TONY SUTTON—LeDuff spent three years travelling the US with a two-man film crew, chronicling the desperation of workers, frustrated by the insincerities of sharp-suited, slack-mouthed career politicians, who were too occupied with nosing their way through the troughs of corporate America to offer hope to their weary constituents.
READ ONCategory: CAPITALIST SYSTEMIC POVERTY
FROM THE ARCHIVES—Ian Plimer’s volcano claims vaporise under questioning on Australian TV
GEORGE MONBIOT—Tony Jones asked Plimer to respond. His answer ranged from the correspondence we had had, to my absence of qualifications, to Roman warming, medieval warming, to the Met Office saying the UK would have a barbeque summer this year, to the temperature 4,000 years ago – in fact any temperature series except the one he was asked about. Whenever I pressed him to answer the question, Plimer said it was “the height of bad manners” to interrupt him. When Jones pushed him again, he started talking about wheat farming in Greenland and grapes in Roman Britain. In my quarter century as a journalist I have never seen anyone go to such lengths to avoid answering a simple point.
READ ON
Capitalism Killed Our Climate Momentum, Not “Human Nature” [annotated]
NAOMI KLEIN—Others have remarked on the maddening invocations of “human nature” and the use of the royal “we” to describe a screamingly homogenous group of U.S. power players. Throughout Rich’s accounting, we hear nothing from those political leaders in the Global South who were demanding binding action in this key period and after, somehow able to care about future generations despite being human.
READ ON
‘Capitalism, The Sole Culprit of the Destructive Exploitation of Nature’
ALAIN BADIOU—It has become common today to announce, for various reasons, the end of the human species as we know it. In the typically messianic direction that a certain ecology proceeds, the predatory excesses of this bad animal that is the human will soon lead to the end of the living world. In the direction of the technological surge, we are promised, pell-mell, the robotization of all work, sumptuous digitization, automatic art, the plasticized killer, and the perils of superhuman intelligence.
READ ON