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.

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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.

“Seek ye first for food and clothing, then the kingdom of God will fall to you also”

G.W.F. Hegel, letter to Knebel, 30 August 1807

We watch in horror, as the global explosion of the Sars-CoV-2 virus continues. The spreading medical emergency starkly reveals the real wages of neoliberalism and its extractive austerities. Gutted national healthcare systems that put profit over lives have left millions of people without access to medical care – a de facto death sentence for many. Every day now, we see where that leaves us in a pandemic. The healthcare crisis unfolds within a larger context of crisis: the underlying economic crisis of late capitalism and the planetary ecological crisis of late capitalist modernity. In the Covid19 emergency, the next crisis to arrive, before the medical crisis is over and just as the economic one begins to kick in, is likely to be a crisis in the capitalist food system.

The growing, picking, processing, packing and delivery of our food is vulnerable at many points in the long supply and delivery chains that stock the shelves in our grocery stores. Farmworkers, food processors and delivery workers are asked to work in unprotected conditions that often make social distancing impossible. Pickers on the industrial farms, many of whom are undocumented or precarious migrants, typically travel from squalid work camps to the fields in tightly packed buses. Workers at Amazon, the largest corporation dominating the end-delivery chains, have begun walkout strikes as Covid19 spreads through their warehouse workplaces. It is hard to see how breaks and bottlenecks in the global flows of food will be avoided without cynically sacrificing the workers who feed us. We need to understand and anticipate this, because food is at the center of life and social reproduction. The struggles for food sovereignty that will soon come to the fore will not only help to keep us alive – they highlight values of care, mutuality, gender equality, and climate and environmental justice that can orient the fight against fascism  and the refusal to go back to normal, when all the dead are buried. If the Covid-19 pandemic is pushing us to think an alternative form of social and natural symbiosis, food production is an essential facet of this operation, even more, a nodal point for its utopian and practical dimensions.

For an End to Big Agriculture

The capitalist food production system is ecocidal and genocidal; paradoxically, extinction is its immanent drift. The rupture of Covid19 is at least an opportunity to overthrow a destructive and unsustainable mono-industrial paradigm and replace it, everywhere, with more localized systems of polyculture and agroecology. Founded on the 17^th century slave plantation system and forced on the world from the 1950s on under the obscene misnomer “the green revolution,” the current capitalist food system is dominated by large transnationals that grow cash crops for export on huge monocultural farms and neo-plantations. These “Big Ag” monopolies are fossil fuel dependent, are heavy with pesticides and chemicals, waste precious water (70-90 % of all freshwater used by modern society!), drive bees and other needed pollinators as well as birds and other small predators to collapse and extinction, and discharge toxic runoff that causes red tides and dead zones when it reaches the seas. Moreover, capitalist food production is fully implicated in driving global warming and climate chaos:

Agriculture is also the largest single source of greenhouse gas emissions from society, collectively accounting for about 35 % of the carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide we release….The energy used to grow, process and transport food is a concern, but the vast majority of emissions comes from tropical deforestation, methane released from animals and rice paddies, and nitrous oxide from over fertilized soils.

We must add that this food system, which eats its own tail in a classic dialectic of enlightenment, is embedded in imperialist relations. More or less in step with the rise of neoliberalism, the World Bank, IMF and Big Ag capital have forced every country in the world to attack its bases of food sovereignty in small-hold farming and to chain itself to the world commodity markets. The global debt system was the lever to force this new phase of “original accumulation,” with deadly applications of violence to repress local resistance to these new enclosures, especially in the Global South. All this arrives every day, in our kitchens and on our plates! The idiocy of this “consensus” may soon be returning to haunt us, just as the idiocy of destroying public health structures returns in the continuous blare of sirens around New York City’s overwhelmed hospitals. Finally, in what should be the nail in the coffin of capital’s control over our food, Rob Wallace, author of Big Farms Make Big Flu, has taught us exactly how the capitalist food system is implicated in the cross species jumps that loosed Sars-Cov-2.

