Category Archives: Resource Based Economy

Experts from Cisco, HPE, Digital Realty and more put forward their data centre predictions for 2020

Mid-December is upon us, which means its time for you guessed it our yearly data centre predictions roundup.

As usual, weve handpicked four industry experts, all of whom have kindly consulted their crystal balls to serve up some digestible summaries of what lies ahead for the data centre in 2020.

Without question, the chief takeaway from this years roundup is the centrality of sustainability.

True, the environmental impact of IT has been scrutinised for several years now, but whereas once the interrogation was audible, now it is deafening. This is a consequence of the broader elevation of the issue around the globe, reinforced by theGreta Effect and the hellish wildfires that tore through the Amazon in October.

Thankfully, society is alert to the fact that data centres are both energy-hungry server farms and integral to the digitalisation on which we universally rely. Popular consciousness of these facts has led to industry stakeholders having a louder voice in the climate debate. Those stakeholders must use their platforms to effectively communicate the data centres long history of energy-efficient innovations and, as such, how it is part of the solution. Equally, it is right that more pressure is put on organisations to minimise ITs resource demand and waste.

Read the predictions in their entirety below.

Automation will become the main mechanism for driving operational agility

Hybrid IT is the new way of doing things. Organisations that originally took a Cloud First or Cloud Only view of the future have largely struggled to realise the potential of that strategy. Applications and their associated data are now distributed across so many locations data centres, hyperscalers, and increasingly the edge.

Organisations have a vast array of choices when it comes to deploying and hosting applications. The challenge is the complexity this generates, as well as a larger attack surface from a security standpoint. Organisations continue to push for simplification whilst still looking to keep their options open. So how does an organisation understand the best location to deploy and host an application and its data?

Alongside customer experience, factors ranging from cost to compliance all have to be balanced out. Once a decision has been taken based on the evidence, IT needs to be able move at a speed that can best support the wider organisation. The future will require clear view of all an organisations applications, network infrastructure, workloads, and security policies. With so much data, machine learning will be important to help IT teams make sense of it all.

Once staff can get a clear top-down view of operations, the next step is moving towards effective automation of the entire IT operations lifecycle. Automation will become the main mechanism for driving operational agility. Through moving to this advanced form of management, organisations can shift their security model to protect workloads across their entire data provision rather than working with the traditional perimeter model.

Ciscos data centre vision is based around the concept of a Central Nervous System for IT. This can deliver deep visibility and insights, the ability to automate actions, reduce time-consuming tasks, and enable innovation, without compromising on cybersecurity proficiency.

We need to further increase the efficiency of our facilities, work together with grid providers to increase capacity, and help government to get legislation up to date

The digital revolution is travelling at full-steam ahead. Our economy and society has, in only a short time, become a digital economy and digital society. Most business models are in a state of disruption due to the rise of the internet. We rely on smart solutions as the new norm to bring efficiency in processes and to become more sustainable. All of this is, in the end, originating from data centres. Data centres have quickly become the reliable foundation of our economy and society something we in the data centre industry should be very proud of.

In the future, we see many positives and challenges ahead for our industry. The sheer size of digitisation, and the growth of data in general, simply demands more data centres. How to facilitate this massive growth is a major challenge.

To move forward, we need to find and educate more people to be able to achieve this growth. We need to further increase the efficiency of our facilities, work together with grid providers to increase capacity, and help government to get legislation up to date. And probably most importantly, make the public more aware of our role and how our industry works to increase their understanding and perceptions.

The only way we can do this is to work together united. We are very happy with the support of the industry in our country which allows us as an industry association to work on these issues. And with many of the challenges the same in every country, we should work together more internationally.

This is the only way to grow in a sustainable way.

We need more sustainable data centres

As enterprises accelerate digital transformation, escalating demands for real-time insights are causing data centres to experience power, space, cooling and resource constraints. The need for sustainable IT is growing as we tackle complex and data-heavy challenges against a backdrop of increasing energy costs and resource limitations, an urgent climate crisis and tightening regulations.

IT organisations that are fast to transform will exceed their financial, sustainability and business objectives to seize a competitive advantage. As more organisations undertake digital transformations, more opportunities arise to critically review the inefficiencies of ageing on-premises IT estates and consider how to structure their modernisation with sustainability in mind.

For instance, IT organisations will continue to transition to consumption-based IT models that eliminate wasteful overprovisioning and underutilisation of assets while refreshing ageing and power-hungry assets without the capital expenditure. By minimising ITs resource demand and waste, the data centre industry will cut costs and reduce its environmental impact both of which are priorities for our customers.

Digital transformation has increased the number and diversity of workloads leading to traditional techniques of management not delivering the desired efficiencies and reliability. Modern data centres generate trillions of data points that have to be correlated and understood in order to make the systems operate effectively. It is not possible for manual operations to scale to meet this ever increasing demand. As infrastructure becomes increasingly critical to an organisations bottom line, constantly ensuring the optimal performance for every application is paramount.

As a result we are seeing Artificial Intelligence (AI) being brought into the data centre to predict and prevent problems before they occur while ensuring optimal performance and efficient resource use. AI uses predictive modeling to understand all the operating, environmental and telemetry parameters and has the potential to do this at scale across a holistic customer installed base. Once introduced these AIs can identify causation from historical events to predict the most complex and damaging problems before they become problems. This increasingly will lead to the autonomous operation of data centres without the need for human intervention.

Physical and cyber will converge to safeguard data centres

Physical security has long been a mainstay in data centre security strategies. Enterprises are now investing heavily in cyber security measures to ensure their systems do not incur additional risks. In 2020 and beyond, data centres will begin to see physical and cyber security converge as advanced technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning are deployed to pinpoint abnormalities in both physical and cyber security and bolster remediation processes. As these technologies continue to mature, they will shift the security paradigm from one of detect and respond to prevent and counter.

Edge computing is already one of the biggest trends happening in networking and IT infrastructure spaces. In 2020, well see advances in SDN, 5G and other networking technologies continue to reshape edge computings role for the enterprise and for end users. Well start to see more businesses remove their components, data and services from a centralised core and place them closer to the edge so assets can be positioned where theyre needed most. Businesses will create centres of data exchange that reside between the core and the edge to enable reduced latency, improved network resiliency and increased efficiency. We predict the edge will become a significant catalyst for one of the biggest technology shifts of the decade, enabling AI, robotics, self-driving cars and other emerging technologies to reshape businesses.

With the recent California and Amazon rainforest wildfires and the surge in climate change activism, individuals and enterprises are understanding that sustainability is more than justa nice to have; rather, theyre both financially and socially necessary.

A recentsurveyfound that 70 percent of respondents were more likely to choose working at a company with a strong environmental agenda. Coupled with that, millennials and Gen Zers, two overwhelmingly purpose-driven generations who care about what their employers stand for, make up the largest portion of the workforce today.

In 2020, sustainability-driven companies will place high importance on supply chain sustainability selecting responsible vendors and motivating current partners to report and improve upon sustainable business practices.To meet both market and employee demand, 2020 will bring an increase in businesses that invest in sustainable business practices. And data centres, in particular, will be in the forefront as customers ask providers to rely more heavily on renewable energy sources to fuel their operations.

Expect density to be a major driver for businesses to look into solutions that enable them to rethink cooling and power consumption

AI, IoT and machine learning are set to change the world in so many ways. For the data centre industry, these new technologies are going to lead to rapidly increasing server densities. Already 451 Research has found that forty-five of companies expect average rack densities to increase to 11kW per rack. This is density is going to put enormous pressure on operations teams who will look to squeeze more out of existing floor space. Expect density to be a major driver for businesses to look into solutions that enable them to rethink cooling and power consumption in 2020. With tools like digital twins leading the way.

The advantages of liquid cooling have been known for a while. However, due to the high initial outlay and unwillingness to embrace new approaches it has failed to gain serious traction. However, with hyper scalers like Google, Alibaba and possibly Microsoft seriously looking and testing liquid cooling it seems that 2020 is its time to rise. Equally driving the take up of liquid cooling will be the growth of edge data centres. Offering better thermal management than air cooling, liquid cooling is set to help boost rack and server density. The challenge now will be bringing the costs down to a manageable level. But be in no doubt that 2020 will be a watershed moment for liquid cooling.

More:

The data centre in 2020: views of the industry - Techerati

The MHRD minister recently told in Lok Sabha that it has been deliberated to provide exit options to undergrad students pursuing engineering in IITs.

The Union Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD) has given a go-ahead to the Indian Institutes of Technology across the country to provide exit options for students who want to opt out of the course midway.

The move, can be understood as a plan to reduce the number of students dropping out of the premier technical education institutes. It will allow students pursuing BTech in IITs to switch to a BSc Engineering degree after the first two semesters if they are not able to keep up with the academic rigour needed for the BTech course. Union MHRD Minister Ramesh Pokhriyal stated that this proposal was up for discussion in a recent IIT Council meeting. The number of students dropped out of IITs in the last five years stood at a staggering 7,248, as per MHRD data.

The minister also added that apart from the IITs, the Indian Institutes of Information Technology (IIITs) have already been given permission to incorporate exit options, as per their convenience.

The draft of National Education Policy, which has been submitted to the Union Cabinet also had explored the possibility of offering flexible entry and exit points for students in higher education. Imaginative and exible curricular structures will enable creative combinations of disciplines for study, and would offer multiple useful entry and exit points, thus demolishing currently prevalent rigid boundaries and creating new possibilities for life-long learning, states the Cabinet draft of the NEP.

Overall a good move

The news of IITs possibly adopting to a new course structure with exit points has evoked diverse responses from stakeholders. While the intitial responses have been welcoming of the move, former students of the IITs and sector experts have flagged caveats in the policy, which, according to them, need more clarity.

Speaking to TNM, Neeraj Parthasarathy, an IIT Alumnus, says that the decision to offer exit option could be most helpful for those pursuing the integrated masters degree courses in IITs. This could help students pursuing integrated masters program at IITs but probably did not think through. They can take the exit option, go with bachelors degree and secure a job, he points out.

He also explains that such options could also help students who tend to figure out that their interests lie elsewhere during the course of their study. They get to take away a basic degree which can possibly help them in the long run, he explains.

Certifying skill levels of students necessary

However, sector experts have expressed concerns over the policy itself and stated that though it is a welcome announcement, it comes with caveats.

Ramachandran K, Head, Strategy of an online learning and Skilling company tells TNM that the MHRD needs to predefine the amount of skills to be imparted in every semester to ensure that the students who opt for exit option are equipped with something to get them jobs.

"If somebody is able to exhibit that the necessary skills have been accomplished and if the curriculum is modified accordingly, then it is great to have an exit option so that when he comes out, he at least has a certain level of mastery over certain things, which he otherwise would not have got," he explains, adding that the job of certifying that the candidate has the said skills must be taken up by the IITs so that the students are not viewed with skepticism in the job market.

Gig-based recruitment helps students

Gig economy refers to a job market in which the proportion of short-term contract work or freelance work is on the rise when compared with the rigid and conventional labour structure.

Placing emphasis on how, in the last three years companies have reduced reliance on educational degrees and have started to focus on the skill-set of the candidates while hiring, Ramachandran says that this move towards a gig economy is what will benefit the students who opt to exit.

In a more gig-based economy, if we are able to bring in skill-based curriculum and a way to exhibit and certify the skill level combined with the possibility of convincing the industry that the institutes have two kinds of people -- one with a certificate and one with no certificates but a set of skills which are certified by the institutes themselves, then I think this is a great concept," he added.

