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#Post#: 8864--------------------------------------------------
Re: True Left breakthrough: seriousness in environmentalism
By: guest55 Date: September 17, 2021, 6:37 pm
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Is the War on Drugs Killing the Environment? | The War on Drugs
[quote]We talk a lot about the human and financial costs of the
War on Drugs – but this conflict is also having a serious
environmental impact.
From the military spraying pesticides onto the Amazon rainforest
to suppress coca production, to MDMA producers dumping toxic
chemicals into rivers in the Netherlands – the illegal drug
trade is unquestionably bad for nature.
But whose fault is this? All the drugs we take could be produced
in much greener ways as part of a legal, regulated market. The
problem is not that they are drugs, it’s that they are illegal.
Is the war on drugs killing the environment? [/quote]
HTML https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tXAzTcKXqZI
Westerners make more money with "drugs" being illegal plain and
simple. Western banks get to launder the drug money and
enforcement agencies are able to ask for a bigger budget because
of the "war on drugs".
[quote]It's really sad how the people in power are destroying
the world and getting away with it!![/quote]
"The people in power" are all Westerners!!!
#Post#: 9242--------------------------------------------------
Re: True Left breakthrough: seriousness in environmentalism
By: Zea_mays Date: October 6, 2021, 1:00 pm
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[quote]If every single one of us were morally upstanding[/quote]
But the majority of people aren't, so we must rely on the state
to outlaw businesses from being able to massively exploit the
planet.
Even if 1 billion people refused to use plastic, etc. and lived
a perfectly exploitation-free lifestyle, we would still have 7
billion people screwing it up for everyone else (and screwing it
up for the billions of animals who are tortured to "sustain" the
ignoble humans).
Even if 7 billion people lived a completely noble and ethical
life, there would still be 1 billion individuals causing
unspeakable cruelty. 1 billion customers to sustain those
ignoble businesses.
Media outlets are owned/funded by business conglomerates, or
business conglomerates pay the media outlets for advertising
(which includes subtle propaganda articles, not just TV
commercials, etc.!) They're trying to distract leftists from the
fact that statism is the solution to this problem, by shifting
the onus to act on individuals. Obviously we need to make
changes in our own lives to live more ethically, but even if 7
billion people magically became ethical, statism would still be
the only way to stop the other 1 billion... Even if you and I
don't buy plastic bottles, multiple corporations around the
globe have just manufactured 1,000 more in the time it took me
to write this comment.
In the past, the recycling movement nearly managed to force
companies to reduce their wasteful usage of plastics. Instead,
the companies funded massive controlled opposition recycling
campaigns which placed the blame for pollution on consumers,
rather than the companies who made the plastic in the first
place. How are we supposed to end plastic waste when companies
keep producing this nonsense?
[quote]Earlier this month, the New York Times posted a video
op-ed correctly debunking “The Great Recycling Con.” According
to the Times, the plastics industry has sold generations of
consumers a lie about just how much of the waste they produce
could be recycled in order to create the false possibility of
eco-friendly, guilt-free consumption.
It comes painfully close, but misses the full story. The true
“Great Recycling Con” runs far deeper than lies about which
products can and cannot be recycled; it is an ongoing political
battle waged by waste-generating corporations against the public
to evade regulation, shift responsibility for environmental
destruction onto consumers, and protect the ecocidal and highly
profitable business model that lies at the heart of industrial
capitalism.
[...]
As product consumption became increasingly tied to the American
Dream, industry seized the ethos of excess to sell more and more
stuff for more and more profit. Vance Packard, a prophetic
journalist and sociologist, criticized advertising as an
industry and a strategy led by “persuaders” who preyed on
consumer vulnerabilities to sell more, more, more of their own
product, promising social status and fulfillment.
In 1960, Packard published The Waste Makers, calling attention
to a number of waste-making practices by corporations, perhaps
most notably the concept of planned obsolescence.
[...]
