Overconfidence in climate overshoot

Global emission reduction efforts continue to be insufficient to meet the temperature goal of the Paris Agreement. This makes the systematic exploration of so-called overshoot pathways that temporarily exceed a targeted global warming limit before drawing temperatures back down to safer levels a priority for science and policy. Here we show that global and regional climate change and associated risks after an overshoot are different from a world that avoids it. We find that achieving declining global temperatures can limit long-term climate risks compared with a mere stabilisation of global warming, including for sea-level rise and cryosphere changes. However, the possibility that global warming could be reversed many decades into the future might be of limited relevance for adaptation planning today. Temperature reversal could be undercut by strong Earth-system feedbacks resulting in high near-term and continuous long-term warming6,. To hedge and protect against high-risk outcomes, we identify the geophysical need for a preventive carbon dioxide removal capacity of several hundred gigatonnes. Yet, technical, economic and sustainability considerations may limit the realisation of carbon dioxide removal deployment at such scales. Therefore, we cannot be confident that temperature decline after overshoot isachievable within the timescales expected today. Only rapid near-term emission reductions are effective in reducing climate risks.

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Research and analysis to provoke public awareness and critical thinking

We contribute to the liberalisation of the democratic instituions of society, for they have been captured by the owners of the market. They work in tandem with their market agents, who, posing as public servants, are entrenched in the halls of government. The political class has betrayed its public mandate and instead operates to impose a marketocratic state to maximise the shareholder value of the institutional investors of international financial markets. They own the global corporations and think they own the world on behalf of their very private interest.

Our spheres of action: true democracy – true sustainability – living wage – basic income – inequality – ecological footprint – degrowth – global warming –human development – corporate accountability – civil, political, economic, social, cultural and environmental rights, responsible consumption, sustainable autonomous citizen cells...

Parting from an ethos of true democracy and true sustainability, We, the citizenry, work to advance the paradigm whose only purpose is to go in pursuit of the welfare of People and Planet and NOT the market.

• TJSGA is member of:

• © The Jus Semper Global Alliance

The New Cold War on China

On March 24, 2021, a high-profile article proclaiming “There Will Not Be a New Cold War” appeared in Foreign Affairs, the flagship publication of the Council on Foreign Relations, the principal think tank for U.S. grand strategy. The author, Thomas Christensen, a professor of international affairs at Columbia University and former deputy assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs in the George W. Bush administration, went so far as to acknowledge that “the [Donald] Trump administration basically declared a cold war on China.” Nevertheless, no New Cold War, Christensen optimistically indicated, would actually materialise, since Washington under Joe Biden would presumablyback away from Trump’s extreme policies toward China given its“vital position in the global value chain.” Beijing could not be seenas an aggressive power in ideological or geopolitical terms, but was simply interested in economic competition.

Yet, what Christensen’s analysis excluded was any mention of the imperialist world system, crowned by U.S. hegemony, which is now threatened by China’s seemingly inexorable rise and pursuit of its own distinctive sovereign project. In this respect, the Trump administration’s prosecution of a New Cold War on China was no anomaly, but rather the inevitable U.S. response to China’s rise and the end of Washington’s unipolar moment. Just as the United States declared the interest of maintaining that same imperial hegemony.

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Net-Zero and the China Challenge: Decarbonisation amid Great Power Competition in the Indo-Pacific

With tensions mounting between the United States and China, the Indo-Pacific is thrust once again into the geopolitical spotlight. On April 11, 2024, the first trilateral summit between the United States, the Philippines, and Japan purportedly took place in response to China’s growing military presence in the region.

For many Global South countries, the inability of the United States, Japan, and allied countries to match what China has achieved underscores the glaring failure of the liberal international order to address pressing social and environmental issues. Countries across Africa, Latin America, and Asia increasingly are taking a more pragmatic relationship with the Chinese state and capital to meet their energy needs and deliver on climate pledges. African governments have welcomed Chinese aid and loans, given their loose political conditionalities compared to traditional international financial lenders. Although these partnerships are naturally not without problems, China has provided an alternative avenue to pursue development and growth. Nevertheless, in a carbon-constrained world, China is itself hard-pressed to provide a credible alternative. Although its state-led development model has delivered breakneck technological advancements, its approach has also been marred by its fair share of ethical and environmental problems. Internally, this success also came at a cost, manifesting in severe environmental degradation and social inequality. Despite its new, greener offerings, China will have to show leadership at unwinding the fossil fuel buildup that it has partially enabled.

The solutions will require a collective approach that takes seriously, above all, the sheer urgency of the climate crisis. In practical terms, this will require finding ways to build a constructive relationship between the United States and China. For the United States and its allies, this may mean accepting China as an inevitable partner in facilitating the worldwide adoption of low-carbon technologies, and more broadly, in solving the climate crisis, despite the challenge posed to U.S. hegemony. This is, of course, no easy task. But as the U.S. Indo-Pacific Strategy puts it: “no country [should] withhold progress on existential transnational issues because of bilateral differences.

