Chávez Announces New Stage of Energy Revolution in Venezuela

June 20, Cuban News Agency

Havana, June 18 (acn) Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez announced on Sunday the beginning of a new stage of the Energy Revolution that is taking place in his country.

During the inauguration of a combined-cycle plant at the Termozulia electric plant in the western state of Zulia, the Venezuelan leader said that the main goal of this new stage is to substitute almost 27 million inefficient incandescent light bulbs by energy saving light bulbs in the official, industrial and commercial sectors.

Chávez insisted on the need to modify the consumption patterns that often tend to the waste of electricity and fuel, and stressed that the efforts currently being made by the Venezuelan government aim at preserving the environment.

The change of 26.7 light bulbs began on Sunday in the 13 states of the highest industrial potential.

After the replacement of 53.2 incandescent bulbs in Venezuelan houses, the Central Electricity Office has certified a reduction of 1400 megawatts in the maximum demand.

There have not been blackouts in the last months in the states of Nueva esparto, Amazonas and Delta Amaruco, where power cuts were more frequent.

"Since the beginning of the Energy Revolution last November, the Venezuelan people have learned to break old paradigms in the use of energy," said Manuel Deza, coordinator of the Energy program.

The newly inaugurated plant reduces emissions to the atmosphere and is part of the Energy Revolution that also includes the substitution of oil by natural gas in the production of electricity and the use of renewable sources of energy, among other initiatives.

The Truth About Recycling

June 7, The Economist

Reuters

As the importance of recycling becomes more apparent, questions about it linger. Is it worth the effort? How does it work? Is recycling waste just going into a landfill in China? Here are some answers

IT IS an awful lot of rubbish. Since 1960 the amount of municipal waste being collected in America has nearly tripled, reaching 245m tonnes in 2005. According to European Union statistics, the amount of municipal waste produced in western Europe increased by 23% between 1995 and 2003, to reach 577kg per person. (So much for the plan to reduce waste per person to 300kg by 2000.) As the volume of waste has increased, so have recycling efforts. In 1980 America recycled only 9.6% of its municipal rubbish; today the rate stands at 32%. A similar trend can be seen in Europe, where some countries, such as Austria and the Netherlands, now recycle 60% or more of their municipal waste. Britain's recycling rate, at 27%, is low, but it is improving fast, having nearly doubled in the past three years.

Even so, when a city introduces a kerbside recycling programme, the sight of all those recycling lorries trundling around can raise doubts about whether the collection and transportation of waste materials requires more energy than it saves. “We are constantly being asked: Is recycling worth doing on environmental grounds?” says Julian Parfitt, principal analyst at Waste & Resources Action Programme (WRAP), a non-profit British company that encourages recycling and develops markets for recycled materials.

Studies that look at the entire life cycle of a particular material can shed light on this question in a particular case, but WRAP decided to take a broader look. It asked the Technical University of Denmark and the Danish Topic Centre on Waste to conduct a review of 55 life-cycle analyses, all of which were selected because of their rigorous methodology. The researchers then looked at more than 200 scenarios, comparing the impact of recycling with that of burying or burning particular types of waste material. They found that in 83% of all scenarios that included recycling, it was indeed better for the environment.

Based on this study, WRAP calculated that Britain's recycling efforts reduce its carbon-dioxide emissions by 10m-15m tonnes per year. That is equivalent to a 10% reduction in Britain's annual carbon-dioxide emissions from transport, or roughly equivalent to taking 3.5m cars off the roads. Similarly, America's Environmental Protection Agency estimates that recycling reduced the country's carbon emissions by 49m tonnes in 2005.

Recycling has many other benefits, too. It conserves natural resources. It also reduces the amount of waste that is buried or burnt, hardly ideal ways to get rid of the stuff. (Landfills take up valuable space and emit methane, a potent greenhouse gas; and although incinerators are not as polluting as they once were, they still produce noxious emissions, so people dislike having them around.) But perhaps the most valuable benefit of recycling is the saving in energy and the reduction in greenhouse gases and pollution that result when scrap materials are substituted for virgin feedstock. “If you can use recycled materials, you don't have to mine ores, cut trees and drill for oil as much,” says Jeffrey Morris of Sound Resource Management, a consulting firm based in Olympia, Washington.

Extracting metals from ore, in particular, is extremely energy-intensive. Recycling aluminium, for example, can reduce energy consumption by as much as 95%. Savings for other materials are lower but still substantial: about 70% for plastics, 60% for steel, 40% for paper and 30% for glass. Recycling also reduces emissions of pollutants that can cause smog, acid rain and the contamination of waterways.

A brief history of recycling

The virtue of recycling has been appreciated for centuries. For thousands of years metal items have been recycled by melting and reforming them into new weapons or tools. It is said that the broken pieces of the Colossus of Rhodes, a statue deemed one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, were recycled for scrap. During the industrial revolution, recyclers began to form businesses and later trade associations, dealing in the collection, trade and processing of metals and paper. America's Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries (ISRI), a trade association with more than 1,400 member companies, traces its roots back to one such organisation founded in 1913. In the 1930s many people survived the Great Depression by peddling scraps of metal, rags and other items. In those days reuse and recycling were often economic necessities. Recycling also played an important role during the second world war, when scrap metal was turned into weapons.

As industrial societies began to produce ever-growing quantities of garbage, recycling took on a new meaning. Rather than recycling materials for purely economic reasons, communities began to think about how to reduce the waste flow to landfills and incinerators. Around 1970 the environmental movement sparked the creation of America's first kerbside collection schemes, though it was another 20 years before such programmes really took off.

