Surviving Capitalism (Not) : Leaked IPCC climate plan to worsen global warming

We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Thursday, April 10, 2014

Leaked IPCC climate plan to worsen global warming - ecologists

Click here to access article by Nafeez Ahmed from The Guardian.

Referring to a leaked report from the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to be released next week, the author writes:

Dr Rachel Smolker, co-director of Biofuelwatch, said that the report's embrace of "largely untested" and "very risky" technologies like bioenergy with carbon capture and sequestration (BECCS), will "exacerbate" climate change, agricultural problems, water scarcity, soil erosion and energy challenges, "rather than improving them."

We can expect to see capitalist ruling circles to engage in a desperate search for strategies to deal with the threat of climate destabilization while preserving their ability to use relatively cheap fossil fuels. Such an effort can only produce futile and even dangerous ideas (for example, see this).