Water has always been an issue in the American west. For 90 years, Nevada and six other south-western states have shared the waters of the once-mighty Colorado river, according to an established formula. It became clear, however, that the allocations of water decided in 1922 were overly optimistic about the projected rivers flows of the Colorado. Nevada, which for years has been drawing more water from its Lake Mead reservoir than has been flowing in, could be at serious risk of going dry in 20 years. Las Vegas needed a Plan B. ”When you have got a community of 2...
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A tree surgeon reflects on why no business can give due regard to the needs of workers and the environment I am, I suppose, a businessman; not, I should say, from choice but more from the need to follow a prescribed and necessary course; necessary, because, were one not to, inevitably the business would fail and fall by the wayside. I say businessman, now, but thirty years ago I would have called myself a ‘tree surgeon’, or ‘woodman’ without the slightest feeling of inadequacy or embarrassment. Admittedly the term ‘tree surgeon’ does sound rather more grand than the reality...
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The Copenhagen Conference on climate change is over and done, the fourteenth in the last two decades since Kyoto. What did this latest one accomplish? Fifteen thousand delegates from one hundred and ninety-three UN members attended. It was generally agreed that the earth’s average temperature rise be kept at no more than two degrees. To achieve that goal, there were many promises – US promised 17% reductions of carbon emissions from 2005 levels, China promised a 45% cut in energy emissions (not from economic output), India 20-25% reductions, and Europe 30% reductions from 1990 levels – but there was...
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Enthusiasm continues apace for the online movie-cum-movement phenomenon Zeitgeist, with its articulate, clean-cut and photogenic presenter Peter Joseph touring even harder than Bob Dylan, it seems, to bring word to the world about the ‘resource-based economy’ idea which sounds so new to everyone else and so uncannily like socialism to us. Socialists should applaud and encourage the efforts of Peter Joseph and Zeitgeist activists everywhere to popularise the ideas of non-market production for use, especially because anti-socialists everywhere will do their best to discredit them with any damn-fool argument they can think of. That’s not to say that there...
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Given the competitive nature of capitalism any agreement on trying to deal with climate change was bound to be feeble and inadequate, If we were living in a rationally-organised world, and a problem such as the threat of a too rapid global warming arose, a co-ordinated global response would be organised as a matter of course. If it was generally agreed amongst scientists specialising in the field that the problem had been caused mainly by the burning of fossil fuels, then steps would be taken to cut this back and to phase in alternative sources of energy. The problems...
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At a recent bookfair in Toronto, members of an organization called, “Supreme Master” handed out leaflets on climate change. The main thrust of their argument is that greenhouse gases are not the major cause of global warming, but de-forestation for cattle grazing land is. To support this contention they offer various statistics, some of which are interesting, and could well be true, e.g. Over 75% of tree cutting in the Amazon rainforest is done for meat production. Livestock produces more greenhouse gases than all world-wide transportation combined. The Arctic sea reflects about 80% of the sun’s heat, stabilizing the...
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Derrick Jensen, a prolific (and well known) anti-capitalist and environmentalist has written a pretty good argument for the need for political change on a system wide basis. Forget Shorter Hours (subtitled “Why personal change does not equal political change”.) Jensen, who writes from a radical environmental perspective, says: Part of the problem is that we’ve been victims of a campaign of systematic misdirection. Consumer culture and the capitalist mindset have taught us to substitute acts of personal consumption (or enlightenment) for organized political resistance. An Inconvenient Truth helped raise consciousness about global warming. But did you notice that all...
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Bianca Jagger participating in a demonstration during the United Nations climate change conference in Poznan, Poland “The politicians just don’t seem to get the seriousness of the global warming crisis. Scientists attending the recent UN climate conference in Poznan, Poland, complained that the gap between political rhetoric and scientific reality on climate change is growing.”It doesn’t matter what the politicians promise,” said French climate scientist Phillipe Ciasis. “Even if we stop emissions growing today, the world will still warm by 2 °C – a lot more in some places. It is too late to prevent that.” Ciais was at...
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Book Review from the December 2008 issue of the Socialist Standard Green Capitalism. Manufacturing Scarcity in an Age of Abundance. By James Heartfield. www.heartfield.org .2008 James Heartfield is associated with the former Trotskyist (British) Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) which used to publish Living Marxism (LM) and has moved on considerably since “the collapse of Communism” at the end of the 1980′s and the dissolution of the formal RCP organisation in 1997. These days the so-called “LM network” produces the edgy www.spiked-online.com website and organises debates and events under the auspices of the Institute of Ideas and a myriad of...
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Over the last few centuries, one region of the planet after another has been “opened up” to capitalist plunder. Often rival capitalist powers fought over the spoils of conquest. In the 19th century they had the “scramble for Africa.” In the 21st they are scrambling to control the resources of the Arctic, which global warming and technological advance are making accessible to exploitation (Socialist Standard, September 2007). Once the Arctic and Antarctic are brought fully under the sway of capital, what next? Won’t that be the end of the story, the closing of the last frontier? There remains space,...
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