In this context, we sat down with long-time anarchist author and organizer Peter Gelderloos, to talk about the present moment, the path ahead for autonomous movements, and the harsh realities in front of us.

IGD: You address climate change in your book, The Solutions Are Already Here, what do you make of the current moment that we are in?

Peter Gelderloos: I think we are in a very critical moment where mainstream voices are identifying a tipping point in relation to recent and recurring extreme weather events, like the hottest Northern Hemisphere summer in recorded history, what’s been called the worst flooding in Greek history after a rare Mediterranean tropical storm, with the heavy rains coming just weeks after the largest wildfires ever recorded in Europe, the very first tropical storm warning in California owing to a rare Pacific hurricane, the largest wildfires in recorded history in so-called Canada…

I think this is such a critical moment because the way the media, NGOs, academics, and governments are conditioning us to think about the crisis is simultaneously an enormous lie and an enormous truth. First the truth: the way that the Earth’s atmosphere has been altered is visible in our every day lives, it is killing people, and it is getting worse. This truth is important because it means it is an urgent question of our survival – and therefore a legitimate question of self-defense – and it reaffirms that we can trust our own experiences and observations, provided we are actually rooted in and attentive towards the world around us. We can fit our daily lives and our experience in one corner of the world into a solidaristic and cohesive global narrative.

The lie is this: that these deaths are unprecedented, that climate change is an appropriate framework for understanding these deaths, and that we can trust current scientific models around tipping points, around predictions of “when it’s too late,” around carbon offset and emissions reductions schemes.

IGD: Was there a turning point – whatever that means – this summer? It seems we’ve reached a peak within popular consciousness with the record heat wave. Does this mean anything?

Peter Gelderloos: There was not a tipping point, and the apparent peak in consciousness has been a triumph of false consciousness. Because the truth is it was too late a long time ago. Depending on where you look in the world and what forms of life you decide to value, it was too late one thousand years ago, it was too late 531 years ago, it was too late 101 years ago, it was too late 50 years ago.

The truth is that for decades already, entire ecosystems and many of the species that make them up have been completely destroyed, for decades already tens of million of humans are dying every year as a result of this broad ecological crisis, and for centuries the extractivist societal forms responsible for the ecological crisis have been colonizing and eradicating the societal forms that take care of their ecosystems and that also tend to resist human-to-human oppressions.

The truth is that while the scientific method for producing knowledge does have a demonstrable value, models for predicting ecosystemic tipping points and the rate of climatic change have proven largely unreliable and generally conservative, so that specific branch of science has demonstrated is too faulty to bear any strategic weight when we are facing life-and-death choices.

The truth is that “climate crisis” is a framework that belongs to those who are trying to murder us and profit off it. The climate is just one part of a greater and interconnected crisis, and if we only focus on the climate, we will never see the root causes and the worst forms of suffering that are going on. This crisis is not caused by humans. It is not “anthropogenic.” It is caused by those humans who have given their lives over to a framework of institutions that are extractivist and oppressive to their cores, institutions that have the power to force the rest of us into line and participate in their life-devouring society whether we choose to resist or choose to look the other way. This framework, fundamentally, means the State.

As I demonstrated in Worshiping Power all states are extractivist and all states in history have been ecocidal. A shared trait of those who want to reform Leviathan, whether these are XR campaigners, climate researchers, paid NGO activists, authoritarian Marxists, or crypto-authoritarians, is that they try to hide or decenter the role of the State in this crisis. Previously, states only provoked regional ecological collapses, which was one major impetus for their systematic turn towards colonial expansion.

The extractivist systems that states represent, though, must expand or die. Since the revolutions that have been overthrowing states for thousands of years were not able to cultivate a sufficiently global and systemic consciousness, the only other option was that states would create a world system. And this means inventing the possibility of a global ecological crisis. The modern state found a suitable engine in capitalism, and it found a world-devouring worldview capable of organizing intercontinental colonization in white supremacy. On Planet Earth, there is no capitalism that is not colonial and thus racial, there is no capitalism without the State, and there is no state that is not extractivist and patriarchal and thus ecocidal and oppressive, an enemy to all life.

IGD: This summer, we saw both a slew of neoliberal articles on ‘life hacks‘ on how to adjust your body to extreme temperatures as well as in Greece, a wave of anti-migrant sentiment as fires rages and conspiracy theories spread. How do we push back against this?

Peter Gelderloos: It is inevitable that when we have a false consciousness around a crisis like this, the hegemonic responses will be individualistic–privileging the consumer with money to spend ethically, the citizen with the right to vote for better candidates, both of them revitalizing the institutions that have caused this crisis–or they will promote pseudo-communities like the nation-state, with their artificial, bloody borders, and their ready cast of scapegoats and villains, who are nearly always pure inventions or more oppressed groups of people, simultaneously internal and external, always too foreign to comprehend and close enough to pose a threat.

Fortunately there is a synthesis between strategies and goals when we are honest with ourselves about what we are facing. Patriarchal society and colonial capitalism, organized by the State, are the enemy to all life. They have proven we cannot share this planet with them, and we do not need to because they are not living beings. They are a hard limit. Only up to that limit is it possible to have a world in which many worlds fit.

The major strategic obstacles to destroying the State are the two arms of the State, the Left and the Right (understanding Left in its historical sense and not in its amnesiac anglophone non-sense, in which it is reputed to mean vague, unspecified, good, incoherent things). To generalize, the Left renews, updates, and revitalizes oppressive structures, giving us Black cops, women millionaires, and recycled toilet paper, and the Right punishes resistance with the attempt to eradicate it. When you get into the messy details, the Left also carries out policing, and the Right also tries to renew oppressive structures like the nation-state, but the point is they both serve the State. In moments of social peace, they are more coordinated, in moments of social upheaval like the present one, they are unable to see past their alibi-giving mythologies and increasingly suspect one another of being a threat to Leviathan as a whole.

IGD: We’re seeing things like eco-systems being hit in big ways due to ice melting and other signs of life support systems being impacted – what do you see happening in the coming years that we should be ready for that is going to impact the situation here in so-called North America?

