Umberto Eco on Fascism

September 5, 2022

From How to Spot A Fascist: “Ur-Fascism“

I’m going to move some of these points around in terms of priority and distort some of it.

Fascism springs from frustration, fear of loss, or actual loss, often loss of economic security or social status. Possibly with people who have seen prosperity being replaced by precarity, or siphoned off to some elites, and there is no solution being proposed by anyone that they know about. They rightly feel ignored, uneasy, slighted and resentful. The leader appears to recognise them and their problems and frustration, and channels it. He promises change.

  • Consequently, fascists can emerge from the middle class who fear loss of status, or fear being relegated to worker status.

Fascism promotes unity by denouncing difference and diversity. It attacks ‘intruders’ or those defined as foreign, and those who seem different. ‘We’ become valuable because we share ‘race’, religion, tradition, or nationality. These are matters of kinship.

  • People who differ from fascist views are evil or corrupt – non-kin. They need to be rooted out as they potentially destroy unity, national tradition and the advancement that is rightly ‘ours’. Dissent from fascism is betrayal.
  • Again unity is ensured by condemnation of diversity and finding scapegoats who are ‘different’ in some way, and who can be blamed for the ‘national failure’, ‘national frustration’ etc.
  • The scapegoats should be apparently strong but in reality quite socially weak; intellectuals, people of a minor religion, some kind of relatively poor minority. The enemy should be denounceable as both too strong and too weak or contemptable… certainly they should be easy to beat up, as that shows fascist masculinity in action.

To keep the fascist loyal, their belief in the movement is not abstract, it is deeply emotional and intuitive. It is sacred and beyond mere words.

  • People who cannot accept the fascist beliefs or who think those beliefs are incoherent, are too weak, and unspiritual, to apprehend fascism’s glory.
  • The different are spiritually inferior. Loathsome even. Or they are evil, trying to take faith away from the faithful.

Fascism generally supports an incoherent and imagined tradition. Italians are Romans. Germans are blond Aryans, both civilized and savage. Fascist Americans defend the constitution while ignoring it. Tradition must embrace contradiction, to point at its real glory.

  • Putting contradictory traditions together (‘Syncretism’) helps people bridge their differences, as well as hinder logical rather than symbolic thinking.
  • Tradition has to reject ‘the modern’ and the things fascism is fighting against, like difference. Differences, such as those recognised by ‘multiculturalism’, ‘gender variation,’ sexual expression, lack of artistic realism, and so on, are not considered part of the tradition that is worshiped. However, difference such as social status and command must be recognised as they express the party elite, and post-agricultural tradition always involves hierarchy.
  • The tradition usually imagines that men are the rulers and women are obedient breeders and supporters of male glory.

Fascism is expressed in action, in doing, not in thinking. Thinking is a form of emasculation. Intellectuals are effeminate and evil, unless they denounce the enemy, help action to occur, or justify the mystical strength of fascism.

  • The active principle is that life is struggle. Life is war. Peace is death. Enemies are needed, and must be overcome. The problem is what happens after total victory, after the final solution? The need is to find more enemies, more people to fight against, and that can be internal to the nation, and destroy the nation.
  • In fascism every fascist is a potential hero. Someone who will lay down their life for the party, for the nation etc. Death is the aim. Fascism is the dark side of the hero archetype in action.

The leader is the person who can express, or divine, the true spiritual will of the people, and guide the people to satisfy that spiritual will.

  • Multiple people cannot express that will. Parliaments are corrupt because they don’t express that will, they express argument, or sometimes loss for the leader.
  • The only real Parliament, for a fascist, is completely obedient to the leader and his expression of the people’s will. Everything else is illegitimate.

Dominant groups in society, tend to think they can support fascism, as it recognises their position in the hierarchy. Because of fascisms love of tradition, they can think fascists are conservatives, and will support their place. They also tend to think the leader can remove obstacles, and get rid of worker disobedience. They may even think they can control and placate the leader. Therefore the dominant groups will generally accept and support fascism, in an effort to protect themselves from peril.

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Biofuels: Will they work?

September 5, 2022

[Long but unfinished]

What are Modern Biofuels

The term ‘biofuel’ is usually used to refer to liquid or solid fuels manufactured from recently living organic material called ‘biomass’ (which can include plants, cooking oils, animals, microorganisms and so on), and made in relatively short human time frames. Fossil fuels also come from living material, but are made in geological time frames.

