The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) is being hailed as a life-saver for the planet and Biden’s presidency.

It is all smoke and mirrors.

Jean Su of the Center for Biological Diversity explains.

“This was a backdoor take-it-or-leave-it deal between a coal baron and Democratic leaders in which any opposition from lawmakers or frontline communities was quashed,” Su said. “It was an inherently unjust process, a deal which sacrifices so many communities and doesn’t get us anywhere near where we need to go, yet is being presented as a savior legislation.”

Jacobin’s commentator, Branko Marcetic writes ““People need to understand the realities of the bill—that it’s a legislative ransom note written by a fossil fuel industry that backed and now celebrates it, one we had no choice but to go along with given the political realities…”

 The New Republic‘s Kate Aronoff noted that it “…consigns more people to living next to more fossil fuel infrastructure for longer; in many cases, that means consigning more people—predominantly poor people, Black people, and Brown people—to disease and death.”

Food & Water Watch managing director of policy Mitch Jones said that “it’s no surprise that climate policy tailored to meet the demands of a coal baron would fall well short of what’s needed to adequately address the severity of the climate crisis we face…The fact that oil and gas executives seem pleased with this legislation speaks volumes about its glaring shortcomings,”

“This new bill is genocide, there is no other way to put it,” said Siqiniq Maupin, executive director of Sovereign Iñupiat for a Living Arctic. “This is a life-or-death situation and the longer we act as though the world isn’t on fire around us, the worse our burns will be.”

Greenpeace USA says the IRA “…pours gasoline on the flames.”

Ebony Twilley Martin, Greenpeace USA’s co-executive director, called the bill “a slap in the face to the frontline communities, grassroots groups, and activists that made this legislation possible.”

“The IRA is packed with giveaways to the fossil fuel executives who are destroying our planet,” she continued. “It sacrifices the same people who have always borne the brunt of oil, gas, and coal infrastructure and climate crisis: Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and low-income communities. Folks living on the Gulf and in the Permian Basin.” She added,  added that a side deal on reforming the federal permit process for energy infrastructure “is simply a disaster” but that “is what happens when the industry responsible for climate change also calls the shots on climate policy.”

Center for Climate Integrity president Richard Wiles also emphasized that “the long shadow of Big Oil’s climate deception hangs over this legislation…the fossil fuel industry continues to wage a relentless campaign of disinformation, deception, and dark money to block climate progress and keep the nation hooked on its products.”

Tom Solomon and Jim Mackenzie, co-coordinators of 350 New Mexico, concurred that “the Inflation Reduction Act is a stark example of the naked corruption of government in Washington D.C….The continued ability of the fossil fuel corporations to buy their way into business as usual in the face of accelerating climate catastrophe is alarming and depressing,” 

Historic Climate Bill, Say Clear-Eyed Critics, Still ‘Pours Gasoline on the Flames’ (commondreams.org)

Many households are falling behind on energy payments with total debt owed three times higher than in September last year, a survey has suggested.

 The concept of human overpopulation, once common, is now rarely used in the scientific literature. The global population is set to surpass eight billion later this year, according to a United Nations forecast. It says that the planet should hit 8.5 billion people in 2030 and 9.7 billion in 2050, peaking at around 10.4 billion in the 2080s before steadying at that level until 2100. All analysts and population models agree that without any totalitarian or coercive measures, populations will start declining.  The question is simply when.

The UN’s Secretary-General António Guterres said the milestone was something to welcome, calling it an occasion to “celebrate our diversity, recognise our common humanity, and marvel at advancements in health that have extended lifespans and dramatically reduced maternal and child mortality rates”. 

Population growth fell to less than 1% in 2020 according to the report, mainly due to a decline in fertility in many countries, which has fallen “markedly” in recent decades. 

Today, some two-thirds of the global population live in a country or area where lifetime fertility is below 2.1 births per woman, “roughly the level required for zero growth in the long run, for a population with low mortality”, according to the UN. 

