Schools, climate strikes and internationalism

Written by Jonathan Neale and first published at The Ecologist

I loved the school students’ climate strikes last month. The energy, the jokes on the placards, the smiles, the hopeful faces. The students in Brighton marching by the railway station, chanting ‘F*** Theresa May’. I had all those kindly, patronizing, adulty feelings. But something deeper too.

I have been a climate activist since 2004: endless protests and phone calls and emails and meetings in small rooms, week after week, year after year, all the time trying to give other people hope. When I spoke at meetings people would ask – But how can we do it? How can we force the powerful the act? In every country, on every continent, someone always asks that question. Because everyone wants to know the answer.

I would try to invent an answer, and then lie alone in the dark in the middle of the night and wrestle with despair. But now I have seen a power that can change the world.

First steps

If young people all over the world come out of school and stay out of school, the cities will stop. The workplaces will stop, because so many people need to go look after their children.

The young people would have immense moral force. They can occupy the parliaments. The police will not and cannot beat and gas and kill all the children. Nor will the soldiers. Nor would we let them. And if it is all over the world, it will be a power such as Earth has never seen.

The kids could make the rest of us brave and decent, and we could follow them out of work into the squares and the halls of power until we win.

We are not anywhere near that now. These are one-day strikes. Who knows how long the strikes will last? How far they will spread? What exactly do they want?

I fantasize we will go all the way this time. I know we won’t. Great historical movements do not work like that. But the process has begun.

International movement

What I can now imagine, many can now imagine. It will be possible for millions to begin working out how to use their power, with apocalypse in their future and a lifetime of making history ahead of them.

I have seen another thing. For forever I have had to listen to experts telling me we would never be able to convince people by scaring them shitless about climate change. They told me, and you, how people were too short sighted and greedy and stupid and unwashed to grasp what the enlightened understood.

Now I know that we climate activists have persuaded hundreds of millions. The first part of our work is done. The real work commences.

Another thing is so big people hardly comment on it. The internationalism. The strikes started with one young woman in Stockholm, spread to Australia, back to Belgium, on across parts of Europe, even came to Britain, are going to be global this Friday, and will not stop there.

As I watched the strike reports, Nancy Lindisfarne and I were finishing a book on class and male violence. The last chapters - a joy to write - were about the exploding resistance to rape and sexual harassment.

Tracing the history of the last few years, the same thing jumped out at us – internationalism. The movement leaps, from the riot against rape at India Gate in Delhi in 2012, to Rhodes University in South Africa, to Buenos Aries and across Latin America, to the women’s marches against Trump, to the MeToo movement in the US, to the Chinese MeToo and the Indian MeToo, to Stormy Daniels and Blasey Ford, just two women, to hundreds of thousands protesting for legal abortion in Argentina, to the conviction of Cardinal Pell in Australia, to three million women in Kerala joining hands to defend the dignity of their menstrual blood, to demonstrations of millions around the world on International Women’s Day last week.

Increasing visibility

These movements are only the beginning, and the earthquakes will threaten all established power.

You can see that same internationalism - the leapfrogging power of example and shared messages - moving as quickly in the climate strikes. It’s partly social media, and partly that our experience is growing more alike across the world. It’s partly migration and Skype.

There is one imbalance. Everyone sees what happens in the US, but people in the US have trouble seeing anything in the rest of the world. That sucks. Let’s change it.

The movement and the internationalism are a property of our age. It is the same this week in the great crowds and strikes against the tyrants in Sudan, Morocco and Algeria. That is how it was in the Arab Spring eight years ago too, which spread throughout the Arab world and south to the rest of Africa, to Greece and Spain and to Occupy in the US. That Spring, like MeToo, like the climate strikes, was a movement of the young.

The young are changing, which means the world will change.

Against the walls

Internationalism matters right now. The solution to climate change must be global, because the atmosphere we breathe is global.

Our movement has tried for global agreement at the top, between the existing governments, tried long and hard, and failed utterly. That’s why we know that we need mass movements from the grassroots, pushing upwards. But those movements have to spread from country to country, each encouraging the others, because in the end we have to win this globally.

Internationalism matters too, because this is the age of The Walls. Trump’s wall, Netanyahu’s wall, the migrant-hating spreading across Europe, the drowning pool of the Med, the xenophobia in South Africa, hating Muslims in India, hating Roma in Hungary, and Brexit.

Internationalism matters in Britain this week because the politicians are leading us into a racist Brexit. Many on the left are tailgating the racist right. They say it would be wrong to have another referendum, because the majority would vote to remain. They say we have to leave because we can only change the world by ourselves, on our own, in our little island. That is a mistake about how we can change the world.

Internationalism matters now because in the lifetime of the today’s climate strikers, heat and its consequences will drive hundreds of millions from their homes. One solution will be the Walls around the World.

Changing the world

We will be climbing these walls, clambering out of the sea, our children in our arms, begging the men and women with the guns to let us through. Or we will be the ones standing on the Wall, gassing the refugees, shooting them, shoving them back into the sea or the desert or the barbed wire.

But the children of Earth are showing us another way. Internationalism makes it possible to learn to welcome the needy because they are our brothers and sisters, and because we can only change the world together.

