OMNI: CLIMATE MEMO MONDAYS, #83, JULY 11, 2022

 

CLIMATE MEMO MONDAYS, #83, JULY 11, 2022
United Nations: Women
Teaching Children about CC (Climate Catastrophe)
Monthly Review a socialist perspective on climate.
Inaction on climate change because the people lack power: Eugene Linden,
     A People’s History of Climate Change, and Matthew Huber, Climate Change as
      Class War .

UN WIRE (6-29-22) WOMEN & GIRLS

 

Bachelet: Women feel most effects of climate change Women and girls often suffer the worst consequences of climate change as they comprise 80% of people displaced by climate change, putting them at a greater risk of threats such as domestic violence, early or forced marriage, trafficking and other forms of sexual violence. While discussion and analysis is important on this issue, "unless we move from rhetoric to concrete action -- immediately -- the lives, safety and dignity of millions of women and girls will continue to hang in the balance," UN human rights chief Michelle Bachelet said.  Full Story: India Blooms News Service (6/28)

 

CLIMATE CATASTROPHE

“American children deserve to be educated about the climate crisis.”  The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (6-23-22).
Anthropogenic climate change is often labeled as too controversial to be taught properly in some of the most populous states in the country. But when climate change isn’t properly taught, students aren’t the only ones impacted. Parents are affected, too. Read more. 

Climate & Capitalism
A socialist source of information on climate:  Monthly Review
Ecosocialist Bookshelf, June 2022 June 9, 2022
A forgotten revolutionary: Thomas Spence on saving the commons June 4, 2022
Greenhouse gases trapped 49% more heat in 2021 than in 1990 May 25, 2022
A major advance in defining the Anthropocene May 20, 2022
Climate change indicators set records May 18, 2022

 

[From a review, heavily edited, of these two books. --Dick]:
Eugene Linden. Fire and Flood: A People’s History of Climate Change, from 1979 to the Present. 
Matthew T. Huber.  Climate Change as Class War: Building Socialism on a Warming Planet.
Our leaders’ failure to tackle climate change, according to Matt Huber in Climate Change as Class War, is not “due to misinformation” but a “lack of power”.  And the “villain” in Huber’s telling is not “consumerism” nor collective inertia, not the “market economy” nor the capitalist system in aggregate, but the “fraction of the capitalist class that controls the production of energy from fossil fuels and other carbon-intensive industries”.  This vision of social change as necessitating struggle against powerful groups that need to be coerced or overcome by a countervailing force, not merely enlightened or lobbied–let alone implored to “tell the truth”, as Extinction Rebellion’s first “demand” has it–is daunting. It’s certainly more demanding than the frictionless model of progress outsourced to technology, or the market, or responsive politicians. Eco-socialists are routinely chastised for their lack of realism or unhelpful combativeness–calling for improbable transformations while the planet burns. The irony is that ostensibly modest technocratic reforms, which so often omit to anoint a credible force that can compel their implementation, are beginning to seem the more irresponsibly utopian. Meanwhile, as a devastating global food shortage looms, inflamed by crop-withering drought and heat, the future is already here. If there is no such thing as “success” now, the urgent need remains to devise and ruthlessly pursue ways of failing better.