We told you so. In case anyone still reckons that biofuels are “green”, here’s what they’ve been causing: deforestation and food shortages.
It’s sick, really. In the free market, the lungs of the planet, and the bellies of the poor, can’t compete with the cars of the rich.
Archive for the 'environment' Category
24
Jan
Biofuels - Guess What?
2006 ended with the shock execution of Saddam Hussein, and 2007 ended with the shock assassination of Benazir Bhutto. As 2007 began, Tony Blair’s departure was still months away, but the speculation on when, how and for whom was already getting pretty boring, and as 2008 begins I’m already sick and tired of the race for the U.S. presidential elections in November. That’s not to say nothing has changed though; this review is far from exhaustive, but I think I’ve covered some important trends.
The War Against Terror
Those of us opposed to the violent extension of imperial power spent the year going half-mad over an ever-imminent attack on Iran. Destruction was averted - for now - at the last minute when the neocons were undermined by their own intelligence services, and when events in Pakistan demanded their more immediate attention. Those events were themselves a direct result of T. W. A. T., into which the Pakistani military have been reluctantly drafted, and the response to those events may well be the de facto occupation of Pakistan. What other hope is there for the occupation of Afghanistan, where even with the Pakistani supply lines secure NATO’s only convincing strategy has been to seek an alliance with the evil Taliban.
In Somalia, meanwhile, the progress of 2006 has been more than offset by the catastrophe of 2007, an Ethiopian occupation with U.S. backing that has created a humanitarian crisis to rival Darfur and the Congo. For America military planners, it seems Africa is the new Middle East, and the strategic interest evidenced by the creation of “Africom” goes hand in hand with a propaganda drive. Sudan, home not only of the Darfurian genocide but also of that bloody Teddy bear, is now well and truly part of the Axis of Evil, but the one to really watch is Eritrea which, like Iran, has now been officially branded a terror state.
And then there’s Iraq where, by the sheer monstrosity of the numbers involved, the human costs of war have long surpassed our ability to make sense of them. As Lenin says, these days…
global violence reaches and breaches new threshholds in the space of months, not years. The potential for new peaks of depravity is almost as limitless as the capacity for allowing each new ongoing atrocity to slip tactfully into the background. Soon it becomes normal. 100,000 deaths is shocking until it becomes 650,000, which is in turn stunning until that again almost doubles. So, allow me to remind you of the exponential function: if the rate of death in Iraq doubles each year, as it has been doing consistently, then about 1.3m will have died between June 2007 and June 2008. Then a further 2.6m the next year, and so on. If the occupation were to end in the middle of 2010, which is extremely unlikely, total deaths on current trends would reach ten million. And if it did come to that, it would soon be forgotten about.
For a while, a broad and credible resistance movement seemed to be taking hold in Iraq, though the “surge” and the concurrent intensification of bombing raids (the robotastic “secret air war”, also being fought in Afghanistan and even Pakistan) have put it in its place for the moment.
The ethnic partition of Iraq is now more or less a done deal; the death squads have done their work, although the construction of Berlin Walls through Baghdad was thwarted by massive peaceful protests in Spring. A similar wall is being built along the U.S.-Mexican border, by an Israeli company and based on lessons learnt through the walling in of the Palestinians. It’s one of many examples of the sick Naqba industrial complex that Naomi Klein revealed in one of the year’s most important articles:
Israel’s economy isn’t booming despite the political chaos that devours the headlines but because of it… Many of the country’s most successful entrepreneurs are using Israel’s status as a fortressed state, surrounded by furious enemies, as a kind of twenty-four-hour-a-day showroom–a living example of how to enjoy relative safety amid constant war. And the reason Israel is now enjoying supergrowth is that those companies are busily exporting that model to the world….
The key products and services are high-tech fences, unmanned drones, biometric IDs, video and audio surveillance gear, air passenger profiling and prisoner interrogation systems–precisely the tools and technologies Israel has used to lock in the occupied territories.
And that is why the chaos in Gaza and the rest of the region doesn’t threaten the bottom line in Tel Aviv, and may actually boost it. Israel has learned to turn endless war into a brand asset, pitching its uprooting, occupation and containment of the Palestinian people as a half-century head start in the “global war on terror.”
While we’re on the subject of Palestine, this year has been of the grimmest yet for the inhabitants of beseiged Gaza. To bolster their new quisling Mahmoud Abbas in the West Bank, the Israelis have relaxed some of the restrictions on life in that territory, but the annexation rolls on with the costruction of the new E-1 settlement bloc set to completely sever the North of the West Bank from the South. All this, alongside another farcical round of talks about talks about peace talks. For more detail on Israel/Palestine, I can but recommend The Heathlander.
Kapital Krunch
The increased military aggression of the U.S. goes hand in hand with its waning economic power. The economies of America and some of its closest allies have been increasingly based on consumption, on demand rather than supply, and that demand has been financed with staggering, unprecedented debt. That debt, on the macro level, comes from the privileged role of the U.S. dollar as the reserve currency of the world, which comes from other nations’ faith in the enduring value of Uncle Sam’s IOUs, which is in turn reliant on American hegemony preventing the emergence of a rival currency.