Biomass can be specially grown on farms, taken from forests (natural or cultivated) or from so called ‘marginal land’, collected from the waste from production of another crop (rather than being used as mulch, fertiliser or animal feed). Biomass can be made from organic garbage or manure, which is then usually (but not always) turned into methane (‘natural gas’) and purified. Biomass can also be made through the growth of algae in tanks or sometimes ponds. Sometimes the burning of mixed rubbish, or plastic pollution is also classified as a biofuel.

History and use

Biofuels such as collected wood, plant matter and dung have been used by humans for heating and cooking for a long time. Some of the earlier internal combustion engines were supposedly either designed or modified to run on biofuels – although I do not have documented evidence for this. Nicolaus August Otto who is usually said to have invented the first automobile engine in 1876, potentially fueled it with alcohol as well as coal gas. The diesel engine, could be run on fuel made out of peanut oil, and Ford’s model T could also run on bio-oils.

However it is usually agreed that the cheapness of petroleum products in the 1910s-20s, ended these experiments and engines were no longer built to work with bio products.

After the recognition of climate change, biofuels have sometimes been mandated by Governments to strengthen energy security, reduce GHG (through regrowth of crops), and because they can provide ways to subsidise some agriculture or other industries.

The EU issued its first biofuel directive in 2003 which recommended “tax exemption, financial assistance for the processing industry and the establishment of a compulsory rate of biofuels for oil companies”. This was so successful that by 2017 it was claimed that:

Biomass for energy (bioenergy) continues to be the main source of renewable energy in the EU, with a share of almost 60%. The heating and cooling sector is the largest end-user, using about 75% of all bioenergy (see section 1).  

European Commission’s Knowledge Centre for Bioeconomy. 2019. Brief on biomass for energy in the European Union. and

The UK was lowering coal consumption but replacing the coal with wood pellets imported from the southeast United States, and providing over $1 billion in annual subsidies to help pay the costs of production and transport, mainly at the Drax power station (“the British government paid Drax the equivalent of €2.4m (£2.1m) a day in 2019”).

Drax appear to claim that wood pelleting is good for the environment and that they buy from sources which encourage tree growth:

“Over the last 25 years, the US South has not only increased its total wood supply – the surplus annual growth (compared to removals) each year has quadrupled”

Managed forests often absorb more carbon than forests that are left untouched .

(Drax 2022c)

We might wonder how biodiverse the new forestry is, and how much GHG are emitted transporting the chips across the Atlantic. We can also suggest that biofuel fit in well with European conditions of burning fuels and subsidy of agriculture. It could also increase wood chopping

According to Eurostat:

Almost a quarter (23 %) of the EU’s roundwood production in 2020 was used as fuelwood, while the remainder was industrial roundwood used for sawnwood and veneers, or for pulp and paper production…. . This represents an increase of 6 percentage points compared to 2000, when fuelwood accounted for 17 % of the total roundwood production. In some Member States, specifically the Netherlands, Cyprus and Hungary, fuelwood represented the majority of roundwood production (more than 50 %) in 2020. 

Eurostat 2021 Wood products – production and trade

Roundwood comprises all quantities of wood removed from the forest and other wooded land, or other tree felling site during a defined period of time

Eurostat: 2018 Glossary: Roundwood production

A Guardian article claims that “Between 2008 and 2018, subsidies for biomass, of which wood is the main source, among 27 European nations increased by 143%.” So the subsidies could provide an extra energy to focus on activities which are already happening.

The IEA claims:

Modern bioenergy is the largest source of renewable energy globally, accounting for 55% of renewable energy and over 6% of global energy supply. The Net Zero Emissions by 2050 Scenario sees a rapid increase in the use of bioenergy to displace fossil fuels by 2030.

IEA Bioenergy 2021?

Clearly bioenergy is significant in the technologies which count as renewable. However, the reduction of emissions from burning biomass, might be largely theoretical. One source claims:

biomass burning power plants emit 150% the CO2 of coal, and 300 – 400% the CO2 of natural gas, per unit energy produced.

