# General world climate crisis articles



## LDC (Jul 31, 2022)

Well, we have a UK articles one, but think we need a world reflections/analysis one rather than just news. Here's 2 to start:

An interview with the trade unionist and lawyer Sudha Bharadwaj about the climate crisis in India:








						Interview: Sudha Bharadwaj on the Climate, Trade Unions and a Just Transition – The Wire Science
					






					science.thewire.in
				




And something from the Berliner Gazette on the economic/ecological crisis:








						The Deadly Logics Of Capital In The Vicious Economic-Ecological Cycle
					

The economic and ecological crises of capital have long been intertwined. This can be seen not least in the heat-induced mass deaths among poor and vulnerable sections of the population – and not onl…




					blogs.mediapart.fr


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## teqniq (Jul 31, 2022)

This was published in the Graun yesterday:









						‘Soon the world will be unrecognisable’: is it still possible to prevent total climate meltdown?
					

Blistering heatwaves are just the start. We must accept how bad things are before we can head off global catastrophe, according to a leading UK scientist




					www.theguardian.com


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## LDC (Jul 31, 2022)

teqniq said:


> This was published in the Graun yesterday:
> 
> 
> 
> ...



Yeah been mentioned somewhere else too. Pretty grim outlook.


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## stavros (Jul 31, 2022)

I've posted it on the iplayer thread, but this three-part doc on the fossil fuel lobbying in the US over the decades is excellent.


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## RD2003 (Jul 31, 2022)

‘Wake-up call’ for climate-sceptic Czechs as blaze devastates national park
					

Sentiment shifting among politicians and the public as beloved region of forested mountains goes up in flames




					www.theguardian.com


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## farmerbarleymow (Aug 1, 2022)

Climate endgame: risk of human extinction ‘dangerously underexplored’
					

Scientists say there are ample reasons to suspect global heating could lead to catastrophe




					www.theguardian.com


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## bluescreen (Aug 2, 2022)

This in the FT. So grim. "There are many hands on the axe" says Alison Richard, senior research scientist at Yale.


> Why famine in Madagascar is an alarm bell for the planet​The UN says it is the first famine caused by climate change. Those caught up in it describe a desperate fight to survive








						Subscribe to read | Financial Times
					

News, analysis and comment from the Financial Times, the worldʼs leading global business publication




					www.ft.com
				




paywall busted, but with gaps where image/text overlays are. Scroll down anyway, you won't miss much.


			archive.ph


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## Artaxerxes (Aug 5, 2022)

Iraq is about to hit 50 degrees.


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## bcuster (Aug 11, 2022)

Satellite imaging shows Antarctic ice shelf melting faster than anticipated
					

Antarctica's coastal glaciers are shedding icebergs more rapidly than nature can replenish the crumbling ice, doubling previous estimates of losses from the world's largest ice sheet over the past 25 years, a satellite analysis showed on Wednesday.




					www.thedailystar.net


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## bcuster (Aug 12, 2022)

Blue-green algae blooms, once unheard of in Lake Superior, are a sign that ‘things are changing’ experts say
					

The blooms are cropping up regularly, likely from warming waters and intensifying storms.




					www.jsonline.com


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## bcuster (Aug 14, 2022)

Climate activists fill golf holes with cement after water ban exemption
					

French environmentalists sabotage golf greens to protest against their exemption from water bans.



					www.bbc.co.uk


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## WhyLikeThis (Aug 14, 2022)

_In recent decades, the warming in the Arctic has been much faster than in the rest of the world, a phenomenon known as Arctic amplification. Numerous studies report that the Arctic is warming either twice, more than twice, or even three times as fast as the globe on average. Here we show, by using several observational datasets which cover the Arctic region, that during the last 43 years the Arctic has been warming nearly four times faster than the globe, which is a higher ratio than generally reported in literature. We compared the observed Arctic amplification ratio with the ratio simulated by state-of-the-art climate models, and found that the observed four-fold warming ratio over 1979–2021 is an extremely rare occasion in the climate model simulations. The observed and simulated amplification ratios are more consistent with each other if calculated over a longer period; however the comparison is obscured by observational uncertainties before 1979. Our results indicate that the recent four-fold Arctic warming ratio is either an extremely unlikely event, or the climate models systematically tend to underestimate the amplification._









						The Arctic has warmed nearly four times faster than the globe since 1979 - Communications Earth & Environment
					

Over the past four decades, Arctic Amplification - the ratio of Arctic to global warming - has been much stronger than thought, and is probably underestimated in climate models, suggest analyses of observations and the CMIP5 and CMIP6 simulations.




					www.nature.com


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## teqniq (Aug 14, 2022)

Just come across this article from May this year regarding an obviously dangerous idiot:









						This New Style of Climate Denial Will Make You Wish the Bad Old Days Were Back
					

The bizarre claim that what we need, right now, is more fossil fuels.




					slate.com


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## teqniq (Aug 14, 2022)

New blog and Twitter account:









						Climate Uncensored: Telling it as it is.
					

Robust, unflinching commentary and assessment of the scale of the climate challenge and our responses to it.




					climateuncensored.com


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## bcuster (Aug 18, 2022)

The Coming California Megastorm
					

A different ‘Big One’ is approaching. Climate change is hastening its arrival.



					www.nytimes.com


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## bluescreen (Aug 18, 2022)

bcuster said:


> The Coming California Megastorm
> 
> 
> A different ‘Big One’ is approaching. Climate change is hastening its arrival.
> ...


Paywall busted version (minus graphics):


			Welcome to nginx!
		


Daniel Swain, cited in the article, is worth following on twitter
@Weather_West


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## Karl Masks (Aug 18, 2022)

bluescreen said:


> Paywall busted version (minus graphics):
> 
> 
> Welcome to nginx!
> ...


jesus! Is that really likely? 

Move over Hollywood....er, literally!