Peter Gelderloos: That question needs to be answered within every specific bioregion, with their specific human and ecological histories. The consumerist patterns of movement that are prevalent in North America, especially in middle-class circles, make it impossible to create those answers. An inability to listen also makes it impossible. Men and white people are all socialized not to listen, so we need to emphasize learning how to. Those who have bought into Western civilization, who, for example, treat their smartphones with more respect than they do people around them, are never going to be able to come up with adequate, rooted answers to the question of surviving-together. Anyone who scoffs at the idea of listening to migratory birds, to forests, to mountains, have no fucking clue and will not even be capable of finding the real conversation that is providing these answers.

Here is an analytical tool that might help. What defines a person? We should consider that a person is any being with whom dialogue is possible and meaningful. Therefore a cop or a millionaire, while human, are not people. The blue jay outside my window is a person. Let’s give our attention and care to people, since if they are people we can share a world with them. Let’s aim our rage and our destructive abilities at the institutions and their loyal robots, because they will never share a world with us.

IGD: The big climate movement is off the streets right at a time when things are at their worst. As anarchists and participants in autonomous movements, what’s the way forward?

Peter Gelderloos: This is also a conversation that I think needs to happen in every corner of the world, though I suspect a smaller number of patterns will stand out than in the conversation about what each particular ecosystem needs to do to survive and adapt.

In the past twenty years, on every continent, we have toppled long-standing regimes, we have defeated the police, we have helped an anti-racist, anti-colonial, and ecological consciousness temporarily become the norm, and we have helped marginalized groups win more spaces for survival, for healing, for joy. (Not a we helping a them but a we-among-us helping ourselves and another we-among-us standing in solidarity with others among us helping themselves.) We’ve accomplished things that in the prior two decades seemed unimaginable.

And our wave of powerful rebellions clearly preceded the economic downturn of 2007/2008. It is vital to remember this and pass this memory on, especially because the priests of materialism are clawing back out of their well deserved graves to try to tell us that we are objects secondary to the calculations of global monetary systems, despite how deadly wrong they proved to be the last time we gave them a hearing, a few generations back. We are not those objects. We are living beings, battered by numerous intersecting oppressive systems that operate in both quantifiable and unquantifiable ways, and we make choices, and those choices matter. We are neither individuals nor identical objects.

Since that wave of rebellions, though, we have lost ground in most places around the world. We need to ask ourselves why, thoroughly and unafraid of what we might learn, and we must share those lessons because our survival depends on them.

I believe in many places we will find that we succumbed to repression, because we had not learned the lessons of previous generations on how to survive it and because we have not valued the roles of care and healing and survival as much as we have valued the role of the attack. And I say that as someone who has spent my life trying to build our capacity to attack and to validate those attacks, given how pacified we were in the ’90s and ’00s. But no oppressive society can be destroyed by negation alone, and those who attack need to also know how to survive the reactions to those attacks.

In other places, we have succumbed to authoritarian currents taking over social movements and spaces of rebellion. (In truth, repression and recuperation always happen together, but one of the two might be predominant, one might fail and then the next succeed.) The repressive forces of the State are immense, and when we can’t withstand them, the most we can do is lick our wounds and identify what we might have done better. However, when movements and spaces of resistance leave us behind, it is nearly always a direct result of internal failures that were not inevitable.

Did we uphold norms around participation that favored those with more resources–the university educated, the middle class, the neurotypical, people without trauma or chronic health problems, people without children or others to take care, people with citizenship, white people? Did we reproduce patriarchal value systems around communication styles, around what forms of struggle are celebrated and rewarded, what forms are ignored, what forms are exploited?

Did we forget our history and enter into non-critical alliances with NGOs and political parties, or sideline ourselves with an expedient acceptance of a single-issue focus, a reformist framework? Did we repeat the great error of antifascism and see only the Right as a danger, while giving a pass to democracy or authoritarian socialists? Did we create a new error of nihilism, so that the historically valid critiques offered by insurrectionalism were drowned in a renewed fetishism of armed groups (ironic, given the exact context the insurrectionary critique was reacting to).

Did we let ourselves be conditioned by dogmatism or the architecture of social networks and create spaces of resistance that were so toxic, only bullies and sycophants could thrive there? Did we fail to develop practices of survival, of healing, of transformation, of mutual growth, so that all we had was a hammer and all we could see were nails?

Did we fail to connect struggles in decentralized ways, spreading logics of solidarity that allowed everyone to support and learn from one another, while not allowing anyone to take over? Did we forget to develop strategies for the day after, how to spread joyous, meaningful life, once we’d burnt everything? Have we lost the ability to imagine being anything else, creating anything else, living any other way?

IGD: Tell us how you are doing – you recently had a fundraiser for your health, how can people support you?

Peter Gelderloos: I am doing, alternately, terribly and wonderfully, which is normal for me since I’m bipolar. My tumor is considered incurable but treatable, so from a doctor’s point of view it’s a question of extending life expectancy, improving their stats. That’s not how I’m going to approach my life and my death.

I’ll get the support I need from myself and those closest to me. Anyone reading this because I have a platform because books or whatever, I would ask them to think about a few things. Many more people are getting cancer and other fatal or chronic health problems. Sickness is not an individual affair. Our world is sick. People deserve whatever space they need as they heal or as they die, but the sickness itself cannot remain private. We need to put our tumors, our inflammations, our breakdowns, our tears, our dead, carry them with bloody hands and put them on capitalism’s doorstep. Not to demand compensation or redress, but as the only explanation we need, the only possible word of truth, before we burn it all down, Leviathan and all those who choose to defend it instead of defending life.

Suffering cannot keep happening behind these metaphorically closed doors. Those who take care of us when we are suffering are our truest comrades. Learn from them and take care of them, for fuck’s sake.

Don’t support me, support all of us. This is a collective problem.

Maybe we could foster struggles that are worth living for and dying for. Maybe we could imagine worlds where we’d actually like to live, where we’d feel grateful to lay our bodies down once our time has come.

Thanks for running this site, and all the work you do for all of us.

______

SOURCE: https://itsgoingdown.org/heating-up-peter-gelderloos-interview/

The post Heating Up: An Interview with Peter Gelderloos on Climate Change and the Fight to Change Everything appeared first on Void Network.

The turbines proposed vastly exceed the islands’ actual needs and are meant to outsource energy to other Greek locations. The wind turbines will not only visually impact the islands’ landscape, but they will have effects on their morphology and climate,, endangering both their flora and fauna and, consequently, the agricultural, livestock and touristic sectors of their economies. Undoubtedly, this will diminish the landscape’s environmental and cultural value and place the livelihood of local communities at risk.

