alanjjohnstone
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The worse case scenarios keep on a-comin
http://news.trust.org/item/20190227184955-v8bt6/
A study by the University of British Columbia compared the economic and environmental impact of holding the global average temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius, as agreed in Paris in 2015, versus the current 3.5 degrees warming scenario.
Millions of people could lose their livelihoods, food source, and be forced from their homes if the world does not meet the Paris goal to curb global warming which is endangering fish numbers.
“This can turn into a massive crisis as it could cause forced migration not only locally but globally,” Sumaila told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. “A steady supply of fish is essential to support these jobs, food sovereignty, and human well-being.”
Just how many scientists are sitting there with fingers-crossed, wishing for the best and hoping no unexpected findings are going to be revealed to upset projections?
“The Uninhabitable Earth”
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/feb/27/the-uninhabitable-earth-review-david-wallace-wells
Hyperbole or realism? The book might be well worth reading and reviewing.
“…Wallace-Wells identifies a tendency, even among those of us who think we are already sufficiently terrified of the future, to be strangely complacent about the figures…There’s also a temptation, when thinking about climate change, to focus on denialism as the villain of the piece. The bigger problem, Wallace-Wells points out, is the much vaster number of people (and governments) who acknowledge the true scale of the problem, and still act as if it’s not happening…if you are surveying the topic from a privileged western vantage, it’s easy to overlook how bad things have already got, to accept the hurricanes and the heatstroke deaths as simply the unfortunate nature of things. In this way, Wallace-Wells raises the disquieting spectre of future normalisation – the prospect that we might raise, incrementally but inexorably, our baseline of acceptable human suffering… You could call it alarmist, and you would not be wrong. (In the closing pages, Wallace-Wells himself accepts the charge as “fair enough, because I am alarmed”.) But to read The Uninhabitable Earth – or to consider in any serious way the scale of the crisis we face – is to understand the collapse of the distinction between alarmism and plain realism. To fail to be alarmed is to fail to think about the problem, and to fail to think about the problem is to relinquish all hope of its solution…”
Sounds familiarly like the debates we have on this thread, don’t you think?
It never stops
No debate, no discussion permitted, no counter-arguments allowed.
An insightful interview that is well worth a read
It is particularly relevant when it refers to the efforts by the Israeli government to finance and influence its pro-Israel lobby of Labour MPs, something that has been consigned to silence by the media. Yet RT and Russia have done a lot less and they achieve headlines when it comes to their propaganda.
Neil, “First do no harm” is a saying particularly popular amongst those involved in the medical field. The takeaway point of “first do no harm” is that, in many cases, it may be better to do nothing rather than intervening and potentially causing more harm than good.
Our principle that we are not a vanguard party that assumes a political leadership role is an important one since it means that if and when we make mistakes we have not demanded that our fellow-workers follow us in our error.
Our principle is another medical-related one. We foremost advise our fellow-workers, “Physician heal thy self.”
Frustrated? Of course we all are. Discouraged? Of course we all are. Conceding? Never. Capitulating? No chance.
William Morris once explained:
“One man with an idea in his head is in danger of being considered a madman: two men with the same idea in common may be foolish, but can hardly be mad; ten men sharing an idea begin to act, a hundred draw attention as fanatics, a thousand and society begins to tremble, a hundred thousand and there is war abroad, and the cause has victories tangible and real; and why only a hundred thousand? Why not a hundred million and peace upon the earth? You and I who agree together, it is we who have to answer that question.”This all may seem to be a distraction from the thread of the WSPUS, but if it is to progress, it requires to have a response for all those who seek easy answers and limit themselves with some tweaking of the system, regardless of how radical that appears to the present public
The Green New Deal is an example of something that seems very stirring but when broken down, only mitigates the problem and doesn’t cure it and in real-politik terms has little chance of success with the Republicans joining the Democratic Party middle to kill any eventual legislation, even if it does reach the floor of Congress or the Senate and at the moment there is not even an attempt at any bill to vote on. It is a wish list, that is all.
I suppose that the only distinction in our positions is that rather than abstention and staying away from the polling booth, we promote the spoiled ballot paper to separate us from the apathetic non-voter, who like the anarchists, Farage will claim credit for, in any lower turn-out.
Ah well ALB, capitalism offers a silver lining in the dark clouds of economic recession…
Another piece of recent research suggests that the world may not have as many clouds in the future
If the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere triples, clouds over the seas will break up and vanish, potentially leading to a disastrous sea level rise. It’s a side-effect of pollution which had never been predicted before – and which could unleash devastating effects. The clouds cover about 20% of subtropical oceans and play an important role in reflecting sunlight back into space.
Tapio Schneider, a scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, said, ‘Our results show that there are dangerous climate change thresholds of which we were unaware. When they disappear, Earth warms dramatically, by about eight degrees Celsius in addition to the global warming that comes from enhanced greenhouse concentrations alone,’ the researchers write.
Extreme CO2 levels could trigger clouds ‘tipping point’ and 8C of global warming
Neil, part of our task is one of education.
