Category: Archive

Australian Greens climate change spokesperson, Senator Christine Milne, today called on the Rudd Government to focus its Budget priorities on existing climate solutions such as energy efficiency and renewable energy, not offer up even greater subsidies to the hugely profitable coal sector.

Senator Milne said "Prime Minister Rudd’s visit to a coal fired power plant in China instead of one of their world-leading solar or wind sites is yet another ominous indicator that his Government intends to protect the coal sector from real, competitive climate solutions.

"The coal sector’s hype of ‘clean’ coal has been badly tarnished in recent years and months, with little or no progress in research and development, while renewable energy technologies have been moving in leaps and bounds, increasing their efficiency, reducing costs and developing improved energy storage technologies.

"Even John Boshier, head of the National Generators Forum and one of Australian coal’s loudest advocates, has said that early confidence in the techno-fix is fading amid growing concerns over cost and timeline blowouts, and the realisation of the mammoth scale of the problem – burying some 300 million tonnes of CO2 every year in Australia alone.

"Coal is simply being out-competed, and its desperation is evident in the increasingly strident calls for government hand-outs to one of the world’s most profitable sectors.

"The Rudd Government’s first Budget must deliver a level playing field for energy technologies that puts a price on climate pollution. When that happens, those technologies that are ready to deliver substantial emissions reductions now, like energy efficiency, solar thermal power and wind energy, will out-compete ‘clean’ coal.

"Instead of delivering a level playing field, Rudd looks set to continue the Howard Government policies of ‘picking losers’ with increased support for the coal sector.

"The coal sector is old, polluting and well entrenched. Even if climate change were not an issue, it would be outrageous that our governments add billions every year to the coffers of the rich multinational corporations that run the sector. When you add climate change considerations to the mix, ongoing fossil fuel subsidies become one of the most perverse and destructive government decisions imaginable. The polluter pays principle tells us that the companies that have profited from polluting for so long should be the ones to shoulder the burden of cleaning up their act, not the taxpayer.

"The Greens have proposed that a portion of the billions that would be saved by cutting fossil fuel subsidies should be channelled towards further research, development and commercialisation of renewable energy and energy efficiency technologies through a Sun Fund, and to pay for the early stages of a systematic and systemic retrofit of Australia’s housing stock for energy efficiency set out in our EASI policy.

"I will be watching the Government’s first Budget carefully to see if its priorities follow Martin Ferguson’s industry-fuelled hype, or a sensible, realistic path to clean energy."

