COMMENT AND ANALYSIS: The politics and economics of climate change [Erik Swyngedouw]

The Marxist analysis is based on the view that any form of social organisation and dynamics has to be understood by looking at the social ways through which the physical environment is transformed.

This often is forgotten by Marxists; that fundamentally Marxism is a historical materialism, meaning that it tries to understand the socio-physical ways in which society is organised and in which society is changed. In capitalism then, the social transformation of the physical environment takes very specific forms, to the extent that capitalism is based on the continuous reinvestment of surplus in the production process. Any kind of capitalist economy necessarily needs an expansion and a deepening of the physical resource base to sustain its activity.

So in that sense – a growth economy, and capitalism is by definition a growth-based economy – necessitates the continuous expansion and the mobilisation of physical resources. In that sense, climate change, or in other words the transformation of oil and other fossil resources into atmospheric CO2, is an integral part of the dynamic of capitalism. You cannot possibly begin to understand the climate predicament without understanding the socio-ecological dynamic of capitalism.

I would argue that Marxism offers the best entry into that analysis.

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COMMENT: What I Did With The Electricity I Used During Earth Hour [Strange Times]

So, it was Earth Hour last night. Naturally I wanted to discuss this on Twitter, as the subject was coming up all day. However I wanted to actually discuss it, not just sneer at people, which is pretty easy to do. And obviously I didn’t want to criticise from the angle that people like Mark Pesce did, who thinks that people in favour of “Human Achievement Hour” are “idiots” (This from someone who is a regular guest panellist on a show about new inventions!) The trouble with Earth Hour is not that it is a tokenistic sham. The trouble with Earth Hour is that it implies that reducing power consumption is the most urgent task facing humanity. If it weren’t a sham, it would be much more dangerous to human progress than it actually is.

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COMMENT: Burying Malthus to save Malthusianism [Brendan O’Neill]

In recent years, a few environmentalist thinkers have started to criticise the narrow Malthusianism of their fellow contemporary greens. Peoplequake by Fred Pearce is the latest attack by a greenie on the Reverend Thomas Malthus, the original population scaremonger, and his slavish followers in today’s population-control lobby. With its quips about the weird, harelipped reverend’s hatred of poor people, its critique of the deeply misanthropic eugenics movement, and its challenge to the idea that Africa is overpopulated, Pearce’s book might even look to some like a refreshing defence of rational thinking against the hysteria of the human-hating, womb-fearing lobby. It is no such thing. Pearce, like other influential green thinkers, is burying Malthus only to save Malthusianism.

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COMMENT: The great grocery smackdown [Corby Kummer]

Buy my food at Walmart? No thanks. Until recently, I had been to exactly one Walmart in my life, at the insistence of a friend I was visiting in Natchez, Mississippi, about 10 years ago. It was one of the sights, she said. Up and down the aisles we went, properly impressed by the endless rows and endless abundance. Not the produce section. I saw rows of prepackaged, plastic-trapped fruits and vegetables. I would never think of shopping there.

Not even if I could get environmentally correct food. Walmart’s move into organics was then getting under way, but it just seemed cynical—a way to grab market share while driving small stores and farmers out of business. Then, last year, the market for organic milk started to go down along with the economy, and dairy farmers in Vermont and other states, who had made big investments in organic certification, began losing contracts and selling their farms. A guaranteed large buyer of organic milk began to look more attractive. And friends started telling me I needed to look seriously at Walmart’s efforts to sell sustainably raised food.

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