For Agroecology and a Food Sovereignty Popular Front

There are better ways, and the struggles to defend and spread them have been ongoing for many decades – indeed, as our Indigenous comrades tell us, for 500 years! Traditional growing practices preserve hard-won local experience and knowledges and tend to work with, rather than try to dominate, local ecologies. As a result, their decentralized polycultures are far more sustainable, frugal, versatile and resilient – just what we need in our food systems in a time when climates are weirding in response to capital’s flogging of the planet. In Europe and the Global North, organic “foodies” and Slow Food enthusiasts are often perceived as luxury hobbyists of the privileged classes. In fact, these lifestyle trends are distant echoes of the intense grassroots struggles for food sovereignty being waged across Latin America and Africa by the largely Indigenous-led network La Via Campesina, in Brazil by the Marxist-inspired Landless Workers’ Movement (MST), and in India by numerous peasant movements.

La Via Campesina in particular has coined and elaborated the idea of food sovereignty into a program for justice from below. It claims an inalienable right of all peoples to define and realize their own food systems, and to defend those systems from coercive invasions and extractive enclosures by imperialist capital. The international network of small and cooperative farmers, peasants, pastoralists and fisherfolk have also worked out and broadcast a body of practices and values they named agroecology. Similar in some respects to permaculture, agroecology embodies a whole approach to social reproduction based on values of care, mutuality and – let’s not be afraid of the word – kinship with the natural world. Many scientists have understood that agroecology offers more sustainable practices than industrial monoculture, and as a result the UN has to some extent appropriated and advocated for the concept, giving it a top-down, technocratic inflection that La Via Campesina has had to criticize. Agroecology is not just a set of practices that can be monetized for profit or adopted without changing anything else in anthropocentric, patriarchal capitalist class society:

Agroecology is a way of life of our peoples, in harmony with the language of Nature. It is a paradigm shift in the social, political, productive and economic relations in our territories, to transform the way we produce and consume food and to restore a socio-cultural reality devastated by industrial food production. Agroecology generates local knowledge, builds social justice, promotes identity and culture and strengthens the economic viability of rural and urban areas.

The urgent point is this: the knowledge commons for sustainable local alternatives to capitalist food production already exist and are readily accessible and sharable. Certainly, agroecological and permacultural approaches are possible in Greece. We only need to ensure that collective projects in this direction are grounded in solidarity with grassroots struggles for food sovereignty and climate and environmental justice – and in a communist horizon for a just and classless world. This is also to say, that acro-ecology is not a backward-looking idealization of the past, it is a forward-looking practice that can be in tune with the best aspects of the current techno-scientific knowledge and capacities. 

Food Sovereignty, Migrant Rights and Anti-Fascism

In the current crises, the struggle for food sovereignty brings forward the exploitation of migrant farmworkers and links up directly to the current terrain of anti-fascist struggle. As already noted, the workers whose labor power is exploited in the fields, slaughter yards and packing houses of capitalist agriculture are very often undocumented or precarious migrants whose status makes them especially exposed to extreme exploitation and coercive violence. Certainly this is true in Europe and many parts of North America. Their workplaces were always likely to be toxic, but now with Covid19 they are often forced to labor in mortal danger. Adequate protections, including face masks, gloves, sanitation gear and testing is a matter of life and death for the women and men who bring our food to table.

We can and must say more: racist anti-migrant and anti-refugee scapegoating is the common denominator of the hard-right turn in global politics. Indeed, racist nationalism dominates the toxic concoction that is resurgent fascism, and has been widely adopted in the rhetoric and policies of rightist governments around the world. This turn reflects tendencies towards authoritarian statism that, among others, have been long developing and were noted and forecast decades ago by Nicos Poulantzas. And it now unfolds in a situation of multiple systemic crises whose class character was vividly described by Mike Davis as a “planet of slums” and whose political logic Christian Parenti has analyzed incisively as “the politics of the armed lifeboat,” which tends towards full-blown “climate fascism.” Such is the moment we live in. We need to be clear about the links between all of these crises and social struggles, and shape our actions across them.

