1184. Philippine's Negotiator Will Fast for Climate Action at UN Talks

By 350.0rg, November 11, 2012 

Yeb Sano on the right. Left; a family tries to scape flooding

Diplomats, negotiators, and civil society representatives from around the world held their breath this afternoon at the UN climate talks in Warsaw this afternoon as Yeb Sano, the lead negotiator for the Philippines, began to address the opening of the conference. 

More than 10,000 people are feared dead in the aftermath of Typhoon Haiyan, which slammed into the Philippines this weekend, causing apocalyptic devastation across a number of islands. 

While scientists are careful not to connect any single weather event to climate change, it’s clear that global warming is loading the dice for devastating events like Typhoon Haiyan. Rising seas, warmer waters, and a warmer and wetter atmosphere, all contribute to supercharge storms like Haiyan and Hurricane Sandy. Scientists have warned that extreme weather events will only increase in intensity and frequency if climate change is left unchecked. 

Addressing the UN Climate Talks on behalf of the Phlippines, Sano didn’t hesitate to connect Typhoon Haiyan to climate change and the fossil fuel industry’s role in fueling the crisis.  

Yeb Sano on Democracy Now! at last year's climate talks, speaking about the impacts of Typhoon Bopha. 

He began by thanking the global community, and especially young people, for the support and solidarity that they have shown the people of the Philippines. 

“I thank the youth present here and the billions of young people around the world who stand steadfast behind my delegation and who are watching us shape their future,” said Sano. “I thank civil society, both who are working on the ground as we race against time in the hardest hit areas, and those who are here in Warsaw prodding us to have a sense of urgency and ambition. We are deeply moved by this manifestation of human solidarity. This outpouring of support proves to us that as a human race, we can unite; that as a species, we care.” 

Sano spoke of the terrifying devastation that Typhoon Haiyan has wrecked upon the Philippines, before connecting the dots directly to the climate crisis. 

“To anyone who continues to deny the reality that is climate change, I dare you to get off your ivory tower and away from the comfort of you armchair,” he said. “I dare you to go to the islands of the Pacific, the islands of the Caribbean and the islands of the Indian ocean and see the impacts of rising sea levels; to the mountainous regions of the Himalayas and the Andes to see communities confronting glacial floods, to the Arctic where communities grapple with the fast dwindling polar ice caps, to the large deltas of the Mekong, the Ganges, the Amazon, and the Nile where lives and livelihoods are drowned, to the hills of Central America that confronts similar monstrous hurricanes, to the vast savannas of Africa where climate change has likewise become a matter of life and death as food and water becomes scarce. Not to forget the massive hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico and the eastern seaboard of North America. And if that is not enough, you may want to pay a visit to the Philippines right now.” 

He continued, “What my country is going through as a result of this extreme climate event is madness. The climate crisis is madness.”

Sano said that he identified with the young people and activists around the world who are standing up to the fossil fuel industry, protesting in the streets, and committing civil disobedience. He shared their frustration, he said, and appreciated their courageous action. The same sort of leadership was necessary here in Warsaw, he said. 

 “We can take drastic action now to ensure that we prevent a future where super typhoons are a way of life,” he said. “Because we refuse, as a nation, to accept a future where super typhoons like Haiyan become a fact of life. We refuse to accept that running away from storms, evacuating our families, suffering the devastation and misery, having to count our dead, become a way of life. We simply refuse to.”

Sano then went off the prepared script of his remarks that were released to the media to announce that he would be commencing a voluntary fast. 


“In solidarity with my countrymen who are struggling to find food back home and with my brother who has not had food for the last three days, in all due respect Mr. President, and I mean no disrespect for your kind hospitality, I will now commence a voluntary fasting for the climate. This means I will voluntarily refrain from eating food during this COP until a meaningful outcome is in sight.”

1183. Cuba Rolls Out Master Plan for Food production and Distribution

By Marc Frank, Reuters, November 8, 2013

A private famers market in Havana

HAVANA, Nov 7 (Reuters) - Cuba rolled out a master plan this week to reform food production and sales that definitively ends the state's monopoly on distribution and replaces many rules that hamper farmers and consumers.

A decree, which puts the management of most food distribution in non-state hands, will be applied on an experimental basis in Havana and the adjoining provinces of Artemisa and Mayabeque before going nationwide beginning in 2015.

With the country importing around 60 percent of its food and private farmers outperforming state farms on a fraction of the land, authorities are gradually deregulating the sector and leasing fallow land to would-be farmers.

It is slow going, with farm output up just a few percentage points since President Raul Castro, who replaced his ailing brother Fidel in 2008, began agricultural reforms as part of a broader effort to "modernize" the Soviet-style economy.

Many aspects of the new law bring together reforms already in place or activities that have spontaneously developed and been tolerated by authorities even if technically illegal, including the renting and selling of trucks to farmers and allowing them to contract private hauling of crops instead of relying on the state.

The decree allows farmers, cooperatives and state farms to sell produce in any quantity and to anyone they please after meeting state contracts, instead of being mired in regulations as to how much they can sell, to whom and how.

Large consumers, including state entities and private eateries, can purchase produce wholesale from private farms and cooperatives, instead of just the state.

