2454. The Presidential Election: What Is Left?

By Bruce Lesnick, Socialist Action, June 3, 2016

With the imminent demise of the Bernie Sanders campaign for the Democratic Party nomination, discussion has turned to what should come next. Some, including Seattle Socialist City Councilwoman Kshama Sawant, have agitated for creating a generic “party of the left.” But what does that mean? As we shall see, it’s a troublingly vague slogan whose beauty, if it exists at all, is solely in the eye of the beholder.

But first, we must step back and survey the lay of the land. Those inspired by Sanders’ campaign and those disillusioned with the two major parties come in various favors:

1) In the first category, there are those who see the status quo—characterized by unequal distribution of wealth, endless war, rampant racism, unemployment, mass incarceration and diminishing expectations—as fundamentally unjust, while having no coherent analysis whence comes the injustice. These are liberals, progressives, or populists: concerned, well-meaning individuals who decry society’s illness with no clear idea of its fundamental cause.

2) At the next level are those who have come to suspect that the drive for corporate profits conflicts with the exigencies of humanity as a whole. As a result, this stratum accepts that in order to solve society’s fundamental problems, capitalism might have to go. However, those in this group are fuzzy about what it means to supplant capitalism or how such a change might come about. They favor amending the current system, hoping that gradually, bit-by-bit, it can be converted into something fundamentally different. The historical name for this outlook is social democracy.

We should note that the minimal requirements of this grouping already exceed the program and perspective of many of the popular opposition voices of today—including Bernie Sanders, Ralph Nader, the Green Party, Bill McKibben of 350.org, and others—each of which accepts the continued existence of capitalism and so consigns themselves solidly to the populist category above.

3) In the final category are those who hold that eliminating capitalism means nationalizing the banks and critical industry under workers control; dismantling Wall Street and the Pentagon; building new institutions of workers democracy to replace the current corporate-occupied government; and creating workplace, regional, and national committees of working people to democratically plan and run the economy. This perspective calls for replacing the current political and economic system from top to bottom with a new system, democratically run by working people, which prioritizes human needs over profits. Those who advocate this approach are called revolutionary socialists.

Once again, we can see that the philosophical underpinning of this category (revolutionary socialism) exceeds the program and outlook of some well-known activists—Naomi Klein, Michael Moore, and Cornel West among them—thus positioning these activists squarely in the social democratic camp.

 Beyond horseshoes and hand grenades

 When the goal is to save humanity from extinction, half-measures won’t cut it; close is not good enough. The liberal and social democratic approaches fall short; the revolutionary socialist approach is what is needed to save the world. Of course, one can object to this assertion, but then you have the responsibility to demonstrate why tweaking the current system has gotten us precisely nowhere in the last 250 years.

One might ask, as propagandists for the ruling rich always do, “Why can’t you point to a single example where revolutionary socialism has created the utopia you advocate?” It’s a loaded question, but one requiring a response nonetheless.

First, there is the simple logical rejoinder: if non-existence of an ideal result were grounds for declaring that an approach is a failure, then the pro-capitalist, liberal,   and social democratic strategies would all be condemned on those very grounds—doubly so, in fact, since each of these has been implemented or attempted countless times in recent history, unlike revolutionary socialism.

Then we must answer the disingenuous element inherent in the question as it is posed by defenders of capitalism—a disingenuousness that even some critics of capitalism fail to appreciate as they blithely repeat the challenge. First, every attempt at a revolutionary socialist advance the world-over has been ruthlessly attacked by the very forces who cynically assert that such an advance is not possible or practical. Second, the unfortunate truth is that no socialist revolution has yet occurred in any advanced capitalist country. Therefore, to judge the efficacy of revolutionary socialism by its success or failure in small or isolated countries, under siege by the forces of global capital, is akin to judging the seaworthiness of a ship that’s forced to navigate in a puddle.

