Topic: Less of What We Don’t Need
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From the tar sands to ‘green jobs’? Work and ecological justice
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The ecological and social implications of climate change have – or should – become a central parameter for all discussions of work and capitalism. It is generally agreed that reliance on the burning of fossil fuels as the pre-eminent energy source for production and consumption over the history of capitalism is the critical factor in…
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Taking on the Sacred Cow of Big “Green” Energy
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The deserts of the American Southwest have come under a new assault in the last decade. The few, fragmented areas of these austere, rugged, yet delicate landscapes that had managed to survive relatively intact from mining, ranching, military use (including nuclear tests), urban encroachment and motorized recreation, are now being targeted for the development of…
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The Fallacy of Economic Growth
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We are being told that we need still more economic growth in order to overcome the present multi-layer crises. Actually we have been hearing this for quite some time now. Both right and left, capitalist and socialist governments, offer their theories about how we need more production and consumption, in order for our societies to…
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If there’s a World War II-style climate mobilization, it has to go all the way—and then some
As global warming has surged this year, so too has America's ambition for heroic climate action. Politicians, economists, and activists have been looking to America's astonishing mobilization for World War II as a model for victory in the twenty-first century's great climate emergency. This spring, Senator Bernie Sanders called for a World War…
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Where Gun Control Ought to Start: Disarming the Police
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On February 5, 2015, Jeremy Lett was physically attacked, then shot in the torso five times while walking outside his apartment. He died in the hospital the next day. His attacker, David Stith, had a history of violent, erratic behavior – at one point a little over a year earlier, Stith entered a Girl Scouts…
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Water is More Valuable than Gold
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The hill overlooking the tailings pond—a vast, dammed tub of liquid residue—was littered with bones. Residents from the area said the goats and cattle that once grazed the land had died since mining operations began a few years ago. They held our hands as we crossed a river, directing us to jump from rock to…
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Why Do Americans Work So Much?
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How will we all keep busy when we only have to work 15 hours a week? That was the question that worried the economist John Maynard Keynes when he wrote his short essay “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren” in 1930. Over the next century, he predicted, the economy would become so productive that people would…
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The Dutch Cure
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This is an excerpt from Chapter 9 of “How the World Breaks: Life in Catastrophe's Path, From the Caribbean to Siberia” by Stan Cox and Paul Cox, published last month by The New Press. The book's ten stories of unnatural disaster include post-Sandy New York and pre-inundation Miami. This passage expands on those stories. When…
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How the World Falls Apart
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Geoclimatic disasters have loomed over humanity throughout our tenure on Earth, but that doesn’t mean we should accept anything about them. Each awful ordeal is an opportunity to learn and change, and the enemy of change is the idea that “these things just happen.” It’s the grand excuse of a global economy that spins off…
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Keeping Our World Cooler for Now Will Make It Permanently Hotter
The following is taken from a presentation by Stan Cox to the New York Academy of Medicine and the Museum of the City of New York on August 11, 2016: The headlines screamed, “Kerry says AC more dangerous than ISIS!” The Secretary of State, at a conference in Vienna last month on reducing the…