In 1991 Germany made history when it passed an ordinance shifting responsibility for the entire life cycle of packaging to producers. In response, the industry created Duales System Deutschland (DSD), a company that organises a separate waste-management system that exists alongside public rubbish-collection. By charging a licensing fee for its “green dot” trademark, DSD pays for the collection, sorting and recycling of packaging materials. Although the system turned out to be expensive, it has been highly influential. Many European countries later adopted their own recycling initiatives incorporating some degree of producer responsibility.

In 1987 a rubbish-laden barge cruised up and down America's East Coast looking for a place to unload, sparking a public discussion about waste management and serving as a catalyst for the country's growing recycling movement. By the early 1990s so many American cities had established recycling programmes that the resulting glut of materials caused the market price for kerbside recyclables to fall from around $50 per ton to about $30, says Dr Morris, who has been tracking prices for recyclables in the Pacific Northwest since the mid-1980s. As with all commodities, costs for recyclables fluctuate. But the average price for kerbside materials has since slowly increased to about $90 per ton.

Even so, most kerbside recycling programmes are not financially self-sustaining. The cost of collecting, transporting and sorting materials generally exceeds the revenues generated by selling the recyclables, and is also greater than the disposal costs. Exceptions do exist, says Dr Morris, largely near ports in dense urban areas that charge high fees for landfill disposal and enjoy good market conditions for the sale of recyclables.

Sorting things out

Originally kerbside programmes asked people to put paper, glass and cans into separate bins. But now the trend is toward co-mingled or “single stream” collection. About 700 of America's 10,000 kerbside programmes now use this approach, says Kate Krebs, executive director of America's National Recycling Coalition. But the switch can make people suspicious: if there is no longer any need to separate different materials, people may conclude that the waste is simply being buried or burned. In fact, the switch towards single-stream collection is being driven by new technologies that can identify and sort the various materials with little or no human intervention. Single-stream collection makes it more convenient for householders to recycle, and means that more materials are diverted from the waste stream.

San Francisco, which changed from multi to single-stream collection a few years ago, now boasts a recycling rate of 69%—one of the highest in America. With the exception of garden and food waste, all the city's kerbside recyclables are sorted in a 200,000-square-foot facility that combines machines with the manpower of 155 employees. The $38m plant, next to the San Francisco Bay, opened in 2003. Operated by Norcal Waste Systems, it processes an average of 750 tons of paper, plastic, glass and metals a day.

The process begins when a truck arrives and dumps its load of recyclables at one end of the building. The materials are then piled on to large conveyer belts that transport them to a manual sorting station. There, workers sift through everything, taking out plastic bags, large pieces of cardboard and other items that could damage or obstruct the sorting machines. Plastic bags are especially troublesome as they tend to get caught in the spinning-disk screens that send weightier materials, such as bottles and cans, down in one direction and the paper up in another.

Corrugated cardboard is separated from mixed paper, both of which are then baled and sold. Plastic bottles and cartons are plucked out by hand. The most common types, PET (type 1) and HDPE (type 2), are collected separately; the rest go into a mixed-plastics bin.

Next, a magnet pulls out any ferrous metals, typically tin-plated or steel cans, while the non-ferrous metals, mostly aluminium cans, are ejected by eddy current. Eddy-current separators, in use since the early 1990s, consist of a rapidly revolving magnetic rotor inside a long, cylindrical drum that rotates at a slower speed. As the aluminium cans are carried over this drum by a conveyer belt, the magnetic field from the rotor induces circulating electric currents, called eddy currents, within them. This creates a secondary magnetic field around the cans that is repelled by the magnetic field of the rotor, literally ejecting the aluminium cans from the other waste materials.

Finally, the glass is separated by hand into clear, brown, amber and green glass. For each load, the entire sorting process from start to finish takes about an hour, says Bob Besso, Norcal's recycling-programme manager for San Francisco.

Although all recycling facilities still employ people, investment is increasing in optical sorting technologies that can separate different types of paper and plastic. Development of the first near-infra-red-based waste-sorting systems began in the early 1990s. At the time Elopak, a Norwegian producer of drink cartons made of plastic-laminated cardboard, worried that it would have to pay a considerable fee to meet its producer responsibilities in Germany and other European countries. To reduce the overall life-cycle costs associated with its products, Elopak set out to find a way to automate the sorting of its cartons. The company teamed up with SINTEF, a Norwegian research centre, and in 1996 sold its first unit in Germany. The technology was later spun off into a company now called TiTech.

TiTech's systems—more than 1,000 of which are now installed worldwide—rely on spectroscopy to identify different materials. Paper and plastic items are spread out on a conveyor belt in a single layer. When illuminated by a halogen lamp, each type of material reflects a unique combination of wavelengths in the infra-red spectrum that can be identified, much like a fingerprint. By analysing data from a sensor that detects light in both the visible and the near-infra-red spectrum, a computer is able to determine the colour, type, shape and position of each item. Air jets are then activated to push particular items from one conveyor belt to another, or into a bin. Numerous types of paper, plastic or combinations thereof can thus be sorted with up to 98% accuracy.

For many materials the process of turning them back into useful raw materials is straightforward: metals are shredded into pieces, paper is reduced to pulp and glass is crushed into cullet. Metals and glass can be remelted almost indefinitely without any loss in quality, while paper can be recycled up to six times. (As it goes through the process, its fibres get shorter and the quality deteriorates.)