It’s possible - and I’m probably guiltier than most - to read too much into the politics of the petrodollar, but it seems like the notorious Project For a New American century, intended to consolidate the American grip on the world through the destruction or annexation of any dissident state, has ended up revealing just how tenuous that grip was. It began with Iran and Venezuela wondering whether their money would be better placed elsewhere, and before long the spell was broken. Faith in the dollar wavered, and the U.S. treasury suddenly found no takers for the money it was printing to fund the war and the trade deficit. In this saturated market the price started to fall, shaking confidence further, and before you could say “vicious circle” the exchange rate was hitting all time lows.
Macro debt is only half the story, though. Capitalism is predicated upon spiralling debt, and requires sustained economic growth to keep mass bankruptcy at bay. During the good times, this is all well and good (except, of course, when you consider the environmental costs associated with this growth), but the times they aren’t so good. Competing with the neoliberal hyperrich in the housing market (and coping with the rising price of oil and, consequently, oil derivatives and oil substitutes) has unbalanced everyone’s budget.
The subprime mortgage crisis was when the debt bubble burst, but none of the forces have gone away that inflated the bubble in the first place, and the crisis can only deepen. Even editorials in the Torygraph are now concluding that
The strategic failure of a whole generation of economists, bankers, and policy-makers has been so enormous that it may now take a strong draught of socialism to save the Western democracies. We start - but may not end - with the nationalisation of Northern Rock.
The oil and biofuel supply shock that precipitated this long overdue crisis of capital is making itself felt worldwide. The populist Third Way on which the rulers of Iran and Venezuela have been spending their oil revenues is being overtaken by inflation. In Iran this has coincided with a break from the global media spotlight, leading to the (equally long overdue) come-uppance of Ahmedinajed. In Venezuela, it coincides with a botched constitutional reform, making the need to deepen and quicken the Bolivarian Revolution more urgent than ever.
Having considered the above, now consider the effects of this inflation in very different contexts. Consider Iraq:
The Iraqi government announcement that monthly food rations will be cut by half has left many Iraqis asking how they can survive. The government also wants to reduce the number of people depending on the rationing system by five million by June 2008.
Iraq’s food rations system was introduced by the Saddam Hussein government in 1991 in response to the UN economic sanctions. Families were allotted basic foodstuffs monthly because the Iraqi Dinar and the economy collapsed. The sanctions, imposed after Saddam Hussein ordered the invasion of Kuwait, were described as “genocidal” by Denis Halliday, then UN humanitarian coordinator in Iraq. Halliday quit his post in protest against the U.S.-backed sanctions.
The sanctions killed half a million Iraqi children, and as many adults, according to the UN. They brought malnutrition, disease, and lack of medicines.
Iraqis became nearly completely reliant on food rations for survival. The programme has continued into the U.S.-led occupation. But now the U.S.-backed Iraqi government has announced it will halve the essential items in the ration because of “insufficient funds and spiralling inflation.”
The cuts, which are to be introduced in the beginning of 2008, have drawn widespread criticism. The Iraqi government is unable to supply the rations with several billion dollars at its disposal, whereas Saddam Hussein was able to maintain the programme with less than a billion dollars.
“In 2007, we asked for 3.2 billion dollars for rationing basic foodstuffs,” Mohammed Hanoun, Iraq’s chief of staff for the ministry of trade told al-Jazeera. “But since the prices of imported foodstuff doubled in the past year, we requested 7.2 billion dollars for this year. That request was denied.”
The trade ministry is now preparing to slash the list of subsidised items by half to five basic food items, “namely flour, sugar, rice, oil, and infant milk,” Hanoun said.
…According to an Oxfam International report released in July this year, “60 percent (of Iraqis) currently have access to rations through the government-run Public Distribution System (PDS), down from 96 percent in 2004.”
The report said that “43 percent of Iraqis suffer from absolute poverty,” and that according to some estimates over half the population are now without work. “Children are hit the hardest by the decline in living standards. Child malnutrition rates have risen from 19 percent before the U.S.-led invasion in 2003 to 28 percent now.”
Consider also Britain, where the government’s response to the rising cost of living has been to cut public sector wages.
Left With Gordon
In the last years of Blair’s decade, Gordon Brown went around dropping subtle hints that he might be at least a little to the left of his predecessor-to-be. Where Bliar’s ascent had been characterised by clear contempt for the Labour Party’s principles and traditions, Brown grunted about how Labour were best “when [they were] being Labour” (as opposed, presumably, to when they were being rebranded Tories). The media, meanwhile, revealed a disturbing obsession with Tony’s balls when they tried to spin Brown the “Atlanticist” into someone who definitely wasn’t up Bush’s arse, and Gordon gave us all cause for a deep sigh of relief by simply Not Being Tony Blair. Anyone who dared to hope, though, has surely been taught a valuable lesson by what followed.
I’m not going to chart the incompetent Blairism that is Brownism. Not only would that be pretty boring, it’s also likely to be a major theme in the mainstream press reviews of the year. I’m far more interested in the responses to Brownism; if Tony Blair’s name is now indelibly linked to the savaging of Iraq, Brown will go down in history as Mr. Incomes Policy. As I’ve said, an important driving force in inflation - and a direct and intended result of New Labour policy - has been the emergence of a new class of the superrich, with whose extravagant spending the rest of us can’t keep up.
None of the political parties would dare suggest lifting a finger against the very rich - only a few rare and hesitant noises from the Lib Dems even broach the idea of a progressive tax regime - but if Gordon is to bring inflation down then someone’s spending has to be restrained, and who better than the working class? 2007’s biggest political story, by far, has been the Brown government’s incomes policy - cutting benefits, cutting public sector employment and public sector wages (in the knowledge that the invisible hand will send private setor wages the same way) - and the resistance it has provoked.