If we accept that a full-blown political, social, and economic revolution is what’s needed to fix the world, then certain conclusions are inescapable:

• For working people to take over the management and running of the government and the economy, they have to be organized.
• Working people have to be on board with the plan and clear on the goal. They have to be willing and able to fight for political and economic power in their own name.
• Working people have to be crystal clear as to who’s on which side, and who their friends are and who their enemies are. Current government institutions, police, and spy agencies are not benign vessels that can be bent to the will of whomever gets the most votes. They are the creations of, by, and for the 1%, designed to maintain their minority rule. Those institutions need to be replaced by genuine democratic structures, responsible to and controlled by the majority.

In this context, what does it mean to break free of the Democratic and Republican parties? What does it mean to build an independent party of the “left”?

Breaking free in the very narrow sense of forming a separate party is not enough. Clearly, another party of the 1% would be not be a step forward. Neither would it be sufficient to build a new populist party of those simply disillusioned with the two major parties. To truly break free means to build a party of, by, and for the working class.

But what does that mean? How do you ensure that a new party doesn’t just spout lofty rhetoric but is actually an exclusive instrument of the working class—that it gets its power, authority and marching orders only from that class? You base it on the fighting organizations of that class—labor unions, committees of the unemployed, organizations and communities of the most oppressed sectors of the working class: African American, Latino and Native American. A convenient name for such an organization is a labor party.

Yes, current labor unions are for the most part small, bureaucratic and even corrupt. But that just means we have more work to do. Building a labor party goes hand in hand with organizing. Every workplace and industry that doesn’t currently have a union should fight to organize one. Every existing union that’s hobbled—whose leadership is too cozy with the bosses, that’s saddled with an undemocratic structure, or whose leaders are unwilling to break with the two capitalist parties and fight politically and economically for the needs of the union and the working class as a whole—needs to be overhauled and retaken by the ranks.

This is what really breaking from the two major parties would look like. This is what would really set us on the road to transforming society.

 Left out

 So now it should be clear what’s wrong with calling for a generic “new party of the left” or “new party of the 99%.” It’s too vague. It’s a Rorschach test. Anyone envisioning such a party sees whatever they want to see. Such populist conglomerations are not anchored organically to any class and so cannot be counted on to lead the kind of changes that are needed.

Those who argue for this inkblot concept are caught in a tangle of logical contradictions. For example, is the Green Party that “new party of the 99%”? If so, then why call for the creation of a new party at all? If not, why not? What is the Green Party missing, exactly? Advocates of the “new party of the left” don’t know or don’t say. However, if instead we use the framework outlined above, there is no confusion. We have no trouble recognizing the Green Party and all similar class-agnostic formations as fitting comfortably within the populist category.

 “Safe” states

 Not surprisingly, a lack of precision on what it means to break with the Democratic and Republican parties leads to other problematic positions.

We see Sawant argue that Sanders should run as an “independent” once his bid to win the nomination of a major capitalist party comes up short. But more than that, he is urged to consider not running in states where the race between the two capitalist parties is close. The rationale—the same one the Green Party used in 2004 at great cost to its reputation—is that the “independent” candidate should not be seen to be a “spoiler.” The message here is painfully schizophrenic: break with the parties of the 1%, but—just kidding—if the race is close, make sure the least-worst of the capitalist politicians wins at all costs!

(If Sander’s won the Democratic nomination, would Sawant’s Socialist Alternative party urge everyone to vote Democrat in November? If so, we are witness to a sad reversal, where a fighting socialist organization embraces the notion that change can indeed come through the Democratic Party. If not, how confusing for those whom Socialist Alternative has mobilized to go all out for Sanders in the primaries.)

 In defense of language

 Sanders says he is campaigning for a “political revolution.” Sawant and other genuine socialists have embraced this call and taken it up as their own. This is indeed strange since the expression has historically been used to describe a change at the top that is distinct from a fundamental change of the whole. The expression “political revolution” was popularized by Leon Trotsky in his fight against Stalinism in the Soviet Union. In that context, it was a call to replace the murderous, bureaucratic regime at the head of the Soviet state with a form of workers democracy, while retaining the socialized economy and property relations that had been won in the Russian revolution. The idea was to replace the rot at the top without reverting to capitalism.

