A 2016 peace agreeement with the Marxist insurgents of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Farc) with its provisions for land reform and rural development, many of the nation’s poor saw it as a chance for social justice. But such hopes went unrealized and, with the current unrest entering its fourth week, some worry that Colombia’s social classes are as bitterly divided as they ever were.

At least 51 people have been killed, 43 at the hands of police and at least one shot dead by a group of men in civilian clothes. Dozens of disciplinary investigations have been launched, and three officers have been charged with murder. Residents of the wealthy neighbourhood of El Peñón, filled the pavements of a tree-lined avenue that flanks the city’s river. In the shadows of the vast condominium complexes replete with pools, gyms and 24-hour private security, crowds cheered a procession of officers from the police’s anti-riot unit, known by its Spanish acronym Esmad, which has been blamed for much of the bloodshed.

Antonio González, a business owner, said: “The police and the army are protecting us from protesters and indigenous people that have come to vandalize our property and threaten our community.”

“We’re seen as enemies by the establishment in Colombia and that’s nothing new,” said Aida Quilcue, an indigenous leader. “Because we represent the poor and ignored in this country.”

Colombia, with its vast and entrenched inequality, has long been defined by class boundaries. Cities are divided into strata, or estratos, with the intention that utility bills and other services can be adjusted accordingly. But in reality, the estratos usually serve as castes that make social climbing impossible, with indigenous and Afro-Colombian communities most often trapped.

“A large part of the Colombian establishment doesn’t understand that these calls for change are coming from the people in the streets of cities, and not from an armed guerrilla group in the countryside,” said Carlos González, a professor of sociology at the Universidad del Valle in Cali.

Amid one of the longest lockdowns in the world, the number of Colombians living in extreme poverty grew by 2.8 million people last year. Red rags were hung outside homes, in a desperate signal that those inside were hungry. And as people got poorer, they also got sicker, with those from the poorest estrato 10 times more likely to be hospitalized or die from Covid-19 than those from the wealthiest.

“If you’re from estrato 1, the only thing you can dream of is getting out,” said Yuliana Ospina, an out-of-work manicurist in Siloé, a downtrodden neighbourhood that straddles the city’s western hills.

Colombia’s class war turns hot on the streets of Cali | Colombia | The Guardian

 Six new audio uploads have been added to the website, as follows –

FAQ The Walking Dead – Paddy Shannon, 24th March, 2021

FAQ Re-imagining the Socialist Standard – Paddy Shannon, 21st April 2021

The Climate and Biodiversity Crisis – Glenn Morris, 23rd April 2021

FAQ Favourite films for socialists – Paddy Shannon, 28th April 2021

May Day – Bill Martin and Howard Moss, 30th April 2021

Is class consciousness a thing of the past? – Anton Pruden, 7th May 2021

“There shall be no buying and selling of the earth, nor of the fruits thereof…The earth is to be planted, and the fruits reaped and carried into barns and store-houses, by the assistance of every family. And if any man or family want corn or-other provision they may go to the store-houses and fetch without money. If they want a horse to ride, go into the fields in summer, or to the common stables in winter, and receive one from the keepers; and when your journey is performed, bring him where you had him, without money. If any want food or victuals, they may either go to the butchers’ shops, and receive what they want without money; or else go to the flocks of sheep or herds of cattle, and take and kill what meat is needful for their families, without buying and selling. And the reason why all the riches of the earth are a common stock is this, because the earth, and the labours thereupon, are managed by common assistance of every family, without buying and selling; as is shewn how more largely in the office of overseers for trades and the law for store-houses…Store-houses shall be built and appointed in all places, and be the common stock.

There shall be store-houses in all places, both in the country and in cities, to which all the fruits of the earth, and other works made by tradesmen, shall be brought, and from thence delivered out again to particular families, and to everyone as they want for their use; or else to be transported by ship to other lands, to exchange for those things which our land will not or does not afford.

For all the labours of husbandmen and tradesmen within the land, or by navigation to or from other lands, shall be all upon the common stock. And as every one works to advance the common stock, so every one shall have a free use of any commodity in the store-house, for his pleasure and comfortable livelihood without buying and selling or restraint from any…The store-houses shall be every man’s substance, and not any one’s.” – Gerrard Winstanley

The World Socialist Movement re-affirms that all peoples should seek their emancipation, not as members of nations or religions or ethnic groups, but as human beings, as members of the human race. They should unite to abolish the division of the world into so-called nation-states and to establish a World Co-operative Commonwealth in which we will all be free and equal members – citizens of the world, not subjects of nation-states.

