Subjects Archives: Climate Change

  “The people living in the 100 developing countries most affected by climate change are responsible for only 3% of global greenhouse gas emissions.” This film is one of the three winners of the Germanwatch screenplay competition about climate justice. | | Print

For some time now it has been clear that standard measurements of growth and development are inadequate and possibly even misleading.  The problem of looking at only the aggregate gross domestic product (GDP) has been widely noted: its blindness to distributional issues and its inability to measure either the quality of life or the sustainability […]

Michael Moore‘s latest film, Capitalism: A Love Story, is so far ahead of the historical/political curve that even people who consider themselves progressives will have to run at full speed to keep up with this renegade filmmaker. Moore has always been ahead of the curve. Twenty years ago with Roger & Me he demonstrated a […]

It does not really need a crisis to show us that our current development strategy is flawed.  Even during the previous boom, the pattern of growth in developing Asia had too many limitations, paradoxes and inherent fragilities.  Much was wrong with the global economic boom that preceded the crisis.  Everyone now knows that it was […]

Rajendra Pachauri heads TERI, The Energy and Resources Institute, based in New Delhi.  An engineer of the railways in his early career, Pachauri went to the United States to earn a PhD in industrial engineering and another in economics, after which he returned to India in 1981 to work with TERI.  In 1995, he joined […]

  I wish to congratulate you on your election and reiterate to you our confidence on your capacity to unerringly conduct our works and deliberations. Likewise I would like to recognize the excellent work developed by Father Miguel D’Escoto, President of the recently concluded session.  The ethical dimension and the political scope of his presidency, […]

  Analytical Monthly Review, published in Kharagpur, West Bengal, India, is a sister edition of Monthly Review.  Its September 2009 issue features the following editorial. — Ed. We now face the immediate need of a qualitative change in our most fundamental economic relationship — delivery of food supply. The problem is not the variability of […]

Bholar Basti, a water-logged slum in Dhaka city, accommodates more than 30,000 people, most of them victims of river erosion, floods, and other natural disasters.  ©Shamsuddin Ahmed/IRIN DAKAR, 1 September 2009 (IRIN) – Current UN cost estimates for climate change adaptation are too low and this could thwart climate treaty negotiations set for December in […]

The Great Recession is allowing some widely held beliefs about the U.S. economy — which were the source of much evangelism over the last few decades — to run up against a reality check.  This is to be expected, since the United States has been the epicenter of the storm of policy blunders that caused […]

The military coup carried out by masked soldiers in the early hours of June 28against the democratically elected President of Honduras, José Manuel Zelaya Rosales, was a bandit act with differing messages intended for different audiences. One such audience is the oligarchical groupings throughout the hemisphere, who will be emboldened by Washington’s tacit tolerance of […]

John Bellamy Foster.  The Ecological Revolution: Making Peace with the Planet.  New York: Monthly Review Press, 2009.  328 pp. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels famously urged the world’s workers to unite because they had a world to win, and nothing to lose but their chains.  Today, the reality of climate change and worsening environmental breakdowns […]

  Analytical Monthly Review, published in Kharagpur, West Bengal, India, is a sister edition of Monthly Review.  Its June 2009 issue features the following editorial. — Ed. The dire consequences of human induced climate change are now most often presented as facing us in the near future.  We suggest that the future, as far as […]

60 Die in Peru Rainforest Protest Send a Message to the President of Peru June 5, 2009 URGENT ACTION ALERT Peru’s Amazon Indigenous Peoples need you to TAKE ACTION now! Tell the Peruvian Government: Immediately suspend violent repression of indigenous protests and the State of Emergency Repeal the Free Trade Laws that allow oil, logging, […]

JOHANNESBURG, 26 May 2009 (IRIN) — Food prices will rise again by 2015, when economies are expected to have recovered from the global recession, pushing up demand once more, says a recent UN report. 2008 is seen as the year of food crises, prompted in part by high fuel prices, but these started declining as […]

Five days ago I read a press report stating that Ban Ki-moon would appoint Bill Clinton as his special envoy for Haiti.

The keynote address at the “Climate Change, Social Change” conference (organized by Green Left Weekly), Sydney, Australia, 12 April 2008. This address became the basis for John Bellamy Foster, “Ecology and the Transition from Capitalism to Socialism” (Monthly Review, November 2008), which in turn became the last chapter of The Ecological Revolution: Making Peace with […]

The battle over “intellectual property rights” is likely to be one of the most important of this century.  It has enormous economic, social, and political implications in a wide range of areas, from medicine to the arts and culture — anything where the public interest in the widespread dissemination of knowledge runs up against those […]

JOHANNESBURG, 14 May 2009 (IRIN) — Climate change will be the biggest global health threat in the 21st century, but little is known about its possible effects on developing countries, where the impact will be felt most, says a new report. “Information that is reliable, accurate, and disseminated is fundamental for effective adaptation and to […]

A talk given at a Left Forum panel, April 2009. It’s spring and I’ve been thinking a lot lately about reincarnation.  If I’m a good adjunct can I come back as a tenured professor?  If I stay a loyal Cub fan, can I come back as a Yankee fan?  Actually, it’s political reincarnation that I’ve […]

I think that what we’re going through now — which is really just starting, we’re nowhere in the middle of it yet either, I think — is much bigger and more extensive than the Great Depression.  There are particular difficulties of fixing it because of the fact that it is bigger, it is more global, […]