear that they will be left homeless,” said 
Nicholas Bequelin, the East Asia director for Amnesty International in 
Hong Kong. “The authorities are falling short in their responsibilities 
to protect residents’ rights.”


Climate change has intensified the pressure to resolve the housing 
crisis. Mongolia has been particularly hard hit, with a series of 
devastating droughts. Temperatures are also on the rise; this summer was 
the hottest in more than a half-century.


Gandavaa Mandakh, a former herder, moved to Ulan Bator three years ago 
from a town in southern Mongolia after losing dozens of cows, camels, 
goats and sheep during harsh winters.


Gandavaa Mandakh, 38, a former herder, now works as a taxi driver; his 
wife works as a cook at a Korean restaurant. They have three children 
and earn about $500 per month. Credit Bryan Denton for The New York Times
Mr. Mandakh, 38, now works as a taxi driver; his wife works as a cook at 
a Korean restaurant. They have three children and earn about $500 per month.


“Of course, we have many problems here,” he said, noting the city’s bad 
traffic and overcrowded schools. “But it’s still better tha

[Marxism] Climate change "will hurt U.S. economy, increase ...

[Richard Sprout via Marxism]

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http://news.trust.org/item/20170629180212-4wi2d/


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[Marxism] Climate Denial, Democrat Style | Raging Chicken Press

[Richard Sprout via Marxism]

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https://ragingchickenpress.org/2017/06/21/climate-denial-democrat-style/


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[Marxism] Climate Disruption's Legacy: Megadroughts, Extinctions, Obituaries for Reefs

[Ralph Johansen via Marxism]

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http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/38236-climate-disruption-s-legacy-megadroughts-extinctions-obituaries-for-reefs 



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[Marxism] Climate Change Hits Hard in Zambia, an African Success Story

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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NY Times, Apr. 13 2016
Climate Change Hits Hard in Zambia, an African Success Story
By NORIMITSU ONISHI

LAKE KARIBA, Zambia — Even as drought and the effects of climate change 
grew visible across this land, the Kariba Dam was always a steady, and 
seemingly limitless, source of something rare in Africa: electricity so 
cheap and plentiful that Zambia could export some to its neighbors.


The power generated from the Kariba — one of the world’s largest 
hydroelectric dams, in one of the world’s largest artificial lakes — 
contributed to Zambia’s political stability and helped turn its economy 
into one of the fastest growing on the continent.


But today, as a severe drought magnified by climate change has cut water 
levels to record lows, the Kariba is generating so little juice that 
blackouts have crippled the nation’s already hurting businesses. After a 
decade of being heralded as a vanguard of African growth, Zambia, in a 
quick, mortifying letdown, is now struggling to pay its own civil 
servants and has reached out to the International Monetary Fund for help.


“The Kariba Dam was a big eye-opener, sort of a confirmation that, yes, 
there could be this problem of climate change,” said David Kaluba, 
national coordinator of the government’s Interim Climate Change Secretariat.


On a continent especially vulnerable to the effects of climate change, 
Zambia’s rapid fall shows how the phenomenon threatens economic 
development across Africa, and how easily it can contribute to wiping 
out the fragile gains made in recent years.


While the global drop in commodities prices has devastated Africa, 
drought and other weather patterns related to climate change over 
decades have also undermined some of the biggest economies across the 
continent, from Nigeria in the West to Ethiopia in the Horn of Africa to 
South Africa at its bottom tip.


Over the next decades, Africa is expected to warm up faster than the 
global average, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate 
Change. Despite an agreement reached in Paris in December, which 
committed nearly every country in the world to lowering greenhouse gas 
emissions, it is far from clear how much money African nations will have 
to mitigate climate change and adapt to it.


Zambia remains largely dependent on foreign assistance to manage climate 
change, and has been slow to plan for the consequences on its own.


“Unfortunately, what is going in Zambia is pretty much what is going on 
in the rest of Africa,” said Danny Simatele, a climate change expert at 
the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg.


To many in Zambia, the current power crisis has focused attention on 
climate change in a way that changes over years and decades, like rising 
temperatures and irregular rainfall patterns, had not. People across the 
nation now track Kariba’s water level — it was 13 percent of capacity on 
a recent visit, up from a low of 11 percent in January — as closely as 
they follow their favorite soccer teams.


At the J.S. Butchery in the capital, Lusaka, the light had just come 
back on after an unscheduled, eight-hour blackout, hardly ideal for the 
food sitting in its glass refrigerator. Joe Mulenga, a 28-year-old 
butcher, said he had first learned about climate change on television 
about a year ago and then did an Internet search about it.


“Now it’s here, we started experiencing it, it’s real,” he said. “I’m 
very worried.”