As an organisation which campaigns exclusively for socialism (as we understand it of course) we are in a unique position to know how people react to the word. Many more people think that Russia was socialist than agree with our definition of socialism.



Many think that we should therefore give up the word and find some other term to describe our aim.

Don’t think that this hasn’t occurred to us.

 Various other terms have been suggested—”world co-operative commonwealth”, “world of free access“. Others, outside our ranks, have come up with “economic democracy”, “self-managed society”, “free society”.



Our experience is that when people first hear us saying we stand for socialism, most do indeed take us to be standing for “state ownership and rule by a socialist party” (a far broader concept than what existed in Russia)

However, when we explain what we do stand for, quite a number say “oh, you mean true socialism” or “pure communism”. Significantly, those who have experimented with other terms are often met with the same reaction.



This reflects the fact that, despite the former regime in Russia dragging the name of socialism through the mud by associating it with dictatorship, secret police, gulags and the rest, to many people the word “socialism” still retains an association with maybe vague ideas of social justice, equality, democracy, community and production for use not profit. In other words, despite Russia, socialism still has an underlying positive image for many people.

Besides, we are part of an unbroken tradition going back to those who first used the word and which has retained the original meaning they gave to it despite and in face of Russia and Labour and similar governments. Why should we surrender the word, especially as Russia has failed and Labour-type parties are now openly pro-capitalist?

The field is now free for us to assert the word’s original meaning. A society where the means of production belong to everybody and run by democratic councils, that’s socialism. With common ownership, nobody or no institution exercises exclusive ownership rights over resources; it is, in effect a condition of “no ownership”. Further, with common ownership, what is produced, as well as the means to produce it, is commonly owned, so that it does not need to be sold. It, too, is simply there, to be distributed to where it is needed, whether this be another workplace for further transformation into a finished product or a distribution centre to which people can come and take what they need. Common ownership means the disappearance of buying and selling and so also money, markets, banks, wages, profits and the rest.



To make decisions—i.e., to exercise democratic control—the members of society need to set in place procedures which allow every member of society the chance to have an equal say in the way things are run. Although this can be envisaged as involving “direct democracy” in neighbourhoods and workplaces, for wider decisions it would also have to involve “indirect” democracy via elected delegates. If such procedures for exercising “democratic control” did not exist, then it would not be possible to talk about “common ownership” either, since, in that case, ownership of the means of production would be in the hands of those who did have the power to make the decisions about how to use productive resources. So, for us “common ownership” and “democratic control” of the means of production by all the people are one and the same thing; they are in the end just two ways of describing the same situation.



Having said this, we don’t make a fetish of the word, “socialism”. On occasions we are prepared to use some other term to express what we stand for since what is important is what we stand for and not what it is called. So we have and do use alternative terms such as “world co-operative commonwealth”.

“Omnia Sunt Communia“, or “everything in common”, a quote attributed to the 15th century German rebel leader Thomas Müntzer

The progress of socialism is governed by the advance of socialist thought among the workers. The socialist movement of to-day cannot bring socialism. The co-operative commonwealth can only be inaugurated by the majority action of the workers. Steadily the workers move along the road to-wards socialism. Circumstances compel them to take that road. Economic laws operate whether they are known or not, but if we understand their operation we can bend them to our purpose and assist society along the course it tends to travel. As a socialists we must help bring this knowledge to our fellow workers.

The shackles of the wage slave and the whip of the master symbolise the reign of capital. Not until slave and master have both disappeared, and forever, and the equal freedom of all has been established, can we lay any proper claim to the term civilisation. The cooperative commonwealth is not dream but entirely within the realm of the possible. This new world will not arrive without the aid of human endeavour. It means hard work. It involves courage. It presupposes earnest convictions. Its goal is industrial freedom and independence that the world has never known and can never know until cooperative labor, solving every problem and surmounting every obstacle in industrial affairs, achieves emancipation. Under the wages system there is no independence for those who toil, because independence means exemption from control by others, the direction of one’s own affairs without interference. There is not in the world a wage-worker who is independent. He or she must not only work to live, but always under conditions dictated by another person. His or her life and the lives of those dependent upon his work are absolutely under the control of others. This is not the land of the free but the home of the slave.

