France is to dispatch war frigates to the eastern Mediterranean as a standoff with Turkey over regional energy reserves intensifies  as the feud over exploration rights has deepened following the discovery of natural gas deposits in waters around Cyprus. Ignoring Turkish anger at not being included, the Greek Cypriot government has been commissioning international energy companies, including the French multinational Total and Italy’s Eni, to explore allocated blocs off the island for underwater resources. Turkey has been sending its own drill ships to the region’s disputed waters in retaliation. Turkey has called for a fair and equal distribution of the energy resources discovered off Cyprus, insisting that they are attempting to exclude and alienate Turkey by striking their own deal without the consideration of both the major regional player and the people of the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC). Therefore, it stresses that the drilling activities that Turkey is carrying out are legal and within territorial waters.



Greece’s defence minister, Nikos Panagiotopoulos, recently went as far as to warn that armed forces were “examining all scenarios, even that of military engagement” in the face of heightened aggression from Ankara. Rejecting Turkish demands that Greece demilitarise 16 Aegean islands, he accused Turkey of displaying unusually provocative behaviour.  It follows a dramatic surge in recent months in the number of violations of Greek airspace by Turkish fighter jets. 

Another regional war for natural resources?

Some 9.4 million Afghans are in need of basic food and housing this year, up from 6.5 million in 2019.



The United Nations is seeking $730 million in humanitarian aid for Afghanistan this year, an increase on 2019 as poverty surges in a country worn down by war and drought, the U.N.’s deputy special representative for Afghanistan said.



“Afghanistan remains the world’s deadliest conflict, and on top of the lingering effects of the drought in 2018, coupled with growing poverty, the need is up,” Toby Lanzer, the U.N.’s deputy special representative for Afghanistan, told Reuters.

The US dropped more bombs on Afghanistan in 2019 than any other year since the Pentagon began keeping a tally.



According to new figures released by US central command, US warplanes dropped 7,423 bombs and other munitions on Afghanistan, a nearly eightfold increase from 2015.

There is a new mood of resistance and solidarity among working people. But we must move from simply anti-capitalism to socialist revolution. We must envision the formation of a truly global movement capable of challenging the most powerful institutions on the planet without succumbing to either Utopianism or reformism.



Famine, AIDS (and now the emerging coronavirus), anti-immigration populism are being hailed as Malthusian “natural” population control to keep in check the high population growth. But what is regarded as a “natural” system is the capitalist system and multinational corporations. There is nothing natural about them other than they currently dominate trade and production, and hence resource use and consumption. Those concerned with environmental destruction must eventually confront the question of the global capitalist market profit system of production.



 Many environmentalists reject traditional politics, since political differences between liberal and conservative have become, for the most part, indistinguishable in practice. The authoritarianism witnessed in the former Soviet Union and its Eastern European satellite countries had discredited socialism. Thus socialist ideas, even eco-socialism, have been marginalised and unable to penetrate the mainstream climate crisis debate. The socialists lack mass influence. The eco-activists have been slow to incorporate Marxist analysis into their views, despite its great potential not only to explain the economic processes leading to environmental destruction, but to change them. A serious critique of capitalism is essential to adequately address the current world environmental crisis. The environmental movement can no longer afford to adapt traditional “liberal” or “conservative” views of the market to its concerns, or ignore the issue altogether by claiming that understanding the market as the central organising principle in modern society is unnecessary. Concepts such as “carrying capacity” clearly must be conceived in their capitalist economic context. The greens must now rethink their vision of a future society. Missing from the eco-activists view of the market is an adequate appraisal of the inherent logic within capitalism that necessitates environmental destruction rather than holding an assumption that the basic system of capitalist production functions more or less efficiently, needing only the enlightened management and regulation by the state to curb its excesses and mitigate its shortcomings. Facing competition from other producers, each firm must minimise or externalise its costs while maximising profit and market share. Like labour, environmental protection appears as a cost in the corporate balance sheet which must be minimised. This fact operates independently of the personal views or ethics of business owners or CEOs. If concerned managers implement costly environmental controls, they either sacrifice profit or lose market share to the competitor who can undersell at a cheaper price in the marketplace. Green tinkering is not enough, nor the best we can hope for. An alternative economic program which serves the interests of the democratic majority is essential.



Socialism’s promises an egalitarian distribution of all the productive wealth capitalism plus a more meaningful democracy, social justice and liberation from alienation. 



The Socialist Party has put forward a convincing ecological future with a credible vision of potential abundance.



 Environmentalists must  ask themselves what kind of a planet they want to live on and what kind of a society they want to do it.



Under the capitalist system, “production of surplus-value is the absolute law of this mode of production” (Marx, Capital). The nature of the capitalist class is to seek fabulous monopoly profits. In exploiting energy resources, the capitalists do not consider the rational use of natural resources but only seek maximum profits.



