Subjects Archives: Ecology

15 arrested as hundreds take part in civil disobedience outside Parliament

If, as history shows, fantasies of weather and climate control have chiefly served commercial and military interests, why should we expect the future to be different?
—James Fleming, Fixing the Sky

“Ecosocialist politics is based on recognizing that a sound ecological policy cannot be achieved within a capitalist framework. In order to restore (to the extent possible) the health of the ecosphere, it is necessary that economic decisions be no longer based on the capitalist goals of maximizing profit and accumulating wealth.”

Geoengineering is a risky business. So risky, in fact, that it should be banned.

It may be hard, but I want you to try to think back a decade, actually slightly less than a decade. In 2000, we were celebrating the millennium, and if you remember what was happening at that time, it was an enormous celebration of a new global capitalism, of globalization, of the end of conflict in the world, of a new world order.

“The overwhelming character of the ecological crisis will eventually…[force workers to recognize] that the main material conditions determining their lives are both economic and environmental—and indeed that the latter are more far-reaching.”

If you look at headlines from the last year, ExxonMobil, Chevron and other major fossil fuel companies have seemingly turned a new page on climate change.

“More countries must rapidly follow the path of Wales in leaving fossil fuels in the ground and transitioning to renewables.”

There is a famous old left phrase, ‘socialism or barbarism’: there is no choice but to find a way to stop capitalism’s destructive logic, because if left unchecked it will create catastrophe.

Leaked document details BusinessEurope’s campaign to undermine EU attempts to cut climate emissions.

In the summer of 2018, the Indian State of Kerala was hit by severe rains and flood–the heaviest in nearly a century. The deluge affected 5.4 million people in this southern Indian state with a population of 35 million.

The global reaction to two landmark new reports suggests the world could well lose that confrontation.

On October 14, on the CBS television program 60 Minutes, the President of the United States admitted that climate change is not a hoax. It is probably happening, he said, but he doesn’t know what is causing it, and he thinks it might change back. 

We must demand immediate, scientifically rational, and enforceable emissions-reduction targets for each country that take into account historical CO2 emissions, and, relatedly, provision of the necessary technological and financial support to less-developed (and less culpable) countries.

Follow the History of Technological Systems.

If there is one thing from which Green thinking and practice suffers, it is the lack of an over-arching historical and socioeconomic conceptualisation of the dynamics making for the trashing of the environment as habit for humans and other creatures.

A Dutch appeals court erupted into cheers today as it upheld a 2015 ruling ordering the government to cut the country’s greenhouse gas emissions by at least 25 per cent by 2020.

In the latest installment of our “Not One Step Back!” reading series, we take a listener recommendation and look at the introduction to “Marx and the Earth: An Anti-Critique” by John Bellamy Foster and Paul Burkett.

We are pleased to announce a victory in our Minnesota Valve Turner case! This trial was a rollercoaster with many twists and turns, but all three defendants were acquitted of their charges this morning in court. They were acquitted, not on the necessity defense, but because the prosecution could not meet the burden of proof that they had committed a crime.

The Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C released today by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), provides a stark profile of the disruptive climate futures we face with rising temperatures and the ‘rapid and far-reaching’ transitions across major sectors of the global economy that are now needed if warming is to be limited to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.