Category: Climate change
A farmer stands on her dried rice field in Thanh Hoa province, 200 km (124 miles) south of Hanoi July 8, 2010. Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung has urged provincial authorities in central Vietnam to fight the worst drought in nearly two decades.
From Climate and Capitalism. I’m republishing the whole thing because it’s so important for future generations that people start thinking about this now, and those involved in organizing this want it spread around as much as possible. This movement is not yet big in America like it is in other countries.
Joel Kovel: Organizing the Ecosocialist International Network
Since its formation in 2007, Joel Kovel has been a leading figure in the Ecosocialist International Network. In this letter, Joel discusses where the EIN is going, including plans for forming chapters in the United States and Canada.
Joel’s comments were posted on July 5 in the EIN’s egroup. We encourage readers to join in the discussion of these issues there: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/EI-Network/
I am sorry to take so long in getting this out to you following my return from Detroit and the USSF; and I have appreciated the postings that a number of you have made in the interim. Richard Greeman, who was active in Detroit, has been the latest to do so. I am placing a copy of his letter at the end of this, along with a thread spun off by other members of that list.
Essentially Richard says that the founders of the Ecosocialist International Network and its steering committee have done basically nothing to further the organization, and asks that we do not leave the members of the EI list and the ecosocialist movement in general in the lurch.
I am totally sympathetic to what Richard says and hope to rectify this with the present communication. Here are some thoughts and observations on the matter, all subject to debate and development:
1. There is nothing that has happened over the last decade that has disabused me of the conviction that ecosocialism is the most important idea before humanity and will remain so whether it succeeds or fails in being realized. However if it fails, so do we as a species. There is no need to rehearse once more the reasoning behind this, which I can assume that everyone who reads this shares.
2. Nobody should be thickheaded enough to think that the principles of ecosocialism are transparently known. Indeed, aside from the core principles that capitalism must be overcome and that whatever overcomes it must include an ecocentric ethic, there are, as I see it, only two axiomatic rules for ecosocialism—that it needs to be planetary in scope (ie, the notion of “ecosocialism in one country” is even more absurd than that of socialism in one country); and that it must be created, indeed, at this stage the main task for ecosocialists must be to provide the conditions so that ecosocialism can be built as a freely developing and nonhierarchical international collective.
Why aren’t the heads of BP, Transocean and Halliburton on trial for manslaughter or negligent homicide in the deaths of 11 oil rig workers in the Gulf of Mexico in April? Instead, BP is threatening journalists via their directives to the United States Coast Guard with criminal action if they dare to film the oil spill coming ashore. A foreign oil company telling our Coast Guard what to do? Yeah…. Only in the Corporate Fossil Fuel States of America.
video from NationalWildlife — May 20, 2010 — National Wildlife Federation’s President and CEO Larry Schweiger testified before the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee May 19, 2010 on what he witnessed while on the front lines of the oil spill response effort.
From the excellent video series, “Climate Denier Crock of the Week”.
Peter Sinclair writes,
“He’s everywhere on the climate denial circuit.
He’s not a scientist. He’s a classics major and journalist.
How is it that he’s been able to sell himself to climate deniers as their number one spokesman?
First, like any good salesman, Lord Monckton knows his customer.”
There are many others, and most of them are not scientists, they are salesmen, and they work for big energy companies or the GOP, or both.
Here is Part II
“The main enemy of Mother Earth is capitalism.” — Evo Morales
Mining Protests Overshadow World People’s Summit on Climate Change
3-Day Conference Draws Thousands
By Claudia Lopez Pardo, from Solveclimate.com
See live coverage of Cochabamba here–until it’s over on Earth Day, April 22nd
Bolivian President Evo Morales launched the World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth on Tuesday, welcoming over 10,000 people from 135 countries and dozens of social organizations to what he declared to be an alternative to the United Nations climate talks.
Fracking Not A Cleaner Alternative: Cornell Prof
Natural gas obtained by the controversial technique of hydraulic fracturing may contribute significantly to greenhouse gas emissions and so should not be considered as a cleaner alternative to coal or oil, according to a Cornell University researcher.
Although natural gas, when burned, produces only about half of the carbon dioxide emissions of coal, that calculation omits greenhouse gas emissions from the well-drilling, water-trucking, pipeline-laying, and forest-felling that are part of the production of hydraulically fractured natural gas, Ecology Professor Robert Howarth argues in a new paper.
Combining the effects of combustion, production, distribution, and leaked methane from hydraulically fractured natural gas gives the fuel about the same greenhouse gas emissions as coal and about 30 percent more than diesel or gasoline, Howarth says in the draft paper published in mid-March.