Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth II

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/243

In Al Gore’s brand-new slideshow (premiering exclusively on TED.com), he presents evidence that the pace of climate change may be even worse than scientists were recently predicting, and challenges us to act with a sense of “generational mission” — the kind of feeling that brought forth the civil rights movement — to set it right. Gore’s stirring presentation is followed by a brief Q&A in which he is asked for his verdict on the current political candidates’ climate policies and on what role he himself might play in future.

Boulder’s Food Summit

Boulder County Going Local Keynote Speaker’s Presentation

http://www.bouldercountygoinglocal.com/2008foodsummit.html

http://www.boulderrelocalization.org/foodsummitkeynotevisuals.pdf

Input:

http://www.boulderrelocalization.org/documents/2008foodsummit.pdf

WHY LOCAL LINKAGES MATTER: Findings from the Local Food Economy Study, by Viki Sonntag, PhD, Sustainable Seattle.

BBC: “UN Calls for Farming Revolution”

A UN-sponsored report has called for urgent changes to the way food is produced, as soaring food prices risk driving millions of people to poverty.

The Unesco study recommends better safeguards to protect resources and more sustainable farming practices, such as producing food locally.

More natural and ecological farming techniques should be used, it says.

Haiti, Egypt, the Philippines and parts of West Africa have seen riots recently over the costs of rice, wheat and soya.

Unesco, a UN educational body, says increased demand for food in India and China, the growing market for biofuel crops, and rising oil prices are some of the factors behind the rising prices.

Executive summary of the IAASTD report [144KB]

A group of 400 experts spent three years researching the report, which was unveiled on Tuesday at Unesco in Paris.

The authors found:

• Progress in agriculture has reaped very unequal benefits and has come at a high social and environmental cost
• Food producers should try using “natural processes” like crop rotation and use of organic fertilisers
• The distance between the produce and consumer should also be reduced

The BBC’s Nick Miles says that with food prices at the top of the international political agenda, this is effectively a blueprint for the future of global agriculture.

Unesco says wheat prices have risen 130% percent since March 2007 while soy prices have jumped 87%.

“The status quo is no longer an option,” Guilhem Calvo, a Unesco expert, told a news conference in Paris.

“We must develop agriculture less dependent on fossil fuels, that favours the use of locally available resources.”

‘Alleviate hunger’

The report said rising oil prices had made transport and farm production more expensive and had led to more crops being grown to make biofuels for vehicles.

It said biofuel production had mixed effects, adding: “The diversion of agricultural crops to fuel can raise food prices and reduce our ability to alleviate hunger throughout the world.”

It also warned large swaths of central and western Asia and Africa were running out of water.

Farming was responsible for more than a third of the world’s most degraded land, it said.

Unesco noted the ”considerable influence” of big transnational corporations in North America and Europe.

By contrast, Latin America and the Caribbean are largely dependent on imported food, it said.

Over the weekend the World Bank outlined a plan of aid and loans to developing nations to help deal with the problem.

SOURCE

Global food system ‘must change’

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7347239.stm

The Food Revolution Begins

Take the food riots now spreading across the planet because the prices of staples are soaring, while stocks of basics are falling. In the last year, wheat (think flour) has risen by 130%, rice by 74%, soya by 87%, and corn by 31%, while there are now only eight to 12 weeks of cereal stocks left globally. Governments across the planetary map are shuddering.

Global food prices have risen 80% over the past three years, and the primary reason may be the success of capitalism in China and India over the past two decades: Their industrialization has spurred demand for energy beyond the capacity of supply, which has pushed oil prices to levels five times what they were in the mid 1990s. That, in turn, has raised pressure on food prices by making agricultural inputs more expensive, and by prompting the substitution of biofuel crops for edible ones on scarce farmland. And, of course, capitalism has indeed raised the living standards of hundreds of millions of people in those countries — they’re eating more, and better, particularly more meat.

Moreover, when the source of that hunger is not the absence of food per se, but the invisible barrier of social inequalities that stand between poor people and the food supplies their poverty denies them, things can turn pretty nasty, pretty quickly. And that’s precisely what we’re seeing right now.