This Author

Jonathan Neale is a writer and was secretary of the Campaign Against Climate Change for several years. He is the editor of One Million Climate Jobs, and blogs with Nancy Lindisfarne at Anne Bonny Pirate.

Watch some of the 5,000 youth that marched in London, England on Friday

A Green Capitalist Solution to Climate Change – Pumping Sulphur Dioxide into the Atmosphere

I think that this techno-fix is typical of the remedies that the capitalist system dreams up to combat climate change, without actually doing anything to avoid reducing, or indeed to completely eliminate the spewing of huge amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere. Incredibly, this idea to pump sulphur dioxide into the air, to form clouds to block out the sun’s rays, is being suggested as a way to go.

I should say at the outset, that I am not a climate scientist, or scientist of any description, so I am prepared to listen to those who are, but this looks to be a crazy plan to me. But, a report published in the peer-reviewed journal Nature Climate Change, finds that cooling the Earth by this method would be enough to eliminate roughly half of global warming.

We have learnt that when big volcanoes erupt they release huge amounts of sulphur dioxide into the air, and the ensuing dark cloud that is produced obscures the sunlight, and so stops some of the sun’s heat warming the earth.

This would mean of course, many of us hardly ever seeing a blue sky, and the affect that that can have on human well-being, appears not to have been considered in the report, but is surely an important drawback with the tactic. In northern parts of Scandinavia, when it is dark for twenty four hours in deepest winter, the suicide rate increases.

Not all climate scientists back this idea as viable, with some stressing that keeping this amount of CO2 in the atmosphere will lead to some regions experiencing severe risks to their climates, increased rainfall, extreme temperatures and more destructive hurricanes and storms. So even if this did work in terms of cooling the earth, it will likely throw up other climatic problems and we can’t be sure exactly what these will be.

Some quick research reveals that sulphur dioxide is a toxic gas with a burnt match smell. It is released naturally by volcanic activity and is produced as a by-product of the burning of fossil fuels (mostly coal) contaminated with sulphur compounds and copper extraction. It is mainly produced by sulphuric acid manufacturing, but occurs in many industrial processes, and is contained in gasoline and diesel fuel for vehicles.

It is a major air pollutant and has significant impacts upon human health, and causes acid rain if large concentrations are present in the atmosphere. Sulphur dioxide is also one of the greenhouse gases which causes the planet to warm.

Inhaling sulphur dioxide is associated with increased respiratory symptoms and disease, difficulty in breathing, makes asthma suffers worse, premature births and premature death increase. When breathed in, it irritates the nose, throat, and airways to cause coughing, wheezing, shortness of breath, or a tight feeling around the chest. In short, pumping extra sulphur dioxide into the air will lead to major public health issues, but a desperation to carry on with business as usual economic activity, means that it is still regarded as possible solution to global warming.  

Shocking though this undoubtably is, it should come as no great surprise. We know that conventual efforts at dealing with climate change, try desperately to avoid the real solution to the situation, which is to drastically reduce the amount of CO2 that we put into the atmosphere. An example of treating the symptoms rather than the root cause of the problem.

What seems ludicrous by any rational measure, like this idea, the prevailing wisdom of our rulers, is to seek something, anything, that leaves the business of making money for corporations untouched. Politicians also have a personal interest in perpetuating this state of affairs, as many are in the pay of these corporations in one way or another. To act in any meaningful way, is beyond the bounds of acceptable thinking, under the dominant logic of our economic and political system.

This is why I believe, that under this system, we will never adequately tackle the climate crisis. The system needs to be changed first, only then will it be possible to avoid climate catastrophe, and solve many other issues of human well-being too.

For a Fighting Ecological Trade-Unionism

Written by Daniel Tanuro and first published at International Viewpoint

How can we reconcile social struggle and environmental struggle? This question poses problems for trade unionists. To avoid a climate catastrophe, it would be necessary to reduce economic activity, to suppress useless or harmful production, to give up a substantial part of the means of transport … But what would happen to employment then? How can we avoid a surge of unemployment, a new rise of poverty and precariousness? In today’s relationship of forces, in the face of financialized and globalized capitalism, these challenges seem impossible to meet.

The International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) has drawn a radical conclusion: under the guise of fine words in favour of the “just transition,” it has chosen to accompany the evolution toward an impossible green capitalism. The Vancouver “Resolution on combating climate change through sustainable development and just transition” (2010) is clear: this document advocates a transition that “without endangering industries’ competitiveness or putting excessive pressure on state budgets” (Article 5). 

We feel that we are dreaming: the demand for the respect of competitiveness is not even accompanied by a reservation concerning the fossil fuel sector, the main cause of climate change! However, without breaking the power of this sector of capital, it is strictly impossible to avoid the climate catastrophe.

A Just Transition?

The ITUC wants to believe that a “democratic governance” integrating the “just transition” would open up “new opportunities,” that it would create massively “green jobs,” good and “decent.” This is wishful thinking. Capital invested in the “energy transition” in no way derogates from the ruthless capitalist offensive against wages, working conditions and trade unions. Germany is at the forefront of both renewable energy and expanding an underclass of poor workers. In many countries, governments use ecology to dismantle union strongholds in traditional sectors.