To get an idea of the kind of class battle Brown has provoked, here are some numbers from PublicNotPrivate:
While frontline staff delivering key services such as health and education were expected to be satisfied with a pay freeze, the pay packets of company bosses have boomed over the past decade. In the public sector itself, the top 300 bosses saw their salaries increase by 12.8% last year, boosting their pay to an average of £237,564. The top 10 highest paid on the list earned an average of £799,000 - or 40 times as much as the basic pay for a nurse. Royal Mail’s chief executive Adam Crozier saw his total package increase by 21% in 2006 to £1.25m while a pay freeze was imposed on ordinary staff.
Similarly, private sector bosses continue to enjoy pay bonanzas. In 2005, the average salary for directors rose by 28% - that is, 25% above the rate of inflation. The following year, boardroom pay for UK’s top companies soared £37% as full-time directors were rewarded with inflation-busting increases in basic salaries, big cash bonuses and payouts from share schemes. The surge in pay took the average wages of a chief executive to £2,875,000 and was more than 11 times the increase in average earnings and nearly 20 times the rate of inflation as measured by the consumer price.
In other words, bosses are paid 98 times more than the average worker - up from 93 times a year ago. The gap is increasing at a dramatic speed: the year before, directors’ pay climbed 28%, up from 16% and 13% the years earlier. Meanwhile, bonuses for City workers rose by 30% last year.
In many firms the pay gap between bosses and workers is even more shocking. For example, Giles Thorley, chief executive of Punch Taverns, enjoys a total salary package of over £11m - that is, 1,148 times the average salary of his employees. Meanwhile Bart Brecht, chief of Reckitt Benckiser earns 718 times the company’s average salary, while Tesco’s boss Terry Leahy enjoys a salary 415 times that of the average shelf-stacker. According to the Institute for Public Policy Research in May 2007, the proportion of wealth held by Britain’s richest 10% rose from 47% in the 1990s to 54% in 2004.
While the bank balances of Britain’s bosses are bigger than ever before, two million workers are languishing on the minimum wage. In 2001, one in four households was classed as “breadline poor”. Little wonder that research by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation revealed that inequality in Britain is at a 40-year high after a decade of a Labour Government.
Bosses also enjoy incomparably better pension deals than their staff. A study in 2005 revealed that nearly 8 out of 10 of Britain’s company bosses are able to retire at 60 and enjoy a pension payout on average 26 times higher than the average worker. In other words, the average director’s pension is worth £167,000 a year compared with £6,344 for ordinary workers. NHS workers have an average pension of only £5,400 a year.
Unsurprisingly, there is overwhelming support for narrowing the gap between corporate fat cats and British workers. A recent YouGov poll revealed that 85% of Britons believed that country would be a better place if the gap was narrowed. The poll also showed that people believed nurses should be paid up to £9,000 more than their current levels; bus drivers £7,500 more; and checkout staff nearly £3,500 more.
Unsurprisingly, then, 2007 ended up being a year of renewed industrial action. Most dramatic was that of the postal workers - reported almost entirely in terms of how it would hurt small businesses - and that of the prison officers, in defiance of a government ban, but I’ve lost count of the number of strikes by council workers and industrial action has been in the air for nurses, teachers, bus drivers, the BBC and even the police. We’re by no means ready to start talking about general strikes, but this is building momentum that shows no signs of slowing down.
Working in a chronically underunionised sector, I’m no expert on the workings of trade unions, but I do know that struggle builds identity here. When a union is dominated by a labour aristocracy, cautious, conservative and sympathetic to the agenda of the capitalists, it becomes fairly legitimate to not want to bother with the union at all. By contrast, a fighting union is a useful union, and it’s not been unusual for recruitment to go up in the aftermath of industrial action.
Perhaps more importantly, it may be pay issues that have galvanised the will to resist, but they are certainly not the only issues. I’ll leave you to judge whether John Pilger’s Sicko II article was better than my post on the subject, but the fact is that the creeping privatisation of the NHS is becoming common knowledge, and struggles are forming around that too. Remember Karen Reissman, who spoke out against the PFI cuts to mental health care in Manchester, and was fired for embarrassing her despised employers? Well, a month of strikes and solidarity demonstrations hasn’t been enough to get her reinstated yet, but this was never really about Karen Reissman herself.
It has got PFI - and resistance to PFI - on the agenda, it has highlighted union-busting policies and thus made us think about why we need unions and, most importantly of all, it is allowing staff to renegotiate the cuts in mental health care provision. The battle isn’t over by any means, but the balance of power is shifting. Anyway, I’m in no position to give an authoritative summary of industrial action this year (in case anyone cares to drop a link in the comments box…), but something’s definitely happening.
Sea changes are going on within the Labour Party, too. There’s always been a significant left-wing to the party, and under Tony Blair it was left to despair and make sense of the new situation. Blair’s departure gave them the impetus to organise around John McDonnell’s leadership campaign. When this campaign was blocked by the whips, and when the party conference was cut down to an undemocratic trade fair, it became clear that those elements of the party that represent the party’s soul are being systematically excluded from the party’s decision making mechanisms. Will the Labour left (and the newly independent Bob Wareing) split off as “Real Labour” and form a united front with Respect? Well, perhaps things won’t turn out quite as I’d really really like them to, but it’s clear that there’s tension to be resolved; the Labour left are now organised and alert, and I don’t expect them to hang around waiting to be deselected forever, nor will the unions keep subsidising their class enemies in Number 10. A massive political realignment is waiting to happen, mark my words.