Sanders clearly uses the term in a similar way. His political revolution is all about rearranging things at the top without challenging the underlying economic system. Again, a lack of clarity on what independent political action really means, and an over-eagerness to build a vague “new party of the left,” has led some to embrace Sanders’ half-baked slogan instead of critiquing its fatal limitations.

Language matters. It can be used to enlighten or to deceive. If someone is in the habit of substituting the word salad for the word chicken wherever it’s used, and they tell you that they eat nothing but salad every day, that doesn’t make them a vegetarian; it makes them a disingenuous manipulator of language. Sanders calls himself a socialist and pretends to be for some kind of revolution. Ignoring his abuse of language adds to the lack of clarity and makes it harder to explain to people what breaking with the parties of the 1% actually means.

Is building a labor party practical? Absolutely. Organized labor, diminished and battered though it may be, has significant financial and human resources. For the last several elections cycles, tens of millions of dollars and thousands of labor foot soldiers were placed at the disposal of the major capitalist parties. Those resources, shifted from the parties of the 1% to labor’s own campaigns, would give the new-formed party instant viability. Meanwhile, such a shift in resources would deal a body blow to the Democrats and Republicans.

But there’s something more behind the idea of a labor party that really boosts its viability. Working people produce everything. All of society’s wealth, though distributed unequally, has its origin in the labor of ordinary people. This gives us tremendous power. If the 1% took a day off, nobody would notice. But when all working people take the day off, it’s called a general strike, and the entire country grinds to a halt.

What’s needed is not some new party in the abstract, but a new tool that can be used by working people to fight for political power as a class, with the ultimate aim of replacing the rule of the capitalist minority with the democratic rule of the working-class majority. Along the way, in our zeal to build the movement we know is needed to set the world right, we should remember: success is not measured by how many people you have marching behind your banner, but by the number of people marching behind your banner in the right direction.

Bruce Lesnick is a long-time political activist who lives and writes in Washington State. He blogs at blogspot.com. He can be reached at blesnick@bugbusters.net.

2453. Permaculture Visionary Bill Mollison Dies at 88

By Ecologist, Septermber 26, 2016

Bill Mollison

Australian educator, author and co-inventor of Permaculture, Bruce Charles 'Bill' Mollison, died on the 24 September 2016 in Sisters Creek, Tasmania. He has been praised across the world for his visionary work, and left behind a global network of 'peaceful warriors' in over 100 countries working tirelessly to fulfill his ambition to build harmony between humanity and Mother Earth.

Born 1928 in the Bass Strait fishing village of Stanley, Tasmania, Bill’s life story included backwoodsman, academic, storyteller, ladies’ man, and to many just ‘Uncle Bill’, doing all these things par excellence.

Bill was co-founder, with David Holmgren, of the permaculture movement – a worldwide network of remarkable resilience, with organisations now operating in 126 countries and projects in at least 140, inspiring individuals and communities to take initiatives in fields as diverse as food production, building design, community economics and community development.

Bill left much useful information and numerous words of guidance and encouragement for those who will miss him most:

“The greatest change we need to make is from consumption to production, even if on a small scale, in our own gardens. If only 10% of us do this, there is enough for everyone. Hence the futility of revolutionaries who have no gardens, who depend on the very system they attack, and who produce words and bullets, not food and shelter.”

Growing up in Stanley, Tasmania he left school at 15 to help run the family bakery and before 26 went through the occupations of shark fisherman and seaman (bringing vessels from post-war disposals to southern ports), forester, mill-worker, trapper, snarer, tractor-driver and naturalist.

His lack of formal education gave him many learning opportunities in how the real world works.

A first class scientific carreer

Bill joined the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO, Wildlife Survey Section) in 1954 and gained extensive research knowledge.

His time in the Tasmanian rainforests gave him the founding structure for what became his life’s passion, Permaculture. The idea that we could consciously design sustainable systems which enabled human beings to live within their means and for all wildlife to flourish with us.

