Simon

We at Green Blog love small green and personal projects and movements (maybe because this blog is one of those?). That’s why we would like to tell you shortly about a guy named Jim and his project called DinkyCard. Jim wants with his site DinkyCard "create a new, smaller international standard for the size of a business card to save some trees". It's a good idea and if I personally would need a business card someday (in a distant future far away) I would definitely use 2'x1.75' sized cards. http://www.dinkycard.org

The future is looking grimmer as each day go by and each new report is released about the state of our fragile earth. Recently we could read that 6 billion people will perish by the end of the century and that we might already have passed the point of no return. And now the International Energy Agency (IEA) says in a report that the worlds energy needs will increase with 50% in just 20 years. The enormous economic growth countries such as China and India are mainly responsible for this increase. The majority of the energy sources built in the coming 20 years will be based on fossil fuels such as coal, oil and gas. You can read a summary of the report here. Changing some light bulbs to CFLs, recycling or using more public transportation will not stop this development. Don’t get me wrong, actions like that are very much needed but we badly need global political agreements that radically cut our CO2 emissions with over 80%, now, not later. Some people have started to think that nuclear power is the solution. But nuclear power will only be a small part of the solution. Nuclear energy is too expensive, it's dangerous and it takes too long time to build a new plant. Don't get stuck in one solution cause there aren’t any. We need to use many different ways to curb and stop the downfall. Some of the solutions are a global CO2 tax, renewable energy sources (all of them), reducing our massive energy waste/usage etc. I recently read an AP/Newsvine article that said that cities are taking the lead on climate change. That's good, but it means nothing if the leaders of the country is to coward or blinded by money to take action. Image credit: Mikko Itälahti. Image licensed under a Creative-Commons Attribution license.

The demand for organic pig meat in Sweden is growing dramatically. A recent study shows that the sale of organic pig meat has increased with up to 78 % compared to last year. In Sweden today there are about 20 farmers who deliver organic pig meat, but that is far from enough to satisfy the consumers. Margareta Thorgren, information director at Scan (one of the biggest meat producers in Sweden) says that “all organic meat produced in Sweden is being consumed” and states that “we could sell much more”. That is why Scan has requested that other farmers who deliver non-organic pig meat should adjust and start delivering EU-organic pigs. And here lies the catch. The requirements for EU-organic pigs are much lower than they are for Swedish organic pigs. It takes about 2 years for a farmer to convert to Kravmärkt, the Swedish organic system. Converting a farm to EU-organic standards only takes one year. The biggest difference between these two systems is that EU accepts that pigs only need to stay outside on a cement floor while the Swedish Krav system demands that pigs should be able to stay outside and poke around in real soil. Swedish Farmers that uses the Swedish Krav system doesn’t want to see EU-organic meat in the Swedish food stores as they believe the buyers would get confused. Tomas Schörling explain that “EU-organic meat tricks the consumer” because in Sweden “people buy organic meat because they want the pigs to be able to live as natural as possible”. Tomas adds that “in England and Germany they want meat without any poisons and that the animal protection often is toned down”. The Swedish government has no problem with food stores in Sweden selling EU-organic meat as long as they are properly marked as such. Scan and the major food stores in Sweden believe that the majority of the EU-organic meat will be, to a start, exported to other countries. Image credits: David Blaine. Images licensed under a Creative-Commons Attribution license.

Here comes another clever environment ad. This one is from the national power company Eskom in South Africa. Related: Clever ad on bridge in Amsterdam via WattWatt

Compact fluorescent light bulbs (CFLs) are low energy efficient light bulbs that you probably already use in every lamp in your home. At least I hope you do, if not shame on you. As we all also know CFLs have one bad side. They contain small amounts of mercury. These small amounts are not dangerous for you, but in vast amounts they are. That’s why it’s sad that there isn’t a global or major plan to recycle the broken and old CFLs. But maybe that is starting to change? IKEA recently announced that they will, in USA, offer free recycling of any CFL that walks through its door, even if the CFL hasn’t been bought in one of the many IKEA stores. It’s a great initiative from IKEA that hopefully other companies around the world will follow. Image credit: Macinate. Image licensed under a Creative-Commons license.

