Dear Friend,
In 2019, a staggering 795 million people, or one in nine of us, does not have enough food to lead a healthy active life. By 2025, around 1.8 billion people will live in areas plagued by water scarcity, and two thirds of the world’s population will be living in water-stressed regions. If there is no water, then there will be no food.
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In Solidarity
Binu Mathew
Editor
Countercurrents.org
The Choice Is Ours: Extinction or Rebellion?
by Simon Whalley
In 2019, a
staggering 795 million people, or one in nine of us, does not have enough food to lead a healthy active life. By 2025, around 1.8 billion people will live in areas plagued by water scarcity, and two thirds of the world’s population will be living in water-stressed regions. If there is no water, then there will be no food.
Due to capitalism’s rapaciousness, our species is hurtling towards ecocide at a frightening pace.
In the early twentieth century, tens of millions died under the Stalinist regime. We blame these deaths on the wickedness of socialism. Later, in Germany, around 6 million Jews were systematically murdered in gas chambers. We blame these deaths on the ills of fascism. At the other end of the Eurasian continent, around 22 – 45 million died under Chairman Mao between 1958-1962. These deaths are blamed on the evils of socialism. Further south, Pol Pot was responsible for the deaths of between 13 percent and 30 percent of the population. The deaths of up to 2.8 million people in Cambodia’s Killing Fields were attributed to the peril of communism.
In 2019, a staggering 795 million people, or one in nine of us, does not have enough food to lead a healthy active life. By 2025, around 1.8 billion people will live in areas plagued by water scarcity, and two thirds of the world’s population will be living in water-stressed regions. If there is no water, then there will be no food.
While the future famines will be caused by a lack of water, the malnourishment we see today isn’t the result of a lack of food on our planet. In fact, there are now more people suffering from obesity than those that are malnourished. The problem stems from our current system of capitalism. Why do we not call capitalism out for all this suffering as we do with socialism, communism or fascism?
This system deems it fair for 13 of the richest billionaires to enjoy as much wealth as the poorest 50 percent. This system regards it rational for these 13 individuals to extract and use as much of the world’s natural resources as 3.6 billion people. If the world’s 13 richest billionaires wished to use their money to buy half the world’s resources, there would be nothing in this current system to stop them doing so. How can this be ethical?
This is why today, people in wealthy countries can spend their days in comfort, chowing down on steaks, whiling their time away playing video games and watching endless TV series and movies, and then go on to talk about these video games and TV shows in an endless loop of nothingness. All while people with the mere misfortune to be born in a different geographical space in time are trying their best to survive in harsh conditions we in the global north car barely imagine. We have more money and more money equals the right to use more resources. We can enjoy ourselves at the expense of the poor.
Due to capitalism’s rapaciousness, our species is hurtling towards ecocide at a frightening pace. All of us in the global north are to blame, some more than others. The fossil fuel companies that have lied to us for decades to keep us hooked on their products, the large conglomerates profiting from the destruction of entire ecosystems to keep us hooked on the flesh of animals even as we are awakening to the fact that plant based diets are healthier and more sustainable, the agrochemical corporations that enrich themselves and their shareholders by forcing farmers to use their chemicals on the food we eat which in turn makes us sick and decimates insect populations and contaminates our soil and kills our earth worms, the car companies that lie about emissions and lobby our elected leaders so we buy more of their products are largely responsible for our current predicament. These companies and the humans that lead them are complicit in nothing short of the manslaughter of millions, the destruction of the ecosystems we rely on for our survival, and the extinction of up to 10,000 species a year. They will also be responsible for the mass starvation of billions of humans in just a decade or so. This is the work of the greed that capitalism encourages and desires in us. Capitalism only survives by us buying more and more things so investors receive returns. The GDP must keep going up and up and up forever or the system collapses. But we all know this is not possible. We have extremely limited resources, and for the GDP to keep rising, we need more and more people. We cannot continue to expand our population in perpetuity. The system was flawed at the outset, and its flaws have never been more apparent than now as we start to see our life systems unravel before our very eyes.
The capitalists and our corrupt governments are largely to blame for this destruction and the extinctions. They will also be to blame for the deaths as food and water runs dry. They were told by scientists that this would happen if they didn’t change course, but they continued anyway to keep the system going, and they ignore the reality of our distress as they fly around in private jets and moor their yachts off shore in the same place they hide their wealth.