Developing a genuine trade union alternative to the class collaboration policy of the ITUC leadership is of strategic importance. The working class occupies a decisive position in industry and services. Without its active participation, an anti-productivist transformation of the economy will remain impossible. But how to win workers to the struggle for the defence of the environment? That is the question. The answer is difficult. All the more difficult because the balance of power is deteriorating and the poison of division is spreading in the working class.

Self-Organization of the Working Class

What must be done? To begin with, the problem must be posed correctly on the theoretical level. For here we are touching on a fundamental question: capital is not a thing, but a social relation of exploitation that subjects workers more firmly than chains would. Like it or not, this system compels every worker to produce more than is necessary for the satisfaction of their needs, and to realize this production in the alienated form of the commodity. 

So, to collaborate in productivism, which ‘exhausts the only two sources of all wealth: Nature and the worker’ (Marx). Today this collaboration is becoming more and more unnatural, since it threatens the very survival of humanity. But in “normal” conditions, capitalist competition imposes it on everyone.

We must therefore get out of “normal” conditions, out of the competition of everyone against everyone. How? By collective organization, by the action of the exploited for their demands. “The emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves” (IWA 1864). This famous phrase of is more than ever valid. Faced with the ecological crisis, the enormous problem of the submission/ integration of workers to the productivist race of capital can only be surpassed by self-organized struggle. 

Practical conclusion: any collective resistance against austerity, dismissals and closures must be supported, even critically (when it is not really democratic, or its starting point is antithetical to the defence of the environment). Because one thing is certain: workers who are defeated in the immediate economic fight against austerity will not progress to a higher political consciousness, integrating the ecological question.

Workers’ control and democratic self-organization can work miracles in terms of consciousness. Even at the level of an enterprise. A remarkable example was provided in 1975-1985 by the “surplus workers” of the glassworkers’ sector in Charleroi: following the fight against the closure of their company, they imposed their conversion in a public enterprise of insulation/renovation of housing (the enterprise was created but sabotaged later by politicians and employers).

Form an Ecosocialist Consciousness

Such examples, however, remain exceptional. In general, the formation of an ecosocialist consciousness requires an approach and experiences at a broader level than the enterprise. It is at the inter-sectoral level that trade-unionism can best pose structural demands consistent with an anti-capitalist approach to the transition. 

To take some examples: the extension of the public sector (free public transport, for example); the expropriation of the fossil fuel sector (a condition sine qua non for a rapid transition to renewables); the radical reduction of working time, without loss of salary (a condition sine qua non for reconciling decreasing output and employment).

But the programme and the struggle are not enough. An ecological and combative trade-unionism requires us to look beyond the inter-sectoral level. A strategy of convergence with other social movements – peasant, youth, feminist, ecological – must be conceived. 

This implies abandoning the misconception that work is the source of all wealth. In truth, the exploitation of wage labour presupposes the appropriation and exploitation of the natural resources which necessarily provide the material object of labour on the one hand, and on the other the patriarchal exploitation of care work, carried out mainly by women and “invisible” in the context of the family. The capital-labour contradiction is thus embedded in a broader antagonism between capital, on the one hand, and reproduction on the other.

If it places itself at the heart of this antagonism, trade-unionism can get out of being on the defensive, make alliances with other social movements, develop with them an attractive ecosocialist project. It is not a question of reviving the chimera of a progressive social transformation by the accumulation of micro-experiences that are supposed to make it possible to avoid a global trial of strength. On the contrary, it is a question of preparing this trial of strength at the territorial level, by systematically developing practices of control, solidarity, self-organization and self-management. 

These will encourage the exploited and oppressed to take things into their own hands, to become aware of their strength, thus promoting an overall ecosocialist and feminist awareness that will strengthen trade-unionism.

This strategic proposal will seem to some people to be far removed from the real relationship of forces. Let them not forget this: the relative calm that reigns on the surface of social relations is misleading. Capitalism is mutilating life and nature. Human nature in particular. The majority of the population are forced to exhaust themselves and to exhaust the environment in alienated work, more and more useless, ethically unbearable and which produces a miserable existence. The explosive material accumulated in this way can release its energy to the left or to the right.

And the climate strikes by young people over recent months in an increasing number of countries are only one positive example of this dynamic – which also is shown by movements like Black Lives Matter and the Women’s strikes planned again for March 8 this year. The political discussions, including on issues such as productivism and growth, taking place among young climate activists need to be spread in trade union circles – as well as the energy and militancy of their mobilization.

It is an understatement to say that trade-unionism has an interest in the liberation on the left of the social energy accumulated in the society by forty years of neoliberal policies. It is by linking the struggle for social justice and environmental justice in an anti-capitalist and anti-productivist perspective that it will have the greatest chance of succeeding. 

Daniel Tanuro is a certified agriculturalist and ecosocialist environmentalist, writes for La gauche, (the monthly of the LCR-SAP, Belgian section of the Fourth International). He is the author of Le moment Trump (Demopolis, 2018).