According to the law, published in the official Gazeta on Wednesday, state-run wholesale markets will be leased to cooperatives and most state retail markets will be leased to farm and non-farm cooperatives and licenses issued to individuals to sell produce.

Boon to Private Sector

The new system still sets prices for a few basics such as rice and beans, prioritizes state contracts (54 percent of output last year) and prohibits the sale of a few export crops such as tobacco and coffee, but by and large represents a big step toward allowing market forces to govern production and prices.

"This very important initiative fulfills the government's commitment to facilitating wholesale markets for fruits and vegetables as the private sector has petitioned," said Richard Feinberg, whose new study, "Soft Landing in Cuba? Emerging Entrepreneurs and Middle Classes," was released this week by the Washington, D.C.-based Brookings Institution.

"Remarkably, it provides space for private businesses to both produce and market foodstuffs in wholesale quantities, in open and healthy competition with the state," he said.

Cuban farmers and consumers have long complained that the state's monopoly on food sales is a disincentive to production, inefficient and leads to waste and poor quality produce.

"Many times we do not produce all that we can for fear we will have nowhere to sell it," said farmer Diogenes Telles, in a phone interview from central Camaguey province.

"Now nothing will rot in the fields because the state doesn't pick it up. If we have the security that all we produce we can sell, of course we are going to produce more," he said.

Cuban economists and farmers have argued for years that the state should get out of assigning farm supplies and equipment to farmers in exchange for contracted food and let those who till the land purchase what they need based on their success and thus purchasing power, something not addressed in the law.

Roberto Perez Perez, the member of the Communist Party reform commission in charge of agriculture, told the state-run media this week that a pilot project to sell supplies to farmers was already underway in the special municipality of the Isla de la Juventud.

"With the measures that are being taken and those that will be implemented we will have an agricultural sector closer to what we need," the official media quoted him has stating.

1182. Billions of Planets Like the Earth Dot the Galaxy

By Dennis Overbye, The New York Times, November 4, 2013

Looking into the Milky Way

The known odds of something — or someone — living far, far away from Earth improved beyond astronomers’ boldest dreams on Monday.

Astronomers reported that there could be as many as 40 billion habitable Earth-size planets in the galaxy, based on a new analysis of data from NASA’s Kepler spacecraft.

One out of every five sunlike stars in the galaxy has a planet the size of Earth circling it in the Goldilocks zone — not too hot, not too cold — where surface temperatures should be compatible with liquid water, according to a herculean three-year calculation based on data from the Kepler spacecraft by Erik Petigura, a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley.

Mr. Petigura’s analysis represents a major step toward the main goal of the Kepler mission, which was to measure what fraction of sunlike stars in the galaxy have Earth-size planets. Sometimes called eta-Earth, it is an important factor in the so-called Drake equation used to estimate the number of intelligent civilizations in the universe. Mr. Petigura’s paper, published Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, puts another smiley face on a cosmos that has gotten increasingly friendly and fecund-looking over the last 20 years.

“It seems that the universe produces plentiful real estate for life that somehow resembles life on Earth,” Mr. Petigura said.

Over the last two decades, astronomers have logged more than 1,000 planets around other stars, so-called exoplanets, and Kepler, in its four years of life before being derailed by a mechanical pointing malfunction last winter, has compiled a list of some 3,500 more candidates. The new result could steer plans in the next few years and decades to find a twin of the Earth — Earth 2.0, in the argot — that is close enough to here to study.

The nearest such planet might be only 12 light-years away. “Such a star would be visible to the naked eye,” Mr. Petigura said.

His result builds on a report earlier this year by David Charbonneau and Courtney Dressing of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, who found that about 15 percent of the smaller and more numerous stars known as red dwarfs have Earth-like planets in their habitable zones. Using slightly less conservative assumptions, Ravi Kopparapu of Pennsylvania State University found that half of all red dwarfs have such planets.

Geoffrey Marcy of the University of California, Berkeley, who supervised Mr. Petigura’s research and was a co-author of the paper along with Andrew Howard of the University of Hawaii, said: “This is the most important work I’ve ever been involved with. This is it. Are there inhabitable Earths out there?”

“I’m feeling a little tingly,” he said.

At a news conference Friday discussing the results, astronomers erupted in praise of the Kepler mission and its team. Natalie Batalha, a Kepler leader from the NASA Ames Research Center, described the project and its members as “the best of humanity rising to the occasion.”

According to Mr. Petigura’s new calculation, the fraction of stars with Earth-like planets is 22 percent, plus or minus 8 percent, depending on exactly how you define the habitable zone.

There are several caveats. Although these planets are Earth-size, nobody knows what their masses are and thus whether they are rocky like the Earth, or balls of ice or gas, let alone whether anything can, or does — or ever will — live on them.

There is reason to believe, from recent observations of other worlds, however, that at least some Earth-size planets, if not all of them, are indeed rocky. Last week, two groups of astronomers announced that an Earth-size planet named Kepler 78b that orbits its sun in 8.5 hours has the same density as the Earth, though it is too hot to support life.

“Nature,” as Mr. Petigura put it, “knows how to make rocky Earth-size planets.”

Also, the number is more uncertain than it might have been because Kepler’s pointing system failed before it could complete its prime survey. As a result, Mr. Petigura and his colleagues had to extrapolate from planets slightly larger than Earth and with slightly smaller, tighter orbits. For the purposes of his analysis “Earth-size” was anything from one to two times the diameter of the Earth, and Earth-like orbits were between 400 and 200 days.

