The Most Dangerous Climate Catastrophe Delusions

Human activities have unequivocally overheated our planet (Lee et al., 2023). According to the sixth and latest report of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), without radical changes, the current global trajectory of greenhouse gas emissions will lead to an average global temperature increase of 3.2°C above pre-industrial levels by the end of the 21st century (Lee et al., 2023). If this occurs, the lives of almost half of the human population would be threatened (Lee et al., 2023), as large areas of the planet would become uninhabitable. Even though we have had a solid scientific consensus for decades on the causes and consequences of the climate crisis, the increase in emissions has not been slowed, and in fact they are now 60% higher than in the 1990s (Stoddard et al., 2021). Every year, emissions and temperature records are broken, and increasingly extreme weather events hit us. In order to change the trajectory we are on, it is necessary to debunk several myths that proliferate, which are listed below (IPCC, 2022).

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Research and analysis to provoke public awareness and critical thinking

We contribute to the liberalisation of the democratic instituions of society, for they have been captured by the owners of the market. They work in tandem with their market agents, who, posing as public servants, are entrenched in the halls of government. The political class has betrayed its public mandate and instead operates to impose a marketocratic state to maximise the shareholder value of the institutional investors of international financial markets. They own the global corporations and think they own the world on behalf of their very private interest.

Our spheres of action: true democracy – true sustainability – living wage – basic income – inequality – ecological footprint – degrowth – global warming –human development – corporate accountability – civil, political, economic, social, cultural and environmental rights, responsible consumption, sustainable autonomous citizen cells...

Parting from an ethos of true democracy and true sustainability, We, the citizenry, work to advance the paradigm whose only purpose is to go in pursuit of the welfare of People and Planet and NOT the market.

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Crisis or collapse? Overshoot and degrowth

The Energy Agency estimates that the green transition will require a seven-fold increase in rare earths, a 19-fold increase in nickel, a 21-fold increase in cobalt and a 42-fold increase in lithium mining over two decades
 

The delicate juncture of the Earth system has been described as a crisis or a set of crises: ‘ecological crisis’, ‘climate crisis’, ‘biodiversity crisis’. Our ecosocial situation has also been described as a crisis.

I will, therefore, return to these notions - crisis, collapse - after devoting a few lines to trying to explain and help us understand. I will outline an overview of our ecological situation - shall we avoid the ambiguity between ‘ecological’ and ‘ecosocial’ (Riechmann, 2023) - by focusing on three of its central elements: the climatic symptom of our ecological overshoot, that of the sixth mass extinction and, finally, the main material source of each of the symptoms, namely the fossil potlatch that is now coming to an end (Santiago Muíño, 2018: 64). I will try to avoid the usual ‘carbon tunnel vision’ (Escrivá, 2021; 2023) that equates ‘ecological crisis’ with ‘climate change’.

The answer to the dilemma between crisis and collapse could, in the end, consist in the conjunction between the incontrovertible diagnosis of severe ecological overshoot and the urgent need for degrowth - to avoid, hopefully, that it is the consequences of overshoot that forces traumatic degrowth.

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Marx and Prometheanism

The term Promethean, referring in this context to extreme productivism, first entered into the ecological debate as a censure aimed almost entirely at Karl Marx. It was adopted as a form of condemnation by first-stage ecosocialists in the 1980s and ’90s, who sought to graft standard liberal Green theory onto Marxism, while jettisoning what were then widely presumed to be Marx’s anti-ecological views. However, the Promethean myth with respect to Marx was to be subjected to a sustained attack, commencing twenty-five years ago, in the work of second-stage ecosocialists, represented by Paul Burkett’s Marx and Nature (Haymarket, 1999) and John Bellamy Foster’s “Marx’s Theory of Metabolic Rift” (American Journal of Sociology 105, no. 2 [September 1999])—followed soon after by Foster’s Marx’s Ecology (Monthly Review Press, 2000). Here it was understood that the outlook of classical historical materialism was not that of the promotion of production for its own sake—much less accumulation for its own sake—but rather the creation of a society of sustainable human development controlled by the associated producers. The key analytical basis of this recovery of the classical historical-materialist ecological critique was Marx’s theory of metabolic rift

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Advancing the Welfare of People and the Planet with a Common Agenda for Reproductive Justice, Population, and the Environment

Driven by increasing consumption and population numbers, human demands are depleting natural resources essential to support human life, causing damage to crop lands, fresh water supplies, fisheries, and forests, and driving climate change. Within this century, world population could increase by as little as 15% or by more than 50%, depending largely on how we respond. We must face the challenge of accommodating these additional people at the same time as virtually eliminating the use of fossil fuels and other activities that generate greenhouse gases, reversing environmental degradation and supporting improved living standards for billions of impoverished people. The response to this challenge is handicapped by a lack of common understanding and an integrated agenda among those contributing to the response. This report offers a strategy to protect natural systems and improve welfare through expansion of reproductive justice, a concept that includes family planning, reproductive health, and gender equity, and preservation of the environment and climate.