The English Diggers, the "Commons," and the Green New Deal

Written by Ed Simon and first published at History News Network

In April of 1649 a group of radicals, some veterans of the recent English civil wars, occupied a bit of common grass on a plot known as St. George’s Hill in Surrey and they began to grow vegetables. These radicals called themselves “True Levellers” to distinguish themselves from another, more moderate political faction, but everybody else called them “Diggers” in reference to both a scriptural passage as well as their literal activity on the hill. In a spirit of communal fellowship, they invited the people of Surrey, then suffering under exorbitant prices food prices, to “come in and help them, and promise them meat, drink, and clothes.”

Gerard Winstanley was the major theorist of the group, and in his manifesto The True Levellers Standard Advanced he advocated for a form of public ownership of land, seeing the idea of a commons not as radical, but rather as a restitution. In Winstanley’s understanding the commons were a feature of English rights, that had been violated in the development of privatization, whereby enclosures had begun to partition off formerly collective lands, which were now owned by individual aristocrats and noble families.

The result, since the end of the fifteenth-century, had been increasing inequity, with the landless poor often not having space on which to graze their animals. There was an explicitly ecological gloss to Digger politics, with Winstanley claiming that “true freedom lies where a man receives his nourishment and preservation, and that is in the use of the earth.” The dream of the commons as exemplified by the Diggers has something to say in our current moment, as we face not just rising prices on vegetables, but indeed the possibility of complete ecological collapse.

Critics of supply-side economics point to the Reagan and Thatcher revolutions of the 1980’s as being a moment whereby the traditional social contract, which held that a democratically organized state had a responsibility of care towards collective rights, had begun to fray. This analysis isn’t wrong, that the conservatives of that decade attacked the welfare state in favor of privatization, a shell-game redefinition of “freedom” whereby the undemocratic allocation of resources and power was shifted to the few, who’ve demonstrated a perilously uncaring stewardship towards the environment.

But I’d argue that there has long been a Manichean struggle between an understanding of democratic control of resources versus a certain aristocratic libertarianism. The “reforms” of the later go back far in our history, with thinkers like Winstanley understanding what’s lost when the commons are turned over to the control of fewer and more powerful people. Results of that ignoble experiment now threaten to end life on earth as we know it.  

If it seems as if there has been an increasing attack on the idea of the commons when faced against the neo-liberal forces of privatization, then perhaps we should draw some succor from the English historian Christopher Hill, who noted in his classic The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution that the “Diggers have something to say to twentieth-century socialists,” and perhaps twenty-first century socialists as well. 

In 2019, I would argue, the idea of the “commons” as a space of collective ownership, responsibility, engagement, and possibility must be a metaphor that the left draws from rhetorically, wrenching it free from the realms of theory and philosophy, and which we can use to more fully define a concept of freedom which is true for the largest possible number of humans.

A good idea never really dies. Even the right-leaning The Economist in an article entitled “The Rise of Millennial Socialism” admits that the newly resurgent left in both Great Britain and the United States’ Democratic Party has “formed an incisive critique of what has gone wrong in Western societies.” Partially this has been by recourse to traditional labor politics, but as The Economist notes it’s only on the left that there has been any credible attempt to solve the apocalyptic threat of climate change, the right either burying their heads in the sand or engaging in irrational and unempirical denialism. 

Part of the new socialist movement’s environmental approach is a return to how the Diggers understood stewardship of the land, so that in policy proposals like Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Edward Markey’s Green New Deal we arguably have the emergence of a new ethic that could be called the “people’s right to the natural commons.” As Jedediah Britton-Purdy wrote in The New York Times, “In the 21st century, environmental policy is economic policy.”

Just as the Diggers hoped to redefine the commons back towards its traditional understanding, so too do todays eco-socialists see this as a fruitful moment in which to expand the definition of freedom as meaning “something more than the capitalist’s freedom to invest or the consumer’s freedom to buy,” as the authors of a recent Jacobin article on the Green New Deal write. Kate Aronoff, Alyssa Battistoni, Daniel Aldana Cohen, and Theo Riofrancos write that for too long the “Right has claimed the language of freedom. But their vision of freedom as your right as an individual to do whatever you want – so long as you can pay for it – is a recipe for disaster in the twenty-first century, when it’s clearer than ever that all our fates are bound up together.”

In opposition, the authors argue that the Green New Deal presents the freedoms of a commonwealth, the “freedom to enjoy life, to be creative, to produce and delight in communal luxuries.” I’d add a freedom of access to our collectively owned environment, including its climate, its land, its oceans. As Woody Guthrie sang with patriotic fervor, “This land is your land, and this land is my land.”

Increasingly the mass of people has come to understand that the exorbitant wealth of the upper fraction of the 1% signal something more than mere luxury, but rather the transfer of undemocratically manifested political power and the ability to do with the earth and its climate whatever they want, even if the entire ecosystem lay in the balance. By contrast, eco-socialism requires a return to the Diggers’ promise, not the abolishment of private property, but an equitable say in how the resources which belong to the common treasury of all people of the earth should be allocated.

Why should executives at Exxon have any ability to decide that they’re alright with apocalypse just because it helps their shareholders? Remember that we’re all shareholders of the earth. Far more pragmatic to consider the potential of what philosophers Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri write about in Commonwealth, when they argue that an embrace of the commons is a rejection of “nihilism,” for in turning away from an apocalyptic capitalist economics we can rather imagine “opening up the multitude’s process of productivity and creativity that can revolutionize our world and institute a shared commonwealth.”

