The urgency of the global climate crisis makes it imperative for any social justice movement to come to grips with, and confront it in some way. There can be no social justice, after all, on a dead planet.
No Ph.D. talking here. Just a woman who reads and studies, as Marxists recommend. I’m disturbed by a video just accessed on YouTube: “Climate change and the migrant caravan.” The news piece suggests that sympathetic and enlightened attitudes lie behind the video’s creation. Applying Marxist and socialist concepts, I hope to expose some of the assumptions, misconceptions and perhaps hidden goals contained in the video.
Let me tell you about why I woke up crying today. It has to do with just how close we are to full-blown climate disaster. I was thinking about children who are already experiencing the horrible consequences of global warming, and I was thinking about particular children I love and what’s in store for them. Most of all, I was thinking about the unthinkable: that we are on the verge of ensuring that most, if not all, life on Earth will be snuffed out.
The climate crisis is the greatest threat humanity has ever faced. At the current rate of greenhouse gas emissions, we are headed for 4°C to 7°C of warming above pre-industrial global averages within the lifetimes of young people. Temperature increases in this range would lead to a hothouse planet with devastating extreme weather events, and make most if not all of our planet uninhabitable.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released an ominous report this week driving home an urgent and serious reality:without immediate action to transform society, climate catastrophe will not only be our children’s future, but our own.
Diana Stuart, Ryan Gunderson, Common Dreams, October 12, 2018
The recent IPCC report has received widespread attention. The report states that rapid and bold actions are necessary to avoid the catastrophic impacts of climate change and that the goals of the Paris Accord will be insufficient. This has resulted in an outpouring of opinion pieces calling for individuals to take actions in their daily lives to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and to pressure elected officials to take significant steps to support renewable energy.
John Bellamy Foster with Fiona Ferguson, Rebel News, October 11, 2018
After a summer of scorching temperatures and forest fires, John Bellamy Foster—author, environmental sociologist and editor of Monthly Review—was interviewed by Fiona Ferguson about the oncoming threat posed by global warming and what is being dubbed as Hothouse Earth.
I agonized on what to title this short piece, designed to highlight the grave problems facing humanity. Is it too late to reverse the direction of global warming and the inevitable catastrophic effects of climate change, and all the other existential threats to the biosphere? In my opinion, the clock is near midnight, and a blunt assessment and recognition of what the people of the world are now facing, is way overdue. Are we productivist or anti-productivist?