A spell at the Tasmanian Museum in curatorial duties, a return to field work with the Inland Fisheries Commission took him back to college in 1966 living on his wits running cattle, security bouncing at dances, shark fishing, and teaching part-time at an exclusive girls’ school.

Upon receiving his degree in bio-geography, he was appointed to the University of Tasmania where he later developed the unit of Environmental Psychology. During his university period (which lasted for 10 years), Bill independently researched and published a three-volume treatise on the history and genealogies of the descendants of the Tasmanian aborigines.

In 1974, he with David Holmgren developed the beginning of the permaculture concept, leading to the publication of Permaculture One. He became fixated on proving and promulgating what he saw as a world renewing concept. Leaving the University in 1978, abandoning a secure academic tenure at the age of fifty (an unheard of move) Bill devoted all his energies to furthering the system of permaculture and spreading the idea and principles worldwide.

He founded the Permaculture Institute in 1978, his ideas influencing hundreds of thousands students worldwide. As a prolific teacher, Bill taught thousands of students directly, and contributed to many articles, curricula, reports, and recommendations for farm projects, urban clusters and local government bodies.

In 1981, he received the Right Livelihood Award (sometimes called the ‘Alternative Nobel Prize’) for his work in environmental design. In recent years, he has established a “Trust in Aid” fund to enable permaculture teachers to reach groups in need, particularly in the poorer parts of the world, with the aim of leaving a core of teachers locally to continue appropriate educational work.

Of all the accolades he received, however, the one he was most proud of was the Vavilov Medal, in large part due to the tenacity, courage, and contributions of the award’s namesake, who Bill considered a personal hero. Bill was also the first foreigner invited and admitted to the Russian Academy of Agricultural Sciences.

A leader of ‘peaceful warriors’ for a better world

Bill came to the UK in the early 80s, visiting city farms and early permaculture projects, teaching courses and visiting the newly formed Permaculture Association. His charismatic style drew large audiences and led to a flurry of new projects and programmes.

We are helped in remembering Bill by his 1996 autobiography Travels in Dreams. Typically he laughs at himself: “This book is a work of fiction: most if not all of it is lies. Even the lies are imprecise reports of old lies overheard.”

He wasn’t universally liked. One reason being he was committed to disrupt the status quo of misguided and unfeeling management. “First feel fear, then get angry. Then go with your life into the fight.”

He was eloquent about the need for peaceful ‘warriors’, as he called them, to challenge the stupidity of ill-governance on a global scale. Despite, or perhaps because, he was an iconoclast, he engendered a global respect which will endure and grow as others develop his foundation thinking.

He authored a number of books on the permaculture design system, the best known beingThe Permaculture Designers’ Manual, published in 1988, and often cited as his most outstanding work. Bill collected solutions and his Permaculture Book of Ferment and Human Nutrition, is an outstanding compendium of traditional food storage systems from across the world.

Few could match his intellectual vigour or ability to recount stories that thrilled and taught deeper lessons about our relationship with each other and nature.

Healing the Earth

Bill asked: “Are we the public or the private person?” The truth of the matter is that for all seasons we are both. Perceived as challenging, a huge harvester of great ideas from around the world (and not always crediting their sources), Bill was also a sensitive man, eloquent raconteur, poet and appreciative of the poetry of others.

He knew how to provoke others to action, but also when to withdraw and let others carry on the work. He paraphrased Lao Tzu: “True change is to so change things that it seems natural to everybody but no-one knows who thought of it.” And: “Our best will not be our children’s best.”

Bill returned to his Tasmanian homeland to spend his final years at Sisters Creek on the Bass Strait coast.

Bill’s legacy is that hundreds of thousands of past students have created a worldwide network to take his concept forwards. In a world in which we are acutely aware of our environment, its capacity and limitations, permaculture design offers a systemic approach to meeting human needs which respect those limitations and provide strategies to actively repair ecosystems.