If it seems as if the Leveller’s nascent eco-socialist revolution failed, that’s not because there isn’t a golden thread connecting them to their own past and our current moment. Such beliefs about the commons were held by those participants of the aforementioned Peasant’s Rebellion in the fourteenth-century, and similar ideas about a collective right to some part of the environment can be seen everywhere from the commons at the center of many colonial New England towns to the environmental progressivism of President Theodor Roosevelt and the establishment of national parks. 

A collective right to a natural common, whereby we once again reaffirm the interdependent and communal ownership of the earth sounds as a radical idea, but a shift towards understanding our environmental crisis in this manner might be the spiritual change required to fully grapple with climate change.

At St. George’s Hill, Winstanley didn’t understand the occupation as being anarchic, but rather conservative in the truest sense of that abused word, as the root for the word “conservation” and as a return to a “merry old England.” As historian Peter Linebaugh explains, the commons have “always been local. It depends on custom, memory, and oral transmission for the maintenance of its norms rather than law, police, and media.” For the Diggers, it was nascent capitalism which was truly radical, and they who rather advocated a return to how they defined the natural state of things.

Half a century before the occupation at St. George’s Hill, and the anonymous author of a broadsheet ballad of 1607 wrote that “The law locks up the man or woman/Who steals the goose from off the common/But lets the greater villain loose/Who steals the common from the goose.” The Diggers’ rhetoric has even earlier precursors, their politics recalling a rhyming couplet of the Lollard priest John Ball who helped lead the Peasant’s Rebellion of 1381, and who used to sing a song asking where aristocrats could possibly have been in a state of nature, for “When Adam delved and Eve span, /Who was then the gentleman?”

In The Century of Revolution: 1603-1714, Hill writes that “Freedom is not abstract. It is the right of certain men to do certain things.” We think of “freedom” as an innate quality – and it is – but we have those with a very limited definition of the word run rough-shod over our environment, where the freedom which has been defined is the right of a very small number of men to make momentous and detrimental changes to the world itself. A world which should be our shared commonwealth.

Of course, proposals like the Green New Deal are upsetting to elites who have long profited by their small definition of freedom as being merely their freedom to exploit the earth. Surrey nobles were also less than pleased by the presence of hundreds of radicals encamped on St. George’s Hill, and by August of 1649 the Diggers lost a court case advocating for their squatter’s rights, so they voluntarily abandoned the plot before the threat of violence would have forced them to do so. Linebaugh writes that the “commons is invisible until it is lost.” Today St. George’s Hill is the site of an exclusive gated community and a tennis club. Maybe it’s time to tear down some of those enclosures again?

Ed Simon is the associate editor of The Marginalia Review of Books, a channel of The Los Angeles Review of Books. He holds a PhD in English from Lehigh University, and is a regular contributor at several different sites. He can be followed at his website, or on Twitter @WithEdSimon. 

As Governments Fail to Act on Climate Change – The People Step Up to the Plate

I must admit that the last couple of years, I’ve gone from despair to depression (not clinical) with the complete lack of urgency from governments around the world, in taking serious action to combat climate change. As the evidence mounts that we have only a few short years to take action, which would give human beings a fighting chance of avoiding cataclysmic change to our planet, nothing much is done.

The failure of more than twenty years of international governmental conferences, to do more than promise to makes cuts in CO2 emissions, and with an over reliance on techno-fixes, most of which do not exist on any large scale, has led me to think that we really are going to hell in a hand-cart. 

But, amidst all of the gloom, some bright shining lights have suddenly given me hope. This has not come from governments though, it is a rising from below, from the people, that offers reasons to believe that things may change for the better.

The Extinction Rebellion, which began in the UK last year, but is now spreading to many countries around the world, is an attempt to pressure the authorities into actually taking the situation seriously, by taking direct action, like blocking roads and other similar protests, for which these people are prepared to be arrested for. Their aim is to:

Support and encourage a citizens uprising in the UK (of about 2 million people) involving low level and higher risk acts of civil disobedience by some (with others willing to support those that take actions). When ready, create a participatory, democratic process that discusses and improves a draft manifesto for change and a new constitution. This will involve creating a genuine democracy, alongside an economy to maximise well-being and minimise harm.

Then there is Earth Strike who are calling for a rolling series of events throughout 2019, culminating in a worldwide strike on 27 September. They describe what they are about thus:

We are a grassroots movement demanding immediate climate action from governments and corporations worldwide...Our protests, scheduled throughout 2019, will raise awareness for a GLOBAL GENERAL STRIKE beginning September 27.

Earth Strike has chapters in 22 countries, from Australia to the United States, with new countries coming on board all of the time. They say:

Until the world’s governments and businesses are held accountable to the people, we are refusing to participate in the system that fills their pockets. There will be no banking, no offices full of employees, no schools full of children, until our demands are met.

Most recently, school students have organised strikes from their studies, who of course have more to lose, again to demand action from the politicians on climate change. This was all started by a Swedish sixteen year old, Greta Thunberg, who held a one person demonstration outside of her parliament in Stockholm. 

Now, up to 70,000 schoolchildren each week hold protests in 270 towns and cities worldwide. In London, they blocked the roads outside parliament chanting “Turn off your engines” at passing cars, and “We want the chance for change now” before mounted police moved them away.

