Climate talks in Germany have ended in acrimony. At last year’s COP26 conference in Glasgow, island states and developing countries agreed to prioritise cuts to carbon emissions on the back of promises that richer nations would finally set up a compensation process this year. It was a compromise they hoped would pay off. But despite two weeks of discussions here in Bonn, they have been unable to get the issue of a funding facility on the agenda for the COP27 conference in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt in November.

 The amount of children trying to flee conflict, violence and other crises is the highest on record, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) said.  Of detected human trafficking victims worldwide, children account for 34%.

The organization said in a statement that 36.5 million children were forced from their homes by the end of 2021.

The number includes 13.7 million children who are refugees and asylum-seekers, and almost 22.8 million children who have been internally displaced as a result of conflict and violence.

The numbers do not include children who have been displaced by climate and environmental disasters, and also do not include those displaced in 2022, or by the war in Ukraine.

UNICEF says the worldwide refugee population has more than doubled over the past decade, with children comprising nearly half. More than a third of displaced children are in sub-Saharan Africa (3.9 million or 36%), a quarter in Europe and Central Asia (2.6 million or 25%) and 13% (1.4 million) in the Middle East and North Africa.

UNICEF: 36.5 million children displaced by end of 2021, highest number ever recorded | News | DW | 17.06.2022

Agroecology — an approach to farming long practiced by Indigenous and peasant communities around the world — could transform our food systems for the better. Agroecology offers the promise of a win-win, where people nourish themselves while restoring ecosystems and addressing the harms and legacies of colonialism. Agroecology aligns with the food sovereignty movement because it is inherently emancipatory and democratic. Where industrial food production emphasizes scalability and proprietary technology, consolidating and controlling power and wealth, agroecological practices require wealth and power to be held locally. Producers must have the freedom, flexibility and resources to build healthy and just relationships in communities and among the people and the land. 

It is also at the center of the food sovereignty movement, a global constellation of peasant- and Indigenous-led organizations fighting for the right to healthy and culturally appropriate food, produced in a way that is ecologically sound and socially acceptable. Food sovereignty is arguably the single largest social movement in the world. La Via Campesina represents over 200 million farmers in 70 countries. And the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa, which operates in 50 countries, is the largest civil society movement on the continent. Agroecological systems are as diverse as the people practicing them and the places where they are practiced. 

There is no doubt that regenerative agriculture and other agroecological practices can help address climate change, including by sequestering carbon in the soil. 

Yet agribusinesses in the Global North are actively looking to agroecology to rebrand and build new markets under the banners of carbon farming and regenerative agriculture. Corporate plans to invest in regenerative agriculture appear to be mere appropriations of agroecological practices, hollowed out of their potential for supporting broad societal transformation.

But, a relentless focus on single outcomes, such as carbon, coupled with industry’s instinct to define and standardize, threatens the transformative potential of agroecology.

lobal food systems are at a breaking point. Not only are they responsible for roughly a quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions, but they are also the top contributors to water pollution and biodiversity collapse. On top of that, many aspects of our food systems are extremely vulnerable to disruptions from climate change. In addition to their immense ecological costs, our food systems are also tremendously unjust. As many as one in four people experience moderate or severe food insecurity. The global expansion of industrial agriculture continues to be a vehicle for the violent spread of colonialism. 

 Crop development through genetic modification is closed off to many by intellectual property laws, patents and the high technological competencies and equipment involved. On-farm domestication and breeding are, by contrast, democratic technologies because they are necessarily open and entirely reliant on local knowledge and sharing.

Beware the Corporate Appropriation of “Sustainable” Farming Practices – In These Times

At Summer School, Brian Gardner will be giving the following talk:

Let Them Do Yoga! – Inequality, Mental Health and Social Revolution

This talk will explore one of the less obvious ways in which capitalism and the class divide impacts negatively on humans. As the profit system turns the screw we are faced with huge and growing mental health challenges such as depression and anxiety.

How much of our this is down to the individual’s biology, and how much is social/political? What does inequality do to our psyches? Why are humans so apparently sensitive to class divisions? And does this provide insight to why inequality is so apparently resistant to political reform?

