Caitlin Johnstone — Take Chances

A gentle call to action — before it is too late.

Caitlin Johnstone — Rogue Journalist
Take Chances
Caitlin Johnstone

George Monbiot — Mass starvation is humanity’s fate if we keep flogging the land to death

What happens when land is consolidated with capital as a factor and the objective is maximizing profit short-term.

The Guardian
Mass starvation is humanity’s fate if we keep flogging the land to death
George Monbiot

See also

Patreon
Principles of Political Economy: The opening lines

Steve Keen

Jonathan Turley — Study: Pollution Kills More People Than War, Smoking, Hunger, and Other Causes of Death

We have previously discussed how environmental dangers remain something of an abstraction for most people who fail to recognize that changes in air or water pollution standards results in high and quantifiable rises in death rates. Even changes in areas like shipping fuels can translate to thousands of deaths. However, since these deaths are not immediate and borne privately, the true costs of pollution are often dismissed. I have been highly critical of the environmental record of the Trump Administration for this reason in rolling back on protections in a variety of areas as well as appointing regulators with anti-environmental record.

Now a new major study has found that environmental pollution kills more people every year that all of the wars. It exceeds the death tolls for smoking, hunger or natural disasters combined. It kills more than AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria combined. Yet, unlike these causes of death, pollution remains a policy concern that is often pushed to the side for more immediate goals like job creation. This is not to say that environmental protection would trump all other concerns but rather the real costs of such pollution are rarely discussed in real terms of premature deaths by politicians.

The study in the respected Lancet medical journal found that one out of every six premature deaths in the world in 2015 was caused by toxic exposure. That amounts to 9 million people who died prematurely due to pollution. The study also found that the cost of the resulting illnesses and deaths amounted to some $4.6 trillion in annual losses.

Worse yet, the 9 million deaths from pollution appears a highly conservative estimate since it relied on only limited data on specific measurable cases of deaths and illnesses. The actual number is likely much higher. Moreover, only half of the 5000 news chemicals introduced since 1950 have actually been fully tested for their toxicity....

Jonathan Turley
Study: Pollution Kills More People Than War, Smoking, Hunger, and Other Causes of DeathJonathan Turley | Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington University

Shanghai Daily — Farms warned to go green or close down

Farms failing to meet environmental requirements will be closed and fewer chemicals will be used in Shanghai's agricultural production.

These are part of the city's endeavors to promote the construction of a green and modern urban agriculture.

Quality is the name of the game.

"Shanghai's agricultural development is more about its ecological function, and compared with quantity, we should focus more on quality," Zhang Guokun, director of the city's agricultural commission, said yesterday.

"Agriculture accounts for only about 0.39 percent of the city's GDP," Zhang said, adding that the city's farmland is small and natural resources for agriculture is relatively limited.

Zhang said the authority aims to decrease the usage of farm chemicals such as fertilizer in agricultural production, shut down farms that could not meet environmental protection requirements, recycle more agricultural waste, improve the environmental conditions of local rivers and soil along with the agricultural development and to make good damaged environmental land.

The authority will also integrate agriculture with secondary and tertiary industries, he added, such as building up more local agricultural brands and integrating with rural tourism to produce an industry chain with more added value....

Ecns.cn
Farms warned to go green or close down
Shanghai Daily

DAPL Company Levels RICO Charges Against Greenpeace — Dimitri Lascaris interviews Greenpeace USA General Counsel Thomas Wetterer

Upping the ante in the environmental wars.

TRNN
DAPL Company Levels RICO Charges Against GreenpeaceDimitri Lascaris interviews Greenpeace USA General Counsel Thomas Wetterer

Russia Beyond The Headlines — Putin camps out in the Siberian taiga

What's the big deal? Beyond the choice of personal recreation, this is highly symbolic, as conservationist and nature enthusiast Teddy Roosevelt understood. It sends a positive signal environmentally, raises awareness, and increases Russia and Putin's soft power.

Siberia is one of the last remaining undeveloped areas, and Putin is working to develop it in an environmentally sound way. Russia recently passed a

Russia Beyond The Headlines
Putin camps out in the Siberian taiga

Rustem Falyakhov — Russia to be cleaned up by Putin

While the US prepares to gut the EPA, Russia gears up an environmental clean-up drive spearheaded by Vladimir Putin. China is already well into its own under the aegis of Xi Jinping. US under the Trump administration headed backward?

Russia & India Report
Russia to be cleaned up by Putin
Rustem Falyakhov, Gazeta.ru,

John McMurtry — Beyond the Empire of Chaos: the Life Capital Solution

Weekend reading.

Philosopher John McMurtry explores economics from the perspective of "life capital."

