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Climate action shouldn’t mean choosing between personal and political responsibility

January 30, 2020

Climate action shouldn’t mean choosing between personal and political responsibility

© fotografixx / iStock

Can your individual behaviour make a real difference to the environment? And should you be expected to voluntarily change your life in the face of our worsening environmental crises? Some argue this emphasis on personal responsibility is a distraction from the real culprits: companies and governments.

We often treat the decisions to find alternative ways of living more sustainably and to pursue political resistance against big polluters and inactive governments as separate. But our recent research found that the relationship between alternatives and resistance is really far more complex. One can often lead to the other.

Previous studies have shown that taking individual responsibility for the environment or developing green alternatives often go hand in hand with political action. Our research suggests that this relationship can form over time, and that when people change their lifestyles for environmental reasons this can galvanise their political action more generally. But we also found that this doesn’t always happen and that bringing the two together can be difficult.

Our first study, carried out with Soetkin Verhaegen of UCLouvain in Belgium, looked at the environmental actions of a group of over 1,500 politically interested Belgians between 2017 and 2018. We found that citizens who took individual actions such as buying ethical products, changing how they travelled or producing their own food or energy, became more politically active over time. This included interacting with political institutions (for example, contacting elected politicians) and other actions such as taking part in protests.

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Global Warming Agenda to Create Authoritarian Government

November 9, 2018

Global Warming Agenda to Create Authoritarian Government

Back in 1996, the former Soviet Union President Mikhail Gorbachev expressed the real truth behind the Global Warming agenda. He said that using climate alarmism could advance the socialist Marxist objectives to restore the power of government. He said: “The threat of environmental crisis will be the international disaster key to unlock the New World Order.” Essentially, this was revealing what I have encountered many times. You create an emergency and then convince the people they MUST surrender more freedom to be safe. What Gorbachev was sayings was, in reality, a path to restoring the U.S.S.R.’s economic and political power.

Those in power always seek more power because they really cannot control the economy nor society. It is the same reason why the bankers always fail is their attempted manipulation. Just as we are now finally reading about bribes that were paid by people at Goldman Sachs to those in Malaysia, they have been allegedly bribing officials around the world to manipulate markets. Even the allegations they made about me that I manipulated the world economy because they lost pointing the finger at me and our model saying I had too much influence after they lost on the whole Russian manipulation back in 1998. This is their mindset. They believe that they can remain in control by expanding power.

To expand power over the general public, they need a crisis. Previously, it was the cold war to keep us frightened and looking to government to protect us. First, it was the Red Scare and communists were everywhere so they launched investigations called the McCarthy Hearings. Then as a child in school, we had drills for a nuclear attack and were told to hide under our desks, as if that would really do something.

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UK scientists risk prison to urge action

November 1, 2018

UK scientists risk prison to urge action

Orangutans are among the most endangered ape species. Image by Erik-Jan Leusink on Unsplash

A group of British scientists and their supporters is willing to risk a prison term to press governments to tackle climate change and environmental crisis.

LONDON, 31 October, 2018 − A growing number of British academics, writers and activists say they are ready to go to prison in support of their demands for action on the environment.

Scientists are not normally renowned for their political activism, and the UK is hardly a hotbed of determined and risky protest against its rulers. But, if this group of nearly 100 British scientists and their backers is right, all that may be on the brink of changing.

Today sees the launch of ExtinctionRebellion, which describes itself as an international movement using mass civil disobedience to force governments to enter World War Two-level mobilisation mode, in response to climate breakdown and ecological crisis.

The group is launching a Declaration of Rebellion against the UK government “for criminal inaction in the face of climate change catastrophe and ecological collapse” at the Houses of Parliament in central London.

“We need ExtinctionRebellion as part of the mosaic of responses to the extremely precarious situation we now find ourselves in”

From today it promises “repeated acts of disruptive, non-violent civil disobedience” if the government does not respond seriously to its demands, and says “there will be mass arrests.”

“Now is the time because we are out of time. There is nothing left to lose.”

The group’s demands include the declaration by the UK government of a state of emergency, action to create a zero carbon economy by 2025, and the establishment of a national assembly of “ordinary people” to decide what the zero carbon future will look like.

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Trade Deals and the Environmental Crisis

May 14, 2016

Trade Deals and the Environmental Crisis

With the release of leaked documents from the TTIP (Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership) ‘trade’ deal Greenpeace framed its conclusions more diplomatically than I will: the actions of the U.S. political leadership undertaken at the behest of American corporate ‘leaders’ and their masters in the capitalist class make it among the most profoundly destructive forces in human history. At a time when environmental milestones pointing to irreversible global warming are being reached on a daily basis, the U.S. political leadership’s response is to pronounce publicly that it favors environmental resolution while using ‘trade’ negotiations to assure that effective resolution never takes place.

Those representing the U.S. in these negotiations are mainly business lobbyists who have been given the frame of state power to promote policies that benefit the businesses they represent. The thrust of the agreements is to enhance corporate power through legal mechanisms including patents, intellectual property rights and ISDS (Investor-State Dispute Settlement) provisions that create supranational judiciaries run by corporate lawyers for the benefit of corporations. Shifting the power to regulate greenhouse gas emissions to the corporations producing them precludes effective regulation in the public interest. The position that environmental harms must be proven before regulations are implemented leaves a dead planet as the admissible evidence.

U.S. President Barack Obama is both the most articulate American politician urging action on climate change and the central Liberal proponent of the trade agreements. The apparent paradox isn’t difficult to understand— the trade agreements will be legally binding on signatory states while Mr. Obama’s statement of the problem won’t be. As evidence of global warming mounts the Republican tactic of denial is looking more and more delusional. By articulating the problem Mr. Obama poses Democrats as the solution while handing the power to curtail greenhouse gas emissions to business lobbyists and corporate lawyers.

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Olduvai IV: Courage
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Olduvai II: Exodus
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