alanjjohnstone
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An interesting analysis on why the attack on abortion is mainly in the Southern states.
“…US white supremacist panic about demographic dilution is what lies behind American political anti-abortion. The pseudo-moralistic religiosity camouflage layered over this “pro-life movement” is just to hide its racist foundation…”
Many thanks. It needed to be said. I was aware of that, ZJW.
I was just contrasting attitudes presented by the media. Nor do I believe Trump is advocating the genocidal destruction of Iran.
We have seen many countries wiped from the map…and created on the map.
We all remember the fuss when an Iranian leader suggested Israel should be wiped from the map. Strange why Trump can get away with threatening the “official end of Iran”
https://www.dw.com/en/donald-trump-threatens-official-end-of-iran/a-48798479
Meanwhile Saudi Arabia joins in the sabre rattling
https://www.dw.com/en/saudi-arabia-will-defend-itself-with-all-force-but-doesnt-want-war/a-48793357
We accept predictions are tricky things but the consensus of them give us a fairly accurate picture of what to expect. Perhaps this article’s projections are on the more pessimistic end but personally I still don’t think it conveys the human costs sufficiently.
“…A four-degree-warmer world is the stuff of nightmares and yet that’s where we’re heading in just decades.
While governments mull various carbon targets aimed at keeping human-induced global heating within safe levels – including new ambitions to reach net-zero emissions by 2050 – it’s worth looking ahead pragmatically at what happens if we fail. After all, many scientists think it’s highly unlikely that we will stay below 2C (above pre-industrial levels) by the end of the century, let alone 1.5C. Most countries are not making anywhere near enough progress to meet these internationally agreed targets.
Climate models predict we’re currently on track for a heating of somewhere between 3C and 4C for 2100, although bear in mind that these are global average temperatures – at the poles and over land (where people live), the increase may be double that…a whole new set of models to be published in 2021 finds much greater sensitivity. They put heating at around 5C by the end of the century, meaning people could be experiencing as much as 10C of heating over land…”4C rise
The good news is that humans won’t become extinct – the species can survive with just a few hundred individuals; the bad news is, we risk great loss of life and perhaps the end of our civilisations. Many of the places where people live and grow food will no longer be suitable for either. Higher sea levels will make today’s low-lying islands and many coastal regions, where nearly half the global population live, uninhabitable, generating an estimated 2 billion refugees by 2100. Bangladesh alone will lose one-third of its land area, including its main breadbasket.
From 2030, more than half the population will live in the tropics, an area that makes up a third of the planet and already struggles with climate impacts. Yet by 2100, most of the high and mid latitudes will be uninhabitable because of heat stress or drought; despite stronger precipitation, the hotter soils will lead to faster evaporation and most populations will struggle for fresh water. We will have to live on a smaller land surface with a larger population.
Indeed, the consequences of a 4C warmer world are so terrifying that most scientists would rather not contemplate them, let alone work out a survival strategy.
Rockström director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, doesn’t like our chances. “It’s difficult to see how we could accommodate a billion people or even half of that,” he says. “There will be a rich minority of people who survive with modern lifestyles, no doubt, but it will be a turbulent, conflict-ridden world.” He points out that we already use nearly half the world’s ice-free surface to produce food for 7 billion people and thinks meeting the needs of 11 billion in such hostile conditions would be impossible. “The reason is primarily making enough food, but also we would have lost the biodiversity we’re dependent on and be facing a cocktail of negative shocks all the time, from fires to droughts.”But other scientists are less panicked
“I don’t think that humans as a species or even industrial civilisation is seriously threatened,” says Ken Caldeira, climatologist at the Carnegie Institution for Science in California. “People live in Houston, Miami and Atlanta because they live in air conditioning through the hot summers. If people are rich enough to air-condition their lives, they can watch whatever is the successor to Game of Thrones on TV, as the natural world decays around them,” he says. But he points out that while richer people risk a loss to their quality of life, the poorer risk their actual lives.
