By John Bellamy Foster

 

This very expensive GLOBAL WARMING bullshit has got to stop.

Our planet is freezing, record low temps, and our GW scientists are stuck in ice.

—Donald Trump, January 2, 2014[1]

February 5, 2017 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal reposted from Monthly Review — The alarm bells are ringing. The climate-change denialism of the Trump administration, coupled with its goal of maximizing fossil-fuel extraction and consumption at all costs, constitutes, in the words of Noam Chomsky, “almost a death knell for the human species.” As noted climatologist Michael E. Mann has declared, “I fear that this may be game over for the climate.”[2]

 

 

By Ian Angus

 
January 26, 2017 –– Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal reposted from Climate & Capitalism –– About 11,700 years ago, the last ice age of the Pleistocene ended and a new time of relative warmth and climate stability began, an epoch that geologists call the Holocene. Now, a large body of scientific evidence shows that “the Earth has been pushed out of the Holocene Epoch by human activities.”[1] A new and unprecedented time of sweeping global change, the Anthropocene, is now underway.

 

 

 

By Anna Lau, Erdelan Baran, and Melanie Sirinathsingh

 

November 23, 2016 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal reposted from Open Democracy — For 4000 years since the breakdown of the Akkadian Empire in Mesopotamia, almost every major societal collapse has featured five trends: spiralling migration, state collapse, food shortages, epidemic disease and climate change.[1] What makes the present era distinct is that whilst previous collapses have been geographically contained, the globalisation of carbon-intensive industry since the 1800s and particularly over the last four decades means that the relationship between cause and effect has been obscured. Many of the people worst impacted by human-caused climate change today are also the least responsible for it. The Climate Stories project believes that averting further damage and building a different future means being led by those who are the first to hear the earth rise up in protest, have considered the causes and are innovating solutions. In this spirit, this article documents reflections from a series of conversations with members of the Kurdish movement on climate change.

 

Exploring the roots of a 21st century ‘climate crisis’

 

 

 

October 28, 2016 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal reposted from Left Voice — Hannah Holleman is an activist and professor of sociology at Amherst College in Amherst, Massachusetts.

 

Her work has appeared in numerous publications on subjects including imperialism and colonialism, political economy ecology, ecological justice, feminism, advertising and propaganda, financialization, mass incarceration, and social theory.

 

 

 

October 3, 2016 -- Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal reposted from LeftStreamed -- Science tells us that a new and dangerous stage in planetary evolution has begun, the Anthropocene, a time of rising temperatures, extreme weather, rising oceans, and mass species extinctions. Humanity faces not just more pollution or warmer weather, but a crisis of the Earth System. If business as usual continues, this century will be marked by rapid deterioration of our physical, social, and economic environment. Large parts of Earth will become uninhabitable, and civilization itself will be threatened. Facing the Anthropocene shows what has caused this planetary emergency, and what we must do to meet the challenge.

 

 

 

August 22, 2016 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal reposted from New Politics — I don’t need to tell you we face an existential threat. Scientists tell us we face a “climate emergency.” Last year was the hottest year ever recorded, beating 2014, which beat 2012. We break new records every year. The fourteen hottest years ever recorded have been recorded since 2000. January and February temperatures were torrid. Global temperatures hit new all-time highs in February; the northern hemisphere breached the 2 degrees-Celsius-above-normal mark for the first time in recorded history. Svalbard, Norway, averaged 10 degrees Celsius above normal. Parts of the Arctic were more than 16 degrees Celsius warmer—basically no winter. There were record-setting low measures of maximum Arctic sea ice this “winter.” In the United States, the winter was record-warm from coast to coast, breaking all-time temperature records for February. The same in Asia. In the tropics, record warmth is massively bleaching the Great Barrier Reef.  

 

 

 

 

A balance sheet of the movement to block the cross-Toronto ‘Line 9’ pipeline project by John Riddell. With notes on the meaning of “climate justice” and the relationship of socialism to social movements.

 

 

 

By Greg Albo and Lilian Yap

 

July 29, 2016 -- Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal reposted from Socialist Project -- The ecological and social implications of climate change have – or should – become a central parameter for all discussions of work and capitalism.

 

 

July 24, 2016 -- Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal via Climate & Capitalism -- John Bellamy Foster discusses the theoretical and programmatic challenges that the Anthropocene, a dangerous new epoch in planetary history, poses for socialists in the 21st century.

 

John Bellamy Foster is editor of Monthly Review and co-author of The Ecological Rift: Capitalism’s War on the Earth. He spoke at the Marxism 2016 conference in London on July 2.

 

 

June 2, 2016 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal reposted from Climate & Capitalism, a shorter version also appeared in Green Left Weekly — Climate & Capitalism editor Ian Angus recently completed a three-week tour of Australia, organized by the Socialist Alliance and Links to introduce his new book, Facing the Anthropocene: Fossil Capitalism and the Crisis of the Earth System. He gave this talk, which draws on material in Chapter 11, at forums in Perth, Adelaide, Hobart, Brisbane and Newcastle.