The polarisation of Labour and the radicalisation of the unions helps put into perspective the other story in the British left this year: the secession from the Respect Coalition of a celebrity faction, led by George Galloway and Salma Yaqoob and egged on by embarrassing swathes of the Life Of Brian left who just can’t stand the Socialist Worker Party. Thus was resolved - in perhaps the worst way imaginable, but still - the tension between activists and electoralists that had been making Respect a victim of its own success lately; with reconciliation not looking particularly likely for the time being, and with the “real” Respect now diminished in numbers and cut off from Parliamentary representation, this is all quite hard to be cheerful about, but if the Party Conference is anything to go by then we are still very live - and operating within a much livelier context than before.
What anguish remains can easily be soothed by laughing at the much messier disintegration of the BNP.
Political Ecology
I said this review was never going to be authoritative, but there’s one story to which I don’t have the time (for now) to do justice but which I can’t in good conscience ignore, and that’s the race between environmental awareness and environmental catastrophe. The subject of sustainability has become a standard mainstream discourse over the last couple of years while, in the background, every prediction the IPCC makes ends up contradicted by things going even worse. By now, most of us are rightly scared of what we’re doing to this world, but the mainstream discourse of ecocide is a dialogue of technocrats, self-conciously apolitical, alternately reinforcing despair and complacency.
Needless to say, we have to make moving on from there into one of the big stories of Twenty Noughtyeight.
19
Dec
All Around The Houses
There’s a building site on the corner of Princess Street and Canal Street in Manchester, a pit of rubble surrounded by hoardings advertising luxury living in the most obnoxious ostentation. It’s hardly an isolated development; gentrification is the new urbanisation, with the rich building themselves fashionable new pads all over our city spaces. As for the country, whole villages are being killed as houses are bought off as second homes until there are too few full time residents to support any kind of economy.
At the same time, we’re living through something of a housing crisis. Monbiot, though it pains his environmentalist heart to say so, reckons we need another three million homes building in the next decade and a half, and points at some examples of truly compelling need:
Wendy Castle moved into her flat in the Trellick Tower in west London when her eldest child was a baby. He’s now 16, and she has three others between 13 and 2. But her flat has only two bedrooms. She sleeps in one of them with her two youngest children. The room is completely filled by beds. On one side they are jammed against the window, which no longer shuts properly. On the other they are pressed against the heater, which can’t be used because of the fire risk. Her two oldest boys share an even smaller room.
She keeps her flat in a state of Japanese minimalism, but in the tiny living room the children were sitting on each other’s laps to watch the television. Like all the women I met that day, Wendy - tough as she has become - cried when she told me how this crowding was affecting her children. Her oldest boy is falling behind at school because “he physically does not have space to do his homework. He can’t do anything till the other kids go to bed.”
But the real shock came when she explained why she was stuck. Kensington and Chelsea, like several London boroughs, operates a points system, reflecting people’s level of deprivation. Every Monday morning it posts up the flats available for social tenants (those who pay less than the market rate). People with enough points can bid for them. Wendy has 40. She has been able to bid on only one occasion. Though her family is officially “severely overcrowded”, she came 87th out of 92. Eighty-six households, bidding for the same flat, were deemed to be in greater need than hers. “I’ve tried everything. But when I ring them they say ‘I don’t know why you bother - you ain’t got the points’.”
There are others, and this anecdotal evidence seems consistent with what I hear too. One of my flatmates, whom my anti-Southerner prejudice had led me to think of as pretty posh, recently told me he’d never had his own room, and had always slept on a mattress in the lounge. It certainly seems to be no exaggeration to talk in terms of “crisis“.
Using figures from the government and the housing charity Shelter, Monbiot summarises: “Over half a million households are officially overcrowded, 85,000 are in temporary accomodation, 1.6m are on the social housing waiting list”, and that’s without counting the people on the streets. Clearly, all these people need somewhere to live; the question is where?
Shortly after it came to power in 1997, the Labour government provided its own answer to that question, designating some parts of the country as “Greenbelt” - pristine rural paradise to be preserved at all cost - and “Brownbelt” - a term more associated with urban decay, indicating the old rubbish that anyone can build on. However, Brownbelt covers a lot more than most people realise: in particular, it covers a lot of people’s gardens.
No count is being kept of how much garden space is being lost to urban regeneration, but it is a lot and, while I’m always happier to see space shared than kept as private property, we shouldn’t neglect the importance of even private greenery in the city, keeping our air clean and, by retaining water, dramatically reducing the risk of flood and drought. Things are made worse by people’s urge to turn gardens into miniature car-parks, and the Olympics - that time-honoured vehicle for merciless gentrification - look set to trample over more than a few allotment gardens.
Given the underestimated environmental value of the Brownbelt, some - including respected environmentalist Sir Jonathon Porritt (though, personally, I have a little difficulty respecting anyone whose name is prefixed by “Sir” or “Dame” or what-have-you, he does seem to be kosher) - are calling for a complete rethink on the subject of the Greenbelt. Since many of the objections can be dismissed as selfish NIMBYism, it seems fair enough, maybe we do need to start building more houses in the countryside.
