Climate Change

[Editor: Once again a case of extreme drought which is probably the result of climate change.]

November 29, 2016

Local officials rushed to get people out of towns as a wildfire raced into Tennessee's Sevier County on Monday evening.

We face (at least) 13 major crises, some of which are immediate. It’s time for some hard thinking about how we confront them.

By , published on the Guardian’s website, 25 November 2016

Please don’t read this unless you are feeling strong. This is a list of 13 major crises that, I believe, confront us. There may be more. Please feel free to add to it or to knock it down. I’m sorry to say that it’s not happy reading.

The country’s worst drought in 25 years, spurred by poor management, El Niño and climate change, has reservoirs drying up and hospitals struggling

Teodora Cauna de Quispe hasn’t had water at her house in Bolivia’s capital, La Paz, for two weeks. “We can’t wash ourselves or our clothes,” she said. “Every so often there is a bit of muddy water that spurts out of the tap on my patio.”

“Bolivians have to be prepared for the worst.” — President Evo Morales.

*****

Legendary Cuban revolutionary and former president Fidel Castro passed away on November 25 aged 90 (having survived hundreds of failed CIA assassination attempts). An internationalist dedicated to a fairer and sustainable planet, Castro long warned that capitalism was threatening to destroy human civlisation through ecological destruction, with the poor of the global South its first victims.

The combination of automation, complexity and climate change is dangerous in ways we haven’t even begun to grasp.

[Introduction by A Socialist in Canada: The environmental movement in all of its political shadings largely fails to address the danger of war and militarism in this world of global warming and the opening of the Anthropocene era. Yet,  the capitalist, military-industrial complex is the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the world, while war and militarism cause the disempowering of movements for social and environmental change.

Considering the sick political calculus that rules Ottawa's backrooms, it is not inconceivable that the bubbly was pouring in Liberal circles with the stateside election of Donald Trump. Indeed, after having enjoyed a year-long honeymoon as the anti-Harper, Trudeau and his aides likely saw this new development as a gift that extends the honeymoon under the guise of being the anti-Donald.