Environment

BY DAN BOSCOV-ELLEN Image by Frédéric Paulussen. Debates on the ecosocialist left are raging, from advocates of degrowth to a new crop of ecomodernists. Many in this latter camp have begun to push nuclear power as a potential alternative to fossil fuels that would help us avoid climate catastrophe. But as Joshua Frank explains to Spectre’s Dan Boscov-Ellen, nuclear remains a false solution with disastrous consequences. Ecosocialists and nuclear, he insists, belong nowhere near each other. Joshua Frank is the managing editor at CounterPunch. He is an investigative journalist and author of the recent award-winning book Atomic Days: The Untold Story of the Most Toxic Place in America (Haymarket, 2022). Thank you for speaking with me tod...

BY STEPHEN F. EISENMAN Andrea Bowers, Step It Up Activist, Sand Key Reef, Key West, Florida, Part of North America’s Only Remaining Coral Barrier Reef, (drawing), 2009. Photo: The author. The origins of the Anthropocene Two current art exhibitions in London, Saint Francis of Assisi at the National Gallery and Dear Earth at the Hayward Gallery, Southbank Centre, raise again thorny questions about the origin and course of the Anthropocene, and the responsibility of artists and curators in a time of crisis. They take completely different approaches – one is a survey of Franciscan iconography; the other a selection of contemporary art that addresses pollution and global warming. But both remind us that time is running out to heal the still widening rift&n...

BY EVE OTTENBERG Mesquite Dunes and Grapevine Mountains, Death Valley National Park. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair. For those climate change denialists who argue humanity is too puny to affect the earth system, take a look at the latest news on our species’ impact on the planet’s axis. Apparently around the start of this century, the earth’s centerline moved, the New York Times reported June 28, and “earth’s spin started going off kilter.” The cause? It’s twofold. First, polar ice sheet and mountain glaciers melting “changed the way mass was distributed around the planet enough to influence its spin.” Second: “Colossal quantities of water pumped out of the ground for crops and households.” This is alarming, to say the least. Because groundwater depletion ain’t about to stop anytim...

BY ROBERT HUNZIKER Image by Markus Spiske. Republican lawmakers in the US Congress are unabashedly pro-global warming: “Bring it on! We’ve got air conditioners in our cars, offices, and homes… no sweat!” Not one Republican in Congress voted for the nation’s most inclusive climate bill of all time, the Inflation Reduction Act, not one Republican vote. Meanwhile, here we go again, this coming fall, with Congress in another deadline to avoid a partial government shutdown. They must pass several spending bills by September 30th when current funding expires or face another ugly quasi-default situation. Leading up to this white-knuckle drop-dead deadline, Republican lawmakers have armed themselves with a plethora of “climate poison pills” inserted into spending proposals. They...

BY ALLIYAH LUSUEGRO Photo by Joanne Francis Just a few weeks ago, I couldn’t step outside my home without pulling on my KN95 mask. As the smoke from wildfires in Canada swept across the eastern U.S., tens of millions of Americans from the East Coast to the Midwest found themselves living under severe air quality advisories. Phones buzzed with warnings as wildfire haze clouded our skylines and concerts and baseball games were canceled or postponed. It was the first time I experienced a Code Purple or Code Maroon — and the first time I understood what an Air Quality Index (AQI) of over 300 truly means as my eyes stung from the charred air. With the wildfire season still only just beginning — and hurricane season looming — we likely haven...

While lecturing workers about ‘consumer choices’, western environmental lobbies give a free pass to the planet’s real polluters. Proletarian writers Subscribe to our  channel The criminal recklessness of imperialism in using weapons of longlasting and devastating toxicity, and the way in which such behaviour is quietly tolerated or even cheered on by green lobby groups, clearly demonstrates how the western establishment’s supposed ‘concern’ for the environment stops conveniently at the line where the interests of the imperialist war/profit machine begin. https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/1548269752&color=%23ff5500&inverse=false&auto_play=false&show_user=true As finance capital attempts to turn suppos...

BY PATRICK MAZZA Hansen’s Warning June 23 is a significant date in history, when climate scientist James Hansen went up on Capitol Hill to warn us human-caused climate disruption had arrived. That was 1988. Fossil fuel executives, who knew it was true because their own scientists had told them so, instead swung into a full-scale disinformation campaign that blocked climate action on the scale that would have been required to avert climate catastrophe. (Inside Climate News Editor David Sassoon tells of how whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, who just passed away, spurred the investigation that uncovered that story.) Thirty-five years later, the oceans are boiling, a heat dome is searing Mexico and Texas, a monster El Niño is growing in the Pacific, and floods ...