“Current trends in energy supply and consumption are patently unsustainable — environmentally, economically and socially. They can and must be altered.”

“Current trends in energy supply and consumption are patently unsustainable — environmentally, economically and socially. They can and must be altered.”

World on track for 6 degree warming, says report

November 13, 2008

THE world is on track to increase average temperatures by six degrees above pre-industrial levels by 2100 — three times the target limit set by governments at last year’s Bali summit, the International Energy Agency reports.
In its annual World Energy Outlook 2008, released in London last night, the IEA warns that the world now faces an “immense” challenge to hold global warming to two degrees above pre-industrial levels, the goal it set in Bali.
The pace of growth in China, India and other developing countries is set to increase energy demand and greenhouse gas emissions much faster than any action by Western countries could reduce them.
The IEA is the energy counterpart of the OECD, a Paris-based think tank funded by Western governments, including Australia, to advise on energy demand, supply, technologies and policy issues. Its advice is seen as authoritative.
This year’s report implies that it is now almost impossible for the world to limit greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere to 450 parts per million (ppm), the target set by ministers last year.
To do so, the price of carbon emissions — from electricity, cars, factories and homes — would have to rise as high as $US180 ($A270) a tonne by 2030, far above the $20 a tonne featured in Treasury modelling.
Even to hold greenhouse gas concentrations to 550 ppm — the interim target floated by the Garnaut report — would require carbon prices to climb to $US90 a tonne by 2030.
In a politically charged finding, IEA executive director Nobuo Tanaka said its modelling shows it will be impossible to reach the Bali target by reducing emissions in rich countries alone, as was envisaged in Bali.
“We would need concerted action from all major emitters,” Mr Tanaka said. “Our analysis shows that OECD countries alone cannot put the world onto a 450 ppm trajectory, even if they were to reduce their emissions to zero.”
The analysis finds that on current trends, only 3% of the increase in energy-related emissions by 2030 would occur in OECD countries. Instead, 97% of emissions growth would be in developing countries, and 75% in China, India and the Middle East.
Mr Tanaka said the era of cheap oil was over, and the world needed “a global energy revolution” based on lifting energy efficiency and the use of low-carbon energy sources, such as solar, wind, nuclear and carbon capture and storage.
“We cannot let the financial crisis delay the policy action that is urgently needed to ensure secure energy supplies and to curtail rising emissions of greenhouse gases,” he said.
“Current trends in energy supply and consumption are patently unsustainable — environmentally, economically and socially. They can and must be altered.”
The report says the key responsibility must be taken by the five major emitters: China, the United States, the European Union, India and Russia.
The report comes at a critical time, with environment ministers to meet at the start of December in the Polish city of Poznan to review progress — or lack of it — in negotiations since their Bali meeting.
Their goal is to negotiate a post-Kyoto agreement to reduce global warming by the end of next year, when they meet in Copenhagen. But as yet there is no shared vision on the key issue of which countries are to reduce emissions, and by how much.

The next year will tell the story or could be sooner. 25 billion to the big three for what? How many business leaders with a mind that could get together and head to the hill in a few months and start off with what do we have to do and how can we do it. Is Obama’s plan still 150 billion over ten years for the fix. Do you think that is realistic? 150 billion to AIG for insurance man that is nut’s and 150 billion or is it 250 billion to see if we can save human civilization. I have to admit I want to see how this is spun.

Pilger, Martha, is one of the clearest headed thinkers and journalists I’ve come across. Thanks for the link.

It is time the wishful-thinkers grew up politically and debated the world of great power as it is, not as they hope it will be. Like all serious presidential candidates, past and present, Obama is a hawk and an expansionist. He comes from an unbroken Democratic tradition, as the war-making of presidents Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, Carter and Clinton demonstrates. Obama’s difference may be that he feels an even greater need to show how tough he is. However much the colour of his skin draws out both racists and supporters, it is otherwise irrelevant to the great power game. The “truly exciting and historic moment in US history” will only occur when the game itself is challenged.

I, unlike Ron, think there is nothing we can do with this Obama symbolism. It is hollow in the end, cynical perhaps, and even detrimental to real change. It is the ultimate answer from the power elite to the last throes of empire.