Why We Must Reduce U.S. and Global CO2 Emissions 80% by 2025
by David Merrill

The period from December, 2007-December, 2009 is perhaps the most important 24 months humanity has ever faced.
The Kyoto Protocol is the current operating plan for addressing global warming.  It expires in 2012 and has long been considered only a first small step in tackling this enormous environmental challenge.  Dramatically deeper cuts in emissions are urgently needed.  And in order for a successor treaty to come into force on time, a global emissions reduction deal will need to be agreed upon no later than Dec. 31, 2009.  The 193 countries attending the U.N.-sponsored climate negotiations held in Bali, Indonesia in December, 2007 have committed to this timetable.
With a deadline set for a global emissions deal to be finalized, we now face a much more daunting challenge:  agreeing upon a plan that reduces greenhouse gas emissions fast enough to truly address the global warming crisis.
An Hourglass of Ice
Before we consider what the emissions reduction target should be, let’s consider just how serious the global warming threat has become.   We need not look any further than the largest hunks of ice on earth:  the Greenland and West Antarctica ice sheets. 
"Å not much additional global warming is needed to cause loss of Arctic sea ice, the West Antarctic ice sheet, and part of the Greenland ice sheet." 
–Dr. James Hansen, NASA, March, 2007
Catastrophic melting of the West Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets would flood every coastal city in the world, ravaging civilization.  The policy implication is clear:  we must phase out fossil fuels as fast as possible, the position of GlobalWarmingSolution.org since its founding in 2003. 
What is a Climate-Safe Atmospheric CO2 Level?
Atmospheric CO2 concentration is currently at 385 parts per million (ppm).
In December, 2007 leading U.S. climate scientist Dr. James Hansen made a startling statement.  In contrast to earlier assessments that 450 ppm CO2 was a safe level, he now believed that it was no more than 350 ppm, a level passed in the 1980’s.
In comments published in the British newspaper the Guardian earlier this week, Hansen said that a target of 450 ppm was a "guaranteed disaster."   (The 450 ppm target, long dismissed by GlobalWarmingSolution.org as reckless, is the target of every major national environmental group).
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/apr/07/climatechange.carbonemissions
So is humanity in a hopeless situation?
Not yet, according to Dr. Hansen.
Climate Science and Humanity’s Deliverance
In the fall of 2007 Dr. Hansen confirmed to me that currently 43% of human-caused carbon dioxide emissions are absorbed by natural systems (mostly oceans and forests).  The other 57% remains in the atmosphere, increasing its heat-trapping capacities.  But our climate salvation lies in this dynamic as well.
Dr. Hansen also confirmed that once emissions are reduced more than 57%,  CO2 concentrations would actually start to fall,  diminishing the atmosphere’s heat-trapping capacities.
Consistent with this urgency, GlobalWarmingSolution.org advocates that global carbon dioxide emissions be reduced 80% below 1990 levels by 2025.  Our report, Rosie Revisited:  A U.S.-Led Solution to Global Warming, released in July, 2007, demonstrates how this could be done.
www.GlobalWarmingSolution.org
It is the most aggressive emissions reduction proposal of any national environmental group and is our way of defining "phasing out fossil fuels as fast as possible."   
By employing energy conservation and efficiency measures and aggressively deploying existing renewable energy technologies, humanity would dramatically transform the global energy system in the period 2010-2025.  By implementing our emissions reduction proposal, we would pass the 57% threshold in 2021, turning the corner towards cooling the earth.
Decision Time:  for the World’s GovernmentsÅ and for You
Now let’s go back to Bali and the U.N.-sponsored climate negotiations.
The strongest proposals on the table call for:

• reducing emissions of wealthy countries 25-40% by 2020.
• reducing global emissions 50% below 1990 levels by 2050.

If this becomes the plan for addressing global warming, when will atmospheric CO2 concentrations start to go down?
The answer:  Never.  (they would never reach the required 57%+ reduction threshold)
Ponder for a moment the children of the world, perhaps even your own.  The only home they will ever have is planet Earth.  In December, 2007, on the brink of environmental catastrophe, the world’s governments gathered for an urgent international climate meeting, and decided to work towards an agreement that guarantees that global warming will continue to spin out of control, that our children will be left on a ruined planet.
As with surgeons and airline pilots, when it comes to the question of preserving a livable planet, what is most crucial is performance, not intention,.  And as the responsible citizens of the decisive country in the international climate negotiations, we must now look beyond official words of concern and consider the actual agreement they are reaching.  In the time remaining from now until Dec. 31, 2009 we need to change the goal from cutting global emissions 50% by 2050, to cutting them 80% by 2025.
But of course no such dramatic political shift will occur without an enormous upwelling in grassroots citizen pressure on the federal government.  That is to say, the success of this emergency plan rests on you, the American citizen.  Be confident that any significant change in the global warming conversation in the United States would immediately transform the international negotiations.
The two strongest bills in both houses of the U.S. Congress call for reducing U.S. emissions 80% by 2050.  No chance that will do the job.  Therefore we need bills in both houses of Congress that would commit the U.S. to reducing emissions 80% by 2025, and that include a provision calling for the President to make that the U.S. negotiating position for global emissions reductions as well.
The start date should be 2010.  Even if all the details of treaty implementation can’t be worked out by then, the emissions reductions could, and should begin then.  Conservation and efficiency measures could certainly make up the needed 5.5% per year reductions for 2010 and 2011.  The reductions would then continue until emissions are reduced 80% by 2025.
How You Can Apply Pressure
Join us in emailing your member of Congress and tell them you want them to pass legislation that commits the U.S. to reducing CO2 emissions 80% below 1990 levels by 2025, and that the legislation must include a provision stipulating that the President make that the negotiating position of the United States in the current U.N.- sponsored climate talks.
Email your U.S. Representative:
https://forms.house.gov/wyr/welcome.shtml
Email your U.S. Senator:
http://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.cfm
Make sure you get a prompt response from them (no more than two weeks).  Then please forward it to us at info@globalwarmingsolution.org .  This will enable us to use this valuable information in our Congressional lobbying campaign.
Epilogue:
Certain urgent facts are clear at this point:

