We live in a time when the confrontation of reality with reason requires us to dwell on apocalyptic questions. Unfortunately, as Fredric Jameson observed over a decade ago, "It seems to be easier for us today to imagine the thoroughgoing deterioration of the earth and of nature than the breakdown of late capitalism." Jameson's comment highlights the fact that our ongoing inability to deal with the challenge posed by climate change is ultimately a failure of political imagination. What we need today, if we heed scientific research that tells us that prolongation of our current behavior will lead inexorably to the collapse of the world as we know it, is an ecological revolution - a thoroughgoing transformation in the relation...>>
After Copenhagen
Climate change is on every politician's lips, and every marketer is "going green." But is significant action in the cards? Periscope begins a series of articles that think beyond the impasse of Copenhagen.
The simple three steps required to escape the greenhouse-gas governance gridlock between global and especially US elites are easy to see, though United Nations officials and nearly all the world's climate negotiators refuse to take them: • Make dramatic emissions cuts - 45% below 1990 levels in the advanced capitalist economies within a decade, so as to reduce the temperature rise to less than 1 degree centigrade in line with scientific demands and the calls of climate change victims.• Acknowledge the vast climate debt the wealthy North owes the under-emitting South - estimated at $400 bn/year by 2020.• Decommission the destructive carbon markets - which have proven incapable of fair, rational and non-corrupt trading. The elites prefer other routes: shifting, stalling, and...>>
Definitions and ImplicationsOver the last decade, the word "sustainability" has become a compulsively used word to get at some unspecified but ubiquitous notion of an environmentally ethical and conscious way of life. Businesses, cities, neighborhoods, buildings, and lifestyles can all be praised as "sustainable" or criticized as "unsustainable." Moreover, there are substantial resources and interests behind the word. Governments, businesses, and civil organizations on all scales are investing heavily in pursuit of "sustainability," perhaps because they genuinely believe that this pursuit will improve the quality of life, but quite evidently too because they believe it will give them a competitive advantage vis-Ã -vis their peers, or perhaps even function as a brand with which they can effectively market their activities. It...>>
PrologueScene: The dark, vaguely panoptic courtyard of Vestre Faengsel, one of the 'correction facilities' that has been turned into an aptly named 'climate prison' for the duration of the 'COP15' United Nations Conference on Climate Change in Copenhagen. The 'climate prisoners', activists largely arrested preemptively over the course of the summit, are out for their hour-long daily walk.Prisoner 1: So what are you in for? Prisoner 2: Conspiracy to commit and incite rioting, property destruction and disturbing public order. My next hearing's in two days. What about you?Prisoner 1: Don't know how long I'll be in here - got arrested 'preemptively' on Monday evening after the riot in Christiania. They said that I was standing next to a stone I was...>>
What happened after Copenhagen? Claims of success and blame for who collapsed the talks fly from many sides of many aisles. In his 18 December 2010 plenary speech to the heads of state attending the 15th Conference of the Parties (COP15) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) US President Barack Obama initially posited, "I believe we can act boldly, and decisively, in the face of a common threat." [1] Later the same evening, before departing from the Copenhagen airport, the US President presented a slightly less triumphal position, essentially confessing, "[T]his progress did not come easily, and we know that this progress alone is not enough...We've come a long way, but we have much further to...>>
On the eve of the UN's long-awaited Copenhagen climate summit, officials are pulling out all the stops to spin the conference as a success, no matter what actually happens. Barack Obama's announcement that he will briefly pass through Copenhagen was a headline story, as was China's commitment to reduce their economy's "carbon intensity," merely lowering their rate of increase in greenhouse gas emissions. Some are proclaiming the advantages of a non- binding "political" or "operational" agreement, as an incremental step toward reducing worldwide emissions. Others are preoccupied with the manufactured scandal stemming from some UK climate researchers' stolen emails. It's everything but what was once promised: the setting for a new binding global treaty to forestall catastrophic climate changes. It...>>
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