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## bluescreen (Aug 18, 2022)

Climate change is increasing the risk of a California megaflood​The paper by Huang and Swain referred to in the NYT article is free to read: 


			https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abq0995


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## bcuster (Aug 19, 2022)




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## spring-peeper (Aug 21, 2022)




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## bcuster (Aug 22, 2022)

In California's water crisis, neighbors turn in neighbors and even celebrities aren't spared
					

Residents in the Los Angeles area have been getting visits from what is essentially the water police as California struggles with a deep drought.




					www.usatoday.com
				




people turning on each other for water, food & fuel; all thanks to out of control global warming and climate legislation inactivity










						Celebrities Accused of Water Abuse During Severe California Drought
					

Wealthy residents of Calabasas and Hidden Hills in Las Virgenes tripled the daily water use of the city of Los Angeles during last year’s drought, and the problem persists.



					www.thedailybeast.com


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## stavros (Aug 25, 2022)

France has banned domestic rent increases by landlords whose properties are in the two lowest energy efficiency bands. (Link in French.)

Is there anything to prevent the UK government, such as we have one at the moment, from doing the same?


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## bcuster (Aug 26, 2022)

Russia is now actively and purposefully increasing the planet's temperature:









						Climate change: Russia burns off gas as Europe's energy bills rocket
					

Russia is burning off millions of dollars in gas every day at a plant near the Finnish border.



					www.bbc.com


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## teqniq (Aug 27, 2022)

Twitter thread, not an article on the apocalyptic monsoon floods in Pakistan which are being linked to climate change:


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## lazythursday (Aug 27, 2022)

stavros said:


> France has banned domestic rent increases by landlords whose properties are in the two lowest energy efficiency bands. (Link in French.)
> 
> Is there anything to prevent the UK government, such as we have one at the moment, from doing the same?


From 2025 all new tenancies have to be in properties with EPCs of at least 'C'. Existing tenancies have until 2028 to get there. So the UK government is actually doing something to address poor leaky rented housing - although must be a strong likelihood this will drive up rents as landlords just screw the tenants for the money they had to spend on insulation...


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## stavros (Aug 27, 2022)

lazythursday said:


> From 2025 all new tenancies have to be in properties with EPCs of at least 'C'. Existing tenancies have until 2028 to get there. So the UK government is actually doing something to address poor leaky rented housing - although must be a strong likelihood this will drive up rents as landlords just screw the tenants for the money they had to spend on insulation...


So no, the UK government isn't doing the same thing. They're doing something that gives ministers a soundbite, without protecting tenants.

And not immediately either.


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## lazythursday (Aug 27, 2022)

stavros said:


> So no, the UK government isn't doing the same thing. They're doing something that gives ministers a soundbite, without protecting tenants.
> 
> And not immediately either.


I didn't say it was the same. I don't think it's right to classify this as a sound bite - rented homes need insulating and landlords have absolutely no incentive to do so without this kind of regulation. Tbh I'm pretty surprised there hasn't been a bigger backlash from whinging landlords - perhaps that's to come.


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## stavros (Aug 27, 2022)

lazythursday said:


> I didn't say it was the same. I don't think it's right to classify this as a sound bite - rented homes need insulating and landlords have absolutely no incentive to do so without this kind of regulation. Tbh I'm pretty surprised there hasn't been a bigger backlash from whinging landlords - perhaps that's to come.


Oh yes, I'm supportive of the end goal of energy efficiency, absolutely. It sounds like, as you suggested, that tenants will ultimately pay for improving someone else's real estate.

I've heard of listed buildings struggling to get permission to put in regular insulation. Are they exempt in any way from this legislation?


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## lazythursday (Aug 27, 2022)

stavros said:


> Oh yes, I'm supportive of the end goal of energy efficiency, absolutely. It sounds like, as you suggested, that tenants will ultimately pay for improving someone else's real estate.
> 
> I've heard of listed buildings struggling to get permission to put in regular insulation. Are they exempt in any way from this legislation?


It looks like there are exemptions for listed buildings but on a case by case basis, ie the landlord has to show that meeting the requirements can't be achieved without impacting on historic features etc.


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## yield (Aug 28, 2022)

teqniq said:


> Twitter thread, not an article on the apocalyptic monsoon floods in Pakistan which are being linked to climate change:



Pakistan declares floods a ‘climate catastrophe’ as death toll tops 1,000
Sun 28 Aug 2022


> “We are at the moment at the ground zero of the frontline of extreme weather events, in an unrelenting cascade of heatwaves, forest fires, flash floods, multiple glacial lake outbursts, flood events, and now the monster monsoon of the decade is wreaking nonstop havoc throughout the country,” she said in a video posted on Twitter. The on-camera statement was retweeted by the country’s ambassador to the EU.
> 
> The heavy downpour started in June and an abnormal monsoon has affected more than 33 million people – one in seven Pakistanis. Nearly 300,000 homes have been destroyed, numerous roads rendered impassable, and electricity outages have been widespread. Local media reported that at least 83,000 livestock had died in the last 24 hours.





> Sharif was briefed during his visit to Jaffarabad district in badly hit Balochistan that at least 75% of the province, Pakistan’s least developed and half of its land area, was affected by the flooding.
> 
> Rehman told the Guardian that numbers of flood-affected population may rise from 33 million as the flood continues, and that this year has been marked by one extreme season after another after deadly heatwaves in March and April.
> 
> “In the 2010 flood, one-fifth of Pakistan was under water. This is worse,” she said.





> “What we see now is an ocean of water submerging entire districts of Pakistan by an unprecedented monsoon cycle that just does not stop, nor does it allow space for a rescue and recovery respite.
> 
> “Pakistan has never seen unrelenting torrential rains like this. This is very far from a normal monsoon. It is a climate dystopia at our doorstep,” said Rehman.


beggars belief


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## teqniq (Aug 28, 2022)




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## stavros (Aug 29, 2022)

The UK doesn't have a minister for climate change, does it, or even for the environment? The closest match I can find is Business, Energy and Clean Growth, which is Greg Hands, and Defra, which is George Useless.