For sure, many of us would like to be our own boss and not be under the thumb of a martinet manager and to have a say in the running of our workplace. Some coops offer such an alternative but are they a means for system change or able to take advantage of a niche market?
What changes is that the coops lose their credibility and drop many of their ethical values as they strive to compete against rivals who have no qualms about being ruthless and cut-throat. As I say, we have practical knowledge of this. Mondragon is the prize example. Orthodox businesses outsourced casual temporary staff and went offshore to cheaper waged countries to safeguard their profitability. When profits were threatened, they lay off staff. These trading decisions were exactly what Mondragon also did. A successful coop is a successful capitalist enterprise or they simply disappear.
As for trade unions, we have not stepped back but exhorted their militancy, to be more demanding if they can get away with it, as put by what Dave in another context explained – clawing back a bit more surplus value that are stolen from us by the employing class.
We have urged them to practice more democracy. We have voiced our support when they engage in strikes.
What we do not do is feed the left-wing fantasy that the unions, even the radical IWW-types, are able to make the leap from defensive industrial economic actions to revolutionary change through general strikes. Once again this conclusion is not some conjecture but from the study of actual class struggle events.
Telling people some home-truths does hurt them emotionally, but in the long-term a lot less painful than coming to realise they have been misled and lied to just for the sake of party recruitment. Understanding how coops and unions operate under capitalist conditions and what are their limitations offer the best chance of using them as a shield against the capitalist predators.
As for the suggestion that we hire a PR company to undertake an image rebrand for ourselves and conduct an advertising campaign for us. I am sure there maybe an agency out there that might share our outlook and approach and have the techniques to spread our message. But our task is not to bring socialism to the working class as the Internationale says, like saviours, but to assist our fellow-workers in their own emancipation.
“I’m not a charismatic speaker, and if I had the capacity to be one I wouldn’t. I’m really not interested in persuading people. What I like to do is help people persuade themselves. ” – Noam Chomsky
Neil, what our role is explaining why after two hundred years of experience we have not learned the lesson of a Chartist.
Ernest Jones, wrote:
“I contend that co-operation as now developed, must result in failure to the majority of those concerned, and that it is merely perpetuating the evils which it professes to remove… That the co-operative-system, as at present practised, carries within it the germs of dissolution, would inflict a renewed evil on the masses of the people, and is essentially destructive of the real principles of co-operation. Instead of abrogating profitmongering, it re-creates it. Instead of counteracting competition, it re-establishes it. Instead of preventing centralisation, it renews it—merely transferring the role from one set of actors to another… your co-operative ranks are thinned, your firms find, one by one, they can no longer in make the returns equal the expenses, they cannot sell as cheap as the capitalist, they can therefore no more command the market, their co-operative fires die out in quick succession, stores and mills close over their deluded votaries—and the great ruin will stand bald, naked, and despairing in the streets.”
We should not repeat mistakes merely because they sound popular. We are not basing an analysis on theory or any abstract hypothesis but empirical evidence, Neil. We will not receive thanks when people are disillusioned and disappointed but instead socialists will be accused again of not fulfilling the promises they make.
A slightly promising sign but a long way to go
Planned Parenthood cannot resume abortions at a clinic in central Missouri after a federal judge ruled that state restrictions were not “undue” burdens on women seeking abortions.
“Let’s call this what it is: politicians ignoring medical evidence to push sexual and reproductive healthcare out of reach for people across Missouri,” Hill said. “Abortion is incredibly safe, yet politicians continue to pursue restrictions that defy medical experts and make abortion as inaccessible as possible. Missourians deserve better.”
The confidence that human activities were raising the heat at the Earth’s surface had reached a “five-sigma” level, a statistical gauge meaning there is only a one-in-a-million chance that the signal would appear if there was no warming. Such a “gold standard” was applied in 2012, for instance, to confirm the discovery of the Higgs boson subatomic particle, a basic building block of the universe.
“Humanity cannot afford to ignore such clear signals”
“The narrative out there that scientists don’t know the cause of climate change is wrong”
With the corporate bail outs and government subsidies and tax cuts to the wealthy, there is a common refrain in the US
“Capitalism for the poor, Socialism for the rich”
It conflates the State’s intervention to bolster capitalists with socialism although it does genuinely reflect that the role of the state is to be the tool of the ruling class.
The US working class has always been under the miscomprehension that its government, federal and state, never steered and fostered capitalism that it was always individualism entrepreneurship and the free market and free enterprise that built and maintains capitalism. A few policies now seem to be undermining that false belief.
I have little time for Wolff regardless how erudite he may be as a Marxist academic who promotes co-ops or as he likes to describe them, workers self directed enterprises, as stepping stones towards socialism. But among progressives he does have an influencial following, he says what they want to hear…I rather describe him as the 21 Century backswoodsman in the tradition of many American mutualists such as Walden etc with idealized images of what capitalism could be like if there still existed a vast western frontier to settle with little houses on the prairie.
