April 13, 2016 - When Rachel Notley's NDP came to power last spring in Alberta, Gordon Laxer's book, After the Sands: Energy and Ecological Security for Canadians, on ecological renewal and Canadian petro-politics was already at the publisher. And so, he was given a week to do some major rewriting because he had not foreseen this political earthquake in the making.

[Webpage editor's introduction: Below are three articles about the Leap Manifesto and the NDP, first from the Jacobin.]

The impossible Dream

By Todd Gordon, Jacobin, April 15, 2016 

B.C. NDP Leader John Horgan met with his toughest critics on the party’s liquefied natural gas policies, and said his party’s official rejection of the Pacific Northwest LNG proposal could yet turn to Yes.

Mr. Horgan was speaking to the annual convention of the BC Building Trade unions in Victoria on Wednesday, where he sought to diffuse anger from his party’s labour allies over his decision to ask the Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency to withhold approval for the proposed Pacific Northwest LNG plant near Prince Rupert.

It may scare some New Democrats, but this sketchy recipe for fighting climate change is not particularly left-wing.

The short document, available on-line, can arouse fierce passions.

Any just transition to a green economy must take place on labor’s terms — not capital’s.

The 2015 Paris Climate Agreement and the “intended nationally determined contributions”submitted to the UNFCCC enshrines carbon markets and emissions trading schemes (ETSs) as a key mechanism for reducing emissions. But are carbon markets effective?

A worker-owned factory in Argentina. The Working World / Flickr

[Webpage editor: Yes, ecosocialists need to take up the issues about the state and the party that are raised in this sympathetic critique of the limits to workers' ownership and cooperatives.]

The world is in crisis.  Capitalism, currently the only economic system in existence, is the cause of this crisis.  It is a crisis that impoverishes millions more every year while enhancing the wealth of the rarefied few who conspire with politicians to make it so.  It is a crisis that manifests itself in endless and meaningless wars.  It is a crisis that dismantles schools, hospitals, roads, and other infrastructure in the name of private profit.