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It’s here, and it’s growing: the self-assembling Coalition of the Radical Left Updated for 2026

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In January, I went to the Oregon coast to get away from the city, clear my mind, and have some fun. While walking down the beach, though, we noticed a horrible sight.

Thousands of dead young birds, called cassin’s auklets, littered the sands, strewn amongst the bottles and random plastic like so many discarded dreams.

Scientists are baffled as to the reason for the die-off. National Geographic called it “unprecedented… one of the largest mass die-offs of seabirds ever recorded.” Between 50-100,000 birds as of the end of January.

The most direct explanation is simply starvation. The natural food of the birds has gone away this season, and it fits in with a larger trend of mass die-offs on the Northwest coast. It could be that ocean acidification is creating an ecological collapse, a lack of oxygen in the water, perhaps, but the main theory places the blame on the warming oceans.

It is climate change that is causing this death, just as climate change induced drought have led to the wars in Syria and Mali. It is killing our young; the entire planet is in grave peril.

Something must be done. But what?

The political party in power in Greece is called Syriza, an acronym meaning Synaspismós Rizospastikís Aristerás (Συνασπισμός Ριζοσπαστικής Αριστεράς) or ‘coalition of the radical left’. Their organization is not what one could possibly call a conventional political party: it is more of a work of rethinking politics and its relationship to the state.

They formed in 2004 as an anti-establishment party, and surfed into power on the waves of riotous discontent incumbent on austerity programs and police repression. Although they have found turbulent times amidst negotiations with global financial institutions, Syriza has shown the North Atlantic the possibility of taking hegemony from the core economic and political powers of neoliberalism.

In the US, we are way behind the times. Would it have been possible to formulate an organized political response to neoliberalism during the antiwar movement that surged into existence during 2003? Instead, the tangled ball of anti-war sentiment unraveled in sectarian provocations.

A friend of mine who joined some anarchist black bloc protests during that era recently recalled an example that illustrates this reality.

We talked about a panel where an audience member asked, “Why did the anarchists continually co-opt the anti-war protests?” The audience member went on to site a specific protest, to which my friend replied, “We were one of the groups that organized that protest.”

Over a century on the front lines of radical change

Anarchists are often attacked as the destabilizing force of left politics par excellence, yet when we approach politics from an anarchist perspective, we see these to be misconceptions. Anarchists bled and died for the eight-hour workday in the 1880s. The Magónista Liberal Party raised the banner of ‘Tierra y Libertad’ (Land and Liberty) in the fight for the Mexican Revolution in the 1910s.

The anarchist-syndicalist party, the National Confederation of Labor (CNT), joined the Spanish Popular Front during the 1930s. Anarchists played a driving role in the 1960s antiwar movement, the alter-globalization movement, and organized the Occupy Wall Street protests.

Today, the Kurdish PYD in Rojava (Syria) is motivated by the formulation of ideas condensed through the meeting of minds between Abdullah Öcalan and libertarian municipalists Murray Bookchin and Janet Biehl.

The goals remain the same: mutual aid, solidarity, justice. There is no reason why, today, the left cannot or should not band together to form political institutions around these tenets to confront the current global threats of climate change and the police state. In fact, there is every reason to perform and encourage such an act through radical new organizations.

Power bases are being built already. In Seattle, City Councilor Kshama Sawant has taken her seat under the party Socialist Alternative (SA). SA is not a conventional political party, nor is Sawant a typical candidate. An immigrant woman of color, she is the first socialist elected to City Council in Seattle since 1877.

Her forward momentum helped carry the $15 minimum wage into effect and inspire a like-minded organization called Right to the City in Portland, Oregon.

Nature in the blast zone (and us too)

Convening around issues of climate change and economic justice, Right to the City is one of several groups developing out of the Occupy movement that gets a sense of purpose from articulating a transformation of the relationships between private property and urban spaces.

The group will be supporting independent candidates in the coming city council elections with the platform of increasing the minimum wage, shutting down industrial polluters, and promoting free access to safer and more diverse public institutions.

The creative application of alternative networks and spaces is emerging with a new way of thinking labor policy in the US. In the Pacific Northwest, the climate movement and labor movement have joined together to shut down the Port of Vancouver and the Port of Longview in light of proposed fossil fuels terminals. Climate and labor activists are currently joining on the picket lines against refineries in the Pacific Northwest, as well.

The oil train derailments are rising at breakneck speed. On Thursday, an oil train derailed near the Mississippi River in Illinois, adding to the several other derailments already this year.

Because we are all in the blast zone, nature is in the blast zone, the environmental group Rising Tide posted an average of a blockade per month of fossil fuel infrastructure in the Pacific Northwest for the last half of 2014, and there is more to come.

Today in Pacheco, California, the IWW is joining with union workers at the Golden Eagle refinery to protest fossil fuel expansion. This confluence marks one of many ways that people are moving forward in defiance of conventional politics, bringing remarkable energy toward rethinking education, food distribution and production, energy and power.

Race, poverty, injustice

While productivity has increased, there has been a decline in median income since 2000, and rents are rising across the country. The poverty rate for African-Americans is nearly triple that of whites, and the environmental injustices related to real estate and inadequate health care mean that people of color are more likely to die of cancer than white people.

The fact that more than two-thirds of African Americans live closer than thirty miles to a coal-fired power plant translates to heart diseases, birth defects, and asthma.

To enforce de facto segregation, overwhelmingly white police departments are commissioned to disproportionately incarcerate and kill people of color. Although data is often sketchy, USA Today disclosed that between 2006 and 2012 a white police officer shot and killed an African-American every three and a half days.

That is saying nothing of the black sites maintained by the Chicago Police Department, for example, under the watch of the Democratic Party machine.

This is nothing new, and it only scratches the surface of the economic hardships experienced in the US. Being denied the meeting of basic needs, Native peoples continue to be dispossessed by land grabs from Peabody Coal in Black Mesa to Resolution Copper in Oak Flats.

Latino/a farm workers are exposed to the terrible crisis of industrial farming, from chemical fertilizers and poisonous pesticides to disproportionately low wages. With climate change-induced droughts, many will be forced to flee the Central Valley and Central Coast area of California, perhaps heading north to the Pacific Northwest.

A grand coalition of the local and grassroots

Something will have to compensate if a collapse in agriculture continues apace in California’s once fertile valley. According to the UN, sustainable compensation of food production can only come from local family and community farming. We will need to reformat the coding system and transform relations between urban and rural, farm and market in order to produce enough food for everyone – but it can be done.

The enormity of the problem is, perhaps, dispiriting, and manifests one reason left movements spin out into sectarian and fracture – after all, one lesson of left politics is that much can be done on a grassroots, local basis. But what if the groups organizing on a local basis joined together to form a Coalition of the Radical Left to confront these major dilemmas on a horizontal basis?

A primary place for such an entity to enter into existence would be the Pacific Northwest, as Portland and Seattle are both among the fastest growing and fastest gentrifying cities with climate refugees to come in the future.

This is how we rise up. It is how we return to our reason for being on this planet in order to overcome the despair, take and share power, and stop the die-offs.

Because when you look the cyclone of famine and drought in the eye, it looks like our own young will be the next to wash up starving on the shores of politics if we don’t seize the moments, the opportunities to stand for our right to live on this earth – a right that we won’t have if we don’t live up to the hard demands of liberation and dignity.

In direct opposition to the neoliberal agenda of the corporate political parties that brought about the financial collapse, a horizon of creative, local activism can be cultivated. This coalition, bringing together ideas of groups like Right to the City and Socialist Alternative, would have an eye to global relations, stopping free trade agreements that have proven to make the rich richer and the poor poorer.

But it would also maintain accountability to grassroots activity for social and ecological justice on a local level – from switching agricultural production to a local level, as insisted upon by the UN, to transforming the daily relations of patriarchal and racist power associated with the police state and its capitalist agenda.

Is this the ‘coming together’ that Naomi Klein is asking for?

The Coalition of the Radical Left, or what might be called CORAL, would be able to dispose of the cancerous institutions of climate change and their power mongers on a regional level, replacing the dialectics of the city with ecologically sustainable and resilient regional networks.

Through this horizontal organization emerging out of the union of Occupy and Black Lives Matter, among other movements, the left could break down the sinister land and water politics that are exterminating native species and exhausting aquifers, acidifying oceans and choking the skies. We could galvanize opposition to capitalism, and generate power to be shared by all people.

Warming oceans, rising sea levels (four inches in two years, according to recent studies on the Atlantic seaboard), catastrophic droughts. They are destroying the complex diversity that the web of life requires to maintain an integral balance.

The coral reefs are an excellent metaphor for what is happening. Based on a diverse amalgam of life and calcium carbonate ecosystems built by groups of animals, the coral reefs have for a long time symbolized the dreamland of Aboriginal life.

Australia’s Indigenous peoples for centuries have mapped out their knowledge of the reefs’ systems through the composition of intricate artworks and musics that translate the vitality of those systems into a lived reality.

As climate change bleaches and destroys those ecosystems, the dreamscapes of the world’s peoples are obliterated. Scientists have begun working with Aboriginal peoples to restore the coral, because that collaboration is the only way to re-establish a sense of the place.

CORAL would have to work as a solidarity movement with Indigenous partnerships along with communities of color. Coming together, we can rediscover how to understand and appreciate both biodiversity and human diversity, how to live together amongst both Indigenous and migrant populations, and how to embrace both the new and the ancient forms of reconciliation and resilience.