Francis Ndilila, who leads the energy committee at the Zambia Chamber of 
Commerce and Industry, said that climate change had had the direct 
“effect already of slowing down our economic development.”


Projections for growth in Zambia, which averaged more than 7 percent for 
the decade up to 2015, have been cut in half.


The problems at the dam here stem from an El Niño weather pattern that 
has brought the worst drought in decades to parts of Africa. Farmers, 
who rely on rain and lack irrigation facilities, have been hit hard.


But so have countries dependent on hydroelectricity, like Zambia, 
Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Tanzania and Malawi. In Zambia, hydropower 
accounts for 95 percent of the electricity. Production at Kariba Dam, 
which usually generates more than 40 percent of the nation’s power, has 
fallen to about a quarter of capacity.


On a recent morning, not a drop came out of the dam’s sluices. Rocky 
patches on the riverbed that feeds Lake Kariba lay exposed, and sections 
of the dam’s walls, usually submerged, were discolored. The rains had 
come late to Zambia this season, and then only in small quantities, 
though recent strong rains up north have given officials some hope.


“Once the in

[Marxism] Climate justice movement shakes Canada's New Democratic Party

[Richard Fidler via Marxism]

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http://lifeonleft.blogspot.ca/2016/04/climate-justice-movement-shakes-canada
s.html
or
http://tinyurl.com/ztv3gyr



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[Marxism] Climate-Related Death of Coral Around World Alarms Scientists

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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NY Times, Apr. 10 2016
Climate-Related Death of Coral Around World Alarms Scientists
By MICHELLE INNIS

SYDNEY, Australia — Kim Cobb, a marine scientist at the Georgia 
Institute of Technology, expected the coral to be damaged when she 
plunged into the deep blue waters off Kiritimati Island, a remote atoll 
near the center of the Pacific Ocean. Still, she was stunned by what she 
saw as she descended some 30 feet to the rim of a coral outcropping.


“The entire reef is covered with a red-brown fuzz,” Dr. Cobb said when 
she returned to the surface after her recent dive. “It is otherworldly. 
It is algae that has grown over dead coral. It was devastating.”


The damage off Kiritimati is part of a mass bleaching of coral reefs 
around the world, only the third on record and possibly the worst ever. 
Scientists believe that heat stress from multiple weather events 
including the latest severe El Niño, compounded by climate change, has 
threatened more than a third of Earth’s coral reefs. Many may not recover.


Coral reefs are the crucial incubators of the ocean’s ecosystem, 
providing food and shelter to a quarter of all marine species, and they 
support fish stocks that feed more than one billion people. They are 
made up of millions of tiny animals, called polyps, that form symbiotic 
relationships with algae, which in turn capture sunlight and carbon 
dioxide to make sugars that feed the polyps.


An estimated 30 million small-scale fishermen and women depend on reefs 
for their livelihoods, more than one million in the Philippines alone. 
In Indonesia, fish supported by the reefs provide the primary source of 
protein.


“This is a huge, looming planetary crisis, and we are sticking our heads 
in the sand about it,” said Justin Marshall, the director of CoralWatch 
at Australia’s University of Queensland.


Bleaching occurs when high heat and bright sunshine cause the metabolism 
of the algae — which give coral reefs their brilliant colors and energy 
— to speed out of control, and they start creating toxins. The polyps 
recoil. If temperatures drop, the corals can recover, but denuded ones 
remain vulnerable to disease. When heat stress continues, they starve to 
death.


Damaged or dying reefs have been found from Réunion, off the coast of 
Madagascar, to East Flores, Indonesia, and from Guam and Hawaii in the 
Pacific to the Florida Keys in the Atlantic.


The largest bleaching, at Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, was confirmed 
last month. In a survey of 520 individual reefs that make up the Great 
Barrier Reef’s northern section, scientists from Australia’s National 
Coral Bleaching Task Force found only four with no signs of bleaching. 
Some 620 miles of reef, much of it previously in pristine condition, had 
suffered significant bleaching.


In follow-up surveys, scientists diving on the reef said half the coral 
they had seen had died. Terry Hughes, the director of the Center of 
Excellence for Coral Reef Studies at James Cook University in 
Queensland, who took part in the survey, warned that even more would 
succumb if the water did not cool soon.


“There is a good chance a large portion of the damaged coral will die,” 
he added.


Scientists say the global bleaching is the result of an unusual 
confluence of events, each of which raised water temperatures already 
elevated by climate change.


In the North Atlantic, a strong high-pressure cell blocked the normal 
southward flow of polar air in 2013, kicking off the first of three 
warmer-than-normal winters in a row as far south as the Caribbean.


