Subjects Archives: Climate Change

The climate crisis and efforts to tackle it have witnessed unprecedented mobilisation of popular movements, NGOs, think tanks, experts, intellectuals and activists, as was evident at the Climate Conference in Copenhagen last December.  Of course, this “civil society” activism has embraced a very wide spectrum of opinion.  Amongst the most vociferous, at various gatherings as […]

“If an oil well is too far beneath the sea to be plugged when something goes wrong, it’s too deep to be drilled in the first place.” — Bob Herbert, June 1, 2010 Imagine “the Associated Producers, Rationally Regulating Their Interchange with Nature” Amidst mass capital-imposed structural unemployment and ever-escalating environmental collapse, the ongoing epic […]

  “It is probably impossible today for anyone to make an even halfway commercial movie that shouts, in some positive sense, ‘Revolution!’ as loudly as its lungs can bear, so one must celebrate the films that seem (whether deliberately or not) to imply its necessity.” — Robin Wood1 At a time when comedy shows tell […]

  The climate policy debate has largely shifted from science to economics.  There is a well-developed consensus, at least in broad outlines, about the physical science of climate change and its likely implications.  That consensus is embodied in massive general circulation models (GCMs) that provide detailed projections of average temperatures, precipitation, weather patterns, and sea-level […]

  Trailer Interview with Peter Mettler Why did you make Petropolis? There are a lot of paths that led to this, going back already 20 years.  I’ve always been interested in the way we humans have the ability to create technology out of our given natural environments.  My impression is that the technologies we develop […]

  In April 2010 more than 35,000 people from 140 countries gathered in Cochabamba, Bolivia and developed the historic Cochabamba People’s Accord, a consensus-based document reflecting substantive solutions to the climate crisis.  We, the undersigned organizations, both participated in and/or supported this historic process. Reflecting the voices of global civil society and the agreements reached […]

Despite talk of a moratorium, the Interior Department’s Minerals and Management Service is still granting waivers from environmental review for oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, including wells in very deep water.  Until last month, most of us never thought about the risk that one of those huge offshore rigs would explode in flames […]

The tremendous success of the April 19-22 World Peoples Summit on Climate Change and Mother Earth Rights held in Cochabamba, Bolivia, has confirmed the well-deserved role of its initiator — Bolivian President Evo Morales — as one of the world’s leading environmental advocates. Since being elected the country’s first indigenous president in 2005, Morales has […]

Communism in the rest of the world seems to have collapsed.  What hope do you have of achieving a socialist state in India? The claim that there is no hope for socialism and communism, that they are dead, is mere propaganda unleashed by the imperialists and the apologists of capitalism.  The 20th century saw the […]

President Morales exhorted workers to rethink, because the latest wage increase of 5 percent is superior to what previous governments offered and, moreover, over the four years under his administration, the wages have risen 40 percent.  He called on workers’ unions to compare this wage increase with the current inflation rate of 0.26 percent in […]

  BP is a London-based oil company with the worst safety and environmental record of any oil company operating in America.  In just the last few years, BP has pled guilty to two crimes and paid over $730 million in fines and settlements to the US government, state governments, and civil lawsuit judgments for environmental […]

  Solidair/Solidaire, the weekly journal of the Workers Party of Belgium (PVDA-PTB), interviewed John Bellamy Foster, editor of Monthly Review, 26 April 2010 Solidair/Solidaire: Many green thinkers reject a Marxist analysis because they think that the Marxist approach to the economy is a very productivist one, focused on growth and seeing nature as “a free […]

I attended the alternative Climate Conference in the Bolivian city of Cochabamba as part of an eight-person Quebec activist delegation.  I came back convinced that we witnessed a turning point in the global Climate Justice movement. Up to now it has been very difficult to link environmental demands to social justice issues.  The mainstream ecological […]

Jesse Freeston: Last week, the Bolivian city of Cochabamba and the country’s president Evo Morales played host to the World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth.  The conference sought to distinguish itself from the United Nations conferences for giving a greater voice to civil society and expanding the conversation beyond […]

THERE is no alternative but to call things by their name. Anyone with minimal commonsense can observe without much effort how little realism remains in the current world. When United States President Barack Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, Michael Moore stated “Now please earn it!” That witty comment pleased a lot of people […]

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Executive Summary: In its first attempts to regulate carbon emissions, the U.S. government is undermining its own efforts by relying on deeply flawed economic models that lead to gross miscalculations of the impact of carbon on the climate and on the nation’s economic future. Agencies seeking to incorporate climate change considerations in rules and regulations […]

This issue of putting taxes on imports for reasons of climate change* has become a very hot topic. . . .  The developing countries are very much against such a measure because they see it as protectionism.  They see it as a way for the developed countries to evade their responsibilities to provide finance and […]

Just how dangerous is the World Bank and its neo-conservative president, Robert Zoellick, to South Africa and the global climate? Notwithstanding South Africa’s existing $75 billion foreign debt, last Thursday the bank added a $3.75bn loan to Eskom for the primary purpose of building the world’s fourth-largest coal-fired power plant, at Medupi, which will spew […]

Of all the misunderstandings that guide U.S. foreign policy — including foreign commercial policy — perhaps the most important and long-lasting is the failure to recognize or understand what national self-determination means to most people in the world.  Or why it might be important to them.  Our leaders seem to have learned very little since […]