According to the logic of the prevailing economic system, corporations must continuously strive to increase profits, expand their markets and outcompete their rivals. For this, their need for raw materials, energy and sinks (for their waste) knows no bounds.

FOR YEARS, OIL TERMINALS, RIGS, and pipelines in the Niger Delta have been under incessant attack by militants who are  demanding economic justice for the largely impoverished people of the Niger Delta. As a result, the treasury’s flow of petrodollars has been severely cut.

On 10 November 2009, it was 14 years ago that Kenule Beeson Saro-Wiwa, a Nigerian writer, was murdered alongside eight of his compatriots.

In his 11 July 2009 speech in Accra, Ghana, US President Barack Obama declared,

Kashmir has for decades been a bone of contention between India and Pakistan over which the two countries have fought wars.

de Dios could be the
next flashpoint in ongoing confrontation between indigenous communities and foreign oil, gas, and mining companies.

From 7-18 December 2009, the 15th Conference of the Parties (COP 15) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) was held in Copenhagen, Denmark. In this event, 192 nations with 115 heads of government gathered to work on a framework for climate change mitigation beyond 2012.

But the COP 15 collapsed after 11 days of negotiations as it concluded without reaching concrete agreements on the Kyoto Protocol and on how countries especially in the North will respond to the climate crisis.

It has to be the least satisfying ‘I told you so’ in history.

Climate justice activists across the world had been predicting a shambolic outcome from COP15 all year. To actually see the desperate, miserable affair being played out, however, was another matter entirely. To see wealthy governments squirming out of their climate commitments whilst blaming the rest of the world for their failure to act; to see representatives of small and impoverished nations bullied and derided for daring to suggest that their countries might be better off above the oceans, with fertile soils and drinkable water; to see dissenting voices locked out and marginalized while the self-selected powers-that-be met behind closed doors to carve up the future; to see a final ‘agreement’ so weak and meaningless that negotiators may as well have spent the week go-carting instead; there’s no triumph to be had in any of this. The fact that we saw it coming doesn’t make it any less of a disaster.
But the COP15 summit wasn’t

COP-15 was a failure waiting to happen.

Hardly any of the disagreements between countries on major issues that the two-year Bali Roadmap intended to resolve were bridged, in time to conclude with a full set of agreements in Copenhagen. Coming into the summit, almost everyone knew that a final deal could not be reached. As the deadline closed in, leaders downgraded expectations for the summit’s presumed outcome to a “political agreement”, something that can at least provide a framework for details to be filled in as negotiations extend for another six to twelve months. This, despite the science pointing to the need for urgent and drastic action, particularly as emissions continue to climb and as changes in the climate continue to overshoot earlier projections.

January 2010
Peoples’ Movement on Climate Change (PMCC)

Millions of people across the planet had hoped that governments under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) would walk away from Copenhagen with a strong, just, and timely climate deal. Predictably, the summit failed to deliver.

Michael Klare’s

Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet:
How Scarce Energy is Creating a New World Order

The dust jacket of this book proclaims that “the price of oil has doubled in less than two years. And it is still rising”. Not now it isn’t.

In early 2008, US investment bank Goldman Sachs, at that time seemingly lording it over the financial world, predicted that the price of oil could reach $200 (£136) a barrel. But today, the firm has been humbled and the price per barrel tumbled below $40 by the end of 2008.

Avatar
(2009, 162 minutes, Rated PG-13)

Carrot and stick — but there’s no carrot actually!
Set more than a hundred and fifty years in the future, a human company called RDA is conducting an exploration in planet Pandora for a very high-valued substance, the Unobtonium that costs $20M per kilo. The RDA has its own group of security headed by Colonel Quaritch, and a research team of scientists headed by Dr. Grace Augustine.