All of this is what needs to happen, because, as we have seen, governments are being negligent in their responsibility to protect their people from what is looking like a disaster of huge proportions. Change needs to come from the grassroots to force this issue up the political and economic agenda. 

Politicians only change course from business as usual, when they are compelled into doing so by the people, and so I hope these movements grow into a powerful force for change,

Do what you can to support them.

Capitalism’s Ownership of Global Warming

Written by Robert Hunziker and first published at Green Social Thought

Capitalism not only owns global warming, there’s a big red mitigation arrow pointed at the heart of today’s rampant capitalism, which is eerily similar to the loosie goosie version of the Roaring Twenties, but with a high tech twist.

After all, somebody’s got to pony-up for climate change/global warming mitigation. Who better than deep pocket capitalists?

For historical perspective: Today’s brand of capitalism runs circles around the Eisenhower 1950s with its 90% top marginal tax rate amidst harmony and good feelings all across the land, an age of innocence aka Leave It To Beaver.

In sharp contrast to the fifties era of good feelings with its emergence of spanking new suburbia, today’s landscape resembles the film Blade Runner (1982) high-tech, rich, and gleaming in some places but elsewhere (often times right next door) shabby and weakening as America’s middle class fizzles away attached to a ball & chain of indebted servitude.

With increasing frequency as climate mitigation is investigated certain statistics stand out like a throbbing sore thumb: “The top three greenhouse gas emitters— China, the EU and the US—contribute more than half of total global emissions, while the bottom 100 countries only account for 3.5%. Collectively, the top 10 emitters account for nearly three-quarters (75%) of global emissions. The world can’t possibly successfully tackle the climate change challenge without significant action from these top-emitting countries.” (Source: World Resources Institute)

Interestingly enough, the socio-politico-economic genesis of global warming as of nowadays is known as Late Capitalism, as defined by Ernest Mandel (Late Capitalism, Verso Classics, 1999) or in the parlance: “Increasing commodification and industrialization of more, and more, sectors of human life” as the social fabric splits apart, delineating “haves” versus “have-nots.”

By definition, that socio/economic paradigm brings in its wake division, and fierce alienation.

So, Late Capitalism, what does it look like? According to Oxfam International, a confederation of 20 independent charitable orgs founded in 1942, sixty-two (62) of the richest billionaires held as much wealth in 2016 as 50% of the entire world population. That number dropped to 8 billionaires in 2017 controlling as much wealth as the bottom half of the world. That remarkable ratio is: 8 : 3,600,000,000.

The 2018 numbers are not yet available, but there’s speculation that the number eight (8) will drop, in time, to two (2) people that control as much wealth as one-half (½) of the world. That’s the absolute epitome, the zenith, of Late Capitalism.

It’s little wonder that wealth disparity, flashed all over the place, has become a target in the context of the climate crisis. In that regard, not many people grasp the issue as well as Kevin Anderson of Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research/UK. Tyndall is one of the world’s most prestigious research institutions, and Anderson has a reputation for telling it like it is.

Recently, he spoke at the Oxford Climate Society.

Accordingly, as discussed by Kevin Anderson, knowing that climate change is a serious (existential) threat… what to do… just for starters: (1) The top 10% carbon polluters in the world must cut their CO2 footprint to the same footprint as members of the EU. (2) The remaining 90% of the world makes no reductions. (3) Ipso facto, global CO2 is cut by one-third.

That’s merely a starter, an appetizer for meeting the 2C temperature guardrail as agreed by the nations of the world at Paris 2015. Interestingly, the top 10% polluters are the heart and soul of effective mitigation, which is defined as an “equitable solution,” meaning those who emit the most carbon must carry the heaviest burden. Yet, an equitable solution has not happened, and there are no signals it will happen.

Getting to the heart of the matter, according to Anderson: “The taboo issue of the asymmetric distribution of wealth underpins the international community’s failure to seriously tackle climate change. Only when we acknowledge this can we move from incrementalism to system-change.”

Believe it or not (of course it is true and believable) 1,500 private jets flew attendees to Davos World Economic Forum to discuss, amongst other issues, climate change.

According to Kevin Anderson: “It’s about time we called these people out.”

For example, the Davos paradigm, meaning plutocrats taking control is legitimized (in Anderson’s words) by: “The climate Glitterati, such as, M. Bloomberg, L. DiCaprio, N. Stern, C. Figueres, A. Gore, M. Carney. All of these people have huge carbon footprints, and they fly around the world in private jets to inform us what to do about climate change. They are supported by a whole cadre of senior academics promoting offsetting, negative emissions, geo-engineering, CCS, green growth, etc. These are all ‘an evolution within the system.”

Also, annual COP (Conference of the Parties) has been hijacked by climate glitterati-related influencers (COPs are annual UN Climate Change Conferences held to assess progress).

Well, surprise-surprise, not surprised, Royal Dutch Shell had a hand in shaping the Paris Agreement of 2015, and it influenced certain provisions of the “Rulebook” adopted at COP24 in Katowice 2018. This meddling clearly violates the ethics that only member states of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change can determine “texts and rulebooks.” But, it happens with regularity.

