Fact of the Day

SAVE THE WORLD - END CAPITALISM

The world is now halfway towards the internationally-agreed safety limit of a maximum 2°C rise in global average temperatures, researchers say. That limit seeks to prevent the global warming caused by the burning of fossil fuels exceeding 2°C above the pre-industrial global temperature. The UN’s Paris climate summit later this year aims to ensure that it is not breached.

A Hungry Future Ahead

Future global wheat harvest is likely to be reduced by six per cent per each degree Celsius of local temperature increase. Worldwide this would correspond to 42 million tons of yield reduction, which equals a quarter of current global wheat trade. Wheat plays an important role in feeding the world, but climate change threatens its future harvest. Without adaptation, global aggregate wheat production is projected to decline

The findings were by an international research consortium to which Natural Resources Institute Finland (previously known as MTT Agrifood Research Finland) substantially contributed. The results were published online in the high impact journal Nature Climate Change. 

The really bad news is that according to Prof. Dr. Reimund Rötter from Natural Resources Institute Finland, “…wheat yield declines due to climate change are likely to be larger than previously thought and should be expected earlier, starting even with small increases in temperature"

Our children and our grandchildren are calling upon us to act right now.

A 2,500 Square-Mile Methane Plume Over Western US

A socialist system will embrace technology, but with the profit motive removed emphasis will be first and foremost on safety for both people and planet. There will be no headlong rush by corporations, no pressure from lobbyists, but a rational appraisal of what's necessary, desirable and acceptable. Whether food, fuel, medicines, rare earth metals or any resource required for production  priority will be given to firm democratic decisions based on the precautionary principle. Do no harm.

 below from here


A monstrous cloud of accumulated methane—a potent greenhouse gas—is now hovering over a large portion of the western United States according to satellite imagery analyzed by NASA and reported by the Washington Post.
Created by years of intentionally released and errantly leaked natural gas during fossil fuel drilling operations, the cloud—invisible to the human eye but captured by advanced satellite imaging technology—is centered over northwest New Mexico and described by the Post as "a permanent, Delaware-sized methane cloud, so vast that scientists questioned their own data when they first studied it three years ago."

So alarmed by the size of the plume were scientists, NASA researcher Christian Frankenberg told the Post, "We couldn’t be sure that the signal was real."
Though there is considerably less of it put into the atmosphere each year, methane is twenty times more powerful as a greenhouse gas than carbon-dioxide or CO2.

The accumulation of methane is not a new problem, but one that appears to be worsening as hydraulic fracture drilling (or fracking) and other intensive fossil fuel extraction operations continue to soar in the southwest region of the country. The latest NASA analysis of the phenomenon put the approximate "average extent of the gas plume over the past decade at 2,500 square miles." Frankenberg pointed out that this estimate pre-dates the most recent gas and oil drilling boom now underway in the southwest.

Though the industry has longed ignored the dangers of so-called gas "flaring"—in which excess methane is simply burned off during oil and gas drilling or processing—environmenalists and climate scientists have long been sounding the alarm about methane's impact when it comes to global warming and other ecological hazards. And though natural gas has been heralded as a cleaner alternative to coal, numerous studies have shown that though gas burns cleaner than coal, the ability of gas to escape during extraction and transportation, the cumulative greenhouse impact could be equal or worse than coal.

Using available data, this graphic was created the Post:

 

 from here

Capitalism Continues To Subsidise Climate Disaster

Despite pledging in 2009 to phase out public subsidies for the fossil fuel industry, G20 countries have disregarded those promises and are currently spending $88 billion a year in taxpayer money to fund the discovery of new gas, coal, and oil deposits around the world, according to a new report published Tuesday by the Overseas Development Institute and Oil Change International.

The report, titled The Fossil Fuel Bailout: G20 Subsidies for Oil, Gas and Coal Exploration (pdf), found that those explorations risk devastating consequences for world economies and the rapidly warming planet alike. And at $88 billion a year, those states are spending more than double on finding new regions to drill than the top 20 private oil and gas companies—largely with taxpayer money.
As existing wells dry up, discovering new reserves in more remote areas has become costly. In 2013, the world's top 20 oil and gas companies invested just $37 billion in exploring reserves of oil, gas and coal.

"G20 governments' exploration subsidies marry bad economics with potentially disastrous consequences for climate change," write report authors Elizabeth Bast, Shakuntala Makhijani, Sam Pickard and Shelagh Whitley. "In effect, governments are propping up the development of oil, gas and coal reserves that cannot be exploited if the world is to avoid dangerous climate change."
Those countries are creating what the report terms a "triple-lose" scenario: investing financially in high-carbon assets that may cause catastrophic climate effects; diverting potential funds for low-carbon energy alternatives like solar, hydro, and wind power; and undermining prospects for an effective, large-scale climate deal next year.

"The scale at which G20 countries are subsidizing the search for more oil, gas and coal—through national subsidies, investment by state-owned enterprises and public finance for exploration—is not consistent with agreed goals on the removal of fossil fuel subsidies or with agreed climate goals, and is increasingly uneconomic," the report states.
The 2009 pledge, known as the Copenhagen Accord, recognizes that any increase in global temperature should be below two degrees Celsius. But the accord was non-binding—and some of its authors, including the United States, Brazil, and China, are among the biggest financial backers of global fossil fuel exploration. Keeping global temperature increases within 2 C would require leaving almost two-thirds of those untapped reserves in the ground.
"Without government support for exploration and wider fossil-fuel subsidies, large swathes of today’s fossil-fuel development would be unprofitable," the report states. "Directing public finance and consumer spending towards a sector that is uneconomic, as well as unsustainable, represents a double folly... Globally, subsidies for the production and use of fossil fuels were estimated at $775 billion in 2012."

The U.S. has become the world's largest producer of both oil and natural gas, surpassing even Saudi Arabia and Russia. It spends more than $6 billion annually on domestic and foreign fossil fuel exploration projects, mostly through tax deductions, and Congress has rejected every plan to repeal those breaks since President Barack Obama took office, the report notes.
But the Obama administration "also champions the current oil and gas boom as the centerpiece of its ‘All of the Above’ energy strategy, which has been the major driver of the increase in fossil fuel subsidy values," according to the report. And some of the world's largest oil and gas companies, like Exxon-Mobile, Chevron, and BP, "are likely to be benefiting the most from exploration subsidies."

