photo by Paul Stein ( _PaulS_ on Flickr CC)

(And why it’s just plain right.)

The protesters at Occupy Wall Street have been criticized for being a scruffy bunch of hippies with no clear central message. Indeed, if interviewed they usually preface their answers by explaining how their movement is a broad tent: grass roots, without leaders and based on a variety of premises and complaints. In short, there is no one key demand that functions in the way that anti-Vietnam War sentiments galvanized the protest movements of the 1960s.

So what.

The US is entrenched in two wars, neither, of which have a definitive end in sight. There is increasing class inequality on a global scale due to a succession of financial and political policies designed to increase and consolidate wealth in the hands of the richest. That small wealthiest percent in turn possess an inordinate amount of political power, which they may use to progressively enhance their riches and thereby gain more power in a sort of preposterously greedy positive feedback loop.

Republicans to the rescue: Ironically, the best sound bite to encapsulate the goals of Occupy Wall Street has come from one of its detractors, GOP Congressman Peter King of New York, who stated during a radio talk show:

I remember what happened in the 1960s when the Left wing took to the streets, and somehow the media glorified them and it ended up shaping policy. We can’t allow that to happen.

To resurrect an erstwhile and oft-mocked political slogan of America’s neo-liberal (or ‘Stalinist’ if you know absolutely nothing about politics or history) president: Yes we can!

That result of the Left ‘shaping policy’ would be great compared to the undemocratic, irresponsible, ecologically destructive, soul-sapping trend of deregulation and income gap widening that’s been going on since 1980.

Here’s a nice quote from a piece in Earth Times:

The belief that higher corporate profits will somehow create jobs has proven itself a pipe dream. Wall Street profits rose 720% between 2007 and 2009 (yes, you’re reading that correctly) while unemployment rose by 102%. Are we to believe that we just need to wait a few more years, and these jobs will magically appear? Furthermore, are we to accept that our environmental crisis will halt until corporations decide to take on that challenge at some unspecified point in the future?

That’s right: the same ideology that gives corporations more rights than human beings also encourages those corporations to destroy the environment with unprecedented vigor, and then tells them that they aren’t doing any such thing, i.e., climate change is a scam orchestrated by a socialist world government plot. [Strange, somehow the governments of the world almost unanimously swing to the Right, yet we’re meant to believe the global Left controls all scientific bodies on Earth.]

Lest I dither further, here’s what some prominent Greens are saying about Occupy Wall Street, which it turns out isn’t just a noble picnic of so-called hippies and anarchists, but is rather proving to be the big tent it always said it was.

Matt Petersen of Global Green, USA writes in the Huffington Post:

photo by Paul Stein ( _PaulS_ on Flickr CC)

What is heartening about OWS is we are beginning to see the environmental movement join in, but it still seems to remain truly grass-roots. Our friends Bill McKibben and May Boeve at 350.org, who lead a global grassroots movement to fight climate change, have been at the forefront. McKibben conducted a climate teach-in this weekend for the protesters.

An article from Treehugger from way back near the start of OWS, puts some substantial Green pro-protest arguments forward:

[…] pervasive joblessness is a byproduct of the systematic dismantling of the American manufacturing base under the ideological pretext of free market absolutism and neoliberal globalization, an economic system disconnected from place and person. Re-localizing, re-regionalizing our economies, focusing on domestic needs first and export needs second, whether in so-called developing or developed nations (both inadequate words) is key factor in making our communities more environmentally resilient, more climate resilient, and in supporting local economies and jobs.

And then there’s the oily elephant in the room, covered in oil and blowing crude from its gas pump-shaped trunk, shaping policies, fueling wars, polluting the land and sea, and changing the climate. (It’s oil).

In closing, leave it to Naomi Klein, that sassy pin-up of the anti-globalization Left, to really bring it home:

The point is, today everyone can see that the system is deeply unjust and careening out of control. Unfettered greed has trashed the global economy. And we are trashing the natural world. We are overfishing our oceans, polluting our water with fracking and deepwater drilling, turning to the dirtiest forms of energy on the planet, like the Alberta tar sands. The atmosphere can’t absorb the amount of carbon we are putting into it, creating dangerous warming. The new normal is serial disasters: economic and ecological.

Read Naomi Klein’s entire piece in the Guardian.

Thank you, Naomi. And thank you, hippies, anarchists, Adbusters and Republican Congressmen for your fantastic work. Tomorrow I will post something about the protests in Europe.

photo by Chronon6.97 (Flickr Creative Commons)

A photo showing a southern right whale breaching on top of a sailboat in South Africa was met with skepticism when it appeared in the media last week. Claims that the picture was ‘Photoshopped’ seem to have now been repudiated with the surfacing of a video of the breach.

The video, shown on CBS News in the United States, clearly shows what the South African sailors, Paloma Werner and Ralph Mothes experienced when the 40-ton whale unexpectedly slammed into their boat, breaking the mast. The whale likely bruised and cut itself, but the sailors were unhurt.

From a Los Angeles Times news blog:

Despite Werner and Mothes’ unswerving story that they weren’t pursuing the whale, local authorities are investigating allegations that the incident could have involved illegal harassment of the animal.

Southern right whales are listed as endangered by CITES, but have recovered significantly to ‘lower risk’ status since the whaling of the species was outlawed in 1937 and after subsequent crackdowns on illegal whaling.

See the original photo of the whale breach in the Telegraph and view the video from CBS news below.

