100,000 marched through the streets of Glasgow on Saturday demanding that “something” is done about climate change. Many, many more protested in other cities around the world. 

The global warming crisis as depicted by mainstream media is narrowly conceived and identified most basically as driven by excessive emission of greenhouse gases caused by humans as the result of bad choices made by the economy by humans. The solution is simply to choose a different set of policies that do not lead to excessive emission of greenhouse gases. The changes necessary therefore does not require any systemic restructuring of human society merely some adjustment of its priorities. The problem, however, is far deeper. Capitalism is the cause of the ecological crisis we face. 

The World Socialist Movement (WSM) seeks to dispel the mistaken idea that this environmental crisis is an exception and simply the result of an aberration within the otherwise rational order of the world market and profit accumulation. The system of capitalism must be placed at the centre of any explanation as to the cause of the abuse and destruction of nature. This means accepting that replacing capitalism role as the world’s economic structure is vital and crucial to any answer to the climate emergency

The answer cannot be one of the integration of nature into ‘green’ capitalism and ‘green’ solutions marketed for profit. Capitalism has fully exposed the system’s destructive consequence to nature, guaranteeing food insecurity, driving small family farmers out of business, off the land and frequently into starvation. Socialism is indispensable to any real solution to the environmental crisis. 

Without the vision of a better world and the organisation to change things that go with it, the protests of the green campaigners will go nowhere. We are running out of time and soon there may well be no future at all

Capitalism is the real enemy, not people themselves. Capitalism is overwhelmingly the driver of planetary ecological collapse, from climate change to resource depletion to pollution. Today, a roaring out-of-control economic system is cutting down forests, sweeping clean oceans and seas, gouging out mountains for minerals and ores, pumping toxic effluents into rivers and out lakes, devouring destroying fragile ecosystem built up over millennia. Capitalists and corporations aren’t totally evil, (although many are), but they can’t stop themselves. They’re just doing exactly what they’re supposed to be doing for their shareholders, returning dividends and raising their stock prices. That’s what is demanded. The conglomerates can’t end poisoning and pillaging, looting and polluting, trashing the planet into one giant global land-fill site. All that matters is senseless business growth, regardless of the ringing of alarm bells or the sight of red warning lights. 

Solutions to the ecological crisis are blindingly obvious but don’t make “economic” sense to the investors’ logic.

 We all know the answers. Stop excessive greenhouse gas emissions. Cease wasteful consumption of resources. End the harmful pollution of the soil, water, and air.

We don’t need any new technology to solve these problems. We just need to halt doing what we’re doing. But we can’t because of being locked into an economic system in which companies have to grow to compete and reward their shareholders.

Our aim is a society that serves the welfare of humanity and the well-being of our environment. The WSM offer no blueprint here or anywhere else for the society we dare to imagine and seek to build other than to help organise the large majority of the population toward this goal. We are living in terrifying times and no-one knows what seeds will take root.

America’s Great Plains are being torn up with frightening implications for biodiversity and carbon storage. Everyone knows about the destruction of the Amazon rainforest, but grasslands are off their radar

Grasslands used to cover a large swath of North America before European settlement. When Europeans arrived, they quickly plowed up about half of the grasslands on the continent and converted them to agricultural use, growing corn, soybeans and wheat. And today, new research shows the rate that the ecosystem is being lost has been increasing.

Patrick Lendrum, a scientist with the World Wildlife Fund’s northern Great Plains program, led a research team that released a report in September showing that from 2018 to 2019 an estimated 2.6m acres of grassland were plowed up, primarily to make way for row crop agriculture – an area larger than Yellowstone national park. Lendrum says. “That’s an alarming trend.” It’s also a huge blow for efforts to fight the climate crisis and represents a little reported unfolding environmental disaster in the US.

Farmers and ranchers make decisions based on global commodity prices. There’s an increased demand for crops for human food, livestock feed and fuel. Biofuels like ethanol boomed in 2009 or 2010 and that increased demand.