The exact size of this public support is hard to confirm, however, because specific subsidies to individual companies are considered "confidential tax information" in the U.S.
According to the report, every dollar of renewable energy subsidies brings back $2.5 in investments, compared to $1.3 brought by every dollar in fossil fuel subsidies.
"Despite the widespread perception that renewables are costly, our research reveals that finding new fossil fuel reserves is costing nearly $88 billion in exploration subsidies across the G20," Whitley said. "Scrapping these subsidies would begin to create a level playing field between renewables and fossil fuel energy."

 from here

Choices? - Capitalism? Barbarism? Socialism?  


 

The Global Warming Worry

Business as usual or system change 

 Climate change is the most global and the most threatening, of all of the consequences of capitalism. No part of the world is unaffected by climate change, especially because the environmentally destructive extraction and consumption of fossil fuels takes place in both rich and poor countries, although rich countries managed to concentrate extractive activities in regions populated by less affluent people, with little political power.

The costs of climate change are not spread evenly across the planet. For example, people living on islands or low-lying seacoast are at risk for rising levels of ocean water. For example, small island states, such as the Maldives, face risk from rising oceans submerging their nations but no part of the world is safe from the long-term consequences of climate change. Given such powerlessness, the climate-change deniers have been surprisingly successful in dismissing the threat of climate change; however, the effectiveness of their rearguard activity seems to be diminishing, but not nearly fast enough to begin to take serious action to diminish dangers threatened by climate change.  Largely because of the resistance of domestic business from accepting any responsibility for climate change, states are paralyzed in the face of taking action. One area in which governments do cooperate is in joining together to oppose any regulations that might be useful in reducing climate change.

 Rajendra Pachauri, chairperson of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), explained that "The Synthesis Report will provide the roadmap by which policymakers will hopefully find their way to a global agreement to finally reverse course on climate change. It gives us the knowledge to make informed choices, the knowledge to build a brighter, more sustainable future. It enhances our vital understanding of the rationale for action—and the serious implications for inaction." He went on to say "A great deal of work and tall hurdles lie ahead. But it can be done. We still have time to build a better, more sustainable world. We still have time to avoid the most serious impacts of climate change. But we have precious little of that time."

Time is not on anyone’s side. Global carbon emissions continue to increase year after year and if they don’t peak and begin to decline in the next two or three years, it will be extremely difficult and costly to keep global temperatures from rising above two degrees C. Temperatures have risen .085 degrees C so far and are linked to billions of dollars in damages, with extreme events affecting tens of millions people. Under business as usual economic growth, the new infrastructure planned and likely to built over the next five years will commit the world to enough CO2 to max out the 2C carbon budget. That budget is the amount of CO2 or carbon that can be emitting and stay below 2C. After 2018, the only choice will be to shut down power plants and other large carbon emitters before their normal lifespan.  Data shows “we’re embracing fossil fuels more than ever,” Robert Socolow of Princeton University and co-author of the study told Vice Motherboard. “We’ve been hiding what’s going on from ourselves: A high-carbon future is being locked in by the world’s capital investments,” Socolow said.

China and the United States are responsible for 35 percent of global carbon emissions but could do their part to keep climate change to less than two degrees C by adopting best energy efficiency standards, a new analysis shows. Although China’s energy use has skyrocketed over the past two decades, the average American citizen consumes four times more electricity than a Chinese citizen. Both countries need to dramatically reduce their use of coal,

However, when it comes to energy efficiency, China’s steel industry is far less efficient than the U.S. The reverse is true when it comes to cement production, according a new Climate Action Tracker analysis of energy use and savings potential for electricity production, industry, buildings and transport in the two countries.

China and the U.S. are very different but could learn from each other. If China and the U.S. integrate the best efficiency policies, “they would both be on the right pathway to keep warming below two degrees C,” said Bill Hare a climate scientist at Climate Analytics in Berlin, Germany.
“We looked at how well both the U.S. and China would do if they each adopted a ‘best of the two’practice in electricity production, industry, buildings and transport. We found this, alone, would set them in a better direction,” Niklas Höhne of Ecofys told IPS. 

Should both the U.S. and China adopt the global best practices on energy use, U.S. emissions would decline 18 percent below 2005 by 2020 (roughly five percent below 1990 levels) and China’s would peak in the early 2020s. That would close the crucial ‘emissions gap’by nearly 25 percent. The emissions gap is the amount of carbon reductions over and above current commitments that are needed before 2020 in order to have a good chance of staying below 2C.

In contrast to the destructive anarchy of capitalist competition which reinforces the divides between countries, classes, and cultures, a cooperative worldwide commonwealth would put an end to the unchecked power and authority exercised by both governments and corporate powers. New techniques of transportation and communication should facilitate a world in which the entire population could be cooperating in the creation of the good society. Of course, nothing of the kind is taking place. 

Fracking - the false hope

Fracking, horizontal drilling and other techniques have led to surging gas production, especially in the US. Global deployment of advanced technology could double or triple global natural gas production by 2050. The widespread use of shale gas continues to attract policymakers. In the UK, a senior Conservative politician, Owen Paterson, former Environment Secretary, is urging more fracking to increase Britain‘s shale gas supplies. Paterson argues against wind power and for “investment in four possible common sense policies: shale gas, combined heat and power, small modular nuclear reactors, and demand management”. Paterson also said that the UK should suspend or scrap its Climate Change Act, which commits it to cutting CO2 emissions by more than 80% on 1990 levels by 2050, unless other countries follow suit.

The journal Nature recognises that technologies such as fracking have triggered a boom in natural gas. But the authors say this will not lead to a reduction of overall greenhouse gas emissions.

Although natural gas produces only half the CO2 emissions of coal for each unit of energy, its growing availability will make it cheaper, they say, so it will add to total energy supply and only partly replace coal. Their study, based on what they say is “an unprecedented international comparison of computer simulations”, shows that this market effect nullifies the advantage offered by the lower pollution content of the gas. This might eventually mean not lower CO2 emissions, but emissions by the middle of the century up to 10% higher than they would otherwise be. Not only could this lead to an overall increase in energy consumption and in emissions, but increased gas production would mean higher emissions of methane from drilling leakages and pipelines.

 Haewon McJeon, staff scientist at the Joint Global Change Research Institute, a partnership between the US Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) and the University of Maryland, said: “The upshot is that abundant natural gas alone will not rescue us from climate change.”

One of the co-authors, Nico Bauer, a sustainable solutions expert at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), Germany, said : “The high hopes that natural gas will help reduce global warming because of technical superiority to coal turn out to be misguided because market effects are dominating. The main factor here is that an abundance of natural gas leads to a price drop and expansion of total primary energy supply.”

The research groups projected what the world might be like in 2050, both with and without a natural gas boom. They used five different computer models, which included not just energy use and production, but also the broader economy and the climate system.