(What makes anyone think that the country that elected a two term Bush is somehow different? Chris Hedges has written a very good piece in TruthDig on the lack of literacy in America – at all levels of education. I was talking to a friend of mine who voted for Obama. He’s in his 60s and has read a book since he graduated from grad school in the 60s. And he has time!!)

Time will tell, as it always does…but it will be too late if we don’t face it and move on with alternatives.

Calling anarchists infantile is ad hominem. It has no basis in reality.

Does it feel good to be an anarchist? Yes and no. Yes because we are proponents of saving the world. No because others are not and we have to share the world with these people.

Take a calm approach here. Take a deep breath and examine everything you know about the state of the world and the state of the elite. Now project forty years down the road with presidents like Barack Obama (and presidents like Barack Obama leading other powerful countries). What’s the outcome? Examine the ecological state of the world, what is needed to save it, and relate that to Obama’s policies.

The world is in ecological crisis, and as far as most third worlders are concerned and many others, imminent and ongoing crisis to their health and well-being. When you have your hand on a hot burner, do you ask for reforms? Do you *negotiate* with the burner that is charring your hand? Do you *compromise* with it, perhaps asking it to leave you a few fingers?

No – you do everything in your power to *remove* your hand from the burner, *immediately*. You’re in a state of brief panic until your hand is removed, at which time you feel relief (and start looking for some ice water).

Any rational creature examining today’s world is in a state of panic. Yet Ron Jacobs and others call for negotiating with the burner that is destroying all of us.

We’re not infantile. We’re the elephant in the room. If you ignore us you’re be imperiling all of us. While so far that is the “American Way”, the future can be made to be different.

It’s mature to panic when the situation calls for it. The calm collected reformers, looking down their noses and sneering at the “infantile panickers”, will not have to worry about being told “I told you so” from these “babies”. By that time, we’ll all be dead.

That said, there is nothing more cynical than the election of Barrack Obama. What ever symbolism (and it will surely fade) he has wrought, it will be his counterpositioning of that symbol by his actions/inactions that will be the bain of any efforts to “reform”.

Furthermore, I can only say that one does not reform an empire when the empire’s power elite are fully in charge.

I will not reiterate my position on localism, but it generates real energy on the ground, human scale. It is not theory, it is real and can be the focus of an independent progressive movement (including Greens, Socialists, Labor, and others). I would go so far as to say that there are people at this level who lose the labels and the realities of human-scale are then dominant; no enemies. There are no schisms to get in the way. An economy grows from it as well as the relationships it helps to foster begin to flurish.

(www.earthcharter.or)

What to feel?

Hope and despair, as Ron Jacobs raises, are feelings that can be put into action, including for revolutionary direction. I felt mostly, though: Suppressed joy. Repressed victory. Freedom Songs of struggle and jubilation. Justice won, justice denied. On-going pain of war, mass murder, torture, unnecessary starvation, unnecessary sickness and early death. Disappointment at not being able to cry with unrestrained gladness—at long last, after endless years of excruciatingly painful castrations, lynchings, eye-gougings, rapings…my people in kinship have achieved a collective victory of such gigantic proportions. The knowledge that the joyful feeling exists for many makes me feel good in itself. The knowledge of why I can’t cry out of pure joy is most disheartening, though. The permanent war age will continue.

Yet I must confess that I feel a vague hope that he—this black man who was three years old when I fought alongside his people in Mississippi for the right to simply vote—might just remember the 106-year old black woman of whom he spoke in his victory speech, a woman who lives to see one of her own people win the biggest prize. Obama took her with him, and therewith took with him, and for the benefit of his white audience too, the history of slavery, brutal racism and the long hard struggles against it. No other Democratic party candidate could have embraced her and her history in such an intimate way. Certainly the warmongering, racist McCain plus crypto-christian-fascist Palin could not, even in their nightmares, imagine such a warm and enlightened communication.