Counterpunch
Beyond the Empire of Chaos: the Life Capital Solution

John McMurtry, University Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Guelph, Canada and author of the three-volume Philosophy and World Problems published by UNESCO’s Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems (EOLSS). His latest book is The Cancer Stage of Capitalism: from Crisis to Cure.

Pope Francis — Laudato Si'

ENCYCLICAL LETTER

LAUDATO SI’

OF THE HOLY FATHER

FRANCIS

ON CARE FOR OUR COMMON HOME

“The 21st century, while maintaining systems of governance inherited from the past, is witnessing a weakening of the power of nation states, chiefly because the economic and financial sectors, being transnational, tend to prevail over the political.” (p. 128)

ht/ Bill Moyers & Co.

The destructiveness of Gold-Fetishism on full display in Alaska...

Today, WaPo reports on a massive political fight going on between US EPA, Alaskan natives, fishermen, environmentalists, and a Canadian gold mining company:

"Just north of Iliamna Lake in southwestern Alaska is an empty expanse of marsh and shrub that conceals one of the world’s great buried fortunes: A mile-thick layer of virgin ore said to contain at least 6.7 million pounds — or $120 billion worth — of gold.

As fate would have it, a second treasure sits precisely atop the first: the spawning ground for the planet’s biggest runs of sockeye salmon, the lifeline of a fishery that generates $500 million a year.

As early as this spring, the Environmental Protection Agency is expected to invoke a rarely used legal authority to bar a Canadian company, Northern Dynasty Minerals Ltd., from beginning work on its proposed Pebble Mine, citing risks to salmon and to Alaska’s pristine Bristol Bay, 150 miles downstream. The EPA’s position is supported by a broad coalition of conservationists, fishermen and tribal groups — and, most opinion polls show, by a majority of Alaskans."

So what we have here is a fight between fake wealth and real wealth. The gold types want to put real wealth- this area of pristine wilderness which supports a massive salmon fishery (ie high protein, low fat FOOD) at risk in order to produce fake wealth- 6.7 million pounds of a soft metal of limited utility (ie GOLD).  Its a sad state of human affairs that we would risk real wealth to extract something of superficial value, that derives most of its "worth" from ancient superstitions, and artificial scarcity from being melted into bars and locked away.

This comes down to FOOD vs. GOLD. Which would you rather have?

Thankfully it appears that US EPA will make the decision to block this project and save the real wealth....at least for now.

Matt Bruenig — Environmentalism poses a problem for libertarian ideology

George Monbiot had an article in the Guardian on Monday about bastardised libertarianism and its inability to understand the real freedoms being fought for by environmentalists and social justice advocates. However, Monbiot’s treatment of environmentalism’s threat to libertarianism was a bit sloppy. He got sucked into the negative freedom and positive freedom debate, and although he worked his way to the correct conclusion ultimately, I felt like the clarity was lacking.

So I want to explain more clearly just how much environmentalists stick in the side of libertarian ideology. First, consider what libertarians of the sort Monbiot criticizes are really about philosophically: they favor a procedural justice account of the world based heavily on property rights. This is the newest face of libertarianism. Gone is the appeal to utility and desert. The modern libertarians try to prop up their political ideas almost solely through a rigid formalism of property rights.

I have written before about the problem with the procedural accounts of property rights, but here I want to just accept the libertarian property rights premise. Somehow individuals can grab up pieces of the world and exclude those pieces from everyone else forever. Once those individuals become owners of their respective property, nobody else can touch that property or do anything whatsoever to that property without their consent. Coming onto my property without my consent is a form of trespass under this picture. Doing anything to my property — whether it be painting it, dumping stuff on it, or causing some other harm to it — is totally off limits.

So environmentalists point out that carbon emissions are warming the planet, one consequence of which is that harm will be done to the property of others. Most environmentalists — being the leftists that they generally are — do not make too much of the property rights issues, but one certainly could. Coal plants release particulates into the air which land on other people’s property. But no permission is ever granted for that. Coal plants do not contract with every nearby property owner to allow for them to deposit small amounts of particulate matter on their neighbors’ land. They are guilty of a form of property trespass.

Beyond that, all sorts of industrial processes have environmental externalities that put things into the air or the water that ultimately make their way into the bodies of others. This is a rights-infringing activity under the procedure-focused libertarian account. The act of some industry is causing pieces of matter to land on me and enter into my body. But I never contracted with them to allow them to do so.…

The short of is that environmentalists totally smash open the idea that property rights theories can really account for who is permitted to do what with the land that they own. Almost all uses of land will entail some infringement on some other piece of land that is owned by someone else. So how can that ever be permitted? No story about freedom and property rights can ever justify the pollution of the air or the burning of fuels because those things affect the freedom and property rights of others. Those actions ultimately cause damage to surrounding property and people without getting any consent from those affected. They are the ethical equivalent — for honest libertarians — of punching someone in the face or breaking someone else’s window.…

Admitting that someone’s use of their own property almost certainly entails an infringement on someone else’s property makes the whole libertarian position basically impossible to act out in the real world.