Plastics, which are made from fossil fuels, are somewhat different. Although they have many useful properties—they are flexible, lightweight and can be shaped into any form—there are many different types, most of which need to be processed separately. In 2005 less than 6% of the plastic from America's municipal waste stream was recovered. And of that small fraction, the only two types recycled in significant quantities were PET and HDPE. For PET, food-grade bottle-to-bottle recycling exists. But plastic is often “down-cycled” into other products such as plastic lumber (used in place of wood), drain pipes and carpet fibres, which tend to end up in landfills or incinerators at the end of their useful lives.

Even so, plastics are being used more and more, not just for packaging, but also in consumer goods such as cars, televisions and personal computers. Because such products are made of a variety of materials and can contain multiple types of plastic, metals (some of them toxic), and glass, they are especially difficult and expensive to dismantle and recycle.

Europe and Japan have initiated “take back” laws that require electronics manufacturers to recycle their products. But in America only a handful of states have passed such legislation. That has caused problems for companies that specialise in recycling plastics from complex waste streams and depend on take-back laws for getting the necessary feedstock. Michael Biddle, the boss of MBA Polymers, says the lack of such laws is one of the reasons why his company operates only a pilot plant in America and has its main facilities in China and Austria.

Much recyclable material can be processed locally, but ever more is being shipped to developing nations, especially China. The country has a large appetite for raw materials and that includes scrap metals, waste paper and plastics, all of which can be cheaper than virgin materials. In most cases, these waste materials are recycled into consumer goods or packaging and returned to Europe and America via container ships. With its hunger for resources and the availability of cheap labour, China has become the largest importer of recyclable materials in the world.

The China question

But the practice of shipping recyclables to China is controversial. Especially in Britain, politicians have voiced the concern that some of those exports may end up in landfills. Many experts disagree. According to Pieter van Beukering, an economist who has studied the trade of waste paper to India and waste plastics to China: “as soon as somebody is paying for the material, you bet it will be recycled.”

In fact, Dr van Beukering argues that by importing waste materials, recycling firms in developing countries are able to build larger factories and achieve economies of scale, recycling materials more efficiently and at lower environmental cost. He has witnessed as much in India, he says, where dozens of inefficient, polluting paper mills near Mumbai were transformed into a smaller number of far more productive and environmentally friendly factories within a few years.

Still, compared with Western countries, factories in developing nations may be less tightly regulated, and the recycling industry is no exception. China especially has been plagued by countless illegal-waste imports, many of which are processed by poor migrants in China's coastal regions. They dismantle and recycle anything from plastic to electronic waste without any protection for themselves or the environment.

The Chinese government has banned such practices, but migrant workers have spawned a mobile cottage industry that is difficult to wipe out, says Aya Yoshida, a researcher at Japan's National Institute for Environmental Studies who has studied Chinese waste imports and recycling practices. Because this type of industry operates largely under the radar, it is difficult to assess its overall impact. But it is clear that processing plastic and electronic waste in a crude manner releases toxic chemicals, harming people and the environment—the opposite of what recycling is supposed to achieve.

Under pressure from environmental groups, such as the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition, some computer-makers have established rules to ensure that their products are recycled in a responsible way. Hewlett-Packard has been a leader in this and even operates its own recycling factories in California and Tennessee. Dell, which was once criticised for using prison labour to recycle its machines, now takes back its old computers for no charge. And last month Steve Jobs detailed Apple's plans to eliminate the use of toxic substances in its products.

Far less controversial is the recycling of glass—except, that is, in places where there is no market for it. Britain, for example, is struggling with a mountain of green glass. It is the largest importer of wine in the world, bringing in more than 1 billion litres every year, much of it in green glass bottles. But with only a tiny wine industry of its own, there is little demand for the resulting glass. Instead what is needed is clear glass, which is turned into bottles for spirits, and often exported to other countries. As a result, says Andy Dawe, WRAP's glass-technology manager, Britain is in the “peculiar situation” of having more green glass than it has production capacity for.

Britain's bottle-makers already use as much recycled green glass as they can in their furnaces to produce new bottles. So some of the surplus glass is down-cycled into construction aggregates or sand for filtration systems. But WRAP's own analysis reveals that the energy savings for both appear to be “marginal or even disadvantageous”. Working with industry, WRAP has started a new programme called GlassRite Wine, in an effort to right the imbalance. Instead of being bottled at source, some wine is now imported in 24,000-litre containers and then bottled in Britain. This may dismay some wine connoisseurs, but it solves two problems, says Mr Dawe: it reduces the amount of green glass that is imported and puts what is imported to good use. It can also cut shipping costs by up to 40%.

The future of recycling

This is an unusual case, however. More generally, one of the biggest barriers to more efficient recycling is that most products were not designed with recycling in mind. Remedying this problem may require a complete rethinking of industrial processes, says William McDonough, an architect and the co-author of a book published in 2002 called “Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things”. Along with Michael Braungart, his fellow author and a chemist, he lays out a vision for establishing “closed-loop” cycles where there is no waste. Recycling should be taken into account at the design stage, they argue, and all materials should either be able to return to the soil safely or be recycled indefinitely. This may sound like wishful thinking, but Mr McDonough has a good pedigree. Over the years he has worked with companies including Ford and Google.

An outgrowth of “Cradle to Cradle” is the Sustainable Packaging Coalition, a non-profit working group that has developed guidelines that look beyond the traditional benchmarks of packaging design to emphasise the use of renewable, recycled and non-toxic source materials, among other things. Founded in 2003 with just nine members, the group now boasts nearly 100 members, including Target, Starbucks and Estée Lauder, some of which have already begun to change the design of their packaging.