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What do I feel in the face of the climate, economic and social crisis: terror, panic, loneliness…

Terror and panic

I watch the videos - the ones that arrive because the worst tragedies are not even covered by the press - of droughts, hurricanes, storms, floods, and famines. I consider it an obligation to see them. If I am not the victim, I must at least know and empathise with the suffering of others, as I have asked men to do and to try to understand patriarchy: 'even if you don't change it, try to feel what we feel, understand our rage'. Now it is my turn, from the privilege of the security I still have, to feel what the victims of the climate and economic impacts detonated by the capitalist system feel. I can't help but panic about what will probably happen to me and to my loved ones. Turning on the water tap, flushing the toilet, and knowing that I am on the side of privilege and that privilege is going to end if the trajectory continues on the course we are on now, accelerating towards the abyss. To be so certain of the catastrophic trajectory we are on, to have the solutions, and to fail to change course. I never had panic attacks until I understood the trajectory we are on...

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'The sea can be a subject of law because it is alive'

They were called ‘the five crazy women’, although there were eight women and three men. The latter were jurists.

These eight people understood, just like Vicente that an environment such as the Mar Menor, the largest saltwater lagoon in Europe, a natural treasure of the Region of Murcia ravaged for decades by financial interests and political neglect, ‘also has rights’. A (revolutionary) stance that has raised variable storms on different fronts, but which continues to win battles. The aforementioned madness was shared by more than 600,000 citizens who signed their names to make the Mar Menor the first natural environment with legal personality in Europe. A milestone that has attracted the attention of half the world, that has given ideas to inhabitants of places like Venice interested in new ways of preserving their home, and that led Teresa Vicente to receive, just a few months ago, the prestigious Goldman Prize, awarded by the eponymous American foundation and considered ‘the Nobel Prize for the environment’.

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Taiwan: An Anti-Imperialist Perspective

In the Western imagination, Taiwan exists as little more than a staging ground for ideological war with the People’s Republic of China (PRC)—a crossroads of democracy versus authoritarianism, Western values versus Chinese backwardness, and free market capitalism versus closed-door communism. Yet for centuries, the island of Taiwan has played a rich and pivotal role in broader Chinese history. Located just one hundred miles from the mainland’s southeastern coast, Taiwan was linked to the mainland through migration, trade, language, and culture long before European and Japanese colonisers seized on its strategic location as a launchpad for economic and military forays against China at large. Today, this history continues as U.S. imperialism positions Taiwan as an ideological and military base for its new Cold War against China.

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‘Hate-fuelled nationalism is a partner of corporateneoliberalism’

Interview with Vandana Shiva - Ecofeminist Activist

 

Vandana Shiva (Dehradun, 1952) is one of our time's most recognised ecofeminist activists and intellectuals. A doctor in quantum physics, she was one of the founders of the World Social Forum, a pioneer in opening up the debate on agroecology and seed control, and the author of more than 15 books. Since 1987, she has been the head of the agroecological farm and seed bank Navdanya in northern India and helps to organise peasant struggles all over the world.

CTXT meets Shiva in the old industrial area of Fabra i Coats in Barcelona to engage in an intellectual conversation.

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Imperialism in the Indo-Pacific — An Introduction

As the highly respected international relations scholar David C. Kang has argued in American Grand Strategy and East Asian Security in the Twenty-First Century (2017) and other works, there has been a general decline in military expenditures as a share of GDP in the largest East Asian states over the last couple of decades. Taking the eleven largest states, it has dropped to roughly half of what it was two and half decades before, declining from an average 3.35 percent in 1990 to an average of 1.8 percent in 2015—a trend that has continued. This objectively points toward a sense of increasing, rather than decreasing, national security in the region. It is this climate of peace that the United States is threatening to disturb, not for the sake of East Asia but aimed at the preservation at all costs of its preeminence as a world power.

C. Wright Mills famously said, “the immediate cause of World War III is the preparation of it.” The United States, facing the demise of its global hegemonic imperialism, is not only preparing for a Third World War; it is actively provoking it. There are signs, however, that a mass anti-imperialist movement is again emerging in the United States and in the other countries of the imperial core of the capitalist world economy, beginning with the Free Palestine movement in response to Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza supported by Washington. The world movement today must be anti-imperialist, anticapitalist, antiwar, and ecological. Since the alternative is global exterminism, it is a struggle that only humanity can win

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Community-Based Adaptation to Climate Change: Core Issues and Implications Practical Implementations

According to current forecasts, global heating is likely to exceed 2.8 °C by the end of this century. This makes substantial adaptation measures necessary to secure a broad basis for livelihood provision and the conservation of biodiversity. While the implementation of top-down and technocratic adaptation efforts predominates, related adaptation shortcomings of a socio-economic and ecological nature are becoming more and more apparent. Community-based adaptation (CBA), with its participatory, inclusive and needs-based bottom-up approach, offers a promising and powerful alternative. This article uses a semi-systematic literature review approach to screen the current literature and identify core issues of CBA. Linking communality, locality, multidimensionality, power imbalances, transformative potential, localisation, the triad of adaptation metrics and nature-based adaptation to corresponding potential actions for practical implementations provides a more holistic conceptualisation and broadens the horizons for further learning, research and improved applications.

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