 “Read! Think! Study!” Working people should be ashamed to follow leaders. They may betray. Unions should be educational to spread economic knowledge. Ignorance is slavery. Intelligence is liberty. Socialism is no utopian dream, nor the product of imagination and not a mirage of the desert to allure and vanish, but a theory of life in which the humblest individual owns him or herself. The basis of this new cooperative commonwealth is the brotherhood of man, and the idea of brotherhood carries with it toleration and toleration means liberty of thought, liberty of opinion, liberty of action. We do not fear the man or woman that says I don’t agree with you. The only thing in this world we dread is ignorance. Think for yourself. If you oppose  us – so be it for we will have infinitely more respect for you than if you support the party without thinking for yourself.

We are not after office, we want socialism. We care little about office except in so far as it represents the triumph of socialism. Socialists are not afflicted with the kind of patriotism which makes the slaves of the nation itch to murder the slaves of another nation in the interest of a plutocracy that wields the same lash over them all. It seems not a little ironic that millions are so patriotic in a country in which the only interest they will have is six feet of dirt in a cemetery.

The World Socialist Movement declares that life, liberty, and happiness for every man, woman, and child are conditioned upon equal political and economic rights. That private ownership of the means of production and distribution of wealth has caused society to split into two distinct classes with conflicting interests, the small possessing class of capitalists or exploiters of the labour force of others and the ever-increasing large dispossessed class of wage-workers, who are deprived of the socially-due share of their product. Our present system divides society into two classes, the “have all” and the “have nothing” class, and that it is the great mass of the people that do all the useful work who belong to the “have nothing. That capitalism, the private ownership of the means of production, is responsible for the insecurity of subsistence, the poverty, misery, and degradation of the ever-growing majority of people. That the same economic forces which have produced and now intensify the capitalist system will compel the adoption of socialism, the common ownership of the means of production for the collective good and welfare, or result in the destruction of civilization. The WSM declares its object to be the establishment of a system of cooperative production and distribution, through the restoration and repossession to the people of all the means of production and distribution, to be administered by organised society in the interest of the whole people, and the complete emancipation of society from the domination of capitalism. Wage-workers with their historical mission to realise a new world should sever connection with all capitalist and reform parties.

The WSM does not hope for the establishment of social order through the increase of misery, but on the contrary expects its coming through the determined, united efforts of the workers of both city and country to gain and use the political power to that end. American socialism is only a branch of world socialism, as American capitalism is a branch of global capitalism. A socialist does not hate every capitalist individually (although many truly deserve our contempt), that some should be picked out as scapegoats while the economic power and political encroachment of all the others should be silently submitted to. It means that while we understand that every individual capitalist is the result of the present system as much as the wage worker, we still must fight the capitalists as a class, because the producers cannot reasonably expect anything but exploitation from the exploiters as a class. To achieve socialism we want to make use of our political liberty and take possession of the public powers.

The WSM will fight open and above-board everywhere and fight all capitalist parties alike. It cannot and will not assist capitalist politicians of one party in one state and of another party in a different state. In short, members of the WSM will be simply socialists, and nothing else.

“Each for all and all for each”

 In 2004, Hamas leaders, Ahmed Yassin and Abdel Aziz_al-Rantissi, offered to end armed resistance against Israel for a 10-year hudna (a truce) which could be re-newed indefinitely in exchange for a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem leaving all other issue such as the important right for refugees to return for future generations to negotiate. Israel’s response was to assassinate Yassin and al-Rantisi. 

In his article Peter Beinart, editor-at-large of Jewish Currents and  professor of Journalism and Political Science, looks at the principles and practicalities for the return of the Palestinian diaspora.

 The American Jewish Committee (AJC) not only endorsed the Dayton agreement but urged that it be enforced by US troops. The 1995 Dayton Agreement, which ended years of warfare between Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia, stated that “All refugees and displaced persons have the right freely to return to their homes of origin” and “to have restored to them property of which they were deprived in the course of hostilities.” 

