NI 519 - May, 2019

How to avoid climate breakdown

A note from the editor

Exit apocalypse

My nine-year-old son, Laurie, looked up at me from the sofa the other day. ‘I know!’ he said, apropos of nothing. ‘What if we found something to put into cars that didn’t make the world too hot?’ I’d been talking to him about climate change while working on this magazine; he tends to absorb things quietly and it’s only later you realize that he’s been working them through.

I felt slightly embarrassed or ashamed – it’s hard to place the emotion exactly – as I answered, crushing his light-bulb moment: ‘Well, the thing is, we already know how to make cars run on clean energy. In fact there’s a way to do almost everything we do now using clean energy. We are, um, just not doing it.’

It’s like the good news and the bad news, all rolled into one. So many of the solutions that can limit climate breakdown are staring us right in the face, but we will need to mobilize like never before to put them into action. In this issue we don’t linger on apocalyptic predictions but instead look closely at how to wean the industrialized world off dirty energy and meet the people and movements fighting to make that happen – farmers, scientists, striking schoolchildren and others.

Elsewhere in this edition we feature a photo-essay that explores the expectations and challenges for young South African people, 25 years after Mandela’s ‘rainbow nation’ came into being. And we speak to Kurdish-Iranian author Behrouz Boochani, who wrote an award-winning book using WhatsApp while detained in Manus Island detention centre.

Hazel Healy for the New Internationalist co-operative.
www.newint.org

The big story

There’s still time to mitigate the worst effects of climate change. Can we pull it off?

Photo: Sandra Kaas/Unsplash

NI 519 - May, 2019

How to avoid climate breakdown

A note from the editor

Exit apocalypse

The big story

There’s still time to mitigate the worst effects of climate change. Can we pull it off? Hazel Healy makes the case for conditional optimism.

The Big Story

Climate science; Transition policy; Action; Listen.

Current emissions; Halving by 2030; Policies to zero by 2050.

Pacific Climate Warrior Brianna Fruean and Anna Taylor of UK school strikes movement talk what inspires them and how to avoid activist burnout. Conversation moderated by Hazel Healy.

The super-rich are preparing for doomsday. Only problem is, the rest of us aren’t invited. Tom Whyman explains.

Can we move away from fossil fuels without destroying the communities that rely on them? Sam Adler Bell looks to the devastated US coalfields of Appalachia.

Indigenous feminists in Guatemala encourage women to speak out against male violence, and to heal and defend themselves as they defend their ancestral territory. Frauke Decoodt listens to their stories of resistance.

In Cameroon, civil war is brewing along linguistic lines. Its origins lie in the botched decolonization of the country’s anglophone territory, but President Paul Biya’s repressive regime has poured fuel on the fire. Lorraine Mallinder reports.

Jair Bolsonaro may be in power, but the Sateré indigenous people are not taking his hostility sitting down. Sue Branford reports from the Brazilian Amazon.

Opinion

Will pensions unite the Left against Bolsonaro?

India’s record on children is puzzling for a country that is the world’s largest importer of arms and has a billion-dollar space programme. Nilanjana Bhowmick writes.

A history of violence. For Nanjala Nyabola, the sentencing of Trump’s campaign chair tells us a lot about the West’s relationship to Africa.

Currents

The United States has conducted more than 100 airstrikes in Somalia since 2017.

The president of El Salvador.

Blood-red patches stain the streets of Myanmar’s capital Yangon.

Scotland’s prostitution laws.

A shop in Brazil has achieved a win for racial diversity by only selling black dolls.

Jack Davies reports on the EU's failure to do due diligence to prevent illegal timber trading between Vietnam and Cambodia.

Where is the Petro-Caribe money??? #PetroCaribeChallenge

Plastic-free Taiwan; Smarter spending; A matter of life and death; and who knew?

Regulars

Praise, blame and all points in between? Give us your feedback.

What is required to be an authentic person? Parsa Sanjana Sajid ponders the answer from the bright lights of a photo studio.

Family matters.

Penal labour is still big bucks.

Vietnamese garment workers vs top five clothes companies.

I march, you march… he leaves.

Perilous journey by Shahram Rezaei (Iran).

Eritrea, an abbreviation of Red Sea in Latin (Mare Erythraeum), was carved out of east Africa by the Italians.

The death of daredevil lawyer Digna Ochoa, a child of Veracruz.

An attitude of mindlessness.

The Kurdish-Iranian writer has been imprisoned on Manus Island – part of Australia’s notorious asylum detention network – since 2013. But that hasn’t stopped him from writing an award-winning book. Using WhatsApp, Husna Rizvi interviews Behrouz Boochani.

Highlighting the work of artists and photographers from the Majority World.

Cartoon by Marc Roberts.

Constitutional monarchs of Thailand.

Cartoon by P J Polyp.

Ethical and political dilemmas abound these days. Seems like we’re all in need of a New Internationalist perspective. Enter stage: Agony Uncle.

Jacob Ohrvik-Stott from Doteveryone on how to do it.

Film, Book & Music Reviews

Future Histories; I Will Never See the World Again; Days in the Caucasus; Under Red Skies.

Malcolm Lewis reviews Woman at War, directed and co-written by Benedikt Erlingsson; The Third Wife, directed and written by Ash Mayfair.

Louise Gray reviews The Medicine Show by Melissa Etheridge and Play Wooden Child by Nodding God.

Trinidadian musician Anthony Joseph tells Subi Shah about how important it is for his children to know about Windrush.

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