• Human civilization is in grave danger.
• Our governments are refusing to mount an adequate response.
• The habitability of our children’s only home now rests in our tender hands.

If we want to retain any prospect of passing on a livable planet to them, it is imperative that the global warming conversation in the United States shifts from contemplating a gradual transformation of our energy system, to phasing out fossil fuels, here and globally, as fast as possible.
The 24-month hourglass is now down to less than 21 months.
David Merrill

Without a framework such as California’s Low Carbon Fuel Standard in place to guide the production of biofuels, NSW risks losing an opportunity to cut global warming pollution and minimise environmental damage from the manufacture and use of alternative transport fuels.
 
“It’s disappointing that the current ethanol fuel debate in NSW does not include a discussion on how to develop an accounting system that measures the emissions profile of fuels and their environmental sustainability,” said Upper House Greens MP Ian Cohen.
 
“Equally disappointing is the lack of progress towards a low-carbon fuel standard. Standards are necessary to ensure that only the biofuels that provide clear environmental benefits are rewarded in the marketplace.
 
“It’s irresponsible for the Premier to blithely state that ‘biofuels are good for the environment’, particularly when his planning minister has just approved a plant at Port Botany that wants to manufacture biodiesel exclusively from imported palm oil. 
 
“Palm oil is a very controversial feedstock, the production of which destroys rainforest biodiversity and produces carbon dioxide emissions often in excess of the fossil fuels it displaces. 
 
“Ethanol is not necessarily a silver bullet. According to the USA’s Union of Concerned Scientists, ‘corn ethanol, depending on how it is processed, can produce higher emissions than gasoline or cut emissions
by 50 percent’[1].
 
“Developing an environmental fuel standard is crucial if the emerging alternative transport fuels industry is to help or hinder efforts to solve the climate issue and protect biodiversity.
 
“I also take issue with Tony Kelly’s comments about the food versus fuel debate being ‘irrelevant in NSW’. Bio-En Australia are currently planning an 80 million litre ethanol plant at Casino fuelled by 200,000 tonnes of corn, wheat, sorghum and barley.
 
 “The CSIRO pointed out last year that ‘there will be increasing competition with grains for food, and with feedgrain for the livestock industry if the Australian ethanol industry expands to its planned production capacity and beyond’[2], said Mr Cohen.

Rosen’s article, which created a lot of noise in Israel, included the text of the ruling in the Torah: "Annihilate the Amalekites from the beginning to the end. Kill them and wrest them from their possessions. Show them no mercy. Kill continuously, one after the other. Leave no child, plant, or tree. Kill their beasts, from camels to donkeys." Rosen adds that the Amalekites are not a particular race or religion, but rather all those who hate the Jews for religious or national motives. Rosen goes as far as saying that the "Amalekites will remain as long as there are Jews. In every age Amalekites will surface from other races to attack the Jews, and thus the war against them must be global." He urges application of the "Amalekites ruling" and says that the Jews must undertake to implement it in all eras because it is a "divine commandment".

Rosen does not hesitate to define the "Amalekites of this age" as the Palestinians. He writes, "those who kill students as they recite the Torah, and fire missiles on the city of Siderot, spread terror in the hearts of men and women. Those who dance over blood are the Amalekites, and we must respond with counter-hatred. We must uproot any trace of humanitarianism in dealing with them so that we emerge victorious."