The effect of Bill’s legacy will only grow as the world recognises the urgent need to work together on environmental solutions.

2452. A Short History of Lesser-evilism in the United States: From Upton Sinclair to Bernie Sanders

By James N. Gregory, The Conversation, August 2, 2016

As we watch Bernie Sanders’ supporters struggling to come to terms with the nomination of Hillary Clinton, it makes sense to ask why leftists are involved in the Democratic Party in the first place.

It started in 1934 when Upton Sinclair, author of “The Jungle” and a socialist for most of his life, announced that he would run for governor of California as a Democrat. This began a unique relationship that has been important to American politics ever since.

Why unique?

In most countries throughout Europe and the Americas, the left has its own party or parties. And until the 1930s, American radicals were committed to standing apart from the two mainstream parties, especially the Democratic Party that had long represented white supremacy in the South and corrupt urban regimes in the North.

For 30 years, the Socialist Party carried the electoral hopes of most radicals. Then, in 1932, Socialist Party presidential candidate Norman Thomas endured a crushingly defeat, receiving just 2.2 percent of the vote.

Upton Sinclair, who had previously run for governor as a Socialist, now set out to do so again as a Democrat. His 1934 campaign electrified California and the nation. Announcing a bold socialistic plan to “End Poverty in California” during the Great Depression, he built a political movement much larger than anything the Socialist Party had ever accomplished.

I have written extensively about the EPIC movement and direct an online project that includes detailed accounts of the campaign and copies of campaign materials. And the Mapping American Social Movements project tracks the broader history of 20th-century radicalism.

Although finally defeated by red-baiting in the general election, Sinclair’s vote tally of 879,537 in California was close to what Norman Thomas had achieved nationwide.

The lesson was obvious. Radicals could do much better working inside the Democratic Party than trying to win elections on their own.

The New Deal Left

In the years that followed, radicals of many kinds became energetic New Dealers working from within to push the Democratic Party to the left. The Socialist Party withered. The radical labor activists who created the United Auto Workers and other new Congress of Industrial Organizations unions tied them closely to the party of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Even the Communist Party embraced the new strategy after 1936, still fielding some of its own candidates while working quietly to support progressive Democrats in what it called the “Democratic Front.”

In some states, radicals found ways to be both separate and included. The Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party and Wisconsin Progressive Party cooperated with Democrats at the national level while competing with the older party in state and local elections. The American Labor Party in New York was also formally separate but in practice endorsed progressive New Dealers.

In many other states, radicals created caucuses inside the Democratic party similar to what Tea Party activists have done recently in the Republican Party. Radicals in California briefly controlled the party apparatus and managed to nominate progressives like California Governor Culbert Olson and U.S. Representative Helen Gahagan Douglas and help them win elections until the late 1940s. The Washington Commonwealth Federation was still more effective. Operating as a formal organization within the Democratic Party, the WCF nominated slates of candidates, developed platforms and pressured lawmakers at all levels for progressive legislation.

Rocky from the start

So began the marriage between radicals and the Democratic Party that continues today. It has been rocky from the start and there have been several near-divorces as leftists at some moments retested the strategy of independence.

In 1948, as the Truman administration geared up Cold War policies at home and abroad, former Vice President Henry Wallace agreed to mount a third-party challenge. Supported by the Communists, Wallace failed to pull most leftists away from the Democratic Party. Truman won reelection and the left lost credibility. For the next two decades, the Democratic Party was decidedly centrist at all levels and almost every state.

The radicals who built new social movements in the 1960s around civil rights, black power, feminism, environmentalism and opposition to the Vietnam War had no tolerance for the centrist Democratic Party, especially after Lyndon Johnson guided the nation from cold to hot war. The alienation yielded a new third party, the Peace and Freedom Party, that secured a position on the ballot in several states in the contentious 1968 election. Mostly, however, the New Left shunned electoral politics in the late 1960s. Their revolution was taking place in the streets.