Environmentalism poses a problem for libertarian ideology

Matt Bruenig

Qin Guangrong — Chinese Shift: Put the Environment Above GDP Growth

"We would rather reduce our growth rate a bit in order to protect the environment and never seek short-term economic development at the expense of the environment. We should never pursue a 'pollution first, treatment later' approach. "

World Post
Chinese Shift: Put the Environment Above GDP Growth
Qin Guangrong | Communist Party Secretary of Yunnan Province, China

The Green Man — Congressional Democrat Proposes Ban On Climate Action

Yesterday, a Democratic member of the U.S. House of Representatives stepped up to deal with the issue – by protecting the market forces that have led to the climate crisis in the first place. Congressman Nick Rahall introduced H.R. 1486, legislation that would make it against the law for the government to shift the expense of carbon dioxide pollution from individuals and small businesses to the corporations that release the pollution in the first place. Rahall’s bill would ban an entire category of action to confront climate change, with the goal of protecting the dirty energy dominance of fossil fuels corporations.

Irregular Times
Congressional Democrat Proposes Ban On Climate Action
The Green Man

Douglas Fischer — The Iron Lady’s Strong Stance On Climate Change

Less noted is how seriously she viewed the threat of climate change and the robustness, more than 20 years ago, of climate science and United Nations body tasked with assessing state of that science.

In a 1990 speech at the second World Climate Conference, in Geneva, Thatcher compared the threat of global warming to the Gulf War, which was then just escalating following Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait.

Climate Progress
The Iron Lady’s Strong Stance On Climate Change
Douglas Fischer via The Daily Climate

Who knew? Margaret Thatcher occasionally wandered off the reservation.

In Hippie Holdout, a Fight Over Worms and Moats

Read it at The New York Times
In Hippie Holdout, a Fight Over Worms and Moats

by Patricia Leigh Brown
(h/t The Oil Drum)

Fun read. Libertarians of the left unite!

Richard Heinberg — What Is Sustainability?

The essence of the term sustainable is “that which can be maintained over time.” By implication, this means that any society that is unsustainable cannot be maintained for long and will cease to function at some point.

Unfortunately, in recent years the word sustainable has become widely used to refer merely to practices that are reputed to be more environmentally sound than others. Often the word is used so carelessly as to lead some environmentalists to advise abandoning its use.

Nevertheless, the concept is indispensable and should be the cornerstone for all long-range planning.

The Post Carbon Reader Series: Foundation Concepts
What Is Sustainability?
By Richard Heinberg

Fouling the nest with fracking?

A former staffer at a state government agency responsible for regulating hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, has warned that allowing the controversial gas drilling method in New York would lead to contamination of the state's aquifers and would poison its drinking water.

These stark warnings, issued by Paul Hetzler in a letter to an upstate newspaper, came as a current employee and union representative at the Department for Environmental Conservation (DEC) sounded alarm bells over the under-staffed agency's ability to monitor the industry and to deal with any emergencies if the plan goes ahead.

Read it at The Guardian (UK)

Fracking will poison New York's drinking water, critics warn

by Karen McVeigh

Naomi Klein on capitalism and climate change

Disaster Capitalism is a hard act to follow. but Naomi Klein has manage to provoke again in an article on the implications of environmentalism and climate change. She admits that the criticism of the Right about serious environmentalism sounding the death knell of modern capitalism, whereas most on the Left are still under the illusion that green consumerism is all that is required.

All of this means that the climate movement needs to have one hell of a comeback. For this to happen, the left is going to have to learn from the right. Denialists gained traction by making climate about economics: action will destroy capitalism, they have claimed, killing jobs and sending prices soaring. But at a time when a growing number of people agree with the protesters at Occupy Wall Street, many of whom argue that capitalism-as-usual is itself the cause of lost jobs and debt slavery, there is a unique opportunity to seize the economic terrain from the right. This would require making a persuasive case that the real solutions to the climate crisis are also our best hope of building a much more enlightened economic system—one that closes deep inequalities, strengthens and transforms the public sphere, generates plentiful, dignified work and radically reins in corporate power. It would also require a shift away from the notion that climate action is just one issue on a laundry list of worthy causes vying for progressive attention. Just as climate denialism has become a core identity issue on the right, utterly entwined with defending current systems of power and wealth, the scientific reality of climate change must, for progressives, occupy a central place in a coherent narrative about the perils of unrestrained greed and the need for real alternatives.

