” the most detailed fictional treatment of the movement from a world recognizably like our own to an anarchist society that I have read.. imagined strongly enough to allow readers to believe that events could happen this way.”
One of the thorniest issues faced by anarchists is imagining a viable process by means of which the contemporary world of dominance and oppression passes into a world of freedom and equality. Is the process to be evolutionary or revolutionary, and if the latter, is it to be violent or non-violent? Interestingly, not many anarchist fictions are dedicated to describing such a transformative process. Most either assume that the anarchist society already exists and devote little attention to how it came about, or they posit some catastrophic event that ends the old order and allows a new one to emerge.
Rarely does an author patiently outline a process of transformation that shows a continuous progress from something like the current state of society to an anarchist one. 1*
It is for this reason that M. Gilliland’s The Free merits an essay here.2.*
It is the most detailed fictional treatment of the movement from a world recognizably like our own to an anarchist society that I have read. More importantly, it is imagined strongly enough to allow readers to believe that events could happen this way. That is to say, it gives plausible answers to the two most important questions regarding such a transformation: under what preconditions is it likely to occur, and once it starts what factors most contribute to its success? After a brief summary of the plot, I trace the answers that The Free gives to these questions.3*…
“The East Siberian Arctic Shelf (ESAS) is exceptionally shallow — more than 75 per cent of its entire area of 2.1 million square kilometres is shallower than 40 metres — so most of the methane gas avoids oxidation in the water column and is released into the atmosphere.” (Wadhams, pg. 123“).
”To spot methane levels breaking the 2000ppb mark so sharply in this fragile region is unprecedented.”
”Another factor that works against acceptance by the scientific community is due to native biases towards Russian researchers, namely Natalia Shakova, one of the foremost prominent researchers of ESAS.”
The northern continental shelves of Russia, inclusive of the Barents Sea, Kara Sea, Laptev Sea and East Siberian Sea (ESAS) are some of the least researched yet most controversial subjects in climate science today. It’s the one region that has the biggest potential to trigger runaway global warming because of sizeable sub sea methane deposits, thereby taking civilization down to its knees. But, that prospect is also extremely controversial within the scientific community.
Scientific opinion runs the gamut: (1) high risk-methane bursts will bury civilization with runaway global warming – a dreadful, deadly risk (2) not to worry, it’s low risk because almost all of the massive deposits of undersea methane will stay put (3) not to worry, low risk because any methane seepage via undersea permafrost is oxidized and dissolves within the seawater and not a threat to runaway global warming.
By and large, climate scientists dismiss the ESAS and some go so far as to vilify published research. In fact, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) dismisses its near-term/intermediate-term risks. The reasons are manifold (more on that later).
Unfortunately, recent events in the high Arctic lean towards option number one as the more likely outcome. In that regard, I recently met with Dr. Peter Wadhams, world-renowned Arctic expert, to discuss the issue (more on that follows).
see also> Seeing is Believing, Earthworks: Community Empowerment against fracking pollution and climate change. HERE> .https://wp.me/pIJl9-e9f
By Jonah M. Kessel and Hiroko Tabuchi Dec. 12, 2019
Immense amounts of methane are escaping from oil and gas sites nationwide, worsening global warming, even as the Trump administration weakens restrictions on offenders.
Jonah M. Kessel, a New York Times visual journalist, and Hiroko Tabuchi, a Times climate reporter, went to West Texas oilfields with a camera that can photograph methane.
To the naked eye, there is nothing out of the ordinary at the DCP Pegasus gas processing plant in West Texas, one of the thousands of installations in the vast Permian Basin that have transformed America into the largest oil and gas producer in the world.
There is a huge global spike in methane, one of the most potent greenhouse gases driving climate change over the last decade, according Harvard University Studies. The U.S. is the biggest culprit, mostly from oil and gas fracking wells, there are over a million of them, with half already abandoned. Obama introduced laws so that the industry would -voluntarily- at least measure the leaks. But even that is being repealed by the Trump administration, a criminal and ecocidal policy in the light of years of concrete scientific proof that the methane emissions are tipping us towards imminent uncontrollable climate chaos..Controlling methane emissions would be a quick way to pause climate change, while CO2 remains in the atmosphere for many decades.
