Geography Archives: Global

This is the tenth edition of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) Emissions Gap Report. It provides the latest assessment of scientific studies on current and estimated future greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and compares these with the emission levels permissible for the world to progress on a least-cost pathway to achieve the goals of the Paris Agreement.

With racist speech and sentiments coming more to the fore in current Irish politics, campaigner John Molyneux takes a look at how racist ideas and language work today.

Environmental destruction isn’t driven by human nature or mistaken ideas. It is an inevitable consequence of a system built on capital accumulation.

It’s bad enough to imagine blame and scenarios of dread, as if from science fiction, but add in the presently feeble response to dire threats and we’re in a funk. If tools were available, we’d get a lift. Marc Brodine’s book Green Strategy, reviewed here, is about tools.

Through the global climate strike and mass demonstrations for the planet launched by Greta Thunberg, an entire generation has gotten a taste of political action, understanding the need for dramatic change to deal with environmental degradation. It is in this context that the group Extinction Rebellion (XR) has struck a chord.

Around 7am on the fourth day of Extinction Rebellion’s (XR) “Spring Rebellion” in Melbourne in early October the clouds to the east cleared enough for the first bright rays of sun to penetrate through to a city centre still shrouded in a cold, misty rain.

In my research I have argued that rising global inequality is driven in large part by power imbalances in the global economy, in that rich countries have disproportionate influence when it comes to setting the rules of international trade and finance.

Most public discussions on climate change are based on global surface temperature only, an inadequate measure to capture the breadth of human activities and the real dangers stemming from a warming planet. Policymakers and the public now urgently need access to a set of indicators that convey the effects of human activities.

The alternative to the social and ecological pathology which is becoming all-pervasive in the socioinstitutional and economic fabric of modern capitalist society is to be found in the development of an appropriate, harmonious relationship between humanity, their productive powers, and nature.

From Chile to Lebanon, young people are demonstrating—in street protests and voting booths—that they’ve had enough of being disciplined and punished by the current development model.

It’s all kicking off everywhere in 2019. Haitians are revolting against a corrupt political system and their President Jovenel Moïse, who many see as a kleptocratic U.S. puppet. In Ecuador, huge public manifestations managed to force President Lenín Moreno to backtrack on his IMF-backed neoliberal package that would have sharply cut government spending and increased transport prices (FAIR.org, 10/23/19).

This short, readable and stimulating book begins with the author overturning perceived knowledge about the 18th century economist Robert Malthus.

With Extinction Rebellion growing rapidly across the world in the fight against climate change, John Molyneux gives his perspective on how socialists should respond to this phenomenon.

Military curfews or states of siege have been imposed recently in Guatemala, Ecuador and Chile, with the army deployed to control protests. Western powers give these countries’ right wing governments the benefit of the doubt despite them being guilty as charged.

“We need to decide if we want to live in a world in which autonomous weapons systems identify and attack targets faster than humans can think.”

The World Bank’s World Development Report (WDR), published every year since 1978, plays a similar role to that of the state of the union address in the US, in which the president hopes to keep the faith of the Congress and public.

In Capital Is Dead, Mckenzie Wark argues that the dominance of the capitalist class may be ending. In order to grasp this epochal transition, leftists must follow the young Marx—and abandon or adapt inherited modes of thought.

On 13 October, Moreno had to promise to withdraw Decree 833. Pressure from the streets, from the United Nations, and from the Ecuadorian Episcopal Conference forced him to the table, where a televised discussion was held. The indigenous leaders won the ‘debate’–they were much more prepared and far more humane than the president and his clumsy ministers.

Although Karl Marx is not known first and foremost as an environmental theorist, in recent decades students of his work have argued that Marx had a systematic approach to environmental protection, that he recognized the key connections among labor, technology, and nature, and, according to sociologist John Bellamy Foster, that his discussions of the environment “prefigured some of the most advanced ecological analysis of the late 20th century.”

No one within the IMF meeting will raise the question of democracy, both in terms of the IMF’s own functioning and in terms of the IMF’s relationship with sovereign countries around the world.