Category: Less of What We Don’t Need
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Keeping Cool Without Costing The Earth
In May 2022 temperatures in India and Pakistan reached 50°C. Heat this fierce causes chaos to infrastructure, water security and also triggers irreversible cell damage within the human body. This extreme event, which plunged nearly a billion people into heat stress, was made 30 times more likely due to climate change. The response for those that can afford…
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“Serbia is (not) for Sale”: On Lithium, Hunger and Other Betrayals
This is the first part of a two-part series on anti-lithium mining protests that have erupted in Serbia over the last several months, and the broader environmental movement around it. Last September, the outgoing Chancellor Angela Merkel made her farewell tour to the Balkans. In Belgrade, she was welcomed by Aleksandar Vučić, the Serbian president…
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Onslaught of the Oily Authoritarians
Democratic politicians are being pressed hard on issues of critical importance to Black, Native, and Latinx communities—those most harmed by state oppression, economic injustice, the extraction and use of fossil fuels, and the impacts of climate change. In response, a minority of the party’s lawmakers began in 2021 to push harder for stronger voting rights…
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Decriminalized Marijuana Reinvents Racism and Poisoning
The change in marijuana laws across the US raises issues far beyond, “Hey, dude, we can blow a joint now without getting busted.” The racism that permeated the age of criminalization now lurks throughout the phase of decriminalization. The burgeoning business of growing pot raises the specter of corporate agriculture with its threats to human…
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Contribution to the development of an ecosocialist program
The ecocidal accumulation of capital threatens the very conditions of human life on the planet. The Covid pandemic confirms this, insofar as the increase in zoonoses over the last forty years is attributable to the destruction of ecosystems. The global ecological limits of sustainable human development have been crossed in several areas (climate, biodiversity, nitrogen…
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The Climate and the Republic, Melting Down in Real Time
The United States is facing two grim prospects in 2022: one, that continued abuse of the ecosphere could render much of the Earth unlivable for humans and myriad other species, and two, that the United States’ current political drift toward autocratic rule could accelerate, dashing any hope of attaining a multiracial, pluralistic democracy. These two…
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Green Capitalism “Can’t Work”
Daniel Tanuro argued that the energy transition would require an increase in fossil energy, and therefore an increase in emissions. So somewhere along the line, to balance the climate equation, we need to compensate for this by cutting production and transport. He suggested eliminating useless or harmful production, such as weapons production or advertising. The…
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Cap the War, Cap the Wells: A Bipartisan Oil Rush or the Phasing Out of Fossil Fuels?
Introduction by Tom Engelhardt of TomDispatch: In case you hadn’t noticed, we live on an eternally well-oiled and well-gassed planet. Only recently, for instance, Joe Biden announced that the U.S. was going to ramp up the supplies of frozen liquid natural gas (LNG) it sends to Europe by 15 billion cubic meters in response to…
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Cuba Prepares for Disaster
The September 2021 Scientific American included a description by the editors of the deplorable state of disaster relief in the US. They traced the root cause of problems with relief programs as their “focus on restoring private property,” which results in little attention to those “with the least capacity to deal with disasters.” The book…
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Why We Need Much More Than the Green New Deal
In view of the attention Green New Deal proposals have received there has been very little concern to assess its technical feasibility. It involves two major technical claims, firstly that renewable energy can sustain present societies at a relatively low cost, and secondly that economy can be decoupled from resource consumption and environmental impact. The…