The true outrage is that most of those authorised to issue Jewish religious opinions support the view of Rabbi Rosen, as confirmed by Haaretz newspaper. At the head of those supporting his opinion is Rabbi Mordechai Eliyahu, the leading religious authority in Israel’s religious national current, and former chief Eastern rabbi for Israel. Rosen’s opinion also has the support of Rabbi Dov Lior, president of the Council of Rabbis of Judea and Samaria (the West Bank), and Rabbi Shmuel Eliyahu, the chief rabbi of Safed and a candidate for the post of chief rabbi of Israel. A number of political leaders in Israel have also shown enthusiasm for the opinion, including Ori Lubiansky, head of the Jerusalem municipality.

There is no dispute among observers in Israel that the shooting in Jerusalem three weeks ago that killed eight Jewish students in a religious school was pivotal for Jewish authorities issuing religious opinions of a racist, hateful nature. The day following the Jerusalem incident, a number of rabbis led by Daniel Satobsky issued a religious opinion calling on Jewish youth and "all those who believe in the Torah" to take revenge on the Palestinians as hastily as possible. A week following the operation, a group of leading rabbis issued an unprecedented religious opinion permitting the Israeli army to bomb Palestinian civilian areas. The opinion is issued by the "Association of Rabbis of the Land of Israel" and states that Jewish religious law permits the bombing of Palestinian civilian residential areas if they are a source of attacks on Jewish residential areas. It reads, "when the residents of cities bordering settlements and Jewish centres fire shells at Jewish settlements with the aim of death and destruction, the Torah permits for shells to be fired on the sources of firing even if civilian residents are present there."

The opinion adds that sometimes it is necessary to respond with shelling to sources of fire immediately, without granting the Palestinian public prior warning. A week ago, Rabbi Eliyahu Kinvinsky, the second most senior authority in the Orthodox religious current, issued a religious opinion prohibiting the employment of Arabs, particularly in religious schools. This religious opinion followed another that had been issued by Rabbi Lior prohibiting the employment of Arabs and the renting of residential apartments to them in Jewish neighbourhoods. In order to provide a climate that allows Jewish extremist organisations to continue attacking Palestinian citizens, Rabbi Israel Ariel, one of the most prominent rabbis in the West Bank settlement complex, recently issued a religious opinion prohibiting religious Jews involved in attacks against Palestinians to appear before Israeli civil courts. According to this opinion, they must instead demand to appear before Torah courts that rule by Jewish religious law.

Haaretz newspaper noted that what Rabbi Ariel was trying to achieve through this religious opinion has in fact already taken place. The first instance of such a court in Kfar Saba ordered the release of a young Jewish woman called Tsevia Teshrael who attacked a Palestinian farmer in the middle of the West Bank. And there are Jewish religious authorities that glorify killing and praise terrorists, such as Rabbi Yitzhaq Ginsburg, a top rabbi in Israel who published a book entitled Baruch the Hero in memoriam of Baruch Goldstein, who committed the Ibrahimi Mosque massacre in 1994 when he opened fire and killed 29 Palestinians as they were performing the dawn prayer in Hebron in the southern West Bank. Ginsburg considers his act "honourable and glorious".

The danger of these religious opinions lies in the fact that the religious authorities issuing them have wide respect among religious Jewish youth. And while only 28 per cent of Israel’s population is religious, more than 50 per cent of Israelis define themselves as conservative and grant major significance to opinions issued by Jewish religious authorities. According to a study conducted by the Social Sciences Department of Bar Elon University, more than 90 per cent of those who identify as religious believe that if state laws and government orders are incongruous with the content of religious opinions issued by rabbis, they must overlook the former and act in accordance with the latter.

