Ecofascism and the Death of Leadership

The Copenhagen climate conference was a complete and utter failure. World leaders and corporate sponsored politicians failed to deliver a legal framework in Copenhagen that will help our species reduce the world's greenhouse gas emissions causing devastating climate change. Despite U.S president Obama's announcement Friday that the ‘accord’ signed in Copenhagen was a "meaningful and unprecedented breakthrough", prominent politicians everywhere continue fail in their efforts to provide the world-changing leadership we so desperately need.

Either Obama is so caught up in his own doctrine of hope to understand the urgency of his task or he thinks he can sell failure as "modest success" to a public that waits each and every day for any sign of real systemic change?

Not only does the so-called ‘Copenhagen Accord’ not include overall emissions targets or deadlines, but also fails to include legally binding protocols or measures. The 'agreement' these industrial-state politicians reached merely suggests limiting global warming to a maximum of 2C above pre-industrial times. But the agreement fails to say how to actualize this vague goal. Without binding legal mechanisms or emissions cut targets there is no way to actually achieve this espoused goal of limiting an increase in global temperature.

i can envision the wealthy 'elite' now gathering in their $2000 suits to discuss corporate salaries and their next public relations attack against scientific data. But there is terrible storm of events coming – and even corporate managers, technocrats and bankers won’t be able to spend or talk their way out it. These ecofascists will continue to increase their influence on institutions and resource transfer systems, but their investments and opinions will be come irrelevant.

The Copenhagen meetings were good for at least one thing: a wide range of resistance and NGO groups came together to support the issue of climate change – forming previously non-exiting links and alliances. Thousands of human rights groups, environmentalists and anti-poverty campaigners have now rallied and reorganized in order to bring climate change within their direct sphere of concern. Politicians’ continued failures are now galvanizing a worldwide movement that will continue put immense pressure on world leaders in the coming months.

If the Copenhagen debacle can teach us anything it is that now, more than even, we must continue to fight and struggle against all those systems of domination and appropriation that seek to silence and brutalize us. The time for talk over people. Either join the coming battles or get the fuck out of the way.

Breakdown, A Degree of Difference

As world leaders leave Copenhagen this weekend after the COP 13 international climate conference they must now prepare for the onslaught of attention and lobbying by corporate advocacy and anti-government organizations awaiting them upon their return home.

While heads of state and elite bureaucrats spent the last 14 days debating environmental policy and promoting national economic agendas - private interest groups and organizations were gearing up massively funded public relations campaigns in order to sway public opinion and force politicians to roll back their environmental rhetoric and get back to business as usual. Prominent financial elites and corporations will inevitable reinforce their economic interests, conventions and related power formations by reminding bureaucrats and elected officials who pays for the now requisite multi-million dollar political campaigns at the core of current democratic processes.

These facts have also remained at the fore throughout the historic international conference. Despite large public expressions of concern about the role corporate profit and predatory financial institutions have in driving the economic and industrial practices responsible for accelerated climate change, both the US and Chinese governments - the two largest emitters of greenhouse gases on the planet - have announced only minor "concessions.”

The only remotely interesting “concession” came when U.S Secretary of State Hillary Clinton reported her administration was prepared to help establish funding of $100 billon a year for developing countries if a deal emerged that met U.S requirements. With such conditionalities governmental, corporate and banking elites have decided that spended their way out of potential catastrophic changes in the Earth’s climate is the only prefered choice.

Only a few leaders from European nations were willing to put forth an effort to move toward an agreement. Denmark's Lars Lokke Rasmussen called late-night talks with a group of 26 influential world leaders about how to unblock negotiations. However, disagreement between all nations about funding projects that actually attempt to decrease, mitigate or adapt to climate change continued. Advisors and aides continued working on a political agreement throughout the night and morning after leaders walked away from the meetings with little resolved. Referring to his staff as “Sherpas”, Rasmussen indicated to the press that politicians have tried to advance their main issues and then let the technocrats provide the language and terms of any final agreements.

Those close to the late night talks between national politicians and “sherpas” indicate that the current draft declaration is reportedly set to suggest attempts to prevent the earth's temperature from increasing 2C. Yet, a document simultaneously prepared by the UN climate convention secretariat, leaked earlier this week, confirms that current pledges on cutting greenhouse gas emissions by major industrial nations during the talks are almost certainly not enough to keep the rise in the global average temperature within this proposed 2C level.