But a highly specialized camera sees what the human eye cannot: a major release of methane, the main component of natural gas and a potent greenhouse gas that is helping to warm the planet at an alarming rate.
Two New York Times journalists detected this from a tiny plane, crammed with scientific equipment, circling above the oil and gas sites that dot the Permian, an oil field bigger than Kansas. In just a few hours, the plane’s instruments identified six sites with unusually high methane emissions.
DCP Pegasus Gas Processing PlantNov. 5, 2019Using a powerful infrared camera, The Times identified large-scale releases. Here, methane escapes from a device meant to be burning it off.
Methane is loosely regulated, difficult to detect and rising sharply. The Times’s aerial and on-the-ground research, along with an examination of lobbying activities by the companies that own the sites, shows how the energy industry is seeking and winning looser federal regulations on methane, a major contributor to global warming.
Operators of the sites identified by The Times are among the very companies that have lobbied the Trump administration, either directly or through trade organizations, to weaken regulations on methane, a review of regulatory filings, meeting minutes and attendance logs shows. These local companies, along with oil-industry lobby groups that represent the world’s largest energy companies, are fighting rules that would force them to more aggressively fix emissions like these.
Next year, the administration could move forward with a plan that would effectively eliminate requirements that oil companies install technology to detect and fix methane leaks from oil and gas facilities. By the E.P.A.’s own calculations, the rollback would increase methane emissions by 370,000 tons through 2025, enough to power more than a million homes for a year.
Impacted residents travel to Madrid to highlight that planned infrastructure to process & export Permian oil & gas would guarantee catastrophic climate change
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
[Top] Optical gas imaging by Earthworks reveals normally invisible air pollution from an unlit flare. [Bottom] A regular still image taken at the same time and place shows what you see with the naked eye.
Madrid, Dec 4 — Today at an official COP25 side event Texas and New Mexico residents — impacted by the extraction of Permian Basin oil & gas, and by planned infrastructure to transport, process and export it — informed delegates and other attendees that catastrophic climate change is inevitable unless the Permian infrastructure expansion is stopped.
“The Permian Basin is an oil and gas carbon bomb that’s exploding, and it’s happening right now. If we can’t defuse it, the world cannot avoid catastrophic
climate change. Major oil companies are trying to lock in decades more oil and gas demand by building infrastructure from the Permian to the Texas Gulf Coast to transport, process and export the world’s largest current oil & gas play,” said Earthworks’ Energy Campaigner Ethan Buckner.
Although communities across the region are bearing the brunt of impacts from oil, gas and petrochemical development, those most at risk from the Permian expansion are those already the most impacted by social and environmental injustice. And on Texas’ Gulf Coast — where the oil & gas is processed and exported — they’re suffering twice: from the operations’ toxic pollution, and from intensified climate change.
“I live less than two miles from the Ship Channel in the East End of Houston, TX. My dad was a United Steelworker who died of cancer in 2016, and I was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease that same year. So I’m well aware that workers and fenceline communities are paying with their health the price of daily exposure to toxic pollution from oil and gas infrastructure,” said Ana
No One Should Have to Breathe These Chemicals – AnaParras of Texas Environmental Justice Advocacy Services (@tejasbarrios). HOUSTON — While families across the country celebrated Thanksgiving with their loved ones, more than 50,000 people in Port Neches, Tex., were forced to evacuate from their homes and spend the holiday in makeshift shelters
.. In 2015 a group of billionairesannounced amid much fanfare that they’d be investing a few globs of their fortunes in clean energy research, and the world was all: “Hoorayforbillionaires!” But two days
later a report from OXFAMcalled “EXTREME CARBON INEQUALITY” (capitalization not my own) revealed that rich people are the biggest contributors to climate change — by a wide, wide margin.Greta Speaks Truth to Power as Those She Criticizes Applaud…16-year-old climate activist Greta Thunberg addressed the U.N. Climate Action Summit with an emotional speech condemning leaders for inaction and stressing that while “[e]ntire ecosystems are collapsing… all you can talk about is money and about fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!”