A new green political movement is growing that see the climate crisis as a revolutionary possibility to create a new world, a new world based on Eco-socialism. In September 2001 a meeting regarding socialism and ecology was held outside of Paris in France. Two of the participants, Joel Kovel and Michael Lowy wrote an ecosocialistic manifesto. The manifesto called for like-minded to getting together started to take form the 7-8th October when about 60 participants from around the world created the Ecosocialist International Network. This is their manifesto: The twenty-first century opens on a catastrophic note, with an unprecedented degree of ecological breakdown and a chaotic world order beset with terror and clusters of low-grade, disintegrative warfare that spread like gangrene across great swathes of the planet—viz., central Africa, the Middle East, Northwestern South America—and reverberate throughout the nations. In our view, the crises of ecology and those of societal breakdown are profoundly interrelated and should be seen as different manifestations of the same structural forces. The former broadly stems from rampant industrialization that overwhelms the earth's capacity to buffer and contain ecological destabilization. The latter stems from the form of imperialism known as globalization, with its disintegrative effects on societies that stand in its path. Moreover, these underlying forces are essentially different aspects of the same drive, which must be identified as the central dynamic that moves the whole: the expansion of the world capitalist system. We reject all euphemisms or propagandistic softening of the brutality of this regime: all greenwashing of its ecological costs, all mystification of the human costs under the names of democracy and human rights. We insist instead upon looking at capital from the standpoint of what it has really done. Acting on nature and its ecological balance, the regime, with its imperative to constantly expand profitability, exposes ecosystems to destabilizing pollutants, fragments habitats that have evolved over aeons to allow the flourishing of organisms, squanders resources, and reduces the sensuous vitality of nature to the cold exchangeability required for the accumulation of capital. From the side of humanity, with its requirements for self-determination, community, and a meaningful existence, capital reduces the majority of the world's people to a mere reservoir of labor power while discarding much of the remainder as useless nuisances. It has invaded and undermined the integrity of communities through its global mass culture of consumerism and depoliticization. It has expanded disparities in wealth and power to levels unprecedented in human history. It has worked hand in glove with a network of corrupt and subservient client states whose local elites carry out the work of repression while sparing the center of its opprobrium. And it has set going a network of transtatal organizations under the overall supervision of the Western powers and the superpower United States, to undermine the autonomy of the periphery and bind it into indebtedness while maintaining a huge military apparatus to enforce compliance to the capitalist center. We believe that the present capitalist system cannot regulate, much less overcome, the crises it has set going. It cannot solve the ecological crisis because to do so requires setting limits upon accumulation—an unacceptable option for a system predicated upon the rule: Grow or Die! And it cannot solve the crisis posed by terror and other forms of violent rebellion because to do so would mean abandoning the logic of empire, which would impose unacceptable limits on growth and the whole "way of life" sustained by empire. Its only remaining option is to resort to brutal force, thereby increasing alienation and sowing the seed of further terrorism ... and further counter-terrorism, evolving into a new and malignant variation of fascism. In sum, the capitalist world system is historically bankrupt. It has become an empire unable to adapt, whose very gigantism exposes its underlying weakness. It is, in the language of ecology, profoundly unsustainable, and must be changed fundamentally, nay, replaced, if there is to be a future worth living. Thus the stark choice once posed by Rosa Luxemburg returns: Socialism or Barbarism!, where the face of the latter now reflects the imprint of the intervening century and assumes the countenance of ecocatastrophe, terror counterterror, and their fascist degeneration. But why socialism, why revive this word seemingly consigned to the rubbish-heap of history by the failings of its twentieth century interpretations? For this reason only: that however beaten down and unrealized, the notion of socialism still stands for the supersession of capital. If capital is to be overcome, a task now given the urgency of the survival of civilization itself, the outcome will perforce be "socialist, for that is the term which signifies the breakthrough into a post-capitalist society. If we say that capital is radically unsustainable and breaks down into the barbarism outlined above, then we are also saying that we need to build a "socialism" capable of overcoming the crises capital has set going. And if socialisms past have failed to do so, then it is our obligation, if we choose against submitting to a barbarous end, to struggle for one that succeeds. And just as barbarism has changed in a manner reflective of the century since Luxemburg enunciated her fateful alternative, so too, must