Sustainable packaging not only benefits the environment but can also cut costs. Last year Wal-Mart, the world's biggest retailer, announced that it wanted to reduce the amount of packaging it uses by 5% by 2013, which could save the company as much as $3.4 billion and reduce carbon-dioxide emissions by 667,000 tonnes. As well as trying to reduce the amount of packaging, Wal-Mart also wants to recycle more of it. Two years ago the company began to use an unusual process, called the “sandwich bale”, to collect waste material at its stores and distribution centres for recycling. It involves putting a layer of cardboard at the bottom of a rubbish compactor before filling it with waste material, and then putting another layer of cardboard on top. The compactor then produces a “sandwich” which is easier to handle and transport, says Jeff Ashby of Rocky Mountain Recycling, who invented the process for Wal-Mart. As well as avoiding disposal costs for materials it previously sent to landfill, the company now makes money by selling waste at market prices.

EPA

It does get recycled, honest

Evidently there is plenty of scope for further innovation in recycling. New ideas and approaches will be needed, since many communities and organisations have set high targets for recycling. Europe's packaging directive requires member states to recycle 60% of their glass and paper, 50% of metals and 22.5% of plastic packaging by the end of 2008. Earlier this year the European Parliament voted to increase recycling rates by 2020 to 50% of municipal waste and 70% of industrial waste. Recycling rates can be boosted by charging households and businesses more if they produce more rubbish, and by reducing the frequency of rubbish collections while increasing that of recycling collections.

Meanwhile a number of cities and firms (including Wal-Mart, Toyota and Nike) have adopted zero-waste targets. This may be unrealistic but Matt Hale, director of the office of solid waste at America's Environmental Protection Agency, says it is a worthy goal and can help companies think about better ways to manage materials. It forces people to look at the entire life-cycle of a product, says Dr Hale, and ask questions: Can you reduce the amount of material to begin with? Can you design the product to make recycling easier?

If done right, there is no doubt that recycling saves energy and raw materials, and reduces pollution. But as well as trying to recycle more, it is also important to try to recycle better. As technologies and materials evolve, there is room for improvement and cause for optimism. In the end, says Ms Krebs, “waste is really a design flaw.”

The Dogma against Climate Change

Article: Sources and Authorities: Dissidents Against Dogma, ALEXANDER COCKBURN, June 10, Counter Punch

This is a pretty crazy article i was reading yesterday, basically Alexander Cockburn (who is one of the counterpunch magazine editors) uses all sorts of long debunked myths about why climate change is a hoax. He uses this as a bases for attacking the left for buying into the "rubbish" and failing to see that it has been created by capitalism to justify ramping up energy prices and forcing working class people to pay more for stuff they need.

Unfortunately he fails to realise that scientists have been arguing for several decades now that climate change is a reality, and something that Governments must respond to immediately. Since then the less accurate science has been vindicated by more and more complex modelling and observing real changes to the climate.

The problem is that we live within a Capitalist society that seeks to commodify everything and put a price tag on everything so they can get some profits out of it. This means that some companies have entered the "green market" to try and make a few bucks out of genuine concern by working class people about the environment. But it also means that when Governments are forced to acknowledge climate change they aren't going to put forward solutions that go beyond the bounds of capitalism (er, duh!), but rather will hope to minimise the economic impact to business, while creating the illusion that something is being done - that something being funded by working people. Thus we have "carbon trading" and carbon taxes, which will force prices up on energy for households, while big corporations like BHP will continue to pay nothing for the 33 million litres of water it uses per day to run a Uranium mine in Roxby Downs (nor will it pay for the upgrade which will require a further 120 million litres of water per day).

But also pro-capitalist governments will suggest the maintanence of big base load power stations and suggest switching from the cheap polluting source of power - coal and oil, to slightly less polluting options and cheap sources of power - Nuclear and hydrogen. Maybe if there is a significant environment movement those governments might be forced to introduce programs that incorporate clean renewables into the grid, but that's more likely to be a small part of the energy production process in the short term.

As it stands Capitalism will try to worm its way out of the climate crises, by midly limiting the impact with some measures that appease the mass sentiment and trying to recorrect market mechanisms to allow a more "green friendly" capitalist production process. However if we look at the alternatives of Cuba and Venezuela, who are constructing a very different society with a consciously socialist leadership, we can see how climate change can comprehensively challenged outside of a captialist framework.

Recently the Venezuela Government disallowed the development of coal mine in the state of Zulia, because the Indigenous people organised against it because of the damage it would have to their health and environment. They are also planting millions of trees to curb the massive deforestation created by the need to fuel capitalist production, but also for the huge cattle stations owned by rich latifundia. They also have a massive organic garden planted right in the middle of Caracas, have organised the community to install millions of energy efficient light bulbs, are building an extensive public rail network throughout the country, plus they have threatened to nationalise any company that is caught illegally polluting the environment. Venezuela is following in the foot-steps of Cuba who managed to overturn their dependence on oil, develop an extensive permaculture industry, and become the only sustainable country in the world (by WWF standards) after 15 years.

Those concerned about unsustainable practices and corporate plundering should spend more time trying to build the environment movement to politically challenge the polluters, rather than trying revive the "debate" about whether global warming is happening or not.

Global Warming: Who's to Blame

Nicole Colson, June 1, Socialist Worker (US)

IT’S NO secret that the wealth of available scientific evidence shows man-made global warming exists.

But recent studies suggest climate change may be happening at an even quicker pace than previously thought--and the consequences are already proving devastating for the environment and for huge numbers of people across the globe.

According to reports issued in February and April by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a body consisting of more than 2,500 of the world’s leading climate scientists, global warming is “unequivocal,” with the current concentration of carbon dioxide and methane--two important heat-trapping gases--in the atmosphere exceeding “by far the natural range over the last 650,000 years.”

