CLIMATE CRISIS
Rupert Read writes: In financial parlance, a ‘black swan’ is a radically unexpected event. Ever-worsening man-made climate change (that is, barring a system change) is not a potential ‘black swan’ event. It’s a white swan, an expected event. It is, quite simply, completely what anyone with a basic understanding of the situation should now expect….
Read More about Why climate change is a ‘white swan’Bookshelf
“What you see in a lot of countries is a predatory capitalism, from Afghanistan to Pakistan to Australia, which show the corporations that are involved in the neo-liberal agenda, an agenda that has been implemented without really any public consent. This is happening, I would argue, almost by stealth,” says author and journalist Anthony Lowenstein….
Read More about How vulture capitalism is swallowing the world
Gopal Aggarwal/Wikimedia Commons
Development/Growth
Andrew Russell writes: The most undervalued forms of technological labour are also the most ordinary: those who repair and maintain technologies that already exist. This shift in emphasis involves focusing on the constant processes of entropy and un-doing– and the work we do to slow or halt them, rather than on introduction of novel things….
Read More about Innovation is overrated; it’s maintenance that matters moreCLIMATE CRISIS
Carbon Brief reports: Four years of current emissions would be enough to blow what’s left of the carbon budget for a good chance of keeping global temperature rise to 1.5C. That’s the conclusion of this analysis, which brings the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s carbon budgets up to date to include global emissions in 2016….
Read More about Analysis: Just four years left of the 1.5C carbon budget
ALTERNATIVES
From Kosmos Journal: What if we told you that humanity is being driven to the brink of extinction by an illness? That all the poverty, the climate devastation, the perpetual war, and consumption fetishism all around us have roots in a mass psychological infection? What if this infection is not just highly communicable but also self-replicating?…
Read More about Seeing Wetiko: On capitalism, mind viruses, and antidotes for a world in transitionCLIMATE CRISIS
Rupert Read, a philosophy professor at the University of East Anglia, UK, recently shocked his new 1st year students with a ‘welcoming address’ that dealt with the looming dangers of climate change. Watch the video or read the transcript of his speech below to know why Prof. Read chose to dwell on this unexpected subject….
Read More about Rupert Read: Why I had to tell my students that I fear for them
Bookshelf
This review by Alice Friedmann of Nafeez Ahmed’s new book has 3 parts: 1) Why states collapse for reasons other than economic and political 2) How Bio-Physical factors contribute to systemic collapse in Syria, Yemen, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Nigeria 3) Predictions of when collapse will begin in Middle-East, India, China, Europe, Russia, North America…
Read More about Red alert: A timeline for global collapseALTERNATIVES
The 2017 Center For Progressive Urban Politics Summit brought together an amazing panel that consisted of John Michael Greer, James Howard Kunstler, Chris Martenson, Frank Morris, and Dmitry Orlov. In this video, the panelists talk about global issues ranging from politics, the economy, the food we eat, immigration, labor, poverty, minorities, war, and much more….
Read More about Watch: Leading thinkers on the converging crises and alternatives
ALTERNATIVES
Jeremy Lent writes: We’re going to be hearing a lot about grand solutions to our climate emergency in the coming years. There’s no shortage of proposals for how to do this. We need a way to distinguish authentic pathways to a sustainable civilization from false solutions. I suggest three ways to consider any such proposal….
Read More about False solutions? 3 ways to evaluate grand climate proposals
Consumerism/Lifestyle
CBC News reports: A new report has calculated the total mass of all manmade things-from buildings to cars and computers- to be an astounding 30 trillion tons, seven times more than the total amount of living matter on Earth. It shows the sheer magnitude of the human impact on our planet, which is still growing….
Read More about Earth’s ‘technosphere’ now weighs 30 trillion tons, research finds
SvitalskyBros
ALTERNATIVES
Editor’s Note: Last week, Ecologise carried the well-known Marxist scholar John Bellamy Foster’s foreword to a new book, Facing the Anthropocene. In response, noted eco-socialist writer Saral Sarkar posted a comment questioning the usefulness of Marxist analysis in understanding the global ecological crisis. This short piece, first published on Ecologise, is Foster’s reply to Sarkar….
