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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.
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.
"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.
Embassy dispatches show America used spying, threats and promises of aid to get support for Copenhagen accord
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The US diplomatic cables reveal how the US seeks dirt on nations opposed to its approach to tackling global warming; how financial and other aid is used by countries to gain political backing; how distrust, broken promises and creative accounting dog negotiations; and how the US mounted a secret global diplomatic offensive to overwhelm opposition to the controversial "Copenhagen accord", the unofficial document that emerged from the ruins of the Copenhagen climate change summit in 2009.
Every now and then in history, the human race takes a collective step forward in its evolution. Such a time is upon us now.
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Global climate change is rapidly advancing, melting glaciers, eroding soil, causing freak and increasingly wild storms, and displacing untold millions from rural communities to live in desperate poverty in peri-urban slums. Almost every human victim lives in the global South, in communities not responsible for greenhouse gas emissions.
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By 2030, global demand for water will exceed supply by 40%— an astounding figure foretelling of terrible suffering.
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"It doesn't seem as if the big industrial nations are serious about trying to halt global warming. "
"Bid by rich countries to change forestry rules would create accounting loopholes that would hide true emissions, developing nations say"
"In yesterdays inauguration rally Evo Morales called for communitarian socialism to replace the failing and destructive Capitalist system. "
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