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## bcuster (Aug 29, 2022)

Another fantastic article on global warming from waPo:










						A melting glacier, an imperiled city and one farmer's fight for climate justice
					

THE CORDILLERA BLANCA, Peru - Once, this was where Saúl Luciano Lliuya came to find peace. The mountain's pristine beauty ensured his livelihood as a guide; its steady stream of fresh water sustained his family farm. The everlasting ice that gleamed from its rugged crest spoke of a world in...




					www.yahoo.com


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## farmerbarleymow (Aug 29, 2022)

Seems a 27cm sea level rise from melting ice in Greenland is baked in now









						Major sea-level rise caused by melting of Greenland ice cap is ‘now inevitable’
					

Loss will contribute a minimum rise of 27cm regardless of what climate action is taken, scientists discover




					www.theguardian.com


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## bcuster (Aug 30, 2022)

Water shortages scare me more than anything else. Drought has caused more human misery than anything I can think of 









						As Colorado River Dries, the U.S. Teeters on the Brink of Larger Water Crisis
					

The megadrought gripping the western states is only part of the problem. Alternative sources of water are also imperiled, and the nation’s food along with it.




					www.propublica.org


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## farmerbarleymow (Aug 31, 2022)

The glaciers in the Alps are melting fast.  That's going to cause problems for Europe once they're gone.  









						Switzerland's vanishing glaciers threaten Europe's water supply
					

Ice in the Swiss Alps provides water for rivers, crops and the cooling of nuclear power stations.



					www.bbc.co.uk


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## bluescreen (Sep 1, 2022)

*Nomad Century by Gaia Vince* - acclimatising to crisis
_This well-sourced book sets out where will be habitable in our future hothouse world and how we should manage the transition_



> perhaps now more than ever, our perspiring world needs smart, radical idealists. _Nomad Century_, which takes in anthropology, demography, technology, politics, economics and sociology, should be on the reading list of anyone and everyone in any position of power. It is not simply a future atlas of human geography showing where will be habitable and for how many, but a hard-hitting must-read on how we will need to live in the coming decades to secure the long-term survival of humankind. It serves as both an obituary for the Holocene, the simpler, cooler world in which our ancestors lived, and a birth notice for the Anthropocene, the warmer world we have foolishly made for ourselves.



This looks to be an essential book on climate change and how countries need to adapt to the reality, including accommodating billions of climate refugees. 
Anyone here read it? This FT review by Anjana Ahuja makes me want to buy it. 

paywall busted:




__





						archive.ph
					





					archive.ph


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## petee (Sep 5, 2022)

archive.ph
		


"Almost all hail is created in supercells, or storms with updrafts of rising air that slowly rotate. Small pieces of ice, called embryos, get swept into those updrafts like “a fountain of particles,” said Matt Kumjian, a meteorologist at Penn State University who studies the internal dynamics of storms. The embryos smash into water droplets, becoming hailstones that continue to grow until they are too heavy to stay suspended and then fall to the ground"


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## LDC (Sep 6, 2022)

bluescreen said:


> *Nomad Century by Gaia Vince* - acclimatising to crisis
> _This well-sourced book sets out where will be habitable in our future hothouse world and how we should manage the transition_
> 
> 
> ...



Will order that, thanks.


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## RD2003 (Sep 8, 2022)

European Youth Bet on Authoritarian States to Fix Climate Change | OZY
					

They care deeply about climate change. They just don't think democracy can solve the problem.




					www.ozy.com


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## bcuster (Sep 8, 2022)

Global potable water shortages and a huge ice cube melting away in the brine:









						'Doomsday glacier' is melting faster than thought, study finds
					

A glacier in Antarctica the size of Florida that could dramatically raise global sea levels is disintegrating faster than previously predicted, according to a study published Monday in the journal Nature Geoscience.




					www.yahoo.com


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## bluescreen (Sep 8, 2022)

bcuster said:


> Global potable water shortages and a huge ice cube melting away in the brine:
> 
> 
> 
> ...


Yes, it's very bad, but 








						Please Stop Calling It the 'Doomsday Glacier'
					

Losing Thwaites Glacier would be troubling, but the overly alarming nickname might do more harm than good.




					www.cnet.com


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## bcuster (Sep 8, 2022)

bluescreen said:


> Yes, it's very bad, but
> 
> 
> 
> ...


ok, i will be glad to...


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## RD2003 (Sep 9, 2022)

‘A new way of life’: the Marxist, post-capitalist, green manifesto captivating Japan
					

Kohei Saito’s book Capital in the Anthropocene has become an unlikely hit among young people and is about to be translated into English




					www.theguardian.com


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## stavros (Sep 11, 2022)

A reasonably interesting podcast about how California is the first American state to introduce the kind of no petrol/diesel car sales after X legislation that we've got. They reckon New York state might be the next, and between them they've got just shy of 60m residents.


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## Artaxerxes (Sep 17, 2022)

Shell memo\policy says not net zero investment


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## teqniq (Sep 18, 2022)

No-one should really be surprised by this:









						Criticism intensifies after big oil admits ‘gaslighting’ public over green aims
					

Fury as ‘explosive’ documents reveal largest oil companies contradicted public statements and wished bedbugs upon critical activists




					www.theguardian.com


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## spring-peeper (Oct 6, 2022)

'Unheard of': Tens of thousands of salmon found dead in B.C. creek as drought conditions persist
					

B.C.'s sunny, dry weather is leading to major drought conditions in parts of the province, causing devastating impacts for some wildlife.




					bc.ctvnews.ca
				






> B.C.'s sunny, dry weather is leading to major drought conditions in parts of the province, causing devastating impacts for some wildlife.
> 
> Video posted to social media recently shows tens of thousands of dead salmon lying at the bottom of a dry creek in Bella Bella.
> 
> ...







> "Unfortunately something I think we're going to see more often as global warming continues at the pace that it's at," Lina Azeez with Watershed Watch Salmon Society told CTV News.
> 
> Azeez, who lives in Port Coquitlam, said she's also seen the shocking impacts of the drought in her own backyard.
> 
> ...