“When we first saw little change in greenhouse gas emissions in our model, we thought we had made a mistake, because we were fully expecting to see a significant reduction in emissions,” said James Edmonds, chief scientist at the Joint Global Change Research Institute. “But when we saw all five teams reporting little difference in climate change, we knew we were on to something.”

From here

Is Australia a good neighbour?

Climate Change Warriors from 12 Pacific Island nations including Fiji, Tuvalu, Tokelau, Micronesia, Vanuatu, The Solomon Islands, Tonga, Samoa, Papua New Guinea and Niue paddled canoes into the world’s largest coal port in Newcastle, Australia.

“We want the Australian community, especially the Australian leaders, to think about more than their pockets, to really think about humanity not just for the Australian people, but for everyone,” Mikaele Maiava from Tokelau said. “We’re aware that this fight is not just for the Pacific. We are very well aware that the whole world is standing up in solidarity for this. The message that we want to give, especially to the leaders, is that we are humans, this fight is not just about our land, this fight is for survival.”

On Oct. 13, Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott said that “coal is good for humanity.”

Mikaele questioned Abbott’s position, asking, “If you are talking about humanity: Is humanity really for people to lose land? Is humanity really for people to lose their culture and identity? Is humanity to live in fear for our future generations to live in a beautiful island and have homes to go to? Is that really humanity? Is that really the answer for us to live in peace and harmony? Is that really the answer for the future?”

Mikaele said “We are educated people, we are smart people, we know what’s going on, the days of the indigenous people and local people not having the information and the knowledge about what’s going on is over. We are the generation of today, the leaders of tomorrow and we are not blinded by the problem. We can see it with our own eyes, we feel it in our own hearts, and we want the Australian government to realise that. We are not blinded by money we just want to live as peacefully and fight for what matters the most, which is our homes.”

The Pacific Islands Forum describes climate change as the “single greatest threat to the livelihoods, security and well-being of the peoples of the Pacific.” Pacific Island leaders have recently stepped up their language, challenging the Australian government to stop delaying action on climate change.

Burning up the planet

Oxfam describes as a “toxic triangle” the “political inertia, financial short-termism and vested fossil fuel interests,” which must be dismantled if climate change is to be controlled. Fossil fuel advocates policies threaten to raise global temperatures, leaving 400 million people in jeopardy of hunger and drought by 2060, Oxfam UK warned in its report ‘Food, Fossil Fuels and Filthy Finance’. A powerful and lucrative fossil fuel industry, spends up to €44 million a year on lobbying EU governments in pursuit of policies that bolster its profits.

Oxfam’s Chief Executive, Mark Goldring, warned the fossil fuel industry, with the help of EU governments and investors, is effectively “trapping us into a warming world.”  EU governments and profit-driven investors are empowering the industry to recklessly pursue myopic profit-centered interests at the expense of ordinary citizens. “The world’s poorest are already being hit hardest and millions more will be made hungry by climate change,” he added.

 $674 billion was spent on fossil fuel energy in 2012. The NGO’s report revealed investment in the industry was bolstered by convenient tax breaks, incentives brokered by governments and approximately $1.9 trillion in subsidies each year.  $6 trillion will be spent in further developing the industry over the next 10 years.

Fossil fuels are responsible for 80 percent of CO2 emissions – the primary contributor to rising temperatures, which threaten well-being, economies and food security. Profit comes before everything, even people and the planet.

From here 

Global Warming - Good For Business

"For most of the planet, the specter of global warming is ominous, but as journalist McKenzie Funk reveals in his book Windfall: The Blooming Business of Global Warming there are those who view the Earth's dangerous meltdown as a golden opportunity...Funk's original, forthright take on this little-discussed profit-taking trend in the climate change sweepstakes is very unsettling."

In short, Funk reports on the long line of individuals, corporations and financial investors who are betting on climate change to make a huge profit from catastrophe.

The following is an excerpt from the introduction:

For three decades we have all known, at some level, about global warming. As a point of scientific inquiry it is older, first identified by the nineteenth-century researchers John Tyndall and Svante Arrhenius, but as a source of popular anxiety and conversation it dates to the first sophisticated computer models of the early 1970s and the first World Climate Conference in 1979 and landmark congressional testimony by the NASA atmospheric physicist James Hansen in 1988. It has been around long enough to become a cliché—I thank it for the heat wave I'm experiencing in Seattle as I write this—and long enough to have birthed a newer cliché: the idea that we have so changed the planet with our engineering and our emissions that we now live in the Anthropocene, a new geologic epoch of man's own creation. Long enough, certainly, for something to have been done about it. In the new millennium, which has brought us Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth, Lord Nicholas Stern's seven-hundred-page Economics of Climate Change, and a string of failed climate legislation and UN conferences, the warnings have been ever louder and more sustained.

The atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide, our principal contribution to the climate and the principal driver of warming, has only been rising. It is now 40 percent higher than preindustrial levels, higher than it has been anytime in the last 800,000 years. In New York's Madison Square Garden, a seventy-foot doomsday clock, recently unveiled by Deutsche Bank, is tracking greenhouse-gas levels in real time: 2 billion metric tons added each month, or 800 a second, for a total of 3.7 trillion tons and counting. The ticker has thirteen red digits, but when you stare at it from Seventh Avenue, the last three are a blur. They're spinning too quickly to see.

This book is about how we're preparing for the world we seem hell-bent on creating. It's about climate change, but not about the science of it, nor the politics, nor directly about how we can or why we should stop it. Instead, it's about bets being placed on a simple, cynical premise: that we won't stop it anytime soon. It's about people, and mostly it's about people like me: northerners from the developed world—historically the emitter countries, as we're called—who occupy the high, dry ground, whether real or metaphorical.
I'm interested in climate change as a driver of human behavior—as a case study, the ultimate case study, in how we confront crisis. Warming will reshape the planet, and in broad strokes we already know how: Hot places will get hotter. Wet places will get wetter. Ice will simply melt. Poor, mostly tropical countries, those least responsible for the consumption that fuels the factories that produce the emissions that cause the warming, will be hit hardest, but wealthier, higher-latitude regions—Europe, Canada, the United States—are not entirely immune. The change is so vast, so universal, that it seems to test the limits of human reason. So it should not be surprising that the ideologies that led us here, those that have guided the postindustrial age—techno-lust and hyper-individualism, conflation of growth with progress, unflagging faith in unfettered markets—are the same ones many now rely on as we try to find a way out. Nowhere is humankind's mix of vision and tunnel vision more apparent than in how we're planning for a warmed world.