But, just as the left in Germany were complicit in the rise of Nazism, we are also complicit in this crime of ecocide. We all benefit from the system that is eating itself. Every day that goes by that we continue to talk about trivial nonsense instead of accepting our dire situation and acting. Every day that goes by as we bury our heads in the sand. Every day that goes by that we carry on buying pointless crap. Every day that goes by that we continue to feed 70 billion farmed animals in factory hell holes while almost a billion humans go hungry. Every day we stay silent as ecosystems collapse, we are complicit in the manslaughter of the global south. We are complicit in the needless resource theft of future generations. We are complicit in the future starvation and conflict that is surely going to arrive at our children’s door. We are enabling the worst to happen to our own children.
If we must blame historical deaths on socialism, communism or fascism, then let’s be honest with ourselves and blame capitalism for ecosystem collapse, extinctions and mass starvation. But, let’s not forget that as we stay silent and act like children, while children act like adults, that we too are to blame.
It doesn’t have to be this way. We have options open to us, but time is running out. Will you play video games and watch TV shows tonight, or will you awaken from this drunken stupor and rise up with humanity to demand a just transition to a fairer and more equal system that encourages love not fear and bridges not walls.
Do you want Extinction or Rebellion?
UN report calls for “radical transformations” to avert global climate catastrophe
by Bryan Dyne
The United Nations Environment Programme issued its tenth Emissions Gap Report yesterday, which highlighted the stark failure of the 2015 Paris Agreement to curb global greenhouse gas emissions and halt global warming. Even if countries hold themselves to their emissions pledges from four years ago, the report warns that global average temperatures will still increase to 3.2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels and Earth will be
increasingly hostile to human life.
The United Nations Environment Programme issued its tenth Emissions Gap Report yesterday, which highlighted the stark failure of the 2015 Paris Agreement to curb global greenhouse gas emissions and halt global warming. Even if countries hold themselves to their emissions pledges from four years ago, the report warns that global average temperatures will still increase to 3.2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels and Earth will be increasingly hostile to human life.
This is well past the two degree limit set by the Paris Agreement, and more than twice the 1.5 degree limit that has been adopted since then. As the report notes, governments and corporations have not curbed their carbon emissions, but largely done the opposite. Greenhouse gas emissions have risen at an average rate of 1.5 percent over the past decade, resulting in the release of the equivalent of 55.3 gigatons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere in 2018, 37.5 gigatons of which were emitted from burning fossil fuels.
Global warming has already caused catastrophic injury to large sections of the world’s population. More powerful hurricanes such as Sandy, Maria and Dorian cause billions of dollars in destruction and cost thousands of lives. Wildfires in Australia have made koalas “functionally extinct.” Nearly 900 million human beings are at risk of starvation as previously fertile lands turn into desert, while 3.2 billion men, women and children live in areas that will not support human life likely by the end of the next decade.
A segment of an ice sheet (Credit: Nasa.gov)
There are already at least 210 million so-called “climate refugees”–those forced to permanently flee their homes as a result of climate change-related disasters, and not from war or other forms of violence. The United Nations estimates that up to one billion will be displaced by 2050.
To have any chance of abating the unfolding crisis, the document echoes reports going back more than four decades calling for reduced carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide emissions. In 2011, the fifth assessment report of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned that the world could only burn an additional 565 gigatons of carbon (coal, oil natural gas) before reaching a critical point of no return for the world’s climate. It also noted that there were 2,795 gigatons of carbon already contained in proven fossil fuel reserves.
Since then, energy production and industrial use have put an estimated 364 gigatons of carbon into the atmosphere. As the Emissions Gap Report notes, countries and companies will have to reduce the greenhouse gases they release by at least 7.6 percent each year from 2020 to 2030 in order to have any chance of alleviating the devastation that has already been wreaked by man-made climate change and to prevent even worse catastrophes.
The report places special emphasis on the fact that the twenty richest countries in the world (the G20) account for 78 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, noting that it is the European Union and countries such as the United States, China, India and Russia that will have to make the most drastic cuts. It calls for “radical transformations” in energy production and the industrial sector, transferring power generation from coal and oil to solar, wind, tidal, geothermal and other renewable energy sources.
Another way of putting this, however, is that 70 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions come from 100 major companies, a fact that United Nations reports gloss over. It is not the world’s population that is responsible for climate change, but rather its transnational corporations, which operate only to enrich their executives and major shareholders. To quote British Petroleum (BP), they are more concerned with the “potential financial impact” of limiting carbon emissions than the health of the planet and those that live on it.