Yet its  CEO, David Harris, has demanded that Palestinian refugees begin “anew” in “adopted lands.”  

In 2019, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) – the US’s most powerful pro-Israel lobbying group – applauded Congress for imposing sanctions aimed at forcing the Syrian government to, among other things, permit “the safe, voluntary, and dignified return of Syrians displaced by the conflict”.

That same year, the Union for Reform Judaism, in justifying its support for reparations for Black Americans, approvingly cited a UN resolution that defines reparations as including the right to “return to one’s place of residence”.

Jewish leaders also endorse the rights of return and compensation for Jews expelled from Arab lands.

 In 2013, Ronald Lauder, the president of the World Jewish Congress, claimed: “The world has long recognised the Palestinian refugee problem, but without recognising the other side of the story – the 850,000 Jewish refugees of Arab countries.” Arab Jews, he argued, deserve “equal rights and treatment under international law”. What they want is for the world to recognise Arab Jewish refugees’ rights to repatriation and compensation so Israel can trade away those rights in return for Palestinian refugees relinquishing theirs. 

Jewish leaders to cloak their opposition in the language of universal principle – “refugee status should not be handed down” – while in reality, they don’t adhere to this principle universally. Across the globe, refugee designations are frequently handed down from one generation to the next, yet Jewish organisations do not object. Jewish leaders who decry multigenerational refugee status when it applies to Palestinians celebrate it when it applies to Jews. In 2016, after Spain and Portugal offered citizenship to roughly 10,000 descendants of Jews expelled from the Iberian peninsula more than 500 years ago, the AJC’s associate executive director declared: “We stand in awe at the commitment and efforts undertaken both by Portugal and Spain to come to terms with their past.”

Israel and its allies insist that it has no legal or historical obligation to repatriate or compensate Palestinians; they also claim that doing so is impossible. Israel, the ADL notes, believes that “‘return’ is not viable for such a small state”. Veteran US Republican foreign policy official Elliott Abrams has called compensating all Palestinian refugees a “fantasy”. Too much time has passed, too many Palestinian homes have been destroyed, there are too many refugees. It is not possible to remedy the past. The irony is that when it comes to compensation for historical crimes, Jewish organisations have shown just how possible it is to overcome these logistical hurdles. And when it comes to effectively resettling large numbers of people in a short time in a small space, Israel leads the world.

 More than 50 years after the Holocaust, Jewish organisations negotiated an agreement in which Swiss banks paid more than $1bn to reimburse Jews whose accounts they had expropriated during the second world war. In 2018, the World Jewish Restitution Organization welcomed new US legislation to help Holocaust survivors and their descendants reclaim property in Poland. While the Holocaust, unlike the Nakba, saw millions murdered, the Jewish groups in these cases were not seeking compensation for murder. They were seeking compensation for theft. If Jews robbed en masse in the 40s deserve reparations, surely Palestinians do, too.

When Jewish organisations deem it morally necessary, they find ways to determine the value of lost property. So does the Israeli government, which estimated the value of property lost by Jewish settlers withdrawn from the Gaza Strip in order to compensate them. Such calculations can be made for property lost in the Nakba as well. UN resolution 194, which declared that Palestinian refugees were entitled to compensation “for loss of, or damage to, property”, created the United Nations Conciliation Commission for Palestine (UNCCP) to tally the losses. Using land registers, tax records and other documents from the British mandate, the UNCCP between 1953 and 1964 assembled what Randolph-Macon College historian Michael Fischbach has called “one of the most complete sets of records documenting the landholdings of any group of refugees in the 20th century”. In recent decades, those records have been turned into a searchable database and cross-referenced with information from the Israeli Land Registry. The primary barrier to compensating Palestinian refugees is not technical complexity. It’s political will.

On the  face of it, the notion that hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of Palestinians might return to what is now Israel seems absurd.  At the height of the Soviet exodus in the early 90s, when the Jewish state took in another 500,000 immigrants over four years. The number of returning Palestinian refugees could be substantially higher than that, or not. When Jews imagine Palestinian refugee return, most probably don’t imagine a modified version of Israel’s absorption of Soviet Jews. More likely, they imagine Palestinians expelling Jews from their homes. Given Jewish history, and the trauma that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has inflicted on both sides, these fears are understandable. But there is little evidence that they reflect reality. For starters, not many Israeli Jews live in former Palestinian homes, since, tragically, only a few thousand remain intact. More importantly, the Palestinian intellectuals and activists who envision return generally insist that significant forced expulsion of Jews is neither necessary nor desirable. Abu Sitta argues that “it is possible to implement the return of the refugees without major displacement to the occupants of their houses”. 

