“Green-collar jobs” are a hot topic these days. This is good news, certainly, for those who seek to alter our present course toward climate catastrophe. Greater awareness of the promise of a green economy allows us to challenge the too-familiar framing of “jobs vs. the environment” that has defeated so many attempts at environmental protection. Washington State Governor Christine Gregoire tapped into the power of reframing with the Climate Action and Green Jobs Bill, which combines a framework to reduce greenhouse gas emissions with a green jobs initiative. After she announced it in her 2008 budget request, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer’s headline read: “Gov. Gregoire announces bill to fight climate change, create jobs.”
A Climate Change Industrial Policy
A new looming threat has caught the military’s attention, namely the security implications of climate change. As early as 1997, the CIA set up an Environmental Center that examined the degradation of land and water as a major source of armed conflict around the world. Such niche efforts within the U.S. security establishment have now gone mainstream.
Corporations Grab Climate Genes
First the biotech industry promised that its genetically engineered seeds would clean up the environment. Then they told us biotech crops would feed the world. Neither came to pass. Soon we’ll hear that genetically engineered climate-hardy seeds are the essential adaptation strategy for crops to withstand drought, heat, cold, saline soils and more.
China: Superpower or Basket Case?
China as an “emerging superpower” makes for a compelling story line in the media. It is reinforced by the propaganda image that the current Chinese leadership would like us to accept. But the reality is quite different. Although recent events in Tibet and western China – and the central government’s response – appear to be generating pro-government patriotic feelings, they dramatically display the practical limits of the government’s power. Other sources of unhappiness with the regime, including income disparities and the inevitable collapse of unsustainable price controls on fuel and food, could breed both urban and rural discontent that has no ready outlet besides unlawful opposition to the government.
Global Power Shift
This essay was drawn from FPIF columnist Michael T. Klare’s new book Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet: The New Geopolitics of Energy, published by Metropolitan Books
Can Capitalism Survive Climate Change?
This whole week, beginning March 31, the United Nations Ad Hoc Working Groups on climate change are meeting in Bangkok in the critical first round of negotiations to follow up on the resolutions of the climate talks in Bali in December.
The Second Shockwave
While the economic contraction is apparently slowing in the advanced industrial countries and may reach bottom in the not-too-distant future, it’s only beginning to gain momentum in the developing world, which was spared the earliest effects of the global meltdown. Because the crisis was largely precipitated by a collapse of the housing market in the United States and the resulting disintegration of financial products derived from the “securitization” of questionable mortgages, most developing nations were unaffected by the early stages of the meltdown, for the simple reason that they possessed few such assets.
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ST. BERNARD PARISH, La., Sept. 7 (UPI) – Thirty-four bodies were found drowned in a nursing home where people did not evacuate. The more than half of the residents of St. Rita’s nursing home, 20 miles southeast from downtown New Orleans, died Aug. 29 when floodwaters from Hurricane Katrina reached the home’s roof.
Gender and U.S. Bases in Asia-Pacific
The power dynamics of militarism in the Asia-Pacific region rely on dominance and subordination. These hierarchical relationships, shaped by gender, can be seen in U.S. military exploitation of host communities, its abuse and contamination of land and water, and the exploitation of women and children through the sex industry, sexual violence, and rape. Women’s bodies, the land, and indigenous communities are all feminized, treated as dispensable and temporary. What is constructed as “civilized, white, male, western, and rational” is held superior to what is defined as “primitive, non-white, female, non-western, and irrational.” Nations and U.S. territories within the Asia-Pacific region are treated as inferiors with limited sovereignty or agency in relation to U.S. foreign policy interests that go hand-in-hand with this racist/sexist ideology.
The Global Water Crisis and the Coming Battle for the Right to Water
Editor’s Note: The following is an excerpt of Chapter 5 in Maude Barlow’s latest book, Blue Covenant. She is touring with her book across the country; see Food and Water Watch for her full schedule.