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Climate change and capitalist growth | libcom.org
Does the failure to reach an agreement to keep global temperature rises below 2 degrees celsius prove that capitalism has no answer to man-made climate change?
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There is widespread scientific consensus that to avoid dangerous, run away climate change, temperature rises will have to be kept to 2oC above pre-industrial levels. This was acknowledged in the Copenhagen Accord at the COP-15 summit in 2009 (which was issued after parties failed to reach a formal agreement). The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change SRREN report states that this “implies that global emissions of CO2 will need to decrease by 50 to 85% below 2000 levels by 2050 and begin to decrease (instead of continuing their current increase) no later than 2015.” Clearly, as the deal agreed at Durban, even in the best case scenario, will not even be drafted until 2015, this is not going to happen.
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Due to capitalism’s inherent expansionary tendencies, technological development serves to escalate commodity production, which necessitates the burning of fossil fuels to power the machinery of production. (…) The theory of the metabolic rift reveals how capital contributes to the systematic degradation of the biosphere.
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The price of a capitalist solution to climate change could be mass famine in large parts of the world.3 So we should certainly err on the side of communism, but I think it underestimates the flexibility of capitalism to think there can be no moves towards addressing climate change, even if they’re too little, too late.
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Emma Goldman may have been the East Village’s most famous radical. For ten years she published the magazine “Mother Earth” out of her 13th Street residence, where she housed transient intellectuals of every stripe.
My Bookmarx 12/27/2011
27 ديسمبر 2011 بواسطة Tamer Mowafy
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