CLIMATE MEMO MONDAYS, #84

 

84. CLIMATE MEMO MONDAYS, #84, JULY 18, 2022.  It’s stupid to try to keep cool by burning carbon.

Chris Hedges and John Feffer’s dystopian novels.
Garzón Espinosa.  Limits of and solutions to Growth.
Dick.  Biden’s $1 billion pledge to increase air traffic capacity.
Sullivan.  From a War to a Peace Economy.

 

 

The Chris Hedges Report Podcast with John Feffer  JUL 8, 2022

Chris Hedges speaks with the author John Feffer about his novels set in a future disrupted by climate chaos.

Listen now

The Limits to Growth: Ecosocialism or Barbarism

Alberto Garzón Espinosa (July 5, 2022).  Mronline.org (7-2-22). 

A major deficiency of the growth-obsessed model driving global neoliberal economic policy is its lack of understanding on the Earth System on which it—and indeed, all life on Earth—

relies. | more…

 

BUSINESS AS USUAL: GROWTH OF WAR/WARMING ECONOMY
7-6-22  The Biden Admin./FAA pledged $1 billion to increase air traffic capacity.   Nobody wants to be on the cutting edge of urgently needed change if you are called a spoilsport on Page One and children cry when flights to Disney World end.   To the contrary.  We cheer Congress for giving the Federal Amusement Agency $1billion dollars to make flying more accessible.  Yes, even though flying is a significant source of CO2 surpassing cars, and the Biden Admin. declared the reduction of CO2 one of its goals, it is giving air travel $1 billion a year extra for five years. Paying no attention to the chaos ahead wrought by airplane fossil fuels emissions, disregarding George Monbiot’s cogent case against flying except for necessity and  “love flights”( to visit our loved ones), and despite the number of desperate people facing food insecurity around the world having climbed by 150 million since the pandemic began, hitting 828 million, the FAA under the Airport Terminal Program is contributing $13 million to XNA’s infrastructural improvements costing a total of $40 million.  For what?  To fund conveniences:  a skybridge between the parking deck and the terminal, new elevators and escalators, new baggage carousels, and a lobby facelift.  XNA urgently needs these improvements?  No, but they “will help meet future demand for travel”   (As will the planned new approach highway to the airport.)  An XNA spokesperson thanked the Biden Admin. for recognizing the importance of these improvements.

        But hush, beware spoilsport sarcasm cruel to children!   7-8-22

(On disastrous growth, read "The Triumph of Death" by Chris Hedges, June 20, 2022).

 

“Moving from a War Economy to a Peace Economy.”  By Mary Beth Sullivan, for mic50.org    [Posted on 22 October 2011 by David Swanson.  Also pub. with minor variations in The Humanist Jan-Feb 2012.  --Dick] “It behooves the peace movement to create a vision that the populace can get excited about – a vision that will capture people’s imagination.  A vision that sees skills and talents of our engineers and scientists creating the renewable energy infrastructure that is critical to surviving the 21^st Century; a vision that engages peace activists, environmentalists, labor, students, artists, food security folks in creating plans for how we will heat homes, feed people, transport people in the year 2040.  This is the true security need for the U.S., and the world.” 

82 WAR WATCH WEDNESDAYS,

 

82 WAR WATCH WEDNESDAYS, July 13, 2022

Chris Hedges.   “No Way Out but War.”   May 22, 2022.

https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/no-way-out-but-war

Permanent war has cannibalized the country. It has created a social, political, and economic morass. Each new military debacle is another nail in the coffin of Pax Americana.

 I could not copy the graphic “No Guts No Glory” by Mr. Fish

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The United States, as the near unanimous vote to provide nearly $40 billion in aid to Ukraine illustrates, is trapped in the death spiral of unchecked militarism. No high speed trains. No universal health care. No viable Covid relief program. No respite from 8.3 percent inflation. No infrastructure programs to repair decaying roads and bridges, which require $41.8 billion to fix the 43,586 structurally deficient bridges, on average 68 years old. No forgiveness of $1.7 trillion in student debt. No addressing income inequality. No program to feed the 17 million children who go to bed each night hungry. No rational gun control or curbing of the epidemic of nihilistic violence and mass shootings. No help for the 100,000 Americans who die each year of drug overdoses. No minimum wage of $15 an hour to counter 44 years of wage stagnation. No respite from gas prices that are projected to hit $6 a gallon.

The permanent war economy, implanted since the end of World War II, has destroyed the private economy, bankrupted the nation, and squandered trillions of dollars of taxpayer money. The monopolization of capital by the military has driven the US debt to $30 trillion, $ 6 trillion more than the US GDP of $ 24 trillion. Servicing this debt costs $300 billion a year. We spent more on the military, $ 813 billion for fiscal year 2023, than the next nine countries, including China and Russia, combined.