Embarrassment of Riches By George Monbiot ….. For the sake of life on Earth, we should set an upper limit on the money any person can amass.
It is not quite true that behind every great fortune lies a great crime. Musicians and novelists, for example, can become extremely rich by giving other people pleasure. But it does appear to be universally true that in front of every great fortune lies a great crime. Immense wealth translates automatically into immense environmental impacts, regardless of the intentions of those who possess it. The very wealthy, almost as a matter of definition, are committing ecocide. A few weeks ago, I received a letter from a worker at a British private airport. “I see things that really shouldn’t be happening in 2019,” he wrote. Every day he sees Global 7000 jets, Gulfstream 650s and even Boeing 737s take off from the airport carrying a single passenger, mostly flying to Russia and the US. The private Boeing 737s, built to take 174 seats, are filled at the airport with around 32,000 litres of fuel. That’s as much fossil energy as a small African town might use in a year.
Where are these single passengers going? Perhaps to visit one of their superhomes, constructed and run at vast environmental cost, or to take a trip on their superyacht, which might burn 500 litres of diesel per hour just ticking over, and is built and furnished with rare materials, extracted at the expense of stunning places. continues below
Eat the Rich? How Offshore Capital Now Rules the World .. Today’s super-rich are the most privileged and powerful group of people in history. If you’re a billionaire, you can even decide an election by funneling a little bit of your money into the race. You can choose to pay 0% tax. You can sway public opinion by buying up media outlets, and by using think […]
Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised to learn that when Google convened a meeting of the rich and famous at the Verdura resort in Sicily this July to discuss climate breakdown, its delegates arrived in 114 private jets and a fleet of megayachts, and drove around the island in supercars. Even when they mean well, the ultrarich cannot help trashing the living.
A series of research papers shows that income is by far the most important determinant of environmental impact. It doesn’t matter how green you think you are. If you have surplus money, you spend it. The only form of consumption that’s clearly and positively correlated with good environmental intentions is diet: people who see themselves as green tend to eat less meat and more organic vegetables. But attitudes have little bearing on the amount of transport fuel, home energy and other materials you consume. Money conquers all. continues below
Growing inequality in the United States shows that the game is rigged. …..Last month, Bloombergreportedthat Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon and owner of the Washington Post, has accumulated a fortune worth $150 billion. That is the biggest nominal amount in modern history, and extraordinary any way you slice it. Bezos is the world’slone hectobillionaire.He is worth what the average American family is, nearly two million times over. He has about 50 percent more money than Bill Gates, twice as much as Mark Zuckerberg, 50 times as much as Oprah, and perhaps 100 times as much as President Trump. (Who knows!) He has gotten $50 billion richer in less than a year. He needs to spend roughly $28 million a day just to keep from accumulating more wealth.
The disastrous effects of spending power are compounded by the psychological impacts of being wealthy. Plenty of studies show that the richer you are, the less you are able to connect with other people. Wealth suppresses empathy. One paper reveals that drivers in expensive cars are less likely to stop for people using pedestrian crossings than drivers in cheap cars. Another revealed that rich people were less able than poorer people to feel compassion towards children with cancer. Though they are disproportionately responsible for our environmental crises, the rich will be hurt least and last by planetary disaster, while the poor are hurt first and worst. The richer people are, the research suggests, the less such knowledge is likely to trouble them. Another issue is that wealth limits the perspectives of even the best-intentioned people. This week Bill Gates argued in an interview with the Financial Times that divesting (ditching stocks) from fossil fuels is a waste of time. It would be better, he claimed, to pour money into disruptive new technologies with lower emissions.