Jump ahead a few years to 1967, and the future was “plastics.”
[...]
In the 1960s, the counterculture movement challenged a number of
prevailing social norms, including the status symbols of owning
lots of stuff.
But in addition to the greater cultural battle, corporate
executives were also waging a political-economic battle against
an early labor-environmentalist movement that threatened to look
behind the curtain of the profitable model of postwar
consumerism and possibly regulate the ecologically destructive
practices that it relied upon.
As early as 1953, as Heather Rogers points out in Gone Tomorrow:
The Hidden Life of Garbage, nearly twenty years before the first
Earth Day, dairy farmers in Vermont noticed their cows choking
and dying on glass beer bottles that had been tossed into their
grazing fields. Consequently, they organized and passed a state
law banning not just the act of tossing the bottles, but the
actual sale of such bottles by commercial businesses.
Presumably anticipating similar regulations around the country,
and fearing a labor-environmentalist coalition challenging their
practices of producing and selling products that quickly turn to
waste, major corporations under threat responded with a series
of “greenwashing” campaigns to derail environmentalists and
labor.
[...]
Drawing on notions of “good citizenship” and inventing the
concept of littering as a literal sin against nature, the group
used symbols of white, bourgeois virtue, most famously Susan
Spotless, and drew on the stereotype of the Noble Indian,
shedding a single tear for what is implied to be a consumer-led
continuation of indigenous genocide, to shift responsibility for
waste management from corporations to consumers. “People start
pollution,” Keep America Beautiful would tell Americans, “people
can stop it.”
And the group’s propaganda campaigns worked. In the six years
after their first major advertising partnership with the Ad
Council, the percentage of soda drinks sold in disposable
packaging quadrupled, from 3 percent to 12 percent. Ten years
later, it was near 70 percent.
Rather than corporations restricting their own production of
disposable materials and eating into their profit, American
consumers would now shame each other into managing industry’s
cheap waste products. It was an insidious sleight of hand that
reframed America’s growing waste problem as one not of corporate
excess, but of irresponsible consumer choices and individual
lifestyles.
[...]
On December 3, the New York City Department of Corrections
announced that it will introduce Meatless Mondays in its prisons
and jails in part to minimize its institutional carbon
footprint. Instead of challenging the agricultural corporations
producing ecocidal levels of methane emissions, the state has
chosen to place the responsibility of managing methane emissions
on people who are incarcerated and already have no choice in
what food to consume.
[...]
But the public, much less the most marginalized among us, has
not gotten us into this mess, and unfortunately, private
citizens acting individually cannot get us out.
We have an obligation to keep our focus on the owners of the
means of waste production — on those who can be coerced by state
regulation into making the grand-scale, systemic changes
required for any climate mitigation.[/quote]
HTML https://www.jacobinmag.com/2019/12/against-recycling-con-corporations-environment-waste-excess
As touched upon in the article above, many necessary
environmentalist goals are not going to be possible without
state-level "structural" changes. For example, it's apparently
cheaper to ship food and manufactured products across an entire
ocean rather than just making them within the nation which needs
them. That's a macro-level issue with economics and laws.
Getting rid of cars will require cities and higher levels of
government to radically change their infrastructure and zoning,
and so forth.
I think the indignation by the Twitter commenters is the correct
attitude to have. The billionaire manufacturers who are paying
millionaires in the media have no room to preach to regular
people before they can live up to the ethical standard they tell
us to live up to.
#Post#: 9435--------------------------------------------------
Re: True Left breakthrough: seriousness in environmentalism
By: Zea_mays Date: October 17, 2021, 7:54 pm
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Some good news, Germany, Spain, Austria, and Denmark are not
giving in to reactionary pseudo-environmentalists in France and
elsewhere:
[quote]France recently asked for the inclusion of nuclear power
in the taxonomy framework by the end of the year, leading the
charge with nine other EU countries - Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech
Republic, Finland, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Slovakia and
Slovenia.