But, he also says that these policy ideas might not really materialise on the ground level since a lot of IITs have chosen to not provide exit options to students studying undergraduate and masters courses.

Stigma must be broken

Neeraj also mentions that while the policy is well-intended, it must ensure that students who choose to exit the courses are not viewed differently from others by potential employers.

This could benefit the students as they still do go out with a degree from a well known institution and can potentially help them land jobs. But my only concern being would this degree become some sort of a stigma? I hope this would be taken in a good way by recruiters (both on and off campus) as these guys have competed with the brightest minds of the country, he explains.

IITs on deliberation mode

Meanwhile, many IITs are still undecided on whether to jump on the bandwagon and alter their course structure based on the MHRD statement or not.

When TNM contacted IIT Madras, an official spokesperson responded that at present the institute offers exit options only for students pursuing their PhD, by which if they are unable to meet the necessary academic requirements, they can choose to exit with an MS degree. Any such policy decision will only be taken by Senate after due deliberations in (all) Departments and Board of academic courses. As on Tuesday, IIT Madras has not initiated any 'exit option' for B.Tech, Dual Degree, MSc, MA and MTech programs, the institute said.

Subrahmanyam, the Dean of Academic Program in IIT Hyderabad also told TNM that currently the institute offers exit option only to PhD scholars and that exit options for MTech students has not been discussed in its senate meetings.

The rest is here:

Exit option for IIT students: Experts welcome move but want stigma addressed - The News Minute

Profile, package and location. It is what a job offers on these three counts that matters, says Ayesha, a 27-year-old freshly minted management graduate. In June this year, she thought she had got all three when she landed herself a job at a leading aerospace company in Bengaluru. But it was not to be. "I joined as a programme manager but the project I was to be a part of was shelved, and here I was, far removed from what I was hired for."

Today, she is working in Mumbai at a leading private sector bank as a product manager. "It is a marketing job and I have to stretch myself, putting in 11 hours at work. Despite compromising on the location, this at least suits my profile requirements." But Ayesha (not her real name) is far from settled. In three years, she expects to move on from here as she says that location will matter yet again due to family compulsions.

While her quest for a happy career continues, Anirudh, 25, is getting his "exit plan" ready even before he joins a leading Indian company. "I need an exit plan as it is a great organisation but still a lala company. I may have to keep my options open." He is not enthused by his mother's plan to celebrate the start of his career.

A cursory look at LinkedIn profiles is enough to realise that the young are switching jobs faster than any time in history. A global study on multi-generation workforce management conducted by the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) has found that on an average, Gen Z (born after 1995) professionals are likely to switch jobs 15 times during their career in comparison to their grandparents, who changed jobs only four times in their career. Achal Khanna, CEO, SHRM India and Business Head, APAC & MENA, says, "This is a reality today." Giving the India numbers, T. Muralidharan, Chairman of HR services firm TMI Group, says, "On a like-to-like basis (same sector, function and job role), the residency period (time between joining and leaving) within an organisation has clearly come down by 25-30 per cent in the last decade." He has concluded this from the three lakh resumes that his firm sees every year.

As employee retention becomes a growing challenge, companies are finding cures with a number of old and new antidotes. From engaging more deeply with employees, opening up communication channels wider and seeking new ways to align their business interests with the aspirations of the current day talent to reviewing hiring, reward and recognition metrics and allowing employee self-growth, the companies are doing everything they can to find win-win solutions for their own as well as their employees' growth.

The question is - can all this work, considering that the nature of jobs itself has changed (high prevalence of project-based and gig work), as has the nature of employees (younger, looking for faster growth and fewer things to tie them up in one place)?

Honing Hour

"It is important to satiate the need of the young to learn more. In October last year (2018), we started an Invest-in-Yourself-Hour (9.30 am to 10.30 am) that people use to learn and get better at what they do," says C.K. Ranganathan, Chairman and Managing Director of CavinKare. After a pilot, it is being rolled out across 30 per cent of the organisation. The aim to cover the entire company in the next year or two to reach between 550 and 600 employees (other than the field force, which is trained separately). At frequent intervals, the company asks people to give presentations on what they have learnt and how they can deploy this new knowledge. In April this year, the company restated its values and to the "core pillars" of ethical behaviour, innovation, excellence and ownership added 'openness' and 'thinking big.' Over the last three years, it has also put in a system to ensure exposure and freedom of expression. Ranganathan says a range of people, from formulators to packaging people, participate in business review meetings. "All of these have brought down our attrition level to almost half of what it was three years ago." Now, efforts are on to look at peer mentoring, he says.

Hiring Metrics

Hiring policies have a key role to play. "We hire from leading business schools but look for attitude and not domain knowledge," says Ranganathan. The key is emotional quotient that covers both managing self and others. A 'can do' attitude, perseverance, motivation and empathy matter, so does the ability to handle rejection.

These issues have bothered many industry veterans and management thinkers. "An engaged employee who is coached, mentored and given the right job will deliver outstanding results and that is how the company triggers a virtuous cycle and grows," says S. Sivakumar, Head of agri and IT businesses at ITC. Seeing it as a subject that has got the attention of management gurus, he refers to the work of Sumantra Ghoshal and Lynda Gratton nearly two decades ago and his own conversations with Ghoshal. He says much of ITC's approach is in tune with the three elements of human capital the two gurus talked about - intellectual capital, social capital and emotional capital. At ITC, he says, the focus is on all three areas - be it building intellectual capital or skills, tools, techniques and ability to solve managerial problems; social capital, where an employee is encouraged to build and harness his or her social network; and finally, emotional capital, building, among other things, a bias for action. Sivakumar says the concept of loyalty today is not really about staying with a company but more about the extent to which a person sees his or her human capital getting enhanced.

Expansion of job bandwidth can play a crucial role in motivating employees. He gives an example from the agri business. "Someone into buying agri commodities in one state could become a manager covering activities beyond commodities, including rural marketing and financial services and, eventually, grow into a regional head role leading multiple branches." While this may happen in other companies too, a growing organisation such as ITC creates many more such opportunities, he says. And while ITC is a behemoth spread across businesses, he says, "We are far more entrepreneurial than others of this size." In fact, he says, the company believes in professional entrepreneurs and also has a term for it - "Proneurs", involved in each business and its start-up initiatives. "At any given point in time, there would be about 200 such start-ups at ITC, and this has been a growing trend over the years," he says.

So, has all this lowered attrition? "On a like-to-like basis, our attrition will be at about 70 per cent of the average industry attrition in the peer group in the different industries that we operate. However, I must add that relative attrition is higher than in the past, say 10-15 years ago, but is still better than others."

To R. Anandakrishnan, Executive Vice President, HR & IT, TVS Motor Company, "It is all about career development of people and that alone will help people stay in an organisation." It is about the kind of learning they can get by working in multiple areas. The idea is to align interests of the individual with that of the business. What about attrition? "Our attrition levels are no more than 5.5 to 6 per cent."

"Talent management will always be a work in progress and evolving. In keeping with this, TVS Motor has put in place a series of measures, including a five-day week since April, greater focus on diversity, moving people around for greater all-round growth, and sponsor higher studies in some cases."

The Company Story

Manu N. Wadhwa, Chief Human Resource Officer (CHRO) at Sony Pictures Networks India, says high mobility is usually seen among the new recruits. If five years ago, the usual tenure was five-seven years, it is now two-three years. Sony Pictures, which she joined from Coke in April, has been alive to this and has started several initiatives to become an organisation people would love to join. For instance, it has opted for an agile POD format where people with skill sets that complement each other are put together for a task, and at the end of the project, the team is not dismantled but is allotted to yet another project. Here, people come together to work on business solutions - such as dealing with the new tariff order which was released in April this year - rather than focus only on issues of their respective departments. Also, she says, collaboration is the new mantra. The company has also launched a new performance management system that is more about continuous discussion and dialogue. Earlier this year, it put in place a programme to facilitate co-creation of strategy wherein people from different functions work on critical priorities. When asked what makes senior leaders like herself move, she says the key reasons for job change in her case have centered around learning and opportunity to solve new and complex problems while operating at scale. This has made her work with companies like GE, American Express, Coke and, now, Sony.

There is a sector component too, says Balaji Uppala, a former student of IIM-A. In consulting, for instance, he points to an "Up-or-out" environment as most expect a jump every two years.

"Building loyalty is a two-way street," says S. Ramnarayan, Professor at Indian School of Business and expert on organisational behaviour. Giving examples of players such as the Rs 2,000 crore Chennai-based FMCG player CavinKare to construction behemoth L&T, he says there are a host of things that companies can do to ensure that the employee is engaged. Critical to these efforts is creating an environment of trust and keeping channels of communication open. "Conversations with new recruits on what they expect and the drivers that go into analysing their individual performance are very important," says the professor.

"You have to pay the market price and need not wait for year-end review to reward high performance," says Ranganathan of CavinKare. This, he says, is as important as the other aspects, especially employee self-growth.

Digital Dive, New Ways

With the nature of work changing - as companies depend more on gig workers and project-based work and take their businesses on the digital route - the challenges can only rise. "The danger lies in keeping the focus more on digital rather than leading and transformation," says S. Ramnarayan, cautioning that while digital teams getting higher compensation may be the new workplace reality, perhaps because of short talent supply, it is important that adequate investment is made to ensure that enough is done for proper integration between digital and business units.

What about the new ways of doing business that the companies are adopting and the new kinds of work that is getting created as a result? Arun Sundararajan, professor at New Yorks NYU Stern School of Business and author of the book "The Sharing Economy- The End of Employment and the Rise of Crowd-Based Capitalism", says, "Full-time employment is still an excellent work arrangement in many contexts, and I expect it will continue to be a dominant work arrangement for many years. Thus, the core group of an organisation will not shrink excessively." However, the role of managers will shift and expand, he says. "Managers in the future will need much greater expertise in project management and design thinking to successfully orchestrate teams with mixed work arrangements. Thinking like an entrepreneur will be another advantageous capability."

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Taming the Job Hopper - Business Today

Prof OTLOGETSWE TOTOLO

I am honoured to be standing before you this morning on this auspicious occasion to welcome you to the 2019 BIUST Graduation Ceremony, the fourth of its kind since the establishment of this University. Allow me to welcome you to this unique campus of the Botswana International University of Science and Technology (BIUST) as the host to the Class of 2019. Although my task is quite simple, I will ensure that before I retire to my seat, you appreciate a few things about the distinct DNA of BIUST graduates, where they are and what they do to transform our communities.

Distinguished Guests, I am very proud of the BIUST Students, as they continue to raise the Botswana flag high. They always top in national and international competitions. Just recently, a team of five engineering and technology students participated in the Makeathon competitions spearheaded by the German Mechanical Engineering Industry Association (VGMA) to develop a solar powered electric car prototype. BIUST technical team played an instrumental role in the development of this prototype. This is a demonstration that we have the right technical skills and know-how to open investment avenues in Botswana and construct a solar powered electric car prototype. The team from BIUST had partnered with other tertiary institutions in the design and delivery of a mobile electric car. I accord them special recognition! This prototype speaks volumes and has amplified our ambitions of being a global player in the era of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Some of our graduating students played an important role to achieve this dream.

Distinguished Guests Academic quality and the maintenance of high academic standards is the main currency of the University on which it builds its reputation and its long term future. Students who are key stakeholders have a legitimate expectation that their qualifications will be recognised and be held in high esteem in Botswana and internationally. In December 2018 the University was registered as a Higher Education Training Provider by the Botswana Qualifications Authroity (BQA). Substantial progress was made in preparing the academic programme portfolio which will pave the way for the registration of its programmes on the National Credit and Qualifications Framework (NCQF) and subsequently to receive recognition by the Engineering Registration Board (ERB) and international accreditation by the Engineering Council of South Africa (ECSA).