Dr. Batalha said, “We don’t yet have any planet candidates that are exact analogues of the Earth in terms of size, orbit or star type.”

Though Kepler itself is sidelined while astronomers devise a new program it can accomplish with less flexible pointing ability, it has sent back so much data that there is still a whole year’s worth of results left to analyze, Dr. Batalha said. “Scientists,” she said, “are going to work on Kepler data for decades.” Kepler was launched in 2009 to perform a kind of cosmic census, monitoring the brightness of 150,000 far-off stars in the Cygnus and Lyra constellations, looking for dips in brightness when planets pass in front of them.

Mr. Petigura and his colleagues restricted themselves to a subset of some 42,000 brighter and well-behaved stars. They found 603 planets, of which 10 were between one Earth and two Earths in diameter, and circled in what Mr. Petigura defined as the habitable zone, where they would receive between a quarter of the light the Earth gets, and four times as much. In the solar system, that zone would spread from inside the orbit of Venus to just outside the orbit of Mars.

Meanwhile, in an innovation borrowed from other data-intensive fields like particle physics, Mr. Petigura designed a computer pipeline so that he could inject fake planets into the data — 40,000 in all — and see how efficiently his program could detect planets of different sizes and orbits. In addition to that correction, he and his colleagues had to correct for geometry; only about one in 100 planet systems is aligned edge-on so that earthlings would see the telltale wink of an exoplanet transit.

“It was a ton of work,” he recalled, explaining that he had to try out tens of billions of different periods for each star in order to find planets.

Sara Seager, an exoplanet astronomer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who was not involved in the work, said the pipeline testing had made the results believable. “I would say that small planets are everywhere and very common,” she said, “no matter how you slice and dice the data. But Kepler is dead and we have no way to get any further data. So we’ll have to be satisfied with this as the final word, for now.”

1181. Book Review: Geopolitics of the Amazon, Landed Hereditary Power and Capitalist Accumulation

By Devin Beaulieu and Nancy Postero, Against the Current, November/December 2013

Alvaro García Linera

Geopolítica de la Amazonía:

Poder hacendal-patrimonial y acumulación capitalista

by Alvaro García Linera

La Paz, Bolivia: Vicepresidencia del Estado, 2012.

An English translation by Richard Fidler is online at http://links.org.au/node/3152.

GEOPOLÍTICA DE LA Amazonía: Poder hacendal-patrimonial y acumulación capitalista (Geopolitics of the Amazon, Landed Hereditary Power and Capitalist Accumulation, 2012) is the latest defense of the politics and policies of Evo Morales’ leftist government by its premier intellectual, vice-president Alvaro García Linera. As the eloquent public spokesman for Morales’ governing strategy since the election of the Movement towards Socialism (MAS) in 2005, García Linera has made a name for himself in Latin American leftist thought and political theory.

The eminent Brazilian political scientist Emir Sader presented this latest publication in a splashy event at the Bolivian Central Bank in the capital La Paz, unequivocally stating that García Linera is the most important intellectual living today in Latin America, impressively able to unite both practice and theory in the overseeing the workings of state while producing critical works of academic scholarship. (His glowing review of the book is at Sader 2012).

García Linera’s work is most certainly an expression of the dramatic changes in Bolivia and the “cultural and democratic revolution” Morales and his MAS party claim to have inaugurated. And García Linera’s intellectual abilities are impressive. When was the last time in Bolivia (or perhaps anywhere in the world), that an official government publication justified state policy with authoritative references to V.I. Lenin’s treatise on counterrevolution, the semiotic coloniality of representation, and Marx’s metabolic theory of nature and capitalist production?

The need to invoke these radical origins is not simply the result of García Linera’s genius or the desires of a committed leftist intellectual-turned-head of state. Geopolitica is the third in a trilogy of books produced by García Linera to counter the mounting criticisms of Morales government by former leftist coalition allies since Morales and García Linera’s reelection in 2009.

As he did in his previous books Las Tensiones Creativas de la Revolucion (The Creative Tensions of the Revolution, 2010), and El “Oenegismo,” Enfermidad Infantil del Derechismo (“NGOism,” Infantile Illness of the Right, 2011), García Linera accuses dissident critics of fomenting counterrevolution that will benefit the lurking rightwing elite.

Unlike previous books, however, his target here is not just a small group of dissident intellectuals and former cabinet ministers, but the entire lowland indigenous confederation (CIDOB, the Confederation of Indigenous Peoples of Bolivia).

The Resource Extraction Strategy

CIDOB staged two marches in 2011 and 2012 with the highland indigenous organization (CONAMAQ) against a proposed Amazonian highway through the Isiboro Sécure Indigenous Territory and National Park (TIPNIS). Government attempts to rebuff the march in 2011, culminating in violent police repression, momentarily turned popular opinion against Morales and his agenda of state-led resource extraction.

According to García Linera‘s analysis here, however, this “hysterical” dramatization of the TIPNIS march is actually a strategy of colonial domination that takes advantage of the internal contradiction at the heart of the revolutionary popular-bloc that brought Morales to power. (14)

Geopolítica surveys the social and political history of the Bolivian Amazon to buttress García Linera’s claim that the TIPNIS march and CIDOB are the tools of what he calls “extraterritorial environmentalism,” the materialization of “environmental capitalist accumulation.”