“Grasslands are mostly used for grazing of livestock and when that balance gets out of line, and crop agriculture becomes more profitable, that’s when we see the resurgence of the tillup,” says Tyler Lark, a researcher at the University of Wisconsin who has studied grasslands for the past decade.  Lark is also studying the ways that croplands are being turned into housing – so the total amount of cropland isn’t expanding that much, but it’s being developed for residential use, and crops are being pushed to the periphery. “It’s almost a cascading effect, as we look at future urban expansion,” he says.

There are enormous implications for climate change when people dig up grasses that have been intact for hundreds of years, because grasslands store tons of carbon in their soils. Native prairie grasses have deep roots that stabilize the soil and prevent erosion. When people plow it up, it releases carbon into the atmosphere. It also exposes the soil to the air, which increases erosion and can also lead to nitrate leaching. People often think of forests as natural ecosystems that store huge amounts of carbon, Lark says. But grasslands store immense amounts as well, out of sight, under the ground. “When we plow those up, a lot does become lost. If we can reduce the conversion, that will go a long way in lowering emissions.”

Once grasslands have been destroyed for agriculture, Lendrum says, it can take decades or even centuries to restore them. The WWF is working with landowners to convert croplands back into grasslands, but the process is slow and expensive. “Once that piece of grass is initially tilled, it’s very difficult to restore those ecosystem benefits,” says Lendrum. “Carbon in particular, it’s a slow process.”

Lark says the future is really about using the croplands we have already in the most efficient manner, and improving yields. “There is lots of room to expand production without expanding cropland area – it’s just easier to expand area than work on innovation.”

 Just as increased attention to rainforests and savannah led to protecting them globally from deforestation, the same level of awareness could be applied to grasslands. Lark says he could see campaigns around native ecosystems, conversion-free supply chains, and products that aren’t contributing to the loss of grasslands.

Ben Turner, a natural resource management scientist at Texas A&M University in Kingsville, Texas, says “We’re not going to reclaim even a small percentage of all the grasslands we’ve lost,” he says. But farmers can make cropland as functional as grasslands used to be, by diversifying crop systems, integrating livestock with crops, and finding ways to value ecosystem services like pollinators and migratory birds.

America’s native grasslands are disappearing | Endangered habitats | The Guardian

Year in and year out we release millions of tonnes of CO2 and methane gases into the atmosphere. Every year acre upon acre of tropical rainforests are destroyed or seriously degraded. So, at the same time, we are destroying the plant life that uses carbon dioxide and converts it into oxygen. The result is global warming. Many of the dangers are well understood but nobody knows for sure and nobody can predict with certainty the critical tipping points when any combination of such changes might produce a sequence of further rapid changes which would be catastrophic from a human point of view. It must be obvious that a set of problems that are global in scale, affecting populations across the entire planet, can only be effectively tackled by cooperation between all peoples. You can’t have the world divided up between rival capitalist states — all riven by economic competition both within their boundaries and between each other and all driven by the economic pressures of profit and class interests, with a good many of them at actual war with each other — and expect to be in a position to solve the problems of the global environment. Effective action has got to be based on world cooperation.

To get the cooperation we first have to get rid of the present system which is based on economic competition. We need to establish a system based instead on common ownership, a world where all means of producing and distributing goods and all productive resources are held in common by the whole community. This means the end of the wages system through which workers are exploited for profit and the end of producing goods for sale so as to get that profit. It means people living and working in the community in a relationship of direct cooperation with each other, producing the goods and running the services that we need. This is a way of organising the community where the use of money will be entirely redundant.

If we establish common ownership, if we set up a society that is run solely for human needs as a result of people cooperating together, we are at last in a position where we can control our actions. Under capitalism, we are at the mercy of economic forces that nobody can control. Get rid of these economic forces and we are at last in a position to make democratic decisions about how best to use production for the benefit of the community.