What grants the racist religious opinions a deeper and far-reaching impact is the fact that for the last decade followers of the Zionist religious current, who form nearly 10 per cent of the population, have been seeking to take control of the army and security institutions. They are doing so through volunteering for service in special combat units. The spokesperson’s office in the Israeli army says that although the percentage of followers of this current is low in the state’s demographic makeup, they form more than 50 per cent of the officers in the Israeli army and more than 60 per cent of its special unit commanders. According to an opinion poll of religious officers and soldiers supervised by the Interdisciplinary Centre Herzliya and published last year, more than 95 per cent of religious soldiers and officers say that they will execute orders from the elected government and their leaders in the army only if they are in harmony with the religious opinions issued by leading rabbis and religious authorities.

Wasil Taha, Arab Knesset member from the Tajammu Party led by Azmi Bishara, says that these religious opinions lead to the committal of crimes. He mentions religious opinions issued by a number of rabbis in mid-1995 that led to the assassination of former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin at that time. "If that’s what happens when religious opinions urge attacks against Jewish leaders such as Rabin, what will the situation be like when they urge attacks against Palestinian leaders and the Palestinian public?" he asks. "We, as Arab leaders, have begun to feel a lack of security following this flood of religious opinions, and we realise that the matter requires a great deal of caution in our movements as we are certain that there are those who seek to implement these opinions," he told Al-Ahram Weekly.

Taha dismisses those who ask about the role of the government and Israeli political cadre in confronting these extremist religious opinions. "The ministers in the Israeli government and the Knesset members compete to incite against the Palestinian public and don’t hesitate to threaten expulsion of the Palestinians who live on their land in Israel and carry Israeli citizenship outside of Israel’s borders, just as former deputy premier Avigdor Lieberman and representative Evi Etam did," Taha said. He notes that Palestinian citizens within Israel have begun to take extreme precautionary measures since the issue of these religious opinions, including security measures around mosques and public institutions and informing officials of public demonstrations so that members of Jewish terrorist organisations can be prevented from attacking participants. Taha holds that the sectors of the Palestinian population most likely to be harmed by these religious opinions are those living in the various cities populated by both Jews and Palestinians, such as Haifa, Jaffa, Lod, Ramleh and Jerusalem.

Palestinian writer and researcher Abdul-Hakim Mufid, from the city Um Fahem, holds that the religious opinions of rabbis have gained major significance due to the harmony between official rhetoric and that of the rabbis. Mufid notes that official Israeli establishments have not tried to confront the "fascist" rhetoric expressed in these religious opinions even though they are capable of doing so. "Most of the rabbis who issue tyrannical religious opinions are official employees in state institutions and receive salaries from them. And the state has not held these rabbis accountable or sought to prohibit the issue of such opinions," he told the Weekly.

Mufid points out that when the official political institution is in a crisis, the Zionist consensus behind these religious opinions grows more intense, and offers as an example the religious opinions relied upon by Rabbi Meir Kahane in the early 1980s to justify his call to forcefully expel the Palestinians. Mufid adds that Israel in practice encourages all those who kill Palestinians, and points to the way that the Israeli government dealt with the recommendations of the Orr Commission that investigated the Israeli police’s killing of 13 Palestinians with Israeli citizenship in October of 2000. The government closed the file even though the commission confirmed that the police had acted aggressively towards the Palestinian citizens. Mufid suggests that what makes the racist rhetoric the rabbis insist upon influential is the silence of leftist and liberal voices, and the lack of any direct mobilisation against it.

© Copyright Al-Ahram Weekly

On April 4, thousands of angry Haitians protested in the southern city of Les Cayes, attempting to set the UN police base on fire while stealing rice from trucks. The rioting soon spread to Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince, where thousands stormed the presidential palace demanding the resignation of the U.S.’ hand picked president, Rene Preval. Fortunately for Preval, UN "peacekeepers" eventually managed to disburse the starving masses with tear gas and rubber bullets. Their brutal suppression perhaps prevented Preval from meeting the same fate as Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier, the U.S.-backed dictator overthrown by a popular rebellion in 1986.

Preval has done nothing to stabilize skyrocketing food prices or to assist those on the brink of starvation-and he made clear in a televised speech on April 9 that he has no intention of doing so now. In a Marie Antoinette moment, Preval scolded Haitian citizens, "The demonstrations and destruction won’t make the prices go down or resolve the country’s problems. On the contrary, this can make the misery grow and prevent investment in the country."