In its most recent report, the IPCC notes that 11 of the last 12 years ranked among the 12 hottest years globally since 1850, when sufficient worldwide temperature measurements began. Over the past 50 years, “cold days, cold nights and frost have become less frequent, while hot days, hot nights, and heat waves have become more frequent.”

The IPCC cites evidence of increasingly severe weather patterns already caused by global warming, including an increase in the intensity of hurricanes in the North Atlantic over the past 30 years; drier conditions in the Sahel (the boundary zone between the Sahara desert and more fertile regions of Africa to the south), the Mediterranean, southern Africa and parts of southern Asia since 1900; and longer and more intense droughts since 1970.

Global biodiversity is being severely impacted as well. An estimated 150 species of plants and animals already disappear each day due to climate change, and an increase of just 2 degrees Fahrenheit could mean “up to 30 percent of the species at increasing risk of extinction,” according to the IPCC.

Glacier mass and snow cover have declined, as has ice in the Arctic and Antarctic Seas. Ocean temperatures and sea levels have risen.

Warming and related changes in monsoon and trade winds have triggered an alarming retreat of Himalayan glaciers. Given their current rate of shrinkage, the IPCC predicts that Himalayan glaciers could be gone by the year 2035. Currently, glacial runoff in the Himalayas is the largest source of freshwater for northern India. Half a billion people in the Himalaya-Hindu-Kush region and a quarter billion downstream will face the impact.

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EVEN CONSERVATIVE estimates of the likely consequences of continued global warming read like a doomsday scenario for much of the planet’s population.

As NASA researcher James Hansen wrote in the New York Times last year, “We have at most 10 years--not 10 years to decide upon action, but 10 years to alter fundamentally the trajectory of global greenhouse emissions”--or else catastrophic change could be inevitable.

The world’s poor will bear the brunt of the climate crisis. As many as 250 million people in Africa alone will have increased “water stress” by 2020, according to IPCC data. Climate change will put an additional 50 million people at risk of hunger by 2020--rising to an additional 132 million and 266 million by 2050 and 2080, respectively.

Crop yields could decrease by up to 30 percent in Central and South Asia by 2050, while rain-dependent agriculture could drop by 50 percent in some African countries by 2020.

“Many millions” living in coastal and low-lying areas will be threatened by rising sea levels. According to a recent report by the British charity Christian Aid, an estimated 1 billion people across the planet could be displaced by the effects of global warming by 2050--including an estimated 250 million forced from their homes because of floods, droughts or famine.

“It is the poorest of the poor in the world, and this includes poor people even in prosperous societies, who are going to be the worst hit,” IPCC Chairman Rajendra Pachauri warned journalists in April. “People who are poor are least able to adapt to climate change.”

That includes people like Lakhan Bibi, leader of the indigenous Kailashi people of the Hindu Kush Mountains in northern Pakistan. At a recent news conference called by the UN, Bibi told Inter Press Service that her people are already seeing drastic changes. “We had never seen before what are seeing now,” Bibi said. “Our herds are running away. Our homes are getting buried in huge glaciers.”

In North America, the village of Newtok in Alaska, once built on stable permafrost, is now literally sinking into the mud, as warming air and ocean temperatures have caused the permafrost to melt.

An impoverished community of the Native American Yupik tribe, Newtok is home to 315 residents. Their houses and boardwalks are now sinking into the mud, while the village itself has been literally turned into an island due to rising waters.

Though there are tentative plans to relocate the village, Newtok leaders say the federal government has been slow to come up with the money. The Bush administration has set aside just $1 million in funds--but cost to move Newtok alone (not to mention the dozens of other villages facing similar problems) will be an estimated $130 million.

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EVERY CREDIBLE report indicates that only drastic action will be able to mitigate the more severe future consequences of global warming.

But many environmentalists point to individual solutions--encouraging people (particularly those in advanced industrial nations) to drive and consume less, use energy-efficient light bulbs and recycle, for example--that will have little impact.

The driving factor behind global warming is the system of modern capitalism, dominated by wealthy nations and companies that rely on the use of fossil fuels, and therefore have a stake in ensuring that environmental considerations don’t cut into their profits or access to markets.

The Bush administration is a prime example. With strong ties to powerful oil and energy companies, the administration not only allowed the energy industry to literally write many of its environmental policies, but has consistently attempted to block or water down international assessments of global warming.

Thus, working behind the scene, the U.S. succeeded in downplaying estimates in the most recent IPCC report of how many people will suffer food and water shortages because of global warming.

And though new targets on reducing emissions were to be discussed at June’s G-8 summit of world leaders, Greenpeace recently leaked a document from an unnamed U.S. official showing that the Bush administration plans to reject any action which would impose mandatory cuts in emissions--no matter how minimal.

Such disregard for the environment is the norm in a system that puts profits over human life.

As environmentalist John Bellamy Foster noted in Monthly Review, under capitalism, “the natural world is seen as a mere instrument of world social domination. Hence, capital by its very logic imposes what is in effect a scorched-earth strategy. The planetary ecological crisis is increasingly all-encompassing, a product of the destructive uncontrollability of a rapidly globalizing capitalist economy, which knows no law other than its own drive to exponential expansion.”

Take, for example, recent Greenpeace revelations that international logging companies have been stripping huge areas of the world’s second-largest rainforest--centered in the Democratic Republic of Congo--in return for minimal taxes and gifts of salt, sugar and tools to indigenous tribes.