Hunger, in itself, is not sufficient to create a political crisis that threatens the very survival of the established order. But in many instances, it has been a necessary component of the despair that forces that has forced ordinary people to take extraordinary risks, confronting those armed to defend the existing order — and, of course, revolutions succeed precisely in that moment when the soldiers and policemen paid to defend the existing order look into the eyes of the “enemy” confronting them, on the streets, and they see themselves, their families and neighbors, and the state’s power to enforce its rule evaporates. As the great Bertolt Brecht once noted, “General, your tank is a powerful vehicle it smashes down forests and crushes a hundred men. But it has one defect: it needs a driver.”

Turns out the Malthusians, and even — gasp! — their Marxist progeny, were not entirely wrong, after all: Spread capitalism to every corner of the globe (a planet already blighted by a century of industrialism with its attendant sometimes catastrophic climate) and the rich do, indeed, get richer, while the poor do get poorer, although not necessarily more numerous.

http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/news/2008/04/food_riots.html

SOURCE: http://tonykaron.com/2008/04/09/a-revolutionary-moment-in-egypt/

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/apr/13/food.climatechange

SOURCE: http://tomdispatch.com/

Trucker’s Strike

On April 1, in a wave of defiance, truck drivers began taking the strongest form of action they can take: inaction. Faced with $4-per-gallon diesel fuel, they slowed down, shut down and started honking.

Outside of Chicago, they slowed and drove three abreast, blocking traffic and taking arrests. They jammed into Harrisburg, Pennsylvania; they slowed down the Port of Tampa, where fifty rigs sat idle in protest. Near Buffalo, one driver told the press he was taking the week off “to pray for the economy.”

The truckers who organized the protests — by CB radio and Internet — have a specific goal: reducing the price of diesel fuel. They are owner-operators, meaning they are also businesspeople, and they can’t break even with current fuel costs. They want the government to release its fuel reserves. They want an investigation into oil company profits and government subsidies of the oil companies.

70 percent of the nation’s goods travel by truck.

“We can no longer haul their stuff for what they’re paying,” said David Santiago, 35, a trucker for the past 17 years.

The actions of the first week in April were just the beginning. There’s talk of a protest in Indiana on April 18, another in New York City, and a giant convergence of trucks on DC on April 28.

SOURCE

Calling for a Constitutional Convention

PBS’s Bill Moyer’s 12/21/07 interview with Sanford Levinson: TRANSCRIPT

TESTIMONY OF SANFORD LEVINSON,
BEFORE THE COMMITTEE ON THE JUDICIARY OF THE UNITED STATES SENATE,
JANUARY 27, 2004

Levinson’s BLOG

Levinson’s book (Aug. ‘06): Our Undemocratic Constitution

Our Democracy Deficit
Our institutions are not promoting self-government.
The Constitution flaws:
-Presidents who do not win the majority of the popular vote.
-Gives WY the same number of senators as CA, with 70 times the population.
-Enables the president to overrule both houses of Congress simply on political grounds.
-Enables Congress to build a bridge to nowhere.
-Allows Supreme Court justices to serve as long as they want and time their departure to influence their own choice on who succeeds them.
Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.

George Washington himself who wrote that “[t]he warmest friends and the best supporters the Constitution has do not contend that it is free from imperfections.” Fortunately, when inevitable imperfections do manifest themselves, “there is a Constitutional door open. The People (for it is with them to Judge) can, as they will have the advantage of experience on their Side, decide with as much propriety on the alterations and amendment which are necessary.” Should the point not already be clear enough, Washington went on to say that “I do not think we are more inspired, have more wisdom, or possess more virtue, than those who will come after us.”

Capitalism’s Failures, Part III

Far from halting all carbon dioxide emissions, the world’s major states and corporations are pumping out ever-increasing amounts with little sign of any meaningful cuts. The potential consequences are almost unthinkable – but all too real.

The only conclusion possible is that those at the head of the US state have no serious intention to take action to tackle climate change.

In a world already riven with imperialist war, and by economic and military tensions, the potential for such upheaval to spark armed conflict, including the ultimate spectre of nuclear annihilation, is not a morbid fantasy, but all too likely.

Global warming has the ultimate potential to cause such a social collapse on a world scale, and to throw into question anything deserving the name human civilization.

–

No serious attempt to cut carbon dioxide emissions can work without a serious reduction in the amount of road traffic. We need to move away from cars and towards public transit.

We should not be conned by the fake populist arguments… Whichever aspect of climate change policy you look at, a picture emerges of a government habitually bowing to the demands of business.

