27 September 2015, Truthdig, Big Tech May Be Getting Way Too Big—Here’s Why. Conservatives and liberals interminably debate the merits of “the free market” versus “the government.” Which one you trust more delineates the main ideological divide in America. In reality, they aren’t two separate things and there can’t be a market without government. Legislators, agency heads and judges decide the rules of the game. And, over time, they change the rules. The important question, too rarely discussed, is who has the most influence over these decisions and in that way wins the game. Two centuries ago slaves were among the nation’s most valuable assets, and a century ago, perhaps the most valuable asset was land. Then came another shift as factories, machines, railroads and oil transformed America. By the 1920s most Americans were employees, and the most contested property issue was their freedom to organize into unions. In more recent years, information and ideas have become the most valuable forms of property. This property can’t be concretely weighed or measured, and most of the cost of producing it goes into discovering it or making the first copy. After that, the additional production cost is often zero. Read more here
Category Archives: PLEA Network
24 September 2015, Hot Air, Dutch government to re-open Urgenda climate change case, The Dutch government has said it wants to re-open the groundbreaking climate change case in which a judge ruled it must cut emissions by at least 25% compared to 1990 levels by 2020. The case was brought by campaign group the Urgenda Foundation and judges ruled in their favour on 24 June 2015, saying the government must do more to protect people from climate change. The government said it would appeal the ruling, but has today raised the stakes by saying it wants to re-open the case entirely. This would give the government and Urgenda the chance to present new arguments, and could take up to three years to complete. In the meantime, the government is legally obliged to comply with the original ruling (to cut emissions by 25% by 2020). Read More here
21 September 2015, The Conversation, Creative self-destruction: the climate crisis and the myth of ‘green’ capitalism. The upcoming Paris climate talks in December this year have been characterised as humanity’s last chance to respond to climate change. Many hope that this time some form of international agreement will be reached, committing the world to significant reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. And yet there are clear signs that the much-touted “solutions” of emissions reduction targets and market mechanisms are insufficient for what is required. In our new book, Climate Change, Capitalism and Corporations: Processes of Creative Self-Destruction, we look at reasons why this has come about. We argue that businesses are locked in a cycle of exploiting the world’s resources in ever more creative ways. Innovating environmental destruction. The disconnect between business and climate action was symbolised by the announcement earlier this year that a significant portion of funding for the Paris meeting comes from major fossil fuel companies and carbon emitters; a situation French climate officials admitted was financially unavoidable. While perhaps unsurprising, this announcement hints at a deeper problem we now face — the global economic system of corporate capitalism appears incapable of achieving the levels of decarbonisation necessary to avoid dangerous climate change. Humanity is locked into a process of “creative self-destruction”. Our economies are now reliant upon ever-more ingenious ways of exploiting the Earth’s fossil fuel reserves and consuming the very life-support systems we rely on for our survival. This is evident in the rush by some of the world’s largest companies to embrace deep-water and Arctic oil drilling, tar-sands processing, new mega-coalmines, and the “fracking” of shale and coal-seam gas. These examples highlight both the inventive genius of corporate capitalism, and the blindness of industry and government to the ecological catastrophe they are fashioning. Read More here
19 September 2015, Climate News Network, The global warming slowdown is an illusion. Researchers say the world is continuing to warm, and evidence shows claims of a slowdown are unequivocally illusory. Global warming has not slowed. The so-called hiatus remains just that – so-called. The world is warming as predicted and any apparent evidence that it is not doing so is a statistical illusion, according to US scientists. They report in the journal Climatic Change that they applied “rigorous, comprehensive, statistical analysis” to the global temperature data and came up with this unequivocal conclusion. And although normally scientists like to spell out the caveats, the margins of error and the uncertainties in their conclusions, the team get to the point with unprecedented firmness. “We find compelling evidence that recent claims of a ‘hiatus’ in global warming lack sound scientific basis. Our analysis reveals that there is no hiatus in the increase in the global mean temperature, no statistically significant difference in trends, no stalling of the global mean temperature, and no change in year-to-year temperature increases,” they write. The very-much discussed and so-called pause, hiatus or slowdown in global warming has puzzled climate scientists for years. During the 1990s, annual global temperatures increased palpably, and at a measurable rate. In the early years of this century, the rate of increase began to slow. Read More here