Toward Dual Power

Food sovereignty is the material and metabolic basis for an organized counter-power to capitalist terror and climate fascism. There have been many helpful discussions of mutual aid and calls for dual power initiated by autonomist comrades in the social emergency of Covid19. And Marxist feminist comrades have called for us to meet the emergency with a “social reproduction revolution.” Now we need to anticipate the coming crisis of the capitalist food system, and begin discussing how we will prepare our reaches for food sovereignty. To consider this a backup plan to help get us by in lean times misses the point. The dominant capitalist classes are certainly preparing to force us back into our places, however far this deadly pandemic goes. Before it exploded, anti-austerity insurrections were already rocking the global system; for the moment the solidarity of social distancing has emptied our streets and arrested the face-to-face and breath-to-breath forms of our politics. This will change, but fallout from Covid19 is still just beginning. The danger of disruptions to the food supply and delivery chains is real, for the reasons indicated above. Even in social distancing, we need to begin the discussions about what we will do, if that happens. Bread riots, a trigger of past revolutions, will come; will there also be pitchforks?

The rupture in normality also brings its opportunities – call it “disaster communism” or whatever you like. Many are aware now, and many more are learning it through the pandemic, that capital’s logic of accumulation is a dead end – literally as well as metaphorically. Degrowth, with a communist-autonomist horizon, is the actual imperative, given the deep structural crisis of planetary meltdown. Degrowth does not mean primitivism nor it is against the development of humanity’s creative forces. It means sustainable symbiosis, thus, a different form of social and environmental justice. Neo-fascism will be the form of desperate violence aiming to block any social transition that threatens capitalist class power. We know this. Either we resign ourselves to go back to our places and work away at our own mutual destruction, or we push this break further, exactly where social reproduction meets anti-fascism and anti-imperialism.

Growing tomatoes, herbs and earthworms on the balcony is no doubt a wonderous thing. But what is called for now is to collectivize the possibilities in all directions. The point is that food sovereignty is the material and metabolic (energy) basis for everything else, as we would quickly realize if we began to go hungry. Agroecology and permaculture are real possibilities in Greece, which need to be explored and built out from below. Some comrades are already actively engaged in this direction. And again: this can’t be a mere withdrawal to rural communes, it has to be a reorientation that feeds the struggles. For now, we should start discussing and sharing knowledge and practices and brainstorming possibilities.

Simple models for collectivizing growing can be organized among friends and small groups and planted wherever there is access to land. Access may be through family plots in villages or, in extremis, by other direct and time-tested means. Growing co-ops can be set up to share the work on a part-time basis, as was done before in many difficult moments of history. Urban gardens will undoubtedly be appearing in unexpected places. The deeper values of agroecology, in their close connection to social struggle and the long resistance to capitalist enclosure, can orient this turn. Whatever happens, we should build out these possibilities as far as we can, because doing so will both support and enact the politics of solidarity and mutuality that we believe in.

VOID NETWORK (Athens-Greece) written by Gene Ray and George Sotiropoulos

*George Sotiropoulos is Doctor of Political Theory and author of A Materialist Theory of Justice: the One, the Many, the Not-Yet.

*Gene Ray is Associate Professor of Critical Theory and author of Terror and the Sublime in Art and Critical Theory: From Auschwitz to Hiroshima to September 11 and Beyond.

________________________________ 

SEE ALSO

Sustainable Ways of Living: Food Production & Distribution- Mutual Aid

Interviews with comrades in Frankfurt practicing collective food production and alternative ways of distribution based on mutual aid and social awareness, experimenting with ecological, alternative and sustainable ways of living. Research by VOID NETWORK / Tasos Sagris & Sissy Doutsiou https://voidnetwork.gr

READ ALSO

The post Feeding Dual Power: Food Sovereignty, Anti-Fascism and other Pandemic Struggles appeared first on Void Network.

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.

The post International Call Against Cop15 United Nations Climate Change Conference Copenhagen December 2009 appeared first on Void Network.

If you read the international press, it is easy to be convinced that the international “debate” about global warming is about whether international organisations and country governments are able to “wake up” to alarming news about the future of the planet.

But if you actually read between the lines of the analyses done by the IPCC (Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change), there is a different ‘truth’ that is convenient to the major countries of the ‘North.’ Despite leaders’ claims of attention to ‘solving’ this ‘global’ problem, they actually have everything to gain from global warming and seem to actually want it.

