A famine in Somalia is almost inevitable. 

Martin Griffiths, the UN’s undersecretary-general for humanitarian affairs and emergency relief coordinator,  has questioned why billions of dollars pledged to tackle the climate crisis have not been used to fight famine in Somalia. Griffiths said he did not know where the promised $100bn (£87bn) a year to fight the impact of global heating in poorer countries had gone.

“The truth of the matter is that we are scrambling to try to understand where the climate money is that was promised a decade ago. Where is it? Who’s holding it and who is not delivering it to places like Somalia?” said Griffiths. “…We haven’t even managed to get to them the money that we pledged nobly some time ago for exactly this kind of purpose.”

Griffiths said he had “failed” to receive an answer when he asked governments how climate financing was decided and delivered. Griffiths said climate funding could have been used to dig wells and support livelihoods in the worst-affected areas of Somalia.

Somalia’s presidential envoy for drought response, Abdirahman Abdishakur Warsame, pointed out that the international community was failing Somalia. “Millions of children are malnourished, many will die, and we don’t have one penny of that climate fund,”

At the UN climate change conference in 2009, rich countries pledged to give low-income states $100bn a year by 2020 to mitigate and adapt to the climate crisis. The Green Climate Fund was created as a way to deliver the money but has had limited impact because rich countries often channel their financing through the World Bank or regional development banks. According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, which monitors donor contributions to climate financing, low-income countries received 8% of the money between 2016 and 2020.

Prof Lee White, Gabon’s environment and climate change minister, said the system was flawed. Donor countries self-report contributions and there is no clear way to trace how much money has been donated and where it has been spent, he said and explaining only a fraction of the money that rich countries say they have provided reaches the Green Climate Fund and even then applications for money come with overcomplicated criteria. He added, “…it often feels the system is designed to prevent you spending the funds on anything other than developed-nation consultants.”

Kevin Watkins, a former executive director of the Overseas Development Institute, said climate and development aid needed to be integrated, “We have a development finance system… which is somewhat competitive, with big agencies scrambling for the same pot of money, which is badly coordinated, and which, in all honesty, is failing to address the real climate risk challenges for countries at the sharp end of the crisis.” 

He said Somalia was an example of low-income countries being forced to rely on humanitarian aid when they had already entered a state of crisis instead of having earlier interventions that could have solved root problems.

Climate crisis funds not reaching countries in need, senior UN official says | Global development | The Guardian

 State laws will prevent 4.6 million Americans from voting in 2022 midterms election.

 The Sentencing Project released a new report which found that 4.6 million people, or one in every 50 adults, will be barred from voting in the 2022 midterms due to a felony conviction. 

The report, “Locked Out 2022: Estimates of People Denied Voting Rights Due to a Felony Conviction,” updates and expands on research The Sentencing Project released in 2020 analyzing the scope of felony disenfranchisement, as well as the state-level distribution of laws that ban people with previous felony convictions from voting.

Three out of four of the people disenfranchised are living in their communities, having fully completed their sentences or remaining supervised while on probation or parole.

 “…this report makes it clear that millions of our citizens will remain voiceless in the upcoming midterms,” said Amy Fettig, Executive Director of The Sentencing Project. “Felony disenfranchisement is just the latest in a long line of attempts to restrict ballot access, just like poll taxes, literacy tests and property requirements were used in the past. It is time for our country to guarantee the right to vote for people with felony convictions.”

One in 19 African Americans of voting age is disenfranchised, a rate 3.5 times greater than that of non-African Americans.More than one in 10 African American adults is disenfranchised in eight states – Alabama, Arizona, Florida, Kentucky, Mississippi, South Dakota, Tennessee, and Virginia.Although data on ethnicity in correctional populations are still unevenly reported, the report conservatively estimates that at least 506,000 Latinx Americans or – or 1.7 percent of the voting eligible population – are disenfranchised.Approximately 1,000,000 women are disenfranchised, comprising over one-fifth of the total disenfranchised population. 

“The climate crisis is killing us,” said the UN secretary general, António Guterres, responding to the report. “It is undermining not just the health of our planet, but the health of people everywhere – through toxic air pollution, diminishing food security, higher risks of infectious disease outbreaks, record extreme heat, drought, floods and more.” He added, “The science is clear: massive, commonsense investments in renewable energy and climate resilience will secure a healthier, safer life for people in every country.”