Palestinians  have begun imagining what might be required to absorb Palestinian refugees who want to return. One option would be to build where former Palestinian villages once stood since, according to Lubnah Shomali of the Badil Resource Center, which promotes Palestinian refugee rights, roughly 70% of those depopulated and destroyed in 1948 remain vacant. In many cases, the rural land on which they sat now constitutes nature reserves or military zones. The Palestinian geographer Salman Abu Sitta imagines a Palestinian Lands Authority, which could dole out plots in former villages to the families of those who lived there. He envisions many returnees “resuming their traditional occupation in agriculture, with more investment and advanced technology”. He’s even convened contests in which Palestinian architecture students build models of restored villages.

Palestinian historian Rashid Khalidi thought it unlikely that many refugees – most of whom now live in or near cities – would return to farming. Most would probably prefer to live in urban areas.

Badil Resource Center and Zochrot, an Israeli organisation that raises awareness about the Nakba, suggest two other options, both of which bear some resemblance to Israel’s strategy for settling Soviet immigrants in the 1990s. In that case, the government gave newcomers money for rent while also offering developers subsidies to rapidly build affordable homes. Now, Badil and Zochrot are suggesting a “fast track” in which refugees would be granted citizenship and a sum of money and then left to find housing on their own, or a slower track that would require refugees to wait as the government oversaw the construction of housing and other infrastructure designated for them near urban areas with available jobs. If a Jewish family owns a home once owned by a Palestinian, first the original Palestinian owner (or their heirs) and then the current Jewish owner would be offered the cash value of the home in return for relinquishing their claim. If neither accepted the payment, Zochrot activists Noa Levy and Eitan Bronstein Aparicio have suggested a further compromise: ownership of the property would revert to the original Palestinian owners, but the Jewish occupants would continue living there. The Palestinian owners would receive compensation until the Jewish occupants moved or died, at which point they would regain possession. In cases where Jewish institutions sit where Palestinian homes once stood – for instance, Tel Aviv University, which was built on the site of the destroyed village of al-Shaykh Muwannis – Zochrot has proposed that the Jewish inhabitants pay the former owners for the use of the land.

This all sounds daunting,  because it is. As fraught and imperfect as efforts at historical justice can be, it is worth considering what happens when they do not occur.

 Israel did not stop expelling Palestinians when its war for independence ended. It displaced close to 400,000 more Palestinians when it conquered the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in 1967 – roughly a quarter of whom only lived in the West Bank or Gaza because their families had fled there, as refugees, in 1948. Between 1967 and 1994, Israel rid itself of another 250,000 Palestinians through a policy that revoked the residencies of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza who left the territories for an extended period of time. Since 2006, according to Badil, almost 10,000 Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem have watched the Israeli government demolish their homes. By refusing to acknowledge the Nakba, the Israeli government and its diaspora Jewish allies prepared the ground for its perpetuation. And by refusing to forget the Nakba, Palestinians – and some dissident Israeli Jews – prepared the ground for the resistance that is now convulsing Jerusalem, and Israel-Palestine as a whole.

 Teshuvah, which is generally translated as “repentance”. Ironically enough, its literal definition is “return”. In Jewish tradition, return need not be physical; it can also be ethical and spiritual. Which means that the return of Palestinian refugees – far from necessitating Jewish exile – could be a kind of return for us as well, a return to traditions of memory and justice that the Nakba has evicted from organised Jewish life. 

The full article unedited and unabridged can be read here

A Jewish case for Palestinian refugee return | Palestinian territories | The Guardian

 This lengthy audio interview is well worth a close listening to.

https://cosmonautmag.com/2021/03/class-and-race-in-israel-palestine-with-emmanuel-farjoun/

At one time Arab workers in Israel we’re just a reserve army of labour. But now he says, in the meantime they have become as an essential, integral part of the Israeli economy without which it would collapse. That’s the main point he brings out in the interview and why he concludes that it gives them some leverage to demand full civil rights and how dependent on non-Jewish labour state of Israel is.