Real power in the Amazon, he says, rests with foreign companies, the governments of developed capitalist countries, regional bourgeois-seigniorial landlords, and NGOs. Lands collectively titled to indigenous communities, like the TIPNIS (one of the main victories of the indigenous movement in the 1990s), actually serve to subsume indigenous territory and natural resources under the control of what he terms a feudal, or patrimonial-hacienda, “arch of power and domination.”

The “pseudo-environmentalism” rallied by the TIPNIS march and its supporters against state extractivism, he says, is a paternalistic “environmentalism for the poor,” that divides in Manichaean colonial fashion Bolivia’s popular indigenous-peasant bloc between romanticized “good” lowland indigenous communities living in harmony with nature and vilified “bad” highland peasants out to ravage nature for illicit drug markets. (75-76).

García Linera’s theoretical acuity shines in this section, as he rightly points out that indigeneity is not as simple as people often assume. Indigenous people do not only live in communal lands, and many people in the cities and in zones of colonization also self-identify as indigenous. The literature on the TIPNIS controversy initially, at least, tended to oppose lowland peoples to the coca-growers, characterizing the TIPNIS communities as authentically indigenous. (But see McNeish 2013.)

Yet García Linera substitutes this essentialist regional dichotomy with his own dualism, executing a cunning inversion. García Linera argues that “in the Amazon, it is not the indigenous peoples who have taken control of territorial power, as occurred years ago in the highlands and valleys where agrarian unions and communities performed the role of indigenous micro-states with a territorial presence, and in reality were the material foundation for the construction of the present Plurinational State.” (25)

In contrast to the virtuous highlanders, the oppressed lowland indigenous people are portrayed here as the passive victims of patrimonial-hacienda power (internal capitalist accumulation), on the one hand, and foreign corporations (external capitalist accumulation), on the other. Without any apparent agency to defend their lands or their livelihoods, they can only be saved by the State.

For García Linera, the Plurinational State, whose foundation is the “syndical capture of State power,” is historically poised to defeat the reactionary “arch of power” in the Amazon. (9)

This statist argument completely denies the existence of lowland indigenous resistance against domination. CIDOB’s thirty years of struggle for territory and self determination receive scant attention — only a one-line reference to the 1990 march for Territory and Dignity. (37)

There is no mention of their critical role in the recent Constituent Assembly, where as part of an alliance with other groups, they proposed the fundamental architecture of the plurinational state and indigenous visions for sustainable development called vivir bien (or living well) (Beaulieu 2012, Schavelzon 2012).

This lapse is a striking reversal for García Linera, who previously claimed, notably in debates with Antonio Negri, Michael Hardt and others in 2008, that Bolivia was witnessing the emergence of a new revolutionary subject in the “multitude form,” whose egalitarian horizontal structure overcomes prior hierarchies of syndical organizing (see Negri et al 2008). It also reduces the lowlands peoples to the status of children, a sad reprise of the tropes of colonialism.

Self-determination or State Supremacy?

When Bolivia’s first indigenous President was elected in 2005, skeptical observers cautioned that Morales would only inaugurate a new cycle of ethnic domination based instead on highland “Aymara hegemony” or “Andean centricism.” While the TIPNIS case certainly demonstrates a privileging of highland demands over lowland communities’ expressed desires, what this book demonstrates more powerfully is the fact that the state is not advancing anything close to indigenous hegemony, Aymara or otherwise.

On the one hand, as spectacles like the state-sponsored 2010 “Collective marriage of Our (Indigenous) Identity” demonstrate, the MAS is promoting symbolic forms of decolonization, like the folklorization of Andean culture, rather than meeting indigenous peoples’ desires for self-determination.

On the other hand — and this is the crucial point — García Linera makes clear that all indigenous demands must be subsumed to the state and to the hegemony of its continued capitalist development model.

This becomes clear in García Linera’s arguments against protestors’ claims that the contested highway project is a part of continental infrastructure development (the so-called IIRSA Plan) imposed by foreign Brazilian capital.

Instead, he sees the highway as the crucial means of wrestling control from foreign powers by extending the sovereign reach of the state. “OUR State… the Amazon is ours, it belongs to Bolivians, not to North Americans or Europeans, nor to the companies or NGOs that claim to be ‘teaching us to protect it’.” (66)

To legitimate the highway, he traces the project to a historic demand going back more than 300 years, to 1763 designs by the Spanish Viceroy in order to protect the colonial frontier from Portuguese invaders. (53) In a revival of an older national security doctrine, he points to the government’s tripling of military presence in the Amazon (95) and creation of a new “Ecological Regiment” (74) as proof of the state’s sovereign intentions.

García Linera envisions this sovereign aim as a Hegelian synthesis: “with the highway, the real geography and the ideal geography of the State (present in maps and treaties) tend to coincide”(emphasis in the original: 96).

It is telling — and deeply troubling — that García Linera justifies the MAS government’s actions by invoking colonial plans. Yet perhaps more troubling is García Linera’s continued return to dualistic argumentation to silence opposition.

