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Category: Climate Crisis

  • Government policies will not get UK to net zero, warns damning report

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    https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/jun/29/government-policy-failures-are-obstacle-to-uk-net-zero-target-advisers-warn

    The government is failing to enact the policies needed to reach the UK’s net zero targets, its statutory advisers have said, in a damning progress report to parliament.

    The Climate Change Committee (CCC) voiced fears that ministers may renege on the legally binding commitment to achieve net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, noting “major policy failures” and “scant evidence of delivery”.

    Lord Deben, the chair of the committee and a former Conservative environment secretary, said the government had set strong targets on cutting emissions but policy to achieve them was lacking. “The government has willed the ends, but not the means,” he said. “This report showed that present plans will not fulfil the commitments [to net zero].”

    He said net zero policies were also the best way to reduce the soaring cost of living. Average household bills would be about £125 lower today if previous plans on green energy and energy efficiency had been followed through. “If you want to deal with the cost of living crisis, this is exactly what you need to do,” he said.

    The greatest failure was the insulation policy. Britain’s homes are the draughtiest in western Europe, heating costs are crippling household budgets, and heating is one of the biggest single sources of carbon emissions, but the government has no plans to help most people insulate their homes.

    …

    Five things we have learned about the UK’s path to net zero

    Energy efficient homes could be an easy win, but we’re ignoring it

    There are currently no credible plans to help the majority of households to improve their energy efficiency, the progress report from the Committee on Climate Change concludes: a gaping policy hole that is costing the UK dear, not just in climate terms but in unnecessarily high energy bills for our leaky homes. Insulating buildings would be the quickest and most effective way to counter soaring gas prices, but has been largely ignored by the government after the botched “green homes grant” was scrapped last year. Even our new homes are not efficient: at least 1.5m homes have been built in recent years that will require expensive retrofitting. “It’s a complete tale of woe,” said Chris Stark, chief executive of the Committee on Climate Change.

    …

  • State of the UK Labour Party

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    Two articles about the UK Labour Party, Craig Murray discusses the pointless Keir Starmer:

    …

    Starmer’s role has been simply to emasculate the Labour Party, and to purge it of any elements that might seek to pose a threat to rampant neo-liberalism and wealth inequality. His efforts to ban Labour MPs from supporting striking railway workers must be anathema to anybody who has the slightest feel for the history and traditions of that party and indeed the most basic understanding of its very raison d’etre.

    This Tony Benn quote from the 1980’s has come into vogue because it is prophetic, and the process appears now complete:

    If the Labour Party could be bullied or persuaded to denounce its Marxists, the media – having tasted blood – would demand next that it expelled all its Socialists and reunited the remaining Labour Party with the SDP to form a harmless alternative to the Conservatives, which could then be allowed to take office now and then when the Conservatives fell out of favour with the public. Thus British Capitalism, it is argued, will be made safe forever, and socialism would be squeezed off the National agenda. But if such a strategy were to succeed… it would in fact profoundly endanger British society. For it would open up the danger of a swing to the far-right, as we have seen in Europe over the last 50 years.

    Starmer is in one sense the apotheosis of this process. Not only has he acted to purge the Labour Party of socialism, he also offers so very little of a meaningful alternative to the Tories that there is very little danger of the Tories being voted out of office. Not only is he a safe right-wing backstop, he is a self-redundant safe right-wing backstop.

    …

    Jeremy Corbyn Sophie Brown, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

    and Jeremy Corbyn openly discusses the many parties that obstructed him. The article also discusses Julian Assange.

    …

    The Guardian has long been viewed as the voice of the liberal-left in Britain, so it surprised many during the Corbyn leadership to see it act as one of the main media vehicles through which the campaign to bring him down was fought. 

    The paper was a key part of the “anti-semitism crisis” that engulfed Corbyn’s leadership. From 2016-19, the Guardian published 1,215 stories mentioning Labour and anti-semitism, an average of around one per day, according to a search on Factiva, the database of newspaper articles. 

    In the same period, the Guardian published just 194 articles mentioning the Conservative Party’s much more serious problem with Islamophobia. A YouGov poll in 2019, for example, found that nearly half of the Tory party membership would prefer not to have a Muslim prime minister. 

    The Guardian’s coverage of anti-semitism in Labour was suspiciously extensive, compared to the known extent of the problem in the party, and its focus on Corbyn personally suggested that the issue was being used politically.

    The late Jewish anthropologist David Graeber commented after the 2019 election: “As for the Guardian, we will never forget that during the ‘Labour antisemitism controversy’, they beat even the Daily Mail to include the largest percentage of false statements, pretty much every one, mysteriously, an accidental error to Labour’s disadvantage”.

    …

    Keir Starmer says he is scrapping Labour’s manifesto and ‘starting from scratch’ on policy

  • XR Extinction Rebellion: Something has to be done!