Graham Land

Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan (image public domain)

Back in 1989 UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher called on the UN for action against man-made global warming. Maggie warned that rapid increases in the use of fossil fuels, the rise of industrial agriculture and population growth were ‘a massive experiment’ on the planet.

James Delingpole quotes Thatcher in a recent piece for the Telegraph:

Recently three changes in atmospheric chemistry have become familiar subjects of concern. The first is the increase in the greenhouse gases—carbon dioxide, methane, and chlorofluorocarbons—which has led some to fear that we are creating a global heat trap which could lead to climatic instability. We are told that a warming effect of 1°C per decade would greatly exceed the capacity of our natural habitat to cope. Such warming could cause accelerated melting of glacial ice and a consequent increase in the sea level of several feet over the next century.

The Met Office’s Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research was soon set up under Thatcher’s government.

By 2003, however, Maggie was already on the side of the right wing conservative climate skeptic brigade, as evidenced in her book Statecraft, in which she presciently stated the now-familiar mantras about the Medieval Warming Period, solar activity and how great more CO2 actually is for the planet. What a strange coincidence that her opinion would match up with the current anti-science stance of the pro-let-big-business-do-what-ever-the-hell-it-wants club, which loved her so well.

But it’s Baroness Thatcher’s sources that tell the real story. According to Bob Ward – director at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at London School of Economics and Political Science – in an article in Tuesday’s Guardian, they’re mostly pamphlets and publications produced by industry and ‘free market’ lobby groups from the US, not scientific papers.

As always, of course, the real source of skepticism is political ideology.

Lady Thatcher reveals her true concerns by claiming that ‘the new dogma about climate change has swept through the left-of-centre governing classes’, and warning that the international effort to tackle climate change ‘provides a marvellous excuse for worldwide, supra-national socialism.’

–Bob Ward

What makes paranoid right-wingers think that anyone slightly to the left of themselves is a socialist? And where do they get off telling everyone that there is some left wing socialist supranational power that is somehow calling all the shots? It’s not! Free market capitalism has co-opted the European left and Democrat politicians in America are often to the right of Nixon on many issues. Yet any measure that calls for taxes or potentially threatens long-established class systems and social ecologies gets the Red Scare treatment – even if it has to do with potentially saving millions of people from starvation and disaster due to climate change.

by Graham Land

Additional resources:

LA Times – Palin has a date with Margaret Thatcher

New Zealand election campaign buttons – photo by wonderferret (source: Flickr Creative Commons)

Economic recession, ‘Climategate’ and other ensuing scandals may have shaken both the  public’s faith in – and concern about – the realities of man made climate change. Yet a fickle media or confused citizenry have not been enough for most political establishments to break from some kind of platform that takes climate change and other environmental issues into account. Contemporary politics are still strongly influenced by what has become the zeitgeist of the day – and the parties of the future will no doubt be judged in part on how they are now reacting to environmental concerns.

For the moment, however – politics being what it is – both populist and vote chasing politicos as well as ideological and practical leaders are taking heightened risks no matter what their stand on the environment. By playing on public doubts and fears, they chance alienating and spurning voters. In fact it may be the Right, which is lacking a clear identity in both the United States and the UK, who hope to benefit by being less cohesive on the issue of climate change than the Left and center, who are at least in theory the far greener side of the political spectrum.

Case in point: according to a piece in The Economist, the British Conservative Party’s chief strategist voted for the Green Party in the last UK elections. And on issues such as energy independence and more vague areas like rural conservation, the Conservatives definitely have their environmental interests. Yet most greens still know on which side their bread is buttered.

Another of the green lobby’s fears is a change of government. Many Conservative activists and MPs are sceptical about climate change. Many more, including some in the shadow cabinet, think the matter should be given low priority. And even true believers worry about the divisive potential of the issue. The grim example of Australia’s centre-right Liberal Party, which deposed its leader in December after he backed an emissions-trading scheme, has not gone unnoticed.

–The Economist

This state of affairs is of course different depending on what country or region we are discussing. Germany and Scandinavia are decidedly greener across all parties than the United States is, for example. Still, it is probably safe to say that a relative comparison can be made from Left to Right within all nations. The character of local green parties must also be taken into consideration. Furthermore, international and cross-national organizations like the UN and the European Union have proven to be greener than the individual governments of many of their members.

But ineffectual or wishy-washy centrist politicians and the influence of politicized media blitzes against the validity of global warming may be underscoring cleavages between not only the Left and Right in terms of environmental issues, but further radicalizing activists on both sides. A failure at Copenhagen for any commitment or binding international treaty for action on climate change may have buoyed climate change ‘skeptics’ or ‘deniers’ as have the ensuing overstated scandals. But these same events may also be galvanizing some climate activists, as an article in the Guardian explains:

In many cases the focus is shifting from global action to local issues, such as fossil-fuel power plants or mines. Rising Tide North America’s document calls for “an asymmetrical assault on the fossil fuel industry” while in the UK and in Europe campaigners are also planning to focus more on local grassroots campaigns, “to start from the bottom” as the Rising Tide spokesman put it.

If Copenhagen forged anything, it was a network of cooperation between local, regional and global environmental movements. After all, many hardcore eco-activists were already against carbon trading policies or a global deal that they believed might shunt the developing countries and world’s poor. How they continue to act on a global level or involve themselves in the political processes of the establishment remains to be seen.

by Graham Land

Additional resources:

Rising Tide North America: The Climate Movement is Dead: Long Live the Climate Movement

The European Union and climate change: Is globalization actually good for the environment?