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## bcuster (Oct 6, 2022)

More coastal flooding in Alaska. In October!  where's the cold weather , climate deniers?









						Another storm threatens Northwest Alaska with high wind and coastal flooding
					

Arctic communities along the Chukchi Sea are expected to be hit hardest through Thursday.




					www.adn.com
				










__





						WPC's Short Range Public Discussion
					





					origin.wpc.ncep.noaa.gov


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## teqniq (Oct 8, 2022)

Will there be any takers?









						Switching The World To Renewable Energy Will Cost $62 Trillion, But The Payback Would Take Just 6 Years
					

Mark Jacobson and his team have published renewable energy study in which they argue the payback time is just 6 years.




					cleantechnica.com


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## stavros (Oct 9, 2022)

Clubs in Ligue 1 and Ligue 2, the top two divisions in France, are being mandated by the government to reduce the time the floodlights are on before and after matches.


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## bluescreen (Oct 9, 2022)

Wasn't sure where to post this thoughtful article about the problem with a lot of clifi, by Rebecca Tamás in the FT:
Why does imagining the end of the world feel easier than saving it?​snippages:


> Apocalyptic climate fantasies often reveal a deep desire to simply get it over with. We can imagine the end of the world much more easily than we can imagine saving it. In this kind of fiction, the inequalities of human society, the plant and animal extinctions, the cruelties and complications that define our real climate crisis, disappear. Such narratives satisfy our craving to wipe the slate clean, to begin from zero, without all the mess and suffering and personal sacrifice that climate action will demand of us.





> Kingsnorth and Hine write that “Secretly, we all think we are doomed: even the politicians think this; even the environmentalists,” as if they have some omniscient insight into the minds of all humanity. The smug assumption is that everyone has already given up, so why not you, the reader, too?
> This perspective, like Franzen’s, often comes from those who are privileged — white, western, financially stable, not in the midst of flood or fire. It is very easy to accept that you’re “doomed” and that there’s no point trying to avert or disrupt climate change, when your home is not being washed away, when your children are not acutely malnourished because of drought. For many at the sharp end of environmental destruction, especially indigenous communities and those in the global south, hope is not a choice, it is a necessity.
> This year, 33 million people in Pakistan — about half the population of the UK — were affected by unprecedented floods that submerged large parts of their country. More than 1,600 have died, according to the Red Cross, including some 500 children. Citizens of the countries most vulnerable to climate change do not have the luxury of waiting for humanity’s final fall. They need us to work together, pressuring our governments to avert the higher global temperatures that will only increase their suffering.



Paywall busted:  archive.ph


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## Artaxerxes (Oct 9, 2022)

https://edition.cnn.com/2022/10/07/business/mississippi-river-closures-grounded-barges-drought-climate/index.html


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## Hilldweller (Oct 12, 2022)

Not quite sure if it fits here, but I've just started skimming this House of Lords report which I thought was interesting and worth sharing here


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## stavros (Oct 12, 2022)

You could stick it here as well.


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## petee (Oct 13, 2022)

climate change giveth, climate change taketh away.

_It’s a grim inside joke among glacial archaeologists that their field of study has been one of the few beneficiaries of climate change. But while retreating ice and snow makes some prehistoric treasures briefly accessible, exposure to the elements threatens to swiftly destroy them.

Once soft organic materials — leather, textiles, arrow fletchings — surface, researchers have a year at most to rescue them for conservation before the items degrade and are lost forever. “After they are gone,” Dr. Taylor said, “our opportunity to use them to understand the past and prepare for the future is gone with them.”

E. James Dixon, former director of the Maxwell Museum of Anthropology at the University of New Mexico, agreed. “The sheer scale of the loss relative to the number of archaeologists researching these sites is overwhelming,” he said. “It’s like an archaeological mass extinction where certain types of sites are all disappearing at approximately the same time.”_



			https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/02/science/climate-change-archaeology.html


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## Artaxerxes (Oct 16, 2022)

This doesn't bode well.


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## teqniq (Oct 21, 2022)

What a fucking joke:









						Egypt hires ‘greenwash’ PR firm to help organise COP27
					

The US agency has a “shameful track record of spreading disinformation” but has been hired by the Egyptian government




					www.opendemocracy.net


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## Signal 11 (Oct 22, 2022)

Artaxerxes said:


> This doesn't bode well.



What's the source for this "estimated death toll is 2-3 billion" in "20-30 years" claim? The IPCC doesn't say anything like that.

The tweeter seems to be some kind of new age grifter who says he got the image (which doesn't seem to include that claim) at "a psychedelic symposium" from "an influential financier". Was that his mum after she lent him money to buy more drugs?


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## Artaxerxes (Oct 24, 2022)

This is a pretty damn good bit of news, concretes a massive co2 producer


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## Rob Ray (Oct 27, 2022)

Essentially acknowledging the reality we've been watching come to pass for the last three decades, but scientists now working off an assumption of 2.4C or more based on what governments actually do (as opposed to the platitudes they mouth). 









						Climate crisis: UN finds ‘no credible pathway to 1.5C in place’
					

Failure to cut carbon emissions means ‘rapid transformation of societies’ is only option to limit impacts, report says




					www.theguardian.com
				




For context, that puts us higher into the outright apocalyptic dominoes scenario (ie. over 2C). 2C itself is pretty terrifying, for example we're on 0.8C now and experiencing more droughts. 1.5C sees an average drought length of 2 months, 2C is four months, 3C is 10 months. Crop yields fall 6% at 1.5C, 9% at 2C.


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## LDC (Oct 27, 2022)

Pretty grim these stats and conclusions. And it's business as usual almost everywhere you look.


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## Rob Ray (Oct 27, 2022)

Certainly makes chucking a tin of soup over a painting pale in comparison to the scale of the vandalism being carried out with the full and enthusiastic backing of our lords and masters.