A report, by the Lancet Countdown group on health and climate change, is titled Health at the Mercy of Fossil Fuels, produced by almost 100 experts from 51 institutions spanning every continent says urgent, health-centred action to tackle global heating could save millions of lives a year and enable people to thrive rather than just survive, with cleaner air and better diets. The health of the world’s people is at the mercy of a global addiction to fossil fuels, according to a study. The report tracks 43 health and climate indicators, including exposure to extreme heat. It found that heat-related deaths in the most vulnerable populations – babies under a year old and adults over 65 – increased by 68% over the past four years compared with 2000-04.

The analysis reports an increase in heat deaths, hunger and infectious disease as the climate crisis intensifies, while governments continue to give more in subsidies to fossil fuels than to the poorer countries experiencing the impacts of global heating. The Lancet report also found that 80% of the 86 governments assessed were subsidising fossil fuels, providing a collective $400bn in 2019. These subsidies were bigger than national health spending in five countries, including Iran and Egypt, and more than 20% of health spending in another 16 countries.

The climate emergency is compounding the food, energy and cost of living crises, the report says. For example, almost half a trillion hours of work were lost in 2021 due to extreme heat. This mostly affected agricultural workers in poorer countries, cutting food supplies and incomes.

Dr Marina Romanello, the head of the Lancet Countdown and at University College London (UCL), said: “We are seeing a persistent addiction to fossil fuels. Governments and companies continue to favour the fossil fuel industry to the detriment of people’s health. Heatwaves are not only very uncomfortable, they are lethal for people that have increased vulnerabilities.”

Extreme heat also led to people being unable to work, with 470bn labour hours lost globally in 2021. 

“This is about a 40% increase from the 1990s and we estimate the associated income and economic losses at about $700bn,” she said. About 30% more land is now affected by extreme drought events, compared with the 1950s.

These impacts are leading to growing hunger, the report says. Hot periods in 2020 were associated with 98 million more people unable to get the food they needed, compared with the average from 1981-2010, and the proportion of the global population enduring food insecurity is also rising. 

“​The largest driver of this is the changing climate,” Romanello said.

Prof Elizabeth Robinson at the London School of Economics said: “This is particularly concerning given that global food supply chains have this year once again been revealed to be highly vulnerable to shocks [such as the war in Ukraine], manifesting in rapidly increasing food prices.”

The report also recorded the impact of the climate crisis on infectious diseases, finding that the periods when malaria could be transmitted became 32% longer in upland areas of the Americas and 15% longer in Africa over the past decade, compared with the 1950s. The likelihood of dengue transmission rose by 12% over the same period.

The report says the strategies of the 15 biggest oil and gas companies remain sharply at odds with ending the climate emergency, “regardless of their climate claims and commitments”.

Prof Paul Ekins at UCL said: “Current strategies from many governments and companies will lock the world into a fatally warmer future, tying us to the use of fossil fuels that are rapidly closing off prospects for a liveable world.”

Rapidly cutting fossil fuel burning would not only reduce global heating but deliver immediate health benefits, Romanello said, such as preventing a million or more early deaths caused by air pollution a year.

A move to more plant-rich diets in developed countries will halve emissions from red meat and milk production and prevent up to 11.5 million diet-related deaths a year, the report says.

“…We must change, otherwise our children face a future of accelerated climate change, threatening their very survival,” said Prof Anthony Costello, the co-chair of the Lancet Countdown. 

Global health at mercy of fossil fuel addiction, warn scientists | Climate crisis | The Guardian

One in three children, an estimated 774 million children, across the world are living with the dual impacts of poverty and high climate risk, according to a new report by Save the Children. In addition, across the globe, 183 million children face the triple threat of high climate risk, poverty and conflict.

‘Generation Hope: 2.4 billion reasons to end the global climate and inequality crisis’, found that while 80% of children are estimated to be affected by at least one extreme climate event a year, some are at particular risk because they also face poverty and so have less capacity to protect themselves and recover.

India has the highest total number of children both living in poverty and bearing the brunt of the climate crisis — up to 223 million children in total. It is followed by Nigeria and Ethiopia, with 58 million and 36 million children, respectively, living with this double burden.