Declaring that the Bolivian state will take sole responsibility for protecting Mother Earth, he asserts: “We will never accept the principle of shared sovereignty in any piece of Bolivian territory. Whoever at this point is opposed to the presence of the state in the Amazon is in fact defending the presence in it of the United States. There is no in-between position…” (Ibid.) Apparently, the state will not share the Amazon even with the indigenous peoples who live there.

From “Live Well” to Extractivism

Finally, García Linera argues against anti-capitalist critiques of natural resource extractivism, the rents (revenues paid to the state — ed.) which form the basis of Bolivian state finance and national economy. Rehearsing an argument he made previously in a widely debated 2012 Le Monde article, he insists that extractivism is not the fundamental issue for the transformation from capitalism to socialism.

Critics confuse a technical system with mode of production, he says. The capitalist mode of production is rather a fundamentally political problem of “planetary geopolitical dimension” beyond the scope of one country. Only worldwide communism can overturn this mode of production. (104)

Rather, seen as a technical form, extractivism can be “a point of departure” for overcoming capitalism. Critiques that “fill the mouth with injuries against extractivism” miss the point that it is a material means to generate wealth and distribute it with justice. (107) For García Linera, the current task is to in order to satisfy the basic and “urgent necessities of the population” (110), part of a much longer historical process.

There can be no doubt that this is a fundamental tension within the MAS government’s agenda. Morales came to power to accomplish two fundamental goals: to overcome the neoliberal system, which channeled the country’s patrimony to the rich and to transnational corporations, and to empower the country’s indigenous peoples and their values and practices. (Postero 2013a, 2013b)

These two goals come together in the significant cash transfers to the country’s poor and senior citizens that the MAS government has instituted since renegotiating oil and gas contracts in 2006. Yet the government’s choice to privilege extractivism has had significant costs to the environment (another critique which García Linera brushes aside here), and to the lowland indigenous communities the government is apparently willing to sacrifice to the larger national goals.

Thus García Linera’s approach here is heralded by some as the only pragmatic means to develop Bolivia, one of Latin America’s poorest countries. Yet in our view, this text betrays the tradition of Latin American socialist thought, from Jose Carlos Mariátegui to Rene Zavaleta Mercado, from whose insights he builds his geopolitical critique of capitalist landlordism.

Those thinkers did not look for the future promise of socialism in a technical system to satisfy basic human needs or a militantly sovereign state, but rather in indigenous struggles against ongoing colonial domination. This, alas, is missing in García Linera’s apologetic text.

Instead, he returns to the tired arguments we hear these days across the planet, arguing that the aberrations of the Amazonian situation “can be ‘cured’ by mobilizing the very inner dynamics and logic” of the capitalist system he (rightfully) argues caused the problem in the first place (see Swyngedouw 2010: 223).

Are there alternatives to this re-embrace of state-led capitalism? Evo Morales gained international attention by staking a strong discursive claim that global climate change was the result of the sins of capitalism. He posed indigenous cosmovision as the alternative: he declared that by embracing indigenous notions of reciprocity and communality, societies could learn to “live well” and sustainably instead of trying to live “better” than others through increased consumption.

The 2009 constitution incorporates this language, making vivir bien one of the guiding principles for the new plurinational state (Art. 8,2). Yet, the new 2012 Framing Law of Mother Earth and Integral Development to Live Well makes clear that the Morales government is now subsuming the potentially radical “horizon” of vivir bien to a pragmatic state-led process of “integral development.”

For Eduardo Gudynas (2013), the new law is a sign that the Morales government has for all intents and purposes silenced those hoping for real alternatives to extractive capitalist development. He says, “this restoration of the idea of development closes a chapter in the Bolivian process. Now it is possible to promote extractivism and defend it as a necessary form of integral development without falling into contradictions” (2013: 25).

For many indigenous people, however, the struggle for alternatives continues. In recent months, the government issued arrest warrants for three principal leaders of CIDOB, forcing them to find refuge in the offices of the TIPNIS in the Amazonian town of Trinidad for three months.

Indigenous activists perceive this ongoing repression as a cynical attempt to block the “real” actors of change from accomplishing their historic task. As one of them explained, “they came after us because they knew that we would make the ‘proceso de cambio’ (process of change) happen” (personal communication, August 2013).

This struggle has served to strengthen the convictions of many in the indigenous movement who hope to realize the full rights of autonomy and self-determination laid out in the 2009 constitution. That hard-won constitution, one activist insisted “should be like a Bible for us indigenous” (personal communication, September 2013).

Indigenous participation in the process of change — including reimagining the plurinational state during the Constituent Assembly — has created enduring expectations that go far beyond García Linera’s pragmatic geopolitics. These demands for alternatives continue to shape the future, whether García Linera recognizes it or not.

References:

Beaulieu, Devin, 2012. Land, Race, and the Rentier State in Latin America. Unpublished MA thesis, University of California, San Diego, Department of Anthropology.

García Linera, Alvaro 2010. Las Tensiones Creativas de la Revolución, La Quinta Fase del Proceso de Cambio. La Paz, Bolivia: Vicepresidencia del Estado.

---------- 2011. El “Oenegismo.” Enfermidad Infantil del Derechismo. La Paz, Bolivia: Vicepresidencia del Estado.