Equally important is to ensure the universitys academic programmes are aligned to the needs of the national economy as well as being able to make a unique contribution internationally. Student employability is a key indicator of the relevance of the Universitys academic programmes. The University undertook its second Graduate Destination Survey in November 2018 to establish the outcomes of the second cohort of students that had graduated at the second graduation ceremony held on February 18th 2018. Six months after graduation, 45% were employed; 19% were pursuing further studies, 2% were self-employed and 34% were actively seeking employment/further studies.

The success of BIUST will ultimately depend on the formative experiences and quality of student life experiences that are provided throughout the campus. During 2018/19, the University made progress in implementing the Student Services Standards for Tertiary Education in Botswana (HRDC: 2017). The overall efficiency and effectiveness of the services provided to students was enhanced and the following key areas of student life have received particular attention: (1) Personal Counselling and Support; (2) Health and Wellness; (3) Residence Life; and (4) Special Needs Services.

Moving on to the theme for this graduation, which is dubbed Harnessing Innovative technologies, entrepreneurship in pursuit of a knowledge based economy, I have deliberately invited the Guest Speaker, Dr. Tiro Mampane, the President and Founder of Boitekanelo College, with the sole purpose of injecting and motivating the Class of 2019 graduates with the panacea for business entrepreneurship to take the right steps towards transforming the economy from a resource-based to a knowledge-based economy. I trust he will propel our thinking to the audience that business entrepreneurship is the way to go towards actualizing sciences, engineering and technology in the new market frontiers.

Ladies and gentlemen, I want to encourage graduands to position themselves to create business ventures in 2020 and beyond, commercialise their technologies, create employment, and partner with strategic financiers for project financing in line with governments development plans. Do not be left behind, you have what it takes.

I would also like to take this opportunity to introduce and congratulate our new Chairman of the BIUST Council, Mr. Balisi Bonyongo who was appointed in June this year. This is his first graduation ceremony at BIUST and he will, on behalf of our Chancellor, and the third President of the Republic of Botswana, His Excellency, Dr. Festus Gontebanye Mogae, confer degrees to 390 graduands in Bachelor of Sciences, Bachelor of Engineering, Masters and PhD from different academic disciplines as follows:

a) 275 graduands in the Faculty of Engineering and Technology consisting of 272 Bachelor of Engineering and three Masters of Engineering; and

b) 115 graduands in the Faculty of Sciences, consisting of 105 Bachelor of Sciences , seven Master of Sciences and three Doctor of Philosophy.

This is a tremendous growth compared to the previous years where:

1. in Feb 2018/19 we graduated 267; being four Doctorates, 31 Masters and 232 Bachelors degrees;

2. in 2017/18, we graduated a total of 224 graduates; being; three doctorates, 63 Masters and 158 bachelors; and

3. In the inaugural graduation of 2016/17, we graduated a total of 58 being; and 51 Bachelors and seven Masters.

I stand proud to announce that the conferment of degrees to the Class of 2019, brings honour and renewed hope to Graduands and Parents as we inject a fresh breed of skills in industry who will join various sectors of the economy, being mining, water, engineering, telecommunications, finance, business and laboratory, ICT and banking industries in the quest to find solutions to community challenges!

BIUST is forever indebted to the Botswana Government for the financial support. The Government has generously agreed to sponsor seven projects under the National Development Plan (NDP) 11. These being the construction of the new state of the art Library building, Student Centre, the new Dining Hall and the expansion of the two main Faculty classrooms and research laboratories, data centres, and the auditorium. These projects are taking shape to match the ever evolving demand for services as the University expands in pursuit of excellence and knowledge in the fourth industrial revolution being.

I would also like to thank the BIUST Council for their unwavering support to this institution. To the academic staff who produced these graduands, we are proud for your mentorship and guidance, as well as support staff for their administrative support, and the organising committee who worked tirelessly towards the success of this ceremony.

This Graduation brings together local, regional and international experts and industry players in science, technology engineering and our respective parents and guardians under one roof, to witness the rewards of hard work and perseverance in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) driven institution. As we celebrate this success - we are not alone, fifteen (15) of our graduands will be bestowed excellence Awards from respective sponsors whom I sincerely welcome and salute for their enormous contribution. I would like to mention that Stanbic Bank, Debswana, Botswana Communications Regulatory Authority, Morupule Coal Mine and many more sponsors as highlighted in the Graduation Booklet have played an instrumental role in making this event a success. This is a clear demonstration of university and industry partnership. This graduation would not have been a beckoning success without their financial contribution.

Parents, ladies and gentlemen, I also wish to share with you that BIUST through its research, is in the process of patenting two (2) research projects being the BIUST Farmhouse and the BIUST Smart house which are very relevant to monitoring livestock remotely and conserving energy respectively. We will in the near future announce the launch the BIUST soap made from waste oil and tallow from our Abattoir in Lobatse, as well as coal beneficiation from Morupule Coal Mine for asphalt and oil as by products.

Other successes I want to celebrate openly alongside this graduation are Research Performance.

Per Capita Output :0.91

Weighted Citation Impact:0.89

Research publication per academic staff stands at 0.6

Total External Research Funds Received from 1st April, to 31st March 2019. BWP 4,190,838.90 (0.85%) of Total University Revenue (BWP489,932, 424.37).

We continue to partner and engage with various players in the academic and industry space to enhance our research efforts. To this end, I am delighted to announce that we are hosting the International Funders Conference to be held in May 2020, the first of its kind which will provide a platform for researchers to share their research objectives and achievements, as well as for the funders to share information on funding procedures and requirements. We are hopeful this will intensify research and improve our research performance.

BIUST is proud to play its role in not only equipping its students with knowledge and skills but also instil skills required of them to assume more proactive roles towards transforming Botswanas economy from resource-based to knowledge-based and the one that embraces the positive potential of the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

*WELCOME REMARKS AT THE CLASS OF 2019 GRADUATION CEREMONY AT BIUST IN PALAPYE, BOTSWANA ON SATURDAY 30th NOV 2019

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'In pursuit of a knowledge based economy' - The Patriot On Sunday

The Government Accountability Offices new technology assessment team published a handbook explaining its processes and providing a resource to other federal agenciesor any organizationtrying to figure out whether a technology is right for its mission needs.

The Technology Assessment Design Handbook was published by GAOs new Science, Technology Assessment, and Analytics Office, a team established to look at emerging technologies and provide unbiased information to Congress and other government leaders. As part of its work, the STAA Office looks at a range of issues around budding technologies, including how their uses can and will affect society; the risks and benefits of implementing those technologies; the status, viability and maturity; and any planned or ongoing federal investments.

GAO has defined [technology assessment] as the thorough and balanced analysis of significant primary, secondary, indirect and delayed interactions of a technological innovation with society, the environment and the economy and the present and foreseen consequences and impacts of those interactions, the handbook reads. The effects of those interactions can have implications.

For GAOand anyone else trying to determine whether a technology would help or hamper their effortsthe first step is developing a hard design plan and getting that down on paper.

Data collection and quality assurance of data can be costly and time-consuming, the handbook states. A thorough consideration of design options can ensure that collection and analysis of the data are relevant, sufficient, and appropriate to answer the researchable question(s), and helps to mitigate the risk of collecting unnecessary evidence and incurring additional costs.

The handbook breaks the process down into three phases.

Phase 1: Determine the Scope

Perform the initial situational analysis to level-set, then determine the scope; goals, purpose and objectives; the problem; and any existing policies that apply. During this phase, assessors should consider what is known and not known about the technology.

The GAO team also suggests this is the time to reach out to potential stakeholders, both inside and outside the organization.

Phase 2: Develop Initial Design

During this phase, assessors should put the design framework down on paper, review it with stakeholders and solidify the initial design for the review.

By this point in the process, the review teams should have an appropriate design, methodology and analytical approach; identify available data sources or need to gather data; determine possible policy goals and how they might be analyzed.

Phase 3: Implementation of Design

The final phase includes implementing the review as designed while being willing to modify the plan as needed.

The handbook offers a detailed breakdown for each phase, including example questions and objectives to help assessors hone the design and approach to glean the most useful insights.

The team also looked at the biggest challenges to producing a useful assessment, such as explaining complicated topics in easy-to-understand language and avoiding bias, either from the team itself or from stakeholders with specific agendas.

GAO stressed that this handbook is a loose guide to developing an assessment.

While [the handbook] presents TA design as a series of phases, actual execution is highly iterative and nonlinear, they wrote. Teams may need to be prepared to revisit design decisions as information is gathered or circumstances change.

No matter the scope or design, GAO offered seven questions to help determine whether the assessment will be useful:

GAO also pushed the handbook as a living document and is actively looking for comments and feedback.

Given that GAO is likely to learn from its current expansion of TA work, GAO will review and update this draft handbook as needed, based on experience gained through ongoing TA activities and external feedback, the handbook reads. The team is accepting comments for one year through the email address TAhandbook@gao.gov.

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GAO Handbook Helps Answer Whether That New Tech Is Right For Your Agency - Nextgov

For three years, Jordan, one of the Middle Easts smallest economies, has pursued an austerity programme as the resource-scarce kingdom faces the twin challenges of dealing with a high debt burden and hosting more than one million refugees.

Now, the country, which has historically relied of foreign aid and grants to finance its budget, has rolled out a stimulus package that pivots to a new growth-focused policy that seeks to revive the economy.

The most difficult reforms are behind us and the promising future lies ahead, King Abdullah II said in his opening speech to parliament last month, heralding in the governments new approach.

In response to growth dipping below 2 per cent this year and unemployment reaching 19.2 per cent in the second quarter of 2019, according to the World Bank, the government has introduced over the last month a multiphase package designed to stimulate industry, investment, real estate, job creation and exports.

As part of the measures, the Jordanian government has issued a guarantee that tax incentives and regulations agreed with external investors will be locked for a 10-year period and not be subject to change a welcome relief those who say investment policy has changed abruptly with the carousel of seven governments over the past nine years.

To bolster industry, which accounts for 20 per cent of Jordans GDP, the government lowered electricity tariffs for the sector by 0.01 Jordanian dinars (Dh0.05) per kilowatt-hour, from 0.085 dinars per kW/h to 0.075 dinars, out of recognition that energy costs now account for 40 per cent of production costs.

The government also lowered income tax on small and medium enterprises to 17 per cent, from 20 per cent.

In a bid to wean the country off its reliance on an estimated 900,000 guest workers, the cabinet also introduced an incentive worth 240 dinars for every foreign worker replaced with a Jordanian.

The growth-focused package also turned to real estate, a sector which has witnessed a 20 per cent downturn in 2019, by waiving property registration and transfer fees for first-time homebuyers and reducing such fees on all transactions by 50 per cent until the end of the year.

To help consumers, the government gave public sector employees their first salary raise in a decade, increasing payments to government employees and civil and military retirees by an average of 20 dinars per month.

The stimulus package has been costly. The incentives are expected to add an estimated 300 million dinars to Jordan's budget deficit, pushing it to 1.2 billion billion dinars for 2020 at a time when Amman is attempting to cut public debt. It is also negotiating the renewal of a three-year credit line from the Washington-based lender worth $713 million (Dh2.6bn).

Yet the government is billing the stimulus as an investment to grow the Jordanian economy".