A study recently published by the University of Ioannina demonstrates that Greece can meet its EU target for the installation of renewable energy systems without any further permit for wind turbines in nature preservation areas. Elliniki Etairia “Society for the Environment and Cultural Heritage”  submitted a proposal to exclude nature preservation areas from the wind turbine programme to the Greek Ministry of Environment and Energy.

Elliniki Etairia, Europa Nostra’s country representation in Greece, nominated these Five Southern Aegean Islands for the 7 Most Endangered Programme 2021. Elliniki Etairia has fought for a sustainable lifestyle using renewable energy since 1972. However, in the case of these Five Southern Aegean Islands, Elliniki Etairia seeks for alternative and balanced clean-energy solutions rather than wind parks, together with an in-depth consultation process with local communities and experts. Elliniki Etairia has recently been contacted by many other community groups and municipalities requesting similar advice and support.

The siting of renewable energy infrastructure in (protected) cultural landscapes is among the potential conflicts between heritage safeguarding and European Green Deal action identified in the recently launched European Cultural Heritage Green Paper “Putting Europe’s shared heritage at the heart of the European Green Deal”. This Paper reflects our firm conviction that, in the case of such tensions, ‘win-win’ scenarios are both desirable and attainable on the basis of a proper consultation process with local communities and heritage experts.

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source: http://7mostendangered.eu/sites/five-southern-aegean-islands-greece

The post SOS Five Greek Islands in great danger appeared first on Void Network.

Indigenous peoples have faced the end of the world before. Now, humankind is on a collective march towards the abyss. Global pandemics, extreme weather, and massive wildfires define this era many now call the Anthropocene.

From Brazil comes Ailton Krenak, renowned Indigenous activist and leader, who demonstrates that our current environmental crisis is rooted in society’s flawed concept of “humanity” — that human beings are superior to other forms of nature and are justified in exploiting it as we please.

To stop environmental disaster, Krenak argues that we must reject the homogenizing effect of this perspective and embrace a new form of “dreaming” that allows us to regain our place within nature. In Ideas to Postpone the End of the World, he shows us the way.

Reviews:

“Ailton Krenak’s words, expressed with the visceral intensity of one of those peoples who ‘still consider the need to stay attached to this land, ‘ … fill me with hope. Amid the successive catastrophes we experience today, he surprises us once again by teaching that the fight for a better world, a world that can be called home, involves not only explicit activism, but dance, music, the stories we tell at night.” — Aparecida Vilaça, anthropologist and author of Strange Enemies: Indigenous Agency and Scenes of Encounters in Amazonia and Praying and Preying: Christianity in Indigenous Amazonia

About the Contributors:

Ailton Krenak was born in Minas Gerais, Brazil, in the Krenak homelands along the Doce River Valley, a region where mining operations have severely affected the ecology. A socio-environmental activist and campaigner for Indigenous rights, he organized the Alliance of Forest Peoples, which unites riverine and Indigenous communities throughout the Amazon. He has consistently been one of the best-known campaigners in the movement set in motion by the Indigenous Awakening in the 1970s and was a key figure in the formation of the Union of Indigenous Nations (UIN), which brought together 180 different Indigenous groups across the country in a unified front to push for rights. In his capacity as a journalist, producing videos and making television appearances, he has pursued an educational and environmental agenda. His struggles in the 1970s and 1980s were instrumental in the inclusion of Chapter VIII of the Brazilian Constitution (1988), which guaranteed Indigenous rights to their ancestral homelands and traditional cultures — on paper at least. He was co-author of the UNESCO proposal that led to the creation of the Serra do Espinhaço Biosphere Reserve in 2005, and remains a member of its managing committee. He was awarded the Order of Cultural Merit by the President of the Republic in 2016, and holds an honorary doctorate from the Federal University of Juiz de Fora, Minas Gerais. He is the author of two previous books, and was recently featured in the Netflix documentary series Guerras do Brasil.doc (Wars of Brazil).

Anthony Doyle was born in Dublin, Ireland. He holds a degree in English Literature and Philosophy and a master’s degree in Philosophy from University College Dublin. He has been living in Brazil since 2000, where he works as a freelance translator of fiction and non-fiction. He is the author of a children’s book in Portuguese entitled O Lago Secou, published by Companhia das Letras.

____________________________

Ideas to Postpone the End of the World

by Ailton Krenak,

Translated by Anthony Doyle

10/6/2020, paperback

Anansi International

SKU: 9781487008512

more info and order here

The post Ideas to Postpone the End of the World- a book by Ailton Krenak appeared first on Void Network.

A study released Tuesday by the Oakland Institute details an “unprecedented wave of privatization of natural resources that is underway around the world”—one that is largely being driven by the United States and its allies.

According to the progressive think tank’s report (pdf), “Driving Dispossession: The Global Push to Unlock the Economic Potential of Land”, governments around the world—particularly in developing countries—are often put under pressure by financial institutions and Western agencies to open up land for so-called “productive use” by miners, agribusiness interests, and other corporate entities intent on exploiting natural resources for profit. 

The U.S. in particular, the report says, is a “key player in an unfettered offensive to privatize land around the world.”

With deforestation and fossil fuel extraction helping to fuel the climate crisis, governments are being pushed in a direction that’s “just the opposite of the drastic shift we need to win the struggle against climate change,” Frederic Mousseau, policy director of the Oakland Institute and lead author of the report, said in a statement.

“Most of the land on our planet, especially in the Global South, is public land or land held under customary tenure systems [and] is seen as an obstacle to exploitation and economic growth,” Mousseau said.

The Oakland Institute included in its report six case studies in Ukraine, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Zambia, Papua New Guinea, and Brazil, finding that global land privatization is often directly driven by U.S. interests. 

Zambia has been affected by what the Institute calls a recent “surge of American and European startups attempting to apply blockchain technology to land registries,” referring to the digital ledger created for Bitcoin. 

The Zambian government is partnering with Medici Land Governance (MLG), a blockchain company and subsidiary of the U.S. online retailer Overstock.com, to assist with land registration and titling. According to former Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne, the use of blockchain “will help unlock trillions of dollars in global mineral reserves that are inaccessible due to unclear land governance systems.”

In Sri Lanka, a U.S. government entity known as the Millenium Challenge Corporation (MCC) approved a five-year compact for the country in 2019, offering the Sri Lankan government $480 million to map and digitize public lands in order to “promote land transactions that could stimulate investment and increase its use as an economic asset.”