The group faces strong opposition from Germany and four other
countries that want nuclear power to be ineligible for green
financing, citing the EU's “Do no significant harm” principle.
The principle is intended to ensure that all projects financed
by the pandemic recovery fund do not harm the bloc’s
environmental goals.[/quote]
HTML https://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/eu-urges-members-protect-poor-residents-amid-energy-80552748
[quote]Spain, Austria, Denmark and Luxembourg joined Germany in
saying investors concerned about nuclear waste storage could
lose confidence in financial products labelled green if they
included nuclear energy without their knowledge.
"We worry that including nuclear power in the taxonomy will
damage its integrity and credibility, and therefore its
usefulness," the countries' ministers said, adding that every EU
country has the right to choose its own form of energy.
Countries like nuclear-reliant France and some eastern European
states favour nuclear because it emits no climate-harming
carbon.
[...]
Germany, already committed to phasing out nuclear energy 20
years ago over safety concerns, responded to the 2011 Fukushima
nuclear disaster in Japan by accelerating its national exit
scheme for reactors.[/quote]
HTML https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/germany-four-others-oppose-classing-nuclear-green-eu-2021-07-02/
I'd rather have carbon (graphite, charcoal, the element trees
suck out of the air to make wood ffs) than waste which remains
toxic for tens of thousands of years... How is that "green"? How
is one of the most densely-populated areas on Earth going to
store toxic waste for tens of thousands of years, while
continuously accumulating more of it as the population uses more
and more energy? Ship it to some other nation...?
Whatever Westerner began the propaganda campaign that "carbon"
is the only pollutant worth regulating should be executed. It's
not even the most dangerous greenhouse gas, although obviously
carbon dioxide emissions must be regulated.
#Post#: 9447--------------------------------------------------
Re: True Left breakthrough: seriousness in environmentalism
By: 90sRetroFan Date: October 17, 2021, 9:18 pm
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"How is one of the most densely-populated areas on Earth going
to store toxic waste for tens of thousands of years, while
continuously accumulating more of it as the population uses more
and more energy?"
Increasingly, I believe that there is a Yahwist collective
subconscious process at work which is deliberately trying to
trash Earth beyond saving in order to spur Westerners to expand
into outer space ASAP. This would neatly account for the
behaviour such as you describe.
#Post#: 9476--------------------------------------------------
Re: True Left breakthrough: seriousness in environmentalism
By: 90sRetroFan Date: October 19, 2021, 10:15 pm
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"Whatever Westerner began the propaganda campaign that "carbon"
is the only pollutant worth regulating should be executed."
Related:
HTML https://www.marketwatch.com/story/electric-vehicles-certainly-do-pollute-their-battery-packs-are-poised-to-be-one-of-the-biggest-new-sources-of-pollution-11634577011
[quote]Although EVs do not release carbon dioxide during their
use, their production (and that of batteries) exerts the same
toll on the environment as that of conventional cars, while the
recycling of lithium-ion batteries poses unique challenges.
...
battery waste could become a big problem not only for the car
industry, but also for the environment.
How big? If an average car battery pack weighs 550 pounds, 100
million cars would produce about 55 billion pounds — 28 million
tons — of battery waste that needs recycling. And we can expect
a big portion of that waste to accumulate by 2040 if the IEAs’
projections are even partially correct.
Water pollution
Although Li-ion batteries are classified by the federal
government as non-hazardous waste and are safe for disposal in
the normal municipal waste stream, several studies have shown
they can contaminate the water. Nowadays, a lot of recycling is
“informal” — it often occurs in less developed, rural areas and
without proper supervision or protective measures in place.
With these kind of operations, there’s a high probability of
lithium seeping into the water supply. A similar situation
occurs in highly developed areas where people improperly dispose
of consumer electronics, which are more often than not powered
by Li-ion batteries. Finally, it’s not just lithium that can
contaminate soil and groundwater. Nickel, cobalt, manganese and
other metals found in EV batteries pose an even greater threat
than lithium to both human life and the ecosystem.
