En Passant

Bloomberg in 2015    

Stunts like Moylan’s will draw attention to the issues at least momentarily and I defend his actions. But to really address climate change, to stop the mining of fossil fuels and to move rapidly to a totally renewable energy society requires the working class entering on to the stage of history and overthrowing the impediment to real change – capitalism. The working class has to be our focus for fundamental change.

The urgency is great. Capitalism cannot cure itself. It is driven by its internal logic to destroy the planet in the search for profit and the reinvestment of any surplus value we create. The choice is becoming starker and starker. It is either socialism with democracy, planning and satisfying human need leading to a secure and safe environment or the continuation of capitalism and the descent into global warming barbarism.

Over the coming weeks and months Gillard, Brown and Abbott will be criss-crossing the country in an attempt to prove that they all have the program to both reduce carbon emissions and to help with the cost of living pressures that workers are currently subject to. None of them do.

Every so often a document comes our way which lights up the sky with its clarity.  Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation and the Bureau of Meteorology have done just that in their State of the Climate report. Using data collected over the last sixty to one hundred years in Australia the report concludes unequivocally that […]

Mike Steketee has stabbed the flat line climate change sceptics in the heart with his lucid and readable analysis in last Saturday’s Australian of climate figures and patterns since records began in 1850. (‘Skeptics skip the long view’ The Weekend Australian, January 3-4 Inquirer, p 16). His analysis shows there has been, in his words,  […]