The analysis - based on several recent studies, notably the International Energy Agency's World Energy Outlook - reports that limiting temperature increase to 2C would require global emissions to be below 44 gigatonnes (Gt) of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) in 2020. Current maximum pledges from developed countries would leave emissions 1.9Gt above that figure, but minimum pledges would mean missing the target by more then 4.2Gt - with a related temperature rise around 3C (5.4F).

The Earth's average temperature has increased about 1 degree Fahrenheit during the 20th century. One degree may sound like a small amount, but it's an unusual event in our planet's recent history. Earth's climate record - preserved in tree rings, ice cores, and coral reefs - shows that the global average temperature has been stable over long periods of time. Furthermore, data suggests, small changes in temperature correspond to enormous changes in planetary ecosystems. For example, at the end of the last ice age, when the Northeast United States was covered by more than 3,000 feet of ice, average temperatures were only 5 to 9 degrees cooler than today.

Therefore a rise in temperature of 3 degrees Celsius is projected to generate intense changes in all of earth's ecosystems and severely test the capacity of many cities, towns and regions to adapt and adjust. Such changes are likely to include increased frequency, intensity and duration of heat waves, deforestation, drought in some places and massive flooding in others, global fresh water shortages, overwhelming mass migrations of people leaving affected areas, and catastrophic biodiversity loss.

With nations pledging to do the absolute minimum in order to maintain conventional economic systems, and preserve the interests of multi-national corporations and financial elites, the climate is expected to reach several degrees above a global average temperature necessary to sustain requisite ecological stability. While national elites and corporate argue over differences in opinion with regard to minor concessions the scientific community continues to indicate that much more serious regulations and actions will be required if we are to prevent devastating changes in the Earth’s climate.

It now seems that while our differences may divide us as a species, the significant ecological and political challenges we are creating for future generations with will most certainly unite us.

The Politics of Climate Change

In the film Hot Politics the PBS news program Frontline and the Center for Investigative Reporting investigate how U.S bi-partisan political and economic forces prevented the U.S. government from confronting what is one of the most serious problems facing humanity today.

The documentary examines some of the key moments that have shaped the politics of global warming, and how local and state governments and the private sector are now taking bold steps in the absence of federal leadership.

WATCH the Entire Program: Here
READ several of the original documents discussed: Here

The Story of Cap & Trade

Do check out the new video from Annie Leonard (creator of The Story of Stuff) on "Cap and Trade" here:

From the Website:

The Story of Cap & Trade is a fast-paced, fact-filled look at the leading climate solution being discussed at Copenhagen and on Capitol Hill. Host Annie Leonard introduces the energy traders and Wall Street financiers at the heart of this scheme and reveals the "devils in the details" in current cap and trade proposals: free permits to big polluters, fake offsets and distraction from what’s really required to tackle the climate crisis. If you’ve heard about cap and trade, but aren’t sure how it works (or who benefits), this is the film is for you.

Most Important Global Summit Ever

For the next two weeks I will be covering the historic Copenhagen Climate Summit. I hope to keep the polemics to a minimum, but I can't promise anything. The following coverage and analysis is from Democracy Now, the only independent news radio program given inside access to the general proceedings of the conference:

Politicians Talk, Leaders Act

Canada's International Reputation in Ruins

“The tar barons have held the nation to ransom. This thuggish petro-state is today the greatest obstacle to a deal in Copenhagen.” -- George Monbiot

It used to be that when people not from Canada thought about the country they did so with some sense of fondness. People used to think of Canada as a peacekeeper, a friendly nation with social standards that made its neighbor to the south seem like a cold-hearted corporate machine. Canadians could travel anywhere and expect to be greeted warmly. All that is now gone.

Europeans, who are much more politically and socially aware than most of us in North America, among others now view Canada as a backward, selfish petro-state only interested in raising its economic status in the international and industrial cash-grab economy. So amazingly destructive has Canada become in its pursuit of tar sand oil that people and institutions around the world are speaking out and tearing asunder a national reputation that took a hundred years to build.

Reports from the global climate change summit in Copenhagen are already coming in that show how Canada is trying every tactic and means possible to derail the talks and prevent any binding international agreements.

Yet as award-winning journalist George Monbiot puts it,

Canada is slipping down the development ladder, retreating from a complex, diverse economy towards dependence on a single primary resource, which happens to be the dirtiest commodity known to man. The price of this transition is the brutalization of the country…

In 2006 the Conservative Party government announced it was abandoning its obligations and targets to cut greenhouse gases under the Kyoto protocol. No other country that had ratified the treaty has done this. Canada was meant to have cut emissions by 6% between 1990 and 2012. Instead they have already risen by 26%.

