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Does the failure to reach an agreement to keep global temperature rises below 2 degrees celsius prove that capitalism has no answer to man-made climate change?
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There is widespread scientific consensus that to avoid dangerous, run away climate change, temperature rises will have to be kept to 2oC above pre-industrial levels. This was acknowledged in the Copenhagen Accord at the COP-15 summit in 2009 (which was issued after parties failed to reach a formal agreement). The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change SRREN report states that this "implies that global emissions of CO2 will need to decrease by 50 to 85% below 2000 levels by 2050 and begin to decrease (instead of continuing their current increase) no later than 2015." Clearly, as the deal agreed at Durban, even in the best case scenario, will not even be drafted until 2015, this is not going to happen.
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Due to capitalism's inherent expansionary tendencies, technological development serves to escalate commodity production, which necessitates the burning of fossil fuels to power the machinery of production. (...) The theory of the metabolic rift reveals how capital contributes to the systematic degradation of the biosphere.
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It's been four years in the offing, but Canada on Monday finally and formally withdrew from the world's only existing legal treaty to cut greenhouse gas emissions, the Kyoto protocol.
China calls Canada's decision 'preposterous', while Greenpeace says the country is protecting polluters instead of people
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Canada has been condemned at home and abroad as "irresponsible" and "reckless" for pulling out of the Kyoto climate treaty, just a day after committing to a future legally binding deal at a major UN climate summit
Several countries have criticised Canada for formally withdrawing from the Kyoto Protocol on climate change.
at the Heartland Institute’s Sixth International Conference on Climate Change, the premier gathering for those dedicated to denying the overwhelming scientific consensus that human activity is warming the planet,
Naomi Klein, the author of a string of provocative and popular books including “The Shock Doctrine,” recently took on global warming policy and campaigns in “Capitalism vs. the Climate,” a much-discussed cover story for The Nation that has been mentioned by readers here more than once in the last few weeks.
What if rising sea levels are yet another measure of inequality? What if the degradation of our planet’s life-support systems -- its atmosphere, oceans, and biosphere -- goes hand in hand with the accumulation of wealth, power, and control by that corrupt and greedy 1% we are hearing about from Zuccotti Park? What if the assault on America’s middle class and the assault on the environment are one and the same?
in list: Occupy Movement
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It’s not hard for me to understand how environmental quality and economic inequality came to be joined at the hip. In all my years as a grassroots organizer dealing with the tragic impact of degraded environments on public health, it was always the same:someone got rich and someone got sick.
"In the Horn of Africa, a famine is raging that has claimed the lives of tens of thousands of people. For the first time in 30 years, the UN has officially declared a famine. The drought in East Africa has resulted in a food crisis across Somalia, Ethiopia and Kenya that has affected over 12 million people"
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the food crisis is a direct result of the colossal underdevelopment of the region, alongside the use of the most primitive agricultural methods. Under capitalism however, it is not possible to solve these problems. Farmers are too poor to purchase better tools or fertilisers, and the common grazing land that many villages rely on is increasingly fenced off and privatised for cash crops; coffee, cut flowers, beans and other ‘luxuries’ destined for western markets.
"Tropical forests designated as strictly protected areas have annual deforestation rates much higher than those managed by local communities – reinforcing a challenge to a long-held belief that the best way to conserve forests is to lock them away in protected areas, according to a new study."
Higher temperatures will reduce growing seasons critical for crops needed to feed the world's poor, a report says
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The shorter growing seasons expected with climate change over the next 40 years will imperil hundreds of millions of already impoverished people in the global tropics,
The west has developed a culture of reckless risk-taking: our leaders entangle us in wars with no exit-strategies, the financial industry overestimates the viability of our market and companies like BP neglect to account for the sensitivity of the global ecosystem. And in this video, recorded at the 2010 TEDWomen conference in Washington, DC, Naomi Klein argues that our highest-stake gamble is the decision to not adequately respond to climate change.
WASHINGTON — Last summer, as torrential rains flooded Pakistan, a veteran intelligence analyst watched closely from his desk at CIA headquarters just outside the capital.
"Weeks into the largest oil spill in American history, government officials met in Washington to discuss ways to compel BP, which leased the drilling rig, to move faster in stopping the spill."
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BP, the regulators knew from experience, might be too big to ban. They recalled that last year, before the spill in the Gulf of Mexico, officials at the Environmental Protection Agency wanted to stop BP from getting government contracts until it addressed various environmental and safety violations. Then, according to a lawyer involved in the debarment process at the agency, the Pentagon objected: BP was its biggest supplier of fuel.
"The UN climate change talks in Cancun are about to conclude. But for millions of people across the world, the awareness of climate change does not rely on the media, or the ebb and flow of global negotiations. It is a terrifying reality. Bringing greater vulnerability to lives already precarious. "
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What does not bode well is that the percentage of climate finance so far to deal with the inevitable mess we have created is only 8% of the total funds released to date. In this statistic lies a simple truth. There is money to be made in mitigation, through efficiency gains, carbon trading, technology development. The powerful players in our economy can see where their interests can be accommodated. Those who are most exposed to climate change are not powerful. Their voices are rarely heard on the global stage and they rarely figure in the economic calculations of powerful governments and multinational companies.
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But perhaps, what matters in finding solutions to global problems like climate change is not just money, but power. And power IS a zero sum game. You cannot empower one party without removing power from another. At the moment we see power shifting from West to East. But not from rich to poor. If this doesn’t change, a global deal may be reached but it won’t be a deal the communities on the frontline of climate change are looking for and urgently need.
"“History will be the judge of what has happened in Cancun.” These are the last lines of the Bolivian Government’s press release yesterday about the outcome of the climate negotiations here in Cancun. The talks ended here today after two weeks of negotiations by a 192 governments. It is a deal that will be remembered by our future generations as one that killed the climate treaty, unless we radically change course."
"It is a triumph for Mexico and a step forward in the fight against global warming: the Cancun climate conference reached a compromise in a dramatic conclusion to negotiations on Saturday. The deal preserves the UN's leadership in climate talks. But the compromises reached were modest."
"Hidden behind the save-the-world rhetoric of the global climate change negotiations lies the mucky realpolitik: money and threats buy political support; spying and cyberwarfare are used to seek out leverage."
"In the name of environmental protection, the World Bank is brokering carbon emission trading arrangements that destroy indigenous farmlands around the world."
"Last year's climate summit in Copenhagen was a political disaster. Leaked US diplomatic cables now show why the summit failed so spectacularly. The dispatches reveal that the US and China, the world's top two polluters, joined forces to stymie every attempt by European nations to reach agreement."
"The Supreme Court announced Monday it would hear two major appeals from corporate America that seek to block mass lawsuits, one involving a huge sex bias claim against Wal-Mart and the other a massive environmental suit that aims to hold coal-fired power plants responsible for contributing to global warming."
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In both cases, the justices agreed to consider stopping the suits before they could move toward a trial.
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