UK Right Wing Think-Tank Aims to Discredit the Extinction Rebellion

Policy Exchange, the right wing British think-tank published a report this week entitled ‘Extremist Rebellion – A Review of Ideology and Tactics’. Written by Richard Walton, a former Head of the Metropolitan Police Counter Terrorism Command, and Tom Wilson, a Senior Research Fellow in the Security and Extremism Unit at Policy Exchange, the report looks into the Extinction Rebellion campaign, which began in the UK, but has now spread around the world.

The think-tank describes itself on its website as ‘the UK’s leading think tank. As an educational charity our mission is to develop and promote new policy ideas which deliver better public services, a stronger society and a more dynamic economy.’

According to the ‘Who Funds You’ website which promotes funding transparency among think-tanks and political campaigns, Policy Exchange had an annual income of £3,553,565, in the year ending on 30 September 2017, but does not reveal the source of its funding.

A brief look at their website tells you that Policy Exchange is on the right politically, with stories such as ‘Monarchy helps unify the country post-Brexit, new poll finds’ a typical example. So it should come as no great surprise that the organisation is very much a defender of the establishment status quo. 

The popularity of Extinction Rebellion’s campaign, particularly of the protests that took place in London and other UK cities in April this year, is clearly a worry for the writers, and it seems to me that this report is an attempt to discredit the campaign and reduce its public support.  

The report complains about the costs of policing the April event, especially in London, and of the loss of revenue incurred by retail outlets in and around the protests. Whilst the report acknowledges genuine public concern at the prospect of catastrophic climate change, it seeks to undermine support for the rebellion by claiming that the organisers are politically ‘extreme’. Take this example from the foreword to the report written by Richard Walton:

…the leaders of Extinction Rebellion seek a more subversive agenda, one that is rooted in the political extremism of anarchism, eco-socialism and radical anti-capitalist environmentalism. The ‘civil resistance model’ they espouse is intended to achieve mass protest accompanied by law-breaking —leading eventually to the breakdown of democracy and the state. Obscured from public view, these objectives mark Extinction Rebellion’s campaign out as an extremist one that seeks to break down the established civil order and liberal democracy in the UK.

The report traces Extinction Rebellion’s roots in the London based Rising Up group, which devised and initiated the campaign. RisingUp’s website, which does say that some of the information contained there may now be out of date. states that we need:

A revolution, meaning a rapid change in wealth distribution and power structures, preventing the rich elite from perpetuating a self-serving ideology. Our democracy, our media, our academia, our think tanks and businesses (organisations whose purpose should be to meet our needs) must serve all people and a healthy ecology.’

The authors of the report say that Rising Up, and so by extension Extinction Rebellion, has an eco-socialist or green anarchist ideology, and to be fair it certainly does look that way, and aims to draw attention to this, so as to put the public and indeed some of its participants off the actions of the campaign. They point out that the underlying thinking of Extinction Rebellion, is that only by changing our system of bourgeois democracy, can the climate crisis be solved.

Regular readers of this blog will be aware that this is the exact the same position taken by this blog and the wider ecosocialist community. The necessity of accumulation and exponential growth for the capitalist system to survive, and the corrupt nature of the corporations first democracy, makes it unsuitable, in fact impossible, for our current political economy to resolve the climate crisis that it has set going in the first place.

The report emphasises the use of emotional appeal in its recruitment of activists, talk of children dying in the future, and attempts to paint Extinction Rebellion as some kind of cult, but this is an emotional subject. All life on earth is in danger of ending on our current trajectory. How could this not be an emotional subject?

Although the report is clear that Extinction Rebellion only advocates non-violent protests, and indeed acknowledges that the organisers see violent protest as counter-productive. It does hold out the possibility though of ‘breakaway fringe elements’ of activists turning to violence, but presents no evidence that this is likely to be the case.

The writers recommend that stiffer penalties be handed out to those who break the law, non-violently, but again concedes that leading lights within this leaderless campaign, welcome the chance to have a platform for stating their case in court trials, and even the publicity generated by activists being sent to jail. They note that hunger strikes are talked about in some of the presentations that aim to recruit activists.

In the report’s conclusion it states:

This paper proposes that the Extinction Rebellion campaign – one that politicians and the public associate with environmentalism – is deeply rooted in a much wider extreme political agenda. Those running this campaign, which enjoys significant public sympathy, appear sincere about urgently wanting to prevent ecological crisis but argue that capitalism is irredeemably entangled with the ecological crisis which they have set themselves against. It is therefore, unlikely that these leaders would settle for any accommodation that proposed to address environmental damage while keeping the present economic and political system in place.