Then in the early 1970s, the marriage resumed. It started at local levels and had much to do with African-American activists mobilizing for municipal elections and with feminist campaigns to see more women in office. When George McGovern won the Democratic presidential nomination in 1972, he was carried along by millions of young people determined to end the war abroad and transform society at home. McGovern lost, but the activists reformed the party, rewriting nomination and convention rules in ways that would encourage grassroots activism and insure significant roles for women and communities of color.

Involvement and frustration

The framework of 1972 has given radicals ever since a stake in the Democratic Party. It’s also been the source of a lot of frustration. The role of the left is mostly invisible and thus different than 1930s and 1940s when clearly identified radical caucuses were common. For one thing, it is hard to know what “the left” is and who belongs to it. The contemporary left has no structure nor even a definite label. “Progressive” has become a vague identifier, but the term is used so loosely as to be almost meaningless.

Secondly, the left has been largely shut out of national level Democratic Party campaigns since 1972. Only once has there been anything like the Sanders campaign. In 1984, Jessie Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition primary challenge turned into a grand crusade that energized and expanded the left in a manner not unlike 2016. Otherwise centrists have commanded the party’s main stage.

More often radicals have been engaged in local-level campaigns where now and then an exciting progressive has been elected to office. Examples include Former Mayor Harold Washington in Chicago, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa in Los Angeles and Mayor Bill de Blasio in New York. Black, Latino, Asian and gay candidates, ballot measures defending the rights of women, immigrants, and LGBTQ people, or helping working people — these are the campaigns that refresh the passions of progressives and keep them active in electoral politics.

Most of all it is the power and threat from the right that has kept radicals involved in the Democratic Party.

The Green Party was launched in 1990 to try an independent electoral strategy once again. After winning some city council seats in California and Wisconsin, the party mounted presidential campaigns behind Ralph Nader in 1996 and 2000.

When Nader’s Florida vote cost Al Gore the 2000 presidential election, the lesson of 1934 was reemphasized: whatever the attractions of third parties, the best hope of the left is inside the Democratic Party.

There is another lesson from 1934 that the Sanders team is probably thinking about. The relationships of the New Deal Era worked better than more recent versions because the left was organized and visible within the Democratic Party. Radical New Dealers dragged the party to the left, pushing policies that transformed the political economy of the nation and the rights of Americans. Will the revitalized left coming out of this election play a similar role in the years to come?

2451. Green Capitalism: How to Raise Trillions for Green Investments

By Henry M. Paulson Jr., The New York Times, September 20, 2016

Art by Mikel Jaso, The New York Times

SAVING our planet from the worst effects of climate change won’t be cheap. A new report from the United Nations says that the world will need to mobilize $90 trillion in public and private capital over the next 15 years.

As a point of comparison, global gross domestic product in 2015 was $73 trillion. But there is no question that the world needs to ramp up its transition to a low-carbon, environmentally sustainable and resilient economy, and to do so rapidly. The question is, how do we pay for it, given the limited availability of government funding, particularly in developing countries?

The answer: private financing. The good news is that there is a global abundance of private capital. To unlock these riches, governments must create conditions that encourage private investment in clean technologies and sustainable development. With smart, well-designed and coordinated policies, financing models and instruments like bonds and incentive programs, countries have the potential to solve some of the planet’s most pressing environmental challenges while still maintaining economic growth.

That is why it is essential for world leaders meeting in New York this week for Climate Week to stay focused on building an international consensus around “green finance.”

Understanding how government can spur this type of investment was a focus of the recent G20 summit meeting in Hangzhou, China. For the first time, these countries reached an agreement on a set of principles to govern green finance and recognized its potential for stimulating economic growth. This is an essential first step in creating an international financial system to support green projects and for providing guidelines for countries on policies to encourage their banking systems to make green investments.

There have been successful experiments in green finance. The global green bond market is growing rapidly — to $41.8 billion in 2015 from $11 billion in 2013. Moreover, innovative financing solutions are being used around the world — private firms in Mexico and India are financing private wind parks; multinational trust funds are supporting solar plants in India, South Africa and Morocco. A new universe of financial instruments and policies are lowering the cost of capital for green growth.