Most work that has no military significance is dominated by them not just construction but health, supermarkets, transport and other services (including even the prisons though these are run by Druze, a special minority, who also serve in the armed forces). And it’s not just cleaners but top managers; most doctors and hospital management are not Jews.

Farjoun’s argument is that this puts the non-Jews in a strong position not just in Israel but in the “Greater Israel” that already exists de facto as a state. He sees the way forward as the 50% non-Jewish subjects of the state of “Greater Israel” bringing pressure to get equal civil rights with its Jewish subjects, and that this will have some success because their of economic importance.

He is in effect saying that the non-Jews of Palestine (which includes Lesser Israel) should go for this rather than for an independent state; and this is what he expects will eventually happen however slowly as it’s what economic trends favour.

He also pointed out that half the Jewish population are in a sense themselves Arabs in that they came from Arab countries where they were Arabs — and Arab-speakers — whose religion happened to be Judaism just as for others it happened to be Christianity. Farjoun points out that in Israel you can’t tell the difference between a Jew and an Arab as they both look and dress the same.

The vital caveat is, however, it would amount to the Zionists having to abandon their ideology of Judaisizing Palestine. But the Boers in South Africa thought they could rule for ever but in the end were undermined by the capitalist economy. Farjoun expects the Zionists to be too.

 A part of the Greenland ice sheet is on the brink of a tipping point, after which accelerated melting would become inevitable even if global heating was halted, according to new research. Rising temperatures caused by the climate crisis have already seen trillions of tonnes of Greenland’s ice pour into the ocean.

The new analysis detected the warning signals of a tipping point in a 140-year record of ice-sheet height and melting rates in the Jakobshavn basin, one of the five biggest basins in Greenland and the fastest-melting. The prime suspect for a surge in melting is a vicious circle in which melting reduces the height of the ice sheet, exposing it to the warmer air found at lower altitudes, which causes further melting. The study shows destabilisation of this ice sheet is under way.

It might already be at the point of no return, or be about to cross it in the coming decades, the scientists said.

“We’re at the brink, and every year with CO2 emissions continuing as usual exponentially increases the probability of crossing the tipping point,” said Niklas Boers at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, Germany, who conducted the research with Martin Rypdal from the Arctic University of Norway. “It might have passed [the tipping point], but it’s not clear. However, our results suggest there will be substantially enhanced melting in the near future, which is worrying.” He continued, “We might be seeing something that is happening in many parts of Greenland, but we just don’t know for sure, because we don’t have the high-quality data for other parts.”

Large-scale melting of the Greenland ice sheet would have long-term global consequences, beyond rising sea levels. It could halt the Gulf Stream ocean current, with potential knock-on effects on the Amazon rainforest and tropical monsoons.

Greenland ice sheet on brink of major tipping point, says study | Glaciers | The Guardian

 Just twenty companies are responsible for producing over half of all the single-use plastic waste in the world, fuelling the climate crisis and creating an environmental catastrophe. Eleven of the companies are based in Asia, four in Europe, three in North America, one in Latin America, and one in the Middle East. 

“Plastic pollution is one of the greatest and most critical threats facing our planet,” said Dr Andrew Forrest AO, chairman of the Minderoo Foundation. “The current outlook is set to get worse and we simply cannot allow these producers of fossil fuel-derived plastics to continue as they have done without check. With our oceans choking and plastic impacting our health, we need to see firm intervention from producers, governments and the world of finance to break the cycle of inaction.”

ExxonMobil is the greatest single-use plastic waste polluter in the world, contributing 5.9m tonnes to the global waste mountain, concludes the analysis by partners including Wood Mackenzie, the London School of Economics and Stockholm Environment Institute. The largest chemicals company in the world, Dow, which is based in the US, created 5.5m tonnes of plastic waste, while China’s oil and gas enterprise, Sinopec, created 5.3m tonnes.

The enormous plastic waste footprint of the top 20 global companies amounts to more than half of the 130m metric tonnes of single-use plastic thrown away in 2019. Single-use plastics are made almost exclusively from fossil fuels, driving the climate crisis, and because they are some of the hardest items to recycle, they end up creating global waste mountains. Just 10%-15% of single-use plastic is recycled globally each year.