the name, and the reality, of a socialism become adequate for this time. It is for these reasons that we choose to name our interpretation of socialism as an ecosocialism, and dedicate ourselves to its realization. Why Ecosocialism? We see ecosocialism not as the denial but as the realization of the "first-epoch" socialisms of the twentieth century, in the context of the ecological crisis. Like them, it builds on the insight that capital is objectified past labor, and grounds itself in the free development of all producers, or to use another way of saying this, an undoing of the separation of the producers from the means of production. We understand that this goal was not able to be implemented by first-epoch socialism, for reasons too complex to take up here, except to summarize as various effects of underdevelopment in the context of hostility by existing capitalist powers. This conjuncture had numerous deleterious effects on existing socialisms, chiefly, the denial of internal democracy along with an emulation of capitalist productivism, and led eventually to the collapse of these societies and the ruin of their natural environments. Ecosocialism retains the emancipatory goals of first-epoch socialism, and rejects both the attenuated, reformist aims of social democracy and the the productivist structures of the bureaucratic variations of socialism. It insists, rather, upon redefining both the path and the goal of socialist production in an ecological framework. It does so specifically in respect to the "limits on growth" essential for the sustainability of society. These are embraced, not however, in the sense of imposing scarcity, hardship and repression. The goal, rather, is a transformation of needs, and a profound shift toward the qualitative dimension and away from the quantitative. From the standpoint of commodity production, this translates into a valorization of use-values over exchange-values—a project of far-reaching significance grounded in immediate economic activity. The generalization of ecological production under socialist conditions can provide the ground for the overcoming of the present crises. A society of freely associated producers does not stop at its own democratization. It must, rather, insist on the freeing of all beings as its ground and goal. It overcomes thereby the imperialist impulse both subjectively and objectively. In realizing such a goal, it struggles to overcome all forms of domination, including, especially, those of gender and race. And it surpasses the conditions leading to fundamentalist distortions and their terrorist manifestations. In sum, a world society is posited in a degree of ecological harmony with nature unthinkable under present conditions. A practical outcome of these tendencies would be expressed, for example, in a withering away of the dependency upon fossil fuels integral to industrial capitalism. And this in turn can provide the material point of release of the lands subjugated by oil imperialism, while enabling the containment of global warming, along with other afflictions of the ecological crisis. No one can read these prescriptions without thinking, first, of how many practical and theoretical questions they raise, and second and more dishearteningly, of how remote they are from the present configuration of the world, both as this is anchored in institutions and as it is registered in consciousness. We need not elaborate these points, which should be instantly recognizable to all. But we would insist that they be taken in their proper perspective. Our project is neither to lay out every step of this way nor to yield to the adversary because of the preponderance of power he holds. It is, rather, to develop the logic of a sufficient and necessary transformation of the current order, and to begin developing the intermediate steps towards this goal. We do so in order to think more deeply into these possibilities, and at the same moment, begin the work of drawing together with all those of like mind. If there is any merit in these arguments, then it must be the case that similar thoughts, and practices to realize these thoughts, will be coordinatively germinating at innumerable points around the world. Ecosocialism will be international, and universal, or it will be nothing. The crises of our time can and must be seen as revolutionary opportunities, which it is our obligation to affirm and bring into existence.

James Lovelock, a famous “climate legend” and scientist, is being interviewed in the latest number of Rolling Stone. His view on climate change and its effect is downright apocalyptic. James Lovelock says that climate change is now irreversible. He continues by predicting that the major part of the humans will get wiped out of the face of the earth due to wars, starvation, epidemics and climate chaos during the rest of the century. James Lovelock estimates that by year 2100 there will only be around 500 millions people left who struggles to survive on the few remaining liveable places on earth: Scandinavia, Canada and Iceland. "It will be a dark time," Lovelock admits. "But for those who survive, I suspect it will be rather exciting." Read the whole article: The Prophet of Climate Change: James Lovelock

Here is a clever ad on a bridge in Amsterdam, the capital of the Netherlands, one of the countries in Europe that will face the worst consequences of global warming. The advert says: "If the water reached this level we would not need the bridge. Drive on, maybe we will achieve this!" Via Woostercollective.com