How will the global collective trauma of COVID play out? And what about the looming existential crisis that is the climate emergency?

Once taboo, we are now encouraged to parade our mental health like some fashion accessory. Are there other ways to regain wellbeing than lunchtime meditation or a friendly chat with HR? Are we just accommodating to the pressures of being both worker and consumer under capitalism?

Or are we seeing signs of humanity growing up? Is our mental environment a key battleground? How might mental well-being influence class consciousness? And what could we reasonably say about mental health inside a future socialist society?

Brian Gardner will explore these questions and more.

Details of more sessions will be announced soon.

 For more information on the event, see here: https://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/summer-school-2022/

Court Circular

(A Tale of Two Leaders)

One summoned to court in recognition

Of his leadership in commissioning

Bombing, shelling, blasting and reducing

Cities to rubble. True to his mission,

No matter what the human rights and wrongs,

Or the legal opinion of lawyers.

Another, once a lawyer who prefers

The statesman’s mantle and honorary gongs,

Who also had cities blasted and shelled

To wrack and ruin, the dead unreckoned,

Has been duly recognised and beckoned

To appear at the Queen’s court, having excelled,

In profiting from political barter,

To merit the Order of the Garter.

D. A.

 In the United States, Black women make roughly 61 cents for every dollar paid to white, non-Hispanic men – translating to a loss of more than $23,000 a year, according to a 2019 analysis by the National Women’s Law Center.

Black women in Georgia are roughly twice as likely as white women to be living in poverty, according to the Georgia Budget and Policy Institute, a nonprofit, and nationally they are less likely to have bounced back from COVID-19 job losses.

 Researchers from Climate Action Tracker released a new report [https://climateactiontracker.org/publications/global-reaction-to-energy-crisis-risks-zero-carbon-transition/] last week warning that this reaction threatens to lock in decades of heat-trapping emissions at a time when the window to reduce greenhouse gas pollution and avert the most catastrophic effects of the climate crisis is rapidly closing.

“So far, governments have largely failed to seize their chance to rearrange their energy supplies away from fossil fuels,” states the report. “Instead, we are witnessing a global ‘gold rush’ for new fossil gas production, pipelines, and liquefied natural gas (LNG) facilities. This risks locking us into another high-carbon decade and keeping the Paris agreement’s 1.5°C limit out of reach.”

Key findings of the analysis include:

New planned LNG import facilities in the European Union —especially in Germany, Italy, Greece and the Netherlands — could supply a quarter more gas to the E.U. than before;Canada plans to fast-track new LNG projects to increase exports;The United States has signed a deal to export additional LNG to the E.U., Qatar and Egypt have signed similar deals with Germany and Italy, respectively. Algeria has signed a deal to export additional gas via pipeline to Italy;In Africa, old gas pipeline projects are being revived (e.g. Nigeria) and countries with previously no fossil gas exports (e.g. Senegal) are now encouraged to supply gas to Europe; andDomestic fossil fuel production has increased in the U.S., Canada, Norway, Italy, and Japan, and new long-term import contracts are closed or extended in the United Kingdom, E.U., Germany, Poland, and Italy.

“If all these plans materialize,” the report warns, “they will either end up as massive stranded assets or they’ll lock the world into irreversible warming.”

“Almost no government supports behavioral change,” the report explains. “Immediate and low-cost options to reduce energy demand and therefore the need for Russian fossil fuels would include shifts in behavior, such as encouraging slower driving by introducing/lowering speed limits, home office policies, restricting car access to cities, or turning down the heating in buildings.”

“These options still seem to be very unattractive to governments,” the authors note. “We have only found governments recommending their population to those behavioral shifts and few incentivizing it. 

Study Finds Fossil Fuel Gold Rush After War in Ukraine – Consortium News

 Covid-19 has killed more than one million people in the United States over the past two years, but more than 338,000 of those lives could have been saved if the country had a universal single-payer healthcare system such as Medicare for All,  according to new peer-reviewed research published Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Unnecessary costs and preventable deaths were already rampant in the U.S. before the coronavirus took hold, but the ongoing pandemic has further exposed and exacerbated the many preexisting inequalities that have contributed to exceptionally high mortality compared with other high-income countries.

