Forty years ago, shop workers in Britain developed the Lucas Plan to save jobs by converting arms manufacturing to industrial production. The struggle for economic conversion, and against the deskilling of work through computer-controlled technology remains relevant today in the search for solutions to the environmental crisis and the employment crisis.
An issue of this magnitude clearly isn’t down to a few shady companies.
The department of the Army will not approve an easement that will allow the proposed Dakota Access Pipeline to cross under Lake Oahe. The following statement was released by Standing Rock Sioux Tribal Chairman Dave Archambault II.
The United Nations Earth Summit in 1992 took place in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and was supposed to establish guidelines for sustainable development. At the Summit, then Cuban President Fidel Castro gave a speech (short), warning of the dire consequences of failing to reverse course. Castro long warned that capitalism was threatening to destroy human civilization through ecological destruction, with the poor of the global South its first victims. Speech reprinted below.
Things will continue on in Los Alamos, no matter who is elected U.S. president in November. The political roots run deeper than the surface justifications of security or scientific advancement. And like the rest of the United States, the lasting effects Los Alamos has had on the planet will be felt for millennia to come, if humanity outlasts the product of its labor for at least 24,100 years—the half-life of plutonium-239.
The basic approach undertaken in this country for the storage and disposal of spent nuclear fuel needs to be fundamentally revamped. Instead of waiting for problems to arise, the NRC and the Energy Department need to develop a transparent and comprehensive road map identifying the key elements of—and especially the unknowns associated with—interim storage, transportation, repackaging, and final disposal of all nuclear fuel.
We're under attack from climate change-and our only hope is to mobilize like we did in WWII. It's not that global warming is like a world war. It is a world war. And we are losing. Defeating the Nazis required more than brave soldiers. It required a wholesale industrial retooling. In this war we're in-the war that physics is fighting hard, and that we aren't-winning slowly is the same as losing.
Climate disruption is inextricably linked to economic inequality. Serious climate solutions must be, too.
Climate change can result in unanticipated release into the environment of toxic and radioactive wastes that were optimistically presumed at the time to be stably isolated
A system based on the fair distribution of use values, decent work, and production and consumption levels that remain within nature’s biophysical limits cannot occur without the abandonment of a social order based on profit and accumulation.
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