It is not an easy path, but integrity and respect never is. It requires self-discipline and practicing our ideas in good faith, passing along the wisdom of life. That is how we spin the fabric of dreams into our realities and celebrate what makes us human.

 

 

Alexander Reid Ross is a contributing moderator of the Earth First! Newswire and works for Bark. He is the editor of ‘Grabbing Back: Essays Against the Global Land Grab’ (AK Press 2014) and a contributor to Life During Wartime (AK Press 2013). 

 




390999

It’s here, and it’s growing: the self-assembling Coalition of the Radical Left Updated for 2026

Leave a reply




In January, I went to the Oregon coast to get away from the city, clear my mind, and have some fun. While walking down the beach, though, we noticed a horrible sight.

Thousands of dead young birds, called cassin’s auklets, littered the sands, strewn amongst the bottles and random plastic like so many discarded dreams.

Scientists are baffled as to the reason for the die-off. National Geographic called it “unprecedented… one of the largest mass die-offs of seabirds ever recorded.” Between 50-100,000 birds as of the end of January.

The most direct explanation is simply starvation. The natural food of the birds has gone away this season, and it fits in with a larger trend of mass die-offs on the Northwest coast. It could be that ocean acidification is creating an ecological collapse, a lack of oxygen in the water, perhaps, but the main theory places the blame on the warming oceans.

It is climate change that is causing this death, just as climate change induced drought have led to the wars in Syria and Mali. It is killing our young; the entire planet is in grave peril.

Something must be done. But what?

The political party in power in Greece is called Syriza, an acronym meaning Synaspismós Rizospastikís Aristerás (Συνασπισμός Ριζοσπαστικής Αριστεράς) or ‘coalition of the radical left’. Their organization is not what one could possibly call a conventional political party: it is more of a work of rethinking politics and its relationship to the state.

They formed in 2004 as an anti-establishment party, and surfed into power on the waves of riotous discontent incumbent on austerity programs and police repression. Although they have found turbulent times amidst negotiations with global financial institutions, Syriza has shown the North Atlantic the possibility of taking hegemony from the core economic and political powers of neoliberalism.

In the US, we are way behind the times. Would it have been possible to formulate an organized political response to neoliberalism during the antiwar movement that surged into existence during 2003? Instead, the tangled ball of anti-war sentiment unraveled in sectarian provocations.

A friend of mine who joined some anarchist black bloc protests during that era recently recalled an example that illustrates this reality.

We talked about a panel where an audience member asked, “Why did the anarchists continually co-opt the anti-war protests?” The audience member went on to site a specific protest, to which my friend replied, “We were one of the groups that organized that protest.”

Over a century on the front lines of radical change

Anarchists are often attacked as the destabilizing force of left politics par excellence, yet when we approach politics from an anarchist perspective, we see these to be misconceptions. Anarchists bled and died for the eight-hour workday in the 1880s. The Magónista Liberal Party raised the banner of ‘Tierra y Libertad’ (Land and Liberty) in the fight for the Mexican Revolution in the 1910s.

The anarchist-syndicalist party, the National Confederation of Labor (CNT), joined the Spanish Popular Front during the 1930s. Anarchists played a driving role in the 1960s antiwar movement, the alter-globalization movement, and organized the Occupy Wall Street protests.

Today, the Kurdish PYD in Rojava (Syria) is motivated by the formulation of ideas condensed through the meeting of minds between Abdullah Öcalan and libertarian municipalists Murray Bookchin and Janet Biehl.

The goals remain the same: mutual aid, solidarity, justice. There is no reason why, today, the left cannot or should not band together to form political institutions around these tenets to confront the current global threats of climate change and the police state. In fact, there is every reason to perform and encourage such an act through radical new organizations.

Power bases are being built already. In Seattle, City Councilor Kshama Sawant has taken her seat under the party Socialist Alternative (SA). SA is not a conventional political party, nor is Sawant a typical candidate. An immigrant woman of color, she is the first socialist elected to City Council in Seattle since 1877.

Her forward momentum helped carry the $15 minimum wage into effect and inspire a like-minded organization called Right to the City in Portland, Oregon.

Nature in the blast zone (and us too)

Convening around issues of climate change and economic justice, Right to the City is one of several groups developing out of the Occupy movement that gets a sense of purpose from articulating a transformation of the relationships between private property and urban spaces.

The group will be supporting independent candidates in the coming city council elections with the platform of increasing the minimum wage, shutting down industrial polluters, and promoting free access to safer and more diverse public institutions.

The creative application of alternative networks and spaces is emerging with a new way of thinking labor policy in the US. In the Pacific Northwest, the climate movement and labor movement have joined together to shut down the Port of Vancouver and the Port of Longview in light of proposed fossil fuels terminals. Climate and labor activists are currently joining on the picket lines against refineries in the Pacific Northwest, as well.

The oil train derailments are rising at breakneck speed. On Thursday, an oil train derailed near the Mississippi River in Illinois, adding to the several other derailments already this year.

Because we are all in the blast zone, nature is in the blast zone, the environmental group Rising Tide posted an average of a blockade per month of fossil fuel infrastructure in the Pacific Northwest for the last half of 2014, and there is more to come.

Today in Pacheco, California, the IWW is joining with union workers at the Golden Eagle refinery to protest fossil fuel expansion. This confluence marks one of many ways that people are moving forward in defiance of conventional politics, bringing remarkable energy toward rethinking education, food distribution and production, energy and power.

Race, poverty, injustice

While productivity has increased, there has been a decline in median income since 2000, and rents are rising across the country. The poverty rate for African-Americans is nearly triple that of whites, and the environmental injustices related to real estate and inadequate health care mean that people of color are more likely to die of cancer than white people.

The fact that more than two-thirds of African Americans live closer than thirty miles to a coal-fired power plant translates to heart diseases, birth defects, and asthma.

To enforce de facto segregation, overwhelmingly white police departments are commissioned to disproportionately incarcerate and kill people of color. Although data is often sketchy, USA Today disclosed that between 2006 and 2012 a white police officer shot and killed an African-American every three and a half days.

That is saying nothing of the black sites maintained by the Chicago Police Department, for example, under the watch of the Democratic Party machine.

This is nothing new, and it only scratches the surface of the economic hardships experienced in the US. Being denied the meeting of basic needs, Native peoples continue to be dispossessed by land grabs from Peabody Coal in Black Mesa to Resolution Copper in Oak Flats.

Latino/a farm workers are exposed to the terrible crisis of industrial farming, from chemical fertilizers and poisonous pesticides to disproportionately low wages. With climate change-induced droughts, many will be forced to flee the Central Valley and Central Coast area of California, perhaps heading north to the Pacific Northwest.

A grand coalition of the local and grassroots

Something will have to compensate if a collapse in agriculture continues apace in California’s once fertile valley. According to the UN, sustainable compensation of food production can only come from local family and community farming. We will need to reformat the coding system and transform relations between urban and rural, farm and market in order to produce enough food for everyone – but it can be done.

The enormity of the problem is, perhaps, dispiriting, and manifests one reason left movements spin out into sectarian and fracture – after all, one lesson of left politics is that much can be done on a grassroots, local basis. But what if the groups organizing on a local basis joined together to form a Coalition of the Radical Left to confront these major dilemmas on a horizontal basis?

A primary place for such an entity to enter into existence would be the Pacific Northwest, as Portland and Seattle are both among the fastest growing and fastest gentrifying cities with climate refugees to come in the future.

This is how we rise up. It is how we return to our reason for being on this planet in order to overcome the despair, take and share power, and stop the die-offs.

Because when you look the cyclone of famine and drought in the eye, it looks like our own young will be the next to wash up starving on the shores of politics if we don’t seize the moments, the opportunities to stand for our right to live on this earth – a right that we won’t have if we don’t live up to the hard demands of liberation and dignity.

In direct opposition to the neoliberal agenda of the corporate political parties that brought about the financial collapse, a horizon of creative, local activism can be cultivated. This coalition, bringing together ideas of groups like Right to the City and Socialist Alternative, would have an eye to global relations, stopping free trade agreements that have proven to make the rich richer and the poor poorer.

But it would also maintain accountability to grassroots activity for social and ecological justice on a local level – from switching agricultural production to a local level, as insisted upon by the UN, to transforming the daily relations of patriarchal and racist power associated with the police state and its capitalist agenda.

Is this the ‘coming together’ that Naomi Klein is asking for?

The Coalition of the Radical Left, or what might be called CORAL, would be able to dispose of the cancerous institutions of climate change and their power mongers on a regional level, replacing the dialectics of the city with ecologically sustainable and resilient regional networks.

Through this horizontal organization emerging out of the union of Occupy and Black Lives Matter, among other movements, the left could break down the sinister land and water politics that are exterminating native species and exhausting aquifers, acidifying oceans and choking the skies. We could galvanize opposition to capitalism, and generate power to be shared by all people.

Warming oceans, rising sea levels (four inches in two years, according to recent studies on the Atlantic seaboard), catastrophic droughts. They are destroying the complex diversity that the web of life requires to maintain an integral balance.

The coral reefs are an excellent metaphor for what is happening. Based on a diverse amalgam of life and calcium carbonate ecosystems built by groups of animals, the coral reefs have for a long time symbolized the dreamland of Aboriginal life.

Australia’s Indigenous peoples for centuries have mapped out their knowledge of the reefs’ systems through the composition of intricate artworks and musics that translate the vitality of those systems into a lived reality.