There are already early signs of success; after 10 months of downward returns, the real estate sector witnessed a 90 per cent year-on-year increase in transactions in November 2019.

Analysts have particularly praised the governments assurances to local and international investors, some of whom were heading to more attractive environments in nearby Turkey and Egypt.

This gives investors confidence that the government wont change the policy suddenly when the government itself changes in two years, says Zayyan Zawaneh, economic analyst and former adviser to the governor of the Central Bank of Jordan.

The IMF has agreed with the Jordanian government that the priorities for the coming years are to maintain economic stability, boost growth, create jobs and strengthen social protection, as it continues talks for a new three-year funding deal, citing the kingdoms important progress in maintaining economic and financial stability.

Yet economists and business leaders question whether the stimulus package represents the deep shift in economic policy needed to stimulate growth and bolster government revenue in the medium to long-term.

After seven years of IMF policy, we did not secure economic growth as expected growth remains at 2 per cent and it is time for the government to realise it is time for a new approach, says Jawad Anani, former royal court chief who served as deputy prime minister for economic affairs from 2016-17.

The total preoccupation with the budget deficit made the government budget-focused to the point where it became growth-blind, he said.

Amman Chamber of Industry points out that many of the reductions are a return to the status quo two years ago, but may not necessarily be enough to revive certain sectors.

This is one positive step in the right direction no government has ever introduced a stimulus package before but we need more than a status quo, we need to address fuel costs, energy, and accessing markets, says Musa Saket, vice chairman of the Amman Chamber of Industry and an economic analyst.

The largest obstacle in Jordanian economic policy, analysts and business leaders agree, is its continued reliance on sales tax for the bulk of its revenue.

Currently 65 per cent of all government tax receipts, and half of its total revenue, comes from sales tax.

In comparison, despite recent increases, income tax accounts for 20 per cent of tax revenue and 16 per cent of overall government revenue.

Analysts say the reliance on sales tax has left the government vulnerable to local market volatility.

The problem is, when the market declines or purchasing power declines, government revenues decline, says Mr Zawwaneh, the economist. This is what is happening right now.

The average Jordanian citizen pays 26 per cent of his or her income in taxes according to government statistics released last year, but wages have remained largely stagnant over most of the past decade, while various developments such as rising energy prices and the influx of over one million Syrian refugees has seen prices rise across all sectors.

We are glad to get a raise, yes, but it is not commensurate with the cost of living, said Murad Munir, a government clerk in Amman, who saw his salary increase by 20 dinars, to 420 dinars a month.

If the government lowers sales tax or reviews the tax system so those at the top pay more, that will be a true relief for us.

The Amman Chamber of Industry and the Jordan Chamber of Commerce say that by being required to pay sales tax to the government up front each year before a single commercial transaction is made, capital and liquidity are tied up, preventing small and medium enterprises from expanding.

The Jordan Chamber of Commerce has also urged the government to amend a system which requires importers and traders to pay not only customs fees based on the value and classification of goods, but also a separate fixed 5 per cent customs fee and an additional 6 per cent customs declaration fee on each shipment.

The commercial sector says it has carried a disproportionate burden of austerity measures; The Jordan Chamber of Commerce says that SMEs in the non-industrial and non-financial sectors now pay 3 billion dinars each year in sales tax directly to the government, 780 million dinars in income tax and 265 million dinars in customs tax.

Mohammed Awad once sold Turkish-made mens and womens clothing under a now-defunct free trade agreement between Amman and Ankara and now imports overstock and irregular apparel sold in bulk from the US, UK and Europe. He says he is struggling to sell imports at cost prices.

The government has provided a few incentives to foreign investors and large industries but the shopkeeper like me are waiting for our turn, says Mr. Awad

Razzaz has pledged that the government will crack down on tax evasion, and will work on tightening loopholes for income tax dodging as well as reviewing the entire tax system in the months ahead.

We Jordanians have been used to economic dark days, Mr. Awad says as he gestures to his unlit Amman storefront. We are waiting and hoping to see the sun.

Updated: December 8, 2019 09:19 PM

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Jordan looks to grow its way out of economic hardship - The National

The chapter in Latin American history that opened in 1998 with celebrations in Venezuela has ended with a coup and violence in Bolivia. As with all tidal waves, the pink tide recedes to reveal a terrain transformed. The left movement landscape that produced variously striped socialist governments in a dozen countries is fractured and disillusioned. Central and South America face a resurgent right and the return of austerity, often through a scrim of tear gas. This state of disarray also marks the continents literal terrain: the forests and mountains cleared and ripped open, their minerals and hydrocarbons sent to port and shipped abroad in the name of a socialist project whose achievements have proven fragile, temporary, and superficial.

Global concern about the future of the Amazon has understandably focused of late on Brazil, where President Jair Bolsonaro has accelerated the destruction of the rainforest with fascistic glee. But beneath that regimes chilling contempt for nature as anything but a store of resources to be harvested lies an unsettling truth: Its agenda of unrestrained extraction represents a difference of degree and style, rather than kind, from the one embraced by every major Amazonian country of the past two decades. This includes the pink-tide governments of Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Brazil, which promoted mining, oil, and industrial agriculture as earnestly as their neoliberal counterparts in Peru and Colombia.

To scrutinize this legacy is not to dismiss the social gains it made possible, however briefly. These gains were real and in some cases striking. New state spending on health, education, and block grant programs improved the lives of many millions of people in a region defined by gross inequality and deep endemic poverty. And yet, as many observed from the beginning, these gains could only be ephemeral, based as they were on the budgetary sugar highs of a unique, decadelong commodities boom driven by China and, to a lesser degree, India. Even before mineral and oil prices began declining in 2012, the coalitions behind many pink-tide governments began to crack under the contradictions and trade-offs of what the Uruguayan social scientist Eduardo Gudynas, an early and influential pink-tide critic on the left, called neo-extractivism. This version of extractivism, it turned out, though defended from palace balconies under the banners of socialism and anti-imperialism, was not so different from the model practiced by centuries of colonial, military, and neoliberal rule. Its main innovation was to negotiate bigger cuts on growing exports of primary resources.

The Esperanca IV informal gold mining camp, near the Menkragnoti Indigenous territory, in Para state, Brazil, on Aug. 28, 2019.

Photo: Joao Laet/AFP via Getty Images

The proceeds of the extra percentage points accomplished much good while they lasted. They also obscured the failure to advance a democratic left project to challenge five centuries of systemic despoilment, dispossession, and dependence. Neo-extractivism enabled important forms of socio-economic inclusion and political empowerment for the masses while simultaneously undermining more radical transformations, concludes Thea Riofrancos in Resource Radicals, her forthcoming study of the politics of pink-tide extractivism.

In both Bolivia and Brazil, the forests are in flames.

In place of these more radical transformations, neo-extractivism accelerated the cycle of destruction required of the regions historical role in the global economy. The political and ecological consequences of this were starkest in the rainforests, dry forests, and the western cordilleras that are the fountains of the Amazon system. As mining and oil auctions multiplied, the pink-tide coalitions of urban workers, small farmers, and Indigenous people broke apart.

Left or right, the ideology is the same: Steal our land and destroy the environment, said Jos Gregorio Daz Mirabal, the Venezuelan coordinator for the federation of Amazonian indigenous organizations, or COICA. In both Bolivia and Brazil, the forests are in flames.

Reckoning with this history takes place, as does everything now, in the light of the climate crisis. Because extractivism dooms the Amazon rainforest, a biome central to any conceivable resolution to this crisis, a new Latin American left will have to reject it.

This idea isnt new. Debates over how Latin America might stitch its veins and build alternatives to a Western development model based on commodity exports were central to the firmament of social movements that pink-tide parties rode to power. During the 1990s, activists, scholars, and political figures from the region engaged in searching critiques of globalization and the extractivist trap. Before Hugo Chvez heralded the arrival of anti-imperialist resource nationalism, securing Venezuelas stature and funding anti-poverty programs with oil receipts and mining projects in the countrys south, the most inspirational figures on the Latin and global left were the Zapatistas in southern Mexico, who demanded a world wheremany worldsfit. In hundreds of gatherings in villages and capital cities of which the World Social Forum was only the largest the rainbow flags of newly politicized Indigenous groups mixed with socialist and Bolivarian symbols in debates over how to build a new Latin America, one that would be socially just and ecologically wise.

About 30,000 people gather in Porto Alegre, Brazil, on Jan. 31, 2002 for a march to officially inaugurate the five-day World Social Forum.

Photo: Douglas Engle/AP

The new thinking found its fullest expression in the concept of buen vivir. As an organizing political principle or ideology, living well is a kind of fusionof Indigenous and Western ideas about limits, solidarity, the sources of human happiness, and the balance of nature. It connotes a strong critique of the market, short-term thinking, materialism, and exploitation of people and the environment. It has been promoted and embraced by governments in Cuba, Venezuela, Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay, and Peru, but is most closely associated with Bolivia and Ecuador. Former presidents Evo Morales and Rafael Correa campaigned on buen vivir platforms and enshrined the concept in their respective pink-tide constitutions.

The use of Indigenous symbols and ideas had become cheap when I met Alberto Acosta at a protest march in the southern Ecuadorean city of Zamora in late 2012. A tall economist with a somewhat severe bearing, Acosta served as Correas first minister of energy and mining and chaired the convention that made global headlines for its inclusion of buen vivir and its kin, the rights of nature, in the 2008 constitution. Three years later, Acosta had left the government and since beenchairing different kinds of conferences, such as Social Movements for Democracy and Life, convened to organize left opposition to Correa and pink tide neo-extractivism.

On the morning I interviewed him, he spoke while marching behind the banner of seven allied left parties that had quit or been founded in opposition to Correas Unity coalition. There is nothing new in Correas development plan, he told me. He cites the dependency school theorists, but his idea is the same center-periphery economic model ofexporting raw materials. He has replaced Uncle Sam with Uncle Chen China to sustain his social programs and political position at the expense of real development. We resist this model just as we resisted neoliberalism.

Because extractivism dooms the Amazon rainforest, a new Latin American left will have to reject it.

I was in Ecuador at the time reporting a story that illustrated the critique. Correas government had approved plans for an open-pit copper and gold mega-mine in the Cordillera del Cndor, an important biological hotspot, species corridor, and watershed in the northwestern Amazon that was home to thousands of Indigenous people, mostly Shuar, and mestizo farmers. The mine, then in the early stages of construction by a Chinese conglomerate called ECSA, was already displacing communities; when completed, it would displace many more and pollute the land and water of anyone who remained. Correa criminalized opposition to the project and attacked his critics as imperialist stooges and agents. In Quito, a campaigner with the NGO Clnica Ambiental showed me the names of hundreds of activists who were in prison or facing jail time. Because Correa represents the left, opposing him opens you up to the charge of supporting the old regime that bankrupted everyone. But hes proven himself a neoliberal with redistributive touches. Hes avoided pacts with the U.S. but sold the country to China.

In Bolivia, a softer version of the same dynamic had begun to play out by 2012. The Morales governments expansion of mining and industrial agriculture had caused early defections from key figures in the social movements forged during the so-called water and gaswarsof the early 2000s before propelling Morales to power. The big break came in 2011, when Morales announced plans to build a 185-mile highway through the primary rainforests of the Isiboro Scure Indigenous Territory. The government claimed that its purpose was to provide better social services to remote villages, but Bolivias Indigenous groups correctly understood the highway as part of a longer-term project to industrialize the lowland forests, eventually connecting them to the Amazon-wide transport grid found in the planning documents of a Brazil-led super-project called the Initiative for the Integration of Regional Infrastructure of South America, or IIRSA. (The highway is funded by the Brazilian Development Bank and tracks closely to land where the Brazilian oil giant Petrobras holds exploration rights.) As resistance spread, Morales raided the offices of Indigenous groups that opposed the highway and forcefully replaced the leaders with loyalists. He publicly accused his critics, including the longtime president of the Confederation of Indigenous Peoples of Bolivia, Adolfo Chvez, of being agents of USAID the U.S. Agency for International Development and charged them with serious crimes. They went into hiding until the countrys Supreme Court reversed the charges.