PFPI Carbon emissions from burning biomass for energy

The complexity and confusion over biofuel use, appears to be being used as a way of making EU renewable figures more respectable, and as such is enmeshed in politics rather than in ‘physical reality’. An Article in Environmental Policy and Governance stated:

We find that the commitment of EU decision-making bodies to internal guidelines on the use of expertise and the precautionary principle was questionable, despite the scientific uncertainty inherent in the biofuels debate. Imperatives located in the political space dominated scientific evidence and led to a process of ‘policy-based evidence gathering’ to justify the policy choice of a 10% renewable
energy/biofuels target.

Amelia Sharman & John Holmes 2010. Evidence-Based Policy or Policy-Based Evidence Gathering? Biofuels, the EU and the 10% Target. Environmental Policy and Governance 20: 309–321. and official site

So it can be suggested that biofuels can act as a fantasy evasion of challenges. Supposedly “responding to industry feedback”, the UK government increased its targets for biofuel, and justifies expanding airports by claiming that planes will use “sustainable” fuels, even though only a small number of planes can be provided with biofuels with current technologies. This means even more magic and fantasy, creeps into responses.

In 2005, the US Congress passed a “Renewable Fuel Standard,” which required transport fuel to include an increasing volume of biofuel. The law was expanded in 2007 and as a result, 2.8 million additional hectares of corn were grown between 2008 and 2016. 

“The Energy Policy Act of 2005 used a variety of economic incentives, including grants, income tax credits, subsidies and loans to promote biofuel research and development. It established a Renewable Fuel Standard mandating the blending of 7.5 billion gallons of  renewable fuels with gasoline annually by 2012. “The Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 (EISA) included similar economic incentives. EISA expanded the Renewable Fuel Standard to increase biofuel production to 36 billion gallons by 2022.” (EPA 2022).

In late 2021, The Biden Administration released plans (Whitehouse 2021) for increased biofuel production for aviation. With the aim of enabling “aviation emissions to drop 20% by 2030 when compared to business as usual” and “New and ongoing funding opportunities to support sustainable aviation fuel projects and fuel producers totaling up to $4.3 billion.” Later reports suggested that the Build Back Better Bill would include $1 billion in extra funding for normal biofuels (Neeley 2021).

In 2022, with the Russian invasion of Ukraine and a worldwide increase in fossil fuel prices. The Administration said (Whitehouse 2022) they were “committed to doing everything [they] can to address the pain Americans are feeling at the pump as a result of Putin’s Price Hike” and this involved spurring US biofuel production (“homegrown” to make it wholesome). This involved authorising the production of E15 in the summer months, when it is normally illegal, partly because it evaporates easily and adds GHG and particulates to the atmosphere including nitric, and nitrogen, oxides, although this is disputed (refs# AFP 2022). He also claimed to have negotiated “a historic release from petroleum reserves around the world, putting 240 million barrels of oil on the market in the next six months” (Whitehouse 2022). This is clearly not an attempt to reduce petrol consumption but the price of petrol which is likely to increase consumption over what it would have been otherwise.

The US Energy Information administration states that in 2021 “17.5 billion gallons of biofuels were produced in the United States and about 16.8 billion gallons were consumed. The United States was a net exporter of about 0.8 billion gallons of biofuels” (EIA 2022).

Biofuels are a major taxpayer supported industry, which appears to help delay change in at least some fields such as transport (automobile fuel), and are supported by that industry.

Scientific Encouragement

Biofuels have long been part of official plans for the energy transition, as a replacement for petrol or gas. The IPCC said in 2018:

Bioenergy has a significant greenhouse gas (GHG) mitigation potential, provided that the resources are developed sustainably and that efficient bioenergy systems are used. Certain current systems and key future options including perennial cropping systems, use of biomass residues and wastes and advanced conversion systems are able to deliver 80 to 90% emission reductions compared to the fossil energy baseline….

From the expert review of available scientific literature, potential deployment levels of biomass for energy by 2050 could be in the range of 100 to 300 EJ…. The upper bound of the technical potential of biomass for energy may be as large as 500 EJ/yr by 2050….

