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People are missing the point the New Scientist writer was making — that the worst case scenario of business as usual and emissions continuing at their 2014 level is now off the table, precisely because business has not continued as usual as governments have taken some steps to try to reduce them.
In other words, average global temperature will not rise to 5 degrees about the pre-industrial level. It still might rise to 3 degrees above it, but that’s not the same. Even so, as he says, a “warming of around 3°C by the end of the century” is “still dangerous, but not hellish.”
To accept that the worst case scenario is not going to happen doesn’t weaken our case against capitalism that, by its nature as involving a competitive struggle for profits between capitalist enterprises from different states, it is unable to deal with global warming and the climate changes it brings in a rational way, and that only socialism, as a world of common ownership and production directly to satisfy people’s needs, can.
It does, however, weaken the case of XR and others that the problem is so dangerous that we should forget about socialism and make trying to deal with it (in effect within capitalism) the over-riding priority.
Apparently, the situation is bad but not as dire as is sometimes claimed:
Here’s is an extract from the article:
“Ten years ago there was a genuine fear that we were heading forcatastrophic warming of between 4°C and 5°C by 2100. Today, those worst-case scenarios are no longer plausible.
The story goes back to 2014, when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) published future greenhouse gas emissions scenarios. To make this baggy monster tractable, the scientists boiled themdown to four: one very high scenario, one very low and two in between. The very high one assumed that there would be no climate action whatsoever and that use of fossil fuels would continue on an upward trajectory until 2100. It became known as the business as usual scenario, or BAU.
BAU quickly garnered more scientific and media attention than the other scenarios, in part because it extrapolated the situation at the time, but also because it made for sensational scientific papers and apocalyptic newspaper headlines. A BAU world would have been a “truly catastrophic hellscape of a planet”, says climate scientist Zeke Hausfather of NGO Berkeley Earth in California.
In the years since, however, the world has changed dramatically. Progress on renewable energy technology and implementation of climate policies have bent the emissions curve downwards towards warming of around 3°C by the end of the century. Still dangerous, but not hellish. And further progress isn’t just possible, but promised. Recent analyses show that, if countries achieve the net-zero pledges that they have already put on the table, warming will stay under 2°C.
As a result, the BAU scenario is no longer even remotely plausible, says Roger Pielke, an environmental scientist at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Nor is the next-worse of the four. “It looks like the apocalyptic scenarios, as of today, are off the table,” he says.
If anything, says Hausfather, BAU was implausible in the first place. It wasn’t just a conservative extrapolation of current trends, but a turbocharged one that assumed, for example, that the use of coal would increase fivefold by 2100, with no climate mitigation action whatsoever.
And yet, the now-obsolete BAU scenario continues to dominate scientific discussions of our climate future. According to a recent analysis by Pielke, the two most recent reports by the IPCC actually increased their emphasis on that worst-case scenario.This bias is also reflected in scientific journals. An analysis by Pielke’s colleague Matthew Burgess found that in the aquatic conservation literature, over 90 per cent of papers published between 2015 and 2022 use the BAU scenario – and about a third use it exclusively. It leaks out into the news media too. “The picture that we paint in terms of science, assessment, journalism and policy is dominated by the most extreme scenario,” says Pielke.
This puts climate scientists on the horns of a dilemma. Do they admit BAU was never really that plausible and risk deniers saying “we told you so” and spreading further muck about climate modelling? Or do they keep pushing BAU and risk it becoming obvious they are hawking a straw man, opening the door to… deniers saying “we told you so”? ”
We face the same dilemma — of seeming to argue that capitalism (responsible for climate change) is not as bad as some people claim (because it can and is doing — in fact has to do — something about it).
Yes, looks like the Ukrainian lie machine has been caught out again. In any event, either he knew what had happened or his suggestion shows that there is some healthy scepticism even in Ukraine about what their lie machine comes up with.
Just heard on the news that a Ukrainian helicopter has crashed on a nursery. Be interesting to see what story they cook up to explain who caused that.
Here, for anyone who wants to go further into Marxism and Law, is a Party member (at the time) arguing with an SWPer on Pashukanis’s theory of law:
https://legalform.files.wordpress.com/2019/03/warrington-standing-pashukanis-on-his-head.pdf
For the record, here is the viewpoint of the exiled (on release from gaol in a prisoner swap) leader of the main opposition party in Ukraine (now banned) He says they’re a lot of people in Ukraine who want a peaceful settlement. That could be true but they will have to keep their heads down as calling for a settlement with Russia is a crime.
Anyway, here it is:
I have now got and read the new translation. It’s only a pamphlet of less than 40 pages. It has led me to revise my opinion of its content. It’s a brilliant satire, on a par with Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and Samuel Butler’s Erewhon , of the obsession with work to keep the capitalist economy going and of the workers’ demand to be given work by capitalists as a “right”.