...
So, why aren’t more batteries recycled? The reason is that
recycling plants don’t get much for scrap — about $100 per ton.
This is by far superseded by logistics costs involved in
collecting, sorting and transporting it.
Finally, to make enough batteries, we would need to triple the
current production rates for lithium, graphite, nickel and
manganese.
...
the result could be a situation that’s much worse than the
plastic pollution that’s fouling up oceans.[/quote]
This is why I keep saying: trying to use Western civilization to
solve a problem created by Western civilization will only lead
to even worse problems later. It is Western civilization as a
whole which needs to be removed before we can tackle anything
else in a serious manner.
Previous coverage:
HTML https://trueleft.createaforum.com/true-left-vs-false-left/true-left-breakthrough-seriousness-in-environmentalism/msg6940/#msg6940
#Post#: 9977--------------------------------------------------
Re: True Left breakthrough: seriousness in environmentalism
By: Zea_mays Date: December 4, 2021, 5:38 am
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[quote]A new book by Andreas Malm, a professor of human ecology
at Sweden’s Lund University, asks a simple but perplexing
question: Given the stakes, why hasn’t the global climate
movement become far more radical than it is?
It’s a fair question. If we as a species were serious, if we
really believed what we already know about climate change, we
would be doing everything humanly possible to shift course. And
yet we’re not. Even the most ambitious policy proposals on the
table, with little chance of passing, are scarcely sufficient.
This is the starting point of Malm’s book, and if you follow his
logic it leads to some conclusions you may find uncomfortable.
He says it bluntly: We should “[d]amage and destroy new
CO2-emitting devices. Put them out of commission, pick them
apart, demolish them, burn them, blow them up. Let the
capitalists who keep investing in the fire know that their
properties will be trashed.” For Malm, we have a choice: Destroy
the property that’s destroying the planet, or sacrifice the
Earth on the altar of that property.
Malm’s book — it’s titled How to Blow Up a Pipeline — is
obviously meant to provoke. But embedded in the provocation is a
morally serious challenge to how we think about, and act on, the
crisis humanity faces.
[...]
Andreas Malm
Well, to begin with, I don’t know that it would succeed. It’s
not like I have a crystal ball where I’ve seen that we’ll win if
we start doing this. But I think that the situation is so dire,
so extreme, that we have to experiment, have to try. What we
tried so far has only taken us so far. It’s given us limited
success, but we still haven’t managed to dent the curves and
bring emissions down and start the transition.
I mean, after a summer like this, and after all the disasters
that keep raining down on us, it strikes me as paradoxical that
people let these machines, these properties that are destroying
the planet, continue to operate without going into the
facilities and shutting them down and wrecking them.
I do think that the past experiences of social struggles
suggests that if you’re fighting a very powerful enemy, you need
to engage in tactics that can impose costs on that enemy. This
usually includes forms of property destruction and confrontation
with the ruling order that goes beyond absolutely peaceful civil
disobedience. I don’t know of any relevant analogy or a parallel
struggle in the past that has succeeded without an element of
more militant methods. I don’t see how we can imagine that we
will win this fight while staying as gentle and kind and polite
as we have in the climate movement so far.
[...]
Andreas Malm
Some people say that, including the Catholic workers that I
write about in the book, Jessica Reznicek and Ruby Montoya, who
systematically destroyed property along the Dakota Access
pipeline when it was being constructed. They come from a
particular radical Catholic tradition where they see this as
falling under the definition of nonviolence. So they would
destroy a lot of equipment, burn it, blow it up, and classify
that as nonviolence.