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The Council on Foreign Relations, the Israel Lobby, and the War on Gaza

For many decades, there has been a continuing dialogue about U.S. military, financial, and diplomatic support for Zionist Israel. However, even in the progressive and left media there has been a lack of discussion of the lesser known political and economic forces that have enabled this support. One key, but often ignored, source has been the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), the think tank of monopoly-finance capital, also known as Wall Street’s think tank.

The CFR is the world’s most powerful private organisation. It is the ultimate networking, socialising, strategic planning, consensus-forming, and foreign policy lobbying institution of the dominant sector of the U.S. capitalist class. As a think tank and policy center, it is the most important U.S. locus of the deep state exerting influence behind the scenes. In the United States, it mainly focuses on directing the federal government, but has power in many areas of life in the United States, such as elite universities, finance capitalist firms, other think tanks, nonprofits, Congress, top corporations, and the mainstream media. While some of its activities are semisecret, for members only, much of what it does can be revealed by perusing its website; reading its journal, Foreign Affairs; examining its annual reports; and following the activities of its members and leaders.

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Jujuy burns: postcards of a rebellion against lithium plundering

Dozens of pickets block the roads in Jujuy, northern Argentina. The protest brings together communities in defence of their territories, the teachers' struggle for wages and the rage of young people against government repression.

If Josep Borrell recently said that Europe was a ‘garden’ and the rest of the world a ‘jungle’, Ursula Von Der Leyen, in the same spirit of conquest, considers the ‘lithium triangle’ (northern Chile, Bolivia and Argentina) as a strategic area for the imperial coffers. On her recent tour of Latin America, the EU representative focused on the new ‘white gold’, as lithium is known. It is an essential mineral for producing electric batteries, such as those used in mobile phones and electric cars. Behind the European ‘green transition’ lies a brutal plunder, the destruction of the natural commons and the plundering of entire peoples. However,against all resignation, the last word has not beenspoken because there is resistance and rebellion in the streets. 

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Provoking Awareness and Action for Geocratia

Activating revolutionary movements for new ecosocial contracts for Geocratia, a vision for building the People and Planet and not the market paradigm

Contrary to the dominant narrative, we do not live in democratic but in utterly unsustainable marketocratic societies. Governments are merely agents implementing and protecting societal structures, providing the best conditions for maximising capital accumulation demanded by financial markets. This requires the unrelenting production and consumption of resources, stark labour exploitation, and sheer wealth inequality, with growth deemed the overriding indicator of progress. Such narrative addresses the ecological crisis through “green capitalism”, which deliberately makes people believe we only need to transition from fossil to renewable energy without altering the structures of capitalism and our consumeristic lifestyles. This way, unrelenting economic growth and its inherent consumerism remain the indicators of progress. This has caused a planetary rift, taking us into an unsustainable trajectory where the odds we will face planetary catastrophes and putting the existence of life at monumental risk in the next twenty years are likely unless we veer fast against it. I argue we can only achieve enjoyable and sustainable lives by drastically decreasing our ecological footprint. This requires replacing capitalism with the new paradigm of Geocratia or “government by the Earth”, where we reorganise societies to build a new ecocentric edifice centred on caring for our planet. To accomplish this, we must build a revolutionary movement from the base to circumvent the traditional political structures of party systems and legislative bodies to strike on the system to force governments to pact new geocratic ecosocial contracts. Here, I describe how it can be done.

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Earth system boundaries and Earth system justice: sharing the ecospace

The literature on planetary and Earth system boundaries calls on humans to live within those boundaries. Sharing such limited ecospace raises questions of justice. Global environmental assessments and scholarship are increasingly paying attention to justice issues, yet inadequately define how to share the limited ecospace. Against this background we ask: how can global environmental assessments’ concerns for justice be enhanced through an Earth system justice framework that guides how the global community could share limited ecospace? Based on an analysis of how justice concerns are addressed in the Assessment of Assessments and global environmental change projects, we build an Earth system justice framework that discusses how ecospace can be shared fairly through the setting of Earth system boundaries and the provision of minimum resource needs for all, andhow this can be achieved through an equitable redistribution of resources, rights, and responsibilities focused on addressing inequality, overconsumption, and harmful accumulation.

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Fast fashion, killer fashion

Fast fashion is emblematic of the irrationality of the dogmas of the current economic system, of the extractivist economic model that rules the world, and of the exploitation of the Global South (or the economic periphery) by the Global North (or the economic centre)—all for the immediate but suicidal long-term benefit of capital.

Advised Fast fashion, as an emblem of the irrational, colonial, and unjust world economic order, undermines human rights, perpetuates poverty and inequality between regions of the world, and facilitates the continuation of a system where the dignity and well-being of workers and nature are sacrificed for corporate profits. The global economy is based on extracting and cheapening natural resources, exploiting labour through wage slavery, and exporting pollution to the Global South. In a democratic world, we would have a say in which economic sectors benefit humanity and deserve to continue growing and which do not. Fast fashion should be one of the first to disappear.

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