A word of caution is in order here, though, too. While a careful choice of sites may limit the environmental cost of what we bulldoze, we also need to think about the environmental overhead of what we build. Suburbia - especially as the term is used in the U.S.A. - is an incredibly inefficient place to live. In terms of space management, energy use, and especially transport, it’s wasteful on a scale that, until the twentieth century, was unknown to all but the most decadent of monarchs. It’s even being suggested, quite plausibly, that the suburbs may have to be abandoned, or at least completely rethought, as a result of ‘Peak Oil’.
However, this idea of mass building to arrive at affordable housing rests on a fairly narrow definition of “affordable”. Money is a human invention; we should be controlling it, rather than letting it control us. During a housing crisis, can we afford to let 676,000 homes stand empty? Can we afford 260,000 second homes when we need another 500,000 first homes? I say we ban them, pure and simple, or maybe think about a housing tax structure that would see tax proportional to the area:inhabitants ratio (ie, the emptier the property, the more it costs). Monbiot also suggests helping older people move to smaller flats; it’s a good idea, but these are temporary measures at best.
The invisible hand of the market is very visible here, and it’s pushing us to places we don’t want to go. Sure, the bubble of speculative property development is in the middle of bursting, so the price of owning a house should fall in line with the price of renting a house, but that’s still a lot of money; more than most of us can afford. Sub-prime lending kept the market ticking along for a while, but surprised no-one by proving fatally unstable. And, increasingly, the invisible hand is pushing us to make a choice: mass homelessness and overcrowding, or else the paving over of half the country; social disaster or environmental disaster. Might it not be better - might it not be more affordable - just to chop off the invisible hand?
What this country needs is socialised housing.
12
Dec
What Do We Want?
Most of the governments of the rich world now exhort their citizens to use less carbon. They encourage us to change our lightbulbs, insulate our lofts, turn our TVs off at the wall. In other words, they have a demand-side policy for tackling climate change. But as far as I can determine not one of them has a supply-side policy. None seeks to reduce the supply of fossil fuel. So the demand-side policy will fail. Every barrel of oil and tonne of coal that comes to the surface will be burnt.Or perhaps I should say that they do have a supply-side policy: to extract as much as they can.
That’s an angle that probably won’t have been debated much in Bali this week, where…
…the biggest NGO delegation in Bali is the lobbying group, the International Emissions Trading Association (IETA). With 336 representatives including lawyers, financiers, emissions traders, consultants, certifiers and emissions trading experts from companies like Shell, the IETA makes up 7.5% of the 4483 Non-Governmental Organisation (NGO) delegates registered to attend the UN climate talks.The IETA totally dwarfs even the largest environmental groups like WWF (2%), Greenpeace (1.6%), Friends of the Earth (1.52%) as well as big development organisations like Oxfam (1.31%).
Remember, NGO doesn’t stand for Cuddly Loveliness For Everyone, just for Non-Government Organisation. Though it wouldn’t be the case from a literal reading of the definition, this category does seem to exclude profit-seeking corporations, but it may as well not do. Buying a stake in the Third Sector is the easiest thing in the world to do, if you have the money, and organisations that aren’t working for any profit of their own may well do wonders for the profits of their benefactors. Tony Vaux’s book The Selfish Altruist contains many great examples of how the well-meaning NGOs can still end up ill-doing - it’s only a matter of time before someone draws up a theory analogous to the Propaganda Model - and as for those who mean ill in the first place…
No, there’s no reason to expect the armies of politicians, lobbyists and journalists in Bali to do an especially sincere or thorough job of representing us. We have to represent ourselves, and the best way we’ve found of doing that has been through taking to the streets: I was there this weekend, one of 10,000 people trudging accross London in the freezing rain. This was by no means the biggest environmental protest we’ve ever seen, but it’s a step in the right direction.
But - and don’t get me wrong - I can’t stand environmental protests. I mean, we need to have them, we need to have them now more than ever, but they just don’t seem to be remotely angry. A good bit of fury is a carthatic way of getting over the hassle of marching, as well as getting the point accross a little more convincingly, but this doesn’t happen with the climate like it does for, say, the war. It’s good, yes, that environmentalism is reaching the mainstream, but it needs more than just numbers: it needs teeth.
“What do we want?” someone always yells, but at environmentalist marches the question rarely seems all that rhetorical. There was a muted chant of this, with the answer “global action”, and I tried again at one point for “climate justice”, but it didn’t take off. Whether that’s because the silent majority didn’t care for all this shouting spoiling a nice day out with the kids or whether, as I suspect, they’re not sure exactly what they want but they don’t like the sound of “global action” or “climate justice” one bit.
I realise that when I rant it’s often unpleasant and unconstructive, so I’ll stop here. Well, I’ll finish with a little reminder: environmentalism is no longer about hugging trees (not that there’s anything wrong with that, per se) but about our survival as a species. If that’s not worth getting a bit worked up about I don’t know what is.
Update: In addition to the above vitriol, I’ll point you to the emergency Avaaz petition against attempts from to sabotage a strong agreement.
Climate negotiations in Bali are in crisis. Things were looking good till now: near-consensus on a delicate deal, including 2020 targets for rich countries, in return for which China and the developing world would do their part over time. IPCC scientists have said such targets are needed to prevent catastrophe. But Japan, the US and Canada are banding together to wreck the deal, and the rest of the world is starting to waver…
We can’t let three stubborn governments throw away the planet’s future. We have until the end of Friday to do everything we can. Please sign our emergency global petition below — we’ll deliver it through stunts at the summit, a full-page ad in the Financial Times in Asia, and directly to country delegates to stiffen their nerve against any bad compromise. Add your name to the campaign below now!