I myself have no problem with that logic. But most philosophers,
as far as I can tell, would say that this is a form of violence
because the owners of these things perceive themselves to be
harmed, their interests being harmed, even though their own
bodies are not being harmed. Therefore, the argument would be
that this is a kind of violence. But all philosophers that I’m
aware of see this as a form of violence qualitatively different
from actually targeting the bodies of the people in question.
[...]
Andreas Malm
The struggle against fossil fuel production would not need
killings, nor would such acts benefit the cause — no matter how
catastrophic the future risks might be. So I do think respect
for this line is essential. That said, I am not a pacifist in
the sense that I rule out the taking of lives in all contexts,
on moral or strategic grounds; in retrospect, I fully support
the Northern side in the US Civil War and the struggle of
anti-fascist partisans in Europe, to take only two obvious
examples.
But I don’t see the moral calculus changing in this fashion,
partly because I don’t see how hurting people — as human bodies
— in the present could even hypothetically save future lives.
[...]
Andreas Malm
No, of course, of course. There are all sorts of pitfalls and
dangers and risks, and we’re so late in the day that no path
forward is risk-free. If you just continue with business as
usual, that entails an enormous amount of risk.
Peaceful civil disobedience as an exclusive tactic for the
climate movement has the risk of inefficacy.
[...]
Again, the George Floyd uprising last year is a case in point,
because I think that there was collective discipline about the
level of violence that the radical edge of that movement engaged
in.
There was a general realization that if the movement oversteps
that boundary, that very important limit, and starts killing
people, the backlash will be tremendous. There are many other
cases where you have militant movements deciding that, “We’re
engaging in this specific kind of violence. We’re not going to
harm individuals, we’re not going to kill people, but we’re
going to harm property,” and have successfully maintained that
limit and that boundary. I don’t think that’s impossible.
[/quote]
HTML https://www.vox.com/vox-conversations-podcast/22691428/vox-conversations-climate-change-andreas-malm
Malm is a communist, so he hasn't seemed to realize that
consumerism-based communism (and its foundations of
Marxism--which literally relies on "materialism"!) is not
actually a radical opposition to what is causing environmental
problems. He thinks environmental problems are all rooted in
capitalism.
From the excerpt of the interview quoted above, he also thinks
retaliatory violence against material things is fundamentally
different from retaliatory violence against individuals. Who
designed the machines in the first place? Who manufactured and
paid for the machines to be built? Who runs the machines? Who
profits from the machines running? Who has capital to produce
more machines? Who bribes the politicians to prevent climate
laws from being passed and enforced? Who pays for constant
propaganda to make the public think climate change is fake? Who
prevents solar and other green energy companies from getting
government subsidies to get their industries off the ground?
[quote]The earth is not dying, it is being killed. And those who
are killing it have names and addresses. -Utah Phillips[/quote]
A non-sentient machine on its own is just a heap of metal.
That's not radical--it does not get to the root of the problem.
But, at least leftists are beginning to realize climate change
is indeed something which needs to be taken more seriously.
#Post#: 9998--------------------------------------------------
Re: True Left breakthrough: seriousness in environmentalism
By: 90sRetroFan Date: December 4, 2021, 9:42 pm
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[quote]We should “[d]amage and destroy new CO2-emitting devices.
Put them out of commission, pick them apart, demolish them, burn
them, blow them up.[/quote]
Destroying a physical copy of a machine will only cause more
pollution as a new copy is constructed to replace the one just
destroyed. What we need is to first achieve a population
containing no one who knows how (or is able to learn how) to
build the replacement. Only then does it become meaningful to
start destroying the physical copies.
The only machines that it would make strategic sense to actively
sabotage in the meantime are those with the potential to build
other machines on their own initiative (ie. AI).
"Who designed the machines in the first place?"
This. What we need is to eliminate all bloodlines capable of
designing machines, or even of maintaining the machines that
already exist.
