It’s often said that socialists are latecomers to environmentalism, that until the 1990s, Marxists ignored or rejected the concerns raised by environmentalists. There’s some justice to that criticism, but there were important exceptions.
On Saturday at the Left Forum in New York City, Chris Hedges joined professorsRichard Wolff and Gail Dines to discuss why Karl Marx is essential at a time when global capitalism is collapsing. These are the remarks Hedges made to open the discussion.
"The call came to protestors assembled at borehole 2 on Burnaby Mountain: 'Kinder Morgan has arrived! Get your asses down here.' I ran to the motorcycle and hurried down to Drummond Walk. A few comrades were just starting to follow KM workers -- 2 hardhats with chain saws, a couple management types and a few security guards. I raged internally as I accompanied them into the forest at the ready, but not knowing what the next step was...
The officials in charge of the United Nations climate talks say that no deal will be done in Paris in December (COP21) to avoid dangerous global warming. After preparatory negotiations in Geneva, Switzerland, this month, Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), confirmed that the target set previously, of limiting warming to 2 degrees centigrade above pre-industrial levels, would be missed.
As we enter 2015, the global corporate system deepens and spreads in its eco-genocidal effects. But the dots are not joined in their common cause across domains. Money-value coordinates like gross domestic product (GDP), commodity productivity and stock market indexes are still adopted as the measures of “economic performance” rather than life capital development which is systemically depredated.
Don’t think for a minute that this president isn’t proud of his climate-changing energy program. To be clear, however, I don’t mean his efforts to check the advances of climate change. Consider the introduction to the new U.S.
Greece will hold parliamentary elections on January 25 and Syriza, the left-wing party which has consistently called for debt restructuring and an end to austerity, is leading the polls. The IMF-European Commission-European Central Bank `Troika' are warning of the "threat" of Syriza coming to power and have forcefully indicated their support for Greece's ruling coalition by conditioning further financial support on the re-election of a pliable government.
There is a strong current within funding circles that would like subsequent campaigns to follow the "caps" model. After the 2010 signing, a representative of Pew Charitable Trusts, a key backer of the deal, told journalist Dawn Paley that they “would love to have similar talks with the oil and gas industry and also with the mining industry as well.”
On February 25, 2013, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) closed the public comment period for the environmental assessment of the AquAdvantage Salmon. Their review of the first genetically modified animal for human consumption concluded with a “finding of no significant impact.”1 Numerous fishermen, consumer safety advocates, public health officials, ecologists, and risk assessment experts submitted comments that directly challenged this finding.
A major threat to fossil fuel companies has suddenly moved from the fringe to center stage with a dramatic announcement by Germany’s biggest power company and an intriguing letter from the Bank of England.
A growing minority of investors and regulators are probing the possibility that untapped deposits of oil, gas and coal -- valued at trillions of dollars globally -- could become stranded assets as governments adopt stricter climate change policies.