According to the Britain’s Guardian newspaper, the Greenpeace report shows that more than 20 companies, mainly from Germany, Portugal, Belgium, Singapore and the U.S., have signed more than 150 contracts.

If all the forests identified for logging are felled, an important natural “carbon sink” would be eliminated, and an additional 34 billion tons of carbon would be released into the atmosphere by 2050--the same amount that Britain has emitted in the past 60 years.

But that means little to the timber companies, which used all kinds of methods to get their contracts.

In the village of Lamoko, on the Maringa river, for example, representatives of a major timber firm secured the “rights” to log thousands of hectares of forests for the next 25 years--in exchange for building the local village a few schools and pharmacies, and giving the village chief 20 sacks of sugar, 200 bags of salt, some machetes and a few hoes.

The cost to the company? Approximately $20,000--in return for the right to log exotic trees that can sell for as much as $8,000 each for the next 25 years.

While logging operations have been going since February 2005, the villagers have yet to see their schools and pharmacies. “We asked them to provide wood for our coffins and they even refused that,” one local man told the Guardian.

As such stories illustrate, the lack of substantial action on climate change is not simply a case of “political inertia,” as Bellamy Foster points out. Rather, it is the logic of capitalism, which must continually expand in the drive for profit.

“Capitalism is by its very nature an unceasing treadmill of production,” Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark noted on the MR Zine Web site. “There is no conceivable alternative scenario within such a runaway-train system that leads toward a sustainable relation to the environment, much less a just society. What is needed is nothing less than a worldwide revolution in our relation to nature, and thus of global society itself.”

In any rational society, the threat of global warming would have gotten attention a long time ago, with every possible resource devoted to measures to slow climate change and alleviate its effects. But under capitalism, greed and profits come first--even at the risk of far-reaching global devastation.

A New War on the Planet?

John Bellamy Foster, June 8, Monthly Review

During the last year the global warming debate has reached a turning point. Due to the media hype surrounding Al Gore's film An Inconvenient Truth, followed by a new assessment by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the climate skeptics have suffered a major defeat. Suddenly the media and the public are awakening to what the scientific consensus has been saying for two decades on human-induced climate change and the dangers it poses to the future of life on earth. Proposed solutions to global warming are popping up everywhere, from the current biofuels panacea to geoengineering solutions such as pumping sulfur particles into the stratosphere to shade the earth from the sun to claims that a market in carbon dioxide emissions is the invisible hand that will save the world. "Let's quit the debate about whether greenhouse gases are caused by mankind or by natural causes," President Bush said in a hastily organized retreat. "Let's just focus on technologies that deal with the issue."

It is characteristic of the magic-bullet solutions that now pervade the media that they promise to defend our current way of life while remaining virtually cost free. Despite the fact that economists have long insisted that there is no such thing as a free lunch, we are now being told on every side -- even by Gore -- that where global warming is concerned there is a free lunch after all. We can have our cars, our industrial waste, our endlessly expanding commodity economy, and climate stability too. Even the IPCC, in its policy proposals, tells us that climate change can be stopped on the cheap -- if only the magic of technology and markets is applied.

The goal is clearly to save the planet -- but only if capitalism can be fully preserved at the same time.

Hence, the most prominent proposals are shaped by the fact that they are designed to fit within the capitalist box. There can be no disruption of existing class or power relations. All proposed solutions must be compatible with the treadmill of production.

Even progressive thinkers such as George Monbiot in his new book Heat: How to Stop the Planet Burning have gotten into the act. Monbiot pointedly tells us that the rich countries can solve the global warming problem without becoming "Third World" states or shaking up "middle-class" life -- or indeed interfering with the distribution of riches at all. Politics is carefully excluded from his analysis, which instead focuses on such things as more buses, better insulated homes, virtual work, virtual shopping and improved cement. Corporations, we are led to believe, are part of the solution, not part of the problem. Less progressive, more technocratic thinkers look for substitutes for hydrocarbons, such as biofuels or even nuclear power, or they talk of floating white plastic islands in the oceans (a geoengineering solution to replace the lost reflectivity due to melting ice).

The dominant answers to global warming thus amount to what might be thought of as a new declaration of war on nature. If nature has "struck back" at capitalism's degradation of the environment in the form of climate change, the answer is to unleash a more powerful array of technological and market innovations so that the system can continue to expand as before.

As Hannah Arendt, one of the leading political philosophers of the 20th century, explained: "Under modern [capitalist] conditions not destruction but conservation spells ruin." Hence, capitalism, faced by natural obstacles, sees no alternative to a new assault on nature, employing new, high-tech armaments.

The ecological irrationality of this response is evident in the tendency to dissociate global warming from the global environmental crisis as a whole, which includes such problems as species extinction, destruction of the oceans, tropical deforestation, desertification, toxic wastes, etc.

It is then possible, from this narrow perspective, to promote biofuels as a partial solution to global warming -- without acknowledging that this will accelerate world hunger. Or it is thought pragmatic to dump iron filings in the ocean (the so-called Geritol solution to global warming) in order to grow phytoplankton and increase the carbon absorbing capacity of the ocean -- without connecting this at all to the current oceanic catastrophe. The fact that the biosphere is one interconnected whole is downplayed in favor of mere economic expediency.

What all of this suggests is that a real solution to the planetary environmental crisis cannot be accomplished simply through new technologies or through turning nature into a market. It is necessary to go to the root of the problem by addressing the social relations of production.

We must recognize that today's ecological problems are related to a system of global inequality that demands ecological destruction as a necessary condition of its existence. New social and democratic solutions need to be developed, rooted in human community and sustainability, embodying principles of conservation that are essential to life. But this means stepping outside the capitalist box and making peace with the planet -- and with other human beings.

