The Great Bifurcation and Prospects for Solar Communism in the Twenty-First Century

Abstract

Confronting the challenge of dangerous climate change will require radical changes in the global physical and political economies. There is not much time left to act to reduce global carbon emissions. Unsustainable energy sources must be replaced with a high efficiency renewable energy infrastructure sufficient to bring atmospheric carbon dioxide down to a safe level and to eliminate energy poverty that now afflicts most of humanity. Success will greatly increase the prospects for ecosocialist transition to solar communism in this century. The prerequisites and necessary conditions for this transition are discussed in this paper.

Keywords:

• climate catastrophe
• ecoscocialism
• solar communism
• renewable energy

Notes on Contributor

David Schwartzman is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Biology at Howard University in Washington DC. His research continues with a focus on biogeochemistry, astrobiology, origin of life, and environmental policy. He is the author of Life, Temperature and the Earth: The Self-Organizing Biosphere (Columbia University Press, 2002). Articles on ecosocialist theory and practice have appeared in Science & Society and Capitalism Nature Socialism. He is a contributing editor for Science & Society and an advisory board member of the Institute for Policy Research & Development. His websites are: solarutopia.org, redandgreen.org.

Notes

¹ I found these pamphlets in a cupboard below the family TV where my father stored them during the McCarthy years. I had the good fortune to be a “red diaper baby,” conceived by Communists in Brooklyn, New York, celebrating the victory of the Red Army in the Battle of Stalingrad, a fact easily verified by my birth date, October 31, 1943.

² The first two requirements were discussed at length in my original papers (Schwartzman 1996a, 2009); the energy consumption/life expectancy correlation is addressed in P. Schwartzman and D. Schwartzman (2011) and Schwartzman (2012a).

³ See “Wind Energy—The Facts.” www.wind-energy-the-facts.org/en/part-i-technology/chapter-4-wind-farm-design/construction-issues.html.

⁴ See, e.g., “The Blue Planet Project.” www.blueplanetproject.net/index.php/tag/maude-barlow.

⁵ An excellent critique of the common invocation of “overpopulation” as the driver of the environmental crisis, and its underlying ideology of neo-Malthusianism, is found in Angus and Butler (2011).

⁶ See, e.g., www.onthecommons.org, http://creativecommons.org/about; also see Bollier and Helfrich (2012).

⁷ The United States remains one of only three countries that have not yet ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, South Sudan and Somalia being the others (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convention_on_the_Rights_of_the_Child). Similarly, the United States has signed, but not yet ratified the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination against Women (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convention_on_the_Elimination_of_All_Forms_of_Discrimination_Against_Women).

⁸ See the Report on the State of Human Rights in DC, http://afsc.org/resource/report-state-human-rights-dc.

⁹ See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convention_on_Biological_Diversity.