The UN’s figures, however, do not account for natural processes that have been triggered by the warming that has already taken place. Last year, Dr. Andrew Glikson of the Australian National University warned of a “methane time bomb” in the Arctic as melting permafrost steadily releases the hundreds of gigatons of methane–a greenhouse gas nearly 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide–stored in soil, lakes and sediment in Canada and Siberia. Scientists have also witnessed methane boiling up from underneath the Arctic Ocean, which is estimated to contain thousands of gigatons of methane.
If these methane reserves are ever fully released, the results would be cataclysmic. The extreme weather events of the past decade would be only the precursors of much more devastating storms, longer heat waves, drier droughts and nonstop wildfires. Coral reefs across the world would die, eliminating significant parts of the food chain. Glacial melting and sea level rise would flood every coastal city on the planet, home to between one-third and one-half of the world’s population, potentially drowning billions of people. At least one million of the Earth’s species would die and continent-scale portions of the world’s surface would become uninhabitable.
Moreover, Earth’s temperature would no longer be directly related to the burning of fossil fuels, making it exponentially more difficult for modern scientific techniques to contain or reverse.
The only way to avert such a scenario would be to implement a scientifically planned global restructuring of the world’s energy industry to transition from a reliance on fossil fuels to renewable energy. This in turn would involve a transformation on the same scale of transportation, logistics, agriculture and ultimately society as a whole. Such changes would necessarily cut across national boundaries, corporate profits and national security interests, all of which are features of capitalism: the division of the world into rival nation-states and the subordination of economic life to the accumulation of private profit.
The only way to place the world’s productive forces on such an internationally coordinated basis is to overthrow the profit system, nation-states and capitalism. Its opposite must be established—socialism, the democratic control of the world’s productive forces by the international working class.
Originally published by WSWS.org
Argentina’s president-elect Alberto Fernandez rejects remaining IMF money
by Countercurrents Collective
Argentina’s leftist president-elect Alberto Fernandez said Tuesday that he would renounce the remaining $11 billion tranche of the country’s International Monetary Fund (IMF) loan as soon as he takes office next month.
Israel’s Next Move: The Real Danger in US Decision to Normalize Illegal Jewish Settlements
by Dr Ramzy Baroud
It is hardly shocking that the United States government has finally decreed that illegal Jewish settlements which have been built in defiance of international law, are, somehow, “consistent” with international law.
Hong Kong Poll Results X-Rayed
by Ramakrishnan
Landslide victory for Hong Kong pro-democracy parties in de facto protest referendum : This ( it was CNN’s) is the tone and tenor of headlines in mainstream media.There is nothing new in this kind of reportage for Indians fed on inobjectivity and hyperboles. This notion however needs to be objectively analysed, more so in the wake of the turmoil there.That will help a better understanding of the implications of this election.
What can you do to make this Thanksgiving a meaningful holiday?
by Dr Mike Ghouse
Thanksgiving day is an opportunity to square things, and express gratitude to those who have done some good to you; a word of encouragement, a smile, recommendation, a dollar when you needed, and all the little things. Our life scale tilts with those receivings – by giving to others, you will regain your
balance.
The Age of Trump, the End of What?
by Tom Engelhardt
French king Louis XV reputedly said, “Après moi, le déluge.” (“After me, the flood.”) Whether that line was really his remains unclear, but not long after his death did come the French Revolution. We should be so lucky! Our all-American version of Louis XV, Donald I, is incapable, I suspect, of even imagining a world after him. Given the historically unprecedented way he’s covered by the “fake” or “corrupt” news media, that “enemy of the people,” I doubt they really can either.
India is not quite yet a Hindu Rashtra: 70th Constitution Day
by Dr Aurobindo Ghose
Under these circumstances, with a growing civil society determined not to submit to the repressive, communal and divisive policies of the government, it is well-nigh
impossible for a Hindu Rashtra or a fascist state to takeover this beautiful, “unity in diversity”, secular, democratic country called India.
The Decline of the “Constitutional Morality” in the Current Political Scenario
by Badre Alam Khan
Nation-wide conferences & seminars including the public meetings were being organized particularly at the national Capital Delhi with immense fervor. Indeed, commemorating the ‘Constitution Day’ is a matter of a great pride and jubilation for every Indian citizen who believed in the sanctity of democratic values and principles. In this connection, a programme was organized at Department of Political Science, Jamia Milia Islamia to celebrate the Constitution Day
Statement of Preliminary Findings of a Fact-Finding visit to Assam on the Updating of the NRC
by Fact-Finding Report
Between the 5th and 10th of November 2019, a nine person team comprising of members of Women against Sexual Violence and State repression (WSS) visited the state of Assam in order to understand the implications of updating the National Register of Citizens (NRC), particularly for the most marginalised people of Assam.
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