CLIMATE MEMO MONDAYS, #92

 

 

92.  CLIMATE MEMO MONDAYS, #92, SEPTEMBER 12, 2022

Monthly Review Editor John Bellamy Foster & Hannah Holleman           The Theory of Unequal Ecological Exchange   Excerpted from Chapter 10 of Capitalism in the Anthropocene, coauthored by John Bellamy Foster and Hannah Holleman Unequal ecological exchange was first raised as a major issue in the work of Liebig and Marx. From the 1840s to the 1860s, the great German chemist Justus von Liebig introduced a critique of industrial agriculture as practiced most fully in England, referring to this as a condition of “Raubbau” or the “Raubsystem,” a system of robbery or overexploitation of the land and agriculture at the behest of the new industrial capitalism emerging in the towns. In Liebig’s view, the elementary soil nutrients, nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium, were being removed from the soil and sent to the cities in the form of food and fiber, where they ended up contributing to pollution rather than being recirculated to the soil. The result was the systematic robbing of the soil of its nutrients. English agriculture, then, tried to compensate for this by importing bones from the catacombs and battlefields of Europe and guano from Peru. “Great Britain,” Liebig wrote, deprives all countries of the conditions of their fertility. It has raked up the battlefields of Leipzig, Waterloo, and the Crimea; it has consumed the bones of many generations accumulated in the catacombs of Sicily; and now annually destroys the food for future generations of three millions and a half of people. Like a vampire it hangs on the breast of Europe, and even the world, sucking its lifeblood. Marx developed Liebig’s approach into a more systematic ecological critique of capitalism by designating the robbery of the earth as “an irreparable rift in the interdependent process of social metabolism,” or metabolic rift. Such conditions were, for Marx, the material counterpart of the capitalist organization of labor and production. It constituted the alienation of the “metabolic interaction” between humanity and the earth, that is, of the “universal condition” of human existence. ...Marx saw production as a flow of both material use values and exchange values or, simply, values. He used the term “metabolism” (Stoffwechsel) to refer to the material exchange (the exchange of matter-energy) that always accompanied monetary exchange of value....

 

Climate change overtakes U.S. flood maps (Arkansas Democrat-Gazette), Sep 05, 2022

 

pat snyder

Climate change overtakes U.S. flood maps

COM­PILED BY DEMO­CRAT-GAZETTE STAFF FROM WIRE RE­PORTS In­for­ma­tion for this ar­ti­cle was con­tributed by Vic­to­ria Cav­a­liere of Bloomberg News (TNS) and staff writ­ers of The As­so­ci­ated Press.

Arkansas Democrat-Gazette

Sep 05, 2022

 

Out­dated charts un­der­state risk to homes and busi­nesses, FEMA chief says

 

 

 

ROCKETS AND CARBON EMISSIONS IN SPACE
 Will Lockett.   “The billionaire space race is killing Earth: Rockets will never be environmentally friendly.”

 http://space4peace.org/newsletters/

We know we must be living through a revolutionary time in history when billionaires are the ones pushing the frontiers of space rather than the government. Access to space has never been so cheap and widely available, allowing for blue sky ideas like space tourism, Mars missions, NASA moon bases, and the development of copious numbers of satellites to become viable. Moreover, these new-age rockets can be powered by carbon-neutral fuel, meaning we are now capable of exploring the heavens without damaging the Earth. Right?

Well, a recent study has shown that even these revolutionary “do-gooder” rockets are harming our precious planet. But how? And how will this affect the space race? Let’s get something out of the way first; to develop an understanding of the environmental harm posed by the space race, we need to know which rockets use which fuel, and how much carbon they emit.  (continued)

 

John Bellamy Foster, Richard York, Brett Clark.  The Ecological Rift: Capitalism’s War on the Earth.  2010.

Publisher’s description
Humanity in the twenty-first century is facing what might be described as its ultimate environmental catastrophe: the destruction of the climate that has nurtured human civilization and with it the basis of life on earth as we know it. All ecosystems on the planet are now in decline. Enormous rifts have been driven through the delicate fabric of the biosphere. The economy and the earth are headed for a fateful collision—if we don’t alter course.
In The Ecological Rift: Capitalism’s War on the Earth environmental sociologists John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark, and Richard York offer a radical assessment of both the problem and the solution. They argue that the source of our ecological crisis lies in the paradox of wealth in capitalist society, which expands individual riches at the expense of public wealth, including the wealth of nature. In the process, a huge ecological rift is driven between human beings and nature, undermining the conditions of sustainable existence: a rift in the metabolic relation between humanity and nature that is irreparable within capitalist society, since integral to its very laws of motion.
Critically examining the sanguine arguments of mainstream economists and technologists, Foster, Clark, and York insist instead that fundamental changes in social relations must occur if the ecological (and social) problems presently facing us are to be transcended. Their analysis relies on the development of a deep dialectical naturalism concerned with issues of ecology and evolution and their interaction with the economy. Importantly, they offer reasons for revolutionary hope in moving beyond the regime of capital and toward a society of sustainable human development.

 John Bellamy Foster, Richard York, Brett Clark  

Also see Foster’s     

Marx's Ecology: Materialism and Nature and              

     The Robbery of Nature: Capitalism and the Ecological Rift

 

 

 

 

Socialism and Ecological Survival: An Introduction

by John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark (Jul 01, 2022)¹

https://monthlyreview.org/2022/07/01/socialism-and-ecological-survival-an-introduction/?mc_cid=f03e9ef3e3&mc_eid=ab2f7bf95e

Capitalism has brought the world to the edge of the abyss. We are rapidly approaching a planetary tipping point in the form of a climate Armageddon, threatening to make the earth unlivable for the human species, as well as innumerable other species. Such an absolute catastrophe for civilization and the human species as a whole is still avoidable with a revolutionary-scale reconstitution of the current system of production, consumption, and energy usage, though the time in which to act is rapidly running out.²

Nevertheless, while it is still possible to avoid irreversible climate change through a massive transformation in the mode of production, it is no longer feasible to circumvent accelerating environmental disasters in the present century on a scale never seen before in human history, endangering the lives and living conditions of billions of people. Humanity, therefore, is facing issues of ecological survival on two levels: (1) a still reversible but rapidly worsening Earth System crisis, threatening to undermine civilization as a whole and make the planet uninhabitable for the human species, and (2) accelerating extreme weather and other ecological disasters associated with climate change that are now unavoidable in the coming decades, affecting localities and regions throughout the globe. Social mobilization and radical social change are required if devastating near-term costs to people and communities, falling especially on the most vulnerable, are to be prevented. (continued)