Climate change

Finlay Asher from Safe Landing spoke to Sacha Ismail from Solidarity . Part one of this interview is here . I think the “Citizens’ Assemblies” that have happened already haven't been perfect, but it’s very good they’ve happened already . They’ve produced useful suggestions , many of which have been ignored by politicians because of a lack of organised pressure. Something that comes up time and time again is pitching the environment vs. the economy. Citizens’ Assemblies recommend that we need to eat less meat, drive less, and fly less… But the government’s response is that air traffic growth...

Finlay Asher of Safe Landing , a climate-oriented group of aviation workers campaigning for long-term employment by challenging industry leaders to conform with climate science, spoke to Sacha Ismail. This is part one; part two, mainly about Safe Landing's idea of "workers' assemblies", is here . As well as running Safe Landing, I’m also involved in Extinction Rebellion [XR] Trade Unionists . Building the links between the trade union movement and the climate movement, and between struggles against the cost-of-living crisis and the climate crisis, is for me the most relevant thing going on at...

Pakistani socialists are supporting a disaster relief appeal by the small farmers’ organisation Pakistan Kissan Rabita Committee: see here . One third of Pakistan is under water. At the time of writing more than 1,500 people, including over 400 children, have been killed by the flooding; over 12,000 injured; and well over 30 million – the equivalent of ten million in the UK – affected. Over 700,000 livestock are dead. In the province of Sindh, which produces half of Pakistan’s food, 90% of crops are ruined, threatening tens of millions more. The rains that have deluged the country are still...

Over the next week we’ll publish notes on some of the motions going to TUC Congress (11-14 September, Brighton), the annual conference of delegates from the vast majority of trade unions in the UK. You can read all the motions submitted here . There may be compositing of motions between now and the conference, and some of the text eliminated. As in much of the labour movement, there is a chronic problem of TUC Congress passing policies and nothing being done about them. Still, the motions are important – both because they should be carried out (particularly the good ones!) and for what they...

At the time of writing nine out of fourteen regions across Britain have declared droughts. Thousands have seen their taps run dry. Farmers are predicting up to 50% losses on crop yields. Cattle and other livestock are likely to be slaughtered early as farmers run out of feed. We have just lived through a long dry spell culminating in the hottest, driest July since 1935. But this drought was entirely avoidable: the result of staggering mismanagement and profligacy by the UK’s privatised water companies. Since these natural monopolies were privatised in 1989 they have prioritised enriching their...

It is good that campaigns such as “Don’t Pay” are promoting the need to fight energy poverty, rising bills, stagnating wages; even if we critique their strategy for doing so. Martin Thomas in “Wage rises, price curbs: where to push” ( Solidarity 641 ) is right that the “most effective working-class response to price surges [is] to push for wage and benefit rises”. However, on one point he is (and I know he recognises this) off-beam. On the serious issue of energy poverty, he adds that we “push for the labour movement to campaign for public ownership and democratic planning of the energy...

Climate politics remains overwhelmingly dominated by NGOs, journalists and scientists, observes Matt Huber in his recent Climate Change as Class War. Huber, a geography academic involved with the Democratic Socialists of America, insists that the "the climate struggle is about power" – meaning both class relations and energy. The book aims to counter the "professional middle class" politics that occupy the environmental left through a political strategy based on workers' material interests and fought through trade union struggle. Its greatest strength is an insistence that the "hidden abode"...

Tuesday 19 July 2022 was perhaps the hottest day in the UK in over 125,000 years. It is likely that the next hottest day will be later this year or next year. It is near certain it will be within the next decade. Climate change is accelerating as capitalist-organised activity, the frenetic fossil-powered acceleration, adds ever-growing quantities of emissions to the atmosphere. By 2100, without revolutionary change to the way we organise economic life, we will experience temperatures not seen on Earth in three million years. Creatures, plants and microorganisms which evolved through slowly...

On 6 July the French government announced that it will take the country's primary electricity utility, EDF, back into full public ownership. This reverses the part-privatisation of 2005, from which 16% of the shares of EDF are now in private hands. The rationale of the decision is one which equally mandates public ownership of the energy industry in Britain: the need for long-term investment not vulnerable to the short-term oscillations of profit and share prices. The immediate impulse is the need to repair, renovate, and expand France's nuclear power stations, which provide a much bigger...

After a two-year delay, the UN has announced that the COP15 summit on Biological Diversity will take place in Canada in December this year. The meeting was originally scheduled in China in 2020 and has been postponed four times due to Covid. Nearly 100 countries, including the UK, have formed the “High Ambition Coalition for Nature and People” (HAC N&P) with the stated aim of protecting 30% of the Earth’s land and and 30% of the Earth’s oceans from human interference by 2030. “30 by 30” is conceived as a stepping stone to the Half-Earth policy proposed by biologist E O Wilson. As habitat...