Subjects Archives: Environment

The latest IPCC report paints a picture of five potential futures for humanity. In the worst one, if corporations keep calling the shots, we could see catastrophic warming of up to 5.7˚C.

“The expropriation of the mass of the people from the soil forms the basis of the capitalist mode of production.” (Karl Marx)

The task includes planting 54 million mu of trees and 46 million mu of grass each year, said Zhang Wei, head of the ecological protection and restoration department of the National Forestry and Grassland Administration (NFGA).

‘The increased atomization of society and associated political economy of capitalism justifies the logic of reductionism’. – Richard Lewontin

The United Nations issued a “code red for humanity” warning earlier this month with over 3,000 pages of scientific documentation saying that the climate crisis has reached a point where we can expect extreme weather including heat waves, flooding and droughts to happen with more frequency and intensity.

Speaking on the impact of the climate crisis on First People, Gavin Singleton from the Yirrganydji traditional owners explained that ‘From changing weather patterns to shifts in natural ecosystems, climate change is a clear and present threat to our people and our culture’.

The report explicitly states that incremental change is not a viable option. It states that individual behavioural changes alone are insignificant. It states that justice, equity and redistribution are essential to climate policy.

Salt Lake City has ranked first for worst air quality in the world twice in the past two weeks. While poor air quality is not a new problem for Utah, the climate crisis is exacerbating the problem due to the devastating increase in wildfires caused in large part by climate change-fueled severe droughts throughout the region in the warmer months.

Another leak of the UN report warns that the only known way to avert climate breakdown is to avoid any model which is based on perpetual growth.

When the big shutdown finally takes hold in the Bakken, the frackers will have gone and most wells abandoned, and people in the region will still have to deal with the illegal trash dumps, polluted streams, health problems, and other unfortunate effects of the boom.

According to this conceptual genealogy sketched by literary theorist Justin Clemens, two important homophonic variants of “Pandemick” emerged in the aftermath of the English Civil Wars.

The dog days of summer are upon us—and the record high temperatures killing hundreds in the Pacific Northwest and bringing 118 degree heat to Siberia serve as a harbinger of even hotter, more dangerous days unless we address the elephant in the room.

It’s devastating. It’s scary. Because we don’t know what’s going on with this fish.’ – JOAQLIN ESTUS

This summer, dangerous heat seems like it’s not letting up.

The sixth report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) runs to nearly 4,000 pages. The IPCC has tried to summarise its report as the ‘final opportunity’ to avoid climate catastrophe.

The question of economic growth and its relation to the climate crisis is a subject of increasing discussion. Here we offer a Marxist view on this critical issue for the environmental movement.

Russia’s Rostec will provide “advanced technology” and train Venezuelan personnel to recover the country’s sanctions-hit power facilities.

The alarm bells are deafening, and the evidence is irrefutable: greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel burning and deforestation are choking our planet and putting billions of people at immediate risk.

“All progress in capitalist agriculture is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the worker, but of robbing the soil.” (Karl Marx)

The current complex of COVID-induced crises fits hand-in-glove with the system’s “normal” operation. Stability has been the delusional realm of a small sliver of the Global North, awash in post-World War Two imperialism and the repeated reinvention (and re-imposition) of various plantation systems of cheap and racialized labor.