climate change

By Jay Riestenberg and Mary Bottari - PR Watch, June 3, 2014

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are not the official position of the IWW (or even the IWW’s EUC) and do not necessarily represent the views of anyone but the author’s.

As the U.S. Supreme Court's 2014 session comes to a close, one of the major cases left for a decision is Harris vs. Quinn,which could effect millions of public sector workers in the United States.

The case originates in Illinois, where home health care workers have been successfully organized by public sector unions. Now, a small group of these workers, represented by lawyers from the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, have sued and their lawyers contend that the agency fees, or the fair share dues that even non-union members of a bargaining unit are required to pay to unions that bargain for higher wages on their behalf, violate the First Amendment. Agency fees are barred in so-called "right to work" states, which have much less unionization and lower wages and benefits.

Joel Rogers, a professor of law and sociology at the University of Wisconsin, calls it "the most important labor law case the court has considered in decades." This is because when the Supreme Court decided to take on the case, the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation dramatically expanded the scope of the case beyond the home health care workers to include all public sector workers, from teachers and firefighters to sanitation workers to librarians. If the court follows National Right to Work's lead, every state in the country would essentially turn into an anti-union "right to work" state, which would be a significant blow to public sector unions' collective bargaining efforts and also complicate thousands of existing contracts between organized workers and municipalities, cities, counties, and states across the country.

The National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation (NRTWLDF) is the 501(c)(3) arm of the National Right to Work Committee (NRTWC), a 501(c)(4) organization. Additionally, the National Institute for Labor Relations Research is an affiliated anti-union research shop. Founded nearly 60 years ago, the NRTWC has been a national leader in the effort to destroy public and private sector unions. The groups have increased their funding and staffing in recent years. In 2012, the three groups combined reported over $25 million in revenue, making them a powerful instrument of the corporate and ideological interests that want to keep wages low and silence the voice of organized labor in the political arena.

By Renfry Clark - Green Left Weekly, April 26, 2014

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are not the official position of the IWW (or even the IWW’s EUC) and do not necessarily represent the views of anyone but the author’s.

If modern industrial capitalism were a person, he or she would be on suicide watch. The system that has brought us quantum physics and reality television, modern medicine and the columns of Andrew Bolt is set on a course which, by all the best reckoning, points directly to its doing itself in.

If capitalism goes on — everything goes. Climate, coastlines, most living species, food supplies, the great bulk of humanity. And certainly, the preconditions for advanced civilisation, perhaps forever.

Moreover, we’re not just talking risk, in the sense of an off-chance. These are the most likely outcomes for capitalism’s current policies and performance in the area of climate change.

As far back as 2010 the famed US paleoclimatologist Lonnie Thompson told a gathering of scientists in Phoenix, Arizona: “Climatologists, like other scientists, tend to be a stolid group … Why then are climatologists speaking out about the dangers of global warming? The answer is that virtually all of us are now convinced that global warming poses a clear and present danger to civilization.”

Rulers in the capitalist world are not remotely contemplating action on the scale needed to contain the crisis. In recent years, the Climate Action Tracker, a scientific partnership that includes Germany’s high-powered Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, has issued an annual report detailing the climate commitments of governments around the world, and spelling out the implications for global warming. The most recent report, from last November, concludes: “Weak government action on climate change will lead to a projected 3.7°C of warming by 2100.”

Almost certainly, though, the warming that will result if action is limited to current promises will be much greater than this. Like the reports issued in recent months by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the Climate Action Tracker figures do not take account of so-called “slow feedbacks”. These are factors, such as the melting of polar ice and releases of greenhouse gases from melting permafrost, that cut in only on a time-frame of decades to centuries.

By Mary S. Booth, PhD - Partnership for Policy Integrity, April 2, 2014

The biomass power industry is undergoing a new surge of growth in the United States. While bioenergy has traditionally been used by certain sectors such as the paper-making industry, more than 70 new wood-burning plants have been built or are underway since 2005, and another 75 proposed and in various stages of development, fueled by renewable energy subsidies and federal tax credits. In most states, biomass power is subsidized along with solar and wind as green, renewable energy, and biomass plant developers routinely tell host communities that biomass power is “clean energy.”

But this first-ever detailed analysis of the bioenergy industry reveals that the rebooted industry is still a major polluter. Comparison of permits from modern coal,biomass, and gas plants shows that a even the “cleanest” biomass plants can emit > 150% the nitrogen oxides, > 600% the volatile organic compounds, > 190% the particulate matter, and > 125% the carbon monoxide of a coal plant per megawatt-hour, although coal produces more sulfur dioxide (SO₂). Emissions from a biomass plant exceed those from a natural gas plant by more than 800% for every major pollutant.

Biomass power plants are also a danger to the climate, emitting nearly 50 percent more CO₂ per megawatt generated than the next biggest carbon polluter, coal. Emissions ofCO2from biomass burning can theoretically be offset over time, but such offsets typically take decades to fully compensate for the CO2rapidly injected into the atmosphere during plant operation.

