Adam Ramsay: World leaders failed us at COP26. But change doesn’t come from glitzy conferences
“Ultimately, you look at the global economy that we've created over the last 40 years, the neoliberal global economy – that's what’s driving climate change. And no wonder, because the logic at the heart of that economy is that there is no right more important than the right to make profit..."
NB: An excellent article. Nothing short of mass global civil disobedience and satyagraha will make a difference. The world's political systems have degenerated into tyrannical plutocracies. Power-hungry con-men rule over us with intimidation and open defiance of the laws and constitutions that brought them to power. They use religion, culture and nation-worship to prevent us from confronting the most dangerous situation humanity has faced since the invention of the atom bomb.
The differences between all our governments is skin-deep; the truth is that our state systems are either lawless, or giving way rapidly to lawlessness - and that the only master they recognise is corporate capital. They are impervious to the human and ecological costs of so-called 'development'. Noam Chomsky has warned us that its either internationalism or extinction. The younger generation now has nothing to lose but its future on a sustainable Earth. Fight back or perish. The ozone layer doesn't care about our petty moronic culture wars. DS
World leaders failed us. But change doesn’t come from glitzy conferences
Copenhagen was a failure that demotivated activists, while Paris merely placated them. But Glasgow has radicalised a generation. In theory, world leaders have been in Glasgow over the past fortnight to negotiate how to reduce emissions of these astonishingly potent gases. In reality, most seemed more interested in building soft power and blaming someone else. But what they don’t seem to understand is that however much human power they accrue, it will be nothing next to the might of CO2, CH4, NO2 and O3, with their firm, covalent bonds forming a tight blanket around the only home we’ve ever known…
If it wasn’t for the
greenhouse effect, the Earth would be as cold and dead as the far side of the
moon.
The pulses of energy
released by the sun’s gravity smashing together hydrogen nuclei and fusing them
into helium atoms have to travel the same 150 million kilometres to get to both
the Earth and the moon. They arrive at each as the same mix of ultraviolet,
infrared and visible light. At both, they heat up rocks, which aren’t so
dissimilar, which absorb that energy and emit it as warm, infrared radiation,
with luxurious, long wavelengths.
But from the moon,
this warmth slips freely back into space. On Earth, it has to navigate an
atmosphere.
Oxygen and nitrogen
particles, which make up 99.03% of our air, are tiny things, even by molecular
standards. Just as thickets of grass don’t trip up ambling giraffes, these
gases don’t interfere with reflected heat waves, which can straddle as much as
a millimetre. Nor, for that matter, does argon, which makes up another 0.93%....
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/why-cop26-gave-me-hope/
Seamus
Heaney’s Advice to the Young
Kiss the Ground Film Trailer (2020) / What's the big deal about soil? / Living Soil Film
George Monbiot: Extinction’s Collaborators
Sam Kriss:
'Neoliberalism' isn't a left-wing insult but a monstrous system of inequality
Climate crisis: economists ‘grossly
undervalue young lives’
Hundreds of global civil society
representatives walk out of Cop26 in protest
JOHN BUELL: Living on a Newly
Unrecognizable Planet
Chomsky: Internationalism or Extinction
Earthly
Anecdotes: an alternative to the doom-saying of our times
Reynard Loki - Here’s a major lesson from
the pandemic: We can save the planet from climate change
This
obscure energy treaty is the greatest threat to the planet you’ve never heard
of
Erin
Brockovich - Plummeting sperm counts, shrinking penises: toxic chemicals
threaten humanity
David Cox - The
planet's prodigious poo problem
Owen Jones: Why don’t we treat the climate crisis with
the same urgency as coronavirus?
World military expenditure grows to $1.8
trillion in 2018
Start-up devours pollution with new plastic
recycling method
Call to
Earth and the extraordinary people working for a more sustainable future
Anna
Fletcher: Indian student creates a brick made from recycled plastic
Scientists Accidentally Create A Plastic-Eating
Enzyme