The current climate crisis while on the surface it may be a question of natural resources, in reality this is absolutely not so. The world’s energy resources, including those of the main capitalist countries, are plentiful. Furthermore, with the development of production and the steady rise of human knowledge, people are discovering and will continue to discover new sources of energy. In essence, the climate crisis gripping the capitalist world is a reflection of the crisis of the capitalist system, an outcome of the sharpening contradictions within the capitalist system, and a result of the capitalists’ ruthless exploitation and plunder of the people.



The decrease and increase of the various energy resources often depend on the amount of profit they give. Capitalism means waste. In the capitalist world, resources are wasted because of anarchy in production and general wastefulness in life. Weapons expansion and war preparations and wars of aggression are bottomless pits in consuming and squandering. They are indeed parasites living on the people of the developing countries. Their wealth comes from their plunder, and the poverty of the developing nations is caused by their exploitation and plunder. The climate crisis is an indication of the great disorder in the world today. It will in turn inevitably make the world situation continue to develop in the direction of upheaval.

“Politicians often talk tough on addressing air pollution but we need to see more action. Cities should be at the centre of the fight against toxic air and councils should take the steps needed, including charging people to drive in city centres and banning wood-burning stoves,” said Andrew Carter, chief executive of Centre for Cities.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/jan/27/one-in-19-deaths-uk-cities-air-pollution

In the major city of Bengaluru, formerly Bangalore, the shanty homes of hundreds of labourers were bulldozed on the pretext that they were housing “suspected illegal immigrants”. The action, taken with police involvement yet seemingly on no official orders, has left hundreds homeless – either forced to share the limited space in those huts that are still standing, or else sleep on the streets. The incident began last Sunday when men in JCB bulldozers, flanked by plainclothes police officers, descended on the 600-home informal settlement of Kariyammana Agrahara, to the east of the city. They declared that all those present were illegal Bangladeshi migrants, and started tearing apart their homes.



It is commonplace in Narendra Modi’s India for senior political figures to speak of Muslim immigrant workers in extremely derogatory terms – usually as “infiltrators”, sometimes as “termites”. The actions has been welcomed by the local branch of Modi’s ruling BJP party, which called it “the right decision”. The incident was particularly concerning because it came just days after the local BJP legislative assembly member (MLA) for the area, Aravind Limbavali, tweeted a video of the settlement, saying it was “without cleanliness … a site of illegal activity” and housing people who “are suspect to be illegal immigrants of Bangladesh”. Only two days after the demolition, the BJP’s most senior official in West Bengal state, Dilip Ghosh, said there were “two crore [20 million] Bangladeshi Muslim infiltrators” who had entered India, adding that “we will not allow any to stay here”.

Lekha Adavi, a member of the Alternative Law Forum collective, said there was clearly a link between the evictions in Bengaluru and a broader anti-immigrant “sense across India right now”, with the government recently passing a citizenship law for refugees that excludes Muslims, and the exercise of creating a register of legal citizens (NRC) in Assam state.



“It is very clear that these guys are implementing their [the BJP’s] agenda, there is nothing more or less to it. They want to implement their agenda of persecuting Muslims, and Bangladeshi Muslim immigrants happen to be one pawn in that entire agenda,” she said.



https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/india-bengaluru-evictions-demolition-slum-shelters-bangladeshi-modi-a9300511.html

Another illustration of blue acceleration is provided by seabed grabbing, state the authors. Article 76 of the UN convention on the law of the sea (UNCLOS) allows countries to claim seabed that lies beyond the 200 miles of a nation’s exclusive economic zone. Since the first claim under Article 76 was made in 2001, 83 countries have made submissions. Put together, these claims account for more than 37 million sq km of seabed, an area more than twice the size of Russia.



Many seabed grabbers include small island states that are trying to become large ocean states in the process. For example, the Cook islands in the South Pacific has claimed an area of seabed that is 1,700 times its land surface. “The extension of the continental shelf is therefore not only transforming the geo-political landscape, it is also substantially shrinking the area designated as the common heritage of humankind,” states the report.



Examples of the conflicts that could ensue because of the blue acceleration include the disruption of key fish stocks by drilling for gas or oil offshore; pipelines that prevent trawl fishing; and offshore wind farms that disturb tourism.



Norway provides a stark demonstration of likely future conflicts. It aims to bring about fivefold rises both in salmon farming and cruise tourism in its waters over coming years while also building more and more offshore wind farms and more and more offshore gas and oil platforms. Seabed mining for minerals is also scheduled to begin. This saturation of ocean space renders Norwegian waters as being highly vulnerable to shocks, states the report.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/jan/25/race-for-seabed-threat-to-oceans