Building such a transformative movement may not be as hard as it first appears. Indeed, if you ask the Heartlanders, climate change makes some kind of left-wing revolution virtually inevitable, which is precisely why they are so determined to deny its reality. Perhaps we should listen to their theories more closely—they might just understand something the left still doesn’t get.

* * *The deniers did not decide that climate change is a left-wing conspiracy by uncovering some covert socialist plot. They arrived at this analysis by taking a hard look at what it would take to lower global emissions as drastically and as rapidly as climate science demands. They have concluded that this can be done only by radically reordering our economic and political systems in ways antithetical to their “free market” belief system. As British blogger and Heartland regular James Delingpole has pointed out, “Modern environmentalism successfully advances many of the causes dear to the left: redistribution of wealth, higher taxes, greater government intervention, regulation.” Heartland’s Bast puts it even more bluntly: For the left, “Climate change is the perfect thing…. It’s the reason why we should do everything [the left] wanted to do anyway.”

Here’s my inconvenient truth: they aren’t wrong. Before I go any further, let me be absolutely clear: as 97 percent of the world’s climate scientists attest, the Heartlanders are completely wrong about the science. The heat-trapping gases released into the atmosphere through the burning of fossil fuels are already causing temperatures to increase. If we are not on a radically different energy path by the end of this decade, we are in for a world of pain.

Read it at The Nation
Capitalism vs. the Climate

by Naomi Klein

Morris Berman reflects on Naomi Klein's essay in La longue durée at Dark Ages America
(h/t) Keven Fathi)

Naomi Klein, climate scientists, and serious environmentalists, as well the opponents of environmentalism, are correct in viewing this as calling for a fundamental reconfiguration of civilization. One side embraces the necessary change, while the other side rejects it. This is going to be one huge emerging conflict since, on one hand, many vested interests are threatened and, on the other, the very future of the humanity is at stake.

One of my predictions for 2012 is that global warming, which the left calls it, or "climate change," as the right calls it, is going to start coming to the fore as one of the big issues, socially, politically, and economically. The Kyoto treaty expires in 2012, and the international conference in Durban to replace it with something "with teeth" is going to become a focal point in the news. This issue is going to move to the front burner. I expect to see it play an increasingly prominent role in the demands of the protestors worldwide as environmental conditions deteriorate, affecting the less affluent first.

Occupy by another name — grassroots opposition to Keystone XL

Connie and Leon Weichman had just finished branding some calves Monday when Connie's niece texted her the news: TransCanada, the Alberta-based company that wants to build an oil pipeline through the middle of the United States, had finally agreed to reroute it away from the Nebraska Sandhills where the Weichmans live and ranch.

The couple had been looking forward to this moment for almost four years, but the victory was less than they'd hoped for.TransCanada's agreement with the Nebraska state legislature would keep the pipeline out of the Sandhills, an ecologically sensitive prairie that overlies the Ogallala aquifer. But it wouldn't do anything to prevent the next route from swinging close enough to the Weichmans' property to endanger their land. And it wouldn't protect Nebraska ranchers outside the Sandhills, who are equally dependent on regional groundwater.

Connie Weichman, a middle-aged woman with graying hair and silver-rimmed glasses, doesn't consider herself an environmentalist and had never before participated in local politics. But along with a steadily growing group of Nebraskans—most of them also first-time activists—she and her husband played a key role in moving the pipeline route out of the Sandhills. Last week the State Department extended the pipeline review process by a year to study alternative routes through Nebraska. Four days later, TransCanada announced it would forgo the Sandhills route.

Environmental groups throughout the nation have celebrated these events as a significant achievement in their battle to stop the pipeline, which would funnel up to 830,000 barrels of tar sands oil per day from Alberta to the Gulf Coast. But they also agree that the unlikely activists from Nebraska helped turn the tide.

Ken Winston, a policy advocate in Nebraska's chapter of the Sierra Club, said the Nebraska coalition included concerned citizens from throughout the state.

"This is a movement that has come from Nebraskans, and it's large spread," Winston said. "Their involvement cut across the political spectrum…. Even if they reject the label, they are truly environmentalists in the best sense of the word."

The Weichmans' entry to activism began in 2008, when TransCanada offered to pay them for a two-mile easement on their property. At first they said no, fearing that diluted bitumen—a special kind of heavy crude produced from tar sands oil—might leak from the pipeline into their groundwater. When the company threatened to take their land using eminent domain, they finally accepted the offer. But by then they also were ready to join the fight against the Sandhills route.... (emphasis added)

Read the rest at Inside Climate News

Nebraska Ranchers Who Turned the Tide in Pipeline Fight Say They're Not Done Yet: Landowners explain why—and how—they became activists.

by Lisa Song

Radicalizing Nebraska?