Raw Story, March 6th, 2010

In his film Capitalism: A Love Story [set to be released on DVD and Blu-ray Monday], Michael Moore squares off with the free-market system for its role in leveraging the United States's wealth into the hands of a few.

But in one clip cut from the documentary [Moore] interviews Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporter Chris Hedges, who explains how capitalism is actually contributing to the very downfall of the human race and the "degradation of the planet."

"All sorts of people who have spent their lives studying climate change, from Bill McKibben on down, have warned us that we don't have a lot of time left," Hedges said. "So it's not just that capitalism has destroyed our economic system and hijacked our political system, but it literally is extinguishing the system that sustains life. If that's not thwarted soon...then we will begin to see massive dislocations, environmental refugees, further depleting of natural resources. Overpopulation is also an issue. The UN estimates that by 2050 the size of the planet will double."

The very concept of capitalism, Moore declares in the film, is the problem because it inevitably leads to a system where the richest few control the means of production as well as the levers of power -- leading to a "plutonomy," a term used in a leaked Citigroup memo from 2005, in which the finance juggernaut concluded that the United States is no longer a democracy.

In the interview, Hedges decries America's turn toward supply-side economics over the last three decades as the cause of stagnating middle class incomes, contrasting it with the increasingly lavish fortunes of the wealthy and the aid they often receive from the government at the expense of working people.

           Read more... 

Cross posted from the Worldwatch Institute's Nourishing the Planet.

Richard Haigh doesn’t look like your typical African pastoralist. Unlike many Africans who grew up tending cattle, sheep, goats, and other livestock, Richard started his farm in 2007 at the age of 40. He quit his 9–5 job at a nongovernmental organization and bought 23 acres of land outside Durban, South Africa.

He wanted to totally change his life.

Today, he runs Enaleni Farm (enaleni means “abundance” in Zulu), raising endangered Zulu sheep, Nguni cattle (a breed indigenous to South Africa that is very resistant to pests), and a variety of fruits and vegetables.

Richard is cultivating GMO-free soya, as well as traditional maize varieties. “All the maize tells a story,” he says. Like the sheep and cattle, many maize varieties are resistant to drought, climate change, and diseases, making them a smart choice for farmers all over Africa.

This sort of mixed-crop livestock system is becoming increasingly rare in South Africa, according to Richard, because of commercial farms that rely on monoculture crops rather than on diverse agricultural systems.

           Read more... 

(Cross-posted from The Paragraph.) Since U.S. states abandoned their old laws that curb corporate power, many corporations have become dinosaurs — huge beasts that have outlived their time, but that keep on stomping through the world.¹ One type of dinosaur is the big oil company, whose products feed disastrous global warming climate change. Such companies should cut back production as the world limits greenhouse gases. Instead, the largest of them, ExxonMobil, has spent many millions to cast doubt on the scientific facts of climate change.²+³ Another type of dinosaur is the for-profit medical insurance company, whose kind controls the gates to health care, shutting out many millions, and canceling the policies of many who need a costly treatment.⁴+⁵ Such companies should bow out of the basic medical insurance business, and let Congress improve and extend Medicare to all. Instead, they have hired former government officials to lobby for keeping control, while getting millions of new, healthy customers at taxpayer expense.⁶

           Read more... 

Originally published at TomDispatch.com

You can already see a new style of writing about China emerging in our American world.  The New York Times set it off recently by publishing a front-page piece on a $3.4 billion Chinese investment in one of the planet’s last great copper reserves -- in Afghanistan.  In passing, reporter Michael Wines also pointed out that Chinese energy companies had gained a stronger foothold in the future exploitation of Iraq’s massive oil reserves than had U.S. multinationals.  The ironies were legion and painfully visible. 

Our two wars have been sucking us dry in two countries where state-owned Chinese companies have just scored significant economic victories.  “While the United States spends hundreds of billions of dollars fighting the Taliban and Al Qaeda [in Afghanistan],” wrote Wines, “China is securing raw material for its voracious economy. The world’s superpower is focused on security. Its fastest rising competitor concentrates on commerce.”

Already, the follow-up pieces are starting to come out and heady cocktails they are:  one part awe and one part bitterness mixed with one part despair.  In Esquire online, Thomas P.M. Barnett put it this way:  “Worse still: Will the rest of the world end up profiting from our blood and money?... The reason why Obama neglects to mention any regional interests like Pakistan's? Admitting the larger logic of regionalization would make too painfully obvious the nature of our current strategic bankruptcy. Because it would suggest that the only 'victory' to be found would be 'won' by those neighboring powers who did nothing to stabilize the situation. In other words, their 'treasure' and our 'blood.'"  At Foreign Policy online, Stephen M. Walt chimed in:  “While we've been running around playing whack-a-mole with the Taliban and 'investing' billions each year in the corrupt Karzai government, China has been investing in things that might actually be of some value, like a big copper mine.”

           Read more... 

RawStory:

President Obama announced on Friday that negotiations among the the world's nations had resulted in a "meaningful and unprecedented breakthrough" on climate change.

One administration official, however, acknowledged in remarks to the Associated Press that it was only a first step and not sufficient in itself to head off global warming. Going by other reactions to the deal, that would appear to be an understatement.

The Guardian obtained a leaked draft of the agreement and reported that "it says countries 'ought' to limit global warming to 2C, but does not bind them to do so."

