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

 Working long hours is killing hundreds of thousands of people a year in a worsening trend the World Health Organization said.

In the first global study of the loss of life associated with longer working hours, the paper in the journal Environment International showed that 745,000 people died from stroke and heart disease associated with long working hours in 2016. That was an increase of nearly 30% from 2000. 

“Working 55 hours or more per week is a serious health hazard,” said Maria Neira, director of the WHO’s Department of Environment, Climate Change and Health

 The joint study, produced by the WHO and the International Labour Organization, showed that most victims (72%) were men and were middle-aged or older. Often, the deaths occurred much later in life, sometimes decades later, than the shifts worked. 

The study – drawing on data from 194 countries – said that working 55 hours or more a week is associated with a 35% higher risk of stroke and a 17% higher risk of dying from ischemic heart disease compared with a 35-40 hour working week.

Long working hours are a killer, WHO study shows | Reuters

Pastoral leases cover 44% of Australia, according to Austrade. Pastoral leases are defined by Austrade as a title issued for the lease of an area of crown land to use for the limited purpose of grazing of stock and associated activities. We were able to identify the leaseholders for just over half that area, pulling together data on more than 400 owners who together hold 700 stations covering 189.5m hectares – or about a quarter of the country.

The person who holds the most land in this pastoral-lease data, by far, is the Western Australian mining magnate Gina Rinehart, who controls 9.2m hectares, or 1.2% of Australia’s landmass, through three different corporate entities.

The biggest corporate landholder is the ASX-listed Australian Agricultural Company. AACo’s biggest shareholder is the Bahamas-based AA Trust, controlled by the British billionaire Joe Lewis, who is also the owner of Tottenham Hotspur.

About 40% of Australia is covered by native title, in both exclusive and shared title. Australian government reports state that Indigenous communities hold the freehold title to 17% of the country, mainly in the Northern Territory and South Australia.

Guardian Australia’s definition of Indigenous tenure, for mapping purposes, includes exclusive-possession native title and freehold, which confer the right to exclude others from the land. This amounts to about 26% of Australia’s landmass. This definition does not invalidate non-exclusive native title – land that features other forms of ownership such as pastoral stations – or Indigenous ownership in areas where native title has been extinguished. When non-exclusive native title is included, the proportion of Australia is about 54%.

Keven Smith, chief executive of Queensland South Native Title Services, says, “If you ask the question of who owns Australia, I would say that First Nations people own this country,” Smith says. “Even though there’s limited application of native title over the four corners of this nation, cultural heritage is tenure-blind.”

 The median price per hectare for agricultural land in Australia increased by 12.9% in 2020 to $5,907 a hectare, the seventh consecutive year of positive growth.

Who owns Australia? | Australia news | The Guardian

 The World Health Organization’s director-general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, voiced outrage that a number of rich countries were now vaccinating children and teenagers while poorer states had barely begun vaccinating health workers and their most vulnerable groups. Instead of offering jabs to young and healthy people, countries should give their doses to the Covax global vaccine-sharing scheme and thereby ensure that those most in need in all countries receive protection, he said.

Canada and the US are among countries that have authorised vaccines for use in adolescents in recent weeks.

In the face of this inequity in access, Tedros warned that the world would probably see more deaths this year than last, despite the arrival of vaccines. “We’re on track for the second year of this pandemic to be far more deadly than the first,” he said. “Saving lives and livelihoods with a combination of public health measures and vaccination – not one or the other – is the only way out.”

Vaccinate vulnerable global poor before children in rich countries, WHO says | Coronavirus | The Guardian

  Chris Zimmerman, the senior executive responsible for enforcing AmerisourceBergen’s legal obligation to halt opioid deliveries to pharmacies suspected of dispensing suspiciously large amounts of the drugs said the company culture was of the “highest calibre”.

Senior staff at AmerisourceBergen routinely disparaged communities blighted by the worst drug epidemic in the country’s history.

After Florida cracked down on pill mills in 2011, Zimmerman sent an email to colleagues. “Watch out George and Alabama,” he wrote, “there will be a max exodus of Pillbillies heading north.”

One email in 2011 included a rhyme built around “a poor mountaineer” named Jed who “barely kept his habit fed”. According to the verse, “Jed” travels to Florida to buy “Hillbilly Heroin”, the nickname for OxyContin, the drug manufactured by Purdue Pharma which kickstarted an epidemic that has claimed more than 500,000 lives.

Another rhyme described Kentucky as “OxyContinville” because of the high use of the drug in the poor rural east of the state. When Kentucky introduced new regulations to curb opioid dispensing, an AmerisourceBergen executive wrote in a widely circulated email: “One of the hillbilly’s must have learned how to read :-)”.

