Adam Ramsay: World leaders failed us at COP26. But change doesn’t come from glitzy conferences

“Ultimately, you look at the global economy that we’ve created over the last 40 years, the neoliberal global economy – that’s what’s driving climate change. And no wonder, because the logic at the heart of that economy is that there is no right more important than the right to make profit…”

NB: An excellent article. Nothing short of mass global civil disobedience and satyagraha will make a difference. The world’s political systems have degenerated into tyrannical plutocracies. Power-hungry con-men rule over us with intimidation and open defiance of the laws and constitutions that brought them to power. They use religion, culture and nation-worship to prevent us from confronting the most dangerous situation humanity has faced since the invention of the atom bomb.

The differences between all our governments is skin-deep; the truth is that our state systems are either lawless, or giving way rapidly to lawlessness – and that the only master they recognise is corporate capital. They are impervious to the human and ecological costs of so-called ‘development’. Noam Chomsky has warned us that its either internationalism or extinction. The younger generation now has nothing to lose but its future on a sustainable Earth. Fight back or perish. The ozone layer doesn’t care about our petty moronic culture wars. DS

World leaders failed us. But change doesn’t come from glitzy conferences

Copenhagen was a failure that demotivated activists, while Paris merely placated them. But Glasgow has radicalised a generation. In theory, world leaders have been in Glasgow over the past fortnight to negotiate how to reduce emissions of these astonishingly potent gases. In reality, most seemed more interested in building soft power and blaming someone else. But what they don’t seem to understand is that however much human power they accrue, it will be nothing next to the might of CO2, CH4, NO2 and O3, with their firm, covalent bonds forming a tight blanket around the only home we’ve ever known…

If it wasn’t for the greenhouse effect, the Earth would be as cold and dead as the far side of the moon.

The pulses of energy released by the sun’s gravity smashing together hydrogen nuclei and fusing them into helium atoms have to travel the same 150 million kilometres to get to both the Earth and the moon. They arrive at each as the same mix of ultraviolet, infrared and visible light. At both, they heat up rocks, which aren’t so dissimilar, which absorb that energy and emit it as warm, infrared radiation, with luxurious, long wavelengths.

But from the moon, this warmth slips freely back into space. On Earth, it has to navigate an atmosphere.

Oxygen and nitrogen particles, which make up 99.03% of our air, are tiny things, even by molecular standards. Just as thickets of grass don’t trip up ambling giraffes, these gases don’t interfere with reflected heat waves, which can straddle as much as a millimetre. Nor, for that matter, does argon, which makes up another 0.93%….

https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/why-cop26-gave-me-hope/

Seamus Heaney’s Advice to the Young

George Monbiot: Dead Line – Future corporate profits are officially more important than life on Earth

Oceana

Kiss the Ground Film Trailer (2020) / What’s the big deal about soil? / Living Soil Film

George Monbiot: Extinction’s Collaborators

Sam Kriss: ‘Neoliberalism’ isn’t a left-wing insult but a monstrous system of inequality

Climate crisis: economists ‘grossly undervalue young lives’

Hundreds of global civil society representatives walk out of Cop26 in protest

CODE RED for Humanity – The IPCC report is clear: nothing short of transforming society will avert catastrophe

JOHN BUELL: Living on a Newly Unrecognizable Planet

Chomsky: Internationalism or Extinction