We can hold Obama to that intimate understanding of the true history of oppressed peoples if we organize and grow in determination, and therewith in strength. Even though Obama will do the bidding of the capitalist-imperialist system, he might just be a significantly bit different and for the benefit of many people whom we abide, like this great great grandmother. And if that is so, it means we have a greater chance to organize and place on the agenda the absolute need to substitute the current economic foundation with one based upon cooperative production and and cooperative distribution of goods, services, and natural resources, and with an absolute end to all aggressive war-making. It means showing people we organize that socialism can and must be about collective decision-making while capitalism is and can only be about decision-making by the monied.

Obama’s inevitable failure to even propose such an agenda let alone fight for it could well drive many people, including sectors of the working class, into an understanding that it is not the person–not the color of the skin, the gender nor the sexual preference–that is the determining factor but the very economic system itself.
Still, I wish to dwell a bit on the victory–the victory of our historical struggles against racism and for racial equality. Let us recall that the United States as a nation was built upon the genocidal racial wars against the aborigine peoples, and upon the slavery of black Africans. Mulato Obama as president of the US of Amerikkka has taken the KKK out of America, at least officially. And that is a victory, and one that can be more readily built upon, which could take the KKK out of America everywhere, if we unite all we can and demand real revolutionary change.

http://www.ronridenour.com

“I am not of the persuasion that reforms are pointless. Instead, I see them as a means of raising consciousness and hopes to the point where folks see and understand the contradictions of capitalism and understand that it is capitalism that must go, not George Bush or some other politician.”

That doesn’t make any sense. What happens time and again is that reform *diverts* and destroys revolutionary energy. What happens is that a revolutionary force emerges, the elite offer “reforms”, and the revolutionary force says “Ok”, and that’s the end of it. That’s what happened in the 1900, the 1930s, that’s what happened in the 1960s, and that’s what most of the supposed “left” want to happen now.

The Bush Administration excited many true leftists in America because we recognized they wouldn’t offer reforms, so this might have led to a true revolution. But Americans are such utter douchebags who only care about the price of gas, not the condition of the world, their civil rights, or apparently anything else, that this revolution didn’t even get off the ground.

If the reformers have their way, we’ll have reforms, and forty years from now (or less) the world will undergo utter catastrophe, whether from capitalist meltdown, ecological meltdown, nuclear holocaust, some combination of those or something else entirely.

The Western left has the luxury of wanting reform. Millions of third worlders killed every year by the West don’t have that luxury.

The natural world doesn’t want reform. Third worlders don’t want reform. Yet the supposedly radical “American left” calls for it time and again. Zinn calls for a “Second New Deal”.

Now that Obama is president, there is little hope. Only McCain with his utter insanity might have driven Americans into a frenzy of revolution. Now Americans are supplicants, drooling zombies, groupies drenched in orgiastic sweat kneeling before their “president of change”.

The possibility of revolution has died in America for now, and with that death the world has lost much of it’s hope.

American “left” – “The natural world and third worlders can’t vote.”

The wrong electorate is voting in America.

Deadbeat “give the brother a chance” is the most vapid statement you’ve made so far.

No Max I’m not saying that. The African American community which you now have such disdain for since they voted overwhelmingly for Obama is saying.

You are the one Max with the “bunker” mentality and if you read what I am writing carefully you’d see that I am really trying to help you alter your rhetoric so that you won’t alienate this very vital voting bloc. I’ll repeat again. The African American community is the MOST LOYAL voting bloc of the Democratic Party. The Left’s strategy to weaken the Democrats MUST include appeals to African Americans.

Ridiculing African American for voting for Obama because you personally has so much disdain for him won’t help you win African Americans over if you do not find a way to contain your Obama disdain. When Obama disillusion African Americans as we’ve seen how much Obama has to kowtow to Zionism, will you have alienated African Americans so much that rather than inspiring them to move in your direction they respond with “fuck you”.

That is the choice Max and right now from some of the remarks I’ve seen here on DV I can see that division and diffusion is in the Left’s future.

Clearly I do hope that the Green Party behind Cynthia McKinney and Rosa Clemente (women of color) knows how to interact with the African American community and can lay the groundwork for the Left. But it is going to take a while.

Peace on Earth. Wendy