How humanity will survive
Our best hope lies in cooperating as never before to radically reorganise our world: decoupling the political map from geography. However unrealistic it sounds, we’d need to look at the world afresh and see it in terms of where the resources are and then plan the population, food and energy production around that. It would mean abandoning huge tracts of the globe and moving Earth’s human population to the high latitudes: Canada, Siberia, Scandinavia, parts of Greenland, Patagonia, Tasmania, New Zealand and perhaps newly ice-free parts of the western Antarctic coast. If we allow 20 sq m of space per person – more than double the minimum habitable space allowed per person under English planning regulations – 11 billion people would need 220,000 sq km of land to live on. The area of Canada alone is 9.9m sq km and, combined with all the other high-latitude areas, such as Alaska, Britain, Russia and Scandinavia, there should be plenty of room for everyone. These precious lands, with tolerable temperatures and access to water, would also be valuable food-growing areas, as well as the last oases for many species, so people would need to be housed in compact, efficient high-rise cities with reflective roofs and resource-recycling systems. That risks raising local temperatures to intolerable levels, because compact cities function as heat islands, so solar-powered cooling or even artificial winds would be needed to counteract this. There is also an increased risk of epidemics in such densely populated spaces.
Full article here and a must read
We will not witness this but some of our children and grand-children will, and they will be as powerless as ever to influence the events. Notice how those scientists all expect the system to be business as usual and they should be the ones who in their modelling should be including an end of capitalism scenario to give real hope.
But the reality is that we are not the many.
Australia votes into power again, a climate change denying (or at least apathetic) government
And this forum is not even of the many of the Socialist Party, who persist in non-participation so I am unable to even gauge the sentiment of socialists.
I admire your optimism as I enter my twilight years seeing the socialist vision no nearer than when I entered the socialist movement in my youth.
Why do I persist? Because it is the right thing to do.
James, in all my experience at demos, I never once had an SWPer accept my offer of a swop. nearly all our rivals but never ever a Socialist Worker seller.
One of our “successes” at May Day rallies in Scotland was our practice of handing out free current issue Standards (and back-issues). The look of dismay on the other paper sellers was a treat to see. Nor did I see any discarded on the ground afterwards. They were taken home and read. Sad it never resulted in any further interest in ourselves, AFAIK. So in that sense, it was ultimately a failure.
What convinced people was not the claims made by the environmentalists but the hard scientific evidence that could not be refuted by the denialists. People began to trust the research which reflected their own anecdotal experience. Gardeners, I knew, began to take notice of the change in weather patterns and growing seasons.
My point is that to convince people of the socialist remedy, will not be the claims of an insignificant socialist party but when they have the technocrats confirm that things cannot be fixed within capitalism and the alternative is a more pragmatic option.
People are reluctant to take great leaps of faith and that is the only thing we at the moment offer. Our word against the “experts”.
Our case has not been corroborated by the science community. And I doubt it ever will be since who pays the piper calls the tune and we do not finance our own technical research institutes or have PhD students to concentrate on the issue.
Scientists asks the wrong questions because of what LBird would put down to ideology. I think Marx or Engels says something like a problem doesn’t arise until the solution arrives. Somebody can correct me on this
But there are things we can do and that is to rebut the carrying capacity of the planet concept with statistics that are available if we collect the available data.
As for the future, many on this forum know my gloom and doom prognosis…if it comes to a gamble between socialism and barbarism, my money will be on the latter.
Our problem is how do we call for rational consumption which means a reduction in all that consumerist throwaway trash advertisers insist we cannot do without and not sound as we are calling for in Sylvia’s Pankhurst words “for penurious thrift, and self-denial.” But there was a poignant truth in Reginald Perrin’s business model of producing crap.
Some members have suggested that even speculating on such policy is premature and that as you say only when we already do have socialism will the issue becomes a serious one to contemplate.