In 61 countries or areas, the population is expected to decrease by at least 1% over the next three decades, as a result of “sustained low levels of fertility” and in the case of some countries, “elevated rates of emigration”. 

More than half of the projected increase in the global population up to 2050 will be concentrated in just eight countries: the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Egypt, Ethiopia, India, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Philippines and the United Republic of Tanzania.

Indeed, India is set to pass China next year to become the world’s most populous nation, while Nigeria is expected to leapfrog the US into third place by 2050. 

China’s population will be dropping to 770 million by 2100, while the Russian Federation’s population of 145 million dropping to just 133 million by 2050 and 112 by the end of the century. 

Since the start of the millennium, “UN reports show that global resource use has been primarily driven by increases in affluence, not the population”, said The Washington Post.   This is “especially true in high- to upper-middle-income nations, which account for 78% of material consumption, despite having slower population growth rates than the rest of the world”, said the paper.  Meanwhile, in low-income countries, whose share of the global population has “almost doubled”, the demand for resources has “stayed constant at just about 3% of the global total”.

When concern about population becomes central to environmental policy, said researcher Betsy Hartman, “racism and xenophobia are always waiting in the wings. It just shifts the discourse away from the real problem of who has power and how the economy is organized.”

Are overpopulation fears unfounded? | The Week UK

 Negotiations on deep-sea mining ended with no agreement, meaning that less than a year remains before a legal clause kicks in that could see seabed mining commence without any environmental or economic regulations in place. Three weeks of discussions ended in a stalemate.

 Spain, Ecuador, Costa Rica and Chile called on the International Seabed Authority (ISA) – the UN body that oversees mining in international waters,  to slow or halt the race towards deep-sea mining, while Micronesia became the first country to officially propose a moratorium. Other countries, including the UK, are pushing for the regulations to be in place as soon as possible.  In July 2021 when the Pacific nation of Nauru declared its plan to start seabed mining.

Pradeep Singh, fellow at the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies in Potsdam, Germany, said that contractors such as Nauru Ocean Resources Inc, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Metals Company (formerly DeepGreen, one of the most prominent firms lining up to start mining the ocean floor for rare minerals), could be granted interim approval of their exploitation plans.

Deep-sea mining talks end with no agreement on environmental rules | Deep-sea mining | The Guardian

 As in so many similar situations when the capitalist State begins to fail, working people start to organise themselves as this article shows. 

“Sri Lanka’s unprecedented economic and political crisis has created new kinds of solidarities among citizens, as they try and help each other ride through fuel and food shortages in the absence of assistance or information from the government…

…Tamil and Sinhala, Christian and Muslim, Buddhist and Atheist find themselves next to each other and end up talking about – what else – politics and economics…

…Soup kitchens have been started to feed people. Some of these kitchens have hired nutritionists to advise them on how to provide a simple and nutritious meal. People are also trying to grow vegetables in home and rooftop gardens. Expatriate Sri Lankans are sending much-needed medicine to help tide over the shortage of essential drugs. People visiting Sri Lanka have been besieged with requests to bring medicine…”

As The State Collapses In Sri Lanka, Citizens Fill The Vacuum| Countercurrents

BP has reported massive profits for the three months to June, after oil and gas prices soared.

 Record-breaking heat has been recorded around the world this year, including in the UK, which smashed its previous record by an incredible 1.6C, reaching more than 40C. Portugal reached 47C on the 21st of this month, the hottest July day on record, while several places in France recorded new highs. 49C was hit in Delhi in May.

Recent research has found that we may actually already be nearing the threshold values for human survivability of temperature and humidity for short periods in some places of the world – a measure known as the “wet-bulb” temperature – and that this threshold may actually be far lower than previously thought.