As climate change bleaches and destroys those ecosystems, the dreamscapes of the world’s peoples are obliterated. Scientists have begun working with Aboriginal peoples to restore the coral, because that collaboration is the only way to re-establish a sense of the place.

CORAL would have to work as a solidarity movement with Indigenous partnerships along with communities of color. Coming together, we can rediscover how to understand and appreciate both biodiversity and human diversity, how to live together amongst both Indigenous and migrant populations, and how to embrace both the new and the ancient forms of reconciliation and resilience.

It is not an easy path, but integrity and respect never is. It requires self-discipline and practicing our ideas in good faith, passing along the wisdom of life. That is how we spin the fabric of dreams into our realities and celebrate what makes us human.

 

 

Alexander Reid Ross is a contributing moderator of the Earth First! Newswire and works for Bark. He is the editor of ‘Grabbing Back: Essays Against the Global Land Grab’ (AK Press 2014) and a contributor to Life During Wartime (AK Press 2013). 

 




390999

It’s here, and it’s growing: the self-assembling Coalition of the Radical Left Updated for 2026

Leave a reply




In January, I went to the Oregon coast to get away from the city, clear my mind, and have some fun. While walking down the beach, though, we noticed a horrible sight.

Thousands of dead young birds, called cassin’s auklets, littered the sands, strewn amongst the bottles and random plastic like so many discarded dreams.

Scientists are baffled as to the reason for the die-off. National Geographic called it “unprecedented… one of the largest mass die-offs of seabirds ever recorded.” Between 50-100,000 birds as of the end of January.

The most direct explanation is simply starvation. The natural food of the birds has gone away this season, and it fits in with a larger trend of mass die-offs on the Northwest coast. It could be that ocean acidification is creating an ecological collapse, a lack of oxygen in the water, perhaps, but the main theory places the blame on the warming oceans.

It is climate change that is causing this death, just as climate change induced drought have led to the wars in Syria and Mali. It is killing our young; the entire planet is in grave peril.

Something must be done. But what?

The political party in power in Greece is called Syriza, an acronym meaning Synaspismós Rizospastikís Aristerás (Συνασπισμός Ριζοσπαστικής Αριστεράς) or ‘coalition of the radical left’. Their organization is not what one could possibly call a conventional political party: it is more of a work of rethinking politics and its relationship to the state.

They formed in 2004 as an anti-establishment party, and surfed into power on the waves of riotous discontent incumbent on austerity programs and police repression. Although they have found turbulent times amidst negotiations with global financial institutions, Syriza has shown the North Atlantic the possibility of taking hegemony from the core economic and political powers of neoliberalism.

In the US, we are way behind the times. Would it have been possible to formulate an organized political response to neoliberalism during the antiwar movement that surged into existence during 2003? Instead, the tangled ball of anti-war sentiment unraveled in sectarian provocations.

A friend of mine who joined some anarchist black bloc protests during that era recently recalled an example that illustrates this reality.

We talked about a panel where an audience member asked, “Why did the anarchists continually co-opt the anti-war protests?” The audience member went on to site a specific protest, to which my friend replied, “We were one of the groups that organized that protest.”

Over a century on the front lines of radical change

Anarchists are often attacked as the destabilizing force of left politics par excellence, yet when we approach politics from an anarchist perspective, we see these to be misconceptions. Anarchists bled and died for the eight-hour workday in the 1880s. The Magónista Liberal Party raised the banner of ‘Tierra y Libertad’ (Land and Liberty) in the fight for the Mexican Revolution in the 1910s.

The anarchist-syndicalist party, the National Confederation of Labor (CNT), joined the Spanish Popular Front during the 1930s. Anarchists played a driving role in the 1960s antiwar movement, the alter-globalization movement, and organized the Occupy Wall Street protests.

Today, the Kurdish PYD in Rojava (Syria) is motivated by the formulation of ideas condensed through the meeting of minds between Abdullah Öcalan and libertarian municipalists Murray Bookchin and Janet Biehl.

The goals remain the same: mutual aid, solidarity, justice. There is no reason why, today, the left cannot or should not band together to form political institutions around these tenets to confront the current global threats of climate change and the police state. In fact, there is every reason to perform and encourage such an act through radical new organizations.

Power bases are being built already. In Seattle, City Councilor Kshama Sawant has taken her seat under the party Socialist Alternative (SA). SA is not a conventional political party, nor is Sawant a typical candidate. An immigrant woman of color, she is the first socialist elected to City Council in Seattle since 1877.

Her forward momentum helped carry the $15 minimum wage into effect and inspire a like-minded organization called Right to the City in Portland, Oregon.

Nature in the blast zone (and us too)

Convening around issues of climate change and economic justice, Right to the City is one of several groups developing out of the Occupy movement that gets a sense of purpose from articulating a transformation of the relationships between private property and urban spaces.

The group will be supporting independent candidates in the coming city council elections with the platform of increasing the minimum wage, shutting down industrial polluters, and promoting free access to safer and more diverse public institutions.

The creative application of alternative networks and spaces is emerging with a new way of thinking labor policy in the US. In the Pacific Northwest, the climate movement and labor movement have joined together to shut down the Port of Vancouver and the Port of Longview in light of proposed fossil fuels terminals. Climate and labor activists are currently joining on the picket lines against refineries in the Pacific Northwest, as well.

The oil train derailments are rising at breakneck speed. On Thursday, an oil train derailed near the Mississippi River in Illinois, adding to the several other derailments already this year.

Because we are all in the blast zone, nature is in the blast zone, the environmental group Rising Tide posted an average of a blockade per month of fossil fuel infrastructure in the Pacific Northwest for the last half of 2014, and there is more to come.

Today in Pacheco, California, the IWW is joining with union workers at the Golden Eagle refinery to protest fossil fuel expansion. This confluence marks one of many ways that people are moving forward in defiance of conventional politics, bringing remarkable energy toward rethinking education, food distribution and production, energy and power.

Race, poverty, injustice

While productivity has increased, there has been a decline in median income since 2000, and rents are rising across the country. The poverty rate for African-Americans is nearly triple that of whites, and the environmental injustices related to real estate and inadequate health care mean that people of color are more likely to die of cancer than white people.

The fact that more than two-thirds of African Americans live closer than thirty miles to a coal-fired power plant translates to heart diseases, birth defects, and asthma.

To enforce de facto segregation, overwhelmingly white police departments are commissioned to disproportionately incarcerate and kill people of color. Although data is often sketchy, USA Today disclosed that between 2006 and 2012 a white police officer shot and killed an African-American every three and a half days.

That is saying nothing of the black sites maintained by the Chicago Police Department, for example, under the watch of the Democratic Party machine.

This is nothing new, and it only scratches the surface of the economic hardships experienced in the US. Being denied the meeting of basic needs, Native peoples continue to be dispossessed by land grabs from Peabody Coal in Black Mesa to Resolution Copper in Oak Flats.

Latino/a farm workers are exposed to the terrible crisis of industrial farming, from chemical fertilizers and poisonous pesticides to disproportionately low wages. With climate change-induced droughts, many will be forced to flee the Central Valley and Central Coast area of California, perhaps heading north to the Pacific Northwest.

A grand coalition of the local and grassroots

Something will have to compensate if a collapse in agriculture continues apace in California’s once fertile valley. According to the UN, sustainable compensation of food production can only come from local family and community farming. We will need to reformat the coding system and transform relations between urban and rural, farm and market in order to produce enough food for everyone – but it can be done.

The enormity of the problem is, perhaps, dispiriting, and manifests one reason left movements spin out into sectarian and fracture – after all, one lesson of left politics is that much can be done on a grassroots, local basis. But what if the groups organizing on a local basis joined together to form a Coalition of the Radical Left to confront these major dilemmas on a horizontal basis?

A primary place for such an entity to enter into existence would be the Pacific Northwest, as Portland and Seattle are both among the fastest growing and fastest gentrifying cities with climate refugees to come in the future.

This is how we rise up. It is how we return to our reason for being on this planet in order to overcome the despair, take and share power, and stop the die-offs.

Because when you look the cyclone of famine and drought in the eye, it looks like our own young will be the next to wash up starving on the shores of politics if we don’t seize the moments, the opportunities to stand for our right to live on this earth – a right that we won’t have if we don’t live up to the hard demands of liberation and dignity.

In direct opposition to the neoliberal agenda of the corporate political parties that brought about the financial collapse, a horizon of creative, local activism can be cultivated. This coalition, bringing together ideas of groups like Right to the City and Socialist Alternative, would have an eye to global relations, stopping free trade agreements that have proven to make the rich richer and the poor poorer.

But it would also maintain accountability to grassroots activity for social and ecological justice on a local level – from switching agricultural production to a local level, as insisted upon by the UN, to transforming the daily relations of patriarchal and racist power associated with the police state and its capitalist agenda.

Is this the ‘coming together’ that Naomi Klein is asking for?

The Coalition of the Radical Left, or what might be called CORAL, would be able to dispose of the cancerous institutions of climate change and their power mongers on a regional level, replacing the dialectics of the city with ecologically sustainable and resilient regional networks.

Through this horizontal organization emerging out of the union of Occupy and Black Lives Matter, among other movements, the left could break down the sinister land and water politics that are exterminating native species and exhausting aquifers, acidifying oceans and choking the skies. We could galvanize opposition to capitalism, and generate power to be shared by all people.

Warming oceans, rising sea levels (four inches in two years, according to recent studies on the Atlantic seaboard), catastrophic droughts. They are destroying the complex diversity that the web of life requires to maintain an integral balance.