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## redsquirrel (Oct 28, 2022)

Not directly linked to climate but this article from the LRB on degrowth vs green-growth is not bad. 

It has one major flaw in that it totally underestimates the active role of labour but the criticism of green-growthers, and of some/most(?) of the de-growthers is on the money. 
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Vol. 44 No. 16 · 18 August 2022
Reversing the Freight Train​Geoff Mann​Tomorrow’s Economy: A Guide to Creating Healthy Green Growth by  Per Espen Stoknes. MIT, 360 pp., £15.99, April, 978 0 262 54385 9
Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World  by  Jason Hickel. Windmill, 318 pp., £10.99, February 2021, 978 1 78609 121 5
Post Growth: Life after Capitalism by  Tim Jackson. Polity, 228 pp., £14.99, March 2021, 978 1 5095 4252 9
The Case for Degrowth by  Giorgos Kallis, Susan Paulson, Giacomo D’Alisa and Federico Demaria. Polity, 140 pp., £9.99, September 2020, 978 1 5095 3563 7

It is hard to know how to talk about modern economies without talking about growth: productivity, entrepreneurial ‘risk-taking’ and the profit-driven cycle of expansion and accumulation. Economic growth is understood to be a natural or automatic process, its absence taken as evidence that we must somehow have got in its way. The purpose of economic policymaking is, accordingly, presented as a matter of loosening the ‘fetters’ on growth, as if the economy were a wealth-generating beast, always raring to go, if only we’d let it.

Given all this, it may come as a surprise to learn that the analysis of ‘economic growth’ in its contemporary sense is a relatively recent development. Some will say that Adam Smith was the first theorist of economic growth (a term he didn’t use), but even as late as 1946, Evsey Domar, one of the founders of modern growth theory, could remark that the rate of growth was ‘a concept which has been little used in economic theory’. That didn’t remain true for much longer, as economists and policymakers wrestled with the legacy of the Depression, fears of postwar stagnation, and the geopolitics of decolonisation and the Cold War. The challenges of growth and industrialisation – the obstacles to achieving them, but also the dislocation and inequality they often entailed – weren’t just a matter of investment, technology and productivity. They were also, in the words of Simon Kuznets, about ‘the future prospect of underdeveloped countries within the orbit of the free world’.

Walt Rostow, who was, along with Kuznets, one of the field’s most influential early thinkers, understood growth as the foundation of the postwar world order. His Stages of Economic Growth, published in 1960, was unsubtly subtitled ‘A Non-Communist Manifesto’. According to what is now called the ‘Rostovian’ account, growth wasn’t just the solution to domestic instability in advanced industrial economies and the remedy for the backwardness of ‘traditional’ (non-industrial) societies; it was also the antidote to socialism. There was no need for revolution: the managed markets of postwar capitalism would eventually, peacefully, deliver the fruits of modernisation – a non-violent, self-reinforcing alternative to expropriation and collectivisation. It wasn’t clear, however, how traditional societies would respond to the inevitable disruption associated with integration into the global economy. ‘How,’ Rostow asked, ‘should the traditional society react to the intrusion of a more advanced power: with cohesion, promptness and vigour, like the Japanese; by making a virtue of fecklessness, like the oppressed Irish of the 18thcentury; by slowly and reluctantly altering the traditional society, like the Chinese?’

Kuznets’s hunch was that market-driven economic growth in traditional societies would initially worsen inequality, but in the long term reduce it. (A hypothesis which, despite his admission that it was ‘95 per cent speculation’, was subsequently elevated to the status of a truth in the now notorious ‘Kuznets curve’.) How could the West keep hold of the rest of the world during these initial shocks? How could the process be designed to ‘avoid the fatally simple remedy of an authoritarian regime that would use the population as cannon-fodder in the fight for economic achievement’? ‘Where is compound interest taking us?’ Rostow asked on another occasion. ‘Is it taking us to communism; or to the affluent suburbs?’ Are we headed ‘to destruction; to the moon; or where?’ The task was to transform traditional societies in such a way that they could ‘enjoy the blessings and choices opened up by the march of compound interest’.

In the years since Kuznets and Rostow, economic growth has arguably become the principal object of contemporary economics and economic policy, and the rate of increase in Gross Domestic Product (GDP) its standard measure. GDP represents the monetary value of a country’s annual output, usually given on a per capita basis. It is commonly assumed that growth – compound growth, in fact – drives the economic miracle-making of modern capitalism, with the result that a rising GDPhas become a policy goal in itself. As Rostow put it, the point was to make growth the economy’s ‘normal condition’, as ‘compound interest becomes built, as it were, into its habits and institutional structure.’ In today’s global economy, income or output growth, at every scale from the firm to the sovereign nation-state, is a primary determinant of the capacity to attract investment or borrow on financial markets, which is in turn a primary determinant of future growth, and so on in a compounding cycle.

Yet while GDP dominates economic policy, it has been subject to withering critique for decades, not least because it is so obviously a poor measure of human wellbeing. All ‘output’ contributes to GDP, no matter if it is in education or healthcare, fracked gas or weapons. It doesn’t matter, either, if an increase in GDP is distributed between two rich people or among a million poor people: if you get hit by a bus, and it costs thousands to save you (or fail to), both you and the bus driver have made a positive contribution to GDP.

Attacks on the fetishisation of growth and the moral bankruptcy of believing that ‘more’ is the same as ‘better’ have an even longer history. John Stuart Mill (among others) argued that humans are best served by a society in which ‘no one is poor, no one desires to be richer, nor has any reason to fear being thrust back by the efforts of others to push themselves forward.’ More recently, the accusation has been that the economics of growth and the policies they underwrite confuse the quantitative process of growth for the qualitative process of development. Today, we know that countries whose per capita GDP is the highest or which grow the fastest aren’t necessarily more peaceful or more democratic; neither do their citizens necessarily live healthier, longer or happier lives. Despite all this, GDP remains the standard measure of aggregate national economic activity, much to the chagrin of proponents of such alternatives as the Human Development Index or the Genuine Progress Indication, which do make some attempt to gauge human wellbeing.