“The proposed MCC compact would shift control of millions of hectares away from the state towards private interests,” the report says, and was proposed by a U.S. entity formed in 2002 by Congress with the stated goal of “reducing poverty through growth.”

“In practice, poverty alleviation has taken a back seat to promoting private sector growth,” the report continues. “This has translated to countries shifting their policies in adherence to a neoliberal economic framework—including the privatization and commodification of land—in exchange for substantial financial grants.”

MCC compacts throughout Africa have “allowed investors to acquire land at bargain prices to facilitate large-scale industrial agriculture at the expense of smallholder farmers,” the Oakland Institute added.

The study also points to Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro’s aggressive push to assume control of Indigenous territories in the Amazon Rainforest, appointing a member of one the country’s most powerful agribusiness families to head the Ministry of Agriculture. Illegal land invasions and massive fires driven by agriculture and mining interests have threatened Indigenous people while contributing to deforestation and the climate crisis. 

As the Institute published the report while the Covid-19 pandemic is upending the global economy, the report points out that “returning to normal is not an option.”

Instead, the economic crisis “must be used as a catalyst to address the systematic issues surrounding the rampant overexploitation of natural resources that has driven the climate crisis to its current state.”

Rather than erasing local governance and negating individual autonomy, governments must instead build systems that incorporate a diversity of ownership and tenure systems, and focus on a development path that serves the people instead of one that takes the land away from them for corporate profits.”

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Source: CommonDreams.org

READ ALSO

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The fires in the Amazon have been among the top news stories in the world for the past week because it is such an iconic location that is so important to the global ecosystem. However, it is important to note that these events come at a time where many other fires are burning across the world, some even larger and more widespread than those in the Amazon.

The World Meteorological Organization announced that this fire season has been unprecedented for the Arctic Circle, with over 100 major fires reported in the region.

In Siberia, it has been reported that over 21,000 square miles of the forest were recently damaged. Some reports, from Global News and other outlets, have indicated that these fires were started intentionally to conceal illegal logging activities, but these reports have not been confirmed.

A fire in Spain’s Canary Islands cased 9,000 people to evacuate. Another Spanish island off the northern coast of Africa, Gran Canaria, lost about 46,000 square miles of woodland due to fires this year.

At this moment, it seems that the largest fires in the world are currently burning in Angola, Africa.

According to MODIS satellite data analyzed by Weather Source, 6,902 fires broke out in Angola in the 48 hours between August 21st and 23rd. During the same time, 3,395 fires were reported in the Democratic Republic of Congo and 2,127 in Brazil.

Large wildfires are not uncommon in Central Africa this time of year, but once again, many of these fires are intentionally set by humans attempting to clear space for agriculture businesses.

According to data from the NASA Aqua satellite, more than 67,000 fires were seen in just one week during June of last year.

Experts believe that most of these fires are the result of a farming technique, known as slash and burn, which as the name implies, involves the burning of forest to make room for crops. Obviously, there are other far less-reckless ways of getting the job done, but burning everything down just happens to be the fastest and the cheapest. The ash also provides nutrients to the crops that will eventually be planted, but environmentalists warn that this practice could cause deforestation, soil erosion and a loss of biodiversity.

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By John Vibes | TruthTheory.com 

The post It’s Not Just the Amazon — Massive Fires Are Burning All Over the World appeared first on Void Network.

So it may surprise you to learn that, at the moment, the main way in which the world employs trees to fight climate change is by cutting them down and burning them. Across much of Europe, countries and utilities are meeting their carbon-reduction targets by importing wood pellets from the southeastern United States and burning them in place of coal: giant ships keep up a steady flow of wood across the Atlantic. “Biomass makes up fifty per cent of the renewables mix in the E.U.,” Rita Frost, a campaigner for the Dogwood Alliance, a nonprofit organization based in Asheville, North Carolina, told me. And the practice could be on the rise in the United States, where new renewable-energy targets proposed by some Democrats and Republicans in Congress, as well as by the E.P.A., treat “biomass”—fuels derived from plants—as “carbon-neutral,” much to the pleasure of the forestry industry. “Big logging groups are up on Capitol Hill working hard,” Alexandra Wisner, the associate director of the Rachel Carson Council, told me, when I spoke with her recently.

The story of how this happened begins with good intentions. As concern about climate change rose during the nineteen-nineties, back when solar power, for instance, cost ten times what it does now, people casting about for alternatives to fossil fuels looked to trees. Trees, of course, are carbon—when you burn them you release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. But the logic went like this: if you cut down a tree, another will grow in its place. And, as that tree grows, it will suck up carbon from the atmosphere—so, in carbon terms, it should be a wash. In 2009, Middlebury College, where I teach, was lauded for replacing its oil-fired boilers with a small biomass plant; I remember how proud the students who first presented the idea to the board of trustees were.

William R. Moomaw, a climate and policy scientist who has published some of the most recent papers on the carbon cycle of forests, told me about the impact of biomass, saying, “back in those days, I thought it could be considered carbon neutral. But I hadn’t done the math. I hadn’t done the physics.” Once scientists did that work, they fairly quickly figured out the problem. Burning wood to generate electricity expels a big puff of carbon into the atmosphere now. Eventually, if the forest regrows, that carbon will be sucked back up. But eventually will be too long—as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change made clear last fall, we’re going to break the back of the climate system in the next few decades. For all intents and purposes, in the short term, wood is just another fossil fuel, and in climate terms the short term is mostly what matters. As an M.I.T. study put it last year, while the regrowth of forests, if it happens, can eventually repay the carbon debt created by the burning of wood pellets, that payback time ranges from forty-four years to a hundred and four in forests in the eastern U.S., and, in the meantime, the carbon you’ve emitted can produce “potentially irreversible impacts that may arise before the long-run benefits are realized.”

As the scientific research on this carbon debt emerged, in the past decade, at least a few of us in the environmental movement started voicing opposition to burning trees. The most effective leadership has come from the Southeast, where community activists have pointed out that logging rates are now the highest in the world, and that rural communities—often communities of color—are being disrupted by endless lines of logging trucks and by air pollution from plants where trees are turned into easy-to-ship pellets. Earlier this year, a proposal to build the largest pellet mill in the world, in Lucedale, Mississippi, drew opposition from a coalition that included the N.A.A.C.P. and which predicted that the plant would have a “disastrous effect on the people, wildlife, and climate.”