The coral reefs are an excellent metaphor for what is happening. Based on a diverse amalgam of life and calcium carbonate ecosystems built by groups of animals, the coral reefs have for a long time symbolized the dreamland of Aboriginal life.

Australia’s Indigenous peoples for centuries have mapped out their knowledge of the reefs’ systems through the composition of intricate artworks and musics that translate the vitality of those systems into a lived reality.

As climate change bleaches and destroys those ecosystems, the dreamscapes of the world’s peoples are obliterated. Scientists have begun working with Aboriginal peoples to restore the coral, because that collaboration is the only way to re-establish a sense of the place.

CORAL would have to work as a solidarity movement with Indigenous partnerships along with communities of color. Coming together, we can rediscover how to understand and appreciate both biodiversity and human diversity, how to live together amongst both Indigenous and migrant populations, and how to embrace both the new and the ancient forms of reconciliation and resilience.

It is not an easy path, but integrity and respect never is. It requires self-discipline and practicing our ideas in good faith, passing along the wisdom of life. That is how we spin the fabric of dreams into our realities and celebrate what makes us human.

 

 

Alexander Reid Ross is a contributing moderator of the Earth First! Newswire and works for Bark. He is the editor of ‘Grabbing Back: Essays Against the Global Land Grab’ (AK Press 2014) and a contributor to Life During Wartime (AK Press 2013). 

 




390999

It’s here, and it’s growing: the self-assembling Coalition of the Radical Left Updated for 2026

Leave a reply




In January, I went to the Oregon coast to get away from the city, clear my mind, and have some fun. While walking down the beach, though, we noticed a horrible sight.

Thousands of dead young birds, called cassin’s auklets, littered the sands, strewn amongst the bottles and random plastic like so many discarded dreams.

Scientists are baffled as to the reason for the die-off. National Geographic called it “unprecedented… one of the largest mass die-offs of seabirds ever recorded.” Between 50-100,000 birds as of the end of January.

The most direct explanation is simply starvation. The natural food of the birds has gone away this season, and it fits in with a larger trend of mass die-offs on the Northwest coast. It could be that ocean acidification is creating an ecological collapse, a lack of oxygen in the water, perhaps, but the main theory places the blame on the warming oceans.

It is climate change that is causing this death, just as climate change induced drought have led to the wars in Syria and Mali. It is killing our young; the entire planet is in grave peril.

Something must be done. But what?

The political party in power in Greece is called Syriza, an acronym meaning Synaspismós Rizospastikís Aristerás (Συνασπισμός Ριζοσπαστικής Αριστεράς) or ‘coalition of the radical left’. Their organization is not what one could possibly call a conventional political party: it is more of a work of rethinking politics and its relationship to the state.

They formed in 2004 as an anti-establishment party, and surfed into power on the waves of riotous discontent incumbent on austerity programs and police repression. Although they have found turbulent times amidst negotiations with global financial institutions, Syriza has shown the North Atlantic the possibility of taking hegemony from the core economic and political powers of neoliberalism.

In the US, we are way behind the times. Would it have been possible to formulate an organized political response to neoliberalism during the antiwar movement that surged into existence during 2003? Instead, the tangled ball of anti-war sentiment unraveled in sectarian provocations.

A friend of mine who joined some anarchist black bloc protests during that era recently recalled an example that illustrates this reality.

We talked about a panel where an audience member asked, “Why did the anarchists continually co-opt the anti-war protests?” The audience member went on to site a specific protest, to which my friend replied, “We were one of the groups that organized that protest.”

Over a century on the front lines of radical change

Anarchists are often attacked as the destabilizing force of left politics par excellence, yet when we approach politics from an anarchist perspective, we see these to be misconceptions. Anarchists bled and died for the eight-hour workday in the 1880s. The Magónista Liberal Party raised the banner of ‘Tierra y Libertad’ (Land and Liberty) in the fight for the Mexican Revolution in the 1910s.

The anarchist-syndicalist party, the National Confederation of Labor (CNT), joined the Spanish Popular Front during the 1930s. Anarchists played a driving role in the 1960s antiwar movement, the alter-globalization movement, and organized the Occupy Wall Street protests.

Today, the Kurdish PYD in Rojava (Syria) is motivated by the formulation of ideas condensed through the meeting of minds between Abdullah Öcalan and libertarian municipalists Murray Bookchin and Janet Biehl.

The goals remain the same: mutual aid, solidarity, justice. There is no reason why, today, the left cannot or should not band together to form political institutions around these tenets to confront the current global threats of climate change and the police state. In fact, there is every reason to perform and encourage such an act through radical new organizations.

Power bases are being built already. In Seattle, City Councilor Kshama Sawant has taken her seat under the party Socialist Alternative (SA). SA is not a conventional political party, nor is Sawant a typical candidate. An immigrant woman of color, she is the first socialist elected to City Council in Seattle since 1877.

Her forward momentum helped carry the $15 minimum wage into effect and inspire a like-minded organization called Right to the City in Portland, Oregon.

Nature in the blast zone (and us too)

Convening around issues of climate change and economic justice, Right to the City is one of several groups developing out of the Occupy movement that gets a sense of purpose from articulating a transformation of the relationships between private property and urban spaces.

The group will be supporting independent candidates in the coming city council elections with the platform of increasing the minimum wage, shutting down industrial polluters, and promoting free access to safer and more diverse public institutions.

The creative application of alternative networks and spaces is emerging with a new way of thinking labor policy in the US. In the Pacific Northwest, the climate movement and labor movement have joined together to shut down the Port of Vancouver and the Port of Longview in light of proposed fossil fuels terminals. Climate and labor activists are currently joining on the picket lines against refineries in the Pacific Northwest, as well.

The oil train derailments are rising at breakneck speed. On Thursday, an oil train derailed near the Mississippi River in Illinois, adding to the several other derailments already this year.

Because we are all in the blast zone, nature is in the blast zone, the environmental group Rising Tide posted an average of a blockade per month of fossil fuel infrastructure in the Pacific Northwest for the last half of 2014, and there is more to come.

Today in Pacheco, California, the IWW is joining with union workers at the Golden Eagle refinery to protest fossil fuel expansion. This confluence marks one of many ways that people are moving forward in defiance of conventional politics, bringing remarkable energy toward rethinking education, food distribution and production, energy and power.

Race, poverty, injustice

While productivity has increased, there has been a decline in median income since 2000, and rents are rising across the country. The poverty rate for African-Americans is nearly triple that of whites, and the environmental injustices related to real estate and inadequate health care mean that people of color are more likely to die of cancer than white people.

The fact that more than two-thirds of African Americans live closer than thirty miles to a coal-fired power plant translates to heart diseases, birth defects, and asthma.

To enforce de facto segregation, overwhelmingly white police departments are commissioned to disproportionately incarcerate and kill people of color. Although data is often sketchy, USA Today disclosed that between 2006 and 2012 a white police officer shot and killed an African-American every three and a half days.

That is saying nothing of the black sites maintained by the Chicago Police Department, for example, under the watch of the Democratic Party machine.

This is nothing new, and it only scratches the surface of the economic hardships experienced in the US. Being denied the meeting of basic needs, Native peoples continue to be dispossessed by land grabs from Peabody Coal in Black Mesa to Resolution Copper in Oak Flats.

Latino/a farm workers are exposed to the terrible crisis of industrial farming, from chemical fertilizers and poisonous pesticides to disproportionately low wages. With climate change-induced droughts, many will be forced to flee the Central Valley and Central Coast area of California, perhaps heading north to the Pacific Northwest.

A grand coalition of the local and grassroots

Something will have to compensate if a collapse in agriculture continues apace in California’s once fertile valley. According to the UN, sustainable compensation of food production can only come from local family and community farming. We will need to reformat the coding system and transform relations between urban and rural, farm and market in order to produce enough food for everyone – but it can be done.

The enormity of the problem is, perhaps, dispiriting, and manifests one reason left movements spin out into sectarian and fracture – after all, one lesson of left politics is that much can be done on a grassroots, local basis. But what if the groups organizing on a local basis joined together to form a Coalition of the Radical Left to confront these major dilemmas on a horizontal basis?

A primary place for such an entity to enter into existence would be the Pacific Northwest, as Portland and Seattle are both among the fastest growing and fastest gentrifying cities with climate refugees to come in the future.

This is how we rise up. It is how we return to our reason for being on this planet in order to overcome the despair, take and share power, and stop the die-offs.

Because when you look the cyclone of famine and drought in the eye, it looks like our own young will be the next to wash up starving on the shores of politics if we don’t seize the moments, the opportunities to stand for our right to live on this earth – a right that we won’t have if we don’t live up to the hard demands of liberation and dignity.

In direct opposition to the neoliberal agenda of the corporate political parties that brought about the financial collapse, a horizon of creative, local activism can be cultivated. This coalition, bringing together ideas of groups like Right to the City and Socialist Alternative, would have an eye to global relations, stopping free trade agreements that have proven to make the rich richer and the poor poorer.

But it would also maintain accountability to grassroots activity for social and ecological justice on a local level – from switching agricultural production to a local level, as insisted upon by the UN, to transforming the daily relations of patriarchal and racist power associated with the police state and its capitalist agenda.

Is this the ‘coming together’ that Naomi Klein is asking for?

The Coalition of the Radical Left, or what might be called CORAL, would be able to dispose of the cancerous institutions of climate change and their power mongers on a regional level, replacing the dialectics of the city with ecologically sustainable and resilient regional networks.

