Global News and Analysis

Source: The Nation/Tom Dispatch

Good news and climate change are not normally associated with each other, but let’s give a tentative cheer for COP21.

Historically, the transition from one energy system to another, as from wood to coal or coal to oil, has proven an enormously complicated process, requiring decades to complete. In similar fashion, it will undoubtedly be many years before renewable forms of energy—wind, solar, tidal, geothermal, and others still in development—replace fossil fuels as the world’s leading energy providers. Nonetheless, 2015 can be viewed as the year in which the epochal transition from one set of fuels to another took off, with renewables making such significant strides that, for the first time in centuries, the beginning of the end of the Fossil Fuel Era has come into sight. read more

Source: The Guardian Unlimited

The former Nasa scientist criticizes the talks, intended to reach a new global deal on cutting carbon emissions beyond 2020, as ‘no action, just promises’

Mere mention of the Paris climate talks is enough to make James Hansen grumpy. The former Nasa scientist, considered the father of global awareness of climate change, is a soft-spoken, almost diffident Iowan. But when he talks about the gathering of nearly 200 nations, his demeanour changes.

“It’s a fraud really, a fake,” he says, rubbing his head. “It’s just bullshit for them to say: ‘We’ll have a 2C warming target and then try to do a little better every five years.’ It’s just worthless words. There is no action, just promises. As long as fossil fuels appear to be the cheapest fuels out there, they will be continued to be burned.” read more

Source: Roar Magazine

The demand for a rational society summons us to be rational beings—to live up to our uniquely human potentials and construct the Commune of communes.

The lifelong project of Murray Bookchin (1921-2006) was to try to perpetuate the centuries-old revolutionary socialist tradition by renovating it for the current era. Confronted with the failure of Marxism after World War II, many, perhaps most radical socialists of his generation abandoned the left. But Bookchin refused to give up on the aim of replacing capitalism and the nation state with a rational, ecological libertarian communist society, based on humane and cooperative social relations. read more

Source: Times Argus

Tomorrow kicks off the final week of negotiations here in Paris at the United Nations’ COP21 climate talks.

I’m here as one of two representatives of the Vermont Workers’ Center, joining a delegation of more than 100 grass-roots leaders from the United States and Canada who have traveled to Paris to speak out against the proposed global climate agreement, which falls far short of what is needed to avoid global catastrophe.

Unlike many of the jet-setting conference-goers here in Paris, this is my first time crossing the Atlantic. I’m a single mom with two kids, born and raised in Brattleboro. Since I was a teenager, fighting for economic and racial justice has been a matter of survival. Through my work with the Vermont Workers’ Center and our national allies, I’ve come to see the interconnections between environmental and social justice issues and the need to build unity between our movements. read more

Source: Pambazuka News

The “green economy” is nothing more than capitalism of Nature. It is a more extreme attempt by corporations, extractive industries and governments of mainly the industrialized countries towards developing mechanisms for cashing in on Creation. This is achieved by privatizing, commodifying and selling off all forms of life.

All humans have two things in common and that is, we walk on two legs and on each hand we have five fingers that we use in common. We are taught from infancy to use these hands and fingers as gifts of the Creator. The Indigenous cosmovision teaches me, for each finger to work together in solidarity, and with the totality of the fingers and hands, we are to help each other, in respect of each other. read more

Source: Jacobin

Naomi Klein on the crackdown against ​COP21 protesters​ and why “system change not climate change” is more than a slogan.

Last year, the Canadian journalist and activist Naomi Klein trained her focus on climate change with her book This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate. In the past year, she’s also been busy launching the Leap Manifesto, a document signed by scores of prominent Canadians that lays out a plan to wean the country off fossil fuels.

So with world leaders assembled in Paris to hash out a climate accord, what are Klein’s thoughts regarding how things stand in the battle against global warming? read more