Climate Change

OTTAWA, Oct. 30, 2014 - After TransCanada filed its official application with the National Energy Board today, environmental organizations in Canada and the United States, First Nations and community organizers said the Energy East pipeline will never be built.

Despite endless conferences, treaties and solemn promises, greenhouse gas emissions have risen 61% since 1990, and the rate of increase is accelerating. As Naomi Klein tells us in her new book, This Changes Everything, we are now experiencing an “early twenty-first century emissions explosion.”

. . . Is Klein correct? “Our economic system and our planetary system are now at war”? And is “climate change a battle between capitalism and the planet”? Must we “change everything” about our economic system?

How do we move those who are anti-corporate to becoming anti-capitalist? And how do we move the anti-capitalists to become socialists? In America with its dominant conservative ideology and political system, with its culture of acquisitive individualism, and its historic antipathy toward socialism going back to the red scares of the 1920s and the 1950s this has always been the problem, figuring out how to get people to move from a posture advocating liberal reform to a position calling for radical transformation of the system.

. . . it is doubtful if many participants returned home thinking that the U.S. and world elites have heard their message and will now collaborate on a plan to slow and then stop emission of greenhouse gases in a timely fashion. Two-decades of fruitless international ‘negotiations’ have made any thinking person skeptical about the intentions of capitalist politicians and corporate leaders who are after their own narrow self-interests rather than the health of the planet and its peoples.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s government is not doing enough to reduce carbon emissions, fight climate change and regulate oil and gas emissions, a series of audits from a federal watchdog have found.

The audits, contained in a report published Tuesday, say Canada has no detailed plan to meet its emissions reduction targets, is on pace to fall well short of meeting them and has made no long-term commitment to environmental monitoring in the oil sands region, the fastest-growing source of emissions.

The world's largest ever march against climate change on Sunday (21 September) brought 400,000 people to the streets of New York, starting a lively parade at Central Park. On Tuesday, 120 of the world's political leaders – notably not including the Chinese and Indians – gathered 25 blocks away at the United Nations. The message they got from society was symbolized by the march route: instead of heading toward the UN building, the activists headed the other way, west.

According to oft-cited statistics, climate scientists are 95%-99% certain of climate change – about as certain as they are of the link between smoking and lung cancer. Nonetheless, an estimated 58% of US Republican congressmen claim to be unconvinced of it. This group, the so-called “climate denier caucus,” is a big part of the reason that meaningful climate activist legislation keeps getting shot down. And according to a recent report, some of America’s most popular companies are helping to fund the effort.

A. The Environmental Crisis

The "environmental crisis" is actually a number of crises, including the following:

climate change;
acidification of the oceans (related to elevated atmospheric CO2 levels);
pollution of air, water, soil, and organisms with harmful substances;
degradation of agricultural soils;
destruction of wetlands and tropical forests; and
accelerated extinction of species.

The iconic skyline was shrouded in fog as we struggled to exit the subway on Sunday morning in New York. Standing at the head of the stairs a blue shirt called for our cooperation, his plaintive tone infused with the sort of accent that movies lead us to expect from NYPD beat cops.

“I need your help here, folks. They’ve closed all the stations up to here, so everyone is going to be coming out this exit. I need you all to help me out and keep moving.”