The environment

Stuff about nature etc.

The magpie and the beeps

Almost 50% of the Tube is actually above ground. Only the Victoria and Waterloo and City lines have no time spent out in the open. That means on many journeys you can get a good idea, particularly in the spring and summer, of how the local wildlife interact with the railway. While it is nice to see young fox cubs try to catch butterflies or sleep in the sun on the embankments, the most interesting animal is probably one of the UK’s least loved: the magpie. At a terminus station as your doors open pigeons and magpies will often hop on to look for scrap food and rubbish left by the passengers...

Stop profit drive frying the planet

In its pursuit of profit, capitalism is frying and boiling our planet. The uncontrolled wildfires burning through July and August — from Hawaii to Greece, from western Canada to Tenerife — not only symbolise runaway climate change, but give a warning of worse to come. The eight hottest years on record are the last eight. 2023 is set to beat them. We haven’t yet reached the key threshold of 1.5 Celsius above pre-industrial temperatures. As we race towards and most likely past it, the events of this summer will start to look minor. Events like the new uncontrolled wildfires are only part of the...

Workers' Liberty Australia makes new turn

At a conference in Brisbane on 29-30 July, Workers’ Liberty Australia decided to turn more to environmental activist groups. Trade union activity, our “traditional” focus, remains important, but right now our small group has fewer openings there, with some of our comrades retired and the union movement at a low ebb. Some activity in the Australian Labor Party links with environmental action, through the Labor Environment Action Network, but Australia’s big cities also have dozen of ad hoc or local environmental groups. Australia had some of the world’s biggest school student climate strikes in...

Labour after the by elections

Two by-election defeats on 20 July and a narrow victory in a third have damaged the Tories. A big victory for Labour in Selby and Ainsty for Keir Mather, a former CBI staffer who had previously worked for Wes Streeting and for Times journalist Matthew Parris, is exactly what Starmer would have hoped for. The derisory Labour vote in Somerset and Frome reflects the Lib-Dems going all out to target the seat. It was never likely to see a Labour victory. But the scale of the vote squeeze there, and the Tories holding on in Uxbridge and South Ruislip, should tell us that Labour’s current Steve-Reed...

Heatwave shows urgency of green policies

Death Valley, California 53.3C; Sanbao, Xinjiang 52.2C; Mexicali, Mexico 50.2C; Tunis 50C; Sicily 47.3C. The July heatwave has been as unrelenting as it has been extensive. And now (31 July) Rishi Sunak has announced that the government intends to give over 100 new licences for oil and gas development in the North Sea, with all their carbon-emission implications. While the UK has experienced a month of damp weather, large parts of the world have suffered temperatures near the limits of human survivability. This is the world at 1.2C warming. Emissions are still rising, and temperatures will...

Capitalism and converging crises

Nancy Fraser’s Cannibal Capitalism tells us that capitalist society is an insatiable glutton that “makes a meal of our creative capacities and of the earth that sustains us — with no obligation to replenish what they consume or repair what they damage”. Racism, sexism, ecocide and creeping authoritarianism are “non-accidental” features of capitalism’s deep structure. Through blind, systemic parasitism on human and extra-human nature, capitalism undermines the social, political and natural bases of its own existence lurching into ever-escalating crises which resolve periodically into new...

Hugo Blanco 1934-2023

Peruvian revolutionary socialist Hugo Blanco, who died in Sweden last month, needs to be recognised as a significant figure in the history of the Trotskyist movement. He became a Trotskyist as a student in Argentina in the 1950s, then returned to Peru. Sixty years ago, connected to the international trend led by the Socialist Workers Party in the USA, he played a major role in the peasant movement in La Convencion province in the Cuzco region of Peru. The majority of the peasantry there and elsewhere in the country laboured under semi-feudal conditions. Belonging to the indigenous population...

To reach “green steel”, fight capitalism

Dependent on massive taxpayer subsidies, the UK steel industry lurches from crisis to crisis. This year alone Liberty Steel announced plans to cut 440 jobs, mothball plants in West Bromwich, Newport and Tredegar, and scale back production at Rotherham. British Steel, which went bankrupt in 2019 and was bought by Chinese firm Jingye, also threatened 800 jobs and closure of both blast furnaces in Scunthorpe (reduced to 260 jobs and the closure of its coke ovens after government and union intervention). Tata Steel wound down operations at Orb plant in Newport 2019 and is now threatening to shut a...

Take climate change and science seriously

Earlier this month, Sunak and other prominent Tories declared that Starmer and Labour were taking climate change too seriously. Sunak frothed that “eco-zealots at Just Stop Oil are writing Keir Starmer's energy policy" — alongside other dishonest smears from other champions of climate catastrophe. Paul Vernadsky’s recent letter seems to take a similar tactic: “I am alarmed that Solidarity ’s ecological politics is collapsing into a callow regurgitation of Extinction Rebellion and its offshoots.” He doesn’t specify what are the similarities or specific limitations of XR, Paul simply uses XR as...

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