They are definitely worried that this campaign might catch on, and this report is probably only the first attempt to discourage it getting any larger. But the climate crisis is not going away, and will get even worse, and the authors of this report have offered no solution to the problem, except clamping down on the protests. I think they will fail.

New Report Suggests ‘High Likelihood of Human Civilization Coming to an End’ in 2050

Written by Nafeez Ahmed and first published at Vice.com

A harrowing scenario analysis of how human civilization might collapse in coming decades due to climate change has been endorsed by a former Australian defence chief and senior royal navy commander.

The analysis, published by the Breakthrough National Centre for Climate Restoration, a think-tank in Melbourne, Australia, describes climate change as “a near- to mid-term existential threat to human civilization” and sets out a plausible scenario of where business-as-usual could lead over the next 30 years.

The paper argues that the potentially “extremely serious outcomes” of climate-related security threats are often far more probable than conventionally assumed, but almost impossible to quantify because they “fall outside the human experience of the last thousand years.”

On our current trajectory, the report warns, “planetary and human systems [are] reaching a ‘point of no return’ by mid-century, in which the prospect of a largely uninhabitable Earth leads to the breakdown of nations and the international order.”

The only way to avoid the risks of this scenario is what the report describes as “akin in scale to the World War II emergency mobilization”—but this time focused on rapidly building out a zero-emissions industrial system to set in train the restoration of a safe climate.

The scenario warns that our current trajectory will likely lock in at least 3 degrees Celsius (C) of global heating, which in turn could trigger further amplifying feedbacks unleashing further warming. This would drive the accelerating collapse of key ecosystems “including coral reef systems, the Amazon rainforest and in the Arctic.”

The results would be devastating. Some one billion people would be forced to attempt to relocate from unlivable conditions, and two billion would face scarcity of water supplies. Agriculture would collapse in the sub-tropics, and food production would suffer dramatically worldwide. The internal cohesion of nation-states like the US and China would unravel.

“Even for 2°C of warming, more than a billion people may need to be relocated and in high-end scenarios, the scale of destruction is beyond our capacity to model with a high likelihood of human civilization coming to an end,” the report notes.

The new policy briefing is written by David Spratt, Breakthrough’s research director and Ian Dunlop, a former senior executive of Royal Dutch Shell who previously chaired the Australian Coal Association.

In the briefing’s foreword, retired Admiral Chris Barrie—Chief of the Australian Defence Force from 1998 to 2002 and former Deputy Chief of the Australian Navy—commends the paper for laying “bare the unvarnished truth about the desperate situation humans, and our planet, are in, painting a disturbing picture of the real possibility that human life on Earth may be on the way to extinction, in the most horrible way.”

Barrie now works for the Climate Change Institute at Australian National University, Canberra.

Spratt told Motherboard that a key reason the risks are not understood is that “much knowledge produced for policymakers is too conservative. Because the risks are now existential, a new approach to climate and security risk assessment is required using scenario analysis.”

Last October, Motherboard reported on scientific evidence that the UN’s summary report for government policymakers on climate change—whose findings were widely recognized as “devastating”—were in fact too optimistic.

While the Breakthrough scenario sets out some of the more ‘high end’ risk possibilities, it is often not possible to meaningfully quantify their probabilities. As a result, the authors emphasize that conventional risk approaches tend to downplay worst-case scenarios despite their plausibility.

Spratt and Dunlop’s 2050 scenario illustrates how easy it could be to end up in an accelerating runaway climate scenario which would lead to a largely uninhabitable planet within just a few decades.

“A high-end 2050 scenario finds a world in social breakdown and outright chaos,” said Spratt. “But a short window of opportunity exists for an emergency, global mobilization of resources, in which the logistical and planning experiences of the national security sector could play a valuable role.”

We Need To Overthrow the Present Political System

Written by Eric Schechter and first published at Dandelion Salad

This morning an acquaintance of mine emailed me a link to Jem Bendell’s article “Deep Adaptation.” Following is a slightly revised copy of the reply I sent to him:

That “Deep Adaptation” article really seems to be getting around — I get the impression that a lot more people are reading it. I read it when I first ran across it half a year ago, and again a couple of months ago when a friend of mine sent it to me. I agree with only a little of it:

It says, among other things, that our climate problem is much more dire and urgent than most people have previously realized. I agree with that, and I’m glad to see that more people are realizing that now.

However, I find its distinction between “collapse” and “catastrophe” confusing. And I am doubtful that any kind of “adaptation” — deep or otherwise — is possible.