* * *

In Egypt, where protests and strikes are illegal, thousands of textile workers and supporters in Mahalla el-Kobra rioted against high food prices and low wages on April 6 and 7. Police occupied the state-owned Misr Spinning and Weaving plant overnight to prevent workers from going on strike as they had planned, but protesters responded by setting buildings on fire and throwing bricks at police tear-gassing them. Police repression did not succeed in frightening these protesters but rather only further fueled their anger.

Roughly forty percent of Egyptians survive on less than $2 per day, while the price of unsubsidized bread rose by 10 times in recent months and the cost of rice doubled in a single week. The national minimum wage has remained unchanged since 1984, at 115 Egyptian pounds per month. The Mahallah workers have called for a national minimum wage of 1,200 pounds per month-which would still leave a family of four living under the poverty level of $2 per day.

This week’s rioting in Mahalla is the latest episode in the rising class struggle now reaching deep inside Egypt’s working class. Middle East Report editor Joel Beinin argued of the growing strike movement, "This is potentially the broadest-based gathering of dissent the Mubarak regime has ever faced. The combination of repression, apathy and political demobilization that has sustained autocracy in Egypt for over half a century is being forcefully challenged, making it increasingly difficult for the Mubarak regime, if not its capitalist cronies, to conduct business as usual." Indeed, Prime Minister Ahmed Nazif rushed to Mahallah on April 8 to announce he is granting the workers a 30-day salary bonus and will address their demands on healthcare and wages.

* * *

Hunger is also rising in the U.S. The unregulated greed unleashed over thirty years of neoliberalism that wreaked havoc on the world’s poorest countries is now exposing the class divide in the world’s richest. It can no longer be claimed that all of those residing in the global North gain prosperity at the expense of the global South.

To be sure, growing hunger in America has only earned passing reference from U.S. media outlets, which still largely take their cue from Wall St. and the White House. On April 7, for example, Tribune Newspapers preposterously featured an article on the plight of that tiny slice of Americans now curbing their exorbitant spending habits. The article feature a down-on-her-luck mortgage broker forced to forego the Botox treatments for which she once regularly dropped $1,800. "I would rather have Botox than go out to dinner," the woman told reporters-who reported it without irony.

Food inflation in the U.S. has reached a level not seen in decades, with food staples like milk rising 17 percent over the last year, rice, pasta and bread rising over 12 percent and eggs increasing by 25 percent. As job losses mount in the current recession, an unprecedented 28 million Americans are expected to receive food stamps to survive this year. One in six people in West Virginia, and one in ten in Ohio and New York, are now relying on food stamps to survive. And one in three children in Oklahoma have been on food stamps at some time in the last year.

Food stamp "entitlements" are far from generous in the world’s most affluent society, and it safe to say that most people suffering from rising food prices do not qualify for help. According to guidelines posted on the USDA’s website, a family of four is eligible to receive food stamps only if their net monthly income is at or below $1,721. This same family of four is then entitled to a maximum monthly food stamp allotment of $542-the same amount as in 1996. The average subsidy amounts to roughly $1 per meal per person. And 800,000 mostly elderly and disabled food stamp recipients currently receive the minimum benefit of a mere $10 per month, according to the New York Times.

* * *

Mainstream economists have usually described the global food crisis as a food "shortage", but the shortage has been greatly exacerbated by the merciless laws of the free market. In many cases, the problem is not an immediate shortage of food but merely a shortage of the money to pay for it. World Food Program Executive Director Josette Sheeran recently remarked about Sub-Saharan Africa, "We are seeing more urban hunger than ever before. Often we are seeing food on the shelves but people being unable to afford it."