The idea that people are irrational has lately been in vogue. We can thank the global financial crisis for that. Behavioral economists have reminded us that the market, far from being a collection of fully logical individuals, is hostage to Keynesian "animal spirits," the emotions, prejudices, impulses, and shortcuts that are part of nearly every human decision and every financial bubble—and part, no doubt, of our apathy about reducing carbon emissions. In the United States, nearly 98 percent of the federal climate-research budget goes to the hard sciences, which have produced mounds of evidence for global warming—enough to make a believer of anyone who gives it an honest look—and produced increasingly refined computer models predicting an increasingly dire future. One recent prediction, from MIT, is of a median warming of 5.2 degrees Celsius by 2100 if we don't curtail emissions—a temperature spike that could entirely melt the polar ice cap in summertime, turn much of Central America and the southern United States into a dust bowl, and wipe island nations off the map. The remaining 2 percent of the federal research budget goes to social scientists, such as those with Columbia University's Center for Research on Environmental Decisions, who probe what may now be the most important question: If we know the risks, why aren't we doing anything? The center's director, Elke Weber, suggests that at both levels where humans make their decisions—emotional and analytical—there are roadblocks. The emotional block: What we don't see doesn't scare us. "The time-delayed, abstract, and often statistical nature of the risks of global warming does not evoke strong visceral reactions," Weber writes. At the analytical level, there is, along with the tension between individual and systemic risk—an apparent tragedy of the commons—something economists call hyperbolic discounting. It goes like this: Offer to give someone either $5 today or $10 next year, and he'll probably take the $5.

Among many activists, politicians, and scientists, the assumption is that climate change now suffers mainly from a PR problem: If the proper nudges can be found or the reality of it finally made visceral, the public will take action. Unspoken and scarcely examined is a second, much bigger assumption: that "taking action" means trying to cut carbon emissions. That taking action will take a certain shape: Green roofs. Carbon caps. Green cars. Solar panels. Footpaths. Forests. Fluorescent bulbs. Bicycles. Insulation. Algae. Inflated tires. Showers. Clotheslines. Recycling. Locavorism. Light-rail. Wind farms. Vegetarianism. Heat pumps. Telecommuting. Smaller homes. Smaller families. Smaller lives. We hope our collective fear of global warming will push us inevitably toward collective behavior. But what if the world as we know it goes on even as the earth as we know it begins to disappear? There's another possible response to melting ice caps and rising sea levels, to the reality of climate change—a response that is tribal, primal, profit-driven, short-term, and not at all idealistic. Every man for himself. Every business for itself. Every city for itself. Every country for itself. There's the possibility that we take the $5.

Taken from here

In many areas the public is taking action, as can be recognised from the last paragraph: individual and local action. And while the public takes action those with the power probably laugh behind our backs. What power does the public have to make any serious impact on the problems of global warming or any other matter that should be in the public domain for serious discussion and decision making policies? How does the public gain the power, currently denied to it, to be the driving force in decisions that impact on the vast majority of the world? Capitalism and its profit motive is the problem, the stumbling block for the public - it is that that must go before we will be in a position to seriously address the problems facing us all. The only alternative for the long haul is socialism.
JS 

Global Warming and 'Capitalism Deniers'

Irreconcilable Differences: Capitalism And A Sustainable Planet

By Gary Olson from here

People who own the world outright for profit will have to be stopped; by influence, by power, by us. — Wendell Berry

The need for more studies confirming that we’re approaching an irreversible ecological crisis, the tipping point beyond human control, is over. James Hansen, the world’s most eminent climatologist is so certain of this evidence that he’s added civil disobedience to his resistance repertoire. Along with legal challenges, expert testimony and lobbying governments, the 72-year-old grandfather advocates direct action by a mobilized citizenry. He’s been arrested several times, most recently in protests again the proposed Keystone XL Pipeline.

This project would transport raw, toxic tar sands (bitumen) from Alberta, Canada to refineries on the U.S. Gulf Coast. In addition to destroying northern forests and endangering our drinking water, Keystone XL will emit a staggering amount of global warming pollution into the environment. Just a few weeks ago, Hansen and some former NASA colleagues wrote that “Burning all fossil fuels, we conclude, would make most of the planet uninhabitable by humans … and would leave just a fraction of humanity clinging to life atop Earth’s highest ridges.”

That the corporate carbon industrial complex remains obdurate in the face of all evidence isn’t surprising but it does reveal the inadequacy of piece meal reform. Simply stated, market based responses won’t save us because there is an irreconcilable conflict between capitalist economic growth ad infinitum and the survival of the planet as we know it. Even the looming prospect of ecocide won’t keep fossil fuels in the ground, resources worth trillions to oil and gas corporations.

As labor rights activist Shamus Cooke puts it, those capitalists who fail to obtain a return on their investments (growth) lose money. This relentless imperative, “this holy shrine of growth cannot be surgically removed from the capitalist body; the body itself was born ill.” And because renewable energy isn’t as profitable as oil,” a majority of capitalist investment will continue to go towards destroying the planet.” Recently, when asked about opposition to the XL Pipeline, ExxonMobil’s CEO Rex Tillerson candidly replied, “My philosophy is to make money.”

As if to reinforce this point, profiting from global warming is the next big thing. I’m reminded of Bob Mankoff’s 2002 cartoon in The New Yorker where a corporate executive declares to an audience of peers, “And so, while the-end-of-the-world scenario will be rife with unimaginable horrors, we believe the pre-end period will be filled with unprecedented opportunities for profits.” Mankoff’s clever prescience is perversely confirmed by a recent Bloomberg headline: “Investors Embrace Climate Change, Chase Hotter Profits.” Because Wall Street now assumes that climate change is “inevitable,” the only remaining question is how to profit from it?

This goes far beyond selling more potent sun screens, inflatable rafts and anti-pollution breathing masks. Billions of dollars are being invested in Australian farmland (far from the ocean) and hedge funds trading in something called “weather derivatives.” Investments are flowing into the mining of copper and gold in Greenland where glacier-free land has suddenly become accessible. Arctic tourism, gas exploration and new shipping lanes through melting polar regions are all climate change, money-making ventures. In anticipation of major droughts, Bayer, Monsanto and BASF have filed some 55 patents for “climate ready” seeds. Green technology is already passé as investors scramble for their final piece of a planet in dire jeopardy.

Working for reforms is not unimportant but capitalism cannot prevent the ruination of the biosphere. My sense is that climate activists who fail to acknowledge this basic truth — we might term them “capitalism deniers” — have no chance of reversing our slide toward the ecological apocalypse.

