Toronto Mayor Rob Ford isn’t this country’s only global embarrassment; Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s appalling record on the environment and contempt for international diplomacy has also shamed Canada around the world. Though governments everywhere have handed over their national agenda to corporate interests, Harper’s conflation of the two has been total. His abject servitude to business, especially the oil industry, knows no bounds.
In 1494, Spain and Portugal were in serious competition over other peoples’ lands. This bothered the church, and Pope Alexander VI made it his duty to write up the Treaty of Tordesillas, which dictated that Spain was free to attempt to conquer lands west of an imaginary line on the Atlantic, and Portugal could attempt the same for all lands east of that line, essentially creating eastern and western hemispheres. A little more than two decades later, Spain’s influence in what it thought was a new world grew nearly as much as its avarice.
Last Thursday a record smashing "hellstorm" called Super Typhoon Haiyan tore across the Philippines leaving unprecedented destruction in its wake. For the second year in a row the Philippines find themselves at the annual United Nations climate conference pleading with the world to take effective action to halt the climate crisis that they say is punishing their nation. Last year at the UN climate conference in Doha, the Philippines were struggling to cope with the aftermath of Typhoon Bopha.
It seems these days that whenever Mother Nature wants to send an urgent message to humankind, it sends it via the Philippines. This year the messenger was Yolanda, a.k.a. Haiyan.For the second year in a row, the world's strongest typhoon, Yolanda, barreled through the Philippines, following on the footsteps of Pablo, a.k.a Bopha, in 2012. And for the third year in a row, a destructive storm deviated from the usual path taken by typhoons, striking communities that had not learned to live with these fearsome weather events because they were seldom hit by them in the past.
Canada has dropped any remaining pretences of supporting global action on climate change by urging other countries to follow Australia's example in gutting its climate plan. In a formal statement, the Canadian government said it "applauds" the move by Australia this week to repeal a carbon tax on the country's 300 biggest polluters. "Canada applauds the decision by prime minister Abbott to introduce legislation to repeal Australia's carbon tax.
Driving into Iraq just after the 2003 invasion felt like driving into the future. We convoyed all day, all night, past Army checkpoints and burned-out tanks, till in the blue dawn Baghdad rose from the desert like a vision of hell: Flames licked the bruised sky from the tops of refinery towers, cyclopean monuments bulged and leaned against the horizon, broken overpasses swooped and fell over ruined suburbs, bombed factories, and narrow ancient streets.
As the Philippines reels from one of the worst storms in history, the annual U.N. climate summit is opening today in Warsaw, Poland. Jeff Masters, director of meteorology at the Weather Underground, says rising sea levels caused by global warming increased the size of the storm’s surge, while the heating of the oceans threatens more extreme storms that could form into typhoons. We also air the emotional plea of Yeb Saño, a member of the Philippines Climate Change Commission, urging action on global warming at last year’s climate summit in Doha.
The people are still reeling from the impact of possibly the biggest typhoon to strike the country. Death toll numbers are rising rapidly. There is massive devastation. Many are still trying to contact their relatives, friends and comrades, but communication systems are down, in the hardest hit areas. How should we, as activists and socialists, respond to the crisis? Firstly, we have to support and take whatever measures are necessary to protect the people. This means all measures that bring the people immediate relief.
An almost complete breakdown of law and order in Tacloban city, where Typhoon Haiyan caused devastating damage after it struck the Philippines on Friday, is being seen as an ominous sign of what may soon follow in other regions. The total death toll from what is thought to have been the most violent storm ever to strike land is expected to rise well above 10,000 – the number estimated to have been killed in one island alone.
Three quarters of a billion people is a lot of people. And that's how many people, within the next 22 years, will almost certainly run low on water – a necessity of life – in just the regions whose rivers are supplied with water from the glaciers in the Himalayas. To put that in perspective, 750 million people is more than twice the current population of United States. It's about the population of all of Europe. In the year 1900 there were only 500 million people on the entire planet. Seven hundred fifty million people is a lot of people.
