Suchergebnisse

Do we know Hamilton? -- Cometh the hour, cometh the man -- The supply effort, from grand forage to manufacturing -- "The badness of the money" : inflation and war -- Military mutiny and the critical period -- Postwar depression -- Challenging the weak state : frontier secessionists, maroons, and Native Americans -- Shays's Rebellion : culmination of crisis -- The Constitution as reaction to crisis -- A dirigiste interpretation of the Constitution -- Public debt as central power -- A bank uniting sword and purse -- The report -- Small-government apocalypse : tax cuts, austerity, and enemy invasion -- The report's long impact.

Mit dem Titel ist die Region der Erde zwischen den beiden Wendekreisen des Krebses und des Steinbocks gemeint. Hier liegen die meisten Staaten der sogenannten "3. Welt", die vom Klimawandel zuerst und am schwersten betroffen sind. Der amerikanische Professor promovierte an der Londoner "School Of Economics" und schreibt u.a. für "The Washington Post " und "New York Times". Er untersucht das Zusammentreffen von Wüstenbildung, Übersäuerung der Meere und steigendem Meeresspiegel mit den politischen und ökonomischen Problemen in Afrika, Asien und Lateinamerika, die zu katastrophalen Entwicklungen führen. Stammesfehden, Bürgerkriege, Flüchtlingsbewegungen und die Auflösung von Staaten werden so beschleunigt und die Staatsführungen entwickeln kaum mehr als militärische Gegenmaßnahmen. Dennoch sieht Parenti auch Hoffnung für wirksame Gegenmaßnahmen, die er im Schlusskapitel vorstellt. Mit seiner umfassende Sichtweise steht er in einer Reihe mit H. Welzer: "Klimakriege" (zuletzt BA 6/08) und G. Dyer: "Schlachtfeld Erde" (BA 11/10). Sowohl für ein breites Publikum als auch für Multiplikatoren geeignet. (2) (Helmut Lange)

Afghanistan's opium production has soared despite eradication efforts. This is partly due to a prolonged drought linked to climate change. But it is also due to the collapses of traditional irrigation systems and the social cohesion upon which the maintenance of those systems depend. This crisis, in turn, raises deeper questions about prevailing notions of the "natural" and the "social" as dichotomous and distinct.

Anyone literate in climate science must admit that the short-term struggle to mitigate carbon emissions is an essential precondition for achieving any other larger, longer-term goal. The science on this is clear: there is no time left to wait, carbon emissions must come down as soon as possible and as fast as possible. By some estimates half of all anthropogenic carbon emissions have happened since 1980, and the rate of emissions continues to increase. Civilization is precariously close to dangerous climatic tipping points. The compressed time frame of climate change forces the author to think about emissions reductions in a pragmatic, short-term, and reformist fashion. If capitalism can transition off fossil fuels over the next several decades, that will merely buy time to continue struggling on all other fronts; most importantly, on all other fronts of the environmental crisis. The left needs to have credible proposals for dealing with the short-term aspects of the climate crisis as well as having a systematic critique and vision of long-term change. Adapted from the source document.

I am going to discuss the political implications of climate change as regards the role of the state. The punch line is this: climate change means that the state is coming back. The choice is whether the state's return will be violent and repressive or whether its return can involve a renovation and transformation that enhances the state's progressive and democratic features. Climate change heralds a return of the state (at least in the near term) because climate change brings more extreme weather and physical disaster, and that means greater social, political, and economic emergencies. In those moments of crisis, who or what steps forward? Adapted from the source document.

Several strands of green thinking maintain that capitalism is incapable of a sustainable relationship with non-human nature because, as an economic system, capitalism has a growth imperative while the earth is finite. One finds versions of this argument in the literature of eco-socialism, deep ecology, ecoanarchism, and even among many mainstream greens who, though typically declining to actually name the economic system, are fixated on the dangers of "growth."

Several strands of green thinking maintain that capitalism is incapable of a sustainable relationship with non-human nature because, as an economic system, capitalism has a growth imperative while the earth is finite. All this may be true. Capitalism, a system in which privately owned firms must continuously out-produce and out-sell their competitors, may be incapable of accommodating itself to the limits of the natural world. However, that is not the same question as whether capitalism can solve the more immediate climate crisis. Adapted from the source document.