This is in contrast to Holland, which has far exceeded their Kyoto targets and still managed to grow their economy at more than double its projected rate.

After walking away from the Kyoto Accord, Canada then set out to prevent the other nations striking a successor agreement. At the end of 2007, it singlehandedly blocked a Commonwealth resolution to support binding targets for carbon emissions in industrialized nations. After the climate talks in Poland in December 2008, it won the Fossil of the Year award, presented by environmental groups to the country that had done most to disrupt the talks.

During the meeting in Bangkok in October 2009, almost the entire developing world bloc walked out when the Canadian delegate was speaking, as they were so revolted by his bullying. Last week the Commonwealth heads of government battled for hours (and eventually won) against Canada's obstructions.

A concerted campaign has now begun by member nations to expel Canada from the Commonwealth!!! Canada is a now an international disgrace!


And what for? The simple answer: OIL. Canada is developing the world's second largest reserve of oil. Actually it’s not even oil – but a filthy mixture of bitumen, sand, heavy metals and toxic organic chemicals. The tar sands, most of which occur in Alberta, are being extracted by the biggest opencast mining operation on earth. An area the size of England is being dug up and sold to transnational corporations.

To extract oil from this mess, it needs to be heated and washed. Three barrels of water are used to process one barrel of oil. The contaminated water is held in vast tailings ponds, some so toxic that the tar companies employ people to scoop dead birds off the surface. Most are unlined. They leak organic poisons, arsenic and mercury into the rivers.

The First Nations people living downstream have developed a range of exotic cancers and auto-immune diseases.

Refining tar sands requires two to three times as much energy as refining crude oil. The companies exploiting them burn enough natural gas to heat six million homes. Alberta's tar sands operation is the world's biggest single industrial source of carbon emissions. By 2020, if the current growth continues, it will produce more greenhouse gases than Ireland or Denmark. Already, thanks in part to the tar mining, Canadians have almost the highest per capita emissions on earth.

And who is Canada selling its future to?

The biggest leaseholder in the tar sands is Shell, a company that has spent millions persuading the public that it respects the environment. Syncrude is another major player. The other great greenwasher, BP, initially decided to stay out of tar. Now it has invested in plants built to process it. The British bank RBS has lent or underwritten £8bn for mining the tar sands.

The purpose of Canada's assault on the international talks is to protect this industry. This is not a poor nation. It does not depend for its economic survival on exploiting this resource. But the tar barons of Alberta have been able to hold the whole country to ransom. They have captured Canada's politics and are turning this country into a cruel and thuggish place.

It should seem very odd to Canadians that Canada is quickly becoming the most immediate threat to the sustainability and peace of our global civilization. But people all over the world are now waking up to this horrible fact.

The National Press is Also Following This Tragedy:

• 'Canada must reclaim its reputation by reducing greenhouse gas emissions' – Edmonton Journal

• 'How Canada can restore its reputation on climate change' – Globe & Mail

• 'Canada's Reputation Tarnished by Tar Sands' - Pembina Institute.

Conspiracy Theorists Caught Cherry Picking Again

Climate deniers have been making a lot of noise about a set of stolen emails from one of the world's leading climate centers, The Universtiy of East Anglia.

The spin they're putting out is that the emails reveal what they always suspected, an evil global conspiracy. In the short video below a climate scientist debunks the so-called debunkers. But i'm sure the denialists and conspiracy will cherry-pick this as well.



From the director of the film below:

Now that the conspiracy theorists have blown off steam, it's time for a more sober analysis of those e-mails and what they mean. I can't go through all of them, there are far too many, and . So I've taken the two that seem to be getting conspiracy theorists most worked up -- Phil Jones's e-mail about "Mike's Nature trick" and Kevin Trenberth's e-mail about a "travesty." I'm glad to see that skeptic websites that cover the science understand what these e-mails actually mean. As you'll see, very few commentators who jumped on the conspiracy bandwagon even before reading the e-mails mandged to get it right.

An Open Letter to Climate Change Denialists

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Dear Denialists,

For many years now you have loudly and openly argued for a 'real' debate on climate change. Yet, when questioned, it often seems the only debate you seek is one where opinion matters most and where we are asked to assume that opinion has the same legitimacy as expertise. Such 'debate' is then measured by climate change denialists according to an assumed right to reject any information they find personally disruptive (or inconvenient) - thus elevating opinion and personal ideology as the standard for establishing truth. We get it, everyone has a right to their opinion and you in particular just don't like being told what to do. We get it.