From left, Venezuelas President Hugo Chvez, Bolivias President Evo Morales, and Ecuadors President Rafael Correa arrive for a military parade commemorating the 200th anniversary of the beginning of Bolivias independence movement in La Paz on July 16, 2009.

Photo: Patricio Crooker/AP

We supported Morales and Correa because the left parties promised to respect our rights, but they broke the promises and weakened our organizations, Chvez told me recently. We had a coherent plan to help the government build sustainable industries that would protect the forests and rivers. The patterns never changed. Were still subject to transnationals that have relationships with the left and right parties equally.

It wasnt just the self-declared Bolivarian pink-tide countries that embraced neo-extractivism. In Brazil, the Workers Party governments of Luiz Incio Lula da Silva and Dilma Rousseff strengthened protections on large areas of the Amazon while also embracing the long-term vision of IIRSA: a region dotted with dams to power mining operations and connected by roads and railways to facilitate the widening flow of raw materials to ports on the Atlantic and Pacific coasts. Under both administrations, mining expanded throughout the country, including in the Amazon. But it was another, more quiet expansion that likely had the biggest climate impact: The green desert of industrial agriculture continued to consume the remaining dry forests and savannas of the Cerrado, a once-massive but rapidly disappearing carbon sink that sprawls across a half-dozen states in Brazils central plateau.

The challenge facing a transformational post-extractivist left is daunting. To take and maintain power, it will have to answer Correas charge that proponents of post-extractivism want the continents poor to live like beggars on a sack of gold. It will need a vision and plan to solve the riddle posed by the left academic and Correa critic Pablo Ospina Peralta: How do you revolutionize the economy when the government depends on the health of the economy that it seeks to revolutionize?

Whatever the specifics of the answer, the case will benefit from the failures of centuries of extractivism. Latin America, where the gated community was conceived, is the most unequal region in the world, with deep structural poverty increasingly compounded by pollution and the effects of the climate crisis. That these issues can be potently paired was visible last month on the streets of Quito, Ecuador. Following an 11-day strike in protest of an announced austerity package, President Lenin Moreno, who succeeded Correa in 2017, relented to meeting with Indigenous leaders who led street protests inopposition to proposed social cuts and labor reforms and an end to oil drilling and mining in the Amazon. In Chile, where the devastation caused by decades of wanton mining has become impossible to ignore, urban protesters are waving Mapuche flags, whose colorful buen vivir symbolism depicts Indigenous blood, the earth, the sun, snow-capped mountains, and hope.

Latin America holds nearly half of the worlds copper and silver, a quarter of its nickel and bauxite, and stores of the rare earths and metals used in computers, solar panels, and next-gen fuel cells.

Something is stirring up, said Arturo Escobar, the Colombian-American scholar whose 1995 book,Encountering Development, gave shape to emerging debates about development and growth. There are visibly growing fissures in the ruling political, economic, and development model consensus, including the commodities consensus of the 2000s and 2010s that caused massive ecological devastation. People are again talking abouta civilizational crisis, which in the best cases leads to thepossibility ofa new epoch that questions the old assumptions and moves towards a politics of buen vivir more communitarian, ecological, and spiritual in orientation.

That a movement could emerge to build a new social order that satisfies human needs, while protecting and regenerating the rivers and forests, may seem far-fetched. But it is no more unrealistic than believing that an economy based on consumption and growth can ever achieve ecological equilibrium.

Dredgers on the Madre de Dios River in Tacana Indigenous territory, near La Paz, Bolivia, on Aug. 31, 2019.

Photo: Ernesto Benavides/AFP via Getty Images

The chances of such a movement succeeding will depend on the success of allied movements elsewhere. Commodity markets have written much of Latin American history, and global demand for raw materials will continue to exert a powerful influence. This will be true even in a greened version of the current system. A global shift away from fossil fuels would spare the Amazon further devastation from oil and gas development, but not from being cleared for monocrops or ripped apart in search of rare earth metals to build solar-charged, annually updated iPhones and the latest all-electricperformance SUV from Jaguar. A growth-based system running on a decarbonized grid will still require massive inputs of the primary materials found in the soils and rock of the nine Amazonian countries. Latin America holds nearly half of the worlds copper and silver, a quarter of its nickel and bauxite (aluminum), and dispersed stores of the rare earths and technology metals used in computers, solar panels, and next-gen fuel cells. In a recent article on Bolivias lithium industry for the New Republic, Intercept contributor Kate Aronoff notes that powering the current economy with renewables would consume the worlds lithium reserves in a very short amount of time. Trying to maintain a green version of global consumer society could lead to a scramble for rare metals to make previous waves of extractivism look gentle by comparison.

If Latin America refused to open its veins for these resources, it would end its role as global resource bank, which began nonconsensually with the 16th-century slave economies that loaded European ships with gold, silver, and sugar. There are small precedents for such a refusal. El Salvador banned all metal miningin 2017to protect its water. Costa Rica has long enforced a limited mining ban. In every country where mining is rampant, movements are organizing behind post-extractivist agendas guided by the ecosocialist values of buen vivir.

Indigenous groups are only part of this project, but they are at the front and play a unique role. They bring a living knowledge of alternatives and are the ones threatened most directly with extinction. One of the most prominent Indigenous voices for a different course is Juan Carlos Jintiach, COICAs coordinator for economic planning and often the only Indigenous voice in the room at settings such as the Convention on Biological Diversity, the United Nations, and the World Bank. He is neither naive nor resigned, but focused on the pregnancies of the moments overlapping emergencies.

This is a confusing and risky time, said Jintiach. It requires social mobilizations that transcend left and right and connect us to each other and the land. Buen vivir contains the concepts, but its a language the other society doesnt always understand. Were building alliances to show there is another way. Its not our fight, its everyones. Right now, there is a storm, a bad storm. But the moment we wake up, well see the sky.

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A New Left in Latin America Will Have to Reject Extractivism - The Intercept

]]> Ivanhoes Mount Elliott smelter in Queensland. Credit: Heritage branch staff.

Australia boasts some of the worlds richest mineral deposits, with over 60 billion tonnes of coal and a further 21.9 billion tonnes of iron ore. This natural abundance has fuelled a mining industry that is consistently one of the countrys most profitable and productive sectors, both domestically and internationally: coal power alone provides close to two-thirds of the countrys electricity, while Australia was the worlds fourth-largest producer of the resource in 2016.

This historic productivity has also ensured that mining remains a politically-charged issue; parties across the political spectrum can ill afford to ignore the needs of the mining sector, as doing so would abandon the millions of people who rely on the industry for employment. As a result, mining lobbyists can wield significant influence. Indeed this years climate change election saw a surprise victory for the pro-mining Liberal-led coalition, highlighting the close relationship between the mining lobby and political power in Australia.

The northern state of Queensland, in particular, epitomises this bond. Home to the beleaguered Carmichael coal project, the states leaders are perhaps closer to the mining industry than in any other part of the country. In response to this relationship, the Grattan Institute, a think tank based in Australia, produced a report entitled Whos in the room? Access and influence in Australian politics, which profiles the role of mining lobbyists in Queensland and across Australia, and aims to determine whether these groups wield undue influence, and what can be done to curb their growing political power.

The mining industry is particularly active in lobbying Australian state and federal governments, said Kate Griffiths, a senior associate at the Grattan Institute and one of the reports authors. Our research shows that businesses with the most to win or lose from government decisions get more meetings with senior ministers, make the most use of commercial lobbyists, and donate much more to political parties than might be expected, given their relative economic contribution.

Mining lobbying groups are particularly prominent in Queensland, where the industry is empowered to push for greater political influence by its significant contribution to the state economy. Griffiths called mining the single largest industry in Queensland, representing 11% of the Queensland economy.

But lobbyists for the mining industry still punch well above their weight, representing about 20% of all lobbying contacts with state government officials.

This influence is compounded by a lobbying regulatory framework which Griffiths called very weak when compared to countries like Canada and the UK. The report highlights data from the Centre for Public Integrity, which complied an index on the strength of lobbying regulations based on disclosure rules in a number of countries, and found that Australia had a weaker lobbying framework than the US, Canada, Hungary, Lithuania and Taiwan.

As a result, the energy sector has made considerable pushes for political influence during times of political upheaval, especially elections; a report from the Select Committee into the Political Influence of Donations found that donations to the major parties reached A$4m around the 2010 election, before tapering off to around A$1m a year alongside later debates, such as the controversy around the permitting of the Carmichael coal mine

In addition to a federal election, 2010 also saw a major victory for mining lobbyists against attempts to tax the sector. The industry successfully campaigned against a new 40% tax rate above the government bond figure for all mining companies, spending A$22m on an advertising campaign to oppose the tax, and eventually negotiating a new tax rate with the government that would cost the state around A$60bn in lost revenue. While this agreement was ultimately repealed by the government in 2014, the episode demonstrated the unusual influence of mining lobbyists, and has inspired a number of similar protests in other industries, with the Grattan Institute naming a further six examples, from sectors as varied as education and property, of lobbyists launching mining tax-style campaigns.

The aggressive influence of the mining sector also takes advantage of a legal system that is vulnerable to policy capture, according to the Grattan Institute, the phenomenon where lobbyists and interested parties can wield de facto political power through donations to and influence over political parties. The group claims that failures in investigative journalism and the politicisation of the public service have contributed to a political climate that is deeply partisan, and where members of the public are often not kept informed of developments in a balanced fashion.

The institute also refers to a telephone poll conducted, which found that 56% of respondents had personally witnessed or suspected a government official making a decision in favour of an external donor or supporter at least once or twice, with this figure rising to 63% among respondents who had worked in government.

This is an entrenched issue in Australian politics, said Griffiths. Our research showed that since 1990, more than a quarter of former federal ministers or assistant ministers have taken up roles with special interests after political life. Former government officials also make up a large and growing share of commercial lobbyists at the federal level.

This culture has further empowered mining lobbying projects. Coal miner Adani secured the support for former Queensland secretary Cameron Milner and former premier Rob Borbidge, members of the Labor and National parties respectively, demonstrating the firms influence at both ends of the political spectrum, to help secure government approval for its controversial Carmichael mine.

Work at the mine has been constantly delayed due to concerns over the completeness of its environmental impact statements and widespread public backlash against the mine, which will do little to ease Queenslands reliance on fossil fuels. With Adani able to leverage its contacts into 33 meetings with government officials between 2015 and 2017, it is not difficult to imagine these personal connections having a greater influence over the states eventual approval of the mine than considerations about its positive impacts on Queenslands environment or its communities as a whole.

The institute makes a number of recommendations to address the power of mining lobbies in its report. From small-scale changes such as requirements for ministers to publish their diaries, so the public knows with which companies they are meeting, to more concrete measures such as a lowering of the threshold over which political donations have to be publicised, from A$13,800 to A$5,000, so the public is better-informed about the source of political parties funding.

Griffiths also highlighted the need for a cultural change, one that could take more time to implement, but would ultimately have a more significant long-term impact on the sector.