The precipitous decline in the planet’s ecological stability, associated in particular with climate change, has turbocharged the critique of growth. It is becoming accepted wisdom that modern capitalism’s relationship with the planet is increasingly extractive and destructive. A lunatic fringe refusing to ‘believe’ in climate change may not yet have bumbled off the edge of the earth, but the facts are now part of mainstream consciousness. Even the likes of the International Monetary Fund, the Financial Times, the European Central Bank, Deutsche Bank and the US military now acknowledge that modern economic growth has been ecologically destructive, and is a principal driver of the looming climate cataclysm.

The critical question is whether our current concatenation of crises is a product of the current mode of economic growth, or of economic growth per se. Is it possible to pursue economic growth in a way that doesn’t make things worse for the planet and its inhabitants: can we, as they say, ‘decouple’ growth from greenhouse gas emissions, the decline in biodiversity and the destruction of habitats?

The prophets of decoupling belong to a motley but expanding crew of green-growthers, including financiers such as the former governor of the Bank of England Mark Carney, economists including Per Espen Stoknes of the Norwegian Business School and Mariana Mazzucato of University College London, and business gurus like Paul Hawken (co-author, with Hunter and Amory Lovins, of Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution, published in 1999). The green-growthers’ pitch is an appeal to the magic of innovation and technology. Self-described ‘techno-optimists’, such as the Financial Times columnist Martin Sandbu, are vocal proponents of market-based climate policy (like carbon taxes and tradeable permit schemes), ‘innovation economies’ and ‘net-zero’ pledges: corporate and government commitments to large-scale projects that would supposedly allow us to continue business basically as usual while offsetting emissions with carbon capture and storage, tree-planting, and other carbon-sequestration programmes.

This is also the message we hear from advocates of the European Green Deal and renewable energy entrepreneurs. Once we get the right kind of growth – ‘healthy growth’ decoupled from capitalism’s sordid environmental record – we won’t have to worry about there being too much growth, and indeed should welcome it as the path to a more ‘inclusive’ capitalism and the means of paying for the coming transition to a high-tech, low-carbon world. ‘Yes,’ Stoknes says, ‘the current version of capitalism may be wreaking havoc, but it’s not that capitalism is broken.’ In fact, he claims, ‘denying the human psyche its subconscious yearning for growth’ would be disastrous.

There is a no-nonsense realism behind some of the green-growthers’ hopes for decoupling: growth-driven capitalism is what we’ve got; it isn’t going away anytime soon; let’s cross our fingers and work with it. One gets the sense that this is where Carney, now UN special envoy on climate action and finance, has ended up. He has rallied virtually every significant financial institution in the world (commanding between them some $130 trillion in total assets) to form the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero, with the aim of mobilising private sector financing for a ‘global transition’ to net zero by 2050. But the initiative seems driven more by desperation than hope. The same might be said of Mazzucato’s exhortation to ‘do capitalism differently’. It’s as if time is so short, and human nature so rigid, that we have no other choice.


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## redsquirrel (Oct 28, 2022)

part 2

The realists tend to want more involvement from the state than green business boosters would like, precisely because they don’t trust the invisible hand to deliver what’s needed: a market-based escape from environmental disaster. Sometimes this position is presented as if it were above politics: whatever one feels about growth or alternatives to it, the unlikeliness of our being able to slow down the capitalist train in time compels the deployment of such emergency measures as national ‘mobilisation’ – analogous to the planned economy of the Second World War – or planetary interventions such as atmospheric solar radiation management.

‘Degrowth’ is the term now most closely associated with those who argue that the promise of green growth is at best a distraction, at worst an anaesthetic, cynically administered. In Less Is More, probably the best-known statement of the case for degrowth, Jason Hickel delivers a belated response to Rostow: ‘Compound interest is incompatible with sustaining life on a delicately balanced living planet.’ We cannot grow our way out of our predicament: growth is growth is growth. As Tim Jackson puts it in Post Growth: Life after Capitalism, ‘Growth means more throughput’ – the flow, in absolute terms, of energy and materials in the production process. ‘More throughput means more impact. More impact means less planet. Endless growth – green or not – can only end up leading to no growth at all. There is no growth on a dead planet.’ The mythology of decoupling is, as he puts it, a ‘form of denial’.

Degrowthers call instead for purposeful and managed economic shrinkage, the rationale for which is straightforward: economic growth is destroying life on earth. Insofar as the kind of growth measured by GDP has historically involved increasing material and energy throughput on a finite planet, the argument is incontrovertible. But, as degrowthers acknowledge, simply shutting down a global economy that is ecologically disastrous could be socially disastrous instead, and the effects would be worst for the already poor and marginalised. Hence models of degrowth are never just about rollback or shutdown, but a combination of purposeful downsizing and global redistribution. Since ‘reducing throughput is likely to lead to a reduction in the rate of GDP growth, or even a decline in GDP itself,’ as Hickel says, ‘we have to be prepared to manage that outcome in a safe and just way. This is what degrowth sets out to do.’

The response from green-growthers is predictable. ‘The real argument,’ as Stoknes sees it, ‘is not about growth or degrowth. It’s not about capitalism or the climate. It’s not about money or your soul. It’s not about finding an alternative to capitalism.’ Rather, ‘it’s about redesigning what we have so it doesn’t rip our earthly home to pieces in a gigantic, blind binge.’ But by any reasonable standard of argument, the burden of proof doesn’t lie with the degrowthers: it lies with those who hold fast to growth. Economic growth has pushed the planetary system to its limits, or past them, and history offers nothing to suggest that continued growth is compatible with the necessary reorientation of the global economy that until now it has hindered, and often actively undermined. Until the green-growthers can point to something, anything, that demonstrates their faith has helped realise a meaningful structural shift – not just towards compostable take-out packaging, or shopping malls with charging stations in the car park, but in the global economy as a whole – it is up to them to make the case, not their critics.

