Climate Memo Mondays, #76, May 23, 2022

76. Climate Memo Mondays, #76, May 23, 2022
Juan Bordera.  The Oligarchy and its elites diluted the “world’s most
      important climate report.”    The third part of the IPCC’s 2021-2022
       Sixth Assessment Report—addressing Mitigation.
Ronald C. Kramer and Rob White.  Carbon Criminals, Climate Crimes.
     Criminals who caused and worsened climate calamity.
Jeff Sparrow, Crimes against Nature: Capitalism and Global Heating
Ophelia Benson, “Cruising Over the Edge.”  Humans won’t change their
    lifestyles in order to save themselves and their civilization.

 Juan Bordera.  “How the corporate interests and political elites watered down the world’s most important climate report.”  mronline.org (4-28-22).  [By altering the Summary.]

The IPCC scientists in Working Group III in charge of proposing a concrete mitigation plan, that is, to reduce emissions and seek viable solutions (technological, economic, and social) to the biggest crisis ever faced by humankind. The science has never been clearer: we must drastically reduce emissions to have a chance of maintaining the climate stability that allows us to live on this planet.
 The Summary for Policymakers for the April 2022 Working Group III Report of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)—the third part of the IPCC’s 2021-2022 Sixth Assessment Report—addressing Mitigation, is according to UN Secretary General António Guterres, “a litany of broken climate promises… Simply put, they [the vested interests] are lying,” denying the science, present in the report as a whole but excluded or downplayed in the Summary for Policymakers.

      “Climate activists,” Guterres explains, are sometimes portrayed as dangerous radicals, but the truly dangerous radicals are the countries that are increasing fossil fuel production” (malaysia.un.org). These statements–which could belong to any social movement spokesperson–are just some of the strongest statements that the present UN Secretary-General has made in the wake of the official release of the Work Group 3 report, the world’s most crucial climate report hitherto and likely into the future.

The IPCC scientist in Working Group III in charge of proposing a concrete mitigation plan, that is, to reduce emissions and seek viable solutions (technological, economic, and social) to the biggest crisis ever faced by humankind. The science has never been clearer: we must drastically reduce emissions to have a chance of maintaining the climate stability that allows us to live on this planet. But the Summary for Policymakers and Managers (the SPM), which will be the only thing the vast majority of policymakers and business leaders will read of the report’s 2,900+ pages, does not measure up to the science behind it, nor to the challenge of climate change, the ecological crisis, and the energy transition. 

Carbon Criminals, Climate Crimes analyzes the looming threats posed by climate change from a criminological perspective. It advances the field of green criminology through a examination of the criminal nature of catastrophic environmental harms resulting from the release of greenhouse gases. The book describes and explains what corporations in the fossil fuel industry, the U.S. government, and the international political community did, or failed to do, in relation to global warming. Carbon Criminals, Climate Crimes integrates research and theory from a wide variety of disciplines, to analyze four specific state-corporate climate crimes: continued extraction of fossil fuels and rising carbon emissions; political omission (failure) related to the mitigation of these emissions; socially organized climate change denial; and climate crimes of empire, which include militaristic forms of adaptation to climate disruption. The final chapter reviews policies that could mitigate greenhouse gas emissions, adapt to a warming world, and achieve climate justice.

Jeff Sparrow, Crimes Against Nature: Capitalism and Global Heating
     “As we have seen,” Sparrow concludes, “many of the businesses most responsible for global warming proved decades ago… that carbon dioxide could  affect the climate in catastrophic ways—and yet they continued normal operations regardless.  That’s murder—social murder.”
     And he looks back to the nineteenth-century British poet Percy Shelley’s “The Mask of Anarchy,” “one of the greatest poems of resistance, at a time when industrial capitalism was still new.”  Shelley names the men responsible for the brutal Peterloo Massacre, in which British cavalry upholding the system charged into a peaceful crowd of around 60,000 people demanding reform.  Writes Shelley:
     I met Murder on the way--
     He had a mask like Castlereagh—

Writes Sparrow, surveying his book: our capitalists today kill “on a scale beyond anything Castlereagh could have imagined.”
   

Ophelia Benson.  “Cruising over the Edge.”  Free Inquiry (April-May 2022).  We are doomed to climate chaos, dissolution of our civilization, and countless extinctions in the Anthropocene era because homo sapiens will cling to their pleasures and do too little too late to stop CO2.   https://learningfromdogs.com/tag/ophelia-benson/