The Transnational Institute and Carbon Trade Watch argue in a definitive report on emissions trading: ” Trading programs in effect privatize the problem of air-pollution. Government and communities lose control over environmental protections, placing it in the hands of the polluters. When the incentive to reduce emissions is profit and cost-effectiveness, there is incredible pressure to cheat by overestimating reductions, while underestimating emissions.”

Solutions

The only realistic way to cut emissions from power generation is to stop burning fossil fuels (coal, oil and gas) and use modes of generating power that do not contribute to global warming. We need a major shift to what is called renewable energy-electricity generation driven by wind, wave, tidal and solar power.

One serious study puts the fossil fuel subsidy figure at $235 billion a year globally– If this money was switched instead to investment and subsidy for renewable energy very dramatic shifts in patterns of power generation would happen within just a few years.

Another area which could make a major contribution to tackling climate change is very simple-energy efficiency. Governments insisting (not persuading, or cajoling, or relying on some market mechanism, but insisting, backed up with severe penalties for those firms which do not comply) on proper insulation and better energy efficiency in every area of society could make a significant contribution to tackling climate change. Among these measures are obvious things like proper insulation on all new buildings and bringing older buildings up to that standard too.

–

The evidence so far is that, left to their own devices, those who dominate society today, in government or at the head of the world’s giant corporations, will not push through such changes–even if they are relatively straightforward in principle.

Behind the greenwash it is business as usual.

–

It may be argued that the measures needed to tackle climate change are not somehow fundamentally incompatible with capitalist society.

For historical reasons we have a capitalist society where the fossil fuel corporations lie at the heart of the production for profit on which the whole system depends. This fact has shaped everything about the world we live in, including the very ideologies and policies of the political parties and politicians who run most of the world’s governments and global institutions.

Capitalism has an immense inertia at its heart. Once patterns of production become established and with them great concentrations of wealth and power established, they are hugely resistant to change. The people who head the giant corporations, and who embody the logic they must follow to survive and expand as profit-seeking beasts, will resist with all their power anything which fundamentally threatens their current basis of profit and power-the fossil fuel based economy.

The record of human history is that those who control societies have often been prepared see the whole of society plunge into disastrous chaos and collapse rather than accept change which undermined their power. I see no reason to suppose the most powerful ruling class in human history, those who today head the giant global corporations at whose centre stand the fossil fuel corporations, will behave any differently to their predecessors whose societies’ fate is witnessed only by ruined monuments.

Might some dramatic shift happen among even a section of elites? I think it would be foolish to gamble the future of human civilization on such imaginings or potentialities becoming realities. A surer path to change is needed.

A strategy to win real action on climate change starts with maintaining and intensifying popular mobilization and pressure. The rich tapestry of coalitions against climate change that have begun to emerge and need to be developed and broadened.

However, for such pressure to be really effective it needs to go further. The movements need a perspective of overturning governments whose commitment to the capitalist system means bowing down to the corporations that pump out greenhouse gases. Only state action can fully implement a programme of changes such as I have sketched. But any government that tries to do so will face determined opposition from those with real power today-the corporations linked into the fossil fuel economy and from business and the rich more generally. They would fight with all means at their disposal to block the assault on their wealth and privilege which is needed to finance the necessary transformation of society. They could only be beaten by mobilizing the power of millions of ordinary people, above all those workers who produce the wealth and profit on which the whole edifice of today’s capitalist society sits. But that means connecting the struggle against those who create the greenhouse effect with struggles against poverty, poor housing, unemployment, war, racism and all the other issues that afflict the great mass of people and will get worse as the climatic changes take place.

In short, the struggle over climate change raises the question of wresting power and wealth out of the hands of those who have it now. It points to the desperate need for a society run in a fundamentally different and democratic way, one in which not profit but the needs of ordinary people and the future of the planet we live on are at the heart of all action and policy. Such a transformation is what I mean by a revolution, and is an aim I call socialism.

Of course such action needs to be international in scope, and ultimately involve the US, if it is to be successful in heading off climate disaster. But to wait on international agreement would be a recipe for no effective action at all. What is needed is for one or a group of countries to begin taking radical action and use that to mobilise social forces in other countries to demand, or enforce, similar action there.

We have to mobilise as widely as possible for protest and action. But we also have to see that the fight to halt climate change also has an inherent logic that goes beyond mere reforms within the existing structures of economic and political power.

