Stuff about nature etc.
Each year the COP meeting highlights a deep contradiction in capitalist society. Extraordinary efforts are made to generate climate science... Yet the talks reveal the seeming powerlessness of capitalist politicians to act on this knowledge.
Printed in the first Discusssion Bulletin on ecology, November 2023 Introduction Every political theory has to conceive of the relationship between humanity and nature, whether explicitly or not. It is unavoidable to make some assumptions about the universe and the place of humanity within it, the impact of ecosystems on human lives, as well as the consequences of human social relations for the planet. The relationship between society and nature has been contested throughout human history. 1 What is the most coherent Marxist starting point for tackling these questions? Marx used the term...
Printed in the first Discusssion Bulletin on ecology, November 2023 I think we have few programmatic differences among us on environmental issues, and none of them paralysing. I am confirmed in that by my recent time in Australia, where there is more environmental activism than here, but among our comrades there is no sense that our programmatic positions as mapped by conference resolutions are rendered inoperable by paralysing differences. I sense that many comrades feel that there are huge and paralysing disagreements which they don't understand. The recent geoengineering study group session...
Printed in the first Discusssion Bulletin on ecology, November 2023 "Everything affects and everything is affected by every other thing, and it is mostly because the manifold motion and interaction is forgotten that our natural scientists are prevented from gaining a clear insight into the simplest things" (p178, Dialectics of Nature , F. Engels) In the preface to Capital volume 1 Marx states his purpose is to "reveal the economic law of motion of modern society" and explain “the development of the economic formation of society …as a process of natural history” (p92, Capital vol 1). There is...
Printed in the first Discusssion Bulletin on ecology, November 2023 Below are some reviews, focussing on books which I think are relevant to debates on theoretical background issues. The books in the class struggle ecological and wider science sections are valuable in general, for ecological stuff: the third section engages more with theoretical questions. My reviews are not polished for articles, they are mostly half-formed critiques, thoughts, and extracts. Some I intended to review, but never pulled together notes. But I share them for reference: General class-struggle ecology, very good —...
The super-rich 1% are responsible for 16% of global carbon emissions, equal to the emissions of the poorest 66% of humanity (five billion people). The richest 10% (incomes over $91,000) are responsible for half the emissions. Limiting long-term global warming to 1.5°C requires a 48% cut in total global emissions by 2030 (compared to 2019 levels). There is no way of achieving this without radical cuts to the oversized emissions of the rich. Progress on poverty alleviation and longer term climate goals also necessitates social control of investment decisions. As the super-rich gather for the...
As if inexorably, the Keeling curve measuring carbon dioxide emissions continues to ratchet up. At the same time, annual global average temperatures continue to increase. This year looks set to become the warmest for millennia. Paltry efforts to curb fossil fuel use, to prevent the problem of climate change at source, have stalled or are swallowed by ever-growing energy demand. Net zero resembles a distant mirage. Activists have to redouble our efforts to impose mitigation measures on profiteering capitalists and their unwilling bourgeois states. While emissions abatement must remain the main...
The UK steel industry is at a crossroads. Steel production is carbon intensive. A transition is needed if the UK is to meet its carbon goals. And the UK’s four blast furnaces, which produce 80 per cent of our steel and provide thousands of jobs, need replacing over the next decade or so. Their owners have proposed a more rapid closure with the loss of up to 5,000 direct jobs and many more beyond that. Steel production has been in a long decline in the UK. At its peak in the early 1970s, the industry employed around 320,000 people. It is now somewhere around 5-10% of that. Just before Margaret...
For many years the representatives of fossil capital have outnumbered politicians and scientists at the COP talks, but this year fossil capital has openly, brazenly taken control. COP28, starting 30 November, will be chaired by Sultan Al Jabr, CEO of ADNOC, the UAE’s state-owned oil company. He recently announced plans to increase output from 2.7 billion barrels to 5 billion barrels a day, and leaked documents reveal ADNOC’s plans to use the summit to broker business deals. For the past 28 years the capitalist class has demonstrated it will not and very likely cannot halt rising emissions...
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