Socialism is not the instant solution to problems but the means by which we can resolve problems. In socialism, we get the release of all productive resources — machinery, transport, raw materials, energy and labour — for the benefit of the community, but as, to start with, there will be a great deal to do we would have to make choices. We would have to make decisions in line with agreed priorities of action.

We’ve got to supply a lot more food, so that has to be increased. We’ve got to supply decent housing for everyone and that is an enormous world project. The mention of just these two priorities of action means that we would need a lot more energy and, as we know, the supply of energy is one of the worst villains in this problem of environmental damage.

It is clear that socialism will have to do two things at the same time: increase the supply of energy and do it in ways that protect the environment.

Do we keep on using nuclear generators knowing that inevitably this leads to what we do with their radioactive waste?

Do we keep on burning oil, knowing that oil is an immensely useful material that can supply thousands of very durable products? The burning of oil in power stations is in fact the kind of profligate waste that only capitalism could go in for.

What about coal, do we keep on burning it? There is no doubt that the burning of coal can be made less damaging by the installation of pollution-abatement equipment but it is expensive. In socialism, money would not be a factor. So we could if we wished to go on burning coal in a less damaging way and, of course, there are immense world reserves of this. Or simply,  we could agree to keep coal in the hole.

However, most people would agree that the most desirable way of producing energy is with the various renewable, benign methods such as solar, wind and wave power etc. This is clearly where the future lies.

Socialism would be free to go in for rapid development of these ecologically-benign methods. With the establishment of socialism, we will throw off the economic shackles of the profit system and break through into the freedom to use all our talents, skills and energies to solve problems through cooperation and collaboration.

 Child marriage robs girls of their childhood and threatens their lives and health.

And girls who marry before 18 have worse economic and health outcomes than their unmarried peers, which are eventually passed down to their own children, further straining a country’s capacity to provide quality health and education services.

Child brides often become pregnant during adolescence, when the risk of complications during pregnancy and childbirth increases – for themselves and their infants.

The practice can also isolate girls from family and friends and exclude them from participating in their communities, taking a heavy toll on their physical and psychological well-being, 

The following facts and figures, which have been compiled by the two main world specialised bodies -UNICEF and UN Population Fund (UNFPA), should suffice to unveil such a flagrant human rights violation.

— Child marriage refers to any formal marriage or informal union between a child under the age of 18 and an adult or another child.

While the prevalence of child marriage has decreased worldwide – from one in four girls married a decade ago to approximately one in five today – the practice remains widespread.

— Child marriage can lead to a lifetime of suffering. Girls who marry before they turn 18 are less likely to remain in school and more likely to experience domestic violence.

— Young teenage girls are more likely to die due to complications in pregnancy and childbirth than women in their 20s, and their children are more likely to be stillborn or die in the first month of life.

— Infants born to teenage mothers are also more likely to be stillborn or die in the first month of life.

— Wherever they occur, harmful practices rob girls of their childhood, deny them the chance to determine their own future and threaten the well-being of individuals, families and societies.

… And the figures

— Globally around 21% (over 1 in 5) of young women were married before their 18th birthday.

— 650,000,000 girls and women alive today were married as children.

— 12,000,000 girls under 18 are married each year. And more than 150 million additional girls will marry before their 18th birthday by 2030.

Where most?

UNICEF and UNFPA also report that, across the globe, levels of child marriage are highest in Sub-Saharan Africa, where around 4 in 10 young women were married before age 18, followed by South Asia, where 3 in 10 were married before age 18.

Lower levels of child marriage are found in Latin America and Caribbean (25%), the Middle East and North Africa (17%), and Eastern Europe and Central Asia (11%).

Among a raft of alarming statistics, a UN report has just found that children account for around 28 percent of trafficking victims globally. And that Sub-Saharan Africa and Central America and the Caribbean have the highest share of children among detected trafficking victims, at the rates of 64 and 62 percent, respectively.

