Climate Memo Mondays, #66

 

66.  Climate Memo Mondays, #66, March 14, 2022
Ronald Kramer, Carbon Criminals, Climate Crimes
Shragg, Overpopulation

Fossil Fuels CORPORATE AND INDIVIDUAL CRIMINALS
Carbon Criminals, Climate Crimes by Ronald C. Kramer.
Foreword by Rob White.  Rutgers University P.  300 pages
2020 Choice​ Outstanding Academic Title

Disciplines: Environment and Ecology, Public Policy, Sociology, Criminology, Criminal Justice, and Law, Current Affairs

 PREVIEW THIS BOOK
RELATED SUBJECTS
SCIENCE / Global Warming & Climate Change

Carbon Criminals, Climate Crimes analyzes the looming threats posed by climate change from a criminological perspective. It advances the field of green criminology through a examination of the criminal nature of catastrophic environmental harms resulting from the release of greenhouse gases. The book describes and explains what corporations in the fossil fuel industry, the U.S. government, and the international political community did, or failed to do, in relation to global warming. Carbon Criminals, Climate Crimes integrates research and theory from a wide variety of disciplines, to analyze four specific state-corporate climate crimes: continued extraction of fossil fuels and rising carbon emissions; political omission (failure) related to the mitigation of these emissions; socially organized climate change denial; and climate crimes of empire, which include militaristic forms of adaptation to climate disruption. The final chapter reviews policies that could mitigate greenhouse gas emissions, adapt to a warming world, and achieve climate justice.

 

Shragg, Overpopulation

Karen Shragg.  “What Gives Overpopulation Its Legs”?  Free Inquiry (Feb. March 2022), 12-15.  Part II.  Immigration is ”the most avoided part of the overpopulation discussion.”

The recent COP26 ended without a plea to deal with overpopulation.  The World Wildlife Fund’s Living Planet Report of 2018 barely mentions overpopulation.   60% of wild animals disappeared during the last four decades, as the planet added 4.5 billion people.

      From a social justice perspective, welcoming immigrants helps the downtrodden,* but it also increases consumption, and mainly it helps industries seeking cheap labor.

      In opposition to US growth, Shragg cites an essay by Gary Wockner:  “Human population growth is either the root cause, or a primary cause, of every environmental problem we face on the planet.”  And immigrants to the high-consuming countries like the US increase consumption, so Shragg wants “caps on immigration.”

     In conclusion she urges the cooperation of all population groups, the four legs of the stool of overpopulation: “those that work strictly on immigration, those that work only on fossil-fuel economics, those that work on family planning and total fertility rates.”

     *[Thus she carelessly dismisses in a sentence the Christian, peace and social justice, and open borders movement.  The main author with whom I am familiar who supports open borders is Todd Miller, whose book, Empire of Borders, is a fervent rejection of borders of all kinds, citing especially the US global war against the poor and climate cataclysms. In a section titled “Demilitarizing the Border, Toward a New World,” he quotes approvingly sociologists like Nandita Sharma, Harsha Walia, and Jenna Loyd.  Miller concludes: “What is required of humanity today is immense and powerful creativity, which requires making new relationships…and borders inhibit the ability to do that.”  --Dick]

Sources cited by Shragg.  (She is on the advisory board of Scientists and Environmentalists for Population Stabilization.)
Roy Beck.  Back of the Hiring Line.  2021.
Gary Wockner.  “It’s Time to Talk about Population Growth.”
Cited by Dick
Todd Miller.  Empire of Borders: The Expansion of the US Border around the World. 2019.  Other books: Border Patrol Nation, Storming the Wall, and Build Bridges, Not Walls (his latest)
Karla Villavicencio.  “Borders: Freedom to Move. . . .,”: The Nation (7.26-28-8.2-2021.)
Cited by Miller.
Jenna Loyd, et al.  Beyond Walls and Cages: Prisons, Borders, and Global Crisis.  2012.
Nandita Sharma, et al.  “Why No Borders.”  Refuge (2009).
Harsha Walia.  Undoing Border Imperialism.  2013.