But Mississippi environmental officials approved an air permit for the plant, which would employ ninety full-time workers, and so far European officials have also turned a deaf ear to the opposition: new E.U. regulations will keep treating the cutting down of trees as carbon neutral at least through 2030, meaning that utilities can burn wood in their old plants and receive massive subsidies for theoretically reducing their emissions. The Drax power plant, in the North of England, which burns more wood than any power plant on Earth, gets 2.2 million dollars a day in subsidies. But a new study, commissioned by the Southern Environmental Law Center and released on Monday, makes clear that, even under the most conservative estimates, Drax’s burning of wood pellets that it imports from the American South will “increase carbon pollution in the atmosphere for more than forty years, well beyond the timeframe identified by the IPCC as critical for carbon reduction.”

European subsidies treat power plants that burn wood as the equivalent of, say, solar panels, despite the fact that, under even the most generous scenarios, they emit at least ten times as much carbon, when factoring in the energy that it takes to make the panels. “They’re looking for ways to shift their infrastructure without drastically overhauling it,” Bob Musil, a veteran-environmentalist who now runs the Rachel Carson Council, said. “Ways that don’t cause shifts in culture.” It’s remarkably similar to what happened in the United States with fracking: political leaders, including some in the Obama Administration, decided that the least-fuss way to replace coal would be with natural gas, only to learn that, as new science emerged, they had in fact replaced carbon emissions with leaking methane, which was making the climate crisis worse.

In this case, the greenwashing is particularly misleading, because burning trees defies the carbon math in another way, too: once they have been cut down, the trees won’t be there to soak up the carbon. “The Southeast U.S. is falsely seen as a sustainable source of wood,” Danna Smith, the executive director of the Dogwood Alliance, told me, because when the trees are cut down they can regrow—unlike, say, in the Amazon, where thin soils usually mean that when trees are cut down the land becomes pasture. She added, “But these forests are vital carbon sinks.”

In fact, the newest research shows just what folly biomass burning really is. This summer, William Moomaw was the co-author of a paper that tracked carbon accumulation in trees. Planting all those trees in Ethiopia definitely helps pull carbon from the air, but not as much as letting existing trees keep growing would. Unlike human beings, who gain most of their height in their early years, Moomaw explained to me, “trees grow more rapidly in their middle period, and that extends far longer than most people realize.” A stand of white pines, for instance, will take up twenty-two tons of carbon by its fiftieth year, which is about when it would get cut down to make pellets. “But, if you let it grow another fifty years, it adds twenty-five tons,” he said. “And in the next fifty years it adds 28.5 tons. It would be a mistake to cut them down when they’re forty and make plywood. It’s really foolish to cut them down when they’re forty and burn them, especially now that we’ve got cheap solar.” He calls letting trees stand and accumulate carbon “proforestation”—as opposed to reforestation.

source: The New Yorker

The post Don’t Burn Trees to Fight Climate Change / Let Them Grow – By Bill McKibben appeared first on Void Network.

Sometimes, when I write scary essays, I encourage you not to read them. This one’s different. It’s going to be brutal, scary, jarring, and alarming. But if you want my thoughts on the future, then read away.

It strikes me that the planet’s fate is now probably sealed. We have just a decade in which to control climate change — or goodbye, an unknown level of catastrophic, inescapable, runaway warming is inevitable. The reality is: we’re probably not going to make it. It’s highly dubious at this juncture that humanity is going to win the fight against climate change.

Yet that is for a very unexpected — yet perfectly predictable — reason: the sudden explosion in global fascism — which in turn is a consequence of capitalism having failed as a model of global order. If, when, Brazil elects a neo-fascist who plans to raze and sell off the Amazon — the world’s lungs — then how do you suppose the fight against warming will be won? It will be set back by decades — decades…we don’t have. America’s newest Supreme Court justice is already striking down environmental laws — in his first few days in office — but he will be on the bench for life…beside a President who hasn’t just decimated the EPA, but stacked it with the kind of delusional simpletons who think global warming is a hoax. Again, the world is set by back by decades…it doesn’t have. Do you see my point yet? Let me make it razor sharp.

My friends, catastrophic climate change is not a problem for fascists — it is a solution. History’s most perfect, lethal, and efficient one means of genocide, ever, period. Who needs to build a camp or a gas chamber when the flood and hurricane will do the dirty work for free? Please don’t mistake this for conspiracism: climate change accords perfectly with the foundational fascist belief that only the strong should survive, and the weak — the dirty, the impure, the foul — should perish. That is why neo-fascists do not lift a finger to stop climate change — but do everything they can to in fact accelerate it, and prevent every effort to reverse or mitigate it.

But I want to tell you the sad, strange, terrible story of how we got here. Call it a lament for a planet, if you like. You see, not so long ago, we — the world — were optimistic that climate change could be managed, in at least some way. The worst impacts probably avoided, forestalled, escaped — if we worked together as a world. But now we are not so sure at all. Why is that? What happened? Fascism happened — at precisely the wrong moment. That shredded all our plans. But fascism happened because capitalism failed — failed for the world, but succeeded wildly for capitalists.

Now, this will be a subtle story, because I want to tell it to you the way it should be told. Let me begin with an example, and zoom out from there.

The world is in the midst of a great mass extinction — one of just a handful in history. Now, if we had been serious, at any point, really, about preventing climate catastrophe, we would have made an effort to “price in” this extinction — with a new set of global measures for GDP and profit and costs and tariffs and taxes and so on. But we didn’t, so all these dead beings, these animals and plants and microbes and so on — strange and wonderful things we will never know — are “unpriced” in the foolish, self-destructive economy we have made. Life is literally free to capitalism, and so capitalism therefore quite naturally abuses it and destroys it, in order to maximize its profits, and that is how you get a spectacular, eerie, grim mass extinction in half a century, of which there have only been five in all of previous history.

But biological life was not the only unpaid cost — “negative externality” — of capitalism. It was just one. And these unpaid costs weren’t to be additive: they were to multiply, exponentiate, snarl upon themselves — in ways that we would come to find impossible to then untangle. (And all this was what economists and thinkers, especially American ones, seemed to whistle at and walk away, anytime someone suggested it.)

