EcoSocialist Notebook, June 18, 2007
June 18, 2007
An occasional roundup of links and information that doesn’t fit our regular format …
Confronting the Climate Change Crisis
I posted “Confronting the Climate Change Crisis” on Climate and Capitalism in January. In addition to generating continuing comment here, the article is being circulated and discussed elsewhere. Most recently …
- The editors of Canadian Dimension, the longest continuing left-wing magazine in Canada, posted it on their website last week.
- Also last week, the always-interesting Politics in the Zeros blog featured a series of posts on various aspects of the article, and those posts in turn sparked comments from readers.
- Socialist Action, a U.S. group based in San Francisco, published it in their newspaper, and then republished it as a pamphlet, using the title Global Warming, Capitalism’s Time Bomb for Humanity: The Socialist Solution. It is now in its second printing.
Monbiot versus Hamilton
The May-June issue of New Left Review features an important debate between Clive Hamilton, executive director of The Australia Institute, and George Monbiot, author of Heat: How to Stop the Planet from Burning. These summaries are from NLR:
- Clive Hamilton: Building on Kyoto A critical assessment of George Monbiot’s scheme for a 90 per cent cut in carbon emissions. Given the psychological grip of capitalist consumption patterns, and the forces blocking attempts to tackle climate change—fossil fuel lobby, heavy industry, airlines—what is the best strategy for environmental action? Can ambitious targets and moral exhortations bring any improvement on existing treaties?
- George Monbiot: Environmental Feedback Responding to Clive Hamilton, George Monbiot stresses the inadequacies of current governmental efforts to address rising global temperatures, and the need for targets to be set by science rather than political expediency. An attack on the cruelties of cost-benefit analysis, and a call for genuine ethical commitment to replace tokenism.
Recommended Reading
Eating Fossil Fuels: Oil, Food and the Coming Crisis in Agriculture, by Dale Allen Pfeiffer. New Society Publishers, 2006.
“Between 1950 and 1984, as the Green Revolution transformed agriculture around the globe, world grain production increased by 250%. That is a tremendous increase in the amount of food energy available for human consumption. This additional energy did not come from an increase in sunlight, nor did it result from introducing agriculture to new vistas of land. The energy for the Green Revolution was provided by fossil fuels. The Green Revolution was made possible by fossil fuel-based fertilizers and pesticides, and hydrocarbon-fueled irrigation.
“The Green Revolution increased the energy flow to agriculture by an average of 50 times its traditional energy input. … In a very real sense, we are eating fossil fuels.”
A little book with a big punch. The author concludes that we can’t depend on government and business leaders to carry out the necessary changes in agriculture: “the necessary changes will require abandoning the economic and power structures from which these leaders profit.”
Includes a fascinating and insightful account of the differences in how Cuba and the Peoples Republic of Korea responded to the cut-off of oil from the Soviet Union.
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