The country with the highest percentage of children impacted by this double burden is South Sudan (87%), followed by the Central African Republic (85%) and Mozambique (80%).

A significant number of children – 121 million – experiencing the double threat of high climate risk and poverty live in higher-income countries, with 28 million of them in the world’s most affluent countries. More than two out of five of these children (12.3 million) live in the US or the UK.

The report also shows how these multiple, overlapping risks are linked to and exacerbate the current global food, nutrition and cost of living crisis that is causing 345 million people in 82 countries to face a severe lack of food.

Families across the world battle the worst global hunger crisis this century, fuelled by a deadly mix of poverty, conflict, climate change, and economic shocks, with the lingering impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic and the crisis in Ukraine further driving up food prices and the cost of living. 

One million people are facing famine across five countries, with estimates that one person is dying every four seconds of hunger.

Inger Ashing, CEO of Save the Children International, said, “Across the world, inequalities are deepening the climate emergency and its impacts, most notably for children and low-income households…”

Generation Hope: 2.4 billion reasons to end the global climate and inequality crisis [EN/AR] – World | ReliefWeb

Pledges to cut greenhouse gas emissions will lead to global heating of 2.5C, a level that would condemn the world to catastrophic climate breakdown, according to the United Nations. Only a handful of countries have strengthened their commitments substantially in the last year, despite having promised to do so at the Cop26 UN climate summit in Glasgow. The plans for emissions cuts countries submitted in Glasgow were inadequate to meet the 1.5C goal so they agreed a “ratchet” mechanism to toughen their targets year on year. However, few governments have updated their plans on emissions in line with 1.5C. Deeper cuts are needed to limit temperature rises to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels, which would avoid the worst ravages of extreme weather.

Simon Stiell, the executive secretary of the UN framework convention on climate change, said: “This does not go far enough, fast enough. This is nowhere near the scale of reductions required to put us on track to 1.5C. National governments must set new goals now and implement them in the next eight years.” He added, “This is not just about words on paper, this is about getting stuff done.” He continued, “At Glasgow last year, all countries agreed to revisit and strengthen their climate plans. The fact that only 24 new or updated climate plans were submitted since Cop26 is disappointing. Government decisions and actions must reflect the level of urgency, the gravity of the threats we are facing, and the shortness of the time we have remaining to avoid the devastating consequences of runaway climate change.”

Taryn Fransen, senior fellow at the World Resources Institute, said: “These reports sound the alarm that progress on climate commitments has slowed to a crawl since the Glasgow climate summit last year…on the whole national climate targets put the world on track to warm 2.4-2.6 C, which is dangerously high.”

Current emissions pledges will lead to catastrophic climate breakdown, says UN | Greenhouse gas emissions | The Guardian

 Worldwide, 820 million people rely on fishing for their livelihoods, according to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation. In some regions like west Africa, up to a quarter of the workforce are involved in fishing. Fish consumption also accounts for a sixth of the global population’s intake of animal proteins, and more than half in countries such as Bangladesh, Cambodia, the Gambia, Ghana, Indonesia, Sierra Leone and Sri Lanka.

More than 90% of global fisheries stocks are being fully exploited, overexploited or depleted, according to the UN. Illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing is a major driver of the marine ecosystem’s destruction and accounts for one-fifth of the global fisheries’ catches, worth up to $23.5bn (£20bn) annually, the third most lucrative natural resource crime after timber and mining. IUU fishing represents around 20% of the global fish catch, according to a 2013 report by the Pew Trust, thus playing a key role in overfishing. The greatest declines in fish stocks are expected to happen in the coastal regions that are most food insecure and more dependent on artisanal fishing for protein.

Developing countries are losing billions of dollars due to IUU fishing, which siphons off revenue through illicit financial flows, according to a new study by the Financial Transparency Coalition (FTC).

The study reveals that the top 10 companies involved in IUU fishing are responsible for nearly a quarter of all reported cases: eight are from China – led by Nasdaq-listed Pingtan Marine Enterprise Ltd – one is from Colombia and another from Spain.

The Spanish tuna giant Albacora SA emerges as Europe’s largest alleged IUU fishing company and has received millions of dollars in EU and other subsidies.

