By Patrick Bond, Durban

June 17, 2015 -- Climate and Capitalism, first published at Triplecrisis and reposted at Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal with permission from the author -- Who’s not heard the great African revolutionary Amilcar Cabral’s injunction, 50 years ago, “Tell no lies and claim no easy victories”? If, like me, you’re a petit bourgeois who is hopeful for social progress, then let’s be frank: this advice hits at our greatest weakness, the temptation of back-slapping vanity.

Naomi Klein interviewed by Agnès Rousseaux and Sophie Chapelle, for Basta! magazine.

May 10, 2015 -- Basta! magazine, posted at Climate and Capitalism, reposted at Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal

Basta! : We seem to be heading straight toward climate disaster. We know what will happen if we do nothing about climate change, yet nothing really changes. Why is it so?

Naomi Klein: It’s not that we’re doing nothing – we’re actually actively doing exactly the wrong things. We have an economic system that defines success and progress as infinite economic expansion. Any kind of expansion is deemed good. Our emissions are going up much faster than they were in the 1990s.

In the past decade, we had very high oil prices, which has created huge economic incentives for fossil fuel companies to push into new, more expensive, higher-emitting forms of extraction, such as tar sands and fracking.

By Patrick Bond, Tunis

March 29, 2015 -- originally published by TeleSUR, submitted to Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal by the author -- Looming ahead in eight months’ time is another "Conference of Polluters" (technically, the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, COP). The last 20 did zilch to save us from climate catastrophe. Judging by early rough drafts of the Paris COP21 agreement recently leaked, another UN fiasco seems inevitable

Environmental activists attempt to gain access to the plenary session of the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP17) in Durban.

By Patrick Bond, Durban

August 30, 2014 -- TeleSUR English, submitted to Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal by the author -- – The movement from below to tackle climate change is gathering pace in South Africa and elsewhere in the world in advance of the September 21 mass march against the United Nations. 

Environmentalists lead, but this struggle invokes the world’s greatest class-race-gender-North-South conflicts, too. Ban Ki-Moon’s heads-of-state summit on September 23 may generate greater publicity for the cause, but if, as anticipated, world rulers simply slap each other on the back, activists will have to even more urgently intensify the pressure.