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Burnt workers are the newest wave of climate casualty
The International Labor Organization (ILO) has just released a brief—but very important—report on the impact of heat stress on workers. What the ILO finds is that the areas of the world most threatened by heat deaths of workers are Southern Asia and Western Africa.
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Our globe is burning!
Peter Linebaugh’s book comes with a long subtitle, a pithy summary of its contents: A Tale at the Crossroads of Commons and Closure, of Love and Terror, of Race and Class, of Kate and Ned Despard. His timeframe is the period between 1789 and 1804 when, in his view, a series of connected events took place in England, Ireland, France, the Caribbean and North America that formed an Atlantic crucible forging the capitalist world we have lived in since.
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Climate change, dust bowls, fishery collapse: metabolic rifts of capitalism and the need for socialism
Humankind and the environment are hurtling toward unprecedented ecological crises. Global warming, sea level rise, and weather extremes due to carbon emissions are catastrophic enough, but they will mix and combine with ocean acidification, air and chemical pollution, water shortages, deforestation, fishery collapse, soil erosion, and mass extinction, throwing both nature and society off a cliff into the unknown.
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Hooray, the Arctic is melting! Say WHAT?
It’s officially summer. Time for a swim, a cold beer, and a new slew of catastrophic climate changes…
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The UN climate talks are coming to Britain. The climate justice movement will be ready
This week it was announced that the 2020 United Nations climate change conference–the so-called ‘Conference of the Parties’ (COP)–is set to take place in the UK.
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‘Report the urgency! This is a climate emergency!’
“This is the biggest crisis in human history. What are we going to tell our children when they ask us: why didn’t we do anything to stop it while we still had time?”
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Carbon markets in a climate-changing capitalism
Carbon Markets in a Climate-Changing Capitalism offers an account of why these earlier expectations were not matched by experience. While the contradictions of market solutions have not gone away, the difference this time is that we are just over a decade away from the IPCC’s 2030 benchmark for 1.5°C. The concentration and centralisation of emissions instead points towards a different pathway that can meet this challenge – one that begins by confronting the disproportionate control the biggest polluters have over our climate future.
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Capital and climate in the critique of the State
This is the second in a series of posts comprising a symposium on the Marxist tradition of state theory and its contemporary lineages.
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Global inequality in a time of climate emergency
Our worlds richest have a great deal of money. They also have the power to decide whether our civilization sinks or swims. So what can we do?
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To survive: we need a global awakening much bigger than a “revolution,” much deeper than just ending capitalism
The climate apocalypse will soon kill all of us (including the plutocrats), if we don’t take drastic measures right away. But the plutocrats are blocking those measures, because they don’t want anything cutting into their short-term profits. In this video I discuss the crazy culture that has us headed toward extinction. To survive, we need an immense cultural change.
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Nine ways scientists can support a people’s Green New Deal
In late 2018, the Green New Deal (GND) vaulted into the center of U.S. politics thanks to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and the young activists of the Sunrise Movement. Since then, the GND has become one of the most hotly debated issues in mainstream politics and has helped inspire an upsurge in climate justice activism and organizing.
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Strike before the planet gets hot
Greta Thunberg has called for a world-wide strike on Friday September 27-for children and adults. Here’s how to make this a reality.
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Why it’s important to connect anti-imperialism to climate action
Internationalist struggles make it possible for the oppressed of the world to unite against the oppressors of the world.
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Students from 1,600 cities just walked out of school to protest climate change. It could be Greta Thunberg’s biggest strike yet
Hundreds of thousands of students around the world walked out of their schools and colleges Friday in the latest in a series of strikes urging action to address the climate crisis. According to event organizers Fridays for Future, over 1664 cities across 125 countries registered strike actions, with more expected to report turnouts in the coming days.
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The wettest 12 months-new analysis shows spikes in flood alerts in the U.S.
April 2019 marked the wettest 12-month period in the United States since record-keeping began 124 years ago, breaking the previous record set from May 2015–April 2016. In most places in the contiguous U.S., by April 2019 it had already rained more than the annual average during the 20th century. This week, heavy rain is dumping up to 1 foot of rain in northern and central parts of the U.S.. It’s evident that extreme precipitation events are getting more extreme, and also that climate change is one of the culprits.
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Working Group on the ‘Anthropocene’
Following guidance from the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy and the International Commission on Stratigraphy, the AWG have completed a binding vote to affirm some of the key questions that were voted on and agreed at the IGC Cape Town meeting in 2016.
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First strike
To help this movement win, we should ask why others lost. We should ask, for example, why Occupy, despite the energy and sacrifices of so many, came to an end, while the institutions it confronted remain intact.
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Before it’s too late
When I arrived at the urban homestead Mary Christina Wood shares with her family in Eugene, Oregon, she had just pulled homemade bread from the oven. I had come to interview her about a bold legal campaign to prevent climate catastrophe. We sat at her kitchen table, near shelves lined with jars of food she […]
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The planet is on fucking fire
Nye promptly did, with what Oliver admiringly called ” an entirely appropriate amount of profanity.” “By the end of this century, if emissions keep rising, the average temperature on Earth could go up another four to eight degrees,” said Nye, growing agitated. “What I’m saying is the planet is on fucking fire.”
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“There is no alternative” to managing the economy and the climate
The United States is the country most easily positioned to address climate change but it has done likely the least out of any rich country. China, a country significantly less wealthy than the United States, has likely done the most. In fact, a recent study provides some evidence that China’s carbon dioxide emissions peaked in 2013 and are declining in large part due to changes in China’s industrial structure, which includes pilot programs for pricing carbon, among many other things.