---------- 2012. “El Extractivismo: destino, punto de partida y superación,” in Le Monde Diplomatique (Bolivian edition) October 2012, 52:3-4.

Gudynas, Eduardo 2013. “Development Alternatives in Bolivia: The Impulse, the Resistance, and the Restoration.” NACLA Report on the Americas 46 (1): 22-26.

McNeish, John Andrew 2013. Extraction, Protest and Indigeneity in Bolivia: The TIPNIS Effect. Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies 8(2): xx.

Negri, Toni, Michael Hardt, Giuseppe Cocco, Judith Revel, Alvaro García Linera, and Luís Tapia 2008. Imperio, multitud, y sociedad abigarrada. La Paz, Bolivia: Muela del Diablo Editores.

Postero, Nancy 2013a. Protecting Mother Earth in Bolivia: Discourse and Deeds in the Morales Administration. In Environment and the Law in Amazonia: A Plurilateral Encounter, James M. Cooper and Christine Hunefeldt, eds. (Brighton, UK: Sussex Academic Press), 78-93.

---------- 2013b. “Bolivia’s Challenge to ‘Colonial Neoliberalism,’” in Neoliberalism, Interrupted: Social Change and Contested Governance in Contemporary Latin America, Goodale, Mark, and Nancy Postero, eds. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press (25-52).

Sader, Emir 2012. “El proceso boliviano y sus conflictos.” El Mundo, 12, October 3, 2012. http://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/elmundo/4-204735-2012-10-03.html.

Schavelzon, Salvador, 2012. El nacimiento del Estado Plurinacional de Boliva. La Paz, Bolivia: Plural Editores.

Swyngedouw, Erik 2010. Apocalypse Forever? Post-Political Populism and the Spectre of Climate Change. Theory, Culture, and Society 27(2-3): 213-232.

1180. Cuba Shutters Private Theaters, Threatens Other Businesses

By Marc Frank, Reuters, November 2, 2013

Cuba youth in a 3D private theater in Havana

Cuba closed dozens of home-based movie theaters on Saturday and reaffirmed its plans to end the private sale of imported goods as communist authorities pressed for "order, discipline and obedience" in the growing small business sector.

A government statement issued through official media said home-based theaters and video games will "stop immediately in any type of self employment," a local euphemism for small business.

The statement said "the showing of movies, including in 3D salons, and likewise the organization of computer games, has never been authorized."

The government banned the private sale of imported goods last month, a measure that potentially affects some 20,000 small businesses and their employees who sell clothing, hardware and other goods brought in informally by travelers, some of whom visit the Caribbean island regularly carrying merchandise from the United States, Spain and Latin American countries.

President Raul Castro, who replaced his brother Fidel in 2008, has instituted a series of market-oriented reforms to Cuba's Soviet style economy where the state still employs 79 percent of the 5 million-strong labor force.

"These measures are corrections to continue bringing order to this form of management, fight impunity and insist people live up to the law," the government said on Saturday.

"In no way does this mean a step backward. Quite the contrary, we will continue to decidedly advance in the updating of our economic model," it said, adding that would only be possible "in an atmosphere of order, discipline and obedience."

The import ban has created a fury among entrepreneurs and the public who have tired of buying high priced and low quality clothing from state-run establishments.

Saturday's closing of private theaters will add fuel to the fire as they have been overwhelmingly welcomed by the public.

Marlene, a Havana housewife, said her neighbor was planning to open a 3D salon.

"The state has no 3D theaters, so what is their problem. Sometimes the government seems to want to make our lives worse for the fun of it," she said, asking her last name not be used.

State role questioned 

Cuban economist Juan Triana, in his regular Thursday commentary on state-run Radio Taino, said that the government should get out of businesses it had no reason to be in, referring to the ban on imports.

"Is it really worthwhile for the state to continue expending effort, money and prestige in an activity it was not designed for ... and which in general undermines its prestige due to the quality of the products, but also theft, corruption, many costs that are difficult to cover even though prices  are very often two or three times their value," he said.

On Saturday the government said it had decided to postpone the ban on imports until January to give vendors time to liquidate their inventories.

Three years ago the government opened up retail services to "self employment" in the form of 200 licensed activities from clowns, seamstresses, food vendors, taxis and the building trades, to small businesses such as restaurants, cafeterias, bed and breakfasts and entertainment.

The government said the measure was aimed at absorbing excess state labor, improving services, eliminating inefficiencies and bringing black-market activity above ground.

There are now 442,000 self-employed people in Cuba, of whom around 100,000 work as employees of small businesses, according to the government.

Enterprising residents have taken advantage of some of the categories - for example entertainer or seamstress - to offer movies, video games and imported clothing and supplies in greater variety and at lower cost than the state.

In September the government added 12 new licenses, including real estate broker, but also listed all self-employed categories and the content of approved activity. It added phrases such as for seamstress, "does not include the sale of manufactured or imported clothing."

Since then, state employees have been visiting all license holders to review their activities and warn them if they are stepping over the line.

"These recent restrictions reflect an on-going struggle between those Cuban officials who envision a dynamic private sector as benefiting Cuban consumers - in these cases of modern video entertainment and low-cost imported clothing - and those government officials who fear loss of state control over the national economy," said Richard Feinberg, a nonresident senior fellow of the Washington-based Brookings Institution and author of various studies on Cuban reforms.