SOURCE: International Socialism

Climate Change & Capitalism, Part II

Climate change is a product of a ‘profit first, look after number one’ system headed mostly by a patriarchy of men.

Climate change will result in a massive reduction in land mass, destructive weather and climatic change, panic, refugees, poverty and death–this scenario cannot be prevented unless the whole world STOPS burning fossil fuels NOW (‘60% cuts now, 90% cuts pretty damn soon’).

HOWEVER that is a future, an abstract picture of chaos which most people in the West cannot truly imagine. Sadly, that future is an everyday reality right now and has been so for many years. The very system which has created this future of climate chaos has been practicing destruction of the environment, livelihoods, homes and lives of millions, to produce a global market of cheap labour and maximum profits for the corporations, their owners and shareholders.

Multinational corporations and private corruption each establish themselves in positions of power and wealth through violence and oppression, condoned by governments through multilateral and bilateral trade agreements allowing profit and production to be valued well above life.

We have been witnessing an overwhelmingly corporate influence on policies to implement carbon dioxide reduction. The consequences of real effective legislation on economic growth is not in the corporate interest (profit), but in the private interest (i.e. to really slow climate change would radically change the current system).

Around the world, industrial infrastructure continues to be constructed in the name of growth despite scientific evidence and advice that such things are seriously detrimental to the future of the planet as well as the present inhabitants.

A prerequisite for capitalism is market expansion which requires the constant turnout of more goods and services whether needed or not. Even if produce is made in a more environmentally friendly way, the sheer level of consumption and transportation negates all efforts to curb negative effects. It’s not just about emissions it’s also about over-consumption!

There is no doubting that industrialization is the cause of climate change (along with the many other abuses it has created and furthered).

Capitalism is the cause of climate change and must be dismantled if we have any hopes of slowing the environmental meltdown.

Only when there is a return to small scale communities living with the land rather than abusing it can these issues be rectified. With a global peak in fossil fuels upon us and the means to fuel mass industry lessening with every coming year, eventually there will undoubtedly be very little choice. Why wait until we are forced into living in way we have not prepared for.

The world leaders wish to continue economic growth (the kind that grows into the pockets of a comparatively tiny elite with enormous power) regardless of its effects on our present and future ability to survive.

Government and corporate structures cannot be trusted (as the record shows) to find or implement solutions to the escalating destruction and “climate apartheid” facing everyday people and the natural world.

SOURCE (PDF)

Capitalism Can Not Survive Climate Change

The assumption is that mandatory cuts–reductions of at least 150-200 percent on the part of the global North– must be market-based, that is, on the trading of emission permits.

The subtext is: Techno-fixes and the carbon market will make the transition relatively painless and—why not?—profitable, too.

The central problem, it is becoming increasingly clear, is a mode of production whose main dynamic is the transformation of living nature into dead commodities, creating tremendous waste in the process. The driver of this process is consumption—or more appropriately, overconsumption—and the motivation is profit or capital accumulation: capitalism, in short.

There will be a break with the high-growth, high-consumption model in favor of another model of achieving the common welfare. The North and the South must reduce growth and energy use while raising the quality of life of the broad masses of people.

Among other things, this will mean placing economic justice and equality at the center of the new paradigm.

The end-goal must be adoption of a low-consumption, low-growth, high-equity development model that results in an improvement in people’s welfare, a better quality of life for all, and greater democratic control of production.

It is unlikely that the elites of the North and the South will agree to such a comprehensive response. The farthest they are likely to go is for techno-fixes and a market-based cap-and-trade system. Growth will be sacrosanct, as will the system of global capitalism.

However it is achieved, a thorough reorganization of production, consumption and distribution will be the end result of humanity’s response to the climate emergency and the broader environmental crisis.

In this regard, climate change is both a threat and an opportunity to bring about the long-postponed social and economic reforms that had been derailed or sabotaged in previous eras by the elite seeking to preserve or increase their privileges.

The difference is that today the very existence of humanity and the planet depend on the institutionalization of economic systems based not on feudal rent extraction or capital accumulation or class exploitation, but on justice and equality.

Will capitalism as a system of production, consumption and distribution survive the challenge of coming up with an effective solution to the climate crisis?

SOURCE:Walden Bello

A mixed economy will have to dominate over the current market economy.  Our future reality might be defined by eco-socialism, but certainly aspects of both Socialism and Communism.