Wet-bulb temperature (WBT) combines dry air temperature (as you’d see on a thermometer) with humidity – in essence, it is a measure of heat-stress conditions on humans. The term comes from how it is measured. If you slide a wet cloth over the bulb of a thermometer, the evaporating water from the cloth will cool the thermometer down. This lower temperature is the WBT, which cannot go above the dry temperature. If humidity in the surrounding air is high, however – meaning the air is already more saturated with water – less evaporation will occur, so the WBT will be closer to the dry temperature.

“The [wet-bulb] temperature reading you get will actually change depending on how humid it is,” says Kristina Dahl, a climate scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “That’s the real purpose, to measure how well we’ll be able to cool ourselves by sweating.”

Humidity and temperature are not the only things that affect a person’s body temperature: solar radiation and wind speed are other factors. But WBT is especially important as a measure of indoor environments, where deaths often occur in heatwaves, says W Larry Kenney, a physiology professor at Penn State University.

Concern often centres on the “threshold” or “critical” WBT for humans, the point at which a healthy person could survive for only six hours. This is usually considered to be 35C, approximately equivalent to an air temperature of 40C with a relative humidity of 75%. (At the UK’s 19 July peak temperature, relative humidity was approximately 25% and the wet-bulb temperature about 25C.)

Humans usually regulate their internal body temperature by sweating, but above the wet-bulb temperature, we can no longer cool down this way, leading our body temperature to rise steadily. This essentially marks a limit to human adaptability to extreme heat – if we cannot escape the conditions, our body’s core can rise beyond the survivable range and organs can start failing.

The oft-cited 35C value comes from a 2010 theoretical study. However, research co-authored by Kenney this year found that the real threshold our bodies can tolerate could be far lower. “Our data is actual human subject data and shows that the critical wet-bulb temperature is closer to 31.5C,” he says.

Bill McGuire, director of the Benfield UCL Hazard Research Centre in the UK, says if the new finding is true, we are in “a whole new ball game” when it comes to extreme heat. “The numbers of people exposed to potentially deadly combinations of heat and humidity across the world would be vastly higher than previously thought.”

“My personal feeling is that a wet-bulb temperature of 35C would not be possible in the UK, although 31C may well be later in the century,” says McGuire. “Then again, the Met Office certainly didn’t expect 40C [dry temperature] heat in 2022.”

The risk of passing the WBT threshold is larger elsewhere, however. In 2020, research found that some coastal subtropical locations have already experienced WBTs of 35C, albeit only for a few hours. The study also found that globally, the number of times that a WBT of 30C was reached – still considered an extreme humidity and heat event – more than doubled between 1979 and 2017. There were about 1,000 occurrences of a 31C WBT, and about a dozen above 35C, in Pakistan, India, Saudi Arabia, Mexico and Australia.

“Previous studies projected that this would happen several decades from now, but this shows it’s happening right now,” said lead author Colin Raymond, a climate scientist at Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “The times these events last will increase and the areas they affect will grow in direct correlation with global warming.”

A study last year found that the maximum WBT in the tropics will rise by 1C for each 1C of average warming. This means limiting global heating to 1.5C above the pre-industrial era would prevent the majority of the tropical area – where 40% of the global population lives – from reaching the survival limit of 35C, the paper said. 

Heatwaves are worsening many times faster than any other type of extreme weather because of the climate crisis. Scientists estimate that it made the India and Pakistan heatwave 30 times more likely. As another paper put it, asking whether today’s most impactful heatwaves could have occurred in a pre-industrial climate is “fast becoming an obsolete question”.

Instead, as heatwaves begin affecting more people’s lives more frequently, the question of what we can do about them is becoming ever more important. As the world sees the deadly mix of high humidity and high temperature more and more often, this could ultimately mean that some places simply become too hot to live in, opening up the need for migration pathways to enable millions of people to get away from their home areas.

More than one in eight UK households fear they have no further way to make cuts to afford a sharp increase in annual energy bills this autumn.