“An environmental catastrophe beckons: much of the resulting single-use plastic waste will end up as pollution in developing countries with poor waste management systems,” the report’s authors said. “The projected rate of growth in the supply of these virgin polymers … will likely keep new, circular models of production and reuse ‘out of the money’ without regulatory stimulus.”

The plastic waste crisis grows every year. In the next five years, global capacity to produce virgin polymers for single-use plastics could grow by more than 30%.

The report said the plastics industry across the world had been allowed to operate with minimal regulation and limited transparency for decades. “These companies are the source of the single-use plastic crisis: their production of new ‘virgin’ polymers from oil, gas and coal feedstocks perpetuates the take-make-waste dynamic of the plastics economy.”

The report said this undermines the shift to a circular economy, including the production of recycled polymers from plastic waste, reusing plastic and using substitute materials. Just 2% of single-use plastic was made from recycled polymers in 2019.

Twenty firms produce 55% of world’s plastic waste, report reveals | Plastics | The Guardian

Rock Feilding-Mellen, the Tory councillor in charge of the Grenfell Tower refurbishment, was informed of plans to save money by swapping zinc cladding for aluminium in 2014 but told police he only knew about it after the June 2017 fire. The switch led to the use of combustible cladding that became the main cause of the fire’s spread. 

The aluminium panels selected saved around £300,000 but contained a plastic core that fuelled the inferno at the 24-storey council block.

Feilding-Mellen told the inquiry that cost was not the priority. In 2013, when RBKC was considering whether to approve a budget increase to £9.7m, Feilding-Mellen queried the budget increase. In 2014, when the  tenant management organisation  was calculating savings from changes to the cladding package, it told its cost consultant: “We need good costs for Cllr Feilding-Mellen.” 

Grenfell: councillor was told about cheaper cladding plan before fire | Grenfell Tower inquiry | The Guardian

  Fatih Birol, the IEA’s executive director and one of the world’s foremost energy economists, told the Guardian: “If governments are serious about the climate crisis, there can be no new investments in oil, gas and coal, from now – from this year.” 

He said strong new policies were needed from governments around the world: “More and more countries are coming up with net zero commitments, which is very good, but I see a huge and growing gap between the rhetoric [from governments] and the reality…If governments are planning investments, it is up to them. But if governments make commitments to net zero emissions, they should see what the implications are.”

 It’s strongest warning yet on the need to drastically scale back fossil fuels.

 The International Energy Agency (IEA) also called for no new fossil-fuel cars to be sold beyond 2035, and for global investment in energy to more than double from $2tn (£1.42tn) a year to $5tn (£3.54tn.

 Few governments intend to halt fossil-fuel exploration. The UK is licensing new oil and gas fields in the North Sea, China is building coal-fired power plants, and oil companies are still investing in new output.

Pledges made by governments in the run-up to the Cop26 UN climate talks, due to be held in Glasgow this November, are also inadequate and need to be strengthened if the world is to limit temperature rises to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels, he said.

Birol made it clear that the technology needed to reach net zero is neither blue-sky nor futuristic. He said: “These technologies are already invented, but not yet in full development. Innovation is critical, but the technologies are here with us.”

The crucial new technologies in development are: advanced batteries, particularly for use in electric vehicles; hydrogen; and carbon capture. These will be needed because some sectors are especially hard to decarbonise, such as steel and cement manufacturing, aviation and shipping, and those using heavy-duty road vehicles. Birol said that most of the rest of the global economy could be decarbonised using economical technologies that are already in widespread use, such as wind and solar power. 

The IEA has set out 400 milestones for governments to reach, including the phasing out of new fossil-fuel cars from 2035 and the decarbonisation of global electricity generation by 2040. Its analysis also took into account a global population rise of about 2 billion people, as well as the need to supply electricity to 785 million people who do not have access to it, and clean cooking to the 2.6 billion people who currently lack it. Doing so would cost about $40bn a year, or 1% of global annual energy sector investment, and would cut premature deaths from indoor air pollution by about 2.5m a year.

 No new oil, gas or coal development if world is to reach net zero by 2050, says world energy body | Fossil fuels | The Guardian