A change in attitudes is required, she said. Politicians in particular need to face up to the fact that Australians are suspicious of them and expect more of them. Most Australians think people in government serve themselves and their mates, rather than the public interest, and 85% think at least some federal politicians are corrupt.

However, these recommendations stop short of stricter measures, such as a hard cap on political donations, as has been implemented in the other Australian states of Victoria and New South Wales, creating a series of recommendations that may dull the extreme edges of the presently warped power balance between mining lobbyists and government, but not one that will eradicate this imbalance altogether.

These limitations are reflective of a broader issue in the Australian economy: its strong dependence on mining. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, the mining sector made a larger contribution to national GDP than construction, manufacturing and agriculture, with the sectors value soaring to A$37bn in July 2019, up from just over A$33bn six years earlier.

Queensland in particular seemed to voice its support for mining projects in this years election; the state voted overwhelmingly in favour of the Liberal coalition in the election, winning two seats from a shocked Labor Party, and highlighting the tight bond between mining interests and political power in the region. If Australia and Queensland are unable to weaken these relationships, mining lobbyists could continue to wield disproportionate influence in local and national politics.

Read the rest here:

Punching above their weight: the power of mining lobbyists in Queensland - Mining Technology

In the days since British Columbias legislature enshrined a United Nations declaration on Indigenous rights into law, the move has been hailed as an historic victory.

B.C.s bill, passed Nov. 28, makes it the first Canadian jurisdiction to align its laws with the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) a landmark international document which protects the Indigenous right to self-government, and a large number of fundamental human rights including safety from genocide and assimilation.

When the bill was first introduced on Oct. 24, Lekwungen dancers opened the floor, Indigenous leaders welcomed a new era of change and the first reading passed unanimously.

While it was a jubilant celebration, Indigenous leaders also slipped in a few jokes about how long it has taken for any government in Canada to reach this step nearly 13 years.

Did you hear that? asked Cheryl Casimer, a member of the First Nations Leadership Council, after the bill was introduced. She left the house waiting in silence for a few seconds.

The sky did not fall, she quipped.

Canadas path toward UNDRIP has been long and reluctantly taken. It was one of just four states to vote against UNDRIP when it was passed by the UN General Assembly in 2007, citing concerns about a measure that requires Indigenous consent for resource-development projects (another 144 countries voted in favour).

But nearly 9,000 kilometres to the south, Bolivia has been a global leader in Indigenous rights for years and, until recently, had the only Indigenous leader in the United Nations.

Bolivia was the first country to implement UNDRIP. Evo Morales, Bolivias first Indigenous president, took office in 2006 and enacted a flurry of changes that made life better for Bolivias Indigenous population. While Canada stalled, Bolivia has long been held up as a beacon for how successful a country with strong Indigenous rights can be.

But Indigenous rights have been thrown into crisis since the newly re-elected Indigenous president was exiled by a conservative faction following the election.

That means that its even more important that we follow through on these positive pushes (in Canada), said Sheryl Lightfoot, an Anishinaabe associate professor at the University of British Columbia and Canada Research Chair in global Indigenous rights and politics. While many countries have swung to the right, she says, Canada and New Zealand are now part of a lonely club of countries making progressive changes for the global Indigenous rights movement.

Canada has trailed behind Bolivia, not issuing a statement in support of UNDRIP until 2010.

It took another six years to drop its objector status and adopt the declaration. And soon afterward, the federal government approved the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion project against the objections of several local First Nations.

Though the 2016 reversal came with a pledge to make UNDRIP into federal law, that hasnt yet happened. (The Liberal government renewed that promise during this years election campaign.) Meanwhile, perpetual and vast inequality has led special rapporteurs from the UN to tell Canada more than once that its failing Indigenous Peoples.

Now that B.C. has taken the step to implement UNDRIP, Indigenous leaders know there is still a long path before the bill may begin to shift systemic issues that perpetuate inequality.

There is no understanding of how long its going to take to address unfairness in the criminal-justice system, unfairness in the child-welfare system, unfairness in economic development, said Green party MLA Adam Olsen, or SHENEP, from Tsartlip First Nation, in an interview with National Observer after the first reading. What we do know is the provincial government is coming to the table in goodwill.

Like Canada's Constitution, UNDRIP guarantees certain human rights to Indigenous people. But, if fully implemented, UNDRIP could empower Indigenous Peoples in ways the Constitution can't by recognizing ongoing systemic injustice and the Indigenous right to self-government.

UNDRIP also enshrines the collectives rights of Indigenous Peoples. While the Constitution asserts the rights of the individual to be equal before the law, UNDRIP asserts Indigenous Peoples "possess collective rights which are indispensable for their existence, well-being and integral development as peoples" to live in freedom as distinct societies.

These provisions are also what have made UNDRIP controversial in Canada. Among the declarations 46 articles approved in 2007 after two decades of international negotiation are requirements for restitution, Indigenous consent on resource-development projects and recognition for Indigenous legal systems.

In 2016, former Liberal justice minister Jody Wilson-Raybould said legally implementing UNDRIP was unworkable for Canada because adopting it as law would be a political distraction to undertaking the hard work actually required to implement it.

Federal NDP MP Romeo Saganash introduced an independent bill to legislate UNDRIP. However, it died in the Senate this year after Conservative senators opposed it over fears that Indigenous consent requirements amounted to a veto on oil and gas development.

The problem is that while there are 46 articles in UNDRIP, the Canadian government hasnt been looking at all of its elements holistically, said Roberta Rice, an associate professor at the University of Calgary who focuses on Indigenous politics in Latin America.

The idea seems like the Canadian government is picking and choosing what it's going to implement, which is the problem, Rice said. It's supposed to be much more revolutionary.

Bolivia, meanwhile, took a swift, far-reaching approach.

When Morales formed government, he abolished the department for Indigenous rights, choosing instead to make them a priority for his entire government. He created a ministry of decolonization, which includes a depatriarchalization unit devoted to dismantling colonialism and patriarchy within government.

The Bolivian constitution was rewritten in 2009 to incorporate UNDRIP and to allow Indigenous territories to govern themselves. The constitution officially changed Bolivia to a plurinational state, recognizing the countrys many Indigenous Peoples rather than only the nation-state. It also identified three dozen official Indigenous languages alongside Spanish depending on where you are in the country, that regions dominant Indigenous language appears on official signage.

And, in 2010, Bolivia was one of the first countries to recognize the rights of waters and lands, not just humans, with its Rights of Mother Earth Law.

They were the only state at the time, in the 2000s, that had significant forward movement in Indigenous rights implementation within the legal political framework, Lightfoot said, and, of course, the only UN member state with the Indigenous leadership. So Bolivia had a heavy set of expectations on it during that time to lead in many ways on the global level.

And while Bolivia took bold steps to enshrine Indigenous rights, the country prospered.

Bolivias socio-economic progress has been praised by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Between 2004 and 2017, Bolivias annual real GDP growth was 4.8 per cent on average, according to the IMF. Meanwhile, the percentage of the countrys residents living in poverty an issue that primarily affects Indigenous people, according to Unicef dropped from 34 per cent to 17 over the same time period.

This process hasnt been perfect. The Morales government did not include UNDRIPs key term, free, prior and informed consent when it incorporated the document into the constitution. Instead, the constitution gives Indigenous Peoples the right to consultation and leaves the power and final decision-making in the hands of the state.

Morales shifted resource extraction under the control of the federal government, a move thats at odds with UNDRIPs requirements that Indigenous Peoples be involved in the process. He also lost Indigenous support over attempts to build a controversial highway through Bolivias southern Amazon, against the wishes of local Indigenous communities.

Morales whole model was to try and use extractive industry in a good way and reinvest into poverty-alleviation programs that will target and help the Indigenous poor, which he has been doing, Rice said. But of course, you create conflict when you build highways through indigenous territories... implementing in practice has been the big challenge.

An extraction-based economy is directly at odds with Indigenous autonomy to land, Rice said, meaning Indigenous Peoples in Canada have faced similar difficulties having their rights recognized by the Canadian government.

The whole idea of respecting the rights of nature and Indigenous ways of knowing and being, but in an extractive economy that needs resources that are under the feet of Indigenous people it's all a big contradiction, she said.

Progress is never linear, and Indigenous rights in Bolivia now appear endangered as the country joins much of the rest of the world in a swing toward the political right.

Official results showed Morales won an Oct. 20 election, but the Organization of American States (OAS) challenged the results, claiming there had been serious irregularities with the vote a statement that critics have questioned in the weeks since the election, pointing to a lack of evidence. Nevertheless, the OAS allegations helped spark anti-Morales protests across the country, and pro-Morales protests in response.

Morales resigned on Nov. 10 and fled to Mexico amid pressure from the military. In seeking a fourth presidential term, he didn't have anything approaching uniform support, even within his core coalition, but nevertheless, many observers see his exile as arising from illegitimate ouster of a democratically elected government.

More than 30 people have died in the protests, most of them after the military was deployed against Morales supporters, according to Reuters.

Paulo Fernando Tudela, a medical student going to school in Santa Cruz de la Sierra, said his countrys current tensions are intricate. Tudela is mestizo, meaning he has mixed Indigenous and European ancestry.

On one side, Evo Morales has performed miracles for our economy and the country has grown impressively since he took over, Tudela wrote in an interview conducted over Facebook from his hometown of Rurrenabaque, a small town in northern Bolivia.

On the other side, we argue that it is unhealthy for somebody to stay in power for too long.

Tudela said hes concerned the far-right government that seized power could undo years of progressive policies under Morales: We improved so much as a country and itll be a shame to see it go to waste.

Bolivias interim leader, an opposition senator named Jeanine ez Chvez, initially appointed zero Indigenous cabinet members (she later added one amid public outcry). Shes also come under fire for past tweets where she mocked Indigenous culture and called Morales a poor Indian.

We have watched Bolivia make important inroads in Indigenous rights and Indigenous recognition since the Evo Morales government came into power, Lightfoot said.

So to watch that change so suddenly, and the swing to the right that seems to be happening, is devastating. Because now, we've lost our one Indigenous government that we had as a member-state. But then also just to watch the happenings on the ground is emotionally difficult.

The fact that Bolivia is in turmoil makes Canadas role in recognizing Indigenous rights even more important on the international stage, she said.

In Canada at the moment, we've got a unique environment, globally. We are actually pushing forward on the Indigenous rights agenda, Lightfoot said.

Rice predicts Morales legacy will outlast the current crisis.

You can't imagine, even without Morales in power, Bolivia would ever go back to not talking about Indigenous rights. It's so part of the norm now that all parties, even the most conservative parties, have to have a stance on Indigenous rights. (Its) the same here in Canada, she said.

That is a shift.

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Indigenous rights: how Bolivia got ahead of Canada - National Observer

The Green New Deal will need to be subject to constant vigilance and pressurefrom experts who understand exactly what it will take, and from social movements that have decades of experience bearing the brunt of false climate solutions.

At the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in 2019, right-wing luminaries set their sights tightly focused on two targets: the Green New Deal and democratic socialismfor them, one and the same. Its a watermelon, ousted Trump White House adviser Sebastian Gorka summarized with his usual theatrics. Green on the outside, deep, deep communist red on the inside.... They want to take your pickup truck, they want to rebuild your home, they want to take away your hamburgers. This is what Stalin dreamt about but never achieved.

Like climate change deniers claims that global warming is a Marxist plot to steal American freedom, the idea of a Green New Deal is nothing new. And both are experiencing a revival.