More than a quarter of households earning less than £20,000 worry they will be unable to cope with higher bills, with families in Yorkshire, the south-west and Northern Ireland the least confident about covering their costs.

Almost half of UK households are concerned about being able to keep up with rent or mortgage payments over the next 12 months as the majority realise they will have to make cuts elsewhere.

It recently emerged that a fifth of UK households now have an average shortfall of £60 a week between what they earn and what they need to cover essentials such as energy bills, rent, transport and food.

The amount that UK consumers borrowed rose by the fastest rate in three years last month, as households struggled to cope with the rising cost of living. People borrowed an additional £1.8bn in consumer credit last month, up from a £900m increase in May.

Pressure on households is expected to ramp up this autumn as the price of essentials – from clothing to food – continues to rise alongside higher energy bills.

More than one in eight UK households fear they have no way of making more cuts | UK cost of living crisis | The Guardian

LET THE CAPITALISTS FIGHT THEIR OWN WARS

The only way in which mankind can bring about a social change and build a fraternal society, free of war, is to establish socialism. This will not come about as an expression of non-violence but as the conscious act of a socialist-minded working-class. Our position is that we are against every war and both sides of every war. Wars are struggles between capitalist interests; no army fights for the interests of any working class. Only in a truly socialist world-wide society will war disappear, because while the capitalist world social order lasts, the roots of war remain. So the only way to lasting peace is through a new world —without money, armaments, classes, or nations. There is no need for war, just as there is no natural need for poverty or mass starvation or housing shortages or hospital waiting lists. It is because society is organised to provide profits for the few rather than satisfaction for the many that these problems face us. 

Ukrainian troops are not fighting to defend Peace, Democracy, Liberty or any other high-sounding ideal. The present conflict is represented in certain quarters as one between “freedom” and ‘‘tyranny” and for the rights of a smaller nation for self-determination. . No one should be misled by their fine words and airy phrases about democracy. Whether they nakedly expose their own profit-seeking interests or whether for reasons of tactics and expediency they mask them in phrases about democracy and it is the same cynical capitalist interest that guides them. We are told that this is a war in defence of peace against aggression and that therefore all defenders of peace and collective security should support it. There never was a bigger lie. This war is a fight between imperialist powers over world domination. This war is not a war for democracy against an oligarchy. It is not a war for the liberty of a small nation.

The Russian invasion is just an aspect of the conflict between Western imperialism and Russian imperialism for control of  Eastern Europe. Not an issue in which the Socialist Party take sides. Whichever side prevails the poor people of the region will lose as the war is basically over who is going to govern and exploit them. The answer to capitalist intrigue and power-politics is not to be found in supporting one capitalist group against another. The task before us is still that of winning over the working class to socialism. 

The way to prevent war is not by engaging in anti-war campaigns. These are quite useless because they leave the causes of war untouched. The only preventative is to take away the urge to war; take away the profit motive. While private ownership of the means of existence remains, the making of profit is the object of the private owners. Abolish private ownership and substitute for it common ownership in the means of production and the profit motive disappears, taking with it the seeds of war. Socialism is the only means to defeat the warmongers.

The working class has only to say “stop” and the entire present. system of society will cease to be. We have only to take the means of wealth production and distribution into the common ownership and democratic control of the whole community to put an end to the need for fighting over markets and resources and frontiers. We need only withdraw our consent to capitalism, in a majority, to set in motion the revolution. The truth is that capitalism is triumphant everywhere because the working class are blind to their own class position, and is still persuaded that they have an interest in leaving power in capitalist hands. It is only a degree worse that in some countries large numbers of workers go further on the road of stupid servility, and help to place power in the hands of Fascist demagogues. The only people who can end this are the workers themselves. When they sicken of Fascism they will be well on the road to destroying it, but it can only be done from within the country concerned. It is the duty of each national section of the working class to struggle against their own capitalist masters, aided to the extent that is possible by the international movement.