#Post#: 10452--------------------------------------------------
Re: True Left breakthrough: seriousness in environmentalism
By: 90sRetroFan Date: January 8, 2022, 3:08 am
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Mainstream academics slowly learn ecofascism:
HTML https://us.yahoo.com/news/cambridge-peer-reviewed-study-suggests-223749884.html
[quote]A study published in a peer-reviewed academic journal
suggests that "authoritarianism" could be necessary to fight
against climate change.
The study, published in Cambridge University’s American
Political Science Review and first reported by the Foundation
For Economic Education, leads with a question of "is
authoritarian power ever legitimate?" before the author outlines
how it could be when combating climate change.[/quote]
I figured this out when I was in primary school!
[quote]The study states that it is "ultimately an empirical
question whether authoritarian governance is better able to
realize desired environmental outcomes and, if so, why and to
what extent."[/quote]
Yes, it is better. Because all it takes is a leader who cares
(instead of a majority of the population). To the extent that
the leader is willing to reduce the population, preferably by
preventing reproduction.
[quote]The study drew criticism on Twitter, most notably from
Alexander Wuttke, political psychology professor at the
University of Mannheim, who called the study "disturbing."
"In my reading, it explicitly argues that we must put climate
action over democracy and adopt authoritarian governance if
democracies fail to act on climate change," Wuttke
tweeted.[/quote]
Yes. (And we should end democracy anyway.)
[quote]Mittiga responded to the criticism with a lengthy Twitter
thread writing that his paper is "meant to be a warning about
the threats climate change poses to democratic governance and
human rights."
"In other words, I argue that we should all be advocating for
rapid and extensive climate action, *precisely for the sake of
preserving democracy and human rights*, which face their biggest
threats in the context of security emergencies, like climate
change," Mittiga adds.[/quote]
I do not argue this. I argue that it was by no coincidence under
democracy that the Industrial Revolution happened in the first
place, which alone should have been enough to discredit
democracy once and for all in the eyes of those who care about
the environment.
#Post#: 10922--------------------------------------------------
Re: True Left breakthrough: seriousness in environmentalism
By: Zea_mays Date: January 30, 2022, 5:50 am
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[quote]China Jails Almost 50 Steel Executives for Faking
Emissions Data
China will jail forty-seven steel company officials for faking
air pollution data, in a sign that Beijing’s crackdown on firms
that are flouting environmental rules is intensifying.
The officials who worked at four mills in Tangshan city near
Beijing, China’s top steelmaking hub, were give prison sentences
from six to eighteen months, the municipal government said in a
statement on its WeChat channel that cited court documents.
The sentences underscore Beijing’s push to clean up a major
source of air pollution. Authorities have ramped up
environmental controls on the steel industry over the past
decade in a bid to reduce bouts of dirty air. The goal is to
have more than 530 million tons of capacity in the “ultra-low
emissions” category by 2025.[/quote]
HTML https://finance.yahoo.com/news/china-jails-almost-50-steel-040109819.html
As time goes on, the ineffectiveness of democracy will continue
to be demonstrated.
[quote]It is impossible for democratic governments to do because
the political parties need the backing of the ultra rich.
That's a bug in the democracies that must be fixed.[/quote]
HTML https://old.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/seq4sn/china_jails_almost_50_steel_executives_for_faking/huldbey/
[quote]This is one of the things that China does really well (as
long as it's not just eliminating political enemies). They'll
just straight up disappear billionaires (72 billionaire
unnatural deaths over a 8 year period) and put the fear of god
in the wealthy class.[/quote]
HTML https://old.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/seq4sn/china_jails_almost_50_steel_executives_for_faking/hulc34b/
[quote] Among the 72 billionaires, 15 were murdered, 17
committed suicide, seven died from accidents, 14 were executed
according to the law and 19 died from diseases.
HTML https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2011-07/22/content_12959437.htm[/quote]
#Post#: 10923--------------------------------------------------
Re: True Left breakthrough: seriousness in environmentalism
By: rp Date: January 30, 2022, 9:24 am
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They should have the same attitude toward machinists.
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