1179. Tar Sands Oil: Keystone XL Pipeline or Not the Oil Industry Will Get Its Way

By Clifford Krauss, The New York Times, October 30, 2013

A Canexus terminal near Bruderheim, Alberta. Photo: Ian Jackson for The New York Times

HOUSTON — Over the past two years, environmentalists have chained themselves to the White House fence and otherwise coalesced around stopping the Keystone XL pipeline as their top priority in the fight against global warming.

But even if President Obama rejects the pipeline, it might not matter much. Oil companies are already building rail terminals to deliver oil from western Canada to the United States, and even to Asia.

Since July, plans have been announced for three large loading terminals in western Canada with the combined capacity of 350,000 barrels a day — equivalent to roughly 40 percent of the capacity of the proposed Keystone XL pipeline that is designed to bring oil from western Alberta to refineries along the Gulf Coast.

Over all, Canada is poised to quadruple its rail-loading capacity over the next few years to as much as 900,000 barrels a day, up from 180,000 today.

The acceleration has come despite a derailment in the lakeside Quebec town of Lac-Megantic in July, in which a runaway oil train bound for a refinery in eastern Canada exploded, killing dozens of people and bankrupting the railway company. That accident and others more recently have renewed concerns about the safety of transporting oil by rail, and given an added argument to some who favor the Keystone XL pipeline.

“They don’t give up,” Jesse Prentice-Dunn, a Sierra Club policy analyst, said of the oil industry.

If all the new terminals are built, Canada will potentially increase its exports to the United States by more than 20 percent — even if Keystone XL is never built.

Shipping by rail can cost an additional $5 or more per barrel, but oil companies have decided that they cannot afford to wait.

“The indecision on Keystone XL really spawned innovation and mobilized alternatives, and rail is a clear part of the options available to our industry,” said Paul Reimer, senior vice president in charge of transport and marketing at Cenovus Energy, a Canadian oil company that is planning to increase rail shipments from 7,000 barrels a day to as many as 30,000 barrels a day by the end of 2014.

Opponents want to stop the pipeline project to keep the oil sands in the ground. They say that emissions from development — through mining or steam heating out of the ground followed by upgrading for shipment — are more harmful than those that come from extracting most conventional crude oil. Proponents say that Canadian heavy oil is no more environmentally harmful than some crude oils already used in the United States, and that it would replace similar crudes from Venezuela and Mexico that are refined on the Gulf Coast.

But now it seems that even if environmentalists win their battle over Keystone, Canada is destined to become an even more important energy provider, one way or another.

The developing rail links for oil sands range across Canada and over the border from the Gulf Coast to Washington and California. Railways can potentially give Canadian producers a major outlet to oil-hungry China, including from refineries in Washington and California.

At least that is the hope of Canadian oil companies, which now depend almost solely on the United States for exports.

“We want to diversify our markets beyond just moving our product south,” said Peter Symons, a spokesman for Statoil, a Norwegian oil giant that has signed contracts to lease two Canadian oil loading terminals. “We can get that product on a ship and get it to premium markets in Asia.”

Several Washington and Oregon refiners and ports are planning or building rail projects for Canadian heavy crude as well as light oil from North Dakota. The Texas refinery giant Tesoro and the oil services company Savage have announced a joint venture to build a $100 million, 42-acre oil-handling plant in the Port of Vancouver on the Columbia River that could handle 380,000 barrels of oil each day if permits are granted.

At the beginning of the year, only a trickle of Canadian oil was transported by rail, no more than 60,000 barrels a day. There was limited rail off-loading capacity in American refineries outside the Gulf Coast, and only a small number of rail cars suitable to transport bitumen, the raw substance in oil sands that can be refined into petroleum products.

But Canadian oil executives were making preparations for more rail traffic. Congested pipelines in the United States were producing localized gluts of Canadian crude, forcing producers to offer discounts that cut into profits.

In response, executives ramped up rail projects on both sides of the border to relieve the pipeline congestion, and now an estimated 175,000 barrels of Canadian crude are running by rail daily, according to a recent report by Peters & Company, a Canadian investment house.

The Canadians remain a few years behind producers in North Dakota, where the paucity of pipelines encouraged early oil explorers like EOG Resources to form a partnership with Burlington Northern Santa Fe to build terminals for the shipment of oil by rail to refineries across the country.

Today more than three-quarters of North Dakota’s production, which also was to move on the Keystone XL pipeline, is transported by rail. The Canadian oil producers took notice.

“The market woke up when all of a sudden in 2012 they built 20 terminals in North Dakota and now people are jumping on the bandwagon,” said Sandy Fielden, director of energy analytics at RBN Energy, a consultancy. “Oil will find a way to market whether it has to come by truck or pipeline or rail.”

With or without Keystone, transporting oil by rail has raised concerns over safety and increased air pollution from extra train traffic. The city of Benicia, Calif., last month delayed the granting of a permit for Valero Energy’s planned rail terminal at its refinery by deciding to require an environmental impact report after residents expressed concerns that Valero would use the terminal to import Canadian oil sands crude.

Much of the concern centers on safety. This month, a train carrying crude oil and liquefied petroleum gas derailed west of Edmonton, causing an explosion and fire and forcing the evacuation of a town.