In late 2018, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published a landmark report informing us that global emissions need to be slashed roughly in half in less than twelve years, a target that simply cannot be met without the worlds largest economy playing a game-changing leadership role. Once Democrats took back the House that year, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi let it be known that her plan for meeting this historic moment was to convene a toothless committee to further study the endlessly studied crisis. Shortly after the midterm election, but before the swearing in, young climate activists with the Sunrise Movement let it be known that they werent having any of it. Demanding a Green New Deal, Sunrise invited 200 people to stage protests on Capitol Hill, where they were supported by several incoming members of Congress, including Ayanna Pressley, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib (who spoke at one of the Sunrise rallies), and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortezlike Tlaib, a member of the Democratic Socialists of Americawho famously visited their sit-in of Pelosis office.

Riding the tide of momentum, and working with Sunrise, Ocasio-Cortezs office made Pelosi a counteroffer for how to meet the climate challenge in 2019: rather than expending all their political energy on a carbon-pricing scheme that was sure to be politically unpopular while failing to bring down emissions with anything like the speed required, the new Congress should have a select committee on the Green New Deal that would, over the course of a year, create a detailed plan to get off fossil fuels in the United States by 2030, taking full advantage of what the proposal called the historic opportunity to virtually eliminate poverty in the United States.

That select committee was not created. Yet within four months, more than 100 members of Congress and virtually every 2020 Democratic presidential hopeful had joined the call for a Green New Deal, an economy-wide mobilization for decarbonization along a science-based timeline. After decades of either silence or cautious moderation on climate change from Democrats, young activists and lawmakers had rewritten the rules of the possible in a matter of days.

To those outside the climate justice movement, the speed seemed dizzying. Yet the ground for this momentum has been prepared for decadeswith models for community-owned and community-controlled renewable energy; with justice-based labor market transitions that make sure no worker is left behind; with a deepening analysis of the intersections between systemic racism, armed conflict, and climate disruption; with improved green tech and breakthroughs in clean public transit; with the thriving fossil-fuel divestment movement; with model legislation driven at the state and city level that shows how carbon pricingif progressively designedcan fight racial and gender exclusion; and much more.

What had been missing until 2019 was the top-level political power to roll out the best of these models all at once, with the focus and velocity that both science and justice demand. That is the great promise of a comprehensive Green New Deal in the largest economy on earth.

Which is why the CPAC crowd is right to worry. Ocasio-Cortez wasnt actually coming for their hamburgers, but the Green New Deal was a true threat to their half-century-long ideological project. No wonder Gorkas speech came with a full-throated call to arms: You are on the front lines of the war against communism coming back to America under the guise of democratic socialism.

The climate-change-denial movement that spawned these talking points is a creature of the ideological network that deserves the bulk of the credit for redrawing the global ideological map over the last four decades. A 2013 study by Riley Dunlap and Peter Jacques found that a striking 72 percent of climate-change-denial books, mostly published since the 1990s, were linked to right-wing think tanks like the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute, a figure that rises to 87 percent if self-published books are excluded.

Many of these institutions were created in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when U.S. business elites feared that public opinion was turning dangerously against capitalism and toward, if not socialism, then an aggressive Keynesianism. In response, they launched a counterrevolution, a richly funded intellectual movement that argued that greed and the limitless pursuit of profit were nothing to apologize for and offered the greatest hope for human emancipation that the world had ever known. Under this liberationist banner, they fought for such policies as tax cuts and free trade-deals and for the auctioning off of core state assets from phones to energy to waterthe package known in most of the world as neoliberalism.

At the end of the 1980s, after a decade of Margaret Thatcher at the helm in the United Kingdom and Ronald Reagan in the United States, and with communism collapsing, these ideological warriors were ready to declare victory: history was officially over, and there was, in Thatchers often repeated words, no alternative to their market fundamentalism. Filled with confidence, the neoliberals next task was to systematically lock in the corporate liberation project in every country that had previously held out, which was usually best accomplished in the midst of political turmoil and large-scale economic crises, further entrenched through free-trade agreements and membership in the World Trade Organization.

It had all been going so well. The project had even managed to survive, more or less, the 2008 financial collapse directly caused by a banking sector that had been liberated of so much burdensome regulation and oversight. But to those gathered at CPAC and similar confabs, climate change is a threat of a different sort. It isnt about the political preferences of Republicans versus Democrats; its about the physical boundaries of the atmosphere and the ocean. If the dire projections coming out of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are left unchallenged, and business as usual is indeed driving us straight toward civilization-threatening tipping points, then the implications are obvious: the ideological crusade incubated in think tanks like Cato and Heritage will have to come to a screeching halt. Nor have the various attempts to soft-pedal climate action as compatible with market logic (carbon trading, carbon offsets, monetizing natures services) fooled these true believers one bit. They know very well that ours is a global economy created by, and fully reliant upon, the burning of fossil fuels, and that a dependency that foundational cannot be changed with a few gentle market mechanisms. It requires heavy-duty interventions: sweeping bans on polluting activities, deep subsidies for green alternatives, pricey penalties for violations, new taxes, new public works programs, reversals of privatizationsthe list of ideological outrages goes on and on. Everything, in short, that these think tankswhich have always been public proxies for far more powerful corporate interestshave been busily attacking for decades.

If the free-market system really has set in motion physical and chemical processes that, if allowed to continue even for one more decade, threaten large parts of humanity at an existential level, then their entire crusade to morally redeem capitalism has been for naught. With stakes like these, clearly greed is not so very good after all. And that is what is behind the surge in climate change denial among hard-core conservatives: no, they have not lost their minds. They simply understand that as soon as they admit that climate change is real, they will lose the central ideological battle of our timewhether we need to plan and manage our societies to reflect our goals and values, or whether that task can be left to the magic of markets.

Heres my inconvenient truth: I think these hard-core ideologues understand the real significance of climate change better than most of the moderates in the so-called center, the ones who are still insisting that the response can be gradual and painless and that we dont need to go to war with anybody, including the fossil-fuel companies. The deniers get plenty of the details wrong (no, its not a communist plot; authoritarian state socialism, as we will see, was terrible for the environment and brutally extractivist), but when it comes to the scope and depth of change required to avert catastrophe, they are right on the money.

Fossil fuels, and the deeper extractivist mindset that they represent, built the modern world. If we are part of industrial or postindustrial societies, we are still living inside the story written in coal.

Ever since the French Revolution, there have been pitched ideological battles within the confines of this story: communists, socialists, and trade unions have fought for more equal distribution of the spoils of extraction, winning major victories for the poor and working classes. The human rights and emancipation movements of this period have also fought valiantly against industrial capitalisms treatment of whole categories of our species as human sacrifice zones, no more deserving of rights than raw commodities are. These struggles have also won major victories against the dominance-based paradigmagainst slavery, for universal suffrage, for equality under the law. And there have been voices in all of these movements that identified the parallels between the economic models abuse of the natural world and its abuse of human beings deemed worthy of being sacrificed, or at least uncounted. Karl Marx, for instance, recognized capitalisms irreparable rift with the natural laws of life itself, while feminist scholars have long recognized that patriarchys dual war against womens bodies and against the body of the earth was connected to that essential, corrosive separation between mind and bodyand between body and earthfrom which both the Scientific Revolution and Industrial Revolution sprang.

These challenges, however, were mainly in the intellectual realm; Francis Bacons original, biblically inspired framework for the extractive economy remained largely intactthe right of humans to place ourselves above the ecosystems that support us and to abuse the earth as if it were an inanimate machine. The strongest challenges to this worldview have always come from outside its logic, in those historical junctures when the extractive project clashes directly with a different, older way of relating to the earthand that older way fights back. This has been true from the earliest days of industrialization, when English and Irish peasants, for instance, revolted against the first attempts to enclose communal lands, and it has continued in clashes between colonizers and indigenous peoples through the centuries, right up to the indigenous-led resistance to new fossil-fuel projects (pipelines, coal mines, export facilities) that have delivered the climate movements most significant victories in recent years.

But for those of us born and raised inside this system, though we may well see the dead-end flaw of its central logic, it can remain intensely difficult to see a way out. And how could it be otherwise? Post-Enlightenment Western culture does not offer a road map for a way to live that is not based on an extractivist, nonreciprocal relationship with nature.

This is where the right-wing climate change deniers have overstated their conspiracy theories about what a cosmic gift global warming is to the left. It is true that many climate responses reinforce progressive support for government intervention in the market, for greater equality, and for a more robust public sphere. But the deeper message carried by the ecological crisisthat humanity has to go a whole lot easier on the living systems that sustain us, acting regeneratively rather than extractivelyis a profound challenge to large parts of the left as well as the right. Its a challenge to some trade unions, those trying to freeze in place the dirtiest jobs, instead of fighting for the good clean jobs their members deserve. And its a challenge to the overwhelming majority of center-left Keynesians, who still define economic success in terms of traditional measures of GDP growth, regardless of whether that growth comes from low-carbon sectors or rampant resource extraction.

Its a challenge, too, to those parts of the left that equated socialism with the authoritarian rule of the Soviet Union and its satellites (though there was always a rich tradition, particularly among anarchists, that considered Stalins project an abomination of core social justice and collectivist principles). Because the fact is that those self-described socialist states devoured resources with as much enthusiasm as did their capitalist counterparts, and spewed waste just as recklessly. Before the fall of the Berlin Wall, for instance, Czechs and Russians had even higher carbon footprints per capita than Canadians and Australians. Which is why one of the only times the industrialized world has seen a precipitous emissions drop was after the economic collapse of the former Soviet Union in the early 1990s. Mao Zedong, for his part, openly declared that man must conquer nature, setting loose a devastating onslaught on the natural world that transitioned seamlessly from clear-cuts under communism to mega-dams under capitalism. Russias oil and gas companies, meanwhile, were as reckless and accident-prone under state socialist control as they are today in the hands of the oligarchs and Russias corporatist state.

And as I wrote in This Changes Everything, too many recent left governments in Latin America failed to diversify their economies away from fossil fuels and other raw commodity extraction when prices were high, leaving them intensely vulnerable to right-wing attacks when commodity prices collapsed, putting their laudable poverty-alleviation programs in dire jeopardy. From Brazil to Venezuela to Ecuador to Argentina, these left governments claimed they had no choicethat they needed to pursue extractive policies in order to pay for programs that fought dire poverty and inequality. And they have a point: the transition to post-carbon diversified economies should have been radically subsidized by wealthy economies in the Global North, as part of our collective climate debt. Forced to choose between poverty and pollution, these governments chose pollution, but those should never have been their only options.

Lets acknowledge these difficult facts, while also pointing out that countries with a strong democratic socialist traditionlike Denmark, Sweden, Costa Rica, and Uruguayhave some of the most visionary environmental policies in the world. Scandinavian-style social democracy has undoubtedly produced some of the most significant green breakthroughs in the world, from the visionary urban design of Stockholm, where roughly 74 percent of residents walk, bike, or take public transit to work, to Denmarks community-controlled wind-power revolution. From all this we can conclude that socialism isnt necessarily ecological, but that a new form of democratic ecosocialism, with the humility to learn from indigenous teachings about the duties to future generations and the interconnection of all of life, appears to be humanitys best shot at collective survival.

These are the stakes in the surge of movements and movement-grounded political candidates who are advancing a democratic ecosocialist vision for the United States, connecting the dots between the economic depredations caused by decades of neoliberal ascendency and the ravaged state of our natural world. These movements and candidates, whether or not they identify explicitly as democratic socialist, are rejecting the neoliberal centrism of the establishment Democratic Party, with its tepid market-based solutions to the ecological crisis, as well as the Trumpian all-out war on nature. And they are also presenting a concrete alternative to the undemocratic extractivist socialists of both the past and present.

