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B.C. Green’s anti-worker biases expose the party’s contradictions on climate change
Canadian PoliticsInstead of helping provide a basis for worker solidarity and grass roots mobilizations against the economic system that caused climate change, Green Party policies emphasize shallow concepts like “innovative enterprise” and “sustainable business.” The B.C. Greens use those buzzwords to distinguish themselves from other major political parties, but in practice such terms indicate the same thinly veiled pro-employer and pro-market biases as the neoliberal mainstream.
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A Green New Deal Needs to Fight US Militarism
EnvironmentThe war on terror unleashed in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attack has led to almost two decades of unchecked militarism. We are spending more money on our military than at any time in history. Endless wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Syria and elsewhere are still raging, more wars are threatened against Iran and beyond, costing the US trillions of dollars and creating humanitarian disasters. Treaties to control nuclear arms are unraveling at the same time that conflicts with the major powers of Russia and China are heating up.
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Labour a Key Partner in a Canadian Green New Deal
EnvironmentWell over a decade ago, we were involved in the creation of Blue Green Canada — an initiative that emerged to address historic mistrust between trade unions and environmentalists. In the years since, friends and allies on both sides of the equation have worked hard to strengthen relations. Once a novel idea, co-operation between union and environmental activists has entered the mainstream. In the emerging climate discussion, those bonds can become frayed once again or they can be strengthened for a new century.
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Polymer perversity
EnvironmentAbout six percent of the world’s oil is currently used to produce plastic. But plastic production is set to quadruple by 2050, at which point it will account for 20 percent of oil consumption and 15 percent of the global annual carbon budget that must be respected if there is any hope of preventing global temperatures from rising by more than two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels (all this according to a 2016 report, The New Plastics Economy commissioned by the World Economic Forum).
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We can’t confront climate change without stopping imperialism
EnvironmentWestern imperialist forces are attempting to overthrow the Venezuelan government to attain more profitable and stable sites for long-term investment. The coup may have failed on Tuesday but it’s almost guaranteed that Trump and his fascist cronies will keep trying until they succeed — or we beat them back. We can’t come anywhere close to combating climate change without preventing the violent privatization of oil assets in the few remaining countries that adhere to a set of anti-neoliberal politics.
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Canada needs a Green New Deal
EnvironmentWith every new decision to support fossil fuel infrastructure and corporate restructuring in the name of profit, the scale of the alternative plan to counter these actions needs to become more ambitious and far-reaching. A Green New Deal can put workers and the environment at the centre of economic policy and ensure that the necessary transformation reaches all areas of people’s lives.
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An Ecosocialist Green New Deal: Guiding Principles
EnvironmentWe must solve the climate crisis and the inequality crisis together. Climate remedies in the context of austerity will produce a popular backlash, as we see in the yellow vest protests against a fuel tax. Corporations profiting from fossil extraction have long worked to turn workers against environmentalists, claiming that clean energy would be a job killer.
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Rethinking some dominant approaches to climate change
EnvironmentAlso, we need to center the working class in a just transition: Decommodify survival by guaranteeing living wages, healthcare, childcare, housing, food, water, energy, public transit etc. Demilitarize, decolonize and strive for a future of international solidarity and cooperation. Ultimately, we need a different kind of government with the political will to lead, coordinate and consolidate the transition.
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A Future Without Fossil Fuels?
EnvironmentImagine a world in which the tortured politics of the Middle East weren’t magnified in importance by the value of the hydrocarbons beneath its sands. And imagine a world in which the greatest driver of climate change—the unrelenting political power of the fossil-fuel industry—had begun to shrink. The question, of course, is whether we can reach that new world in time.
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It’s the Green New Deal or Else
EnvironmentDo environmental calamity and the real risk of extinction count as “extravagantly high costs”? When might we be willing to achieve the not-so-fringe benefit of continued existence by confronting the totalitarian “command and control” imposed on all of us by big carbon capital’s social and economic preference for short-term private accumulation and profit over the longer-term common good.