You see, capitalism promised people — the middle classes which had come to make up the modern world — better lives. But it had no intention of delivering — its only goal was to maximize profits for the owners of capital, not to make anyone else one iota richer. So first it ate through people’s towns and cities and communities, then through social systems, then through their savings, and finally, through their democracies. Even if people’s incomes “rose”, cleverly, the prices they paid for the very same things which capitalism sold back to them with the other hand, the very things they were busy producing, rose even more — and so middle classes began to stagnate, while inequality exploded. Let’s specify the unpaid costs in question: trust, connection, cohesion, belonging, meaning, purpose, truth itself.

These were social costs — not environmental ones, like the mass extinction above. And I will make the link between the two clear in just a moment. First I want you to understand their effect.

A sense of frustration, of resignation, of pessimism came to sweep the world. People lost trust in their great systems and institutions. They turned away from democracy, and towards authoritarianism, in a great, thunderous wave, which tilted the globe on its very axis. The wave rippled outward from history’s greatest epicenter of human stupidity, America, like a supersonic tsunami, crossing Europe, reaching Asia’s shores, crashing south into Brazil, cresting far away in Australia. Nations fell like dominoes to a new wave of fascists, who proclaimed the same things as the old ones — reichs and camps and reigns of the pure. People began to turn on those below them — the powerless one, the different one, the Mexican, the Jew, the Muslim— in the quest for just the sense of superiority and power, the fortune and glory, capitalism had promised them, but never delivered.

The capitalists had gotten rich — unimaginably rich. They were richer than kings of old. But capitalism had imploded into fascism. History laughed at the foolishness of people who once again believed, like little children hearing a fairy tale, that capitalism — which told people to exploit and abuse one another, not hold each other close, mortal and frail things that they are — was somehow ever going to benefit them.

Now. Let me connect the dots of capitalism’s unpaid social and environmental costs, and how they are linked, not additively, 2+2=5, but with the mathematics of catastrophe.

When we tell the story of how capitalism imploded into fascism, it will go something like this: the social costs of capitalism meant that democracy collapsed into neo-fascism — and neo-fascism made it unlikely, if not outright impossible, that the world could do anything at all about climate change, in the short window it had left, at the precise juncture it needed to act most. Do you see the link? The terrible and tragic irony? How funny and sad it is?

The social costs of capitalism weren’t just additive to the environmental costs — they were more like multiplicative, snarled upon themselves, like a great flood meeting a great hurricane. The social costs exponentiated the environmental, making them now impossible to reduce, pay, address, manage. 2+2 didn’t equal 4 — it equalled infinity, in this case. Both together made a system that spiralled out of control. Wham! The planet’s fate was being sealed, by capitalism imploding into fascism — which meant that a disintegrating world could hardly work together anymore to solve its greatest problem of all.

Let me sharpen all that a little. By 2005, after a great tussle, much of the world had agreed on a plan to reduce carbon emissions — the Kyoto Protocol. It was just barely enough — barely — to imagine that one day climate change might be lessened and reduced enough to be manageable. Still, there was one notable holdout — as usual, America. Now, at this point, the world, which was in a very different place politically than it is today, imagined that with enough of the usual diplomatic bickering and horse-trading, maybe, just maybe, it would get the job done. And yet by 2010 or so, the point of all this, which was to create a global carbon pricing system had still not been accomplished — in large part thanks to America, whose unshakeable devotion to capitalism meant that such a thing was simply politically impossible. So by this point the world was behind — and yet, one could still imagine a kind of success. Maybe an American President would come along who would see sense. Maybe progress was going in the right direction, generally. After all, slowly, the world was making headway, towards less carbon emissions, towards a little more cooperation, here and there.

And then — Bang! America was the first nation to fall to the neo fascist wave. Instead of a President who might have taken the country into a decarbonized future, Americans elected the king of the idiots (no, please don’t give me an apologia for the electoral college.) This king of the idiots did what kings of idiots do: he lionized, of all things…coal. He questioned whether climate change was…real. He packed the government with lobbyists and cronies who were quite happy to see the world burn, if it meant a penthouse overlooking a drowned Central Park. He broke up with allies, friends, and partners. Do you see the point? The idea of a decarbonizing future was suddenly turned on its head. It had been a possibility yesterday — but now, it was becoming an impossibility.

Before the neofascist wave, the world might have indeed “solved” climate change. Maybe not in the hard sense that life would go on tomorrow as it does today — but in the soft sense that the worst and most vicious scenarios were mostly outlandish science fiction. That is because before the neofascist wave, we could imagine nations cooperating, if slowly, reluctantly, in piecemeal ways, towards things like protecting life, reducing carbon, pricing in the environment, and so on. These things can only be done through global cooperation, after all.

But after the neofascist wave, global cooperation — especially of a genuinely beneficial kind, not a predatory kind — began to become less and less possible by the day. The world was unravelling. When countries were trashing the United Nations and humiliating their allies and proclaiming how little they needed the world (all to score minor-league wins for oligarchs, who cashed in their chips, laughing )— how could such a globe cooperate more then? It couldn’t — and it can’t. So the neofascist wave which we are now in also means drastically less global cooperation — but less global cooperation means incalculably worse climate change.

So now let’s connect all the dots. Capitalism didn’t just rape the planet laughing, and cause climate change that way. It did something which history will think of as even more astonishing. By quite predictably imploding into fascism at precisely the moment when the world needed cooperation, it made it impossible, more or less, for the fight against climate change to gather strength, pace, and force. It wasn’t just the environmental costs of capitalism which melted down the planet — it was the social costs, too, which, by wrecking global democracy, international law, cooperation, the idea that nations should work together, made a fractured, broken world which no longer had the capability to act jointly to prevent the rising floodwaters and the burning summers.

(Now, it’s at this point that Americans will ask me, a little angrily, for “solutions”. Ah, my friends. When will you learn? Don’t you remember my point?

There are no solutions, because these were never “problems” to begin with. The planet, like society, is a garden, which needs tending, watering, care. The linkages between these things — inequality destabilizing societies making global cooperation less possible — are not things we can fix overnight, by turning a nut or a bolt, or throwing money at them. They never were. They are things we needed to see long ago, to really reject together, and invest in, nurture, protect, defend, for decades — so that capitalism did not melt down into fascism, and take away all our power to fight for our worlds, precisely when we would need it most.

