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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The U.S. Quest for Nuclear Primacy: The Counterforce Doctrine and the Ideology of Moral Asymmetry

When I come to study in detail some of the arguments of these new military writers about nuclear war, I will necessarily have to adopt many aspects of their own methods and terminology, that is, I will have to meet them on the methodological ground of their own choosing. I want therefore to apologise in advance for the nauseating inhumanity of much of what I have to say.

—P. M. S. Blackett

The demise of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) in 1991 resulted in Washington declaring at that very moment that a new unipolar world order was being ushered in, with the United States now the sole superpower. The United States, supported by its NATO allies, immediately initiated a grand strategy of regime change or “naked imperialism” in the Balkans, the Middle East, northern Africa, and along the entire perimeter of the former Soviet Union. This was accompanied by the rapid expansion of NATO itself eastward into the former Warsaw Pact countries and regions previously part of the USSR. The pivotal goal in this expansion, as explained by former U.S. National Security Adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski in The Grand Chessboard, was to incorporate Ukraine into NATO, which would create the geopolitical and geostrategic conditions for the final overpowering and forced breakup of the Russian Federation.

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Extractivism in the Anthropocene

Over the last decade and a half, the concept of extractivism has emerged as a key element in our understanding of the planetary ecological crisis. Although the development of extractive industries on a global scale has been integral to the capitalist mode of production since its onset, commencing with the colonial expansion of the long sixteenth century, this took on a much larger worldwide significance with the advent of the Industrial Revolution of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, marking the beginning of the age of fossil capital. Nevertheless, it was only with the Great Acceleration, beginning in the mid-twentieth century and extending to the present, that the quantitative expansion of global production and of resource extraction in particular led to a qualitative transformation in the human relation to the Earth System as a whole. This has given rise to the Anthropocene Epoch in geological history, in which anthropogenic (as opposed to non-anthropogenic) factors for the first time in Earth history constitute the major determinants of Earth System change.1 In the Anthropocene, extractivism has become a core symptom of the planetary disease of late capitalism/imperialism, threatening humanity and the inhabitants of the earth in general.

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Lithium fever dehydrates Andean wetlands

A ruling in Catamarca, Argentina, recognises for the first time that this type of mining has a direct impact on the environment

The recent ruling of the Supreme Court of Catamarca on lithium mining in the Salar del Hombre Muerto in Argentina takes on board the repeated warnings that various communities and people in different areas of research have been making: this new extractive advance is based on the collapse of bodies of water and is a threat to entire hydro-social basins. The ruling is only a very elementary acknowledgement from a high level of the state of the impending catastrophe in the salt flats and high Andean lagoons of Argentina and South America in the name of a false energy transition.

While alarms are being raised in corporate and governmental sectors about the possible impacts on existing investments and those under negotiation, the underlying issue - the ecological crisis and the truly sustainable alternatives for life embodied by the plaintiff communities - are left out of the main debates.

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The Ecological Crisis of Capitalism and Human Survival

There are few well informed people nowadays who do not know that from an ecological point of view the human species is in deep trouble. If things continue to develop as they have over the past fifty years for another century or two—a very short time by historical standards—it is virtually certain that civilised life as we know it today will no longer be possible in large parts of the planet and its survival elsewhere will be problematic at best. A few years ago views of this kind would have been generally dismissed as the ravings of ecological extremists. No longer. Statements like the following from an impeccably mainstream source are no longer exceptional: “We cannot continue in our present methods of using energy, managing forests, farming, protecting plant and animal species, managing urban growth, and producing industrial goods. We certainly cannot continue to reproduce our own species at the present rate.” This comes from the prestigious Business Council for Sustainable Development whose members include arepresentative sample of the top officers of theworld’s biggest multinational corporations.

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Degrowth under discussionin the heart of the beast

An analysis of the main positions and interventions at the recent 'post-growth Woodstock' in the European Parliament

For three days, from 15 to 17 May, the European Parliament hosted a historic event. Some have called it the Woodstock of post-growth. In the Beyond Growth conference series, organised by 18 MEPs of different colours, many of the world's best minds on the issue of degrowth/post-growth debated with some of the continent's leading politicians.

The first plenary was a taste of what was to come, of the fracture that is increasingly opening up between science and politics, a fracture between the irrefutable evidence of scientific urgency and the limits of the Union's realpolitik to achieve transformations that are not patches or, even worse, disguises. If you follow the story of what has happened, you will see that, despite everything and everyone, there is a way out for Europe and the rest of the world.

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"Environmentalism has not been able to counteract the neoliberal era's cancellation of the future"

JAIME VINDEL GAMONAL / RESEARCHER

Fossil Culture. Art, culture and politics between the Industrial Revolution and global warming (Akal, 2023) is an essential book for anyone who wants to approach the imaginaries of progress in the temporal arc indicated in the title. We land in images that take us on a journey from the "stormy clouds" of which John Ruskin spoke in the 19th century to the verses of Pasolini, "we shall see patched trousers;/ red sunsets in suburbs empty of engines". We don't need to cross borders to find transversal works, books that unite cultural criticism and ecology, something still very rare in our country, so given to the narrow (and blind) channels through which disciplines pass and which this extensive study undertakes with passion. What is politically active is that the book is written on the urgency of the embers that all intellectuals must tread on without remedy, those of the climate, ecological and energy crisis that is ravaging us. We will have the pleasure of talking to its author, Jaime Vindel (1981), a researcher at the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC).

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The Necessity of System Change: An Ecological and Marxian Synthesis

Over the last few decades, we have witnessed both an intensification and a convergence of a number of crises: from the 2008 global financial crisis to the emergence of new infectious diseases (the SARS outbreak of 2003 and the ongoing pandemic of COVID-19, to mention two), to the acceleration of climate change and biodiversity loss, to the persistence of various forms of malnutrition. Such crises have offered the opportunity to reflect on the most important drivers. For example, we know that the encroachment of human activities related to the expansion of farming, logging, and mining into previously remote wild habitats is an important driver for biodiversity loss and the emergence of new infectious diseases, while also accelerating climate change (for example, through deforestation). We know that the continuous extraction and use of fossil fuels in transport and production is the main cause of greenhouse gas emissions. Finally, we also know thatthe deregulation of the financial markets has encouragedspeculative behaviours, which can wreak havoc on economic and social systems.

In all of these cases, we have heard experts, regulators, and members of civil society calling for radical changes to financial, food, and energy systems. But while such outlooks are important, they remain incomplete, since they tend to focus on the proximate causes while missing the deeper systemic elements. In what follows, we provide a more comprehensive narrative that looks at the systemic cause of the different crises: the accumulation and circulation of capital on an ever-increasing scale.

For a full read of this brief, ~ file.

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The Political Economy of Migration

Patterns of migrations have shifted during the history of capitalism through the changing international divisions of labour. Poverty and the longing for a better life have driven immigration in a polarised world-system. This process has been facilitated by the development of transportation and communication, and hampered by the existence of borders. It has drawn in peasants, skilled and unskilled workers, and a brain drain of educated experts, all with the purpose of optimising capital accumulation. The modern growth of international labour migration coincided with the emergence of neoliberalism in the mid-1970s and the globalisation of production.

As Immanuel Ness writes in his new book, Migration as Economic Imperialism, with the emergence of the United States as the indisputable dominant economic and military world power…capitalist development strategists began to shift their focus to low-wage southern labour, precisely as the northern economies were shifting from manufacturing to service industries. Thus international labour migration expanded dramatically in the 1990s to reduce shortages in the Global North of low-wage workers willing to work in tedious jobs in agriculture, construction, urban services, manufacturing and home care.