Another email contained a mocked up breakfast cereal box with the word “smack” under the words “OxyContin for kids”

This is the company that has a culture of the “highest calibre”?

Two West Virginia local authorities accuse the distributors of putting profit before lives and turning Cabell county into the “ground zero” of the epidemic. A data expert told the trial that over nine years the three distributors delivered about 100m opioid doses to Cabell county – which has a population of just 90,000. Drug distributors delivered 1.1 billion opioid painkillers to West Virginia between 2006 and 2014, even as the state’s overdose rate rose to the highest in the US.

AmerisourceBergen paid $16m to settle legal action by West Virginia over opioid deliveries but did not admit wrongdoing. The same year, McKesson paid a record $150m fine after the DEA accused it of breaking the law. Critics, including DEA officials, have accused the companies of regarding the fines as “the cost of doing business” and then carrying on as before.

Big pharma executives mocked ‘pillbillies’ in emails, West Virginia opioid trial hears | Opioids crisis | The Guardian

 As the ecological crisis worsens it would be all too easy to slide into catastrophism, to present mankind’s future as an apocalypse, a social Armageddon. The environmental struggles needs an alternative social vision. The cause of our environmental problems are bad individual life-style choices and the strategy for change does not involve writing pleading letters to politicians to regulate corporate behaviour. These will do next to nothing about the economic system which requires profit expansion that drives it.

Capitalism maximises economic growth. Capitalism just attempts to grow regardless of any consequences which may be harmful to our environment. Competing businesses are concerned only with profit and capital accumulation, not with sustainability. Capitalism doesn’t care for neither either humanitarian  nor environmental welfare are central to its economic decision-making. The result is that both peoples and the planet are suffering. The global competition for profits is larger than any one individual or corporation or government. The system is unstoppable. Its inhumanity  is extreme. the poor are left to die from preventable hunger and curable diseases. The objective of capitalism is simply the achievement of profit and corporations will be environmentally friendly only it is profitable to be, or unprofitable not to be. Big business tramples over people’s needs. Capitalism fails to aid the desperately vulnerable if profit cannot be extracted or costs levelled elsewhere. Ethical investments and government guidance to consumers are inadequate in the face of the omniscient power of the capital economic laws. Business ventures which has the possibility of attracting high profits will always be a magnet for the stock-exchange share-holder regardless of any environmental downsides and they will lobby against any government regulation which is an obstacle to expected lucrative dividends. Divestment merely leaves the door open for others less scrupulous to make a financial return.

A commonly held misconception is that the World’s growing populations present one of the greatest ecological problems. Many in the environmentalist movement seem convinced that the amount of land and resources used by humans far outstrips the carrying capacity of the planet. Yet the apparent logic breaks down quickly. Peoples with the highest birth rates such as in Africa use a fraction of the world’s resources, while a minority with low birth rates in the “developed” countries use most of those resources. The apparent “over-population problem” isn’t one of numbers but more of a distribution of wealth problem. Any ecological carrying capacity calculations do not account for scarcity and starvation. There is ample food presently being grown to sustain the world’s population yet it isn’t filling the bellies of the hungry who cannot afford to pay the prices being paid  to fatten livestock  and or to fill the tanks of cars with  ethanol fuel. Green activists who claim the focus must be on slowing population growth are ignoring the real and imminent threats to our planet.

“Green” capitalism is based around making profits from renewable energy sources, cap and capture technological fixes, electric vehicles and the like, all on the premise on the belief that global warming can be stopped by changing dirty products for clean green ones. Capitalism’s stock-exchanges we’re assured, is capable of saving the planet by the miracle of the invisible hand of the market take hold of the steering wheel and trading in carbon credits. But as we expect it is the need for making profit which drives the whole process. People should not fall for market-inspired “solutions” as the lesser evil and less pain. Socialists go beyond the market-led illusory promises of a low-carbon economy.

A socialist  society would allow genuine possibilities for ecological sustainability. Without profit-seeking being the motivation for production, we will have eliminated the reason environmental safeguards are not put into place. Protecting the environment is often a commercial impracticality, a cost to be cut to the minimum. A world socialist revolution and  constructing a new society not dominated by the needs of capitalist accumulation is necessary where the human carbon footprint would be relatively benign. The struggle for socialism remains an urgent necessity. 

The Socialist Party faces up to the reality, difficult as it is, to prevent exceeding the tipping points and experiencing catastrophic runaway climate change in the future  it will be necessary to do away with capitalism, to overthrow it and replace production for profit with planned production for human need. The battle lines are drawn. There can be no truce and no alliances made with capitalists. The enemy who will sabotage all attempts to mitigate the threat of climate change is the capitalist class.