That said, the degrowthers do, of course, have questions to answer too, like how is this supposed to work? Among the most common policy proposals are such things as shifting to public and non-motorised transportation; institutionalising the purchase of second-hand products over new ones; moving to plant-based diets and prioritising agroecological methods; and improving efficiency and reducing energy use in existing buildings. All of which would make a big difference. But how would policies be put in place soon enough and on a large enough scale to make that difference? Indeed, it is a live question whether ‘policy’, at least in the way it is used in modern, bureaucratic, liberal democracies, is the right tool for the sweeping changes required – the move to a plant-based diet, to take just one example. This is to say nothing of the more radical institutional shifts that degrowthers like Giorgos Kallis and his co-authors call for in The Case for Degrowth, such as limiting the reach of private property relations and reviving ‘commoning’ practices, or distributing technologies and financial support as reparations for the legacies of colonialism in the global south. Can we imagine ‘policies’ that realise transformations of the global political-economic order on this scale? That’s before we even consider the question of who or what body has the political power to make all this happen.

One of the building blocks of modern economics is the ‘production function’, a simplified proposition about the operation of the nuts and bolts of the economy. It sets out the way key inputs – the ‘factors of production’, capital and labour (raw materials and land having largely been dispensed with long ago) – combine to produce an economy’s output. Since any given collection of inputs could be used for a wide variety of purposes, the specifics are almost always assumed to be a function of technology and institutions: the relative contributions of capital and labour to production represent rational solutions to technical problems posed by budget constraints, market forces, current technologies and so on.

The general textbook form of the production function is Q = f (K, L), which merely states that the quantity of output Q is the result of mixing capital K and labour Laccording to a production process represented by a sequence of operations f. (In practice the function can be quite elaborate.) Economic growth, here represented by an increasing Q, is generally understood to be determined by an increase in the productivity of the combination of K and L. That is the only way to achieve an increase in GDP per capita (otherwise, Q rises only because K and L rise independently, not because we are combining them more productively).

The analogy is a little rough, but arguing for degrowth is something like proposing a reduction function. If a production function describes the purposeful combination of resources to increase output, a reduction function would describe how we might purposefully use capital and labour to reduce output, to shrink and slow our economies carefully and fairly. The task is to pull back from the precipices that growth-oriented production ignores or does not understand, to do what we can to undo the damage already done, and to reconstruct our economic relations with one another and with the non-human world.

The reduction function, if we could ever come up with it, would describe an extraordinarily helpful, and hopeful, set of (un)productive relationships. But who will design it, and who will implement the plans it generates? Mainstream economists tend to frame the production function as a technical question: how to use capital and labour most efficiently, to get the most Q out of our K-L mix. But in fact, the principal determinants of the production function are more political than technical. Power relations shape the real-world production process at every level, from the household to the global economy. In the stick-figure abstractions of introductory textbooks, production processes assemble themselves, but beyond an imaginary world in which capital and labour co-operate to realise a shared dream of efficiency, the power to marshal inputs, and to determine their relative quantities and necessary qualities, is a precondition for all production.

In other words, the form of the production function seems to identify two ‘agents’, which combine their energies to the ends of production, but in fact there is only one agent with the power to decide and act: capital. That won’t be news to economists. In the standard production function, whatever the technical constraints, labour is an input like any other, and capital determines it. ‘Labour’ doesn’t choose how much L to allocate to this or that process or sector, or get together with capital and negotiate. As Alfred Marshall, the godfather of modern economics, put it in 1890, it is ‘businessmen’ who ‘bring together the capital and the labour required for the work; they arrange or “engineer” its general plan, and superintend its minor details.’ Everything is premised on the assumption that Capital decides, and Labour does what it’s told.

In contrast to orthodox production functions, where the politics are obscured by a façade of objective rationality, the politics behind a reduction function would ideally be much more explicit. Virtually every degrowth advocate emphasises the terrible injustice of current arrangements, the ‘democratic’ basis of the degrowth project, and the equity and accountability it promises. Hickel speaks for the whole movement when he remarks that ‘if our struggle for a more ecological economy is to succeed, we must seek to expand democracy wherever possible’ – to international institutions like the IMF, to central banking, corporate governance, common-pool resource management and radical media and election finance reform.

Yet even for those of us who agree that the pursuit of perpetual growth is a disastrous premise on which to base our collective future, it is difficult to set aside the worry that degrowth will be a top-down, elite-driven process. How to reverse this freight train of a global economy? You can’t just turn off the engine, or leave it to each wagon to organise its own efforts. The degrowth plan is a reduction in the size of the global economy – not, we are told, via austerity or intentional recession, but through careful planning, with a particular emphasis on shrinking the extraordinary consumption of the global north via economic restructuring and domestic and international redistribution.

Any such plan must envision a rapid and highly co-ordinated global programme of decommissioning. Our current growth-oriented regime has put most of the power and resources in very few hands, but that doesn’t mean that liberating ourselves from the ‘tyranny of growth’ necessarily entails redemocratisation, and it is hard to imagine that the scale of the task can be addressed by localised leadership. How will it be co-ordinated, and by whom?


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## redsquirrel (Oct 28, 2022)

part 3 

Depending on who you talk to, the answer might be anything from meditative self-reflection to social revolution. In its more metaphysical variations, degrowth strikes an unfortunate note of self-help; Liegey and Nelson, in Exploring Degrowth, tell us that degrowth’s ‘deep philosophy’ can ‘decolonise our growth imaginaries’, while Jackson urges that we discover a ‘virtuous flow’.* There is a fixation, in this strand of the conversation, with the second law of thermodynamics, according to which the total ‘entropy’ or disorder of a physical system and its surroundings must necessarily increase over time. (‘A library that is not arranged becomes disarranged,’ as Georges Perec put it. ‘This is the example I was given to try to get me to understand what entropy was and which I have several times verified experimentally.’) In Jackson’s phrase, ‘the most likely state of the world is chaos,’ a sentiment that underwrites a lot of talk about degrowth’s capacity to restore ‘balance’ to humanity’s relation to the nonhuman world.