Compounding the problem, bioenergy facilities take advantage of gaping loopholes in the Clean Air Actand lax regulation by the EPAand state permitting agencies, which allow them to emit even more pollution. Electricity generation that worsens air pollution and climate change is not what the public expects for its scarce renewable energy dollars.

Read the report (PDF).

By John Reimann - Oakland Socialist, March 7, 2014

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are not the official position of the IWW (or even the IWW’s EUC) and do not necessarily represent the views of anyone but the author’s.

(The March 7th, 2014) Wall Street Journal carries an article on Obama’s head of the EPA, Gina McCarthy. They report:

“Sen. James Inhofe (R., Okla.), a longtime and outspoken EPA critic, said he has been won over by Ms. McCarthy’s work. (NOTE: Inhofe is the foremost spokesperson for the oil industry in the US Senate and is one of the most prominent deniers of the fact of global warming.)

“Mr. Inhofe hosted two meetings last year in his office at the Capitol between Ms. McCarthy and executives of Devon Energy Corp. They told Ms. McCarthy the EPA was overestimating the level of greenhouse-gas emissions from hydraulically fracked wells in an annual report to the United Nations.

“The accounting matters to industry executives because part of the U.N. climate-change effort involves coordinating with governments to write national plans to address the emissions.

“The executives presented alternative methods for the calculations. They became the basis for Ms. McCarthy’s proposed change in 2014 in how the EPA will measure such emissions.

“‘She sat down and made modifications to the rule, and that was very helpful,” Mr. Inhofe said. “You don’t get that if you have a relationship of hostility.’”

So there we have it. The head of the Environmental “Protection” Agency is allowing the oil and gas industry to write important rules for her and is being praised by a global warming denier. What more could the corporate criminals ask for?

An open letter from some students at Green Mountain College re: XL DISSENT - March 3, 2014

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are not the official position of the IWW (or even the IWW’s EUC) and do not necessarily represent the views of anyone but the author’s.

This isn’t personal, honest. Nothing holier-than-thou. Most of us are playing the same game as you– conference calls, teach-ins, unpaid internships. And it’s for the same reasons, or at least we think so-we’ve seen some of what this way of life is doing to the world, and we know that there’s more out there that we don’t know, more than we could ever absorb. And we’re scared, and we want it to stop.

But we’ve started, slowly, to realize something even scarier. The ways that we’ve been taught to fight back aren’t cutting it. Not even close. Candlelight vigils, petitions, chaining yourself to the White House fence, none of it is going to make the continued extraction of fossil fuels less profitable, and none of it is going to shift our communities away from a way of life centered on profit.

Barack Obama does not care about your arrest record any more than he cares about a soundbite he delivered to a bunch of rich college kids at Georgetown a couple years back. When he told some fellow students trying to speak truth to power that “We had the pipeline rally in the summer,” it summed up pretty well how much pressure he’s actually feeling from all of the environmentalists’ efforts to stop KXL.

Let’s break it down a little bit. This KXL dissent thing, as well as pretty much all of 350 and friends’ strategy, is meant to draw media attention and put political pressure on the president. We’re gonna hold Obama accountable, make him deliver on his promises. The problem is, there’s absolutely nothing in it for him. Even if we all have to hold our noses, the vast majority of self-identified environmentalists are going to vote for Democrats in 2016 and beyond because there’s no other viable option. Third parties sound nice but we all took Gov in high school and know that it’s not gonna happen. The Democrats also know it. It would be nice for them if we knocked and doors and phone banked in 2016, but it’s nothing compared to the money they need from Wall St. And I’m sure you know where Wall St. stands on the whole pipeline thing.

From libcom.org, February 22, 2014

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are not the official position of the IWW (or even the IWW’s EUC) and do not necessarily represent the views of anyone but the author’s.

Part of domestic living in Britain is receiving hot water and heating from a boiler that serves one property alone. In fact, around 93% of households have a single appliance in homes where typically the number of occupants per household is around 2.5. Natural gas is the majority fuel by far for all heat needs within homes and non-domestic buildings.

So, where's this going beyond pointing out that gas is king and there is a boat load of heating and hot water boilers per person? I hope to make a brief case for the immediate need to do away with individual boilers, replacing them as best practicable with a more communised form of heating, the district heating network (DHN).

The case against the crap we call cutting edge technology

Fuel, more specifically natural gas, is running out fast in Britain, and despite our dependence on a finite resource we desperately rely upon for industry and manufacturing, we burn the stuff in our own homes, regulated by nothing more than the ability to pay. The utilisation of renewable energy sources for heat production in Britain is, according to the Department of Energy and Climate Change "around 15%... in 2012; this equates to 2.3% of total heat demand" (DECC, National Renewables Statistics), a figure that flies in the face of a common misconception that problems around resources and emissions control are being adequately addressed by technology. Furthermore, whilst the trend for using renewable sources of energy have continued to impress for electricity production, for heat production less so. In 1990, renewables represented a replacement of around one million tonnes of oil for both electricity and heat production, a third of that figure being for heat. In 2012 renewables replaced around 7 million tonnes of oil for electricity production and one million tonnes heat; considering most energy use is for heat production overall, development in renewable energy for heat production has seen the smallest change in face of the biggest need.