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Long shaped by fire, Australia enters a perilous new era
Australia has always been a dry continent where fire has played an important ecological role. But the latest massive conflagrations there are evidence that a hotter climate has thrust Australia into a new normal where fires will keep burning on an unprecedented scale.
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Welcome to Global Ecosocialist Network
The Global Ecosocialist Network (GEN) is being launched at a moment of extreme danger for humanity. The intensity of the crisis and the scale of the danger is hard to grasp or express adequately because, unless you are in one of the parts of the world currently experiencing extreme weather, it cannot yet literally be seen. And even where the danger is actually being experienced there are very powerful forces at work to obscure its real causes.
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Climate change, the Green New Deal, and the struggle for climate justice
Most calls for a Green New Deal correctly emphasize that it must include a meaningful commitment to climate justice. That is because climate change—for reasons of racism and capitalist profit-making—disproportionately punishes frontline communities, especially communities of color and low-income.
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Climate journalism and fossil fuel ads: an unholy marriage?
NBC’s Camel News Caravan was one of the earliest television news programs in the United States. Sponsored by Camel Cigarettes, the program had an anchorman who not only kept an ashtray on his desk and often smoked while delivering the news, but also encouraged viewers to light up a Camel.
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Where is the rift? Marx, Lacan, capitalism, and ecology
When, decades ago, ecology emerged as a crucial theoretical and practical issue, many Marxists (as well as critics of Marxism) noted that nature–more precisely, the exact ontological status of nature–is the one topic where even the crudest dialectical materialism has an advantage over Western Marxism.
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World’s super rich meet in Davos to discuss the climate change problem they created
Research has shown that the people most responsible for a warming planet were disproportionately the same people attending the summit and an increasing number of observers see climate change, inequality and capitalism as bound together.
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Closer than ever: It is 100 seconds to midnight
Humanity continues to face two simultaneous existential dangers—nuclear war and climate change—that are compounded by a threat multiplier, cyber-enabled information warfare, that undercuts society’s ability to respond.
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The Juliana 21 continue to fight for justice in the biggest climate lawsuit in America
Decision of Divided Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals finds primarily for Juliana plaintiffs, but holds Federal Judiciary can do nothing to stop the U.S. Government in causing climate change and harming children.
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The climate-migration-industrial complex
Thirty years ago there were fifteen border walls around the world. Now there are seventy walls and over one billion national and international migrants. International migrants alone may even double in the next forty years due to global warming.
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Jeff Bezos donates three minutes’ income to help Australia fight wildfires
The donation would be equivalent to someone who earned $500 per week announcing on social media that they had just donated five cents to help tackle the blazes.
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Australia’s profit-driven apocalypse
Some firefighters report flames 150 metres high. Read that again, slowly. Flames 150 metres high. Higher than a 40 storey building.
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Misrepresenting Marx’s Ecology: A Response to Daniel Tanuro’s “Was Marx an Ecosocialist?”
Daniel Tanuro is an agricultural engineer and leading socialist activist who has made numerous contributions to ecosocialist thought and practice, most notably, in his book Green Capitalism: Why It Can’t Work. Yet, this has been coupled with persistent claims that there are “fundamental flaws” in Karl Marx’s ecological critique of capitalism.
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How getting rid of ‘shit jobs’ and the metric of productivity can combat climate change
Yes, we’ll be less efficient. But we’ll be happier, more useful and better able to tackle climate change.
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The limits of capitalism
At this point in human history, the limits of capitalism and the limits of our species’ life on Earth have converged. We have never been here before, and we cannot go back.
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Climate scientist: I witnessed Australia on fire. Climate change is already here.
Prior to beginning my sabbatical stay in Sydney, I took the opportunity this holiday season to vacation in Australia with my family. We went to see the Great Barrier Reef—one of the great wonders of this planet—while we still can. Subject to the twin assaults of warming-caused bleaching and ocean acidification, it will be gone in a matter of decades in the absence of a dramatic reduction in global carbon emissions.
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President Thomas Sankara: A 70th birthday tribute
Thomas Sankara’s passion was Africa’s advancement; his experimental field was Burkina Faso. What President Sankara wanted to see in Africa, he strategized, mobilized and implemented in Burkina Faso. He would then present his successes to African leaders, while encouraging them to surpass his achievements.
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What passes for reality is not worth respecting
In October of last year, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) released its flagship World Economic Outlook. In that report, the IMF said that the global growth rate would stumble at 3% in 2019. A month ago, the IMF’s main economists returned to this theme; ‘Global growth’, they wrote, ‘recorded its weakest pace since the global financial crisis a decade ago’.
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Love the land or watch it die
Sagebrush, Ponderosa Pine, Juniper Trees, and Piñón Pine are important flora in the western United States. Juniper can live more than 1,000 years, as can some Piñón. Ponderosa live up to 400 years. Sagebrush is a perennial and can survive for 100 years. All have been and are used for a variety of purposes by native peoples.
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Is degrowth an alternative to capitalism?
In what follows, I will first briefly summarize the core arguments of the book, which promises to provoke important discussions on the matter of limits and subjects. Then I will reflect on the fuzziness of the primarily cultural conceptualization of capitalism, and argue that neither self-limitation nor degrowth qualifies as a mode of production, such that they could constitute an alternative to capitalism.
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Ruling class bereft of answers while catastrophic fires escalate across Australia
New fires are expected to ignite, while strong winds are predicted to fan the hundreds of blazes that are already burning. Hundreds of thousands of people were urged yesterday to evacuate the most-at-risk areas.