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  • Jeremy Corbyn unites with direct action group Just Stop Oil

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    https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/jun/16/jeremy-corbyn-unites-with-direct-action-group-just-stop-oil

    Jeremy Corbyn Sophie Brown, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

    Jeremy Corbyn, the former Labour leader, has teamed up with direct action campaigners to form a new “red/green” climate and social justice movement which aims to stage a “major wave of popular mass action” later this year.

    Corbyn’s Peace and Justice Project, which he set up in 2021, is joining forces with Just Stop Oil campaigners who have staged a series of disruptive climate actions over the past six months.

    The new movement – which also includes trade unionists, civil society organisations and leftwing activists – argues that the current “destructive economic model” is the root cause of the cost of living crisis as well as the climate crisis.

    …

    New red green coalition forms to confront cost of living and climate crisis through a “major wave of mass popular action”

    …

    Lawrence Leather, 22 a spokesperson for Just Stop Oil, said:

    “It’s been over a year since Sir David King, the former UK chief scientific adviser warned the ‘next three to four years will determine the future of humanity”. But still the government refuses to do anything.

    “As the climate breaks down, the cost of everything will rise. That’s why we want to bring together the broadest coalition we can, including the trade unions, Britain’s biggest social movement, around concrete demands that decarbonise and put money back in people’s pockets.

    “We are encouraging everyone to step up now and join the movement. The politicians won’t save us. It’s on us to change history. Their time is up. Our time is now.”

    Jeremy Corbyn, the founder of the Peace and Justice Project, said:

    “Movements are the motor of change in history. When we come together, we can transform the world. And we must because those in power – the fossil fuel giants, the billionaires and the governments they own – are picking our pockets and stealing our future.

    “That’s the crisis. You can’t separate out the cost of living and climate crises. The whole system, which creates billionaires and starves hundreds of millions, is the crisis. It can’t be resolved, it must be overcome and transformed.”

  • Earth’s Atmospheric CO2 Hasn’t Been This High In Millions of Years

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    Republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons Licence (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

    “Either we drive the fossil fuel industry into extinction—or the human race.”

    KENNY STANCILMay 17, 2022

    Climate scientists and concerned citizens are sounding the alarm as daily, weekly, and monthly records for atmospheric carbon dioxide levels continue to be shattered while the fossil fuel-powered capitalist economic system responsible for skyrocketing greenhouse gas pollution plows ahead.

    New data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) shows that the weekly average CO² concentration at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii reached 421.13 parts per million (ppm) from May 8 to May 14—the highest in recorded history and up from 418.34 ppm one year ago and 397.38 ppm one decade ago.

    “We simply do not know a planet like this,” meteorologist Eric Holthaus said Monday. “We are in a climate emergency.”

    https://twitter.com/EricHolthaus/status/1526384367987068928?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1526384367987068928%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.commondreams.org%2Fnews%2F2022%2F05%2F17%2Fearths-atmospheric-co2-hasnt-been-high-millions-years

    According to NOAA, the daily average CO² concentration at Mauna Loa hit 422.04 ppm on May 14, just slightly below the agency’s all-time record of 422.06 ppm observed on April 26. Researchers from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego, meanwhile, measured 421.68 ppm of CO² at Mauna Loa on May 13, which they consider the daily record as of Monday.

    Those record-breaking daily and weekly measurements came after the monthly average CO² concentration at Mauna Loa surpassed 420 ppm for the first time in human history, with NOAA observing 420.23 ppm in April compared with Scripps at 420.02 ppm.

    Pieter Tans, a senior scientist at NOAA, recently told Axios that “it is likely May will be higher still.”

    “The window to act on climate change is closing,” American Clean Power warned recently on social media. “Accelerating the transition to clean energy will help reduce emissions and secure a healthier future for all.

    Twenty years ago, the highest monthly average CO² concentration was 375.93 ppm, according to NOAA. In 1958, the first year scientists began collecting data at Mauna Loa, it was 317.51 ppm.

    Climate scientist James Hansen, who alerted congressional lawmakers to the life-threatening dangers of the climate crisis in 1988, has long called for reducing atmospheric CO² to below 350 ppm, and there is now a scientific consensus that the livability of the planet decreases beyond such a concentration.

    Nevertheless, the annual rate of increase in CO² levels over the past six decades is now roughly 100 times faster than earlier increases that occurred naturally thousands of years ago.

    CO2 concentration over 10,000 years - Keeling Curve

    “The world effectively has made no serious progress compared to what is required,” Tans said earlier this month. “We really need to focus on decreasing emissions and we haven’t had much success globally because the rate of increase of CO² remains as high as it has been in the last decade.”

    “CO² has a longevity of hundreds to thousands of years,” he noted, “so we are really making a very long-term climate commitment.”

    Speaking with the Financial Times recently, Tans added that “we are going in the wrong direction, at maximum speed.”

    California-based activist Joe Sanberg put it even more bluntly last week.

    “It’s shocking that we’re staring down the barrel of the greatest existential crisis humanity has ever faced and we still haven’t passed a Green New Deal,” Sanberg tweeted. “Time is running out. Either we drive the fossil fuel industry into extinction—or the human race.”

    Republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons Licence (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).