Like a lot of new agey analyses of the world’s problems, this version of degrowth emphasises the good in the world we have, and suggests that acts of virtuous voluntarism can remake that world. (Perhaps this is the reason Jackson chooses the term ‘post growth’ over ‘degrowth’: ‘post’ may remain agnostic about what comes next, but retains a hint that it will be better.) It isn’t clear to me whether this sort of approach to degrowth is a help or a hindrance – an emphasis on personal growth, diagrams of ‘tensions in the human psyche’ and reflection on one’s ‘values’ certainly resonates with the individualism of our moment. There is in principle no reason this individualised approach should be incompatible with broader, even revolutionary, social and political change.

But Hickel’s insistence that ‘degrowth is part of the broader ecosocialist movement’ does not enjoy unanimous support. While all its proponents reject the claim that degrowth is merely a historical rewinding – a nostalgic retreat to a supposedly kinder, gentler postwar capitalism – it is hard not to detect a bit of that in Post Growth, which opens with a lengthy paean to Robert F. Kennedy, is close to dismissive of a socialist alternative, and leans heavily on the critical liberalism of Hannah Arendt (certainly no socialist). For Hickel, though, the tradition of democratic socialism – radical redistribution, public ownership, decommodification and decolonisation – provides at least a working answer to the questions of power and co-ordination that Jackson mostly avoids.

In its Sixth Assessment Report (Working Group II), released in February, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change explicitly considered the degrowth analysis for the first time: ‘Linking development to past and current modes of economic growth creates significant challenges for Climate Resilient Development, as it implies that the very processes that have contributed to current climate challenges, including economic growth and the resource use and energy regimes it relies upon, are also the pathways to improvements in human wellbeing.’ The term ‘degrowth’ may not yet appear in the IPCC’s Summary for Policymakers – notoriously diluted by the member-government approval process – but a shift in the range of ideas circulating in the halls of powerful institutions is underway, and not just at the IPCC. Is this evidence of the dissemination of a degrowth sensibility? Or is it proof of what some socialist critics of degrowth have said all along: that it is an elite-driven programme of middle-class anxiety about ‘excess consumption’?

In that respect, there is a danger that degrowth gets caught, despite its advocates’ intentions, in the political ruts carved by mid-20th century debates over ‘development’. Economists like Rostow and Kuznets helped shape these debates. As I have said, they were accused of mistaking growth for development, but that critique is too simple. As the peripatetic Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter remarked in 1934, development, as distinct from ‘mere growth’, ‘is that kind of change arising from within the system which so displaces its equilibrium point that the new one cannot be reached from the old one by infinitesimal steps. Add successively as many mail coaches as you please, you will never get a railway thereby.’ Development, like degrowth, named a process whereby society became something other than it had been, and also served as a model which other political projects could emulate.

But framing degrowth as the 21st-century version of development carries significant risks. Development, though it had some popular moments, was largely driven by global and domestic elites, and it depended on mass recruitment to a programme whose ends, if not always its means, were already determined. Degrowthers too should avoid thinking of themselves as having identified a civilisational lodestone to which all ‘good’ politics are oriented. But that ship may have sailed. Many degrowthers believe they are saving human civilisation (take a look at the subtitle of Less Is More). At a historical moment of such precarity, their ‘rationality’ can seem the only way forward, and politics can appear as an obstacle. The problem is that rescue missions of this sort are almost always elite-driven, precisely because one of the things that defines the elite is its unquestioned assumption that it is responsible for civilisation.

Unlike many of their technocratic predecessors, however, some advocates of degrowth – who are, it must be said, mostly members of the elite from the global north – recognise this fatal flaw. That’s why Hickel and others are so eager to link it to other struggles (along with colleagues like Kallis and Paulson, Hickel frequently describes degrowth as by definition ‘a demand for decolonisation’). They are engaged in an effort to transform degrowth into a popular movement, to build a mass political base for a programme designed, for the most part, without politics in mind.

Efforts of this kind tend to be uphill battles. You could say that the environmental movement more broadly has been attempting something like this for the last half-century, and while it has had significant successes, a sustained, diverse and international mass base has yet to materialise. Like that movement, degrowth’s most prominent advocates too often act as if they already have the answers to every question, even before it has been asked. Kallis and his co-authors cite research showing that in parts of the global south, ‘the term degrowth is not appealing, and does not match people’s demands.’ But that doesn’t prevent degrowthers from frequently recruiting to the cause everything from the peasant movement Via Campesina to Indigenous blockades at Standing Rock. The claim is that these are earnest acts of solidarity. Perhaps, but such links must be forged from both sides. That will require more politics, less programme and a lot of humility.


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## stavros (Oct 31, 2022)

Not an article, but Lula's re-election in Brazil is very good news, isn't it?


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## farmerbarleymow (Nov 6, 2022)

This is quite striking


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## stavros (Nov 15, 2022)

Tuvalu and their neighbours propose moving en masse.


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## bcuster (Dec 1, 2022)

Dimming the Sun to Cool the Planet Is a Desperate Idea, Yet We’re Inching Toward It
					

The scientists who study solar geoengineering don’t want anyone to try it. But climate inaction is making it more likely.




					www.newyorker.com


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## stavros (Dec 13, 2022)

The EU have just legislated to put tariffs on certain imports which don't match or exceed their own environmental standards. I'm not an economist, but I'd have thought an economy this size doing this would have a noticeable impact.

The imports include steel, which may or may not partially fuck the government's new coal mine.


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## JimW (Dec 15, 2022)

Drought might well have been the cause of the Hun invasions that signalled the beginning of the end for the Roman Empire: Drought encouraged Attila's Huns to attack the Roman empire, tree rings suggest


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## story (Dec 24, 2022)

Wrong thread.

I‘ve reposted it in the extreme watch thread.









						Extreme Weather Watch
					






					www.urban75.net


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