Here are the two paths that I see before us:

(1) Worldwide ecosocialist revolution within the next couple of years, changing everything, and fixing the climate to some degree. That requires waking up most of humanity to an understanding vastly different from anything they have ever imagined. It’s not likely that we’ll follow this path, but I’m still advocating for it; I haven’t given up hope yet.

(2) The capitalists retain their grip on power. They continue to block any changes that would cut into their short-term profits, regardless of how this destroys everyone’s future including their own. And the destruction is coming much bigger and faster than most people realize.

(The reason the capitalists do this is because they are not some unified “Illuminati.” They are in cutthroat competition against each other, and each says “I just have to make a buck for myself right now, I’ll leave it to someone else to clean up the mess.”)

Already, climate change has begun to cause crop failures, rising food prices, and large numbers of refugees. Uncle Sam’s psychopathic foreign policies add to the number of refugees.

All that will increase, and within a few years we’ll see massive famines, and the end of any organized human society, i.e., “civilization.” Most humans will die. I’m estimating this catastrophe will happen by 2035, but I have no precise timetable or specific evidence — I’m just eyeballing what I see happening around me. Keep in mind that the processes are exponential, not linear.

Some “back to nature” idiots believe that the aforementioned catastrophe will stop global warming, and a few bands of roving humans will find a way to adapt. Those idiots are mistaken. We have set into motion some major feedback loops that no longer depend on the carbon emissions of a large number of humans. (For instance, the warming melts the ice, replacing white reflecting surface with darker non-reflecting surface, increasing the sunlight that the planet captures, hence more warming.) And it is unlikely that we can do anything to stop those feedback loops, once civilization has ended.

And so the warming will continue until all the ice has melted, all the forests have burned, and all the phytoplankton have died. By then all the wildlife will be dead, and all the humans too. I’m expecting this by 2045, though again I have no precise timetable or specific evidence. (I laugh ironically at all the newspaper headlines about cities flooding in the year 2100.)

Elon Musk dreams of flying to Mars, but there’s no need: Mars is coming here. And if he does get to Mars, and if his closed-ecosystem biodomes somehow are viable despite their severe lack of diversity, he is bringing to Mars the same capitalist mentality that is killing Earth — and that most people on Earth, even most climate activists, still don’t see.

Good luck to us all. Viva la revolución.

[Addendum: More people are talking about how to survive the coming collapse. But I am convinced that NO ONE will survive the coming collapse, and our only hope is to AVERT the coming collapse. And more people are talking about the fact that averting the coming collapse is impossible under the present political system, so I don’t know why they don’t realize that WE NEED TO OVERTHROW THE PRESENT POLITICAL SYSTEM.]

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.

I am Not a Criminal – The Air Polluters are the Criminals

Written by Allan Todd

In Milton Keynes, on Friday 25 January, I was one of 24 Greenpeace activists found guilty of ‘aggravated trespass’. All those (myself included) without any previous criminal convictions, were given 12-month conditional discharges, with damages and court costs of £105 each. Those who had got previous convictions were, in addition, fined £200 each.

Our case arose from a Greenpeace ‘air pollution’ action back in August 2018, which peacefully locked-down VoltsWagon's (VW) UK HQ in Milton Keynes for most of one day - according to VW, this prevented 960 employees from getting into work, costing the company £166,000.

After the verdicts, I was minded of what the Ancient Greek playwright, Euripides, wrote: 

‘Those whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad.’

The background

Many companies - such as Volvo - have already committed to phasing out the production of diesel vehicles. However, the VW ‘stable’ - which is responsible for 1 in 5 of all new diesel vehicles being put on UK roads today - had refused, for over a year, all Greenpeace requests to discuss this issue.

But, on the very day of that Greenpeace action, VW finally agreed to discuss the issue; and, 3 months later, have announced they will phase out all diesel production by 2040.

The crime of air pollution

As is widely known, air pollution is bad for all those with lung complaints, and for the elderly - but it is particularly harmful to the brain and lung development of young children. It is claimed that, in London alone, over 9000 deaths a year are linked to air pollution.

In fact, just 2 weeks before our trial, a judge had given permission for a second inquest into the death of 9-year-old Ella Kissi-Debrah in 2013, following a severe asthma attack. She had not been born with asthma - but lived near London’s S. Circular Road, which is a notorious air-pollution hotspot. 

Professor Stephen Holgate, who examined the case, believes that - without the illegally-high levels of air pollution the government still fails to stop - Ella would not have died. He said there was a ‘striking association’ between when Ella was admitted to hospital, and spikes in the most dangerous air pollutants recorded by government monitoring stations near her home.

