Capitalism

Last Friday evening I was asked to speak at the international launch of Canadian ecosocialist Ian Angus’ new book Facing the Anthropocene: Fossil Capitalism and the Crisis of the Earth System. The transcript of my address is reproduced below (spoiler – I really liked this book!):

News alert! Despite what you may have heard, the war in Afghanistan is still raging. Nearly 10,000 US troops remain, and since 2014 the Obama administration has carried out almost 2,000 airstrikes on whatever they damn well please in the country. No question the mounting Afghan death toll and the bombing of hospitals and civilian infrastructure ought to infuriate the few remaining antiwar activists out there; but the toll the Afghanistan war is having on the environment should also force nature lovers into the streets in protest.

With each day the bad news spreads. A gigantic wildfire now covering some 4,000 km² is spreading through northeastern Alberta and into Saskatchewan — devastating much of Fort McMurray, the city in the heartland of the tar sands. Some 90,000 residents have been displaced and thousands of homes, many local industries and businesses, destroyed.

There may not be a single large-scale industry or multi-national corporation on Earth that is genuinely profitable if they had to account for their ecological impact. A recent UN-supported report shows that the world's 3,000 largest publicly-traded companies alone caused US$2.15 trillion (€2 trillion) of environmental damage in 2008, that the total cost is much higher, and that companies and communities downstream in the global supply chain are at risk from the environmental impacts.

Human activity has transformed the Earth, accelerating climate change in just a few decades. Author Ian Angus talks to Socialist Review about facing up to the new reality.

As the climate crisis continues to deepen and as it becomes less and less plausible that current efforts to curb global warming will even come close to preventing our earth from crossing the 2 degree Celsius ‘red line,’ the climate movement has shifted towards a bolder vision for climate action. Virtually every pole of the climate movement has evolved towards a set of bolder, more urgent demands and the mantra ‘keep it in the ground’ has begun to dominate the discussion about fossil fuel extraction and use.

April 22, 2016 -- A fracturing of Canada's social democratic party has opened as party members and much of its electoral base express their dissatisfaction with the conservative economic, social and environmental policies that predominate in the party's decision-making echelons.

Dissension came to a head at the New Democratic Party's national convention in Edmonton, Alberta April 8 to 10. Party leader Tom Mulcair was rebuked in a confidence vote on his continued leadership, failing to reach even fifty per cent support of the 2,800 delegates gathered.