Let alone that girls are forced by traffickers and smugglers to sexual exploitation. “Sexual tourism has a child face. No country is untouched and no child is immune.”

Child Marriage – 800 Million Girls Forced to Be Mothers | Inter Press Service (ipsnews.net)

Food waste is not only caused by forgetful consumers and accidents in food supply chains. 

In fact, food systems research has shown that food waste is a core, and even profitable, feature of food systems today. But as it is so often the case with environmental hazards, the profit motive trumps preventive action, and the issue of food waste is only superficially addressed.

Industrial food systems create industrial-scale food waste.  Several studies have shown that large-scale food waste is an inevitable outcome of the competition, speed, and growth-driven market mechanisms which rely on overproduction to generate profit at the expense of people and the environment.

Currently, up to half of the food produced globally is never eaten.

It represents 8-10 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. 

None of us wants to think that our food systems might be designed to be wasteful, especially given that the world’s resources are being depleted at an alarming rate, and that up to a quarter of our fellow humans are going hungry.

 The abundance of calories produced by our food systems (in the United States, up to 4,000 calories per day for each person) presents a glaring contradiction to the scarcity and hunger manufactured alongside it.

United Nations’ Food Systems Summit (UNFSS) Action Track 2, titled Shift to Sustainable Consumption Patterns, focussed partially on the issue of food waste. But it stated “eliminating wasteful patterns of consumption” and “building consumer demand for sustainably produced food”, as the main goals in this arena, rather than addressing root causes of wastage.

Emily Mathiesen of FIAN International notes that “the UNFSS overlooked structural inequalities and human rights abuses that perpetuate food insecurity and hunger”.

Campaigning group Feedback Global’s executive director, Carina Millstone, blames the summit’s shortcomings around the issue of food waste and the food system in general on the disproportionate role corporations played in its organisation.

Millstone was part of the food waste working group of Action Track 2, but she says she realised early on that the group was dominated by a “handful of organisations intent on promoting voluntary, business initiatives and citizen action for food waste above all else”. Like hundreds of others that boycotted the summit, Feedback Global, which has worked on food waste issues since 2013, stepped aside “as it became clear the recommendations would skirt around identifying and addressing the root causes of food waste – profit-driven corporate agribusiness”.

At the farm level, research by Feedback Global showed how unfair trading practices and power concentration in food systems allow major agribusinesses to transfer the risks and costs of food waste to farmers. The consolidation of the manufacturing and retail sectors ensures that large food corporations control the conditions of trade, including prices, aesthetics, cancellation and volumes. Farmers, especially those growing monocultures, are therefore pressured to meet strict buyers’ requirements, and overproduce.

That so much food is being wasted while so many are going hungry is an undeniable sign that our economies of food are lacking justice. But it is misguided to suggest the problems of hunger and food waste can simply be resolved if we invest more in food redistribution.

 The global expansion of charitable solutions like food banks cannot fix the underlying economic inequalities that produce hunger. In what food security expert Andrew Fisher calls the “hunger industrial complex”, food waste, hunger and corporate interests collide to maintain the status quo. Beyond the laudable efforts of thousands of volunteers, extensive corporate sponsorship of the global expansion of food banking hints that this model is not about transforming and preventing wasteful systems, but primarily managing, perpetuating and even justifying excess.  

Research shows that food charities in many countries often struggle to handle large-scale donations due to a lack of sufficient storage, cooling and transport infrastructure.

The global advocacy group This Is Rubbish highlights in its Plenty To Share campaign, tackling root causes of food waste and hunger means tackling global wealth inequalities while preventing further corporate control over our food sources.

‘Big Food’ at the UN table: A recipe for big waste? | Opinions | Al Jazeera

 The poorest 50%, however, will be most severely impacted by climate change.

 India is cutting the taxes on petrol and diesel to “further spur the overall economic cycle”, the government said. However, the move is also expected to boost demand for fuel as countries try to curb fossil fuel consumption. The tax cuts are also expected to increase consumption of petrol and diesel even as global leaders, including Mr Modi, have been gathering for the COP26 climate change conference to tackle the global economy’s reliance on fossil fuels.