Yet another round of fighting that began in 1948 when the state of Israel was established, and a conflict the Palestinians have no chance whatsoever of militarily overcoming Israel.  The return of the Jewish diaspora saw a new forced exile, that of the Palestinians. The World Socialist Movement is always spontaneously on the side of the oppressed against the oppressors and the massive use of overwhelming force by the state of Israel clearly exposes it as the oppressor. But just because we sympathise with the victims of Israeli oppression does not mean that we favour the solutions popular among Palestinians.

 According to Israeli propaganda, the only way to stop rocket attacks on Israel from happening is to counter-attack with their far more lethal air attacks. The message drummed into Jewish-Israelis is that “we” have no choice but to defend ourselves against an enemy bent on driving “us” into the sea. Likewise, Palestinians are told that Israel is intent upon committing genocide upon them, if not physically but as a non-people.  The World Socialist Movement consider both Netanyahu’s government and Hamas are terrorist in the sense of targeting civilians. Israel uses terror on a much larger scale than Hamas, solely because it has a much greater military ability. Either side could avoid war by reaching compromises upon the other side’s political demands. The solution of the emergence of secular states is not easy to envisage in view of the prevalence of ethnic-supremacist, sectarian and even racist outlooks in both Jewish-Israeli and Palestinian society. The ethnic religious nationalism by orthodox Jewish zealots who are advocates the expulsion of all Arabs from “Greater Israel”, has resulted in an dislike and distrust of Jews by many Palestinians. The hopes of Jewish workers of a life free from persecution have not been answered by the setting up of the state of Israel.

This year has seen two well-informed reports from reliable sources, B’tselem and Human Rights Watch, that Israel has transformed itself into an apartheid state. It confirms what was said in 2003 when former Italian prime minister Massimo D’Alema that during a meeting with former Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon told him that apartheid South Africa’s “Bantustan” system was the best solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The Palestinian people can perhaps be forgiven for perceiving their struggle to be one against a Middle–Eastern form of apartheid and ethnic cleansing.

It is easy to see why the poverty-stricken  in the Palestinian refugee camps might view the promise of Palestinian self-government as an answer. Sadly, like the Zionists, Palestinians have fallen for  a dangerous myth about the past; in their case, the myth that Palestine belonged to them. It was no such thing: most Palestinians struggled along on tiny plots of land, under the weight of massive debts, exploited by a class of landlords. Palestine did not belong to the Palestinians, any more than modern Israel belongs to working–class Israelis. In 1930, the average rural family in Palestine was in debt to the tune of £P27, which was approximately such a family’s yearly income. On 1936 figures, one-fifth of one per cent of the population owned a quarter of the land! Clearly pre-Israeli Palestine did not belong to the Palestinian peasants: in 1948 they were driven off land which was not theirs.

 They have yet to realise it, but the workers of the region regardless of the  national boundaries where they now live — have an identity of interest.  Let’s hope that they come to recognise their common interests and reject the nationalism and religious bigotry that engender false divisions, violence and racial hatred. When it comes to the nationalist and religious fervour, there is nothing at all with which we as socialists can identify, for both are abstractions that have imbued the workers of the region with a false consciousness that prevents them identifying their real class interests.  While the focus is understandably  on the genuine  grievances of the Palestinian against oppression, we need to add that the majority of Israel’s Jewish population  also live lives of relative poverty, and within a system that depends upon exploitation and division. The real conflict is yet to begin—the class war of the master class and their wage-slaves.

We appeal to workers to organise consciously and politically and to use the power at their disposal to head off the threatening bloodshed, and secure the space we need in order to build a world of peace and stability. As ever, we appeal to the workers of all lands to join with us in campaigning for a system of society where there are no leaders, no classes, no states or governments, no borders, no force or coercion; a world where the earth’s natural and industrial resources are commonly owned and democratically controlled and where production is freed from the artificial constraints of profit and used for the benefit of all; a world of free access to the necessaries of life.  Socialists aspire to is a world without national frontiers in which free movement is possible and where all people live together as equals. Socialists are sickened by the violence of the Gaza conflict. The slaughter in Gaza underlines yet again the urgent need to work not for  a “two-state” solution or “one-state”, but the “no-state” solution as the only one that can ever give permanent peace. We sympathise with the suffering of our fellow workers, whatever their ethnic origin. It is always they who suffer the brunt of their masters’ wars. No longer obsessed with ethnic conflict, “Jews” and “Palestinians” will be able to refocus on the social, economic and ecological problems spawned by the “normal” peacetime functioning of capitalism. A space for socialist ideas will open up in this small corner of the world.