The agricultural/food business is now the second most profitable industry in the world, lagging only behind pharmaceuticals. Indeed the automaker Mitsubishi, which also controls the second largest bank in the world, has become one of the world’s largest beef processors, demonstrating the degree to which capital has flocked to the agribusiness sector. The World Bank’s World Development Report 2008 heaped approval on the role of agribusiness, commenting, "The private agri-business sector has become more vibrant. New, powerful actors have entered agricultural value chains and have an economic interest in a dynamic and prosperous agricultural sector and a voice in political affairs."

But just as agribusiness wiped out small U.S. farmers in the 1980s, it has repeated this pattern around the world ever since. As global justice activist Vandana Shiva wrote in 2006, in India "without market regulation agribusiness corporations will make profits selling costly seeds, buying cheap farm produce, and locking farmers in debt. This has been the process by which the small family farmer has disappeared in U.S.A, Argentina, Europe."

Now the law of supply and demand has dictated that the new market for biofuels should reduce the production of corn for food by 25 percent in the U.S.–triggering a manmade shortage and a rise in corn prices. Speculators have been hoarding crops on the expectation that prices will rise further. Meanwhile, investors around the world have been fleeing the falling dollar to buy up commodities such as rice and wheat, adding to the speculative momentum and forcing staple prices higher for the world’s poorest people.

The neoliberal agenda long ago lost its shine for the vast majority of the world’s population, although its most earnest proponents have been the last to recognize this stubborn reality. The most recent World Economic Outlook, published by the IMF last fall, did note rising inequality in the richest countries: "Among the largest advanced countries, inequality appears to have declined only in France The recent experience (of increasing inequality) seems to be clear change in the course from the general decline in inequality in the first half of the 20th century."

Yet the IMF remained optimistic about the future of neoliberalism: "from 2002 to the present, the world economy has enjoyed its strongest period of sustained growth since the late 1960s and early 1970s, while inflation has remained at low levels. Not only has recent global growth been high but expansion has also been broadly shared across countries. The volatility of growth has fallen."

In recent weeks, neoliberal policymakers appear to have finally realized that widespread hunger could ignite a level of protest that threatens the ruling order worldwide. World Bank president Robert Zoellick recently worried on the organization’s website, "33 countries around the world face potential social unrest because of the acute hike in food and energy prices."

Perhaps these out-of-touch policy wonks should suggest that the world’s poor start eating ethanol, in keeping with their long-standing bourgeois tradition. And U.S. workers now teetering into the neoliberal abyss should consider following their brothers and sisters around the world in fighting back.

Sharon Smith is the author of Women and Socialism and Subterranean Fire: a History of Working-Class Radicalism in the United States. She can be reached at: sharon@internationalsocialist.org

The economic slowdown is painful for many families. I personally share economic anxieties associated with the mortgage bubble popping. We are all finding it harder to pay the mortgage, buy food and fuel, and enjoy some special luxuries. Yet all bubbles burst — be they historically for tulips in Holland or property in Japan — and you deal with the underlying causes or you suffer further. I believe strongly that there should be no bailout of high flying bankers, home flippers, or people that took out mortgages they cannot afford. Wall Street fat cats that created the mortgage backed security Ponzi scheme should go to jail.

Endless Growth Impossible in a Finite World

Yet this economic cooling may also offer a welcome respite to reconsider the growth at any cost madness devouring the Earth’s life giving ecosystems, and which threatens to impoverish and kill many or all of us. It is essential that we look at the far deeper ecological roots to this economic crisis, and their foretelling of related environmental bubbles. The ongoing biofuel scam, using first food and soon trees as fuel to supposedly avert climate change, shows the potential for ill-conceived climate change responses to increase land pressures, food prices and negatively impact economies. These sorts of macro ecological/economic connections are examined further here.

Humans seem to always want more, even when there is none, or achieving it diminishes the future. A colleague recently pointed out to me that there may be a genetic component, expressed sub-consciously, to humanity’s expansionist bent that constantly seeks more, bigger and better human works. And that there are societal memes that foster and promote this myth that endless growth and expansion in population, consumption and resource use at the expense of ecological habitats is possible. For a few hundred years the western economic model of markets and growth that builds upon these human proclivities has created wealth while wreaking havoc upon peoples, societies and ecosystems.