But we did not do that. We were busy “solving problems”. Problems like…hey, how can I get my laundry done? Can I get my package delivered in one hour instead of one day? Wow — you mean I don’t have to walk down the street to get my pizza anymore? Amazing!! In this way, we solved all the wrong problems, if you like, but I would say that we solved mechanical problems instead of growing up as people. Things like climate change and inequality and fascism are not really “problems” — they are emergent processes, which join up, in great tendrils of ruin, each piling on the next, which result from decades of neglect, inaction, folly, blindness. We did not plant the seeds, or tend to our societies, economies, democracies, or planet carefully enough — and now we are harvesting bitter ruin instead. Maybe you see my point. Or maybe you don’t see my point at all. I wouldn’t blame you. It’s a tough one to catch sight of)

The tables have turned. The problem isn’t climate change anymore, and the solution isn’t global cooperation — at least given today’s implosive politics. The problem is you — if you are not one of the chosen, predatory few. And the solution to the problem of you is climate change. To the fascists, that is. They are quite overjoyed to have found the most spectacular and efficient and lethal engine of genocide and devastation known to humankind, which is endless, free natural catastrophe. Nothing sorts the strong from the weak more ruthlessly like a flooded planet, a thundering sky, a forest in flames, a parched ocean. A man with a gun is hardly a match for a planet on fire.

I think this much becomes clearer by the year: we have failed, my friends, to save our home. How funny that we are focused, instead, on our homelands. It would be funny, disgraceful, and pathetic of me to say: is there still time to save ourselves? That is the kind of nervous, anxious selfishness that Americans are known for — and it is only if we reject it, really, that we learn the lesson of now. Let us simply imagine, instead, that despite all the folly and stupidity and ruin of this age, the strongmen and the weak-minded, in those dark and frightening nights when the rain pours and the thunder roars, we might still light a candle for democracy, for freedom, and for truth. The truth is that we do not deserve to be saved if we do not save them first.

Umair Haque- October 2018

source: Eudaimonia & Co

The post How Capitalism Torched the Planet by Imploding Into Fascism- by Umair Haque appeared first on Void Network.

TTIP, bargain sales of crown jewels of states, Panama-Paper-scale tax evasions, fast-tracks for dirty mining companies in Greece, expulsions to make place for Special Economic Zones and new zones of extraction: these are the inevitable consequence of one ideology: neoliberalism. This macro-economic blueprint-dominated policymaking in the last three decades but took Europe by storm in the last decade. Symptomatic: just this week it turned out that former EU chief Barosso not only works for Goldman Sachs but worked with them while being president of the European Commission.

But look a bit closer and you see that this world is already cracking, puffing and in some parts tumbling down, while alternative macro-economic models are now flourishing. Maybe that’s why two articles where the authors radically drop the whole pursuit of GDP growth, the ultimate aim of neoliberals,( published on 1 and 2 September on the Ecologist), sparked a well-participated debate.

Most of us know that science tells us that there are plenty of unburnable fuels and that humanity lives far beyond the regenerating bio-capacity of planet earth. But how do we get to a mainstream economic system that respects planetary boundaries? Neoliberalism doesn’t have any answer to that so we put the question to alternative macro-economic professors – a degrowth or décroissance pioneer and a civil society leader in Europe. We basically asked: what needs to happen next?

Clive Spash ranks amongst the top 5% of economists in the world, despite having a rather different macro-economic view than most of his colleagues. When asked for a pragmatic way to get his ideas mainstreamed he started off with some words of caution: “The pragmatic way forward has so far sold the environmental movement to the neoliberals and corporations with stupid ideas like pricing nature being put forward to solve the environmental crisis.

“Degrowth is an anti-establishment word which is why it gets support from the radicals, so why would you expect the establishment to welcome it? The only way current pro-growth politicians will listen is when cities are under water and towns on fire.”

Even that is by far a guarantee for intellectual flexibility. Naomi Klein describes in The Shockdoctrine how “disaster capitalism” works. A hurricane like Katrina is not used to draw lessons about climate change but as an opportunity for the privatisation of housing and education. Milton Friedman, the semi-god of the neoliberals who pushed for this to happen, made one point I do agree with: when disaster strikes, you need to be ready with a coherent set of ideas and policies.

Spash stresses the need for a political revolution. “The route for real change is not via those who are already totally vested in the growth economy and have gained power through it. Rather look for power amongst those who are disenfranchised by the capital accumulating system. Give them voice. Look to organisations that care for them and if they do not exist, create them. Remember that the vast majority are disenfranchised by the current economic system.”

For progress on making it happen, Spash also looks at alliances in civil society, new political parties, local democracy and the rule of law. “We need to seek legal redress for the many wrongs e.g. land grabbing, pollution, tax avoidance by corporations, oppression of Indigenous people for fracking, oil shale, tar sands, biofuels. We need to expose corruption, corporate power and the failures and undemocratic processes of the EC, World Bank and WTO.”

Giorgos Kallis, professor of ecological economics and political ecology adds a few concrete and radical policy proposals: “First, reduce working hours without reducing wages – this means that instead of unemployment you have more people working less time each. Second, disinvest from dirty or socially useless sectors (e.g. advertising) and invest in clean sectors and the care economy.

“Of course it means you will reduce dramatically the profits. And to proceed with the necessary reduction of debts, it means that some debtors will not be paid back their money and their assets will lose value. But who said that this was supposed to be easy, or implementable with simple reforms and modifications here and there within the existing system?”

These and other ecological economics professors seem to say that slacktivism and the occasional Earth Day with some dimmed lights and woollen sweaters ain’t gonna save us from mayhem. A large debt write-off seems politically impossible today but neither economics nor politics is like physics so the unimaginable today can quickly become the inevitable tomorrow.

Even the IMF, the world’s credit supplier that doubles as the inquisition for the neoliberals, is openly calling for writing off debt. At this point they’re only talking about Greece, but the only reason that this hasn’t happened yet is that things could move quickly from there. But a quick change is precisely what we need and it wouldn’t be a unique situation either. In 1953 Greece wrote off 50% of the money it owed from … Germany. If you think today’s Georgios’s and Maria’s are far better off than Hans und Emma Public in 1950, you probably haven’t visited Greece for a few years.

To make it happen, the term “degrowth” seems to be more useful for internal use in academia or for preaching to the converted than for external use to the general public. Politicians who participated in the degrowth conference frequently stressed that outside the conference they would never use that word.

