Environment

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....
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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A recent EU study headed by a Deutsche bank economist reveals that global economic loss through deforestation is vastly greater than economic loss through the current crisis in the world’s banks (Nature loss ‘dwarfs bank crisis’). The study puts the estimated annual loss at between 2 and $5 trillion. Graphs of consumption or growth trends...
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Poisoned for Pennies – The economics of toxics and precaution: principal author Frank Ackerman with Lisa Heinzerling, Rachel Massey, Wendy Johnecheck, and Elizabeth Stanton (2008)   The purpose of Ackerman’s book is to expose the weaknesses of the “cost-benefit method” of economic analysis, which has been promoted heavily since the Reagan administration, and...
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Capitalism has a nasty habit of suddenly laying a ton of grief on unsuspecting members of the working class. A typical example is when the employees of Consumers Glass in Etobicoke, Ontario, were recently told the plant was going to be shut down just two weeks after they had negotiated a union contract. But...
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