 

 

Ian Angus is an author and veteran of socialist and environment movements in Canada and internationally and is the founder and editor of the online journal, Climate and Capitalism.

 

 

 

Christopher Wright speaking at the global launch of Ian Angus' Facing the Anthropocene: Fossil Capitalism and the Crisis of the Earth System in Sydney, May 13.

 

By Christopher Wright

 

May 16, 2016 -- Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal reposted from Climate, People and Organizations -- It’s a great pleasure to speak to you tonight at the launch of Ian Angus’ new book Facing the Anthropocene: Fossil Capitalism and the Crisis of the Earth System.

 

When Ian contacted me late last year and asked if I’d be interested in reading his manuscript, I have to say I was somewhat wary. As many of you probably know the term “Anthropocene” has become something of a buzzword de jeure in academic circles. Every day it seems there is a new book released with “Anthropocene” in the title, there are new journals about the Anthropocene, and specialist conferences on the topic. It seems that Anthropocene studies has become something of an academic fashion.

 

 

 

May 6, 2016 -- Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal reposted from Socialist Review -- Human activity has transformed the Earth, accelerating climate change in just a few decades. Author Ian Angus talks to Socialist Review about facing up to the new reality. Angus will be one of the keynote speakers at Socialism for the 21st century: Moving beyond capitalism, learning from global struggles being held in Sydney on May 13-15.

 

 

 

Canada: Leap Manifesto unites broad forces, builds climate justice campaigns

 

“The Truth and Reconciliation Commission has acknowledged shocking details about the violence of Canada’s near past. Deepening poverty and inequality are a scar on the country’s present. And Canada’s record on climate change is a crime against humanity’s future.” —The Leap Manifesto

 

by John Riddell

 

April 3, 2016 -- Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal reposted from Climate and Capitalism -- Five hundred Toronto-area supporters crowded into a west-end school auditorium March 29 to support the Leap Manifesto, launched early this year in support of a rapid, “justice-based” energy transition to a renewable economy.

 

The movement was launched in January 2016 to popularize the ideas of Naomi Klein’s influential book on climate change, This Changes Everything. Klein pointed to the need for a mass social movement addressing both the urgent need for climate action and an agenda for social justice.

 

 

“There are too many coal barons, too many oil tycoons, too many politicians who are completely tied to the fossil fuel industry, too many vested interests that don’t want change,” argues Simon Butler.

 

Radio Adelaide interview with Simon Butler.

 

April 4, 2016 -- Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal via Climate & Capitalism -- Simon Butler is a member of the Socialist Alliance in Sydney, Australia, a regular contributor to Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal and co-author, with Ian Angus, of Too Many People? Population, Immigration and the Environmental Crisis (Haymarket Books, 2011).

 

He was interviewed by Des Lawrence on Radio Adelaide, on March 20, 2016.

 

 

 

Greenpeace activists during a protest in Paris at the COP21 United Nations climate change conference in November.

 

By James Jordan

 

January 13, 2016 - Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal - It has been a month since the UN climate summit in Paris, aka COP 21. One might expect the kind of ebb and flow we often see in popular movements. Interest in climate issues, the cause of the day during the summit, might be expected to wane and move to the back burner of public discourse until such time as another development pushes it forward again.

 

However, climate change is fundamentally different. It is going to get worse — we will be getting slapped in the face with this one for a long, long time, even under the best scenarios. Only a few weeks after COP 21, the world experienced a wave of floods and extreme weather exacerbated by global warming. In the US, there were record-setting floods along the Mississippi River. In South America, floods caused the evacuation of 180,000 persons. In Scotland, floods cut across class lines to threaten a historic castle neighboring the Queen's Balmoral residence, its foundation being eaten away by the swollen Dee river. Meanwhile, oil wars and drought continue to drive an immigration crisis in Syria and throughout the Middle East and Northern Africa. The issue of climate is not the “struggle du jour” - it is going to be the main course for quite a while.

 

Michael A. Lebowitz (pictured) will be one of the keynote speakers at Socialism for the 21st century: Moving beyond capitalism, learning from global struggles being held in Sydney on May 13-15.

By Michael A. Lebowitz

Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal — An earlier version of this paper was presented at ‘The First World Congress on Marxism’ at Peking University, 10 October 2015 in Beijing, China.

‘On Care for Our Common Home’: the premises

Everybody is talking about it — the dangers presented by climate change. Adding significantly, though, to the emphasis upon the need to take dramatic action now has been Pope Francis’s recent Encyclical Laudati Si’, ‘On Care for our Common Home’. Its over-riding theme is that we must ‘protect our common home’. ‘The climate,’ the document stresses, ‘is a common good, belonging to all and meant for all’ and is ‘linked to many of the essential conditions for human life’ (23). Not only, however, are we destroying those conditions but, ‘the earth, our home, is beginning to look more and more like an immense pile of filth’ (21). How is it, the Encyclical asks, that we have ‘so hurt and mistreated our common home as we have in the last two hundred years’ (53)?