“Illegal fishing is a massive industry directly threatening the livelihoods of millions of people across the world, especially those living in poor coastal communities in developing countries already affected by the Covid-19 pandemic, the cost-of-living crisis and the impact of climate change,” said Matti Kohonen, one of the report’s authors and the executive director of the FTC.

 Global losses due to IUU fishing are estimated to be up to $50bn (£44bn), according to one study.

Africa is the most affected continent, losing some $11.2bn (£9.76bn) in revenue annually from IUU fishing while concentrating 48.9% of identified industrial and semi-industrial vessels involved in the practice, the FTC report found. Of that total, 40% are in west Africa alone, which has become a global epicentre for IUU fishing.

 Argentina loses between $2bn to $3.6bn (£1.74bn to £3.14bn) in terms of IUU fishing catch per year. Chile estimates its losses at $397m (£346m) and Indonesia’s are at $4bn (£3.49bn) annually, equivalent to the country’s annual net rubber exports, it concluded.

Kohonen said, “…vessel owners continue operating with complete impunity, using complex company structures and other schemes to hide their identity and evade prosecution”. Almost no countries require information about owners when registering vessels or requesting fishing licenses, meaning that those ultimately responsible for these activities are not punished – rather, fines are issued to the captains and crews of the vessels. Fishing vessels flagged to Asia represent 54.7% of reported IUU fishing by industrial and semi-industrial vessels, followed by Latin America (16.1%), Africa (13.5%) and Europe (12.8%).  8.76% of identified illegal vessels use flags of convenience such as Panama and the Cayman Islands, which have lax controls and low or no effective taxes.

 Peoples Temple was a church founded in 1954 in Indianapolis by a man named Jim Jones. In the mid-1960s the church moved to California. In 1974 it leased land in the rainforest of Guyana, near the northern coast of South America, for an agricultural settlement that came to be known as Jonestown. It was there, in November 1978, that over 900 people were poisoned or otherwise killed  – an act that Jones glorified as ‘revolutionary suicide’ but more closely resembled a massacre. 

Although Peoples Temple had the trappings of a Christian church, the doctrine preached by Jones combined Christian and Oriental religious beliefs with political ideas taken from the American Communist Party. Jones claimed to be a reincarnation of both Jesus Christ and Lenin. Other heroes of Jones were Stalin, Mao, and Kim Il-Sung. Everything that Jones did from his late teens onward was done in the name of socialism and communism.

Survivors of Peoples Temple have kept in touch and built a partly online community of remembrance. Many have written about and tried to make sense of an ambiguous experience. A key role in this community is played by the Jonestown Institute, sponsored by the Department of Religious Studies at San Diego State University. The institute maintains a richly informative website and publishes an annual report. Both are open to contributions from anyone with something to say about Peoples Temple, regardless of political, religious, or philosophical viewpoint.

Here was an opportunity to offer members of this community a new perspective on Peoples Temple. I submitted four articles to the Jonestown Institute. They are listed with links on the page assigned to me on the institute’s website. They will also appear in the next annual Jonestown Report, scheduled for publication around November 1.

My first article, Jim Jones: an attempt at psychic-political analysis, focuses on Jones as an individual. I suggest that Stalinism, as a system of domination supposedly aimed at ending domination, was well suited to psychic needs rooted in the severe neglect he suffered in early childhood. 

The next article, Peoples Temple and socialism, questions the widely held assumptions that Jones was a socialist and Peoples Temple a socialist movement. I analyze Jonestown as a peculiar kind of class society and conclude that genuine socialism is impossible without democracy. 

The third article argues that even within a highly authoritarian structure there may exist islands of autonomy.

The last article — Was Jonestown sustainable? — argues that the whole project of establishing such a large and permanent agricultural settlement in the middle of the rainforest may have been ecologically unsustainable. 

Stephen Shenfield

Jonestown: in the name of socialism – World Socialist Party US (wspus.org)

Methane is the second biggest contributor to global heating after carbon dioxide, with a greenhouse gas impact at least 27 times worse than CO2 over a 100-year time span. The gas is already responsible for about one-fifth of all global heating. Most of Europe’s methane emissions come from agriculture – particularly livestock – but the EU has avoided using policy levers such as its €387bn common agricultural policy to directly tackle the problem, according to the report by the Changing Markets Foundation. The EU won’t achieve a promise to cut methane emissions by 30% by 2030. Methane emissions rose by their highest ever amount to a new record last year

Nusa Urbancic, the campaigns director for the Changing Markets Foundation, said: “We’re in a climate emergency and cutting methane is the best short-term measure to slow the temperature increase. That is why we need urgent policy action to transform our food production systems. Our leaders must start listening to scientists instead of lobbyists, otherwise the EU won’t be able to meet the global methane pledge.”