We are paying a heavy social, political, and economic cost for our militarism.   MORE  https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/no-way-out-but-war

The Quest for Peace in Islamic Tradition by Abbas Aroua, with a foreword by Johan Galtung.  2013.  Publisher’s description:
This contribution from an insider Muslim author provides peace workers with a few resources from Islamic tradition that could be used when addressing a conflict rooted in an Islamic context. It presents briefly a number of basic Islamic concepts that are often misunderstood and misused. It addresses the issues of peace and war, conflict and conflict transformation, the requirements for decent work, the concept of «work of goodness» as well as other issues related to Islam/West relations, the tensions that may arise between Muslims and Westerners and the way to deal with them.  About the Author: Medical and health physicist, Abbas Aroua is adjunct professor at the Lausanne Faculty of Biology and Medicine. He is also the founder in 2002 and director of the Cordoba Foundation of Geneva (CFG) for peace studies. Involved in research, training and mediation the CFG focuses on conflicts in or involving the Muslim world.   https://www.transcend.org/tms/2022/06/please-pitch-in-to-avoid-tms-bankruptcy/comment-page-1/#comment-95915

 

John Paul Lederach.    Building Peace: Sustainable Reconciliation in Divided Societies. ‎ United States Institute of Peace (February 1, 1998).  

A major work from a seminal figure in the field of conflict resolution, Building Peace is John Paul Lederach's definitive statement on peacebuilding. Marrying wisdom, insight, and passion, Lederach explains why we need to move beyond "traditional" diplomacy, which often emphasizes top-level leaders and short-term objectives, toward a holistic approach that stresses the multiplicity of peacemakers, long-term perspectives, and the need to create an infrastructure that empowers resources within a society and maximizes contributions from outside.

Sophisticated yet pragmatic, the volume explores the dynamics of contemporary conflict and presents an integrated framework for peacebuilding in which structure, process, resources, training, and evaluation are coordinated in an attempt to transform the conflict and effect reconciliation.

Building Peace is a substantive reworking and expansion of a work developed for the United Nations University in 1994. In addition, this volume includes a chapter by practitioner John Prendergast that applies Lederach's conceptual framework to ongoing conflicts in the Horn of Africa.

 

NEEDED: A GLOBAL MOVEMENT FOR NUCLEAR DISARMAMENT

decade@decade-culture-of-peace.org  7-2-22	Jul 1, 2022, 12:23 PM (22 hours ago)

Dear Friends,
I have just posted my culture of peace blog for July, entitled :
"NEEDED: A GLOBAL MOVEMENT FOR NUCLEAR DISARMAMENT"
You will find it at https://decade-culture-of-peace.org/blog/?p=1457

In case you have not already received it, this month's CPNN bulletin is
entitled "TWO THEMES OF PEACE: COLOMBIA AND NUCLEAR DISARMAMENT" You may
find at https://cpnn-world.org/new/?p=27587

If you wish to make a comment on the blog or bulletin, you may write to
me at coordinator@cpnn-world.org and I will put your comment on line. 
Because of the flood of spam, I have discontinued the direct application
of comments.
Thank you for your interest in the culture of peace.
David Adams

 

 

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. 

 

 

OMNI: CLIMATE MEMO MONDAYS, #82, JULY 4, 2022

 

CLIMATE MEMO MONDAYS, #82, JULY 4, 2022

I have been reading Tom Engelhardt’s essays, books, books he edited, books he promoted for several years.   This essay culminates those “antidotes” to the leaders of our nation and their mainstream media by explaining incisively the convergence of the two most catastrophic failures of our nation: our continuous wars and climate disruption.  Here is the essay’s conclusion.  I hope you will read the entire essay.  Dick

 A regular antidote to the mainstream media

https://tomdispatch.com/extreme-life/?utm_source=TomDispatch&utm_campaign=8b5638e2ad-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2021_07_13_02_04_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1e41682ade-8b5638e2ad-309346777#more

TOMGRAM

Engelhardt, Life in Hell (Literally!).  POSTED ON JULY 5, 2022.

. . . .We — and that means much of the planet, not just those of us here in the United States — need to mobilize not against each other for once, but against what’s clearly becoming the greatest disaster in human history.

Stop and think about that for a moment. Given our history, that’s saying something, isn’t it?

And yet the men — and they were men — I labeled terrarists years ago because they, and the giant oil companies they ran, seemed so utterly intent on devastating the planet (something I called “terracide”) for the most immediate profits and an all-too-high-flying life for themselves still seem to be in the saddle. Yes, in this century, Washington conducted a disastrous 20-year war against terrorism, but never, whether Republicans or Democrats were in office, against this planet’s true terrarists.

As I wrote about them almost a decade ago,

“Those who run the giant energy corporations knew perfectly well what was going on and could, of course, have read about it in the papers like the rest of us. And what did they do? They put their money into funding think tanks, politicians, foundations, and activists intent on emphasizing ‘doubts’ about the science [of climate change] (since it couldn’t actually be refuted); they and their allies energetically promoted what came to be known as climate denialism. Then they sent their agents and lobbyists and money into the political system to ensure that their plundering ways would not be interfered with. And in the meantime, they redoubled their efforts to get ever tougher and sometimes ‘dirtier’ energy out of the ground in ever tougher and dirtier ways.”