Is the New UN Global Warming Report too Conservative?

Brett Clark and John Bellamy Foster, February 17, Monthly Review

There is now a strong consensus among climate scientists that human activities are the primary forces responsible for the observed warming of the earth's atmosphere. The recently released fourth assessment report, Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis, of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) notes that warming is "unequivocal" and human activities are the cause. Global average temperature has risen by 0.74°C (1.3°F) since 1906. The IPCC projects a further increase of 0.4°C (0.7°F) in warming during the next two decades, and an increase (best estimate) of 1.8-4.0°C (3.3-7.1°F) in global average temperature during this century.

Not surprisingly, this new report, which was the product of hundreds of scientists (150 lead authors with 450 contributing authors) and had to be unanimously approved by 154 governments, including the United States and other major oil-producing countries, is shrouded in controversy. However, rather than arising from global warming naysayers, the principal challenge to the report this time comes from leading climatologists themselves, who view this new IPCC report as too conservative, underestimating the risks of global climate change.

Commenting on the IPCC's record with climate change projections, James Hansen, Director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and widely considered to be the world's foremost climatologist, explained that the "IPCC has not overstated or overestimated those changes. The changes of carbon dioxide have been very accurate. Temperatures actually increased somewhat faster than projections. And sea level has increased notably faster than the prior estimates by IPCC" ("Gorilla of Sea Level Rise," Living on Earth, February 2, 2007). Yet, if the IPCC has in no way erred by overestimating the dangers, the same cannot be said with respect to underestimating them. Hansen and other leading climatologists insist that the new IPCC report fails to provide projections of sea level rise that are consistent with rising global temperature.

As the ocean warms due to increasing global temperature, it also expands, causing the sea level to rise. Melting glaciers and ice sheets are also increasing the volume of water. Destabilization of the ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica would result in big increases -- to be measured in feet rather than inches -- in sea level. Nonetheless, the new IPCC report estimates an increase in sea level of only 18 to 59 centimeters (0.6-1.9 feet) this century -- an estimate even lower than in its 2001 report. Some experts have voiced strong dissent regarding these calculations (see "Experts Slam Upcoming Global Warming Report," CNN.com). Hansen points out that the IPCC center point of 3°C (5.4°F) increase in global average temperature is "inconsistent with the numbers that they gave for sea level," because they do not take into account the contribution of melting ice sheets ("Gorilla of Sea Level Rise").

In an article in Science (January 19, 2007), Stefan Rahmstorf "connects global sea-level rise to global mean surface temperature." In establishing this relationship, Rahmstorf projects a "sea-level rise in 2100 of 0.5 to 1.4 meters [1.6-4.6 feet] above the 1990 level." Hansen and his colleagues at the Goddard Institute observed in an article entitled "Global Temperature Change" published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on September 26, 2006, that the temperature of the earth is now at the Holocene maximum and within approximately 1°C (1.8°F) of the maximum temperature of the last million years when the sea level was maybe as much as 5 meters (16 feet) higher than today. At a time when the earth's temperature was 2-3°C (3.6-5.4°F) warmer than today in the Middle Pliocene three million years ago, the sea level was 25-35 meters (80 feet or more) higher. As Hansen notes, based on this and other research:

We do have a lot of information available to us both from paleoclimate; the history of the earth and how ice sheets responded in the past and also the new data from satellites, and on surface measurements on the ice sheets which shows that there are processes beginning to happen there, exactly the processes that we're afraid will accelerate. The last time a large ice sheet melted sea level went up at a rate of five meters per century. That's one meter every 20 years. And that is a kind of sea level rise, a rate which the simple ice sheet models available now just cannot produce because they don't have the physics in them to give you the rapid collapse that happens in a very nonlinear system ("Gorilla of Sea Level Rise").

Larsen BIn "A Worrying Trend of Less Ice, Higher Seas," published in the March 24, 2006, issue of Science, Richard A. Kerr, explained that the melting of the ice sheets and glaciers in Greenland and Antarctica has accelerated in the last ten years. Ice shelves are moving rapidly toward the sea and melting. For example, when the 1,255-square-mile Larsen B ice shelf broke off of Antarctica in 2002, it only took 35 days for it to disappear.

As the temperature increases, a chain reaction is set in motion, amplifying warming tendencies. The ice caps melt and pools of water are formed. Rather than reflecting solar radiation, like the white ice does, the blue water absorbs the heat, further accelerating the rate of melting of the adjacent ice cap. This water also heats the ice below, driving deep holes of warm water within an ice shelf. The water from melting ice over land, such as in Antarctica and Greenland, sinks deep into the ice, cutting tunnels, known as "moulins." When it reaches the land beneath the ice, it both warms the ice underneath and serves as a lubricant that could lead massive amounts of ice to shift and fall into the sea. The melting of just Greenland's ice sheet could raise the worldwide sea level 20 feet. These positive feedback loops can start out slow, but accelerate in time.

In contemplating such changes and increases in the global temperature, James Hansen points out "if you start talking two or three degrees Celsius, then you're really talking about a different planet from the one we know" ("Gagged Climate Expert," Living on Earth, February 3, 2006).

In part, the critique offered by Hansen and other leading climatologists of the new IPCC report stems from the urgency of the matter at hand. "We have," Hansen says, "at most ten years -- not ten years to decide upon action, but ten years to alter fundamentally the trajectory of global greenhouse emissions" -- if we are to prevent such disastrous outcomes from becoming inevitable ("The Threat to the Planet," New York Review of Books, July 13, 2006). One crucial decade, in other words, separates us from irreversible, nonlinear processes that could set in motion the conditions for an entirely new geological age leading to the extinction of a majority of species on the earth and threatening human civilization.