In 2017, London’s air was so dirty, it breached the ANNUAL limit for pollution just 5 days into the year - one site near Ella’s home broke the HOURLY limits for nitrogen dioxide concentrations 24 times over that same 5-day period.

Yet we - not the polluters, or the UK government which continues to fail to protect its citizens - are the ones judged to be the ‘criminals’ in all this!

Future activism

Like the other 84 Extinction Rebellion campaigners who were arrested during the ‘Five Bridges’ action back in November, I’m still waiting to see if I will be prosecuted for my ‘wilful obstruction of a highway’ (Lambeth Bridge, in my case).

However, despite the conditional discharge, I will continue to engage in non-violent direct action - with Greenpeace, and with Extinction Rebellion (we’ve just set up an ‘Extinction Rebellion Cumbria’ group) - regardless of the law and the legal system. In particular, the Climate Crisis is now so serious that failure to take peaceful actions would be the real crime.

Because, sometimes it is necessary to break laws in order to achieve better laws and policies. This has been shown countless times in history: the women who struggled for the vote in the UK; Gandhi in India; and Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks in the US Civil Rights Campaign.

We also need to remember that Hitler became Chancellor legally, under the German Constitution then in force - and the Nuremburg Laws which increasingly discriminated against Jewish people were, technically, legal. So those who broke those racist laws and, instead, gave help and shelter to those being persecuted, were judged to be ‘criminals’.

But history, rightly, has judged the members of the legal professions who enforced the Nazis’ totally immoral legal system - because ‘it was the law’ - as, morally, hardly less guilty than those who crammed Jewish people into the trains, operated those trains, and chased them out of the trains and straight into the gas chambers on arrival at the death camps.

So… in the words of Anonymous UK: ‘Expect me!’

Allan Todd is a member of Allerdale & Copeland Green Party, a climate activist and a Green Left supporter

UK Engages in Expensive Gesture Politics in Syria

Damage to the Syrian Scientific Research Center after it was attacked by U.S., British and French military strikes to punish Syrian President Bashar Assad for suspected chemical attack against civilians, in Barzeh, near Damascus (credit NBC News).

In the early hours of Saturday the US, France and UK military forces launched a missile attack on targets in Syria, as a response to the alleged chemical weapons attack by Syrian forces last week. The Pentagon says three targets were hit by more than a hundred missiles. The facilities hit were used in the production of chemical weapons according to the Pentagon and has reduced Syria’s capability to produce these weapons. Missiles were launched from aircraft and ships.

At the time of writing information is short on the extent of the damage on the ground and whether there have been any civilian casualties resulting from the strikes. It is hard to believe there were none, from what we have seen in the past when cruise missiles are used in urban areas, like Saturday’s attack. If the reports coming out of the US, France and UK are correct and these sites did indeed hold chemical weapons, then there is surely a risk of chemicals being released into the atmosphere?

For the UK’s part, official reports say that four Tornado war planes took part in the attack, launching cruise missiles while airborne, probably from outside of Syrian airspace. It costs millions of pounds to use one these missiles, so the raid will have run into approaching half a billion pounds to the UK taxpayer, when we have been told for the last eight years that the country is skint, and can’t afford decent public services. How many nurses and police officers could that pay for? Quite few, I think.

The UK prime minister, Theresa May, took the decision to authorise the attack while Parliament is still on Easter recess. MPs return on Monday when Parliament reopens, and an emergency debate will be held, in retrospect. Constitutionally, it is not entirely clear that May is allowed to take military action, without the approval of Parliament.

This is because the British constitution in general is not clear, it is not written down in any one document, like the US constitution, but rather has evolved over time and has many different feeds into what is constitutional. May will claim that she doesn’t need Parliament’s approval, and in some ways she is right. Declaring war was always a subject that attracted the Royal Prerogative, like other foreign policy issues.

But the British constitution is in many cases based on conventions. In 2003, Tony Blair to his credit, allowed a debate and vote on the UK getting involved in the invasion of Iraq, although he didn’t have to constitutionally. I think he wanted the extra cover this would provide him with, because the action was controversial in the country at large. David Cameron followed suit when he was prime minister and wanted to bomb Syria. Cameron unlike Blair lost the vote in Parliament.

What this did was to establish a convention, that when acts of war are being authorised, Parliament should have a say, and take the final decision. So, from this point of view, May’s actions are unconstitutional. This illustrates why we need a proper written down constitution, rather than the mixed bag of a one that the UK currently has.  