“We call urgently for the US, Canada and Japan to stop blocking serious 2020 targets for emissions reductions, and for the rest of the world to refuse to accept anything less.”
This website just got its 15,000th view today. Celebrating meaningless milestones being a fair bit easier than, err, getting down to some serious coursework, I have found the following video clip, of crucial relevance to current events.
Seriously, though, a few people really are working on flying cars, and it’s one of the most stupid ideas anyone could come up with right now. We need to cut back, massively, on our pollution and energy consumption. Our burning desire for cars that fly has to come second to our need for survival.
The 8th of December will be a day of global protests for tougher action on climate change, specifically aimed at influencing the outcome of upcoming climate talks in Bali. Do what you can to decrease your own footprint, of course, but decarbonising our economy is going to take a massive collective effort, and it’s just as important to get a bit of political mobilisation going. UK readers: see you in London?
I won’t bother with any outlandish fantasy horror, as there is something really scary out there at the moment anyway, something that can give me nightmares now I’ve long outgrown ghosts and zombies and the Borg. I’m talking about the ecological collapse into which we’re sleepwalking, and of which by far the most visible aspect is climate change.
Someone who I thought deserved a bit of a scare was my MP, James Purnell. In the spirit of the season, I wrote James the following letter:
Dear James Purnell,
The Climate Change Bill is likely to get a second reading in December before being debated in Spring. While it is good to see environmental targets being enshrined in law, the law doesn’t go nearly far enough, and I hope you will do what you can to make it go further. The three following amendments would be particularly welcome.
1/ A higher 2050 target
Even Gordon Brown has acknowledged that a 60% cut in emissions may 2050 may not be satisfactory. Some prominent climate scientists go much further than that, and I hope we can commit to at least an 80% cut.2/ Binding annual targets
If a week is a long time in politics, 43 years is an eternity. Few of us are convinced that governments would pay much attention to a 2050 target in setting day-to-day policy. We need legally-binding annual milestones on the way to any 2050 target, or the latter will become just so much “aspirational” PR.
Incidentally, these milestones will be a great help to the businesses and entrepeneurs whose interests New Labour takes so seriously, and for whom the current uncertainty can only be frustrating.3/ Include shipping and aviation
Currently, emissions from shipping and aviation are excluded from the UK’s emissions total. Given the amount contributed by these sectors, as well as the massive growth currently projected, this makes a mockery of the whole system. I have heard the justification that working out how much of the emissions associated with a flight are attributable to which country are too complex, but this is nonsense: attribute half the emissions to the country of departure and half to the country of arrival.The UK is on target to meet its Kyoto targets merely because of the savings inherent in the politically-motivated flight from coal to gas. As coal mining starts to expand once more, and with imminent massive airport expansion, there is a real danger of our emissions rising dramatically without strong government action. Even the U.N., in its latest reports, acknowledges the immense dangers posed by climate change to our very survival as a species, and I trust you will take these concerns as seriously as they merit.
On an unrelated note, I also hope you take some steps in the aftermath of this Photoshop incident to reassure your constituents that their confidence in you is justified, perhaps by supporting the Elected Representatives (Prohibition of Deception) Bill introduced by Adam Price MP of Plaid Cymru.
Yours sincerely,
Dave Sewell
I suggest you drop yours a line (click here to send a quick email, here to go further); even if they’re a slippery toerag you’d never contemplate voting for, they are supposed to at least try and represent you. Post your letters here in the comments section if you like.
Incidentally, the amendments suggested here are those of the I-Count campaign (h/t the Coffee House), but they’re by no means enough to make it perfect (nor, in my view, will even 80% be enough, but it’s a start). I could also have complained, for example, about the potential for wriggling out of any commitments with dodgy trading schemes, but that’s a complex argument that I don’t think there’s any point me having out in emails with my MP. We need to raise the level of debate on the issue first, and in the meantime there is scope for vastly improving the bill with those three amendments that I reckon we can all agree with based on existing information. Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good, and all that.
15
Oct
Derailing a Disaster
Via ExitStageRight: Humanity could cause its own demise
Unfortunately, the current discussion of global warming is rarely placed in the context of an even more arresting prediction: If current environmental trends continue, half of the species on Earth - perhaps including humans - will go extinct by century’s end.
OK, I know that sounds like scare mongering but stick with me for a moment… You could hardly be blamed if you didn’t notice, but we appear to be living through the fastest of the six episodes of mass extinction that have taken place in the Earth’s history. (Yes, incredibly, extinctions are taking place faster now than they did after an asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs.)
Unlike the five previous mass extinctions, this one is man-made.
Rob Newman: It’s capitalism or a habitable planet, you can’t have both
There is no meaningful response to climate change without massive social change. A cap on this and a quota on the other won’t do it. Tinker at the edges as we may, we cannot sustain earth’s life-support systems within the present economic system.
Capitalism is not sustainable by its very nature. It is predicated on infinitely expanding markets, faster consumption and bigger production in a finite planet. And yet this ideological model remains the central organising principle of our lives, and as long as it continues to be so it will automatically undo (with its invisible hand) every single green initiative anybody cares to come up with.
Much discussion of energy, with never a word about power, leads to the fallacy of a low-impact, green capitalism somehow put at the service of environmentalism. In reality, power concentrates around wealth. Private ownership of trade and industry means that the decisive political force in the world is private power. The corporation will outflank every puny law and regulation that seeks to constrain its profitability. It therefore stands in the way of the functioning democracy needed to tackle climate change. Only by breaking up corporate power and bringing it under social control will we be able to overcome the global environmental crisis.
