Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Unless and until we mobilize a mass movement to take down and transform the U.S. legal, political and economic systems upholding the fiction that corporations possess the same constitutional rights as individuals, along with other hallmarks of corporate power, it is fruitless to blame green consumers for the failure to spur large-scale meaningful change.
-China’s ‘carbon intensity’ commitment means nothing
-Let’s Try Cap-and-Trade on Babies
-Illusions on the edge of a precipice
-How to stop doubting and love the climate models
-Baffin Island reveals dramatic scale of Arctic climate change
-The Economic Case for Slashing Carbon Emissions
-The Cold we Caused
-BBC is right to allow BNP on Question Time, says Mark Thompson
-BNP: Thank you Auntie for giving us such a boost
-10 things you should know about the BNP when you watch Question Time tonight
-How the BNP came in from the cold
Social critics have pointed out with some justice that today’s industrial states are troubled, corrupt, and dysfunctional. It’s too often remembered, though, that as the pressures of resource depletion come to bear, what replaces them need not be an improvement.
-Obama at the Precipice
-Fighting the Taliban
-Is Escalation Obama’s Only Choice in Afghanistan?
-Pakistan targets key Taliban town
This post introduces the U.S.-based Mobilization for Climate Justice, as well as similar critiques and activism associated with this Climate Justice coalition. As I indicate, the organizers in and around that coalition also address a range of energy & carbon issues (including tar sands pollution, and biofuel land grabs) — along with interrelated and more apparent global warming concerns. Their approach to these ecological issues is based on prior environmental justice critiques and activism, as well as wider opposition towards corporations, and other international market structures.
Histories of left-wing politics tend to focus on major parties and movements as well as individual leaders and influential theorists. A small number of professional politicians and intellectuals thereby usually dominate the picture. The new book by labour movement historian John Charlton has the considerable virtue of looking at the movement’s rank and file at ground level, in this case, the North-East of England and particularly Tyneside. The Left’s real soul is to be found amongst those many thousands, if not millions, of unsung individuals, inspired by some sort of socialist vision, who, in their workplace or local neighbourhood, have fought against exploitation and oppression.
-Capital gains
-Post-human Earth: How the planet will recover from us
-Rereading: Robert Macfarlane on The Monkey Wrench Gang
-Communist China celebrates 60th anniversary with instruments of war and words of peace
-China vows to crack down on industrial overcapacity
-China, U.S. risk rifts in Middle East: former Chinese envoy
-Nigeria and China’s oil deal still a secret
-Parades and protests mark China’s National Day
-Merkel gets her ‘dream coalition’ as Social Democrat vote collapses
-Europe’s Socialists Suffering Even in Downturn
-Angela Merkel win ends Turkey’s EU hopes
-Nuclear power? Yes, maybe
-Can one woman save Africa?
-Africa doesn’t need a green revolution. It needs agroecology
-Human-made Crises ‘Outrunning Our Ability To Deal With Them,’ Scientists Warn
-The Australian town that kicked the bottle
-Energy executives offer ideas on stimulus
-America’s Teacher
-The Year of the Flood
-The End of Oil?
-The Constant Economy by Zac Goldsmith