We took the best evidence available for impacts on agriculture, on trade routes, on flood damage, on migration, on resource extraction (as impacted by climate) and on health and disease and analysed it.

What we found is that in a world divided by the wealthy countries of the ‘North’ and the poor countries of the global ‘South,’ climate change will make the ‘North’ warmer and richer and the ‘South’ poorer in a way that reinforces the current imbalances of power.

The biggest winner from global warming is going to be Russia, turning its frozen North into arable land and lowering the cost of resource extraction while also opening up new sea lanes for trade through the North Pole. This is one of the reasons why Russia has been comparatively silent on this debate. Canada will benefit in a similar way.

China too is going to benefit. Even though tens of millions of Chinese may be displaced from the southern part of the country, there will be benefits to the North and weakening of their neighbours that should allow China to expand its power.

The other major powers, the US, Europe and Japan will have some dislocations of population and industries, but the overall costs will likely wash out.

The biggest losers from climate change, in every way, are the same peoples who are always at risk; Africa, Latin America, Southeast Asia, India, and the Pacific Islands. It is here where millions of peoples will be flooded from their homes and lose their livelihoods. Minority cultures and indigenous peoples will be hit hard, forcing assimilation and possibly extermination of cultures; requiring a rapid and distorting change if they are to physically survive.

Given that most of the major powers have likely done their own calculations, why are they not available publicly and why the apparent concern and rhetoric about climate change as a shared global problem? Perhaps it is no accident that the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and IPCC offices have asked countries to do analyses of impacts on their own countries and have not sought to collect and publicise these country analyses.

It seems as if the major powers have co-opted the dialogue in an attempt to buy off the losers with a scheme that they can control, that also hides the calculations of the costs and benefits.

Rather than take the approach that a court would take, measuring the benefits and losses of different parties and then redistributing them so that everyone remains whole, the approach of the international community is one of ‘carbon trading’ that sends some compensation to poor countries in ways that slow the changes by charging the countries that release more greenhouse gases.

Meanwhile, it seems a safe bet to assure that the countries benefiting economically from global warming will also use their increased revenues to increase their military spending, to control national and international security threats. With climate change certain to lead to instability within countries and between them, there will be an argument for legitimising increased military interventions that will (at least for a time) reinforce current imbalances of power between North and South.

The real motive for the greening of industries is driven by economics – the costs to them of accessing and controlling resources – and of pollution in those countries, with little global concern for the overall planetary environment.

For those in the developing world, who will have to deal with these truths, it is time to realise that the current global discourse isn’t evidence of a new concern among wealthy countries for a common destiny of the planet and for the world’s poor. The major powers are not the ‘friends’ of poor countries on this initiative. Similarly, China, while claiming to be one of several poor countries whose per capita consumption should be allowed to increase to that of other major powers, is not promoting this interest on behalf of all of the world’s poor, since this change is likely to be to China’s benefit and at their expense.

Sale of resources by poor countries to seek to quickly increase their relative position – such as oil sales by Cambodia or Azerbaijan – will likely worsen their overall position in the long run by promoting the environmental changes that will help to impoverish their peoples. Similarly, attempts to quickly modernise and increase consumption in developing countries other than China will help to reinforce the global changes that will keep developing countries poor and weak while also destroying their cultures.

The best strategy for ‘developing’ countries is to try to put aside regional differences now and to collectivise as alternative power blocs against the major powers. The world’s native peoples must continue to organise as a bloc for the enforcement of international law, since they are at an accelerated risk of disappearing as a result of climate change. It is in their interest to seek to maintain their traditional systems and keep their patterns of consumption low as a way to slow global warming and their vulnerability to it. At the same time they may have to consider (unfortunately) investing what they can in the technologies of defence and power that they can use to force change in the developed countries.

David Lempert is an anthropologist, lawyer, and educator Hue Nhu Nguyen, is an environmental policy analyst

This piece found in :
http://www.theecologist.org/pages/archive_detail.asp?content_id=2112
and first appeared in The Ecologist February 2009

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The post A convenient truth about climate change: why most of the major powers really want global warming by David Lempert and Hue Nhu Nguyen appeared first on Void Network.