Growth in economies, human populations and resources accessed by destroying ecosystems is a disease upon the living Earth. The malignant growth machine turns ecosystems into resources and then into financial investment papers and consumption. A year later the consumer products are in the landfill, the paper wealth may be further over-priced or just scrap paper, and there are both fewer resources and ecosystems — but always more people. The ability to live well based upon long-term steady-state interdependence with intact, healthy ecosystems and their natural capital is lost forever.

The Mortgage Bubble: Destroying Our Habitat to Build Homes

The mortgage bubble is a case is point. In America and many other over-developed countries the size of new homes grew and amenities seemed to know few limits. Each had to have restaurant quality kitchens, hardwood floors, multi-car garages, track lighting, and other seemingly endless conspicuous consumption to denote social class. Each represents the unsustainable consumption of resources from ecosystems, and requires continued intensive inputs to maintain. Most such development requires extensive automobile travel, sprawl into native ecosystems, and energy that will not be there in the future.

These extravagant McMansions are the epitome of everything wrong with "modern" society, industrial capitalism, and demonstrates our detachment from Earth, whose habitats are our true home. This more at any expense economy that knows no limits and has no concept of enough is responsible for our current economic downturn and is literally killing our future economic and ecological prospects. Can those that believe in markets and capitalism not entertain any limits upon the size and resource use intensity of our homes? Does anyone see the connection between more people using more resources to build large homes, leading to less farmland and overuse of limited energy, resulting in food and energy price hikes?

In the mortgage bubble, we are seeing the first signs of many wholly ecological bubbles to come. The world is not only at peak oil, but well past peak water, land, climate, oceans, food and energy in general. Rising food prices are the front edge of the food bubble — a result of over-population, climate change, water shortages and land scarcity. The climate bubble has already begun to burst –- it is too late to return to the relatively stable set of climate patterns with which we evolved — but failure to stabilize emissions as early as possible will bring far worse. And perhaps most ominously, and by extension of the food and climate bubbles, we are facing a deadly water bubble that is already disrupting societies and may prove insurmountable.

Ecological Bubbles and a New Global Dream

These ecological bubbles are partly responsible for the current economic downturn, and unless addressed now, they are certainly going to soon fully burst with calamitous impacts in their own right upon societal and individual well-being. The American dream which has been embraced by the world — based upon a sub-conscious urge to expand our dominance over nature and always, forever have more of everything, with constant societal pressure to do so — will have to give way to a more organic, ecologically-cognizant reality of living simply but well within ecological limits. Sadly for many, but a blessing for the Earth System and the not super rich, the whole world cannot live an over-consumptive super-sized lifestyle without destroying being.

It is time for a new global dream. The new dream would include aspiring that all have their basic needs met, even as individuals are free to pursue their passions and fortunes, as long as they do not undermine common ecological systems. Such a dream seeks to avert apocalyptic ecological and societal collapse through promotion of a sense of personal enoughness, voluntary simplicity and a whole range of necessary fundamental changes in society such as ending the use of coal and logging of ancient forests.

One thing is clear — more unbridled growth based upon unsustainable resource use will not solve the global ecological problems associated with unbridled growth and unsustainable resource use. The human enterprise and each global citizen’s consumption aspirations must be downsized to a scale appropriate to ecosystem limits. Or the Earth herself — as it turns out, with the assistance of the human created economic system — will do so brutally.

The industrial resource and illusory financial binge must end if we are to reverse the destruction, and begin the restoration, of the biosphere, its component ecosystems, and their ability to provide natural capital upon which to base a steady-state economy. It is time to get back to making honest, good livings from actually making or doing something of societal value, by making a living with the land and Earth, and that does not depend upon liquidating ecological being and financial speculation.

As the economic bubble deflates we might as well get on with finding a way to live simply, sustainably, equitably and justly with the Earth and each other. Because when the water, food and climate bubbles fully burst — we are going to need each other, and to be ready.