RT @[email protected]

BREAKING: Los Angeles votes 12-0 to ban new drilling and to close all 5,000 existing oil and gas wells in the city. This is a historic victory by @[email protected] and all citizens over the oil industry and environmental racism.

Never forget we hold the power.👊
http://bit.ly/3OV1zNT

🐦🔗: https://twitter.com/SDonziger/status/1599428334013644800

Don't be fooled by claims of "carbon offsets" or nonsense about "net-zero by 2050." Much of what passes as climate action by industry and government is nothing more than #greenwashing and has little or no impact on actually reducing emissions and slowing down global warming.

It's important to remember that our rulers have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo, in keeping the stores open, the factories running, the airliners flying, and the cruise ships sailing. The longer they're able to pretend that business-as-usual is just fine, the more money they will make. And they believe (though it's likely a delusion) that with enough money and enough power, they and their descendants will be able to survive and even thrive in the 3°C to 5°C world of the future.

Here's a new report that backs up this point...
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"Satellites detect no real climate benefit from 10 years of forest carbon offsets in California"

Many of the companies promising “net-zero” emissions to protect the climate are relying on vast swaths of forests and what are known as carbon offsets to meet that goal.

On paper, carbon offsets appear to balance out a company’s carbon emissions: The company pays to protect trees, which absorb carbon dioxide from the air. The company can then claim the absorbed carbon dioxide as an offset that reduces its net impact on the climate.

However, our new satellite analysis reveals what researchers have suspected for years: Forest offsets might not actually be doing much for the climate.

Read more -- https://theconversation.com/satellites-detect-no-real-climate-benefit-from-10-years-of-forest-carbon-offsets-in-california-193943
#ClimateCrisis

Electric cars are less bad for the #environment than gas/petrol cars. Still bad, but slightly less bad.

Electric cars are GOOD for automakers, because they can keep building and selling cars!

Electric cars are GOOD for the oil industry, because they can produce and sell more petrochemicals used to make #plastics, which electric vehicles are loaded with.

Electric cars are GOOD for the asphalt, concrete, and steel industries, because they mean more roads, more highways, more suburban shopping malls, and more factories!

Electric cars are GOOD for capitalists who can fool buyers into believing they're making a carbon-neutral "green" choice, when they're really not.

Finally, electric cars are GOOD for promoting the myth of the endless-growth economy! 😀

#AntiCapitalism #Degrowth #ClimateCrisis

George Monbiot in his latest Guardian piece calls for 'political, economic, cultural and technological change' to avoid climate/ecological breakdown. I have no argument with the current priority of ending fossil fuels, but I think it's important to also explore the kind of systemic change George has in mind - and at the risk of putting off many, I think this exploration needs to learn from past transitions of similar scale: from feudalism to capitalism in Europe, and the colonial imposition of capitalism on traditional societies elsewhere in the world.

What immediate;y leaps out from this analogy is that the transition from feudalism to capitalism in Europe took the best part of 600 years – from the 14th to the 20th centuries. Even at the turn of the 19/20th century a detailed study in the heart of England – the Oxfordshire village of Headington Quarry – could report that capitalism had hardly penetrated – almost everybody ‘scratched’ a living from a combination of subsistence growing and rearing, small suplus trading and piece work – both capital investment and wage labour hardly intervened; enclosure was still a live issue.

Scary – because we haven’t got 600 years. The much faster imposition of capitalism through colonialism (sometimes on pretty sustainable economies not dissimilar to Headington Quarry) also offers little hope, because it was so violent. Indeed, even in Europe, some historians trace the convulsions of the 20th century to capitalism’s disruption of traditional social relations.

But I do see a chink of light in the very fact that capitalism has encountered such difficulty pushing out other forms of economic and cultural organisation – that far from being the natural and inevitable arrangement its apologists would like us to believe, it is recent, and perhaps it is fragile.

So really I want to explore 2 questions: how to transition from capitalism to more sustainable political economy – and how this transition can minimise violence.

#climatecrisis #environment #economics #feudalism #capitalism

(Headington Quarry research by Raphael Samuel, in Village Life & Labour, RKP, 1975)