Republished by Climate and Capitalism with permission, from the UK magazine Socialist Review, January 2017
With Donald Trump in the White House the future for our climate looks bleak, but capitalism’s love affair with fossil energy runs much deeper than the desires and personalities of individual politicians.
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.
[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.
Sept 14, 2016 - Capitalism has run so amok, producing so much waste and life-destroying pollution, that scientists now say that Earth has entered an entirely new epoch: The Anthropocene
[Webpage editor's note: This serious escalation of military aggression against Russia should be actively opposed by the movement against climate change. For some background on NATO policy, see http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/06/30/why-is-nato-so-irrational-today/ . It increases the risk from other existential threat we face, along with climate change - nuclear war.
For Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump, the only thing to fear about climate change is fear itself. As he declared in a 2014 tweet, “This very expensive GLOBAL WARMING bullshit has got to stop.” Perhaps taking his words to heart, the four major U.S.
News alert! Despite what you may have heard, the war in Afghanistan is still raging. Nearly 10,000 US troops remain, and since 2014 the Obama administration has carried out almost 2,000 airstrikes on whatever they damn well please in the country. No question the mounting Afghan death toll and the bombing of hospitals and civilian infrastructure ought to infuriate the few remaining antiwar activists out there; but the toll the Afghanistan war is having on the environment should also force nature lovers into the streets in protest.