It is a safety net

Last year, 10.8% or 14.3 million workers, belonged to unions according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Another 1.7 million workers were covered by a union contract though they did not say they were union members. Union membership was down in 2020 from 20.1% or 17.7 million in 1983, the first year with comparable data.

Union membership increases the household wealth for workers overall, according to a report by the Center for American Progress, a progressive think tank, which analyzed data from the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances from 2010–2019. It gives a particular boost, increasing earnings, offering access to retirement savings and bolstering other benefits essential for financial security, according to the report.

White union households had almost twice the median wealth of white households that did not include a union member, according to the report, which analyzed the survey data gathered from thousands of U.S. families who answer questions about their earnings, balance sheets, benefits and demographics.

But the difference in wealth was most striking among some workers of color, the report concluded, with Black union households having three times the median wealth of Black families without a union member, 

And Hispanic union households having five times the median wealth of their non-union counterparts.

The report attributes the difference in resources between those in a union and those who are not with potentially playing a crucial role in bridging a financial gulf in which white families have roughly ten times the wealth of their Black peers, and over eight times the wealth of the median Hispanic family.

David Madland, senior fellow with the Center for American Progress and co-author of the analysis, explained, “Unions boost wealth for everyone .. but they provide even more of a boost for Black and Hispanic households, and because of this greater boost they help close the racial wealth gaps in a significant way.”

The analysis from the Center for American Progress is also in line with data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and other studies that found union members make more than those not in unions and have more access to employer provided health insurance.

Full-time workers who were represented by a union in 2020 had typical median weekly earnings of $1,138 compared with non-union workers who had median weekly pay of $958, according to the BLS.

And an August 2016 review of the Current Population Survey by the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), a progressive think tank, found Black workers who belonged to unions earned wages that were 16.4% higher on average than their Black peers who were not in unions.

A September 2008 CEPR survey of the data, which is compiled by the Census Bureau and Bureau of Labor Statistics, found union membership increased Latino workers’ wages on average by 17.6% as compared to their peers. And Latino union members were 26% more likely to have employer-provided health care than their Latino counterparts who were not in unions.

“The differences in household wealth for Black and Hispanic households are largely due to the retirement benefits and job stability afforded by a union contract,’’ says Misael Galdámez, research analyst for social mobility and economic opportunity at UCLA’s Latino Policy and Politics Initiative.

The typical Black union household has more than $100,000 in wealth while the typical non-union Black household has less than $30,000 in wealth, Madland says. Among Hispanic households, the difference is $124,000 as compared to $24,000.

“This is a lot more dollars in people’s pockets and bank accounts that we’re talking about,” he says, adding that those additional resources can fund a child’s college tuition or seed a rainy day fund.

Union members are also more likely to have a pension or other high quality retirement benefit, as well as employer provided health insurance, both pillars of financial security, Madland says.

“Retirement is a key way people accumulate wealth over their lifetime and health insurance is a way to protect the wealth they accumulate so if they go into the hospital they don’t eat into their nest egg as much,” he says.

Unions can also safeguard jobs and provide protections that make workplaces more palatable, Madland says. 

“What unions do for job stability is they provide an avenue for workers to have a discussion about workplace conditions which tends to mean that the environment is better and workers want to stay longer,” Madland says. “And they have protections. The employer can’t just fire them for no reason.”

‘I joined as soon as I was hired’: Black, Hispanic workers benefit from unions, study shows (yahoo.com)

 In 2020, disasters, primarily triggered by weather-related hazards, resulted in 30.7 million forced movements. 

That is more than three times the number prompted by conflict and violence.

 In 2020, disasters, primarily triggered by weather-related hazards, resulted in 30.7 million forced movements. 

That is more than three times the number prompted by conflict and violence.