Through this horizontal organization emerging out of the union of Occupy and Black Lives Matter, among other movements, the left could break down the sinister land and water politics that are exterminating native species and exhausting aquifers, acidifying oceans and choking the skies. We could galvanize opposition to capitalism, and generate power to be shared by all people.

Warming oceans, rising sea levels (four inches in two years, according to recent studies on the Atlantic seaboard), catastrophic droughts. They are destroying the complex diversity that the web of life requires to maintain an integral balance.

The coral reefs are an excellent metaphor for what is happening. Based on a diverse amalgam of life and calcium carbonate ecosystems built by groups of animals, the coral reefs have for a long time symbolized the dreamland of Aboriginal life.

Australia’s Indigenous peoples for centuries have mapped out their knowledge of the reefs’ systems through the composition of intricate artworks and musics that translate the vitality of those systems into a lived reality.

As climate change bleaches and destroys those ecosystems, the dreamscapes of the world’s peoples are obliterated. Scientists have begun working with Aboriginal peoples to restore the coral, because that collaboration is the only way to re-establish a sense of the place.

CORAL would have to work as a solidarity movement with Indigenous partnerships along with communities of color. Coming together, we can rediscover how to understand and appreciate both biodiversity and human diversity, how to live together amongst both Indigenous and migrant populations, and how to embrace both the new and the ancient forms of reconciliation and resilience.

It is not an easy path, but integrity and respect never is. It requires self-discipline and practicing our ideas in good faith, passing along the wisdom of life. That is how we spin the fabric of dreams into our realities and celebrate what makes us human.

 

 

Alexander Reid Ross is a contributing moderator of the Earth First! Newswire and works for Bark. He is the editor of ‘Grabbing Back: Essays Against the Global Land Grab’ (AK Press 2014) and a contributor to Life During Wartime (AK Press 2013). 

 




390999

Banged up for democracy – the UK kleptocracy cannot tolerate dissent. Updated for 2026

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I spent Valentine’s Night in jail in solitary confinement for 16 hours, contemplating the fact that my lawyer said I was facing up to 14 years jail. Why?

In the UK, Boris Johnson owes his political power to and literally gets paid millions of pounds by the tax-dodging extremist right wing media billionaires.

He abuses that power via his private security corporation guards to order the arrests of the Occupy pro-democracy and anti-tax dodging protesters.

I had simply been standing silently and peacefully beside Boris Johnson’s private guard whilst he was handing out arrest warning notices to peaceful protesters on Parliament Green (in ‘Tarpaulin Square’).

I was holding a cardboard coffin placard with the slogan “UK Democracy RIP – killed by corporate billionaires”, made by Nigel Lowell. There is loads of video footage and picture evidence showing me silently peacefully protesting (see below).

This private security guard then told the police that he was “intimidated” by my doing this and that I was seeking to “intimidate him from giving evidence as a court witness” at my trumped up trial for assault in June.

Evidence is so passé …

So without a shred of evidence of any such intimidation, the police a half-hour later in pretty brutal fashion came in force to arrest me, as I was peacefully listening to the democratic discussion being held by the Occupy Democracy General Assembly on the grass.

The police subsequently arrested three more of us on the instructions of the ‘Boris Guards’, including the inspirationally peaceful Nigel Lowell and the legendary live-news journalist Lorenzo Obi Abidanas, for simply being on the Green in Tarpaulin Square.

What I think is really important to know is that it is clear that the London Mayor Boris Johnson has given the orders that anybody who dares to protest about the lack of democracy in Parliament Green are to be arrested.

But meanwhile the real 1% criminals that Johnson serves go un-arrested and indeed they pour money into Johnson’s pockets and are treated to VIP hospitality at our taxpayers’ expense.

Boris Johnson owes his political career (and his power to order peaceful pro-democracy protesters to be arrested) to the extremist right-ring billionaire media-moguls like Rupert Murdoch, the Barclay Brothers and rich Tory donors.

So when Murdoch was vilified for his role overseeing a press empire mired up to its neck in hacking the phones of the relatives of dead British servicemen, Johnson as his key political servant, instead of calling for this man to be banned from owning UK media, shamed London by inviting him instead as a VIP guest to our taxpayer funded Olympics.

And let’s also remember that Johnson rakes in a quarter of a million pounds each year from the tax-dodging owners of The Telegraph, the Barclay Brothers, who avoid UK taxes by living in the notorious tax-havens of Jersey and Monaco.

Boris Johnson is the servant extraordinaire of The Prostitute State. And he abuses his political power to crack down on those who are protesting at the corrupt hijacking of our democracy by these billionaire tax dodgers and media moguls.

We will not be intimidated!

Occupy Democracy and Occupy Rupert Murdoch Week will not be intimidated by the arrests and trumped up charges by his corporate bully-boy hired hands.

We will be back again in Tarpaulin Square with our pro-democracy monthly protest events and talks on March and at Murdoch’s HQ at The Shard from March 23rd-29th.

It is time to say no more to the calamitous destruction of the planet and the hijacking of the wealth of the 99% by the 1%. Be there if you care!

Meanwhile I continue to be on bail now for seven separate charges arising out of my peaceful protesting on Tarpaulin Square, as the police waste time investigating these ‘offences’:

  1. Accused of possessing plastic tarpaulin sheet under my arm in Tarpaulin Square at 10am on a sunny morning at October Occupy Democracy.
  2. Accused of refusing to allow police to confiscate my folded tarpaulin in Tarpaulin Square.
  3. Accused of refusing to obey instruction to leave Tarpaulin Square when instructed to do so by police as I was in possession of a folded tarpaulin.
  4. Accused of not giving my name and address when arrested for being in possession of a folded ground sheet in Tarpaulin Square (there is film footage of my actually giving them my name and address whilst being brutally taken to the ground and handcuffed and physically lifted bodily into the air and escorted in military formation to the police van by a phalanx of 30 officers including TSG at October Occupy Democracy!!
  5. Accusation of “assault” for bumping into Boris’s private security guard when I was trying to protect a peaceful protester from being attacked by the guards who had been throwing peaceful protesters over the iron fence they had erected to implement Boris Johnson’s ban on our protest. (Trial arranged for June 18th) at December Occupy Democracy.
  6. Accusation of “intimidation of a witness in a criminal trial” for standing silently and peacefully with the cardboard coffin stating “Democracy RIP – Killed by Corporate Billionaires” at February Occupy Democracy.
  7. Accused of standing on Parliament Green on Valentine’s Night at February Occupy Democracy.

All charges have been dropped for the arrest they made on me for standing in front of Mandela’s Statue at the November pro-democracy protest with a sign saying “Free Nelson Mandela”.

 

 

Donnachadh McCarthy is author of ‘The Prostitute State’ – how Britain’s Democracy Has Been Bought, an Occupy Democracy supporter and former Deputy Chair of the Liberal Democrats. He is currently a member of no political party.

More information:

 




390270

Fracking is driving UK civil and political rights violations Updated for 2026

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The UK is faced with extreme energy development that will utilise all three ‘fracking’ technologies: Shale Gas/Oil, Coal Bed Methane (CBM) and Underground Coal Gasification (UCG).

Currently exploration licences cover a relatively small area of land, but roughly a third of the British Isles is being offered to fracking companies as part of the 14th onshore licensing round.

A new report released today by the Bianca Jagger Human Rights Foundation highlights a number of potential human rights impacts for UK citizens should fracking development proceed beyond the exploratory stage.

The human rights implications of extractive activity are being increasingly discussed on the international stage, as concerned citizens demand global leaders take action to modify the excesses of human consumption and consumerism.

The report’s concluding section alludes to issues beyond its scope which we elaborate on here; specifically the violations of civil and political rights that both exploratory and production phases of fracking development will likely entail.

Interviews, online surveys and correspondence with local campaigners have returned a wealth of personal testimony that dispels any suggestion that fracking development’s problems are limited to environmental and human health concerns.

The anti-fracking movement is the fastest growing social movement in the UK with currently over 180 local groups, up from around 30 in 2013. This inconvenient fact poses a problem for a government wanting to go ‘all out for shale’. How has the state reacted so far?

Nationally coordinated suppression?

To date there have been over 400 arrests of peaceful protestors, and data from Balcombe and Barton Moss is suggestive of a nationally coordinated attempt to suppress opposition to shale gas extraction at the expense of domestically and internationally recognised rights.

This campaign has been interpreted by those within the anti-fracking movement as akin to the state response to the 1984-5 Miners’ Strikes through the use of political policing and intimidation of protestors.

Civil and political rights have been primarily infringed by the response of Greater Manchester Police and Sussex Police to peaceful protest at exploratory drilling sites, exhibited most commonly through protestors attempting to delay the arrival of equipment by walking in front of delivery lorries.

The resultant interactions between police and protestors have prompted concerns over the prioritisation of fracking development’s alleged ‘economic benefits’ and provision of short-term ‘energy security’ over the rights of individuals and local communities.

The analysis of interview data indicates that through these actions the rights to freedom of peaceful assembly, freedom of expression, liberty and security of person, a fair trial, and respect for a private and family life, have been threatened or violated through the use of unnecessary or excessive force, unlawful arrests, covert surveillance of protestors, and intimidation of members of the Anti-fracking movement.

Each of these rights is protected by the Human Rights Act 1998, European Convention on Human Rights, and International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which the UK is legally bound to observe.

Police Violence and arrest quotas

Police interaction with anti-fracking protesters at both Balcombe and Barton Moss involved the use of violence, forcible removal of individuals from the protest site without arrest, and kettling.