At COP 24 in Katowice at a side event organized by the International Emissions Trading Association (a big time biz lobby) Shell’s chief climate adviser, David Hone, publicly announced that Shell should take some credit for inclusion of Article 6 in the Paris Agreement, which enables countries to trade emissions in carbon markets.

Not only, Mr. Hone also took a bow and credit for part of the text in the all-important “Rulebook” adopted at Katowice. By all accounts and according to various environmental groups, big corporations are “greenwashing.”

Fossil fuel companies were significant sponsors at COP24 in Katowice. Their logos were ubiquitous. And, at a mind-blowing out of this world event, the Polish Pavilion was stuffed full of actual lumps of black coal, as samplers.

Poland’s President Andrzej Duda told COP24 delegates: “Using coal is not in contradiction with climate protection in Poland because we can lower the emissions and ensure economic growth at the same time.”  What!!! Who falls for this kind of claptrap?

ExxonMobil pledged to cut its methane emissions and contribute funds for a carbon tax campaign in the U.S. Oh, please, stop it! Pseudo solutions like carbon markets and geo-engineering promises (that don’t work to scale) are pushed by corporate interests to legitimatize their current CO2 emissions. Oh please! It’s a ruse because if you lay claim to geo-engineering technology that fixes CO2 emissions, then you legitimize using as much fossil fuel as your little heart desires. But, the brutal truth is the technology is not perfected.  

Not by a long shot. Then what?

Climate change is ultimately a rationing issue. But, so far, forget it: “We’ve had 28 years of abject failure on climate change. It’s not that we haven’t brought emissions down. It’s just that we’ve watched them go up. In fact, since 2000, the rate at which they’ve gone up is even faster than the 1990s.” (Anderson)

According to Anderson, the current CO2 global budget is roughly 700Gt of CO2 maximum to adhere to the Paris Agreement of temps below 2C. Meanwhile, 43Gt of CO2 is emitted per year, which equates to 16 years of current emissions to stay under 2C. Thereafter, and in fact, before then, CO2 emissions must drop to zero. (For the record, this has never happened.)

At the end of the day, the only conceivable way forward to prevent the world from turning into an oven is “system change” via transformation to decarbonized energy supply technologies with deep penetration of efficient technologies and a profound shift in behavior and reframing the value propositions re success and progress, an economic model that fits the purpose of mitigation, like eco economics.

As for the current economic model of high-end neoliberal capitalism, it must be displaced in favor of eco economics. What are the odds? One hundred percent (100%) it will happen but way too late!

According to Kevin Anderson, “Everything is pointed in the wrong direction… We are guaranteed defeat unless we start to think radically differently.” He concludes: “We have an outside chance of still meeting 2C if society addresses the political, social, and economic implications, as well as the technical ones.”

But, what if it’s too late?

Postscript: “Winning slowly is basically the same thing as losing outright. In the face of both triumphant denialism and predatory delay, trying to achieve climate action by doing the same things, the same old ways means defeat. It guarantees defeat.” (Alex Steffen – American award-winning futurist, 2017)

Our children on strike for the climate! What about us? What do we do?

Written by Daniel Tanuro and first published at International Viewpoint

All over the world, thousands of young people are starting to set off spontaneously for the climate. On 17 January, in Brussels, more than 12,000 people went on strike and demonstrated in response to the magnificent appeal made at COP24 by the 15-year-old Swedish high school student Greta Thunberg. They were more than 35.000 one week later and the movement continues.

"What’s the point of going to school if tomorrow our world is destroyed," these young people ask. It’s common sense itself! These young people are not exaggerating. The situation is indeed very serious. The average global temperature has only increased by one degree since 1800, and the result is already worrying: heat waves, cold waves, more severe droughts, melting glaciers and ice caps, more violent cyclones, huge forest fires...

At two degrees, the impacts will be catastrophic. From that point we risk experiencing a snowball effect of global warming. The Earth would become a "drying planet", the temperature could rise very quickly by 4°C. Entire regions would become uninhabitable, hundreds of millions of people would become climate refugees, biodiversity would collapse and sea levels would eventually rise by three to four metres. It would no longer be a disaster, but a cataclysm!

The unavoidable conclusion is that everything must be done to ensure that the 1.5°C threshold for global warming decided at COP21 in Paris is not exceeded. But governments are not doing this. On the basis of their "climate plans", specialist's project a warming of between 2.7 and 3.7°C... At the very least, because more and more leaders are tempted to deny reality, like Donald Trump and the Brazilian fascist Bolsonaro!

In Europe, the Belgian government is one of the most hypocritical: on 2 December 2018, it congratulated the 75,000 demonstrators marching over climate, the next day it refused to support two European climate directives! Shame on those Tartufes! But the people are fed up with false promises and recuperation: there were even more demonstrators in Brussels on January 27.

Capital destroys our lives and the planet

Scientists have been ringing the bell for over 25 years. Why do emissions continue to increase? Why do governments do (almost) nothing? Because they are at the service of capitalism, because capitalism’s sole purpose is profit, because profit requires growth and because this growth is historically based on fossil fuel energy (oil, coal and natural gas).