Of course we need new technologies. But he has missed the crucial point: in seeking to prevent climate breakdown, what counts is not what you do but what you stop doing. It doesn’t matter how many solar panels you install if you don’t simultaneously shut down coal and gas burners. Unless existing fossil fuel plants are retired before the end of their lives, and all exploration and development of new fossil fuels reserves is cancelled, there is little chance of preventing more than 1.5°C of global heating. continues below
see also:US Millionaires Pass $1.500,000,000,000 Tax Cut for RichEvery year wealth and power are concentrated in fewer and fewer hands.. HOW CAN WE STOP THIS MADNESS NOW? ‘Welfare for the Wealthy’: 227 Congressmen Pass $1.5 Trillion Tax Cut for Corporations and the Rich “It’s immoral that many hardworking families will pay a higher tax bill or lose access to critical services like healthcare […]
But this requires structural change, which involves political intervention as well as technological innovation: anathema to Silicon Valley billionaires. It demands an acknowledgement that money is not a magic wand that makes all the bad stuff go away. On Friday, I’ll be joining the global climate strike, in which adults will stand with the young people whose call to action has resonated around the world. As a freelancer, I’ve been wondering who I’m striking against. Myself? Yes: one aspect of myself, at least. Perhaps the most radical thing we can now do is to limit our material aspirations. The assumption on which governments and economists operate is that everyone strives to maximise their wealth. If we succeed in this task, we inevitably demolish our life support systems. Were the poor to live like the rich, and the rich to live like the oligarchs, we would destroy everything. The continued pursuit of wealth, in a world that has enough already (albeit very poorly distributed) is a formula for mass destitution. continues below
see also: The US military is a bigger polluter than as many as 140 countries …The US military is one of the largest polluters in history, consuming more liquid fuels and emitting more climate-changing gases than most medium-sized countries. Its carbon bootprint is enormous. Like corporate supply chains, it relies upon an extensive global network of container ( … )
A meaningful strike in defence of the living world is, in part, a strike against the desire to raise our incomes and accumulate wealth: a desire shaped, more than we are probably aware, by dominant social and economic narratives. I see myself as striking in support of a radical and disturbing concept: Enough. Individually and collectively, it is time to decide what enough looks like, and how to know when we’ve achieved it.
Left, Center and Right: We’re All in Denial About Climate Change .. byTed Rall .. If you really believe that the planet is becoming uninhabitable, if you think you are about to die, you don’t march peacefully through the streets holding signs and chanting slogans begging the corrupt scoundrels who haven’t done a damn thing for decades to wake up and do something. You identify the politicians and corporate leaders who are killing us, you track them down and you use whatever force is necessary to make them stop. Nothing less than regime change stands a chance of doing the job.
There’s a name for this approach, coined by the Belgian philosopher Ingrid Robeyns: limitarianism. Robeyns argues that there should be an upper limit to the amount of income and wealth a person can amass. Just as we recognise a poverty line, below which no one should fall, we should recognise a riches line, above which no one should rise. This call for a levelling down is perhaps the most blasphemous idea in contemporary discourse but her arguments are sound. Surplus money allows some people to exercise inordinate power over others, in the workplace, in politics, and above all in the capture, use and destruction of natural wealth. If everyone is to flourish, we cannot afford the rich. Nor can we afford our own aspirations, that the culture of wealth maximisation encourages. The grim truth is that the rich are able to live as they do only because others are poor: there is neither the physical nor ecological space for everyone to pursue private luxury. Instead we should strive for private sufficiency, public luxury. Life on earth depends on moderation.
shared with thanks from www.monbiot.com (inserts and illustrations added.)
An alliance of non-hierarchical groups formed over the last few months, the Green Anticapitalist Front is attempting to provide a link between the extensive anarchist experience of green direct action and the latest wave of climate change activism. Here, the group outlines its background and ideas for future activity.
note> This post was 1st made as a copiable flyer HERE
No Government Will Save the Planet for Us
by Crimethinc From September 20 to 27, tens of thousands will take to the streets to denounce the causes of climate change and call on governments to address what may be the most drastic crisis facing humanity in the 21st century.
These mass actions will showcase the growing anger of a new generation that has known nothing but crisis, war, and the threat of environmental collapse.