For myself, as a grandfather of two little guys and nearing my retirement from full-time teaching, the prospect of of engaging in civil disobedience, being a serial arrestee on behalf of the environment is appealing for the next stage of my life. I like to imagine Jackson and Zinn’s parents having a true story to tell the boys when they plead: “Tell us again about how Grandpa tried to stop the bad guys who didn’t care about all the animals, plants and people on earth.”

 Gary Olson is professor and chair of the political science department at Moravian College in Bethlehem, PA. 

Now the bad news

DON'T CHANGE THE CLIMATE - CHANGE THE SYSTEM

Extreme heat waves are set to quadruple by 2040, according to a new study to make growing crops and surviving actually impossible. This will happen  regardless of whether humans curb greenhouse gas emissions.

Published in the Environmental Research Letters, the study tracks trends in heat increases, finding that "3-sigma" heat wave events, in which climates are warmed to 3 times their normal temperature for over 3 weeks in a row, have been on the rise since the 1950s. No amount of emissions mitigation can stop this frequency from doubling by the year 2020 and quadrupling by 2040, and by the latter year, extreme heat events will cover 20 percent of the globe. Furthermore, 5-sigma events, which do not occur presently, are expected to ravage parts of the world's surface by 2040. 3-sigma heat events will be common occurrences in 85 percent of the world, and 5-sigma heat events will occur in 60 percent of the world by 2100.

What 3 sigma refers to is 3 standard deviations, in this case 3 deviations above the mean. 3 standard deviations is about 99.7% so if you were to have data for 1000 heat waves, then a 3 sigma event would be within the three hottest. As the temperature increases, the peak temperature and the length of time of the waves most likely will increase as well but no, we're not about to be basking in 300° F temperatures any time soon. Likewise, the 5 sigma events predicted for later this century will not mean a five-fold increase in temperature but rather serves as an indication that when they arrive they will be severe: 5 sigma indicates the hottest heat wave in about every 2,000,000 events.

More simply (I hope), the worst heat waves of 50 years ago will become the norm while we have yet to experience what the worst heat waves of 2063 will be like.

The report comes as a record heat wave hits North Asia, killing dozens and sickening far more, flooding hospitals with heatstroke victims amid power shortages that are cutting off air conditioning in some areas. A National Resources Defense Council report predicts that, by the end of the century, 150,000 people in the U.S. could die as a direct result of heat waves alone, with the projected deaths from global warming overall being far higher.

Climate chaos will create resource wars around the globe- with many millions more killed. Man-made greenhouse gases will not be curbed, because that would cut too deeply into profits. And, not before too much longer we can expect massive methane releases. Russian researchers have already found kilometers wide columns of methane rising from the ocean. We are cooked. Well-done. 

Methane Madness

Large amounts of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, are trapped and concentrated in the frozen Arctic tundra but are also found as semi-solid gas hydrates under the sea. The impact of rising temperatures on permafrost AND the diminishing ice cover in the East Siberian sea is allowing the waters to warm and the methane to leach out.  Researchers examined the impact of the release of a plausible 50-gigatonnes of methane over a decade.The impact would increase flooding, sea level rise, damage to agriculture and human health. The effects of the extra methane would be felt most in developing countries.

"That's an economic time bomb that at this stage has not been recognised on the world stage," said Prof Gail Whiteman at Erasmus University in the Netherlands "We think its incredibly important for world leaders to really discuss what are the implications of this methane release and what could we indeed do about it to hopefully prevent the whole burst from happening."

"We are looking at a big effect," said Prof Peter Wadhams from the University of Cambridge, "a possibly catastrophic effect on global climate that's a consequence of this extremely fast sea ice retreat that's been happening in recent years."

Many science fiction novels and movies often depict the “mad scientist”. However, it is scientists that are providing us with the early warnings and  it is the capitalist class who are the mad ones, fully prepared to risk a rise in global disasters rather than risk a drop in their profits.

Capitalist Criminals

The lead industry, the asbestos industry, and the tobacco companies all knew the dangers of their products, made efforts to suppress the information or instill doubt about it even as they promoted what they made, and went right on producing and selling while others suffered and died. With all three industries, the negative results conveniently arrived years, sometimes decades, after exposure and so were hard to connect to it. Each of these industries knew that the relationship existed. Each used that time-lag as protection.


The most profitable corporations in the world, giant energy companies like ExxonMobil, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, BP, and Shell, certainly know what they were doing. These companies have been extracting fossil fuels from the Earth in ever more ingenious ways. The burning of those fossil fuels, in turn, has put record amounts of carbon dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere. Only this month, the CO2 level reached parts per million for the first time in human history. A consensus of scientists has long concluded that the process was warming the world and that, if the average planetary temperature rose more than two degrees Celsius, all sorts of dangers could ensue, including seas rising high enough to inundate coastal cities, increasingly intense heat waves, droughts, floods, ever more extreme storm systems, and so on. None of this is exactly a mystery. It’s in the scientific literature. Those who run the giant energy corporations know perfectly well. Its top executives continue to plan their futures knowing that their extremely profitable acts are destroying the very habitat, the very temperature range that for so long made life comfortable for humanity.

These companies have even begun taking advantage of climate change itself -- in the form of a melting Arctic -- to exploit enormous and previously unreachable energy supplies. Oil and gas companies evidently has no qualms about making its next set of profits directly off melting the planet. With their staggering profits, these industrial barons could have decided anywhere along the line that the future they were ensuring was beyond dangerous. They could themselves have led the way with massive investments in genuine alternative energies (solar, wind, tidal, geothermal, algal, and who knows what else), instead of the exceedingly small-scale ones they made, often only for publicity purposes.

To destroy our planet with malice and forethought, with profits as motive, isn’t that the ultimate crime against humanity?
Adapted from here

The Cautionary Principle

There have been two recent interesting news items on this. One that the amount of CO2 recorded in the atmosphere has passed the figure of 400 parts per million. Actually, the figure for CO2 equivalent (ie including other greenhouse gases) has long been above this level. Anyway, it confirms that the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere has been steadily increasing year by year. The other report shows, however, that the Earth's average global temperature has remained static since 1996.


