Since 2004 the rhetoric of Bush’s republican party has turned curiously green, integrating climate change as a legitimation for neoliberal imperialism. At the same time the unintended consequence of America’s unsuccessful adventures has been to enrich an ‘anti-neoliberal’ class of oil rentiers in Africa, Latin America and Asia. George Caffentzis plots the changes in the US energy policy as it turns from eco-naysayer to ecowarrior

It’s not just the founders of hippy communes or artists like Amy Balkin who are looking for ‘a breathing space from the State’ in which to experiment with freedom and free-time. Big IT companies like Google apparently share their ideals. With a commitment to ‘me time’, the production of ‘universal access’, and (energy) sovereignty, corporates are leveraging the dream of the commons

Public Domain

The emerging capitalist War On Global Warming concentrates on adapting technology and behaviour – particularly other nation-states’ – to mitigate environmental damage. Transformative technological and social innovation is better than meddling micro-action, argues James Woudhuysen

From New Left Review, an overview of Putin's Russia which avoids the usual cliches about authoritarian nationalism versus oligarchic anarchy etc.  While a state apparatus riddled (compared to, say, the late 'Soviet' Politburo) with serving security personnel is active at evey level of business, so representation of the business elite within the state has actually expanded significantly since the Yeltsin era.  Unprecedented growth of state bureacracy is complimented by what some analysts call exceptional 'non-institutionalization' of public life, and certainly by the complimentary growth of a structurally essential informal-criminal sector.   And underlying the administration's play for geopolitcal prestige is the policy of holding oil proceeds in dollars and euros, committing the country to what Wood calls 'deferred suicide' through non-reproduction (eg. one hospital in five lacks hot water and sewage facilities).

TONY WOOD
CONTOURS OF THE PUTIN ERA
A response to Vladimir Popov

The Green=Malthusian case restated from a neoclassical/'market' economics perspective.  No this doesn't imply that it's an intrinsically 'right-wing' argument, just that even bourgeois analysts can see the connection when their brief is to worry about medium to long-term material conditions rather than simply cheerleading for 'ethical' antipolitics.

The best hope for energy security

By Martin Wolf

Published: July 4 2006 19:18 | Last updated: July 4 2006 19:18

Repent, for the end of the world is nigh. This is an element in many religious beliefs. Thomas Malthus, the early 19th century forefather of environmental doomsayers, brought it into the modern era with his remark that: “The power of population is so superior to the power of the earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race.” Malthus was wrong: the world’s population has risen six-fold since his day, while life expectancy has doubled. So will contemporary Malthusians prove right about energy?

If his controversial Gaia theory claimed to offer a holistic vision of planetary self-regulation, James Lovelock’s answer to global warming is anything but. Advocating a return to nuclear power, energy isolationism for Britain, and meat cultures grown in vats, his theories sound more cold war than new age. Interviewing him this January, novelist James Flint sampled the fall-out from an avenging Gaia

It’s rare that a book gets a three-page splash in a national newspaper, especially when that book hasn’t even been published, and especially when it’s a pop-science book. But that’s exactly how The Independent treated the news that James Lovelock, originator of the famous Gaia Hypothesis of planetary self-regulation, had written a new work, (The Revenge of Gaia: Why the Earth Is Fighting Back – and How We Can Still Save Humanity), arguing that it’s already too late to stop global warming.

What mutations in the circulatory logic of capital and spectacle have occurred since September 11th? In their 2005 book Afflicted Powers: Capital in a New Age of War, Bay Area collective Retort argue that neoliberalism has moved from an era of austerity programmes and agreements to one of all out war – over air, land, and media. Here Anustup Basu reviews their book and traces the demise of a Kantian modernity based on ‘enfranchisement and eternal peace’ and the rise of one based on ‘weak citizenship and perpetual conflict’

George Caffentzis analyses contemporary energy politics: is US national energy independence enough?

Climate justice direct action group London Rising Tide visits the Science Museum's new exhibition, Energy - Fuelling the Future, nearly drowns in corporate doublespeak, but recovers enough to chat with a passing teacher and locate the main sponsor's Achilles heel

> California oil fields

This whole thing is so wholly, totally, sophisticatedly, elusively, plainly, horribly wrong from so many angles that it's almost impossible to know where and how to start. Since being asked to respond to this exhibition, we've uncovered layer after putrid layer of deep cynicism dressed up as 'education', 'dialogue', 'concern for the future' and the illusion of empowered participatory democracy embedded in the phrase 'have your say'.