 The Institute for European Environmental Studies, finds that the bloc is still failing to set dedicated methane targets for the livestock sector, or channel subsidies for methane cuts, forcing a reliance on loophole-ridden regulations which may hide agricultural emissions. The new report says that “undue influence” from agri-industry lobbyists, who EU officials met three times more often than non-industry groups, watered down legislative initiatives that could have cut livestock emissions. Methane releases from animal farming in Europe now have the global heating power of 160 coal-fired power plants, measured over a 20-year period. 

Tim Searchinger, a senior research scholar at Princeton University and senior fellow at the World Resources Institute, explained, “Enteric methane emissions [from cow burps and farts] alone would add at least 25% more to agricultural emissions by 2050, compared to 2010.” Searchinger said the best ways to mitigate methane emissions would be to feed livestock more efficiently, use new feed additives which may reduce emissions, and cut down on beef consumption.

EU on track to break pledge to cut methane emissions by 30%, warns report | Greenhouse gas emissions | The Guardian

“The world is finally waking up to the injustices of racism, sexism and other forms of discrimination, and putting laws in place to stop them from destroying people’s lives. Povertyism must be treated just as seriously,” said Olivier De Schutter, special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights. 

Prejudice against poor people is “a stain on society” that needs to be made illegal, according to him. He calls for the term “povertyism” to be included in anti-discrimination law alongside sexism and racism “to stop destroying people’s lives”. De Schutter defines “povertyism” as the negative stereotyping of the poor, and “a major source of non-take-up of rights” in that it can discourage people from applying for jobs and benefits. He added that while povertyism was a global problem, there tended to be greater stigmatising of the poor in wealthier countries where inequalities are starkest.

“Poverty will never be eradicated while povertyism is allowed to fester, restricting access to education, housing, employment and social benefits to those who need them the most,” De Schutter said.

Examples cited include employers judging CVs more harshly when an applicant’s address is in a deprived area, landlords refusing to rent apartments to tenants on benefits, and poorer school pupils being given different advice from that given to their more privileged peers.

Such “humiliation and exclusion” will not disappear on their own, argues De Schutter. He is calling on governments to include “socio-economic disadvantage” in anti-discrimination laws as a protected characteristic similar to age, sex, disability and race. He also wants “pro-poor affirmative action”, which he considers essential to breaking the vicious poverty trap.

“We have many studies showing that the belief in meritocracy is highest in those more unequal societies and the UK is not faring very well in this regard for the moment, nor is the US in fact. And it is the elites in those countries that believe in meritocracy because, of course, that’s a way for them to confirm their sense of superiority,” he said.

Make poverty discrimination illegal like racism or sexism, official to tell UN | Global development | The Guardian

From schools to now the universities Iranians are expressing their discontent with theocratic government rule. 

Students protested on Tuesday at Beheshti University and the Khaje Nasir Toosi University of Technology, both in Tehran, as well as Shahid Chamran University of Ahvaz, in Khuzestan province.

Despite what rights group Amnesty International has called an “unrelenting brutal crackdown”, young women and men were again protesting. “Death to the dictator” and “Death to the Revolutionary Guards”, women chanted.

 The Oslo-based group Iran Human Rights (IHR) said the demonstrations so far had cost the lives of at least 141  protesters.

During the past five weeks, thousands of Iranians have protested against the theocracy in over 100 cities. 

“In challenging the mandatory hijab, they are questioning and rejecting the very essence of the rules and principles upon which the hijab is imposed,” Sanam Anderlini, native Iranian and member of the International Civil Society Action Network explained. “On one level it is about the question of choice about the hijab, but that’s the tip of the iceberg. The hijab is an integral symbol of the regime’s ‘Islamist’ identity, which embeds women’s second-class status, discrimination in the constitution and law.”

Socialists cannot make predictions about the future but we can voice our support and solidarity for fellow workers campaigning for more freedom.