Interview respondents described how they were “kicked and pushed and punched”, “pushed and shoved in the back”, “pushed off the road by the police”, and “shoved in the back repeatedly”. Police behavior was described as “brutal”, “violent”, “thuggish”, “rough”, and “very, very aggressive”, resulting in interactions in which a bone got broken.

The use of physical violence was widely reported amongst interview and survey respondents, indicating unlawful police activity at both Balcombe and Barton Moss that directly impacted upon the ability of anti-fracking protestors to realise one of their fundamental civil and political rights.

This violence was accompanied by other forms of unlawful activity to inhibit anti-fracking protest activity at both sites.

References were made in several interviews to the concept of arrest quotas, whereby police would carry out specific numbers of arrests over consecutive days.

At Barton Moss, throughout the autumn and winter of 2013, one interview respondent recalled how “there were five arrests every day”, and that “Officers were heard to say ‘We need one more arrest’.”

The same respondent believed that the use of arrest quotas was “almost certainly planned in advance”, and designed as “a long term plan” which would ensure that “eventually everyone would be arrested”.

More explicitly, the respondent explained how such patterns of arrests effectively worked, as “you’re arrested, you get bailed, next time you get arrested in breach of bail. Over a period of time, such a cycle would decrease the effectiveness of the protest camp’s actions and increase the likelihood of its disbandment.”

Arrests were also described as “clearly random”, “quite random”, and “completely random”, with one respondent expressing the most telling sentiment, that: “there was a risk that at any time you could be arrested”. Such arrests were believed to be used as a way of “undermining people’s morale”.

Spurious arrests

In addition to arrest quotas and arbitrary arrests, allegations were made by an interview respondent of arrests being knowingly made on unlawful charges by Greater Manchester Police.

At Barton Moss, delivery lorries travelled down Barton Moss Lane to reach the IGas drilling site, a designated private road with footpath access for the public. The respondent described how police made arrests on Barton Moss Lane for “the crime of obstructing a public highway”, an entirely unlawful charge given that the road is private and therefore does not constitute a public highway.

Significantly, the respondent described how, at a court hearing of individuals charged with the crime of obstruction of a public highway in November 2013, “a solicitor informed the court that Barton Moss Lane was a private road which has public footpath access”, but Greater Manchester Police “continued to make arrests. under that crime until […] February.”

This meant that, as expressed by the respondent, “for nearly three months they continued to arrest for a crime that wasn’t a crime”.

Many arrests appear to have been made under what were somewhat spurious claims. For example, interview respondents detailed how at both Balcombe and Barton Moss, while escorting delivery lorries to the exploratory drilling sites, protestors were arrested for “obstructing a police officer” if they fell over.

These arrests were justified under the premise that “if you fall down in front of a police officer you are obstructing him from moving down the road”. Such interactions between police and protestors prompted frustrations, but also fears.

Monitoring of Communications

Several interview respondents raised concerns of police surveillance of email accounts, telephones and social media.

Although, as one interview respondent indicated, such activities are “difficult to prove”, other interview respondents were insistent in their belief of surveillance activity, stating that “We knew that they were monitoring our Facebook pages, our emails and our phones”, and “I have no doubt that they were bugging certain people’s phones” and “keeping a close eye on people’s Facebook pages”.

Concerns for some anti-fracking protestors over the security of information were such that one interview respondent described how, when important details about protest action required discussion, the individuals involved would “get together and speak about it rather than using [social] media.”

Seemingly to confirm fears of surveillance, another respondent described how a list of press contacts on an email account were “scrambled”, preventing messages from reaching the majority of the list’s recipients.

The use of covert surveillance has prompted fears of how intelligence gathered by Greater Manchester Police and Sussex Police has been shared nationally, with explicit reference made by one interview respondent to the Domestic Extremist Unit.

Another correspondent reported having been visited at home by two members of the Counter Terrorism and Domestic Extremism Unit after filming at a potential drilling site. The visit, according to the two “officers”, was made on the request of a local police force who in turn received their request from the firm’s “security personnel”.

It seems that behind such examples of close cooperation and coordination between ‘fracking’ firms, the state and police forces lies a specific intent to intimidate and deter individuals involved in protest or related activities.

Democratic freedoms eroded

The explicit violations of rights in the context of anti-fracking protests fit within a wider discussion of democracy, and concern the right to public participation, which is protected in matters of environmental impact by the Aarhus Convention.

The increasing opposition to fracking, evidenced in the growing plethora of local campaign groups across the UK, indicates governmental failure to adequately respond to local and national concerns over the human rights implications of fracking or provide sufficient opportunities for public participation in decision making.

Both interview and survey respondents have expressed dissatisfaction with the lack of governmental consideration of public concerns, stating variously that “The government are not listening to people”, “the government refuses to engage and consult with the public”, “The government is ignoring the will of the people”, and “we have never been consulted”.

These comments indicate a deeper concern with the denial of citizen participation in a democratic society, with survey respondents describing how “democracy appears to be disregarded completely”, and that the process of introducing fracking in the UK “is eroding our democracy”.

With specific respect to public opinion, one survey respondent described how, when the application for exploratory drilling was made by Cuadrilla in Balcombe, and the local council requested residents’ opinions, “899 letters against it […], 5 for and they still went for it”.

This example demonstrates a particular disregard for the individuals living in proximity to exploratory sites, and indicates how individuals have become disillusioned with official avenues of complaint.

Fundamental rights are at risk

Not all anti-fracking activity in the UK has been ‘lawful’ as such, and has included the occupation of Cuadrilla’s offices in Blackpool and the blockading of roads to exploratory drilling sites.

Although instances of direct action which technically violate domestic law are not protected by international human rights legislation, these events indicate the extent to which individuals are sufficiently disillusioned with governmental policy to consider and undertake ‘illegal’ action.

Acts of both civil disobedience and peaceful protest will occur with increasing frequency as local communities realise the extent of the extractive industry’s impact.

This indicates the vital nature of further human rights based research into the planning, implementation and infrastructure of fracking development, and the need for genuinely independent human rights impact assessments for all communities before any extractive activity begins in the UK.

The civil and political implications of fracking development in the UK will only intensify as anti-fracking protests proliferate alongside exploratory activity.

The rights violations described above must therefore prompt both public awareness and governmental response to the reality that fracking development can no longer be considered in separation from the civil and political sphere, as personal testimony indicates the extent to which fundamental rights of UK citizens who oppose governmental policy are at risk.

As the report concludes, “for the UK Government to proceed with fracking without adequate assessment of the human rights position would amount to a serious failure of responsibility.”

 

 

The report: A Human Rights Assessment of Hydraulic Fracturing and Other Unconventional Gas Development in the United Kingdom is launched today.

Also on The Ecologist:


Jess Elliot is a Research Associate at the Human Rights Consortium, School of Advanced Study, University of London.

Damien Short is a Reader in Human Rights at the School of Advanced Study, University of London and Director of the School’s MA programme in Understanding and Securing Human Rights, Human Rights Consortium and Extreme Energy Initiative.

This article is an extended version of one originally published today on The Conversation.

For further information on violations of civil and political rights in the context of anti-fracking protests in the UK, please look out for the forthcoming Short et al, 2014, International Journal of Human Rights, December 2014.

The Conversation

 




380157

Nuclear power trumps democracy Updated for 2026

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Why is our democracy failing to tackle the horrific urgency of the climate crisis and the decimation of our eco-systems?

And why are all the main political parties betting the farm on nuclear power in spite of its madhouse economics – and against all their promises to either oppose nuclear power altogether, or to refuse subsidies for it?

In my new book, The Prostitute State – How Britain’s Democracy Has Been Bought, I set out my view that there is a single problem at the root of our nation’s difficulties.

A corporate elite have hijacked the pillars of Britain’s democracy. The production of thought, the dissemination of thought, the implementation of thought and the wealth arising from those thoughts, are now controlled by a tiny, staggeringly rich elite.

As a result the UK is no longer a functioning democracy but has become a  ‘Prostitute State’ built on four pillars: a corrupted political system, a prostituted media, a perverted academia and a thieving tax-haven system.

This has disastrously resulted in a flood of wealth from the poor and middle classes to the top 1%. This stolen wealth is built on the destruction of the planet’s ecosystems, which are essential for humanity’s survival.

Nuclear power defeats democracy

The reversal of government policy on nuclear power is a classic example of how the Prostitute State trumps democracy. Betrayed environmental activists must understand that – notwithstanding the noble form of democratic structures – what they are really up against is a corrupt corporate state.

The concept of lobbying is reasonably well known, but few of us understand how far lobbying has penetrated and hijacked the political parties themselves.

For example, most people are perplexed at how the nuclear industry managed to persuade the UK’s previous Labour government to build a fleet of hugely expensive experimental nuclear power stations on land prone to flooding from rising sea levels.

They also struggle to comprehend and why Labour’s shadow energy and climate change minister, Caroline Flint MP, having stated that she would only support nuclear power if built without public subsidies, now supports the £15-20 billion subsidy package for Hinkley C nuclear power station

Labour managed managed this policy U-Turn despite the Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima nuclear catastrophes; the failure to find safe waste-disposal sites capable of protecting radioactive waste for over 100,000 years; and insurance companies’ point blank refusal to provide nuclear accident insurance.

It’s the money, stupid

My simple answer is that the nuclear industry has poured millions of pounds year after year into a massive political lobbying campaign.

They bought a whole swathe of senior ex-politicians to work as nuclear lobbyists, spent a fortune on trying to manipulate public opinion through media and advertising, and even funded school trips to their nuclear plants.