What does this mean? The "climate deniers" have been having a field day, claiming that this shows that measures to reduce the emission of CO2 into the atmosphere are unnecessary. Actually, what is shows is that scientists have been able to refine their theories, especially about "climate sensitivity", i.e. the relation between an increase in CO2 in the atmosphere and an increase in Earth's average temperature. This is a key figure for forecasting how much hotter the Earth will get and how fast. As we pointed out in an article in the December 2007 Socialist Standard:

"Socialists are not scientists so all we can do is to exercise critical thinking while taking into account what the majority of scientists in the field have concluded, knowing that they could be wrong.
The majority of scientists in the fields involved have concluded that the undeniable rise in average global temperatures has been caused since at least the 1970s by the rise in the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere due to the burning of fossil fuels. In other words, that it is man-made or “anthropogenic”as they put it in their language.
What is not clear –scientists are still arguing about it –is what precise temperature rise is caused by the emission of a given extra amount of CO2. This of course is a key ratio since more and more CO2 is being released into the atmosphere by the continued burning of coal, oil and gas.
If you assume the “climate sensibility”of CO2 to be low, then the rise in average global temperature at particular levels will be low. If you consider its “climate sensibility” to be high, then by 2100 the rise could be 2, 3 or 4ºC. A 3 or 4º rise could cause huge problems: sea levels rising by a third to a half a metre (one or two feet), more stormy weather, more forest fires, more droughts and desertification.
So, without necessarily subscribing to the higher figures put forward by the more engaged scientists, it can be accepted that it is desirable to cut back on CO2 emissions. The question we look at in this issue is how likely is this to happen under capitalism given its competitive and anarchic nature?"

This cautious approach has allowed us to avoid some of the more alarmist views put out by some (and used to argue that the problem is so urgent that we can't wait for socialism and so should subordinate campaigning for socialism to campaigning to reduce greenhouse gases within capitalism).

For instance the Anarchist Federation brought out a pamphlet Ecology and Class in 2003 or 2004 which made the following claim on page 7:

"Global warming will expand ocean water and raise sea levels by two feet by the year 2010."

It didn't happen and they (and the others whose claim they accepted) were made to look fools. Ironically, the scientists' explanation for the pause in global warning since 1996 is that the heat has been absorbed by the sea, maybe to be released later and more slowly.

So, instead of making unsubstantiated claims in a bid to show how bad capitalism is, we should stick to what we advised in 2007:
"Socialists are not scientists so all we can do is to exercise critical thinking while taking into account what the majority of scientists in the field have concluded, knowing that they could be wrong"

The case for socialism hots up

Recent reports detail how, as a result of human activity, we are on track for a four-degree Celsius increase in average global temperatures. Should this come to pass, the Earth would be hotter than at any time in the last 30 million years.  Already as ecosystems destabilize we witness ever-more erratic and extreme weather events. 2012 was a record year of heat in the continental U.S., which set 362 new record high temperatures and not a single record low.

While the World Bank concludes that avoiding a 4-degree temperature increase is “vital for the health and welfare of communities around the world”– it nevertheless is still handing out loans to construct more than two dozen coal-fired power plants, to the tune of $5 billion. Carbon emissions are at record highs and set to rise further in a world where 1,200 new coal-burning power stations are under construction, and oil and gas extraction are on the increase around the world. By 2030, the entire Western Hemisphere will be energy independent, due to the expansion of new techniques for oil and gas exploration, such as fracking in shale deposits, and horizontal and deep-water drilling. Fossil fuels are expected to remain at 81 percent of the energy mix, in an energy economy that will be 39 percent larger than today. As corporations hunt every square meter of land and sea for more fossil fuels to sell, and to  line the pockets of their shareholders, millions of people know that the world is changing in ways that threaten the beauty, diversity and stability of life on Earth. Rather than limiting the power of the corporations, politicians are greasing the wheels of capitalist expansion.

To understand climate change it’s necessary to examine the structure and ideology of the system of capitalism. To get to the root of the issue, it becomes necessary to analyze the intertwined workings of the whole economic system of production and exchange of goods and services — that is, capitalism. The insane capitalist “logic” is short-term profit-taking must be maximized at all costs. If capitalism is not growing, it is in crisis. Growth must occur continuously and in all sectors. If the sector in question is highly profitable, it will grow even faster, regardless of any social considerations. Like, for example, the fossil-fuel sector. Oil production, rather than declining, as is desperately needed to stop climate change, is predicted to increase from the current 93 million barrels per day to 110 million by 2020. Instead of optimism about acting on climate change, the real optimism these days among capitalists is about the profits they can make from the oil and gas bonanza.

 This senseless waste is evident in the practice of gas flaring. The natural gas that comes up with the oil, rather than being collected and utilised, is simply set on fire. In Texas, the natural gas flared in 2012 could have provided electricity to 400,000 homes. Companies are in such a rush to make money from oil that they can’t be bothered to develop the infrastructure necessary to cope with associated natural gas. Stanford University academic Adam Brandt explains: “Companies are in a race with their competitors to develop the resource, which means there is little incentive to delay production to reduce flaring.” We also are confronted by the idiocy that while one set of capitalists is fracking for natural gas, a different set of capitalists is setting fire to the exact same gas because it’s a nuisance that slows down production! Nothing could exemplify the utter waste and anarchic insanity of capitalism than this fact.  One of the government regulatory bodies supposedly in charge of overseeing the oil corporations, North Dakota’s Industrial Commission, gave their logic for refusing to take action against this senselessness: “If we restricted oil production to reduce flaring, we would reduce the cash flow from oil wells fivefold…As well as cutting waste, we are mandated to increase production, which we would not be doing.”
Coal has gradually declined in use in many countries. One might think this is a good thing. However, capitalism is a global system, so any coal not sold in one place, finds a market overseas. The Chinese population is literally choking to death on grotesque amounts of air pollution in cities such as Beijing. And who’s to blame? The U.S. government says China is building too many coal plants — but the coal destroying people’s lungs and poisoning the air in Asia is coming from mines in Europe, Australia and the U.S. Economic competition between countries makes it impossible for effective international agreements on climate change and emissions reduction to be negotiated.

As socialists, we argue that we need to live in a world where there are no classes with diametrically opposed interests, in perpetual conflict over social and political power. Only in such a socially just and ecologically sustainable world will there be any long-term hope for humanity to live in peace with itself, other species and the planet upon which we all depend. The stepping-stones of that  road are the acts of struggle needed to create it. Whether we travel that road or not — and whether we leave behind a world to our descendants as beautiful as the one we were born into — will depend on our own independent, organized self-activity to wrench control away from a ruling elite that is quite happy to continue making money from a system that must be overturned.