The challenge now is to build on these successes and ensure that green finance mechanisms are widely adopted so that capital markets can allocate financing to low-carbon sectors of the economy that have the potential to generate growth and jobs.

For this to happen, countries will need to adopt policies that reduce the price of low-carbon investments to make them more attractive for private investors. These policies include environmental regulations to stimulate clean, sustainable development; incentives and subsidies for clean energy investments; and the pricing of carbon emissions, which can be done in a variety of ways, including emissions trading and taxes. We also need to eliminate subsidies that encourage the use and extraction of carbon-based energy like coal and oil. Such policies will take strong political will, especially as economic growth is slowing.

China has taken important steps in this direction and has declared green finance a “strategic imperative.” The country faces a significant challenge. It needs $1 trillion over the next five years to make investments in efficient buildings, low-carbon transportation and clean energy in its cities. But the government can afford to finance only 15 percent of that, according to a recent report by my organization, the Paulson Institute, along with Bloomberg Philanthropies and the Green Finance Committee of China Society for Banking and Finance.

Accordingly, China recently began an initiative to raise private capital through the sale of green bonds. After just six months, these bonds now account for 40 percent of the global market. Recent guidelines issued by the government outline an ambitious road map for creating green lending, environmental stress tests, benchmarks to ensure credibility of green investments, disclosure requirements and innovative public private partnerships. For instance, the Building Efficiency and Green Development Fund will provide financing to use new technologies from American companies in China to make building more energy-efficient. (The nonprofit Paulson Institute, which seeks to strengthen relations between the United States and China on economic and environmental issues, is an adviser to this fund.)

China also has announced plans to create a nationwide carbon market in 2017 that is on track to become the largest in the world. Pilot exchanges already allow Chinese pollution emitters in several cities to trade carbon credits, earned by reducing emissions, to other companies that have been less successful in reducing their carbon discharges. In this way, China is trying to turn an environmental liability into an economic asset. If these exchanges work, they will be powerful examples for the rest of the developing world.

Financing the world’s transition to a low-carbon economy will be costly, but we can’t afford not to do it and, it is important to note, it is feasible. We have the ideas, the models and the capital to make it happen. What’s needed now is leadership from global policy makers to prioritize the development of a global green finance system.

Henry M. Paulson Jr., the chairman of the Paulson Institute, a former Treasury secretary and chief executive of Goldman Sachs, is the author of “Dealing With China: An Insider Unmasks the New Economic Superpower.”

2450. The Anthropocene: Evolution Is Happening Faster Than We Thought

By Menno Schilthuizen, The New York Times, July 23, 2016

Blackbird in New York

Amsterdam — A FRIEND recently invited me over to see the blackbird that had taken up residence in a potted plant on her balcony.

Serenely incubating eggs in the inner city, this bird had little in common with its shy, reclusive ancestors that nested in Europe’s forests. Early in the 19th century, probably in Germany, blackbirds began settling in cities. By the mid-20th century, they were hopping around on stoops all over Europe.

Many “wild” bird species — like the peregrine falcons, red-tailed hawks and laughing gulls of New York — have set up camp in cities. But the thing about Europe’s urban blackbirds (a relative of the American robin, not to be confused with North American blackbirds, which belong to a different family) is that they are very different from their forest-dwelling relatives. They have stockier bills, sing at a higher pitch (high enough to be heard over the din of traffic), are less likely to migrate (in cities there’s food and warmth year-round), and have less nervous personalities.

For many of these differences, genes are responsible. The birds’ DNA, after 200 years or less of adaptation, has diverged from that of their rural ancestors.

For a long time, biologists thought evolution was a very, very slow process, too tardy to be observed in a human lifetime. But recently, we have come to understand that evolution can happen very quickly, as long as natural selection — the relative benefit that a particular characteristic bestows on its bearer — is strong.