Universal single-payer healthcare, which the study calls “fundamental to pandemic preparedness,” could have prevented 338,594 Covid-19 deaths in the U.S. from the beginning of the public health emergency to mid-March 2022. Researchers estimate that if everyone in the country was provided with comprehensive care for free at the point of service, 131,438 people who died from Covid-19 could have been spared in 2020 alone, and roughly 80,000 people with other diseases could have been saved that year. More than 207,000 additional Covid-19 deaths could have been averted in 2021 and the first three months of this year.

the study’s lead author Alison Galvani, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Modeling and Analysis at the Yale School of Public Health, told Scientific American. “Americans are needlessly losing lives …”

Medicare for All Could Have Prevented More Than 338,000 US Covid Deaths: Study (commondreams.org)

The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), published a major report, warning of a new nuclear arms race.

It found that after decades of nuclear disarmament, all nuclear powers are currently spending a lot of money on new nuclear warheads and associated delivery systems, such as long-range missiles, ships, submarines, and aircraft.

SIPRI researcher Hans Kristensen and his colleagues have spent years estimating the nuclear weapon inventories of the world’s nuclear-armed states. The current total is understood to be 12,705, with over 90% owned by Russia and the United States.

“Nuclear states are super busy modernizing their arsenals”, Kristensen, who is also director of the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists, told DW. “Both to extend the versions they have, but also to introduce new kinds. Countries are beginning to adhere more importance to nuclear weapons.”

One country, in particular, stands out: China. “The Chinese increase is the most significant buildup in the world right now in terms of numbers,” said Kristensen. “It’s completely unprecedented by Chinese standards. We don’t know why China is doing this for the simple reason that China doesn’t want to talk about it.”

“Perhaps China fears that its existing arsenal would not survive a US nuclear strike,” Kristensen says. “Maybe it’s also a reaction to the fact that missile defense systems will be better in the future and China wants to be able to overcome such systems with more warheads.” In any case, he said, one thing is certain: President Xi Jinping wants a “world-class” army — and that apparently means one that is nuclear-armed.

In the past two years, Kristensen and his colleagues have identified some 300 newly built silos for ballistic missiles in Chinese deserts from satellite imagery.

A world free of nuclear weapons is therefore likely to be a very distant prospect. 

Nuclear weapons: Disarmament is a thing of the past | World | Breaking news and perspectives from around the globe | DW | 13.06.2022

Plans from major corporations to drastically reduce emissions have both “major flaws” and “major credibility gaps,” according to Net Zero Tracker’s annual report. Net Zero Tracker says many company promises to slash emissions are flawed and vague. The report also casts doubt on the use of carbon offsets, a key tactic for many companies’ climate goals.

Roughly half of the Forbes 2000 largest companies have yet to announce plans to reach net-zero — the point at which greenhouse gas emissions are negated by deep cuts in output as well as methods to absorb atmospheric carbon dioxide. Of the 702 companies with a net-zero target, such as Amazon, Apple, and Volkswagen, two-thirds haven’t made it clear how they plan to achieve that goal, according to the report.

The report also highlights the “unacceptably low” targets among many of the companies to be carbon neutral by 2050. Such long-running plans would do little to halve emissions in the next eight years, something scientists believe is needed to stem climate change.

Net Zero Tracker, run in part by the UK-based Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU) and the University of Oxford, assesses publicly available data for about 200 countries as well as large publicly traded companies.

“We see a lot of issues with credibility, and the quality and robustness of these targets,” said report co-author Frederic Hans, a climate policy analyst at NewClimate Institute, a German think tank.

The practice of carbon offsetting also featured heavily in the study. Buying credits for emissions reduced elsewhere is often a key tactic for corporations who say they are serious about their climate goals, despite the fact that experts have raised serious concerns about its efficacy and its lack of regulation.

Report reveals ′major flaws′ in corporate climate pledges | News | DW | 13.06.2022