Carbon emissions reach record: How can we build solidarity to fight climate change?

When carbon emissions appeared to level off from 2014 through 2016, some people were hopeful that industrial civilization just might be able to decouple carbon emissions from economic growth. After all, the world economy had been growing and yet carbon emissions had not grown with it.

Fast forward to today. It turns out that humans are still burning lots of carbon to support economic growth as carbon emissions in 2018 reached a new record. The temporary halt from 2014 through 2016 was primarily due to the rapid replacement of coal-fired power plants with natural gas and renewable energy sources, a trend that by itself cannot solve the climate crisis.

So, once again, policymakers are asking how they can possibly achieve the rapid decline in emissions which the world's scientists say is necessary to avoid catastrophic climate change. The answer is actually simple and extremely painful. They must stop focusing on growth and make an all-out effort to reduce emissions.

The Russians are coming (and they're bringing oil)

As America's Russia hysteria is stirred once again by the arrival of the long-awaited report of the U.S. Department of Justice on Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election, a surge in Russian oil imports has arrived on America's shores.

The surge was little noticed by what passes for the U.S. foreign policy apparatus these days which has now become obsessed with toppling the current regime in Venezuela—a regime unloved by American oil interests who saw their property expropriated by the Venezuelan government.

By effectively preventing the national Venezuelan oil company from getting paid for its cargoes to the United States, the U.S. government has forced Venezuela, previously a major source of imported oil, to seek other customers for its mostly heavy crude.

Deep adaptation, post-sustainability and the possibility of societal collapse

I write this piece primarily to get you to read an academic paper that has attracted relatively widespread attention. It is entitled "Deep Adaptation: A Map for Navigating Climate Tragedy."

It is remarkable in a number of aspects. First, it was written by a professor of sustainability leadership who has been heavily involved for a long time in helping organizations including governments, nonprofits and corporations to become more sustainable. Second, the author, Jem Bendell, has now concluded the following after an exhaustive review of the most up-to-date findings about climate change: "inevitable collapse, probable catastrophe and possible extinction." Third, his paper was rejected for publication not because it contained any errors of fact, but largely because it was too negative and thought to breed hopelessness.

It is important to understand what Bendell means by "collapse" in this context. He does not necessarily mean an event taking place in a relatively short period of time all over the world all at once. Rather, he means severe disruptions of our lives and societies to a degree than renders our current institutional arrangements largely irrelevant. He believes we won't be able to respond to the scope of suffering and change by doing things the way we are doing them now with only a few reformist tweaks.

Uber, Lyft and oil frackers: Tech mirages, not real businesses

Ultimately, businesses must make money for their investors or those businesses are shut down. It's true that some businesses "make" money by laundering it for people engaged in criminal enterprises.

There is another category of businesses that don't make money but are not an extension of criminal activity. I'm calling them tech mirages. Tech mirages appear to be exciting, new viable businesses that are revolutionizing the way we do things. That's the mirage part!

In fact, they are doing old things to which they add some not particularly new technology and in the process attract and then consume vast amounts of capital. Investors are dazzled by the mirage while seemingly incapable of understanding what the financial numbers are telling them.

Ride hailing giants Uber and Lyft are two examples of tech mirages. The part of the oil industry engaged in extracting oil from deep shale deposits using a special form of hydraulic fracturing or fracking is another tech mirage.

The unfinished American project: Democratizing work

At the dawn of the American republic, most people worked on farms. Census data for 1790 didn't include occupation. But it is estimated that 90 percent of those living in the United States were farmers. America was known in Europe for having a large middle class made up primarily of "yeoman" farmers, that is, small farmers owning their own land.

A form of political democracy had come to the newly independent country. It didn't include women, slaves, Native Americans or the propertyless. But the right to vote has by fits and starts expanded as property requirements were dropped, slaves were freed and given the vote (only to have it wrested away later), women were enfranchised, and finally voting rights legislation brought down barriers to ballot access for African-Americans. (New challenges to those rights have arisen with the striking down of portions of the Voting Rights Act by the U.S. Supreme Court.)

Still, universal suffrage seems closer than ever (even if voter turnout in presidential years has been in the 50 to 60 percent range since 1918).