As they managed to persuade a Labour government to abandon their 1997 election manifesto commitment to oppose new nuclear power stations, it is crucial to understand how deeply the nuclear lobby is embedded in the Labour party.

My personal belief is that a complex web of financial interests ensured that the Labour government served the nuclear industry – no matter what Labour party members or the British public wanted.

Just consider for example the following list of Labour Party politicians:

  • Former Energy Minister Brian Wilson became a non-executive director of Amec Nuclear, a client of BNFL, a nuclear operator.
  • Former Energy Minister Helen Liddell was hired to provide “strategic advice” by the nuclear corporation British Energy.
  • Former Secretary of State John Hutton, who as Business Secretary published the government White Paper announcing government plans to build new nuclear stations, was appointed Chair of the Nuclear Industry Association in 2011. He also joined the advisory board of US nuclear corporation Hyperion Power Generation in July 2010.
  • Colin Byrne, the Labour Party’s former chief press officer, headed up lobbying giant Weber Shandwick’s UK arm, which BNFL hired to lobby for new nuclear plants.
  • Gordon Brown’s brother, Andrew, was nuclear giant EdF’s head of media relations in the UK.
  • Yvette Cooper was the Planning Minister who introduced fast-track planning for nuclear power stations. Her father was chair of nuclear lobbyists The Nuclear Industry Association and is director of the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority.
  • Alan Donnelly, former leader of the Labour MEPs, runs the lobbying company Sovereign Strategy, which represented US nuclear engineering giant Fluor. His website promised “pathways to the decision makers in national governments”.
  • Former Labour Minister Jack Cunningham was legislative chair of the Transatlantic Nuclear Energy Forum, an organisation founded by lobbyist Alan Donnelly to foster “strong relationships” between nuclear power companies and governments.
  • The Tory Peer Lady Maitland was a paid member of Sovereign Strategy’s board.
  • Donnelly funded Labour leadership contender David Miliband’s constituency office refurbishment.
  • David Sainsbury, Labour Minister for Science from 1998 to 2006 told the House of Lords that he regarded nuclear power as a form of renewable energy.
  • Ed Miliband’s barrister wife Justine Thornton advised EdF Energy on its Development Consent Order for a new nuclear plant at Hinkley Point.

Of course I cannot say that the financial links of any individual with the nuclear industry had any bearing on the party’s change in policy. However this wholesale hiring of senior Labour Party figures by the nuclear lobby may have been influential in the fact that a number of key aims were achieved over the last ten years:

  • the reversal of Labour’s commitment to rule out new nuclear power stations.
  • Labour ministers’ introduction of a fast-track planning process for new nuclear plants without lengthy inquiries.


The saintly Lib Dems …

It is also noteworthy that whilst governments across the world were abandoning nuclear power after the Fukushima disaster, the new Tory / Lib Dem coalition abandoned their manifesto commitments to provide no public subsidy for new nuclear, by guaranteeing multi-billion pound annual subsidies.

The Tory / Lib Dem government also made the taxpayer liable for nuclear disaster costs, after the private insurers refused to do so – as just one catastrophic accident would bankrupt most global insurance companies.

    To understand the comparative power of political lobbying versus voting at elections, you need to realise that the final two aims above were achieved despite the Lib Dems having for decades supposedly opposed nuclear power and the Tories having opposed nuclear subsidies in the 2010 general election.

    I was never convinced by the Lib Dem leadership’s opposition to nuclear power after it successfully, in the late ’90s, squashed the adoption in policy papers of the phrase “a renewable energy economy” that I had proposed to replace “a low carbon economy” which they favoured.

    The latter of course allowed the switch to a pro-nuclear policy once the Lib Dems were in government.

    The prominent Lib Dem MP Ed Davey stood for election opposing nuclear energy, but as Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, he became nuclear power’s chief cheerleader – announcing that the government’s entire industrial strategy was now based on new nuclear!

    The UK government is already spending the equivalent of 93% of the Department of Energy and Climate Change’s entire annual budget on nuclear subsidies! This was achieved despite polls indicating overwhelming support by the public for renewable energy over nuclear power.

    Lib Dem nuclear links

    Ed Davey’s brother, Henry Davey, works for the global law firm Herbert Smith Freehills which has advised EdF on its purchase of nuclear plants and the development application for a new nuclear plant at Hinkley Point.

    Also Lib Dem peer Tim Clement-Jones, Nick Clegg’s Party Treasurer at the last general election and the Party’s spokesman on culture and sport in the House of Lords, is founder and chairman of Global Government Relations, the lobbying arm of the huge multinational law firm DLA Piper, and serves as DLA Piper’s London Managing Partner.

    DLA Piper is listed as a member of the Nuclear Industry Association, and boasts of its widespread experience with many nuclear industry companies. According to its website it

    • advised AREVA SA on their investment in New Nuclear Build at Hinkley Point C including the new Contract for Difference regime, waste management strategy and HM Treasury Infrastructure Guarantee Scheme.
    • advised Sellafield Limited on all aspects of their waste management and decommissioning programme covering annual capital spend of £1billion.
    • is advising the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority on the application of the International Nuclear Liability Conventions in respect of the marine transport of high level radioactive waste from Europe to Japan.
    • is advising nuclear supply chain on tendering exercises in support of new nuclear build in the UK.
    • is advising Westinghouse, Nuclear Decommissioning Authority, Magnox Limited and International Nuclear Services Limited on all aspects of fuel supply contracts, enrichment, waste management and radioactive transportation in support of activities in UK and globally.

    Of course this could all be complete coincidence and we cannot conclude that Lord Clement-Jones had any influence on Lib Dem policy changes as regards nuclear power.

    But what we do know is that Davey won the battle yesterday at the European Commission to overthrow the Commission’s previous ban on state aid for new nuclear power, following intense political and industry lobbying of the 28 Commissioners.

    Thus the Lib Dems’ legacy will be to have thrown open the floodgates to new nuclear power right across Europe, despite their election manifesto having promised to oppose it.

     

     

    Donnachadh McCarthy FRSA is a former Deputy Chair of the Liberal Democrats. He can be reached via his website 3acorns.

    This article is based on an extract from Donnachadh McCarthy’s new book ‘The Prostitute State – How Britain’s Democracy Has Been Bought‘. 

    Copies of ‘The Prostitute State – How Britain’s Democracy Has Been Bought‘ are available from theprostitutestate.co.uk.

    E-book version available from www.Lulu.com.

     

     




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‘Political will is only barrier to 100% renewables’ Updated for 2026

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The new handbook shows how forward-looking communities around the world are already moving away from reliance on fossil fuels and generating their own power with 100% renewables – while also becoming more prosperous and creating jobs.

The report, ‘How to Achieve 100% Renewable Energy‘, is released ahead of the UN Climate Summit in New York tomorrow (23rd September), when the UN Secretary-general, Ban Ki-Moon, will call on world leaders to make new commitments to cut fossil fuel use.

The World Future Council, based in Hamburg, Germany, has issued the report to show that it is only lack of political will that is preventing the world switching away from fossil fuels. It believes that the leaders at the UN summit need to set ambitious targets and timetables to achieve the switch to renewables.

We have the technologies!

Using case histories – from small islands in the Canaries to great commercial cities such as Frankfurt in Germany and Sydney in Australia – the report makes clear that the technologies to go 100% renewable exist already.

In many cases, the switch has the combined effect of saving money for the community concerned and creating jobs, making everyone more prosperous. In all cases, improvements in energy efficiency are essential to meeting targets.

Where the100% renewable target is adopted, it gives the clearest signal to business that investments in clean technologies will be secure. The report says:

“The benefits range from savings on fossil fuel imports, improved energy, and economic security, as well as reduced energy and electricity costs for governments, local residents and businesses.”

There is no case made for nuclear power. Indeed, the report says that the uranium needed for nuclear fuel is – like coal, oil and gas – a finite resource that will soon be running out.

Fukushima goes for 100% renewables by 2040

One of the case histories in the report is the Fukushima Prefecture in Japan. In March 2011,  it sustained the world’s worst nuclear accident since the 1986 Chernobyl disaster in Ukraine, and has now opted to go for 100% electricity from renewables by 2040.

Some of the 100% renewable targets detailed in the report are just for electricity production. The authors – Toby Couture, founder of the Berlin-based energy consultancy E3 Analytics, and Anna Leidreiter, climate and energy policy officer at the World Future Council – point out that heating and cooling, and particularly transport, without fossil fuels is far more challenging, but still equally possible. Some countries are already committed to it.

Denmark, a pioneer in the field, has a target of achieving all its electricity and heating needs from renewables by 2035, and all energy sectors – including transport – by 2050. This includes an expansion of wind and solar power, biogas, ground source heat pumps, and wood-based biomass. Because of its investments, the country expects to have saved €920 million on energy costs by 2020.

At the opposite end of the scale, El Hierro, a small island in the Canaries, has a 100% energy strategy, using a wind farm and a volcanic crater. When excess electricity is produced by the wind farm, water is pumped into the volcanic crater, which acts as a storage lake for a hydroelectric plant. This supplements the island’s electricity supply when the wind drops or when demand is very high.

A future component of El Hierro’s strategy is to replace the island’s entire stock of 4,500 cars with electric vehicles, so cutting the need to import fuel.