Kallis says: “This is fine, in so far as the vision is there, and there is agreement that growth is no longer necessary, possible, or desirable.” According to a study done in Spain, 15% of the population is in favour of degrowth, and a further 20% supports the idea that we should ignore growth. Within civil society movements, these percentages are even higher. “So why not talk to a trade union about the folly of growth and the need for degrowth, and then explain what you mean by it and defend it, whilst providing alternatives? Why be afraid to use a term and a set of ideas that 15-35% of the people – and 70-80% of your own political base – are in support of?”

Kallis adds that those in politics who understand the problems with neoliberalism have a certain responsibility that too few have taken so far. “I think the role of politicians, especially those of small parties, is to push the lines of the debate and the contours of what can be said and what not. Note how successfully the far right is doing it. Those politicians enter parliaments and tsay things that are unthinkable. By repeating them they create a new norm, and then the usual right moves towards them.

“I think ‘green ‘left’ politicians should do the same. That’s why they have been elected. They should push the limits of the debate – they should criticize growth relentlessly and at every opportunity far right talks about immigration or blasts the EU in all opportunities. They should keep confronting politicians over their hypocrisy when they say that they can both have growth and meet the Paris agreement goals etc”.

It’s true there are plenty of opportunities to call these politicians out. Last time the G20 met, Chinese host Xi stressed two things in one speech: ratify the Paris Agreement and boost intercontinental trade. It’s like saying that yes, the house is on fire and we’re all going to work on that (on a voluntary basis) but hey, let’s add some more oil to the fire first.

Host and co-organiser of the most recent degrowth conference held in Budpest last month, Vincent Liegey, is both an academic and a degrowth pioneer. His Cargonomia project in Budapest is a vivid example of a different type of economy. Ask him how such ‘nice’ niches can become mainstream and he stresses the need to reconnect to rural and older people. “Brexit or elections in Austria show how our societies are divided: these people feel left behind by the cosmopolitic who dominate politics and the economy. At present they mostly seek justice at the right but things are moving at the left as well. The fact that we organise these ever bigger academic conferences on degrowth also attracts attention at policy levels: it gives people like us credibility when we go to Brussels and talk with policymakers.”

Within civil society, as in academia and politics, there are those who prefer to look down on or simply ignore the rising degrowth debate and equally there are those who see it as very welcome and much needed. Leida Rijnhout is a civil society leader currently working for Friends of the Earth Europe who falls in the category of the latter, a supporter of degrowth from long before the term became popular in academia. She describes the choice that civil society organisations need to make: “They can chose to go for “green and fair neoliberalism”, where social and environmental justice will only exist in their pragmatic minds. The other choice is that they try to achieve a systemic change by pushing innovative new policy changes and by supporting grassroots organisations and communities of people working and living on the frontlines.

“Groups that resist the way this extractive and expansive economic model destroys not just their livelihoods but the global ecosystem – these are the people who want to stop the madness and build new alternatives. This is exactly what the degrowth movement does: academics supporting activists in their groundbreaking work, whether it is a divest movement or a blockade to stop fracking or another tar sand oil pipeline.

“It is the task of civil society organisations to bring these voices, these battles to decision-makers and convince them that a fundamental change in economic thinking and acting is a condition to achieve justice and wellbeing for all.”

Leida adds that in this ever more connected world, a strong cooperation between organisations in the Global North and Global South is invaluable. Environmental justice in the South goes hand in hand with degrowth in the Global North. That realisation is growing. Two years ago, at the degrowth conference in Leipzig, world class activists from the Global South such as Alberto Acosta (a former Minister of Ecuador) and Nnimmo Bassey (a Livelihood prize winner) explained the need for such alliances. This year, Ashish Kothari brought a convincing keynote on why ordinary Indians are great allies in a global struggle to bring the destructive economic forces to a halt.

So what needs to happen next? Well, in a way the paradigm shift is already happening. As the widely acclaimed documentary “Demain (Tomorrow)” showed: the alternatives are already here. A new community type of agriculture and community-owned green energy, local currencies, peer-to-peer networks, sharing economy: it’s all unfolding and growing right here and right now. It may be that you haven’t noticed because the mainstream corporate sponsored media hasn’t really covered much of it. But it’s here. Google it. Community supported agriculture, energy cooperative, Local Exchange and Trading System, peer-to-peer, …

Of course it’s also true that the destructive forces are also still here and still in full force. They won’t last but the question is if they will break down by design or by disaster. Look at the now stalled talks on TTIP or the delay in getting CETA ratified. Look at the fast-shrinking credibility of the European Commission, which boasts of its “jobs and growth” agenda.

The question is not if the neoliberal agenda will fall but when. A more crucial question is: what ideology will replace it? The xenophobic and/or fascist ideology is on the rise but so is social ecologism: the ideology behind a much smaller economy in terms of material and energy extraction but with a much higher level of wellbeing for all. To make the latter happen it’s not enough to delegate responsibility by voting right (or rather left and green). Participate.

Nick Meynen is one of the Ecologist New Voices.

source: The Ecologist

The post From neoliberalism to ecologism: what needs to happen next? Nick Meynen appeared first on Void Network.

Peoples Caravans Arrive in Cancun to offer an alternative voice to the COP16 Summit 

Police Harass Mayan Caravan Headed to COP16, Stop Religious Ceremony at Chichen Itza Ruins 

more info : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gw9ULKRXt2g

Glassbead report from COP16 ESMEX

http://mobilebroadcastnews.com/MBN/story/Cancun-COP16

The post First Reports from Cancun Climate Change Summit People’s Actions appeared first on Void Network.

Void Network invites you to see the new video
of video activist Dimitris Meletis about climate change,
the December 2009 Copenhagen United Nations Summit
for the Climate Change (COP15)
and the resistances expressed there by the people.

Copenhagen 2009 – Οι φωνές που δεν ακούμε και οι δράσεις 
που δε βλέπουμε from dimitris meletis on Vimeo.
video in English with Greek subtitles

Copenhagen 2009 – The voices and the actions of the people for climate change from dimitris meletis on Vimeo.

the video in English

Copenhagen 2009 – the extras from dimitris meletis on Vimeo.

the extras of the video / 51′:53″ duration time

The post Climate Change : Copenhagen 2009 / The voices and the Actions of the people for Climate Change // a short film by Dimitris Meletis appeared first on Void Network.