The Toronto Star explains, "It is not binding and it does not set new greenhouse-gas reduction targets. Instead, countries are to set their own emission reduction commitments, which would not be legally binding. Those commitments will be the subject of further negotiation, with the aim of a final deal at next year's summit in Mexico."

A Greenpeace representative told The Guardian, "This latest draft is so weak as to be meaningless. It's more like a G8 communique than the legally binding agreement we need. It doesn't even include a timeline to give it legal standing or an explicit temperature target. It's hard to imagine our leaders will try to present this document to the world and keep a straight face."

A representative of World Development Movement used even stronger language, saying, "This summit has been in complete disarray from start to finish, and now appears to be culminating in a shameful and monumental failure that will condemn millions of people around the world to untold suffering. The leaders of rich countries have refused to lead and instead sought to bribe and bully developing nations to sign up to the equivalent of a death warrant."

Adele Morris, Fellow, Global Economy and Development and Policy Director for Climate and Energy Economics, Global Economy and Development at The Brookings Institution and Kurt Davies, research director at Greenpeace USA, talk to Paul Jay about the Copenhagen "Climate Sham":

Real News Network - December 19, 2009
Without US commitment Copenhagen breaks down

           Read more... 

Rob Hopkins is the founder of the Transition movement, a radically hopeful and community-driven approach to creating societies independent of fossil fuel.

From his bio at Ted.com:

Hopkins leads a vibrant new movement of towns and cities that utilize local cooperation and interdependence to shrink their ecological footprints. In the face of climate change he developed the concept of Transition Initiatives -- communities that produce their own goods and services, curb the need for transportation and take other measures to prepare for a post-oil future. While Transition shares certain principles with greenness and sustainability, it is a deeper vision concerned with re-imagining our future in a self-sufficient way and building resiliency.

Transforming theory to action, Hopkins is also the co-founder and a resident of the first Transition Initiative in the UK, in Totnes, Devon. As he refuses to fly, it is from his home in Totnes that he offers help to hundreds of similar communities that have sprung up around the world, in part through his blog, transitionculture.org

Hopkins, who's trained in ecological design, wrote the principal work on the subject, Transition Handbook: From Oil Dependency to Local Resilience, a 12-step manual for a postcarbon future.

Hopkins website is "Transition Culture: An evolving exploration into the head, heart and hands of energy descent", where he asks "How might our response to peak oil and climate change look more like a party than a protest march? This site explores the emerging transition model in its many manifestations" One of the posts I found most thought provoking on his site is Your Free Guide to Setting Up Local Currencies, available in .pdf for download on that page. He discusses in the video below some communities setting up their own currencies and local economies.

Here is Hopkins giving a talk for Ted.com, filmed this past July and posted there in November this year...

Time-lapse proof of extreme ice loss: James Balog on TED.com

"Ninety five percent of the glaciers in the world are retreating or shrinking... there is no scientific dispute about that"


Photographer James Balog shares new image sequences from the Extreme Ice Survey, a network of time-lapse cameras recording glaciers receding at an alarming rate, some of the most vivid evidence yet of climate change. (Recorded at TEDGlobal 2009, July 2009 in Oxford, England. Duration: 19:22)

           Read more... 

Today is the Blog Action Day on Climate Change. As you hop around the blogs today you are likely to see many with Blog Action Day in the title. The idea is that today more than 7,000 bloggers world wide will all take the time to post a blog entry about climate change. It is designed to do a couple of things; first off, it brings the message of climate change and its effects to the mind of people again. Second it gives a huge array of thoughts and suggestions on actions to the blog reading section of society.

"Originally posted at Squarestate.net"

The Dog is not usually focused on this issue. He spends his time working on torture accountability and other policy issues, but this is an issue that affects every single organism on the planet. Over the last four billion years the Earth has had a wide variety of climatic conditions. There is good evidence that in a period from 750 million years ago to 635 million years ago there were several episodes where the planet was completely covered by ice. Each of these episodes lasted several million years before CO2 from plate tectonics built up enough to warm the planet and push the glaciers back.

           Read more... 

Senator Inhofe commonly makes claims about the science of global warming. When Chris Mooney asked about Inhofe's disdain for the scientific mainstream, a member of his committee staff responded

How do you define 'mainstream'? Scientists who accept the so-called 'consensus' about global warming? Galileo was not mainstream.

Galileo's spirit looked on, more than a little irritated. But it wasn't provoked to return until Inhofe said:

...God’s still up there. We’re going through these cycles...The [AGW] science really isn’t there.

That very night in Inhofe's office, a spectre rose up from the floor in a great, billowing cloud.

JI: My God! What is that?!?

GG: I was once Galileo Galilei, philosopher of Florence.

JI: Wha...What do you want with me?

GG: I was sent to speak with you, Senator Inhofe.

           Read more... 

Living in lush green neighborhoods has provided the rich with a life-saving advantage over the poor who suffer from sweltering heat in concrete jungles. Transforming green open lands into a maze of buildings and roads of cities provided benefits to all of society, but it also creates urban heat islands that cause illness, death and misery that is disproportionately imposed on poor communities.

Urban heat islands were first described over 200 years ago. Concrete structures create both surface and air urban heat islands of double-digit temperature differentials between cities and rural areas.

For years, the rich bought their escape. A new study reveals it only costs $10,000 to decrease outside temperature by ½ degree Fahrenheit.

One inadvertent "benefit" of climate change is the growing awareness of this phenomenon of "cooking by day and night." Fortunately, some are working to reduce the devastating impacts of urban heat islands.

Urban Heat Islands

           Read more...