Be that as it may, what you don't realize is how productive debate actually works. Contrary to what your kindergarden teachers told you your opinions - that is to say, any potentially uninformed or vested opinions - are more than likely quite irrelevant, if not completely useless.

The 'real' debate about climate science should only take place among people who know how to understand the data and read the articles in which the science is presented. Scientific debate should not include the opinions of Fox News reporters, CEOs of major banks or any other non-scientists who glean their opinions from their favorite talk show hosts or magazines. As an analogy, would you ask your hairdresser to fix your car engine, or would you ask your mechanic to cut your hair? Probably not. So why would anyone ask a businessperson, or a butcher, or supermodel to contribute to any sort of productive and practical debate on climate science? It is inappropriate for the task at hand.

Now, in light of the recent scandal over leaked emails of climate scientists, many climate denialists have rallied and are claiming a victory over the global warming acknowledgers. Climate denialists claim that these emails between a small handful of people is "proof" that the scientific data supporting the notion of human-influenced global warming and dangerous climate change is wrong.

It is true that computer hackers obtained 160 megabytes of e-mails from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in England. And its true that a handful of researchers seem to have been caught manipulating data and trying to influence public opinion. But how on earth does this disprove global warming??? The Climate Research Unit was not the first group to suggest global warming was a problem, and they aren't even a large enough group to begin to impact the results on all the other studies done by thousands of researchers strongly indicating a crisis in global climate systems.

That being said, I would like to take this opportunity to invite all you fervent climate change denialists to prove me wrong, and now enter full force into the 'real' debate, by asking you a few questions. If you can't address the following questions you just haven't done the homework necessary to weigh in on this recent debate over leaked emails, let alone on the wider debate on climate change:

1. Which studies were compromised by the actions of the Climate Research Unit, and how? be specific. Cite papers and data sets.

2. This supposed scandal involves perhaps a half dozen people, how does it affect the work of the 3,000+ others who’s work make up the broader climate science?

3. How does the actions of these few people affect the scientific data collected before the alleged culprits even graduated from university? Or even the work done before they were born?

4. Of the 30,000+ studies that make up the consensus on global warming, which ones are now in question? Where is your evidence? be specific. Please run through a list of the studies you believe are affected?

If you can't answer these questions then you might what to rethink your role in championing this latest round of "debunking" claims. In fact, you might want to rethink the appropriateness of denying global warming in the first place...

Graham Harman on Manuel DeLanda

Below is a talk by philosopher Graham Harman on Manuel DeLanda's notion of assemblages. Anyone remotely familiar with the content of this blog will note the strong presence of DeLanda's work. Graham Harman is a theorist I have only recently discovered, thanks to the blogging efforts of Mike Johnduff. Harman is considered a leader in a recent philosophical movement called Speculative Realism. I will be posting much more on speculative realism as i continue to confront some of the main themes and discursive gestures involved in the work of its major proponents.

Much of this talk is rather irrelevant to practice - in the sense of getting along with, struggling or coping in the world - but is nonetheless intellectually stimulating. What interests me is that Harman says that he does not believe in the world as a continuum. Harman wants to hold firm to his ideas about the quasi-essential nature of objects. In contrast, DeLanda would argue for an assemblage theory of how objects (which are actually sub-parts or emergent from other properties) combine to create other objects, all operating on each other at different scales according to their intensive properties.

So where do we make the determination as to which 'objects' should be considered as enduring enough to have causal primacy? Which wholes (objects) do we privilege without reference to their parts (other objects)?

I think Harman wants his metaphysical understanding about how the world works, with its supposed object-permanency, to take precedence over philosophical discourses and arguments that privilege a kind of chaotic, fluctuating and creative ontology (theory of what exists). But I think we would do well to remember that at a different time scale, beyond the perveiw of human perception, the world is much more like a layered field of dynamic flux than a container of persistent objects in mechanical or vicarious conjunction.

Please give this a listen and decide for yourself. And then let me know what you think:

AUDIO: Graham Harman at the LSE - “Assemblages According to Manuel DeLanda”

This lecture was delivered at the London School of Economics. Download or listen to it here. A power point presentation of talking points is also available online.

Robert Anton Wilson on Alfred Korzybski

"There is nothing rationally desirable that cannot be achieved sooner if rationality itself increases. Work to achieve Intelligence Intensification is work to achieve all our sane and worthwhile goals." -Robert Anton Wilson