On Wednesday, July 27th, 2022, representatives of unions and social movements met in Johannesburg to discuss the country’s energy crisis. The representatives agreed to form a united front to resist privatisation of the power sector and to propose alternative ways to address both the immediate crisis and the longer-term challenges posed by the decarbonisation of South Africa’s energy system. What follows is a work-in-progress statement that captures the discussion and conclusions reached at the end of the meeting.
Nationwide alert issued with south-west especially badly hit, as major companies forced to suspend work
A record-breaking drought has caused some rivers in China – including parts of the Yangtze – to dry up, affecting hydropower, halting shipping, and forcing major companies to suspend operations.
The Inflation Reduction Act is being hailed by the mainstream climate movement, Congress members, and the media as the most important climate bill in U.S. history. That's a pretty low bar, and it says more about our government's long record of failure on climate than it does about whether this law can prevent dangerous temperature increases in coming decades.
Climate change is killing giant sequoias in numbers that portend ecological disaster unless radical action is taken to reverse the impacts of the climate crisis. Sequoias, once deemed “unburnable,” began to be widely destroyed by fire in 2015, and then in 2020 and 2021, California fires tripled in area covered.
Some strategic points are definitely overlooked in this article (including the need for democratic planning and the absolute requirement for international solidarity). But his emphasis on cooperatively prepping for capitalism’s systemic breakdown, already in progress, is often ignored by the rest of us.
- Gene McGuckin
In many regards, the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 is a story of contradictions. Narrowly passed over unanimous Republican opposition in the Senate last week, the bill is expected to pass the House of Representatives soon. The IRA bill devotes $369 billion to accelerate the transition to green energy, making it by far the biggest climate change legislation in US history. But the price of West Virginia senator Joe Manchin’s support was the inclusion of measures intended to boost fossil fuel production.
Canada was quietly trying to muscle in on Europe’s gas market months before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine pushed the continent’s energy security to mainstream attention, documents obtained by Canada’s National Observer reveal.