The Sunrise Movement and its supporters in Congress chose to model the Green New Deal after President Franklin D. Roosevelts historic raft of programs, understanding full well that a central task is to make sure that this mobilization does not repeat the ways in which its namesake excluded and further marginalized many vulnerable groups. For instance, New Dealera programs and protections left out agricultural and domestic workers (many of them black), Mexican immigrants (some 1 million of whom faced deportation in the 1930s), and indigenous people (who won some gains in the New Deal era but whose land rights were also violated by both massive infrastructure projects and some conservation efforts). That is why frontline groups are mentioned repeatedly in the original Green New Deal resolution: this mobilization has to right the wrongs of the last one or it has no chance of catching fire.

Some deeper challenges about New Deal logic remain to be tackled. For instance, so far much of the emphasis has rightly been on industrial transformation and job creation. Not nearly enough has been on the outsize role that consumption plays in what used to be called the American way of life, or the way that a culture of overwork fuels cycles of disposable consumption (stressed and overworked people need fast and easy everything). Our leading emission-reduction experts tell us that if we are going to hit the targets demanded by science, we in wealthy countries dont just need to consume green stuff; we need to consume less stuff, with a higher premium placed on activities, like caregiving and the arts, that are inherently low carbon.

Despite these challenges, I have written before about why the old New Deal remains a useful touchstone for the kind of sweeping climate mobilization that is our only hope of lowering emissions in time. In large part, this is because there are so few historical precedents we can look to (other than top-down military mobilizations) that show how every sector of life, from forestry to education to the arts to housing to electrification, can be transformed under the umbrella of a single, society-wide mission.

Which is why it is so critical to remember that none of it would have happened without massive pressure from social movements. FDR rolled out the New Deal in the midst of a historic wave of labor unrest: there was the Teamsters rebellion and Minneapolis general strike in 1934, the eighty-three-day shutdown of the West Coast by longshore workers that same year, and the Flint sit-down autoworkers strikes in 1936 and 1937. During this same period, mass movements, responding to the suffering of the Great Depression, demanded sweeping social programs, such as Social Security and unemployment insurance, while socialists argued that abandoned factories should be handed over to their workers and turned into cooperatives. Upton Sinclair, the muckraking author of The Jungle, ran for governor of California in 1934 on a platform arguing that the key to ending poverty was full state funding of workers cooperatives. He received nearly 900,000 votes, but having been viciously attacked by the right and undercut by the Democratic establishment, he fell just short of winning the governors office.

All of this is a reminder that the New Deal was adopted by Roosevelt at a time of such progressive and left militancy that its programswhich seem radical by todays standardsappeared at the time to be the only way to hold back a full-scale revolution.

Its also a reminder that the New Deal was a process as much as a project, one that was constantly changing and expanding in response to social pressure from both the right and the left. For example, a program like the Civilian Conservation Corps started with 200,000 workers, but when it proved popular eventually grew to 2 million. There is plenty of time to improve and correct a Green New Deal once it starts rolling out (it needs to be more explicit about keeping carbon in the ground; about nuclear and coal never being clean; and about the connections between fossil fuels, foreign wars, and migration). But we have only one chance to get this thing charged up and moving forward.

The more sobering lesson is that the kind of mass power that delivered the victories of the New Deal era is far beyond anything possessed by current progressive movements, even if they all combined their efforts. Thats why it is so urgent to use the Green New Deal framework as a potent tool to build that powera vision to both unite movements and dramatically expand them.

Part of that involves turning what is being derided as a left-wing laundry list or wish list into an irresistible story of the future, connecting the dots between the many parts of daily life that stand to be transformedfrom healthcare to employment, day care to jail cell, clean air to leisure time. The Green New Deal has been characterized as an unrelated grab bag because most of us have been trained to avoid a systemic and historical analysis of capitalism and to divide pretty much every crisis our system producesfrom economic inequality to violence against women to white supremacy to unending wars to ecological unravelingin walled-off silos. From within that rigid mindset, its easy to dismiss a sweeping and intersectional vision like the Green New Deal as a green-tinted laundry list of everything the left has ever wanted.

Now that the call for a Green New Deal is out there, however, the onus is on all of us who support it to help make the case for how our overlapping crises are indeed inextricably linkedand can only be overcome with a holistic vision for social and economic transformation. This is already beginning to happen. For example, Rhiana Gunn-Wright, one of the leading architects of the Green New Deal, has pointed out that just as thousands of people moved for jobs during the Second World Warera economic mobilization, we should expect a great many to move again to be part of a renewables revolution. And when they do, unlinking employment from health care means people can move for better jobs, to escape the worst effects of climate, and re-enter the labor market without losing.

Investing big in public healthcare is also critical in light of the fact that no matter how fast we move to lower emissions, it is going to get hotter and storms are going to get fiercer. When those storms bash up against healthcare systems and electricity grids that have been starved by decades of austerity, thousands pay the price with their lives, as they so tragically did in post-Maria Puerto Rico.

And there are many more connections to be drawn. Those complaining about climate policy being weighed down by supposedly unrelated demands for access to healthcare and education would do well to remember that the caring professionsmost of them dominated by womenare relatively low carbon and can be made even more so. In other words, they deserve to be seen as green jobs, with the same protections, the same investments, and the same living wages as male-dominated workforces in the renewables, efficiency, and public-transit sectors. Meanwhile, as Gunn-Wright points out, to make those sectors less male dominated, family leave and pay equity are musts, which is part of the reason both are included in the resolution.

Drawing out these connections in ways that capture the public imagination will take a massive exercise in popular education and participatory democracy. A first step is for every sector touched by the Green New Dealhospitals, schools, universities, and moreto make their own plans for how to rapidly decarbonize while furthering the Green New Deals mission to eliminate poverty, create good jobs, and close the racial and gender wealth divides.

My favorite example of what this could look like comes from the Canadian Union of Postal Workers, which has developed a bold plan to turn every post office in Canada into a hub for a just green transition. Think solar panels on the roof, charging stations out front, a fleet of domestically manufactured electric vehicles from which union members not only deliver mail, as well as local produce and medicine, but also check in on seniorsall supported by the proceeds of postal banking.

To make the case for a Green New Dealwhich explicitly calls for this kind of democratic, decentralized leadershipevery sector in the United States should be developing similar visionary plans for their workplaces right now.

We have been trained to see our issues in silos; they never belonged there. In fact, the impact of climate change on every part of our lives is far too expansive and extensive to begin to cover here. But I do need to mention a few more glaring links that many are missing.

A job guarantee, far from an opportunistic socialist addendum, is a critical part of achieving a rapid and just transition. It would immediately lower the intense pressure on workers to take the kinds of jobs that destabilize our planet, because all would be free to take the time needed to retrain and find work in one of the many sectors that will be dramatically expanding.

This in turn will reduce the power of bad actors like the Laborers International Union of North America, who are determined to split the labor movement and sabotage the prospects for this historic effort. Right out of the gate, LIUNA came out swinging against the Green New Deal. Never mind that it contains stronger protections for trade unions and the right to organize than anything we have seen out of Washington in three decades, including the right of workers in high-carbon sectors to democratically participate in their transition and to have jobs in clean sectors at the same salary and benefits levels as before.

There is absolutely no rational reason for a union representing construction workers to oppose what would be the biggest infrastructure project in a century, unless LIUNA actually is what it appears to be: a fossil-fuel astroturf group disguised as a trade union, or at best a company union. These are the same labor leaders, let us recall, who sided with the tanks and attack dogs at Standing Rock; who fought relentlessly for the construction of the planet-destabilizing Keystone XL pipeline; and who (along with several other building trade union heads) aligned themselves with Trump on his first day in office, smiling for a White House photo op and declaring his inauguration a great moment for working men and women.

LIUNAs leaders have loudly demanded unquestioning solidarity from the rest of the trade union movement. But again and again, they have offered nothing but the narrowest self-interest in return, indifferent to the suffering of immigrant workers whose lives are being torn apart under Trump and to the indigenous workers who saw their homeland turned into a war zone. The time has come for the rest of the labor movement to confront and isolate them before they can do more damage. That could take the form of LIUNA members, confident that the Green New Deal will not leave them behind, voting out their pro-boss leaders. Or it could end with LIUNA being tossed out of the AFL-CIO for planetary malpractice.

The more unionized sectors, like teaching, nursing, and manufacturing, make the Green New Deal their own by showing how it can transform their workplaces for the better, and the more all union leaders embrace the growth in membership they would see under the Green New Deal, the stronger they will be for this unavoidable confrontation.

One last connection I will mention has to do with the concept of repair. Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Ed Markeys Green New Deal resolution, introduced in the House and Senate in February 2019, called for creating well-paying jobs restoring and protecting threatened, endangered, and fragile ecosystems, as well as cleaning up existing hazardous waste and abandoned sites, ensuring economic development and sustainability on those sites.

There are many such sites across the United States, entire landscapes that have been left to waste after they were no longer useful to frackers, miners, and drillers. Its a lot like how this culture treats people. Its what has been done to so many workers in the neoliberal period, using them up and then abandoning them to addiction and despair. Its what the entire carceral state is about: locking up huge sectors of the population who are more economically useful as prison laborers and numbers on the spreadsheet of a private prison than they are as free workers. And the old New Deal did it too, by choosing to exclude and discard so many black and brown and women workers.

There is a grand story to be told here about the duty to repairto repair our relationship with the earth and with one another, to heal the deep wounds dating back to the founding of the country. Because while it is true that climate change is a crisis produced by an excess of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, it is also, in a more profound sense, a crisis produced by an extractive mindseta way of viewing both the natural world and the majority of its inhabitants as resources to use up and then discard. I call it the gig and dig economy and firmly believe that we will not emerge from this crisis without a shift in worldview, a transformation from gig and dig to an ethos of care and repair.

If these kinds of deeper connections between fractured people and a fast-warming planet seem far beyond the scope of policy makers, its worth thinking back to the absolutely central role of artists during the New Deal era. Playwrights, photographers, muralists, and novelists were all part of a renaissance of both realist and utopian art. Some held up a mirror to the wrenching misery that the New Deal sought to alleviate. Others opened up spaces for Depression-ravaged people to imagine a world beyond that misery. Both helped get the job done in ways that are impossible to quantify.

In a similar vein, there is much to learn from indigenous-led movements in Bolivia and Ecuador that have placed at the center of their calls for ecological transformation the concept of buen vivir, a focus on the right to a good life as opposed to more and more and more life of endless consumption.

The Green New Deal will need to be subject to constant vigilance and pressure from experts who understand exactly what it will take to lower our emissions as rapidly as science demands, and from social movements that have decades of experience bearing the brunt of false climate solutions, whether nuclear power, the chimera of carbon capture and storage, or carbon offsets.

But in remaining vigilant, we also have to be careful not to bury the overarching message: that this is a potential lifeline that we all have a sacred and moral responsibility to reach for.

Naomi Klein is Senior Correspondent for The Intercept, a Puffin Writing Fellow at Type Media Center, and the inaugural Gloria Steinem Endowed Chair in Media, Culture and Feminist Studies at Rutgers University. She is the author, most recently, of On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal.

This essay is adapted from the authors chapter in We Own the Future: Democratic SocialismAmerican Style, a new anthology edited by Kate Aronoff, Michael Kazin, and Peter Dreier and published by The New Press.

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Care and Repair: Left Politics in the Age of Climate Change - Dissent