The attack appears to have been careful to avoid Russian military casualties, and Russia was given advance warning of the operation. The scale is also fairly limited, but is being justified as a deterrent to Syria’s president Assad using chemical weapons again. I find this unconvincing. The US bombed Syria a year ago with the same reasoning, but appear to have not deterred this latest use of chemical weapons, if they were used, which is still not fully established.

So, the assumption is that this is just an expensive gesture type of politics, which has no further justification or aims. A deadly but futile gesture. I hope MPs put the prime minister on the spot on Monday, because I can’t see what this action was meant to meaningfully achieve?  

Theresa May’s Response to Outing Gay People is Cynical and Irresponsible

Defending her political secretary, Stephen Parkinson, in Parliament on Monday, the prime minister, when asked about the Brexit whistle-blower Shahmir Sanni, being outed as gay, by Parkinson, trotted out the most trite of replies.

Sanni, who is of Pakistani origin told the Guardian he had the “most awful weekends” after revealing details of the Vote Leave campaign getting around spending limits at the 2016 EU referendum. Money was channelled through a separate campaigning group BeLeave, who have links to Cambridge Analytica, the company accused of misusing personal data gathered by Facebook, for the referendum campaign. Sanni was forced to admit to his family still living in Pakistan that he is gay.

Being gay in Pakistan is a much bigger deal than in Britain, and this news could well endanger Sanni’s family. Why Parkinson decided to make public the fact he and Sanni had had an eighteen month relationship, is not entirely clear, but it certainly looks like an attempt to smear Sanni’s revelations in some way as unreliable.

In response to a question from Labour MP Ben Bradshaw, who highlighted the danger posed to Sanni and his family and concluded by saying:

“It’s a disgrace, prime minister, you need to do something about it.”

The prime minister intends to do nothing about it, it appears:

May said: “I of course recognise the importance of ensuring that we do recognise that for some being outed as gay is difficult because of their family circumstances. What I want to see is a world where everybody is able to be confident in their sexuality and doesn’t have to worry about such things.”

Well we all want to see that, but how is this going to be achieved? Not by mere wishful thinking that is for sure, or outing gay people with family connections outside the UK. Surely May bears some responsibility for what her political secretary puts into the public domain, especially on such a sensitive and potentially life threatening issue like this?

May seems completely incapable of thinking on her feet, and has become infamous for her robotic standard line responses to questions in Parliament and from journalists alike. I can’t ever really remember her giving a straight answer to a straight question, preferring instead to say something which is vacuous, often baffling and seemingly designed to put her audience to sleep.

I expect May’s defence of Parkinson, who worked at the Vote Leave campaign, where he met Sanni, like everything else May does, is designed to appease the hard Brexiters in her Cabinet and Parliamentary party. To sack Parkinson would likely stir unrest, amongst an increasingly worried Eurosceptic faction in the Tory party.

The accusations of breaking electoral law by Vote Leave and its association with the dubious behaviour, to say the least, of Cambridge Analytica threatens to undermine the legitimacy of the referendum result, and so to make it less likely that we will leave the EU. It does seem that almost everyday some news comes out that is unsupportive at best, and often quite damning about Brexit itself.

The wheels appear to be falling off the Brexit wagon, one by one, and there aren’t too many left now. Maybe, the momentum is with remaining in the EU now, or to take the softest of Brexits, anyway. Time will tell.

For this slide in public perception on Brexit to be used as a motive for possibly putting lives in danger is truly outrageous and disgraceful. What was the purpose of Parkinson outing Sanni? I can see no other motivation, other than to try and muddy the waters around the actions of the Vote Leave campaign. The fact we haven’t been offered a suitable explanation, from the prime minister or anyone else does lead people to draw their own conclusions.

Will you give us a straight answer to the question of why Sanni was outed for being gay, Mrs May? I won’t hold my breath, I don’t think May is likely to change the habit of a political lifetime, so you will have to make your own minds up.  

Hurricane Irma shows the Power of Nature and the Feebleness of Humanity

There is no doubt that the human species has had a profound affect on the natural world. Deforestation, pollution of air, land and sea, other species extinctions (or near extinctions), ozone layer depletion and rising global temperatures. Not a record to be proud of.

All of which have been accelerated since the industrial revolution. Indeed the industrial revolution would have been impossible without fossil fuels providing the extra energy and the economic growth that came with it. Now we are starting to see the ecological consequences our behaviour.

Of course, there are many, usually completely unqualified to make such pronouncements, who deny man’s part in climate change. I expect they will be out in force when they see this post. But the science is clear, and the evidence gets stronger all of the time, that the climatic changes that are occurring, and they are occurring, is related to human activity. Namely, burning fossil fuels, which produces carbon, one of the main greenhouse gases which causes the planet to warm.