The severity of the situation is amplified if we consider the full range of ecological consequences (droughts, flooding, severe storms, loss of biodiversity, etc.) of global climate change, not to mention the array of environmental problems that are emerging as every ecosystem is threatened with collapse. The scale of ecological destruction -- as well as the ongoing nuclear threat -- caused the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists recently to move its symbolic "doomsday clock" to five minutes to midnight, two minutes forward from where it was -- and twelve minutes closer to cataclysm than in the early 1990s.

In reality, the threat to the planet from the environmental crisis is even more serious than natural-scientific reports suggest (see "Ecology of Destruction," Monthly Review, February 2007). This is because there is much more than mere political inertia, as commonly supposed, preventing the world from radically changing course and initiating an alternative scenario to business as usual. Capitalism is by its very nature an unceasing treadmill of production. As Karl Marx put it in the nineteenth century: "The division of labor is necessarily followed by greater division of labor, the application of machinery by still greater application of machinery, works on a large scale by work on a still larger scale. That is the law [driven by competition] which again and again throws bourgeois production out of its old course and which compels capital to intensify the productive forces of labor, because it has intensified them . . . the law which gives capital no rest and continually whispers in its ear 'Go on! Go on!'" (Wage Labor and Capital). There is no conceivable alternative scenario within such a runaway-train system that leads toward a sustainable relation to the environment, much less a just society. What is needed is nothing less than a worldwide revolution in our relation to nature, and thus of global society itself.

"Not to Laugh, Not to Weep, But to Understand" - Leon Trotsky

As Leon Trotsky said of the Stalinist betrayal of the Russian Revolution and everything it acheived, the task is "not to laugh, not to weep, but to understand". This site has been started as an attempt to understand essentially the politics of climate change, and turn things around before it is too late.

Already the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is predicting a 2degC temperature rise even with large cuts in greenhouse emissions and the Stern Review proposals, while far more serious than that proposed by conservative governments around the world, could lead to 5 degree rises by the end of the year. The situation requires a radical change in the way we organise as a society.

As indicated by the atmospheric changes in the last thousand years, the qualitative change in greenhouse gas concentrations have coincided with the beginning of industrial capitalist development. The problem isn't civilisation in and of itself, but rather a product of a system that puts accumulation of capital above the fulfillment of human and world needs.

Initially Capitalism expanded production capacity with technological development and the creation of a new social force - the working class - whose labour could be purchased to carry out extraordinary feats. While Capitalism is based on generalised commodity production, the commodities produced actually fulfilled some human needs and overcome contradictions remaining from Feudalism. This process was helped through the formation of the Capitalist state, which enabled investments to be consciously directed (like towards constructing railways, harbours etc).

However very quickly it became clear that a society owned and organised by a elite minority, could not and would not directly seek to improve the problems of the majority and through the quest to accumulate more and more capital it introduced new and far more horrible problems. Diseases ran rampant, smog enveloped London, and the colonised countries were economically distorted around the needs of the colonial countries. More and more farmers were thrown into unemployment and into the cities to earn miniscule wages for survival.

Soon the economic powers were able to acquire (both legally and illegally) huge sums of wealth and the banks became powerful providers of finance for developing new more profitable industries. But the rate of return on investments constantly fell and the big industries with banks came together to form even larger monopolies to regulate the prices and thus ensure competition didn't drive down profit margins. The state too became more engaged in aiding this process, crushing opposition to wage cuts and poor working conditions, using military force to penetrate into new "markets" for buying and selling their products (particularly cheap labour).

And so the period of Imperialism came into being.

With the entering of this period, Capitalism entered its last stage. From here production became an increasingly social process, now globally, but the wealth would concentrate into the hands of fewer and fewer individuals. Today 225 individuals own the same as 2.5 Billion and the ratio of incomes between richest and poorest countries has grown from 3:1 in 1820, to 72:1 in 1992. This continues to grow and the situation of billions of poor living in the third world is becoming increasingly dire. At the same time Capitalist production has become increasingly parasitic and destructive. Huge amounts of waste are dumped wherever cheapest, fossil fuel electricity plants have grown to accomodate the rising energy demand, water has been sucked dry from every lake and river, and increasingly dangerous chemicals are being created to aid making cheap throw away goods that need to be continually replaced, refuelled and repaired.

If we are to secure a decent living not just for a handful of rich capitalists in the 22nd century, but for the entire world, then we cannot rely on individual solutions or better technologies. Yes they are important, however they cannot fundamentally deal with the crises that has been created by centuries of chaotic capitalist production. So to genuinely create an inhabitable earth for the 22nd century we must turn society on its head: take control of society away from the hands of the polluters and put it into the hands of the oppressed majority.

Unfortunately however the rich polluters are not likely to give up their position of power lightly. Only with an organised political movement of the majority of society, who have so far been excluded from the real decision making process, can we confront this situation and introduce a society that can open the way for a truly inhabitable earth. This society is a socialist society. Not the destructive bureacratically degenerated Stalinist socialism of most of the last century, but a Socialism of the 21st Century. Socialism of the 21st Century, must be the truly democratic, liberating and human society invisaged by Marx and Engels and (initially) created by Lenin. This socialism is the type which has made Cuba the only sustainable country in the world and is allowing Venezuelan people to actually make poverty history.

If we cannot fight and organise for Socialism in the 21st Century, then sadly we will see the destruction of civilisation and the creation of Barbarism of the 21st Century.