Last month, a Canadian National Railway Company train carrying lubricating oil, ethanol and natural gas liquids between Winnipeg and Edmonton derailed in Saskatchewan, leading to a leak on farmland and well-publicized comments by Saskatchewan’s premier, Brad Wall, that the accident underscored the need for more pipelines to safely move petroleum products.

Shipping oil by rail is generally more expensive than by pipeline, but the oil companies working in North Dakota made a critical innovation — leasing complete 100-car trains dedicated to oil rather than the traditional train that ships a variety of products. By shipping directly from the oil fields to refinery depots, the companies sped deliveries and lowered costs.

Rail lines are also easier and faster to build than pipelines, particularly since permitting of pipelines can take years and are sometimes rejected.

“We would like to bring that crude oil down by pipeline, specifically the Keystone XL pipeline, but we also want to have access from rail and ship,” said Bill Day, a vice president at Valero, which is building a rail unloading facility to handle heavy oil from Canada at its St. Charles, La., refinery. “We want multiple means to deliver crude oil to our refineries.”

1178. Climate Change Seen Posing Risk to Food Supplies

By Justin Gillis, The New York Times, November 1, 2013

Change in wheat production due to weather patterns in 2011

Climate change will pose sharp risks to the world’s food supply in coming decades, potentially undermining crop production and driving up prices at a time when the demand for food is expected to soar, scientists have found.

In a departure from an earlier assessment, the scientists concluded that rising temperatures will have some beneficial effects on crops in some places, but that globally they will make it harder for crops to thrive — perhaps reducing production over all by as much as 2 percent each decade for the rest of this century, compared with what it would be without climate change.

And, the scientists say, they are already seeing the harmful effects in some regions.

The warnings come in a leaked draft of a report under development by a United Nations panel, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The document is not final and could change before it is released in March.

The report also finds other sweeping impacts from climate change already occurring across the planet, and warns that these are likely to intensify as human emissions of greenhouse gases continue to rise. The scientists describe a natural world in turmoil as plants and animals colonize new areas to escape rising temperatures, and warn that many could become extinct.

The warning on the food supply is the sharpest in tone the panel has issued. Its previous report, in 2007, was more hopeful. While it did warn of risks and potential losses in output, particularly in the tropics, that report found that gains in production at higher latitudes would most likely offset the losses and ensure an adequate global supply.

The new tone reflects a large body of research in recent years that has shown how sensitive crops appear to be to heat waves. The recent work also challenges previous assumptions about how much food production could increase in coming decades because of higher carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere. The gas, though it is the main reason for global warming, also acts as a kind of fertilizer for plants.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is the principal scientific body charged with reviewing and assessing climate science, then issuing reports about the risks to the world’s governments. Its main reports come out every five to six years. The group won the Nobel Peace Prize, along with Al Gore, in 2007 for its efforts.

Hundreds of billions of dollars are being spent every year to reduce emissions in response to past findings from the group, though many analysts have said these efforts are so far inadequate to head off drastic climatic changes later in the century.

On the food supply, the new report finds that benefits from global warming may be seen in some areas, like northern lands that are now marginal for food production. But it adds that over all, global warming could reduce agricultural production by as much as 2 percent each decade for the rest of this century.

During that period, demand is expected to rise as much as 14 percent each decade, the report found, as the world population is projected to grow to 9.6 billion in 2050, from 7.2 billion today, according to the United Nations, and as many of those people in developing countries acquire the money to eat richer diets.

Any shortfall would lead to rising food prices that would hit the world’s poor hardest, as has already occurred from price increases of recent years. Research has found that climate change, particularly severe heat waves, was a factor in those price spikes.

The agricultural risks “are greatest for tropical countries, given projected impacts that exceed adaptive capacity and higher poverty rates compared with temperate regions,” the draft report finds.

If the report proves to be correct about the effect on crops from climate change, global food demand might have to be met — if it can be met — by putting new land into production. That could entail chopping down large areas of forest, an action that would only accelerate climate change by sending substantial amounts of carbon dioxide into the air from the destruction of trees.

The report finds that efforts to adapt to climate change have already begun in many countries. President Obama signed an executive order on Friday to step up such efforts in the United States. But these efforts remain inadequate compared with the risks, the report says, and far more intensive — and expensive — adaptation plans are likely to be required in the future.

The document also finds that it is not too late for cuts in emissions to have a strong impact on the future risks of climate change, though the costs would be incurred in the next few decades and the main benefits would probably be seen in the late 21st century and beyond.

The leak of the new draft occurred on a blog hostile to the intergovernmental panel. In a brief interview, a spokesman for the panel, Jonathan Lynn, did not dispute the authenticity of the document.

“It’s a work in progress,” Mr. Lynn said. “It’s likely to change.”

Several scientists involved in drafting the document declined on Friday to speak publicly about it. In the Internet era, the group’s efforts to keep its drafts secret are proving to be a failure, and some of the scientists involved have called for a drafting process open to the public.

A report about the physical science of climate change leaked in August, then underwent only modest changes before its final release in Stockholm in late September. The new report covers the impact of climate change, efforts to adapt to it, and the vulnerability of human and natural systems.

A third report, analyzing potential ways to limit the rise of greenhouse gases, is due for release in Berlin in April.