The Global Fight for Climate Justice: Anticapitalist Responses to Global Warming and Environmental Destruction
Ian Angus
Language: English
Pages: 284
ISBN: 1552663442
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
While corporations continue with business as usual, climate change is rapidly expanding the gap between rich and poor, according to this group of anticapitalists from five continents. Their essays here cover topics from food shortages and carbon trading to perspectives from indigenous peoples, and the authors make a compelling case that saving the world from climate catastrophe will require much more than tinkering with technology or taxes. They argue only radical social change can prevent irreversible damage to the earth and civilization.
recommends a global average of one child per family as part of its strategy for a sustainable world. Yet they fail to examine the case of China, which has enforced a one-child policy on its population for three decades. There are many problems with this far-from-humane policy. But if assessed solely on sustainable climate outcomes then China’s population reduction scheme can only be considered to be a spectacular failure. To sustain their emphasis on population control, SPA has to downplay the
of the personal responsibility escape hatch. Within the mainstream eco-yuppie paradigm, the most you can possibly be expected to do is “right thing” in your own life. You buy your indulgences in the form of a low-carbon lifestyle and an arsenal of “eco-friendly” products, and in return you are exempt from the uncomfortable task of looking your class, your politics and your job in the face. Nature of capitalism As for the puzzling part: such views, however well informed, ignore the nature of
recruitment and training/retraining of the hundreds of thousands of workers required. Significant increases in fossil fuel prices on order to force energy efficiency and to make alternative energy sources more attractive. Fiscal measures The establishment of an Oil Legacy Fund, financed by a windfall tax on the profits of the oil and gas companies. The development of a package of other fund raising measures, such as government and local authority bonds, “Go Green” national savings bonds
aimed at replacing the anti-environmental capitalist system can pull the planet back from the brink of disaster. Foster breaks down the logic of the capitalist “treadmill” into six elements. First … constituting its central rationale, is the increasing accumulation of wealth [capital] by a relatively small section of the population at the top of the social pyramid. Second, there is a long-term movement of workers away from self-employment and into wage jobs that are contingent on the continual
continuing business as usual. In Part One: Tomorrow Will Be Too Late. Fidel Castro’s compelling statement to the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, in which described the crisis, explained its causes, and posed solutions. No other world leader was as clear or decisive. Some Impacts of Global Warming and Not a Distant Prospect. Two articles that summarize in point form the probable effects of uncontrolled global warming, and recent evidence that climate change is already changing the world.