The environment

Stuff about nature etc.

North Sea: fight for the workers’ plan

As we enter another hot summer and emissions hit an all-time high, the Labour leadership sought headlines with a series of feeble announcements on environmental policy. Labour’s policies are an improvement compared to the denialists in charge of the Tory party, but far too timid as an answer to the ecological crisis. Rank-and-file offshore workers and environmentalist groups have published a set of demands for a worker-led just transition. The Our Power report calls for a wage guarantee and an offer of free retraining for workers made redundant as the oil fields are decommissioned. But at the...

Is Solidarity collapsing into XR?

I am alarmed that Solidarity ’s ecological politics is collapsing into a callow regurgitation of Extinction Rebellion and its offshoots. First, Stuart Jordan continues his quest for natural laws leading us toward a nightmarish dystopia. Last month he suggested we’re all doomed by entropy, or at least not getting far by recycling materials. Next the Jevons paradox , casting doubt on the use of renewable energy such as wind turbines and solar power. Without renewables and recycling, few modern alternatives are left to fossil-driven capitalism, never mind for socialism. Second, the paper carries...

Dam probably breached by Russia

The Nova Kakhovka dam, spanning the gigantic Dnipro river in southern Ukraine, collapsed on the early morning of 6 June. The dam was captured early in Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. As early as March 2022 rumours began that the Russians had mined the dam with the intention of blowing it up if the Ukrainians looked like retaking it. The dam was completed in 1956 and held 18 cubic km of water. Normally the water surface was held at about 16m above sea level, although at the start of 2023 the level had dropped to 14m, rising rapidly until, just before the dam was...

The Jevons paradox and capitalism

Workers’ Liberty’s Marxist Ecology Reading group met on 12 June to discuss the “Jevons Paradox” via chapter 7 of The Ecological Rift by Foster, Clark and York. Almost all the models to avoid catastrophic climate change pin hopes on significant gains in resource and energy efficiency. However, history shows that efficiency alone will not do the job so long as production is organised on a capitalist basis. The 19th century economist William Stanley Jevons observed that gains in efficiency tend to lead to increased scale of production and hence paradoxically to increased, rather than decreased...

The zoonotic transfer risk

Matt Sanderson’s article, “The risks from bird flu” ( Solidarity 675 ) is right to raise the alarm, and the limitations of current precautions. Since this highly pathogenic strain of the H5N1 subtype of bird flu emerged two years ago, it spread far and wide across bird populations. A particular concern the last half year, beyond the economic impact, and the very small number of humans knowingly infected, is the large number of mammals infected. Thousands or tens of thousands of sea lions seem to have been killed by bird flu in south America this year. Many mink were found infected prior to the...

The risks from bird flu

For the past two years a variant of H5N1 avian influenza (bird flu) has been circulating in wild and domestic bird populations. This strain, particularly transmissible and deadly to birds, started in unaffected geese and ducks (migratory birds). The flu variant has not yet spread in humans; measures to guard against that have included six months where farmed birds have been kept inside and a number of other measures affecting animal welfare. A select few strains of influenza (H1 and H3) can infect humans (and pigs), whilst birds are affected by H5 and H7 influenza. Humans can become ill with...

Getting thermodynamics wrong

Zack Muddle takes up the debate on ecology and entropy after Stuart Jordan’s contribution in Solidarity 672 Thermodynamics is integral to modern science. Devised before atomic theory or relativity, it remains consistent with both, has wide-ranging practical and theoretical uses, and has been applied far beyond its initial domain; from quantum refrigerators to black holes and beyond. Many are tempted to try to wield fundamental and universal scientific laws in service of a particular social theory; to draw a straight line from a seemingly simple physical fact to argued conclusions about complex...

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