Our capitalist economic system, is remarkably adaptive, in that it can seemingly monetise almost anything, and climate change and its ability to cause ‘natural’ disasters is no different. Naomi Klein details this at length in her book The Shock Doctrine, written in 2007, and subtitled The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Disasters allow an opportunity to make money, which is all that really counts in capitalism.

What the system cannot do though, is resolve the problem of climate change. All kinds of techno-fixes will be put forward, because they are likely to make money, but this is merely greenwash. The central logic of the system, grow or die, the pursuit of infinite economic growth, will not allow a solution to be found.

We are in the hurricane season now, and this year has produced some spectacular and destructive storms already. The ones that attract the most attention are of course, those which make landfall in the USA. Harvey and Irma fit the bill perfectly.

But there is an avoidance of discussion of the causes of such powerful storms, which is attributed to ‘natural causes’. Which they are, but the strength of these hurricanes is increased by warmer sea water, something like 1C warmer in the Gulf of Mexico over the last 40 years, which is sucked up into the storm. To reinforce this avoidance of the discussion of causes, as the Green MP, Caroline Lucas found, mentioning this inconvenient truth, provokes attacks from right wing politicians and their friends in the mainstream media.

The idea that we can tame nature or just ignore it altogether is running out of road though, with each hurricane, flood or drought that occurs. In the UK, we are lucky to not experience many strong hurricanes, but each winter sees more and more flooding and I expect this year will be no different. More money goes on flood defences, but the floods keep happening. We can’t hold back nature indefinitely, we need to address the causes, but you will see little action in this direction.

Twentieth century socialism was not immune from the delusion of humanity being able to control nature either. Leon Trotsky famously declared that the ‘socialist superman’ would move mountains and redirect rivers all to the benefit of his socialist utopia. But the USSR had probably an even worse record than capitalist nations in degrading the environment, and of course failed to bring nature to heel.

But our problem now is solely with capitalism, and the experience of the British so called entrepreneur Richard Branston, is an example in microcosm. I say so called because the extent these days of his entrepreneurship is taking government contracts to run previously publicly run services, like railways. He owns an airline and also has plans for space aeroplanes to be run commercially, which will make climate change even worse. Ironically, he likes to think of himself as 'green'.

Branston owns the Caribbean island of Necker, which bore the full brunt of Hurricane Irma, and all the great tycoon could do was cower in his basement as the storm raged across the island.

Nature cannot be tamed, we have to work with it, everything we do needs to be ecocentric, carefully designed to compliment nature. But there is just no money to be made that way under our current economic system, so it will not happen. Ecosocialism is the only way to go. System Change, Not Climate Change.    

Twice as Many Americans View North Korea as a Critical Threat Than Can Find It on a Map

Media coverage has created a massive gap between US desire to attack North Korea and an understanding of the crisis.

Written by Adam Johnson and first published at Alternet

A recent poll conducted by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs found that 75 percent of Americans list North Korea as a “critical threat” facing the United States, up from 55 percent just two years ago. The same poll found that 40 percent of Americans support conducting preemptive air strikes on North Korean “nuclear facilities”—a move that would effectively start and all-out war on the peninsula.

Contrast this poll with another one from March showing that just 36 percent of Americans can locate North Korea on a map. This means that there are more people in the United States who want to launch a unilateral, unprovoked war against North Korea than even know where North Korea is. This massive gap—between our collective desire to bomb something versus not having a clue what that something is—is stark evidence of a colossal media failure in the United States, a media failure that, as a rule, decontextualizes the “crisis” in North Korea and strips it of all political nuance.

Routinely, the media frames the US as responding to North Korean bellicose as if they are the ones initiating conflict out of thin air. Take, for example. President Trump’s recent threats to reign “fire and fury” upon North Korea, which was largely presented as a response to a hostile and unstable Kim regime.

“Trump Warns North Korea: Stop Threats,” the Wall Street Journal front page read Wednesday. This gives people the distinct impression the United States was just minding its own business and some random lunatic decided to provoke an otherwise benevolent and innocent Trump administration. Missing from this narrative is that North Korea’s “threats” are almost always qualified as defensive in nature, which is to say they are always on the condition of a US first strike.

This is consistent with a broader historical context that’s never provided. Rarely does the media mention that the Korean War never ended and the destruction the US leveled against the peninsula—while largely forgotten stateside—is still very fresh in the minds of both South and North Korea.