Adapted from this article

It is getting hotter

A wee bit of arithmetic. Revenues minus Costs = Profits. Profits rise if costs borne by producers fall. The typical capitalist enterprise's response is to seek more profits, increase the size of the company, or gain a bigger share of the market, greater profits enable an enterprise to make the investments and tap into a new market; faster growth attracts capital; and a larger market share can secure lower prices for raw materials. The profit motive in capitalist production guarantees costs of production will be forced onto others. And unless one wishes to argue the world’s creatures need no place to live, no food to eat and no clean water to drink, the destruction of these in capitalist production is a cost to either be borne by the producer or to be borne by others. Even the most radical ‘free-market’ capitalist economists agree that this set of relations is a prerequisite for capitalism.  And production that threatens to end the world, as global warming does, means ‘profits’ from said production would not exist if capitalists were forced to bear their true costs. Capitalists have almost never been forced to bear the costs of capitalist production. After depleting resources and causing environmental destruction capitalists have simply moved on to pastures new.

Global warming is not an accident of history for which none bear responsibility. Capitalists have benefited and continue to benefit from the destruction of the planet where they act in their own narrow economic interests to-wards a collective suicide. A number of economists and politicians that the role of government was to correct ‘market failures’ such as environmental destruction and reduce the problem of "externalities" or the tendency of capitalists to force their costs of production onto people who see no benefit from it. It is a forlorn hope.  It assumes the very same capitalists who have spent centuries profiting from unhindered growth and forcing their costs onto others will comply with regulation they, themselves have largely written to ensure a credible enforcement system does not exist. The purpose is provide the appearance of action toward a solution without effective action taking place. It does not question the nature of the problem—that the political economy of capitalism is responsible for global warming.

Adapted from here

Change the system, not the climate

People are losing their homes, their livelihoods, their sources of food. People are dying because of climate change. We are already feeling the impacts of climate change; the past few months we have witnessed record-breaking extremities of weather – drought, typhoons, floods and extreme temperatures. These extremities of weather change have also wreaked havoc on crops, farmlands, livelihoods and homes. Around the world communities are already facing the impacts of climate change. Already, there is a growing relation between climate change and the staggering increases in food prices and the growing food crisis. Capitalism has been a catastrophic failure for the majority of the human race, not to mention the other species and the environment. Technological advances have not been used for the bettterment of humanity but rather to enrich an elite class.

The United Arab Emirates, where Doha is located, has THE highest carbon footprint per capita in the world, the perfect spot for world governments to put on a "save the environment show". 

"I can't explain why industrialised nations here in Doha can't see the urgency of all this,"  Teresa Anderson of the Gaia Foundation, the UK partner of the African Biodiversity Network remarked. SOYMB and Shamus Cooke can answer her

"Our environmental crisis is not caused by some abstract notion of growth that humans in general just can't seem to shake.  Capitalistic style growth, however, is built into the system at the ground floor; nothing is produced under capitalism (in the private sector) unless a profit (growth) results; capitalists who don't get a return on their investments (growth) lose their money. This is the holy shrine of growth that cannot be surgically removed from the capitalistic body; the body itself was born ill. Thus, if renewable energy is not as profitable as oil — and it isn't — then the majority of capitalist investing will continue to go towards destroying the planet. It really is that simple. Even the best-intentioned capitalists do not throw their money away on non-growth investments. Countless environmentalists have tried to solve the climate issue while keeping capitalism in place, since this is the only "practical" solution. But this approach has failed as the climate has dramatically worsened. It's becoming increasingly obvious to a growing number of people that our economic system itself cannot be reformed to save our environment." writes Shamus Cooke "Ultimately, climate activists must come face to face with political and corporate power. Corporate-owned governments are the ones with the power to adequately address the climate change issue, and they will not be swayed by good science or even a flooded planet."

The international peasants organisation Via Campesina rejected "the false capitalist solutions" contained in the drafts of proposals, and argued they would "only worsen the climate and food crises...The inaction in the climate negotiations is a reflection of the corporate capture of governments by big business who want to continue exploiting nature to gain as much profit as possible," the group said in a statement.

 Negotiations are a "million miles from where we need to be to even have a small chance of preventing runaway climate change," said Lidy Nacpil of Jubilee South Asia Pacific, a network of faith-based and development organisations. "We cannot go back to our countries and tell them that we allowed this to happen, that we condemned our own future," Nacpil said in a statement.

 "African negotiators are throwing their hands up in despair, and asking why they should even bother coming to the negotiations, if the developed countries continue to wring more demands from us in return for no money or commitments," said Seyni Nafo of Mali and a spokesperson for the African Group of Negotiators in the U.N. climate talks.

 Regardless of all those representatives meeting in Doha, Qatar, they will ultimately fail to agree on any effective action. Climate change is a world problem and as such can only be tackled at world level. But, as the experience of the Kyoto Treaty shows, the chances of the world’s major capitalist states agreeing on an adequate enforced programme are practically nil. The history of sincere but failed attempts to correct a system which cannot meet needs leads to the conclusion that a new social system should be tried.  Only in a world in which the Earth’s natural and industrial resources have become the common heritage of all humanity can the necessary measures be taken to stabilise and reduce emissions, curtail and end pollution and deal with the consequences of global warming and climate change.

 The bottom line is that we possess fore-knowledge of the chaos and flight of the homeless and the hungry as a result of the inevitable floods and droughts and this is surely premeditated murder of millions from self-interest.

Fact of the Day

In 2011, rich nations spent $58 billion on subsidies and just $11 billion for climate adaptation and mitigation in developing countries. According to the study, the United States spent $13 billion on fossil fuel subsidies in 2011 and just $2.5 billion in climate aid.

climate genocide - 10 billion people set to die this century

Dr Donald A. Levin (Professor of Biology, University of Texas, Austin) and his son Dr Phillip Levin (a biologist with the National Marine Fisheries Service) (2002) explain:
“ Some 2,000 species of Pacific Island birds (about 15 percent of the world total) have gone extinct since human colonization. Roughly 20 of the 297 known mussel and clam species and 40 of about 950 fishes have perished in North America in the past century. On average, one extinction happens somewhere on earth every 20 minutes. Ecologists estimate that half of all living bird and mammal species will be gone within 200 or 300 years. Although crude and occasionally controversial, such statistics illustrate the extent of the current upheaval, which spans the globe and affects a broad array of plants and animals…The current losses are, however, exceptional. Rates of extinction appear now to be 100 to 1,000 times greater than background levels, qualifying the present as an era of 'mass extinction'. The globe has experienced similar waves of destruction just five times in the past.”