But we can generalize that when carrying capacity of the planet is determined on the American or European consumption rates, we should say less will be better and more probable.
I wish we has some statistic whizz who could calculate the number of superfluous workers there will be in socialism and the amount of resources and production that goes into supporting the war economy and the buying and selling exchange economy, with its built-in obsolescence so that the usability and life of something is fully extended beyond a year or two guarantee and add to this the savings made when we do not have the collateral damage of unnecessary crime and illness and built in obsolescence.
Only then will we be able to convince our doubters that abundance is really possible with some hard facts and figures, but an abundance of what society considers to be the necessities and necessaries of a full happy life. Some say we are in no position to determine that. But can we not produce, low, medium and high projections as science already does on various future projections today?
Having poked Dave Douglass into a reply I won’t bother with a follow-up because I believe the letter from Robbo which he coincidentally sent to WW on another topic, namely the Labour Party also explains the weakness of Dave’s response….which is a simplistic one of let’s all wait for that far-off time when real socialism becomes relevant and in the meantime patch up capitalism’s failures with palliatives that we will call socialism-lite…nope such an approach doesn’t confuse, does it, comrades…nor is it isn’t an act of political procrastination…but it is revolutionary praxis…as reformists view such beliefs..;DUH
America’s lap-dog disassociates itself with its own general
“Britain agrees with the United States that Iran poses a heightened threat and will work closely with its ally, Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt said on Thursday.”
He could easily have said ” Britain agrees with Iran that the United States poses a heightened threat”
I found this Guardian article biased to blaming the crisis on Iran and accepting the US is responding rather than the opposite…USA turning the screws and Iran responding.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/may/16/iran-tells-middle-east-militias-prepare-for-proxy-war
On the blog with the simple title A View on Trump
https://socialismoryourmoneyback.blogspot.com/2019/05/a-view-on-trump.html
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/may/16/bill-de-blasio-2020-presidential-campaign
NYC mayor enters the race
we have a trade war but this one now uses real war legislation
“An executive order issued by the US president, Donald Trump, on Wednesday declared a national economic emergency that empowers the government to ban the technology and services of “foreign adversaries” deemed to pose “unacceptable risks” to national security, including from cyber-espionage and sabotage….Trump’s executive order invokes the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, which gives the president the authority to regulate commerce in response to a national emergency that threatens the US. The order directs the commerce department, working with other government agencies, to draw up a plan for enforcement within 150 days.
I re-blogged this article a while ago and I am sure it resonates with many
https://socialismoryourmoneyback.blogspot.com/2018/01/lazy-liberal-thought.html
“…Liberals and other Democrats are getting dumber by the day…It’s all about Trump. It’s Trump this, Trump that. All day long. Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, and Trump some more…There’s no social and power structures that matter. There’s no underlying class rule or longstanding capitalist ecocide, no dominant oppressive institutions, no ideologies that matter….no history that matters.
Racism? It’s cuz of Trump.
Sexism? Trump did it.
Threat of nuclear holocaust? Blame Trump.
Inequality and plutocracy? The handiwork of Boss Tweet, that bastard.
Climate change? You know the answer: big stupid Trump.
Liberals have fallen prey to … “the Trump Effect of whitewashing and absolving this rightwing system.”…
“Their fixation on Trump,” Vivek Jain writes… “allows them to ignore the wickedness of capitalism and of the US government.”
“Trump is a great distraction,” Tom Wetzel writes, a “cover for elite interests: ‘if only there wasn’t some obviously racist clown in the white house everything would be cool.’ ”…things would be just super if the Wall Street War Hawk and arch-elitist “Queen of Chaos” was back in the White House. You betchya!…The solution to everything wrong in the world for liberals is getting a corporate military Democrat in the White House…maybe Oprah Winfrey. Or Michelle Obama….”
Also worth the read is this, another re-blog
https://socialismoryourmoneyback.blogspot.com/2017/02/the-demon-trump.html