Rarely is it mentioned in the media that during the US bombing of Korea from June 1950 to July 1953 the US military, according to their own figures, killed approximately 3 million Koreans—roughly 20 percent of the population—mostly in the North. This is compared to 2.3 million Japanese killed in the whole of World War II, and that included the use of two nuclear bombs.

Rarely is it mentioned the US dropped more bombs and napalm on Korea in the early ‘50s than it did during the entire Pacific campaign against the Japanese during World War II—635,000 tons of munitions and 32,557 tons of napalm.

Rarely is it mentioned that, according to Dean Rusk, the Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs, the United States bombed “everything that moved in North Korea, every brick standing on top of another.” Rarely is it mentioned that after running low on urban targets US bombers destroyed hydroelectric and irrigation dams, flooding farmland and wrecking crops. Rarely is it mentioned the CIA oversaw South Korean death squads that killed thousands on suspicion of being communists.

Now, this may not matter to the casual media consumer but it matters a great deal to the North Korean government and this historical context goes along way explaining the martial posture on display. If this seems like ancient history we can go back to just 1994 when House Republicans helped torpedo a nuclear deal then-President Clinton arrived at with the North Koreans in good faith. Or to 2002 when George Bush listed North Korea in its “Axis of Evil” hit list then proceed to invade and destroy one-third of that list. Or to 2011 when NATO bombed Libya into a failed state six years after Gaddafi gave up his nuclear ambitions in earnest. The US has, for decades, given the North Koreans no reason not to pursue nuclear weapons and contextualizing the situation as such would, perhaps, reduce the amount of Americans eager to bomb Pyongyang without provocation or attack.

One doesn’t have to like or sympathize with a government to understand its motivation. Once one understands the history of the US’s war on Korea and internalizes the fact that the North Koreans don’t see the war as being over, their actions don’t seem irrational or unhinged—they seem like the last resort of a country that views itself, fairly or not, as under siege. If only the media could make an effort to reflect this context far more often, perhaps it would reduce the amount of people itching for war and—along with some useful visual aids—significantly increase the number of Americans who at least know where or what North Korea is.

Adam Johnson is a contributing analyst at FAIR and contributing writer for AlterNet. Follow him on Twitter @AdamJohnsonNYC.

Tory Minister Blames All Local Authorities for Grenfell Towers Blaze

The Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, Sajid Javid, in his keynote speech to the Local Government Association Conference on Tuesday this week, appeared to blame local government as a whole for the Grenfell Tower fire in London. The speech caused outrage amongst the local government delegates at the conference.

Javid used much of his speech at the conference in Birmingham to reflect “on what has gone wrong in local government and what we need to do together to fix it”.

He said that tackling inequalities in housing across the country would be one way to rebuild trust, criticising councils that have yet to publish a Local Plan.

He continued: ‘Others produced a plan when the policy was first introduced, but haven’t touched it since and are left with a dusty document that’s hopelessly out-of-date and irrelevant to the real needs of their communities.

‘And then there are those councils that have an up-to-date plan, but have failed to be honest about the level of housing they need in their area.’

Council leaders have reacted angrily to Mr Javid's speech, with senior figures describing it as a 'declaration of war', as reported in the Municipal Journal (subscription).

Leader of the Local Government Association's (LGA) Labour group, Cllr Nick Forbes, said: 'It was a deeply divisive and muddled speech - a shameful attempt to place the failings of one authority at the feet of the whole sector.'

He described the speech as “patronising and blame shifting” and said he had rarely “been so incensed” by a secretary of state’s speech. Others described it as “lecturing” and criticised Mr Javid for only taking three questions from delegates, according to Local Government Chronicle (subscription).

An unnamed conference delegate is quoted as saying ‘never felt so patronised as a councillor by a minister for local government (not even Eric Pickles). Well done Sajid Javed.'

Terms like “went down like a bucket of cold sick” (as LGA Labour group leader Nick Forbes put it), “buck-passing” and “patronising bastard” were also repeatedly used. Conservative councillors are no less enraged than their Labour counterparts, according to LGC.

Closing the conference, the Conservative chairman of the LGA, Lord Porter, revealed he gave Mr Javid an earful about his speech in a 'difficult' phone call.

He said: 'There was a lot of anger following Sajid's speech. I think his comments were ill-judged in part of his speech.’

There was no hint of questioning as to why the Department for Communities & Local Government had delayed a review of building regulations in relation to high-rise building fire safety, heeding the lessons of the 2009 Lakanal Tower blaze in Southwark, as reported on this blog.

And there was no openness about confusion about building regulations which means flammable cladding has been used in at least 181 high-rise buildings in 51 council areas. Either many, many councils have failed on fire safety, or central government has given out the wrong or misconstrued messages.