Read More about Marxism, ecology and the Anthropocene: A debate
Representative pic
Conserve/Resist
Souparna Lahiri writes: How will forests provide for such high energy demands being put on them, especially in the name of renewables? In the Global South, there’s a rise in monoculture tree plantations for biofuels, or wood. Biofuel plantations have already caused the clearing of rainforests and threatened animals and humans that depend on them….
Read More about Why our approach to World Forests Day is a threat to forests
CLIMATE CRISIS
Globalization seems to be looked on as an unmitigated “good” by economists. Unfortunately, they miss the point that the world is finite. We don’t have infinite resources, or unlimited ability to handle excess pollution. So we’re setting up a “solution” that is at best temporary. Here’s why globalization is, in fact, a very major problem….
Read More about Gail Tverberg: Twelve reasons why globalisation is a huge problem
Countercurrents.org
ALTERNATIVES
From Countercurrents.org: Human cultural evolution can be regarded as an enormous success in many respects. However, thoughtful observers agree that civilization is entering a period of crisis. As all curves move exponentially upward: population, production, consumption, etc, one can observe signs of increasing environmental stress, while the existence of nuclear weapons threaten civilization with destruction….
Read More about Information theory pioneer John Scales Avery on the planet’s converging crises
ALTERNATIVES
John Bellamy Foster writes in the foreword: It’s capitalism and the alienated global environment it has produced that constitutes our “burning house” today. Mainstream environmentalists have generally chosen to do little more than contemplate it, while flames lick the roof and the entire structure threatens to collapse around them. The point, rather, is to change it….
Read More about Bookshelf: Facing the Anthropocene: Fossil Capitalism and the Crisis of the Earth SystemCLIMATE CRISIS
Dave Lindorff writes: The concern is that if the Arctic Ocean waters were to warm even slightly, as they will do as the ice cap vanishes in summer, at some point the clathrates which have currently trapped massive amounts of methane will suddenly dissolve releasing tens of thousands of gigatons of methane in huge bursts….
Read More about Why trapped methane in the Arctic is a problem for allCLIMATE CRISIS
David Korten writes that if don’t make a collective choice to heal the planet and build a fundamentally more equitable society, we’ll see intensifying competition for shrinking resources and habitable spaces. Activist Mary Robinson explains why climate change Is a threat to human rights and asks us to join the movement for worldwide climate justice….
Read More about The biggest refugee crisis since WWII is a sign of a planet in trouble
Campaigners outside Pretoria high court during South Africa’s first climate change lawsuit.
James Oatway/CER
ALTERNATIVES
The Guardian reports: Around the world courts are stepping in when politicians fail to act, with South Africa’s government the latest to lose a groundbreaking climate lawsuit with judges ruling against its plans for a new coal-fired power station. The government’s approval of the proposed Thabametsi coal-fired power station was challenged by NGO EarthLife Africa….
Read More about How climate change battles are increasingly being fought, and won, in court
Oil giant Exxon is facing an investigation for suppressing evidence of Climate Change in the late 1970s
CLIMATE CRISIS
The Paris climate agreement was hailed by Al Gore as the moment when “the community of nations finally made the decision to act”. But there’s been no readjustment of energy stock prices since then. Indeed, the flotation of a tranche of Saudi oil giant Aramco, is expected to create the most valuable company on earth….
Read More about Ben Chu: Financial markets are now betting against the future of the planetConflict/Dispossession
Deepa Bhasthi writes in The Guardian: The illegal dumping of waste mixed with mass untreated sewage in Bangalore is creating a water crisis which threatens residents’ health–and is causing the city’s famous lakes to catch fire. This is the new story of the city, which some scientists believe will be “unliveable” in a few years….
Read More about City of burning lakes: experts fear Bangalore will be uninhabitable by 2025