We have prepared the following text as a flier encouraging climate activists to consider how to interrupt the causes of climate change via direct action rather than petitioning the state to do solve the problem for us. Please print these out and distribute them at climate protests and everywhere else you can. Continue reading “The Wrong ICE is Melting, The Wrong Amazon is Burning”
101 East investigates how the illegal wildlife trade is wiping out rare species on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi.
Monkeys, butterflies, bats, snakes and a dazzling assortment of birds – the forests on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi are known as the ‘Galapagos of Asia’
…… But for how much longer?
Humanity’s impact is now endangering the survival of Sulawesi’s creatures, many of which are found nowhere else in the world.
“80 to 90 percent of the wildlife in Sulawesi is facing extinction. We are sleepwalking into ecological disaster,” says Billy, who works at the Tasikoki Wildlife Refuge.
”The extinction of the animals is part of climate and environmental breakdown caused by rampant exploitation for personal and corporate profit, imposed from outside by a kleptocratic State. Autonomous government of the islands would grant a stake to local people, along with strict environmental controls and suppression of plundering Corporations”.
Komodo dragons face extinction
A range of animals, from orangutans, sun bears and birds to crocodiles, can be found at the refuge. All of them have been taken from traffickers or people who kept them illegally as pets.
But Billy says the demand for “bushmeat” poses the biggest threat to animals.
“Mostly they are being caught from the wild, from the forest, for bushmeat … to be served on a plate as food,” he says.
More and more people are realizing that irreversible Climate change is happening now. This coincides with the far right takeover of the Brazilian State, hitching it to the insane policies of greed and destruction of the US Regime. But the militarist and misogynist Brazilian right is not yet all powerful. We can still exert pressure in many ways, perhaps in Europe by supporting threats to cancel the upcoming EU/Mercosur trade agreement if the Brazilian regime continues its policies and its campaign to destroy the Amazon Rainforest, which belongs to nobody and us all.
Amazon burning: Brazil reports record surge in forest fires
Brazilian Amazon beset by 9,500 new forest fires since Thursday, prompting fresh scrutiny of President Bolsonaro’s environmental stewardship.
Fires raging in Brazil‘s Amazon rainforest have hit a record high number this year, according to new data from the country’s space research agency, as concerns grow over President Jair Bolsonaro‘s management of the environment.
People are deliberately starting fires in the #AmazonRainforest to illegally deforest indigenous land for cattle ranching
Pataxó woman: “These assholes came in and burned down [our reservation]… I want all of the media here to see this” pic.twitter.com/uGFp7RItHK
Nearly 73,000 fires were recorded between January and August, compared with 39,759 in all of 2018, the National Institute for Space Research (INPE) said on Monday. The surge marks an 83 percent increase over the same period last year and is the highest since INPE records began in 2013.
Satellite images spotted more than 9,500 new forest fires since Thursday alone, mostly in the Amazon basin, home to the world’s largest tropical forest and seen as vital to slowing the pace of global warming.
Establishment attitudes towards XR have been hardening. This week, a report co-authored by a former head of the Met Police’s Counter Terrorism Command warned of XR’s ‘subversive agenda… rooted in the political extremism of anarchism, eco-socialism and radical anti-capitalist environmentalism’.
The report calls for a ‘far more proactive’ police response, new anti-protest legislation, more prosecutions, and demands that ‘politicians and public figures should avoid endorsing, legitimising, or meeting with Extinction Rebellion’.
Activists ask Londoners to withhold 22 percent of their council tax to protest slow action on ‘climate emergency’…….
rs21 members have been getting involved around the UK, and trying to find out why XR has got the authorities so rattled…
Leeds
Watch Al Jackson‘s video interview with an XR activist in Leeds who explained why people had set up camp for the week. ‘We can’t hide from the facts any more’, she said. ‘The people in charge…need to get moving, and if they don’t, it’s time for them to step down.’
Addressing climate catastrophe needs to be part of a wider vision for change: ‘We need a redistribution of finances anyway… We’re living in an unfair society.’
The Free 