John Bellamy Foster: This administration is not just a cabal of ignoramuses. Behind the right’s climate denial is the economic reality that seriously combating capitalism’s war on the planet requires the defeat of the system.
A new conservative campaign aims to discredit efforts to define the new and dangerous stage of planetary history, by driving a wedge between social scientists and the Anthropocene Working Group.
In one year, rich countries take $2 trillion more from poor countries than they return in aid and investment. The countries that brag most about their foreign aid are enabling mass theft.
With Donald Trump in the White House the future for our climate looks bleak, but capitalism’s love affair with fossil energy runs much deeper than the desires and personalities of individual politicians.
Susan George: We are faced with determined adversaries who care nothing about human rights or climate change. They only want a world in which they can make endless amounts of money using all available resources, no matter what the costs to nature and to human life.
‘Like latter-day wizardry, corporate risk calculations suggest that markets and capital can, not only control the natural world, but somehow anticipate it’
Under capitalism, everything is a business opportunity. Disasters are not viewed by business leaders as problems to be solved, they are seen as circumstances of which they must take advantage.
Another contribution to C&C’s ongoing discussion of Andreas Malm’s masterful new book on the origins and current implications of an economic system whose deep dependence on fossil fuels threatens the survival of civilization.
Climate change and extreme weather events are not devastating a random selection of human beings from all walks of life. There are no billionaires among the dead, no corporate executives living in shelters, no stockbrokers watching their children die of malnutrition.
New analysis of global inequality shows that the income gap between people in rich and poor countries is far wider than policymakers are willing to admit.
Overfishing, pollution and warming water have pushed the world’s oceans into crisis. If nothing is done the results will be catastrophic for marine systems and the billions of humans who rely on them. To stop this destruction our society has to be organized in a completely different way.
Michael Yates explains why inequality matters, how it negatively affects nearly every aspect of our lives, how its underlying causes are rooted in modern capitalism, and why informed radical action by working people, the unemployed and the poor is needed to overcome the great inequality that marks our time.
Michael Roberts reviews John Smith’s Imperialism in the 21st Century. This “powerful and searing indictment of the exploitation of billions of people,” argues that “the huge low wage proletariat that has emerged in the last 30 years is the key to the profits of imperialism.”
In “Economics After Capitalism: A Guide to the Ruins & a Road to the Future,” ecosocialist Derek Wall offers an insightful overview of non-orthodox economics, from Social Credit to Marxism to Elinor Ostrom.
To avoid challenging the fossil fuel profiteers, the Paris negotiators bet on untested and dangerous geoengineering technologies.
The politicians who poisoned the water supply in Flint are as bad as they come, but it’s the system they serve that makes such disasters inevitable.
‘Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming.’ A brilliant Marxist critique of capitalism and the origins of the fossil fuel economy
Michael Lebowitz: “The tragedy of our commons is that our finite world is being destroyed by the relentless drive for profit, by the system we must name—capitalism.”
In ‘This Changes Everything,’ Naomi Klein shows that industry interests are opposed to those of ordinary people, a point climate activists have had trouble communicating and been reluctant to embrace
Capitalism’s infrastructure, which is designed to dominate nature, cannot simply be taken over and used for an ecological transformation. Only a complete, root-and-branch change will do the job.