Oil boom threatens climate catastrophe

November 14, 2012

You’ve probably seen the headlines announcing that by 2020 the United States will pass Saudi Arabia as the world’s largest oil producer, and that by 2030 North America will be a net exporter of oil. The International Energy Agency, representing 28 of the world’s richest countries, comes to that conclusion in its annual report, World Energy Outlook 2012. Most of that expansion will come from non-traditional sources — especially shale oil and tar sands.

Lorne Stockman of Oil Change International draws our attention to another of the report’s conclusions, one that hasn’t been widely reported. The IEA notes that with every passing year it is harder to believe that average global warming can be kept below 2°C – the level at which scientists say catastrophic climate change will become avoidable. And it says:

“No more than one-third of proven reserves of fossil fuels can be consumed prior to 2050 if the world is to achieve the 2°C goal.”

That’s not the opinion of some flaky tree-hugger. It’s the considered judgment of the world’s leading authorities on energy. If we don’t leave at least two-thirds of oil in the soil, the climate will boil.

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"We have always distinguished the social kernel from the political form of bourgeois democracy; we have always revealed the hard kernel of social inequality and lack of freedom hidden under the sweet shell of formal equality and freedom – not in order to reject the latter but to spur the working class into not being satisfied with the shell, but rather, by conquering political power, to create a socialist democracy to replace bourgeois democracy – not to eliminate democracy altogether."

"But socialist democracy is not something which begins only in the promised land, after the foundations of socialist economy are created; it does not come as some sort of Christmas present for the worthy people who, in the interim, have loyally supported a handful of socialist dictators. Socialist democracy begins simultaneously with the beginnings of the destruction of class rule and of the construction of socialism. It begins at the very moment of the seizure of power by the socialist party. It is the same thing as the dictatorship of the proletariat. Yes, dictatorship! "

"But this dictatorship consists in the manner of applying democracy, not in its elimination, but in energetic, resolute attacks upon the well-entrenched rights and economic relationships of bourgeois society, without which a socialist transformation cannot be accomplished. But this dictatorship must be the work of the class and not of a little leading minority in the name of the class – that is, it must proceed step by step out of the active participation of the masses; it must be under their direct influence, subjected to the control of complete public activity; it must arise out of the growing political training of the mass of the people."

Rosa Luxemburg