…
To get from here to there we must talk about climate chaos in terms of what needs to be done for the survival of the species rather than where the debate is at now or what people are likely to countenance tomorrow morning.
If we are all still in denial about the radical changes coming - and all of us still are - there are sound geological reasons for our denial. We have lived in an era of cheap, abundant energy. There never has and never will again be consumption like we have known. The petroleum interval, this one-off historical blip, this freakish bonanza, has led us to believe that the impossible is possible, that people in northern industrial cities can have suntans in winter and eat apples in summer. But much as the petroleum bubble has got us out of the habit of accepting the existence of zero-sum physical realities, it’s wise to remember that they never went away.
George Monbiot: Bring On The Recession
I am about to break the last of the universal taboos. I hope that the recession now being forecast by some economists materialises.
I recognise that recession causes hardship. Like everyone I am aware that it would cause some people to lose their jobs and homes. I do not dismiss these impacts or the harm they inflict, though I would argue that they are the avoidable results of an economy designed to maximise growth rather than welfare. What I would like you to recognise is something much less discussed: that, beyond a certain point, hardship is also caused by economic growth.
On Sunday I visited the only UN biosphere reserve in Wales: the Dyfi estuary. As is usual at weekends, several hundred people had come to enjoy its beauty and tranquillity and, as is usual, two or three people on jet skis were spoiling it for everyone else. Most economists will tell us that human welfare is best served by multiplying the number of jet skis. If there are two in the estuary today, there should be four there by this time next year and eight the year after. Because the estuary’s beauty and tranquillity don’t figure in the national accounts (no one pays to watch the sunset) and because the sale and use of jet skis does, this is deemed an improvement in human welfare.
This is a minor illustration of an issue which can no longer be dismissed as trivial. In August the World Health Organisation released the preliminary results of its research into the links between noise and stress. Its work so far suggests that long-term exposure to noise from traffic alone could be responsible, around the world, for hundreds of thousands of deaths through ischaemic heart disease every year, as well as contributing to strokes, high blood pressure, tinnitus, broken sleep and other stress-related illnesses… All over the world, complaints about noise are rising: to an alien observer it would appear that the primary purpose of economic growth is to find ever more intrusive means of burning fossil fuels.
This leads us to the most obvious way in which further growth will hurt us. Climate change does not lead only to a decline in welfare: beyond a certain point it causes its termination. In other words, it threatens the lives of hundreds of millions of people. However hard governments might work to reduce carbon emissions, they are battling the tide of economic growth. While the rate of growth in the use of energy declines as an economy matures, no country has yet managed to reduce energy use while raising gross domestic product. The UK’s carbon dioxide emissions are higher than they were in 1997(3), partly as a result of the 60 successive quarters of growth that Gordon Brown keeps boasting about. A recession in the rich nations might be the only hope we have of buying the time we need to prevent runaway climate change.
The massive improvements in human welfare - better housing, better nutrition, better sanitation and better medicine - over the past 200 years are the result of economic growth and the learning, spending, innovation and political empowerment it has permitted. But at what point should it stop? In other words, at what point do governments decide that the marginal costs of further growth exceed the marginal benefits? Most of them have no answer to this question. Growth must continue, for good or ill. It seems to me that in the rich nations we have already reached the logical place to stop.
I now live in one of the poorest places in Britain. The teenagers here have expensive haircuts, fashionable clothes and mobile phones… They have been liberated from the horrible poverty their grandparents suffered, and this is something we should celebrate and must never forget. But with one major exception, can anyone argue that the basic needs of everyone in the rich nations cannot now be met? The exception is housing, and in this case the growth in value is one of the reasons for exclusion…
Governments love growth because it excuses them from dealing with inequality. As Henry Wallich, a governor of the US Federal Reserve, once pointed out in defending the current economic model, “growth is a substitute for equality of income. So long as there is growth there is hope, and that makes large income differentials tolerable”. Growth is a political sedative, snuffing out protest, permitting governments to avoid confrontation with the rich, preventing the construction of a just and sustainable economy. Growth has permitted the social stratification which even the Daily Mail now laments.
Is there anything which could sensibly be described as welfare that the rich can now gain? … Is it not time to recognise that we have reached the promised land, and should seek to stay there? Why would we want to leave this place in order to explore the blackened wastes of consumer frenzy followed by ecological collapse? Surely the rational policy for the governments of the rich world is now to keep growth rates as close to zero as possible?
But because political discourse is controlled by people who put the accumulation of money above all other ends, this policy appears to be impossible. Unpleasant as it will be, it is hard to see what except an accidental recession could prevent economic growth from blowing us through Canaan and into the desert on the other side.
Discuss.
14
Sep
Norway Bans Greenwash!
Well, not quite, but they’re climbing the mountain:
No car can be “green,” “clean” or “environmentally friendly,” according to some of the world’s strictest advertising guidelines set to enter into force in Norway next month. Cars cannot do anything good for the environment except less damage than others,” Bente Oeverli, a senior official at the office of the state-run Consumer Ombudsman, told Reuters on Thursday.
Carmakers such as Toyota, General Motor’s Opel, Mitsubishi, Peugeot Citroen, Saab and Suzuki had all used phrases this year in advertisements that the watchdog judged misleading, she said. One Toyota advertisement for a Prius, for instance, described the gasoline-electric hybrid as “the world’s most environmentally friendly car.”
