The environment

Activists from Workers' Liberty and supporters of Solidarity will be at Labour Party conference and women's conference, 7-11 October in Liverpool. We'll be there to help the efforts of Free Our Unions, the Labour Campaign for Free Movement, the Ukraine Solidarity Campaign, India Labour Solidarity, and other campaigns; to sell literature, seek discussions and contacts. There will be demonstrations for the NHS and for abortion rights on Saturday, for free education on Sunday. And agitation for a block on new North Sea oil and gas fields, following the Tories' decision to "max out" licences in...

Apart from the personal interest he and other leading Tories have in fossil capital, Rishi Sunak calculates that there are votes to be won by championing reckless individual advantage in the face of climate breakdown. That explains his announcements on net-zero policies and the Rosebank oil field. The Tories’ original net-zero plans were not ever sufficient for meeting Paris climate targets. Further, the Paris climate targets in themselves are not sufficient to avoid 2°C+ global heating: that requires creating a global carbon drawdown industry in addition to halting emissions. The government’s...

The “final” National Policy Forum report going to Labour Party conference in Liverpool, 8-11 October 2023, is mostly 112 pages of warm words evading clear commitments. The conference Delegates’ Briefing says that the facility to “refer back” items from the NPF report, established since 2017, will not be available, on the pretext that (for the first time since 2017) this is a “final” report and so there is nowhere to “refer back” to. Delegates will still seek to remonstrate by voting against sections of the report and passing motions stating clear commitments or contradicting the report. The...

Almost 50% of the Tube is actually above ground. Only the Victoria and Waterloo and City lines have no time spent out in the open. That means on many journeys you can get a good idea, particularly in the spring and summer, of how the local wildlife interact with the railway. While it is nice to see young fox cubs try to catch butterflies or sleep in the sun on the embankments, the most interesting animal is probably one of the UK’s least loved: the magpie. At a terminus station as your doors open pigeons and magpies will often hop on to look for scrap food and rubbish left by the passengers...

In its pursuit of profit, capitalism is frying and boiling our planet. The uncontrolled wildfires burning through July and August — from Hawaii to Greece, from western Canada to Tenerife — not only symbolise runaway climate change, but give a warning of worse to come. The eight hottest years on record are the last eight. 2023 is set to beat them. We haven’t yet reached the key threshold of 1.5 Celsius above pre-industrial temperatures. As we race towards and most likely past it, the events of this summer will start to look minor. Events like the new uncontrolled wildfires are only part of the...

At a conference in Brisbane on 29-30 July, Workers’ Liberty Australia decided to turn more to environmental activist groups. Trade union activity, our “traditional” focus, remains important, but right now our small group has fewer openings there, with some of our comrades retired and the union movement at a low ebb. Some activity in the Australian Labor Party links with environmental action, through the Labor Environment Action Network, but Australia’s big cities also have dozen of ad hoc or local environmental groups. Australia had some of the world’s biggest school student climate strikes in...

Two by-election defeats on 20 July and a narrow victory in a third have damaged the Tories. A big victory for Labour in Selby and Ainsty for Keir Mather, a former CBI staffer who had previously worked for Wes Streeting and for Times journalist Matthew Parris, is exactly what Starmer would have hoped for. The derisory Labour vote in Somerset and Frome reflects the Lib-Dems going all out to target the seat. It was never likely to see a Labour victory. But the scale of the vote squeeze there, and the Tories holding on in Uxbridge and South Ruislip, should tell us that Labour’s current Steve-Reed...

Death Valley, California 53.3C; Sanbao, Xinjiang 52.2C; Mexicali, Mexico 50.2C; Tunis 50C; Sicily 47.3C. The July heatwave has been as unrelenting as it has been extensive. And now (31 July) Rishi Sunak has announced that the government intends to give over 100 new licences for oil and gas development in the North Sea, with all their carbon-emission implications. While the UK has experienced a month of damp weather, large parts of the world have suffered temperatures near the limits of human survivability. This is the world at 1.2C warming. Emissions are still rising, and temperatures will...

Nancy Fraser’s Cannibal Capitalism tells us that capitalist society is an insatiable glutton that “makes a meal of our creative capacities and of the earth that sustains us — with no obligation to replenish what they consume or repair what they damage”. Racism, sexism, ecocide and creeping authoritarianism are “non-accidental” features of capitalism’s deep structure. Through blind, systemic parasitism on human and extra-human nature, capitalism undermines the social, political and natural bases of its own existence lurching into ever-escalating crises which resolve periodically into new...