Links for Friday, Feb 16
Links from Naked Capitalism and other sources. Food for the climate soul.
It’s Naked Capitalism day. There have been a number of good links recently over there, enough to share as a group. To them I’ve added a few extras for your reading and listening pleasure.
Links
Six links and a musical treat.
• Start with the video above. Click here or on the image to play it. This is from the now-dead Corbyn campaign in the UK, the one killed by charges of anti-semitism (hat tip Dave Johnson).
File under “Bleeding obvious.”
Now these, from Naked Capitalism…
• Net-Zero Targets Face Reality Check (OilPrice.com via Naked Capitalism)
Back in 2021, the International Energy Agency published what it called a landmark report titled “Net Zero by 2050: A Roadmap for the Global Energy Sector”. The report made quite a splash, not least because of the assumptions it involved about oil, gas, and coal use.
Many companies, however, especially in the financial services world, took the report at face value and made it a basis, or at least a reference point, for their net-zero plans. Now, they have to revise these. Because it turned out the IEA’s assumptions were quite far-fetched. And they weren’t the only ones.
The problem is the constant one — how to meet tight climate targets, which are still, I remind you, existential, in a way that accomplishes the least disruption. I’m one of those those who think disruption is inevitable. But achieving climate goals with the least disruption maximizes the political feasibility of accomplishing them.
File under “Help people the most you can and they’ll likely help you.”
• Imperialism, Lenin, and US Wars Abroad (Rob Urie via Naked Capitalism)
This is a longer piece, with many good nuggets in it. Here’s one:
The answer to the great mystery of why the US launches, or otherwise engages in, wildly murderous and destructive wars no matter who, or which duopoly party, is in power is: war is the business of America. Some economies produce mangoes and kittens and some produce wars. The (military) Keynesian project that followed WWII in the US was intended to be a broadly distributive jobs program for returning veterans. However, in thoroughly predictable fashion, capitalist consolidation and concentration dictated that these firms would be ‘rationalized,’ meaning the canard of capitalist ‘efficiency’ deployed, to convert broad economic distribution into highly concentrated distribution.
I’ll leave you to find the Leninist nugget yourself.
File under “The natural end of capitalism is monopoly.”