The Tory government is desperately looking for someone to blame for the Grenfell Tower disaster and the woeful response from Tory run Kensington and Chelsea Borough council. But the failings that led to the rapid spread of the fire rest with the Tory government who have been promising for four years to amend building regulation about flammable cladding, but never got around to it.

Cuts to local services funding such as council planning offices and the fire service also played a part in contributing to unsafe cladding being allowed to be installed at the tower block.

The government’s running down of social housing generally is from an ideological standpoint, they think building new council houses just creates Labour voters. But the chickens are coming home to roost for this government, you can’t have decent, affordable and safe public housing by leaving things to the market. Forty years of this approach has led to the housing crisis that we see today, and no amount of pointing fingers at others will remove the blame for the situation which led to the loss of so many lives at Grenfell Tower.    

Right Wing Trolls' Vitriol is Raging Against the Dying of the Light

I work close to the Houses of Parliament in London, and after I left work on Wednesday I strolled down to Parliament Square to take a look at the Day of Rage protest, to take some photos and write a report for this blog.

There are often mid-week, evening, protests around Parliament, and I have covered some of them before here. Being so handy to where I work, these are easy stories for me to post. They are generally pretty popular too, and Wednesday’s post was much better than average for these type of posts.

One of the reasons that I started this blog, was to put out an alternative narrative to main stream media and right wing social media. A green left take on things like demonstrations and news stories more generally.

Around about 70% of the traffic to this blog comes from Facebook links, the rest come from left politics aggregator sites, twitter, email groups and google searches. I have over 700 Facebook friends and posts are public, and I also link the blog posts in various Facebook groups. These groups are mainly of the green, left liberal, socialist and anarchist type political groups. But I also post the links into some more general politics groups and some London based community type groups.

The reaction to Wednesday’s post in the lefty groups was overwhelmingly positive, with likes, shares and comments from posters. In the more general political groups, there was some support, but a hell of a lot of negative, and in some cases, downright offensive comments.

I should have guessed really, as before I even went to the demonstration I’d read the twitter #dayofrage thread and it was full of right wing trolls, often complaining of paying taxes for the police to keep order at this protest, and maligning the protesters for being work shy, on benefits etc etc. No proof of these things was offered of course, but hey, why let the truth get in the way of your twisted view of the world?

No doubt these characters have been ‘radicalised’, by the right wing media, such as Rupert Murdoch owned The Sun, The Telegraph, the Daily Mail and the Daily Express, but the trolls went even further than these right wing rags.

Here’s a selection from the general Facebook groups that I post blog links to:

"Why won't you come face us?" ‘Because you smell and no one likes lefties.’

‘Must have been dole day today, or the snowflakes melted in the heat.’

‘Or was it too early for the great scrounging unwashed perhaps?’

‘If you support the politicization of grenfell, as these brain dead cunts do, then fuck you too, you are what’s wrong with this Country.’

‘The residents of the Grenfell flats disassociated themselves from this march. it would seem it was hijacked to further a political agenda.’

‘Here we go will try anything to win an election.’

‘Deluded twats lol.’

Charming! Remember, this demonstration was about probably well over a hundred people being burnt to death, because of the neo-liberal policies of the last 40 years and general uncaring and negligent behaviour of the local and national politicians, Tory, New Labour nationally and at local level which has been controlled by the Conservative Party since 1964.  

Of course, I fairly often get trolled by these ring wing numpties, and you have to have a bit of a thick skin if you blog about politics, but Wednesday’s post attracted the worst reaction I have ever had. Maybe I hit a raw nerve with this post?

I noticed during the recent general election campaign, as the opinion polls narrowed between the Tories and Labour, the right wingers became increasingly silent. I think Owen Jones, The Guardian columnist, might have put his finger on the reasons causing this outburst now. I’m not a big fan of Jones’ writing, but on Thursday he wrote a piece entitled ‘The old Tory order is crumbling – it’s taken Grenfell for us to really see it’ where he argues ‘The iconic episode that, for the right, summed up the fall of the post-war consensus was the “winter of discontent….If any episode sums up the collapse of our own neoliberal era, it is surely Grenfell Tower.’

Jones maybe onto something here, the political wheel in place since the late 1970s looks to be turning at last. Just like the post-war Keynesian consensus ended by Tory leader Margaret Thatcher, the neo-liberal era looks to be coming to a close. This is why these right wing trolls are making so much noise, but I think it is in vain. Their time, and neo-liberal politics time are about to become a nasty memory. It’s almost the time for the trolls to crawl back under their rocks.

Here’s to the not too distant future.