Renewables? They are produced for profit, not for ecology. If we produced less and shared more, they would be enough to satisfy the real needs of humanity. But multinationals refuse to give up their fossil energy stocks and equipment, banks refuse to give up their capital invested in these stocks and equipment and bosses in all sectors have only one idea in mind: to exploit ever more labour and nature in order to produce ever more and make more profit than their competitors...

We are told that growth is the condition for everything: our jobs, our wages, our social security, our public services, our standard of living. Thus, our lives apparently depend on our exploitation and that of nature. In reality, this productivist system destroys both our lives and nature.

Today, we are on the brink of the abyss

Today, we are on the brink of collapse. To have a 50/50 chance of not exceeding 1.5°C of global warming, global net CO2 emissions must decrease by 58% between 2020 and 2030. Then they must be reduced to zero in 2050, after which it will be necessary to ensure that the Earth absorbs more CO2 than it emits.

Otherwise, it will be necessary either to resign ourselves to a planet that has become an used one, or to use technologies to artificially remove carbon from the atmosphere ("negative emission technologies") or to return part of the solar radiation to space ("geoengineering"). Warning: there is no guarantee that these witchcraft apprentice technologies will work. It will have to be experienced directly on a life-size scale, on the Earth and the living things that inhabit it....

Faced with a deadly danger, the instinct for self-preservation is a thousand times legitimate. The high school students are therefore a thousand times right to go on strike. Let us not stand idly by. Let us support them in the face of attacks from the pro-Trump right and attempts at recovery, wherever they come from. And let us follow their example!

Social and ecological issues: a single struggle!

The main victims of global warming are those who are constantly attacked by governments and employers: workers, peasants, children, women, pensioners, the sick... and migrants!

The rich tell themselves that they will always get by, even if it means living on artificial islands reserved for billionaires. To save their privileges and destroy our social and democratic achievements, they are increasingly tempted by the extreme right-wing who are racist, sexist and climate deniers. It is therefore clear that social and ecological issues are two sides of the same great democratic struggle.

This fight has only just begun. The world of work must take place there. From yellow vests to youth, it is high time to bring together struggles and demands. Today, our children are on the streets and on strike to defend their right to exist and that of their children on this planet. What about us adults? What do we do? We must be behind them! It is our duty and responsibility.

Let us mobilize, by all means. Let’s go on strike, too. Not a strike in slippers: an active strike. To discuss thoroughly all the injustices, all the destruction and ways to put an end to the current mess, both socially and environmentally.

For an ecosocialist emergency plan

Is it still possible to avoid climate disaster? The effort required is enormous. It can only succeed by combining the social and the ecological, in democracy and justice. An ecosocialist transition is essential. This requires an emergency plan. Here is a ten-point draft:

1. Eliminate unnecessary and dangerous production (starting with weapons!) and unnecessary transport of goods, locate production to the maximum, fight against programmed obsolescence.

2. Create public companies to insulate and renovate all buildings (at no extra cost to the inhabitants).

3. Invest massively in public transport, discourage the use of private cars. Rationalising air travel.

4. Leave fossil fuels in the ground. Expropriate and socialize the energy and finance sectors to organize a rapid transition to an economy based 100% on renewables (without nuclear!).

5. Redistribute wealth, restore equality in terms of taxation and the progressiveness of taxation on globalised incomes. Refinance the public sector, education and the care sector.

6. Respect climate justice. Transfer to the South the technologies and financial resources necessary for sustainable development for all.

7. Breaking with agribusiness. Promote ecological agriculture that does what it takes to sequester as much carbon as possible in the soil.

8. Share the necessary work among all, without loss of pay. Reconvert workers in the sectors to be eliminated (with income maintenance and social achievements) into new activities.

9. Getting out of the market: free education, transport, health care. Free consumption of water and electricity corresponding to basic needs, rapidly progressive pricing above this level.

10. Develop a culture of "caring", transparency and accountability. Strengthen and socialize care activities for people and ecosystems. Grant the right to vote to all. Recognise the rights of citizens and popular control and initiative, including the revocability of elected representatives

Utopian? Between 1940 and 1944, the United States government implemented an emergency plan. Military production has increased from 4% to 40% of GDP and all kinds of restrictions were imposed. What was done to defeat Nazism and ensure the global supremacy of US multinationals can be done to save the climate with social justice. It is a matter of political will. It is up to us to impose it.

Youth and student movements

The Albanian student struggle has reached historic dimensions

Student protests in Albania: “What we are witnessing is the direct effect of the neoliberal reform in education”

In the wake of the yellow jackets, a major youth movement could develop in France

China Intensifies Crackdown on Marxist Student Activists

Amid Growing Clampdown on Dissent and Free Speech, Hong Kong’s Youth Is Pushing Back

Climate

A Lesson in How Not to Mitigate Climate Change

COP24: During the disaster, the comedy continues

Our planet, our lives, and life itself, are worth more than their profits!

Tropical Forests Are Flipping From Storing Carbon to Releasing It

The rising tide: Kerala 2018 flood

Daniel Tanuro, a certified agriculturalist and eco-socialist environmentalist, writes for “La gauche”, (the monthly of the LCR-SAP, Belgian section of the Fourth International).

Daniel Tanuro is the author of The Impossibility of Green Capitallism, (Resistance Books, Merlin and IIRE) and Le moment Trump (Demopolis, 2018).