Subjects Archives: Climate Change

Five days of direct action and civil disobedience are planned this week to denounce “broken promises” and demand ambitious action against the planetary threat.

European responses to extreme weather demonstrate post-industrial nations have much to learn from people in the Global South, writes Aranyo Aarjan.

Chinese President Xi Jinping said on Tuesday that China would stop building new coal-fired power plants abroad, marking a historic shift away from the fossil fuel before the United Nations climate summit in November.

One-hundred-thousand students strike. Fifteen-to-twenty thousand demonstrate in Quebec.

The leaders of the United States and China each pledged to the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday that they would help press the fight against virulent pandemics and global warming–even as they offered vastly different visions of the world order.

rs21 member Greg Peakin explains the concept of metabolic rift, and why it is an important tool for climate organising today.

Agriculture—especially industrial agriculture requiring chemical inputs—is cause and victim of these changes. Cultivation patterns such as mono-cropping, with heavy reliance on groundwater and chemical inputs, have reduced the food sovereignty of poor countries and generated growing environmental problems.

The scientific consensus is clear that human activities are primarily responsible for global climate change, and that the climate crisis now represents the greatest threat to human civilization and nature.

On Monday 9th August, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) delivered a climate report warning of ‘code red for humanity’.

There is no doubt among scientists that the increasing frequency of extreme weather and associated disasters like fires is a result of climate change.

For Kali Akuno, co-founder and co-director of Cooperation Jackson, the wreckage of Hurricane Ida is a surreal reminder of what he and others in the Gulf Coast region experienced 16 years ago.

Academics are perfectly placed to wage a rebellion: we exist in rich hubs of knowledge and expertise; we are well connected across the world, and to decision-makers; we have large platforms from which to inform, educate and rally others all over the world; and we have implicit authority and legitimacy, which is the basis of political power. We can make a difference.

Editors urge ‘fundamental changes to how our societies and economies are organized’.

Industry expansion relates to sectors such as public transport, where decarbonisation requires more buses and trains and fewer private car journeys. Industry evolution relates to new sectors, such as solar and offshore wind farms, that are newly emerging and do not have any history of labour relations, but there will not be space to discuss this fourth scenario in this column.

Mobilizing the global labour movement for climate justice and just transition is one of the defining challenges of our times. However, for workers in many sectors, it is unclear how climate issues will affect them specifically, and how they should respond.

It is a sign of just how serious matters have become—with the UN COP26 talks on climate in Glasgow this November now regarded by many as a last-ditch effort to achieve a global solution on behalf of humanity as a whole—that the early draft versions of Part II and Part III of the IPCC’s, ‘Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis’, were leaked during the summer.

Floods, fires, ice caps melting, hurricanes—all attest to the violence of human-caused climate disruption.

The United Nations issued a “code red for humanity” warning earlier this month with over 3,000 pages of scientific documentation saying that the climate crisis has reached a point where we can expect extreme weather including heat waves, flooding and droughts to happen with more frequency and intensity.

Speaking on the impact of the climate crisis on First People, Gavin Singleton from the Yirrganydji traditional owners explained that ‘From changing weather patterns to shifts in natural ecosystems, climate change is a clear and present threat to our people and our culture’.

The report explicitly states that incremental change is not a viable option. It states that individual behavioural changes alone are insignificant. It states that justice, equity and redistribution are essential to climate policy.