There are some mistakes in the translation, the worst of which is translating “femmes galloises” as “Welsh women” rather than “Gallic women”. Not sure if it is a complement or an insult to Welsh women to say that they are as fierce as Asterix’s female Gauls.
Also, the introduction takes too literally Lafargue’s description of what an “idleness regime” would look like, as if that was what he was advocating.
But anyway hopefully this will introduce more people to socialist/communist ideas (Lafargue uses the word “communist”).
He keeps on referring to the so-called National Debt being “our” debt and thst “we” have to pay the interest on it. But it is not our debt, something the working class owes. It is the debt of the capitalist state. Its function, within the capitalist economy, is to cover government spending which would otherwise have to be covered by higher taxation. Parenti seems to imply that it could be covered by the government simply creating more money. The government could do this — and governments have — but this doesn’t create any new wealth. If overdone it depreciates the unit in which wealth is expressed (inflation) and so causes a rise in the general price level. Which, if tax thresholds remain the same, amounts to an increase in taxation.
I have always thought that the best thing about this pamphlet was its English title. It was meant as a criticism of the “Right to Work” (The Right to be Exploited) rather than, as the article suggests, part of the campaign for an 8-hour day, which still wouldn’t leave much time to be lazy. Eight hours for the usual six-and-a-half days at the time = a 52-hour week.
We must get a copy of the new translation to see if reads better than the pre-WW1 one. Ordering it now.
This seems plausible (even if it comes from a Trotskyist site). Ukrainian nationalism has always been nasty and there’s nothing like a war for making nationalism nastier.
“…There is no substitute for a robust private sector, creating wealth in every community.”
Somebody else who thinks that capitalism is the only game in town.
It appears that Just Stop Oil are going to continue their self-indulgent, irritating and counter-productive tactics — counter-productive because most people are already convinced that something needs to be done about climate change, so they are not even raising consciousness about the issue. In fact, as they believe that a way-out can be found without getting rid of the market system they are themselves contributing to the confusion about what needs to be done.
Maybe they have decided to go for broke because they are convinced that the situation is getting worse and that the urgent thing now is to topple the government and replace it with a different regime that will take drastic, immediate measures to deal with climate change.
I don’t know to what extent Roger Hallam is still one of the leaders of XR (maybe Just Stop Oil was just a front for them rather than the breakaway it appeared to be), though the police will. But here is how he set out, in his 2019 manifesto Common Sense in the 21st Century, subtitled “Only Nonviolent Rebellion Can Now Stop Climate Breakdown And Social Collapse”, how a non-violent “rebellion” could topple a government.
“We must adopt the most successful model for regime change shown by the social scientific research – the civil resistance model. This involves mass participation civil disobedience: tens and hundreds of thousands of people blocking the centres of cities to demand change. There are a number of tactical options, but the main process is as follows:
• The people conduct mass mobilisation – thousands need to take part.
• They amass in a capital city where the elites in business, government and the media are located.
• They break the law – they cross the Rubicon. Examples include blocking the roads and transport systems.
• They maintain a strictly nonviolent discipline even, and especially, under conditions of state repression.
• They focus on the government, not intermediate targets – government is the institution that make the rules of society and has the monopoly of coercion to enforce them.
• They continue their action day after day – one-day actions, however big, rarely impose the necessary economic cost to bring the authorities to the table.
• The actions can have a fun atmosphere– most people respond to what is cultural and celebratory rather than political and solemn.
After one or two weeks following this plan, historical records show that a regime is highly likely to collapse or is forced to enact major structural change.”The 21 April is the beginning of the weekend of our Annual Conference, so we will be there to witness the inevitable failure of this crackpot strategy.
I think it will be due to the German word Geist meaning both “spiritual” and “mental”:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geist
I imagine that in his writings in German (and Dutch) Pannekoek used the corresponding adjective. Some translators have translated it as “spiritual” when it could have been better translated as “mental” or “intellectual”. Even perhaps Pannekoek himself, when he wrote in English or translated his articles into English, did not grasp the connotation of the English word “spirtual”.
I think we can be sure that he did not have in mind a sort of religious revival but meant what we mean by a change in consciousness; workers had to change their ideas and a majority of them had to come to want and understand socialism before they could bring it about.
On “spiritually”, during the break I am reading Rachel Holmes 500-page biography of Eleanor Marx. At the end of chapter 20 she writes that Marx
“was famously critical of the tyranny of all religions but was sympathetic to the spiritual impulse.”
A footnote refers the reader to pages 55-6 of Francis Wheen’s biography of Karl Marx. When you check, Wheen is referring to the anti-Semitic insults Marx used in some of his letters to Engels such as referring to Lassalle as a “Yid” and worse.
It looks as if Holmes has got her notes mixed up. In any event, she produces no other evidence was sympathetic to “the spiritual impulse” (whatever that might be), though she does quote Karl Marx as saying:
“Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.”
She describes Eleanor Marx “a resolute secularist and atheist”.
Her book is quite good.