Rhein-Hunsruck, Germany producing 230% of its needs from renewables

Some places have already exceeded 100% electricity from renewables. The Rhein-Hunsruck district west of Frankfurt, Germany, managed this in 2012, and expects by the end of this year to be producing 230% of its needs, exporting the surplus to neighbouring areas through the national grid. It hopes to use the surplus in future for local transportation, hydrogen or methane production.

There are many other examples in the report, including from San Francisco in the US, Cape Verde island in West Africa, Bangladesh, Costa Rica, and Tuvalu island in the Pacific.

These show that both rich and poor communities can share the benefits of the renewable revolution – and, in the case of the 3 billion people still without electric power in the world, bypass the need for fossil fuels altogether.

Jeremy Leggett, a pioneer of solar power and author of a foreword to the report, says: “We are on the verge of a profound and urgently necessary shift in the way we produce and use energy.

“This shift will move the world away from the consumption of fossil resources towards cleaner, renewable forms of power. Renewable energy technologies are blowing the whistle on oil dependency and will spark an economic and social renaissance.

“The question is: Do we make this transition from fossil resources to renewables on our own terms, in ways that maximise the benefits to us today and to future generations, or do we turn our heads away and suffer the economic and social shocks that rising prices and market volatility will create?”

 

Paul Brown writes for Climate News Network.

 

 




381249

‘Political will is only barrier to 100% renewables’ Updated for 2026

Leave a reply




The new handbook shows how forward-looking communities around the world are already moving away from reliance on fossil fuels and generating their own power with 100% renewables – while also becoming more prosperous and creating jobs.

The report, ‘How to Achieve 100% Renewable Energy‘, is released ahead of the UN Climate Summit in New York tomorrow (23rd September), when the UN Secretary-general, Ban Ki-Moon, will call on world leaders to make new commitments to cut fossil fuel use.

The World Future Council, based in Hamburg, Germany, has issued the report to show that it is only lack of political will that is preventing the world switching away from fossil fuels. It believes that the leaders at the UN summit need to set ambitious targets and timetables to achieve the switch to renewables.

We have the technologies!

Using case histories – from small islands in the Canaries to great commercial cities such as Frankfurt in Germany and Sydney in Australia – the report makes clear that the technologies to go 100% renewable exist already.

In many cases, the switch has the combined effect of saving money for the community concerned and creating jobs, making everyone more prosperous. In all cases, improvements in energy efficiency are essential to meeting targets.

Where the100% renewable target is adopted, it gives the clearest signal to business that investments in clean technologies will be secure. The report says:

“The benefits range from savings on fossil fuel imports, improved energy, and economic security, as well as reduced energy and electricity costs for governments, local residents and businesses.”

There is no case made for nuclear power. Indeed, the report says that the uranium needed for nuclear fuel is – like coal, oil and gas – a finite resource that will soon be running out.

Fukushima goes for 100% renewables by 2040

One of the case histories in the report is the Fukushima Prefecture in Japan. In March 2011,  it sustained the world’s worst nuclear accident since the 1986 Chernobyl disaster in Ukraine, and has now opted to go for 100% electricity from renewables by 2040.

Some of the 100% renewable targets detailed in the report are just for electricity production. The authors – Toby Couture, founder of the Berlin-based energy consultancy E3 Analytics, and Anna Leidreiter, climate and energy policy officer at the World Future Council – point out that heating and cooling, and particularly transport, without fossil fuels is far more challenging, but still equally possible. Some countries are already committed to it.

Denmark, a pioneer in the field, has a target of achieving all its electricity and heating needs from renewables by 2035, and all energy sectors – including transport – by 2050. This includes an expansion of wind and solar power, biogas, ground source heat pumps, and wood-based biomass. Because of its investments, the country expects to have saved €920 million on energy costs by 2020.

At the opposite end of the scale, El Hierro, a small island in the Canaries, has a 100% energy strategy, using a wind farm and a volcanic crater. When excess electricity is produced by the wind farm, water is pumped into the volcanic crater, which acts as a storage lake for a hydroelectric plant. This supplements the island’s electricity supply when the wind drops or when demand is very high.

A future component of El Hierro’s strategy is to replace the island’s entire stock of 4,500 cars with electric vehicles, so cutting the need to import fuel.

Rhein-Hunsruck, Germany producing 230% of its needs from renewables

Some places have already exceeded 100% electricity from renewables. The Rhein-Hunsruck district west of Frankfurt, Germany, managed this in 2012, and expects by the end of this year to be producing 230% of its needs, exporting the surplus to neighbouring areas through the national grid. It hopes to use the surplus in future for local transportation, hydrogen or methane production.

There are many other examples in the report, including from San Francisco in the US, Cape Verde island in West Africa, Bangladesh, Costa Rica, and Tuvalu island in the Pacific.

These show that both rich and poor communities can share the benefits of the renewable revolution – and, in the case of the 3 billion people still without electric power in the world, bypass the need for fossil fuels altogether.

Jeremy Leggett, a pioneer of solar power and author of a foreword to the report, says: “We are on the verge of a profound and urgently necessary shift in the way we produce and use energy.

“This shift will move the world away from the consumption of fossil resources towards cleaner, renewable forms of power. Renewable energy technologies are blowing the whistle on oil dependency and will spark an economic and social renaissance.

“The question is: Do we make this transition from fossil resources to renewables on our own terms, in ways that maximise the benefits to us today and to future generations, or do we turn our heads away and suffer the economic and social shocks that rising prices and market volatility will create?”

 

Paul Brown writes for Climate News Network.

 

 




381249

‘Political will is only barrier to 100% renewables’ Updated for 2026

Leave a reply




The new handbook shows how forward-looking communities around the world are already moving away from reliance on fossil fuels and generating their own power with 100% renewables – while also becoming more prosperous and creating jobs.

The report, ‘How to Achieve 100% Renewable Energy‘, is released ahead of the UN Climate Summit in New York tomorrow (23rd September), when the UN Secretary-general, Ban Ki-Moon, will call on world leaders to make new commitments to cut fossil fuel use.

The World Future Council, based in Hamburg, Germany, has issued the report to show that it is only lack of political will that is preventing the world switching away from fossil fuels. It believes that the leaders at the UN summit need to set ambitious targets and timetables to achieve the switch to renewables.

We have the technologies!

Using case histories – from small islands in the Canaries to great commercial cities such as Frankfurt in Germany and Sydney in Australia – the report makes clear that the technologies to go 100% renewable exist already.

In many cases, the switch has the combined effect of saving money for the community concerned and creating jobs, making everyone more prosperous. In all cases, improvements in energy efficiency are essential to meeting targets.

Where the100% renewable target is adopted, it gives the clearest signal to business that investments in clean technologies will be secure. The report says:

“The benefits range from savings on fossil fuel imports, improved energy, and economic security, as well as reduced energy and electricity costs for governments, local residents and businesses.”

There is no case made for nuclear power. Indeed, the report says that the uranium needed for nuclear fuel is – like coal, oil and gas – a finite resource that will soon be running out.

Fukushima goes for 100% renewables by 2040

One of the case histories in the report is the Fukushima Prefecture in Japan. In March 2011,  it sustained the world’s worst nuclear accident since the 1986 Chernobyl disaster in Ukraine, and has now opted to go for 100% electricity from renewables by 2040.

Some of the 100% renewable targets detailed in the report are just for electricity production. The authors – Toby Couture, founder of the Berlin-based energy consultancy E3 Analytics, and Anna Leidreiter, climate and energy policy officer at the World Future Council – point out that heating and cooling, and particularly transport, without fossil fuels is far more challenging, but still equally possible. Some countries are already committed to it.

Denmark, a pioneer in the field, has a target of achieving all its electricity and heating needs from renewables by 2035, and all energy sectors – including transport – by 2050. This includes an expansion of wind and solar power, biogas, ground source heat pumps, and wood-based biomass. Because of its investments, the country expects to have saved €920 million on energy costs by 2020.

At the opposite end of the scale, El Hierro, a small island in the Canaries, has a 100% energy strategy, using a wind farm and a volcanic crater. When excess electricity is produced by the wind farm, water is pumped into the volcanic crater, which acts as a storage lake for a hydroelectric plant. This supplements the island’s electricity supply when the wind drops or when demand is very high.

A future component of El Hierro’s strategy is to replace the island’s entire stock of 4,500 cars with electric vehicles, so cutting the need to import fuel.

Rhein-Hunsruck, Germany producing 230% of its needs from renewables

Some places have already exceeded 100% electricity from renewables. The Rhein-Hunsruck district west of Frankfurt, Germany, managed this in 2012, and expects by the end of this year to be producing 230% of its needs, exporting the surplus to neighbouring areas through the national grid. It hopes to use the surplus in future for local transportation, hydrogen or methane production.

There are many other examples in the report, including from San Francisco in the US, Cape Verde island in West Africa, Bangladesh, Costa Rica, and Tuvalu island in the Pacific.

These show that both rich and poor communities can share the benefits of the renewable revolution – and, in the case of the 3 billion people still without electric power in the world, bypass the need for fossil fuels altogether.

Jeremy Leggett, a pioneer of solar power and author of a foreword to the report, says: “We are on the verge of a profound and urgently necessary shift in the way we produce and use energy.

“This shift will move the world away from the consumption of fossil resources towards cleaner, renewable forms of power. Renewable energy technologies are blowing the whistle on oil dependency and will spark an economic and social renaissance.

“The question is: Do we make this transition from fossil resources to renewables on our own terms, in ways that maximise the benefits to us today and to future generations, or do we turn our heads away and suffer the economic and social shocks that rising prices and market volatility will create?”

 

Paul Brown writes for Climate News Network.

 

 




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