A large underwater heat wave formed in the northeastern Pacific in early 
2014, and has since stretched into a wide band along the west coast of 
North America, from Baja California to the Bering Sea. Nicknamed the 
Blob, it is up to four degrees Fahrenheit warmer than surrounding 
waters, and has been blamed for a host of odd phenomena, including the 
beaching of hungry sea lions in California and the sighting of tropical 
skipjack tuna off Alaska.


Then came 2015, with the most powerful El Niño climate cycle in a 
century. It blasted heat across the tropical and southern Pacific, 
bleaching reefs from Kiritimati to Indonesia, and across the Indian 
Ocean to Réunion and Tanzania on Africa’s east coast.


“We are currently experiencing the longest global coral bleaching event 
ever observed,” said C. Mark Eakin, the Coral Reef Watch coordinator at 
the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Maryland. “We are 
going to lose a lot of the world’s reefs during this event.”


Reefs that take centuries to form can be destroyed in weeks. Individual 
corals may survive a bleach

[Marxism] CLIMATE VS CAPITALISM: why we need system change

[John Passant via Marxism]

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CLIMATE VS CAPITALISM: why we need system change

The globe continues to warm. The recent Paris conference agreement was a 
sham. We are heading towards 3 - 4 degrees C warming. Why can’t world 
leaders end their fossil fuel addiction? If you are in Canberra come to 
this meeting to discuss why we have to change the system, before the 
system destroys the planet. It is on at 1 pm on Wednesday 17 February in 
room G 039 in Copland Building at the Australian National University.


http://enpassant.com.au/2016/02/16/climate-vs-capitalism-why-we-need-system-change/

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[Marxism] Climate Change, Women and Bangladesh’s Disaster Capitalism

[Andrew Pollack via Marxism]

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http://www.europe-solidaire.org/spip.php?article37030
How climate change drives women off the land and into competition with each
other in garment shops
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[Marxism] Climate activists in Paris defy state ban and police brutality

[John Passant via Marxism]

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Protesters filled the streets of Paris on the eve of the United Nations 
Cop21 climate change summit–despite president Francois Hollande’s best 
attempts to keep them away writes Dave Sewell in Socialist Worker UK 
from Paris.


http://enpassant.com.au/2015/11/30/climate-activists-in-paris-defy-state-ban-and-police-brutality/

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[Marxism] Climate Justice must be Supplemented by Responsible Consumption

[Hans G Ehrbar via Marxism]

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Lately I have been discussing climate change a lot with religious
people.  Most religious commentaries on the climate are based on the
unquestioned assumption that humans affect the climate as individuals,
that individuals make the wrong choices and need some kind of spiritual
awakening.

I don't think this is the right way to look at it.  What wrecks the
climate is not individuals but society.  Changes of individual
behaviours will only then do the trick if we strategically seek out
those individual changes which unhinge entire social structures.

Let me explain better.  What paralyzes modern capitalist societies in
front of the clearly perceived climate danger is the fact that we are a
class society.  Class warfare has degenerated into a protracted
trench warfare with no clear winners of losers.  The capitalists are
unable to push the cost of climate mitigation on the workers, and the
workers are unable to force the capitalists to pay for climate
mitigation out of their profits.  Since both sides refuse to pay for it,
climate mitigation is not happening.

If the working class and the female gender and the oppressed nations and
minorities could quickly win the class/race/discrimination war and in
conjunction with this tackle the climate issue, this would be wonderful,
and this is a strategy which should be pursued.  But we cannot rely on
this climate justice strategy as our only strategy.  The power of the
capitalists and other oppressors is too entrenched, it cannot be removed
quickly enough.

Therefore I submit that the climate justice strategy must be
supplemented by what I call the responsible consumption strategy.  80%
of environmental damage is done by 20% of the world's population, by all
those living comfortable middle class lives.  If this demographic
voluntarily reduces their consumption, sheds off the excess of stuff and
seeks happiness in more free time and better social relations and more
natural beauty and respect for nature, then they can make a difference
for the climate right now.  This demand side movement can give us more
time to work on the supply side, renewable energy, electrified mass
transportation, and dwellings which produce more energy than they
consume.

This strategy of responsible consumption is an attempt to escape from
the class war deadlock by a gambit, by the sacrifice of a pawn.  If
those living prosperous lives, both workers and capitalists, voluntarily
reduce consumption, they show their willingness to do climate mitigation
even if they cannot shift the cost of it on others but must pay for it
themselves.  This is an obvious and moral individual action to take for
those who can afford it, since our overconsumption is clearly changing
the planet into an inhospitable environment for future generations.
This is so compelling that it has the potential to become a powerful
cultural movement undermining the culture of promotion of exploitation
versus avoidance of exploitation.  In addition, it also has strategic
implications for the social order.  It makes it easier to force the
capitalists to do climate mitigation because they no longer have the
market for their reckless climate-unaware fossil-fuel based growth.

Hans G Ehrbar


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