“If someone says their car is more ‘green’ or ‘environmentally friendly’ than others then they would have to be able to document it in every aspect from production, to emissions, to energy use, to recycling,” she said.
“In practice that can’t be done,” she said of tougher guidelines entering into force in Norway from October 15. The guidelines distributed to carmakers said: “We ask that … phrases such as ‘environmentally friendly’, ‘green’, ‘clean’, ‘environmental car’, ‘natural’ or similar descriptions not be used in marketing cars.”
To my mind, there are few things more perverse than claiming to save the environment by selling cars. Of course some cars are worse than others, and downsizing from a Chelsea tractor to a tiny, efficient hybrid can only be a good thing - but it’s a decision that needs to be taken based on objective, substantiable facts, not on sales waffle like “[the Volvo C30 was] designed with the utmost respect for the environment in mind.”
I use the Volvo example not because they’re the worst offenders, but because that particular greenwash was banned by the Advertising Standards Authority, who deemed it misleading given the C30’s relatively high emissions. That’s an order of magnitude weaker than the Norwegian laws, but it’s a start and we should envisage better things. Norway’s ruling party is substantially to the left of ours, but not so much that they oppose large-scale privatisation, and of the new laws were released with the usual sugar happy-businesses-leading-the-way rhetoric. They even belong to the same European political bloc as New Labour, and if it can be done there, why not here?
Of course, Gordon Brown showed how he feels about facing up to big business in the name of the environment, by appointing a former head of the CBI as energy minister. Norwegians too tend be more environmentally aware than Brits - after all, for decades our pollution has been blown across the North Sea to rain on them - but the only way to change that is to, well, change that.
The ASA are already looking into the problem of excessive greenwash, but the more noise we make the further that is likely to go. I don’t have a TV, and while I watch it at my parents’ house I usually leave the room in disgust at every commercial break (incidentally, did anyone see Ghosts on FilmFour last night? How unreal were the adverts: here we are watching desperation and poverty, now we are watching happy bouncy aspirational ads for fashion clothes and cars, here we are watching people trapped and alienated in the rain miles from home, now we are planning our holidays in the sun miles from home). However, from now on I will make the effort and urge you all to join me: when you see shameless abuse of environmental concerns in an advert, write to the ASA (or your country’s equivalent: the FTC in the U.S., the ASB in Australia, the ASCI in India, etc.). Tell them which advert in particular has bothered you and why; if enough of us do it, this is the best way to get a convincing general picture across. Several hundred people read this blog alone, and the ASA rarely gets more than a couple dozen complaints for a given advert; if we all send one complaint each, they’ll listen. Come on, it’s the work of about 30 seconds.
The ASA won’t solve all our problems - as I’ve argued before, we should think about banning ads for all flights and all but the most efficient cars ASAP, and that goes way beyond the remit - but it could push for Norwegian-style legislation and, more broadly, put advertising restrictions onto the agenda.
In his column in the Guardian newspaper, George Monbiot writes passionately and insightfully about ecocide - about how we are destroying the planet, where this could lead us, what we could do about it and who benefits from us not doing anything. He writes all this in a small column, surrounded by massive great adverts for big cars, cheap flights, and various other sundry carbontastic luxuries. This is true of the corporate press in general, of course - one of the most glaring hypocrites is the Independent, which counts among its main selling points both its focus on green issues and its extensive infommercial travel section - but Monbiot has been making a name for himself as an environmental campaigner and should be rights be quite angry about it all.
Everyone’s favourite press watchdog, MediaLens, issued Monbiot a challenge last month: to break the silence on this issue, to address the pervasive advertising lest it render his journalism irrelevant and futile. He thought about, and wrote a scathing attack on “Eco-junk” culture, on green consumerism, on the great sales promotion that tells us we can shop our way to sustainability. This is may have convinced some, but a lot of us were disappointed that he still shied away from the real issue. “To read his article,” I wrote at the time, “one may suspect laziness on the part of newspapers, or naivety - but one would never guess that hawking tat is essentially their raison d’être.“
A quick google shows that, to be fair, reactions were mixed - many people, clearly did find it thought-provoking and revelatory - but Monbiot himself doesn’t seem to have been any more convinced than I was. Today, he’s given up, writing:
I am sorry to be crude, but however else I try to say it, the phrase “lying bastards” comes to mind… But I write all this with the blush of the hypocrite, for I have been forced to concede that I too am complicit in the strategies of corporate power…
A quick survey leads him to the same conclusions as MediaLens, and from a few email exchanges with the newspapers’ advertising he infers the obvious: that the newspapers will never volunteer to give up a lucrative source of advertising. So, one way or another, we have to make them. If we can ban cigarette adverts from TV and sport, then why not? (Actually, I can think of a lot of adverts that want banning, but I can think of no higher priority than averting ecocide, so let’s take this one step at a time). Anyway, I can’t find evidence of any campaign to implement such restrictions, but if someone knows of one please let me know and I’ll do my best to publicise it. In the meantime, you can sign the following petitions to the Prime Minister’s office (UK residents and expat citizens only):
Petition to ban the advertising of flights
I’m contemplating starting a more focused petition myself, but we have to avoid too much duplication. 200 petitions with 500 signatories each will get a lot less attention than one petition with 10,000 signatories (and even that’s not enough). For now, let’s all just sign these two, and please let’s spread the word.
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