And where else to find such strong natural selection than in the heart of a big city? The urban environment is about as extreme as it gets. Temperatures in the city center can be more than 10 degrees higher than in the surrounding countryside. Traffic causes continuous background noise, a mist of fine dust particles and barriers to movement for any animal that cannot fly or burrow. Much of the city is clad in impervious surfaces of stone, glass, steel and tarmac. There is pollution of soil, water and air, mainly human-derived food sources, and an especially motley crew of local and invasive flora and fauna.

With urban environments expanding all over the world, wildlife and biologists alike are starting to treat the city as a true ecosystem. Many species’ original habitats are being squeezed into annihilation. For them, it’s adapt or die. And field biologists like me are following suit. As we have to travel ever farther to find untouched wilderness, we are beginning to realize that the expanding urban sprawl is perhaps not something to be depressed about, but rather something very exciting, as entirely novel forms of life are evolving right under our noses.

A Fordham University biologist, Jason Munshi-South, studies the populations of white-footed mice marooned in New York City parks. These native mice once lived all over the place. But as the city expanded, they became confined to the small pockets of forest left behind in parks. Thus isolated, the mice in each park began evolving a park-specific genetic blueprint. In some parks, Dr. Munshi-South found mice carrying genes for heavy metal tolerance, probably because soils there are contaminated with lead or chromium. In other parks, the animals have genes for increased immune response — maybe diseases spread more easily in some high-density populations.

French biologists have been studying a daisylike weed called Crepis sancta, which normally produces two kinds of seeds: heavy ones that fall to the floor, and light seeds that drift in the wind for long distances. But in Montpellier, in southern France, C. sancta makes reduced numbers of the airborne seeds. Small wonder: The plants grow in pockets of soil on sidewalks, and any seeds that are carried on the wind are likely to land on concrete. The heavy seeds that land at the parent plant’s feet, on the other hand, are pretty certain to find a patch of fertile soil. So plants genetically predisposed to produce more heavy seeds have been favored by urban evolution.

THERE are more examples: Spiders in Vienna are evolving to build their webs near moth-attracting streetlights. In some cities, moths, in turn, are developing a resistance to the lure of light bulbs. Certain Puerto Rican city lizards are evolving feet that better grip urban surfaces like concrete. Some grass is adapting to the relentless regime of the lawn mower by acquiring a shorter stature.

The most exciting projects are perhaps no longer in faraway forests and canyons, but just there on our doorstep. We evolutionary biologists are trading our expedition gear for subway tickets and studying street grass and house mosquitoes instead of jungle orchids and mountain birds.

And we have millions of city dwellers to help us. Citizen science projects on urban ecology and evolution are springing up everywhere. This year, my students and I will introduce a smartphone app to measure how snail shells in hot inner cities in Europe and North America are evolving lighter colors to shield against overheating. Adeline Murthy of the University of New Mexico used the Christmas Bird Count, an annual census conducted by volunteers, to show that North American cities harbor an avifauna that is pretty much homogenized across the continent. At least 18 bird species are shared by all of them — something not the case in non-urban areas.

In fact, that Christmas data highlights one feature of urban nature that sets it apart from all other ecosystems: globalization. City-adapted wildlife is likely to hitch rides on human transportation and colonize other cities — at least within the same climate zone.

What’s more, as cities continue to grow, they will exchange more goods, people and information over greater distances. So each change in the environment (a particular pollutant, a certain novelty in road construction, a new kind of food source) will spread quickly across the world, and urban wildlife everywhere will be faced with the same novel challenge. Those that evolve adaptations will also easily spread to other cities, leading to a truly globalized urban flora and fauna — continually evolving at breakneck speed to keep up with an increasingly human-dominated world.

Back on my friend’s balcony, I peered through the branches at that nesting blackbird. She returned my stare with one glistening eye, as if to say: “Consider me your Darwin’s finch. And this city is my Galápagos.”

Menno Schilthuizen, an evolutionary biologist at the Naturalis Biodiversity Center in the Netherlands, is the author of “Nature’s Nether Regions” and the forthcoming “Darwin Comes to Town.”