“For those concerned with the fate of the earth, the time has come to face facts: not simply the dire reality of climate change but also the pressing need for social-system change. The failure to arrive at a world climate agreement in Copenhagen in December 2009 was not simply an abdication of world leadership, as is often suggested, but had deeper roots in the inability of the capitalist system to address the accelerating threat to life on the planet. Knowledge of the nature and limits of capitalism, and the means of transcending it, has therefore become a matter of survival. In the words of Fidel Castro in December 2009: “Until very recently, the discussion [on the future of world society] revolved around the kind of society we would have. Today, the discussion centers on whether human society will survive.””

Groundbreaking government survey pinpoints fertilisers and pesticides as greater source of water contamination

–The government could do a lot more to educate people on this issue. However, for the same reason that global warming will not be addressed, people will also be mislead about their effects on the climate. A more radical analysis is necessary than the one that is allowed in current corporate news-dominated discourse.

“None of the existing models or policies could “square the circle” of economic growth with climate safety”

Somebody over at the New Economics Foundation has discovered Daly. The report can be found here.

“[Researchers don't] know how long it might take for the remaining oil to finally disappear but predicted it will take a long time.”

What they do know is that they’ll get a publication out of their study.

Wiebo Ludwig has been released from a jail in Grande Prairie, Alta., without charges being laid as police continue to search his property as part of their investigation into a series of attacks on pipelines in British Columbia.

Bombing the Land of the Snow Leopard | By Joshua Frank
Another argument for getting out of Afghanistan.

The World in 2020 | By Michael T. Klare

“The narrow-minded rationality of the capitalist market, with its short-term calculus of profit and loss, is intrinsically contradictory to the rationality of the living environment, which operates in terms of long, natural cycles. It is not that “bad” ecocidal capitalists stand in the way of “good” green capitalists. It is the system itself, based on pitiless competition, demand for return on investment, and the search for quick profits that is the destroyer of ecological equilibrium.”

“the problem of industrial capitalist civilization is not—as is often claimed by some environmentalists—“excessive consumption” by the masses, and the solution is not a general “limitation” of consumption, not even in the advanced capitalist countries. The problem is the prevailing type of consumption based on “false needs”: display, waste, fetishism of commodities. What is needed is production aimed at the satisfaction of genuine needs, beginning with those that might be called “biblical”: food, water, shelter, garments.”

“How can these real needs be distinguished from their artificial and meretricious counterparts? By the fact that the latter are produced by the system of mental manipulation called “advertising.” Contrary to the claim of free-market ideology, supply is not a response to demand. Capitalist firms usually create the demand for their products by various marketing techniques, advertising tricks, and planned obsolescence. Advertising plays an essential role in the production of consumerist demand by inventing false “needs” and by stimulating the formation of compulsive consumption habits, totally violating the conditions for maintenance of planetary ecological equilibrium.”

–This article is full of gems.

By Nick Egnatz | Counterpunch | “As the New Year approaches and with it the one year anniversary of Obama’s administration I have a request for my friends on the left. Name one good thing that Obama has done.”

–Indeed, it is.

“The document makes no mention of key points on which an agreement had been expected. No specific targets for greenhouse gas cuts were stated, meaning no action to keep temperatures under a 2C rise was set.”

During his speech to the 15th United Nations Climate Change Summit in Copenhagen, Denmark, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez slammed the “lack of political will” of the most powerful nations to take serious action to avert climate change, and called for systemic change to save the planet.
See also: Venezuela: What is happening in the Copenhagen Summit is Unacceptable.

–Sign the petition to demand that the Harper government act according to Canadian values and not those of the out-dated and wholly rejected neo-conservatives.

–The people are pushing back.

–Democracy Now! has a story on the protests against the Canadian Government in Copenhagen.

“Here, in the land between the two rivers that was once the heartland of ancient Mesopotamia, the water crisis has ravaged agriculture, an industry still struggling to regain its footing after three decades of deprivation and war. This was the second mooted site (the other was the Marshlands themselves) of the fabled Garden of Eden — a land so rich in soil and water that it would quench the needs of its dwellers throughout eternity. It doesn’t look quite like that now.”

The 20 Quebec doctors who have threatened to leave Sept-Iles if a uranium mine is built are not backing down. The list includes specialists, such as an anesthesiologist. Working class power.

“The Indigenous Justice Advocacy Network seeks a review of Environment Minister Peter Garrett’s ruling,”
“The indigenous group aims to protect cultural heritage and provide legal services for indigenous Australians, according to its Web site. A hearing is scheduled for Dec. 23, Melbourne-based Alliance Resources said in the statement.”

“The harm this country could do in the next two weeks will outweigh all the good it has done in a century.”

MONTREAL – Doctors threatening a mass resignation in protest over a plan to open a uranium mine near their North Shore community got a severe reprimand on Monday.

“After spending the last year fighting mining exploration activities, 20 of the 57 hospital physicians – psychiatrists, family doctors, anesthetists, a lung specialist, surgeons, gynecologists – said they needed to inform the public about potential radioactive contamination of the town’s water supply.”

“Yves Lamontagne, head of the Quebec College of Physicians, said it would be unethical for 20 doctors in Sept Îles to walk out on the job and leave the population without proper health services.”

–When scientists start getting politically mobilised, you know that something is really wrong.