And, in truth, all too little has changed to date, as the giant energy companies in the Ukraine moment prosper, while the price of oil and natural gas only soars and the rest of us continue to swelter.

It’s not that there’s nothing to be done. The price of renewable energy has been falling steadily for years. Were governments to focus the sort of attention on changing our energy environment that now goes into wars, hot and cold, and the sort of money that now goes into the Pentagon and its global equivalents, don’t for a second doubt that we could move toward a genuinely renewable world.

We’ve been warned, again and again, by the leading scientists of this planet, that it’s not only getting bad but, unless humanity refocuses in a big-time way, that it’s only going to get so much worse. The question is: when will the pain of climate change become too great to ignore any longer and will it then be too late? I hope to hell not!

Copyright 2022 Tom Engelhardt   https://tomdispatch.com/extreme-life/?utm_source=TomDispatch&utm_campaign=8b5638e2ad-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2021_07_13_02_04_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1e41682ade-8b5638e2ad-309346777#more

 

WAR WATCH WEDNESDAYS, #81

 

81 WAR WATCH WEDNESDAYS, #81, July 6, 2022
WBW Book Club for Peace and Ending War.
Transcend Media Service (TMS).  Global Network Against Weapons in
     Space:  Civilian Rocket Launch Sites Militarized.
Biden’s Bloated Military Budget Raised $45 Billion More by Senate Panel.
Nafeez Ahmed. UN Warns of Global Collapse, MSM Are Silent.

 

WBW Book Club Online with Gareth Porter, Jeff Cohen, Francesco Da Vinci, Alfred de Zayas, Rivera Sun

World BEYOND War  7-1-22

         8:30 AM (9 minutes ago)              

 Check out some of our upcoming online book clubs.

These are small-group discussions, four weeks in a row, online with some of the best authors on peace and ending war.

This one with Gareth Porter starts July 10, and as soon as you sign up we'll both email you a PDF and mail you a paperback of the incredible book under discussion, Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare.

Or, consider signing up well ahead with time to receive and read the book, for one of these:

August: Cable News Confidential with Jeff Cohen.

September: I Refuse to Kill with Francesco Da Vinci.

October: Building a Just World Order with Alfred de Zayas.

November: The Crown of Light with Rivera Sun.

World BEYOND War is a global network of volunteers, chapters, and affiliated organizations advocating for the abolition of war.

 

TRANSCEND Media Service
Editorials and articles originated on TMS may be freely reprinted, disseminated and translated, provided a citation and link to the source, TRANSCEND Media Service, is included. Please forward our Weekly Digest to your colleagues and friends. Thank you, enjoy your reading.

The Hidden Problems from Rocket Launch Sites [Pollution, ozone destruction, expanded militarism]   New GN video looking at the many impacts from the explosion of rocket launch facilities worldwide. Our latest video explores the various dangers that come from the growing numbers of rocket launch sites around the world. Tens of thousands of launches are having major impacts on Earth's environment and a peaceful world.  Most launch facilities, sold to the public as civilian, turn out to be a Trojan Horse as the military soon takes over and Pentagon, DARPA, and CIA space missions are launched.   See the video here  Please like and share this video with others  Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space P.O. Box 652, Brunswick, ME 04011  globalnet@mindspring.com

UNCEASING WARS, NUCLEAR WAR DANGER, WARMING, WEATHER EXTREMES, PANDEMICS, ECONOMIC CRISIS: GLOBAL COLLAPSE?
‘Revolting’: Senate panel raises Biden’s bloated military budget by $45 billion: Recently the Senate Armed Services Committee voted to increase the president’s already unprecedented military spending request, bringing the total proposed budget for the coming fiscal year to $857.6 billion. That’s even though most U.S. adults support cuts to the Pentagon budget. “If Congress truly wants to keep people safe, they must start by rejecting this increase and investing taxpayer dollars in human wellbeing, instead,” says AFSC’s Tori Bateman. (Truthout) .  AFSC Weekend Reading (6-24-22).

 

United Nations Warns Of ‘Total Societal Collapse’

By Nafeez Ahmed, Byline Times. Popular Resistance.org(5-30-22).  When the United Nations published its 2022 ‘Global Assessment Report on Disaster Risk Reduction’ (GAR2022) in May, the world’s attention was on its grim verdict that the world was experiencing an accelerating trend of natural disasters and economic crises. But not a single media outlet picked up the biggest issue: the increasing probability of civilizational collapse. Buried in the report, which was endorsed by UN Secretary-General António Guterres, is the finding that escalating synergies between disasters, economic vulnerabilities and ecosystem failures are escalating the risk of a “global collapse” scenario.  -more-