More depressing is that Dr James Lovelock FRS (Gaia hypothesis) and Professor Kevin Anderson ( Director, Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, University of Manchester, UK) have recently estimated that fewer than 1 billion people will survive this century due to unaddressed, man-made global warming – noting that the world population is expected to reach 9.5 billion by 2050, these estimates translate to a climate genocide involving deaths of 10 billion people this century, this including 6 billion under-5 year old infants, 3 billion Muslims in a terminal Muslim Holocaust, 2 billion Indians, 1.3 billion non-Arab Africans, 0.5 billion Bengalis, 0.3 billion Pakistanis and 0.3 billion Bangladeshis. Unaddressed, man-made climate change will thus yield an average annual avoidable death rate to 100 million per year.

Dr James Hansen, (heads the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City, and an adjunct professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Columbia University) has concluded: “After the ice has gone, would the Earth proceed to the Venus syndrome, a runaway greenhouse effect that would destroy all life on the planet, perhaps permanently? While that is difficult to say based on present information, I’ve come to conclude that if we burn all reserves of oil, gas, and coal, there is a substantial chance we will initiate the runaway greenhouse. If we also burn the tar sands and tar shale, I believe the Venus syndrome is a dead certainty” (James Hansen, “Storms of My Grandchildren.")

Yet it needn't be.

An Australian engineering team called Beyond Zero Emissions has released its 5 year study that shows how Australia can have 100% renewable energy by 2020 using renewable technologies of wind power and concentrated solar thermal with molten salts energy storage for 24/7, baseload operation. Professor Mark Jacobson of Stanford University, California, and Mark A. Delucchi of University of California Davis have produced a plan for 100% renewable energy plan for the whole world by 2020. James Hansen in answer to the question “Is there any real chance of averting the climate crisis?”, has stated: “Absolutely. It is possible – if we give politicians a cold, hard slap in the face. The fraudulence of the Copenhagen approach – 'goals' for emission reductions, 'offsets' that render ironclad goals almost meaningless, the ineffectual 'cap-and-trade' mechanism – must be exposed. We must rebel against such politics as usual.”

Capitalism denies - or through resolute inaction effectively denies - the acute problem of man-made climate change. Capitalism – that brought us wars and holocausts – has been unable or unwilling to address man-made climate change and now threatens a climate genocide.

It must be system change, not climate change.

Humans and Nature

It is basic Marxism to state that wealth is anything useful produced by human labour from materials found in nature. Humans meet their material needs by transforming parts of the rest of nature into things that are useful to them; this in fact is what production is. So the basis of any society is its mode of production which, again, is the same thing as its relationship to the rest of nature. Humans survive by interfering in the rest of nature to change it for their own benefit.
But in capitalist society wealth takes the form of an immense accumulation of commodities and a commodity is an article of wealth produced for the purpose of being exchanged for other articles of wealth. Thus commodity production is an economic system where wealth is produced for sale, for the market. Socially useless production constitutes a large and growing proportion of economic activity within capitalism and, as such, contributes significantly to the perpetuation of artificial scarcity.

From The German Ideology:
“Animals…change the environment by their activities in the same way, even if not to the same extent, as man does, and these changes, as we have seen, in turn react upon and change those who made them…But animals exert a lasting effect on their environment unintentionally and, as far as the animals themselves are concerned, accidentally. The further removed men are from animals, however, the more their effect on nature assumes the character of premeditated, planned action directed towards preconceived ends...In short, the animal merely uses its environment, and brings about changes in it simply by its presence; man by his changes makes it serve his ends, masters it. This is the final, essential distinction between man and other animals, and once again it is labour that brings about this distinction”

That humans have to interfere in nature is a fact of human existence. How humans interfere in nature, on the other hand, depends on the kind of society they live in.

Before anyone goes and accuses the Marxist of wishing to dominate Nature , heed the later words of Engels in The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man:
"...let us not flatter ourselves overmuch for our human victories over nature. For every such victory it takes its revenge on us. Indeed, each in the first place brings about the consequences on which we counted, but in the second and third place it has quite different, unforeseen effects which only too often cancel out the first ones... At every step we are reminded that we by no means rule over nature like a conqueror over a foreign people, like someone standing outside nature -– but that we with flesh, blood and brain belong to nature and exist in its midst, and that all our mastery of it consists in the fact that we have the advantage over all other creatures of being able to know and correctly apply its laws...As long as individual capitalists produce and exchange for the sake of the immediate profit, only the nearest, most immediate results can be considered in the first place... In relation to nature, as to society, the present mode of production is predominantly concerned only about the first, the most tangible result. Why should one be surprised, then, that the more remote effects of actions directed to this end turn out to be of quite a different character, and mainly even of quite an opposite one..."

Marx in Capital is critical of the effect of capitalism on the ecological balance of Nature.
"Capitalist production, by collecting the population in great centres, and causing an ever-increasing preponderance of town population, on the one hand concentrates the historical motive power of society; on the other hand, it disturbs the circulation of matter between man and the soil, i.e. prevents the return to the soil of its elements consumed by man in the form of food and clothing; it therefore violates the conditions necessary to lasting fertility of the soil. By this action it destroys at the same time the health of the town labourer and the intellectual life of the rural labourer...all progress in capitalistic agriculture is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the labourer, but of robbing the soil; all progress in increasing the fertility of the soil for a given time, is a progress towards ruining the lasting sources of that fertility. The more a country starts its development on the foundation of modern industry, like the United States, for example, the more rapid is this process of destruction. Capitalist production, therefore, develops technology, and the combining together of various processes into a social whole, only by sapping the original sources of all wealth- – the soil and the labourer."

In The Communist Manifesto Marx argued for the "Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of the distinction between town and country, by a more equable distribution of the population over the country." and we see the influence of such views in the Marxist William Morris’ News from Nowhere, where London is virtually semi-rural and Manchester no longer exists.

Greens are wrong to see interference as inherently destructive of nature, it might do that but there is no reason why it has to. Does the fault lie in all industrial production, or could we, by adopting proper socialist arrangements, produce, transform nature, reap benefits from science and technology and have growth in needs satisfaction and in life quality: all without bringing on ecological crisis? Socialists say ‘yes‘. An ecological-communist society requires the development of productive forces. Not profit-seeking blind economic growth to increase capital accumulation, to reinvest in the hope of creating yet more capital, with all their destructive effects on the rest of nature , but eco-socialist growth must be a rational, planned development for everyone’s equal benefit, which would therefore be ecologically benign.

Today’s environmental problems are world problems – global warming, pollution, deforestation, not to mention poverty and disease – that can only be tackled on a world scale, socialists should be sceptical of this being able to be undertaken effectively by loose adhoc federations of local communities. There requires the continuation of some permanent administrative structure beyond local level. A socialist central administrative body. But having said that, it involves a high degree of decentralisation and local control. Socialists recognise the need also for permanent administrative bodies at regional and global as well as local level that some socialists will take issue with