Biomass provided about 10.2% (50.3 EJ/yr) of the annual global primary energy supply in 2008,

IPCC Chapter 2: Biofuels 215-16

Recognised Problems

Not enough biofuels

In 2011, the International Energy Agency forecast that biofuels could make up 27 percent of global transportation fuels by 2050. In 2021 the same organisation called for greater production of biofuels, but feared that (even i biofuels were less polluting and were low emissions) the necessary increase was not happening:

Transport biofuel production expanded 6% year-on-year in 2019, and 3% annual production growth is expected over the next five years. This falls short of the sustained 10% output growth per year needed until 2030 to align with the SDS.

IEA Transport Biofuels tracking report 1921 [Note IEA website addresses are often used more than once for the current report]

And:

While biofuel demand grew 5% per year on average between 2010 and 2019, the Net Zero Emissions by 2050 Scenario requires much higher average growth of 14% per year to 2030.

Despite a boost in biofuel production in Asia, Wood Mackenzie state

Our forecast shows that no Asian market can meet its biodiesel and ethanol blending targets this year. Indonesia for example, l requires 15 million hectares more palm oil plantations to reach its mandate target, and in China ethanol for biofuels started noticeably competing with food production (Wood Mackenzie (2021).

The IEA calls for more production incentive policies to make up this shortfall, but remarks:

These policies must ensure that biofuels are produced sustainably and avoid negative impacts on biodiversity, freshwater systems, food prices and food availability. Policies must also incentivise greenhouse gas reductions, not just biofuel demand

op cit.

Removal of emissions

To be useful, biofuels must replace other worse sources of emissions and pollution, rather than being used in addition to those sources of pollution. This is another case in which emissions density, the ratio of energy to emissions is an irrelevant measure, as biofuels could reduce emissions intensity, while still allowing emissions increase.

It is perhaps questionable whether sustainable production of biofuels is compatible with both reduction of fuel costs (ie they compete with fossil fuels as replacements), rapid growth of production and lowering of pollution, as pollution is often associated with making things cheap and plentiful.

Lockin

Biofuel, as an addition to petrol, may require us to keep petrol going for longer than is necessary, preserving fossil fuel company profits with only marginally lower emissions. Biofuels may also not be as efficient as fossil fuels and therefore increase overall consumption, and a Jevons effect might eventuate if the mixed fuel becomes cheaper to use, and more is consumed.

The Time Issue

It is generally much quicker to burn a plant or the fuel derived from a plant than it is to grow the volume of plants being burnt and turned into fuel. The more biofuel being burnt in a time period, the more biomass is needed to be being produced at the same time.

If it takes three days to regrow and process the amount of matter burnt in 1 day (which is excessively and unlikely quick replacement), then we need to grow and store enough biomass for days two and three and then grow it again. The greater the demand for biofuel the greater the demand for excess production. This will generally denature the soil, and make a problem for food production as it takes large quantities of land. Currently the world is expected to suffer food shortages because of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. It is probably not sensible to bet so much on crops for biomass given the instability of the current world through politics and through climate which may affect growth and fertility.

Systemic problems

a) Biofuels may take a lot of energy, land and manufactured fertiliser to produce, refine and transport to places of consumption, so their Energy Return on Energy Input (EREI) could be extremely low while the pollution through their production could be high.

b) Using organic waste, usually for the production of biogas, may remove natural fertilisers from the soil so that the ecological cycle of recovery is broken, and has to be repaired artificially. This may increase the energy ‘consumed or ‘wasted’ in making replacement chemical fertilisers. Again the IEA states:

biofuels are increasingly produced from feedstocks such as wastes and residues, which do not compete with food crops…. [while currently] only an estimated 7% of biofuels came from wastes and residues… Accounting for just 3% of transport fuel demand – biofuels are not on track to attain the Net Zero trajectory

###

Given that used cooking oil and waste animal fats provide the majority of non-food-crop feedstocks for biofuel production, and are limited “new technologies will need to be commercialised to expand non-food-crop biofuel production”. In other words imaginary, or possible, technologies will have to rescue us again.

c) Use of biofuels increases the so called ‘metabolic rift’ which comes with industrial agriculture. Materials and nutrients are taken from the soil and dispersed into the atmosphere, or become waste in another place – where they may decay into methane, another GHG.

d) Biofuels may lead to indirect land-use change. That is when food crops in one part of the world are directed to biofuels, and farmers elsewhere try to capitalise on the potential shortage of food crops by expanding into forests, or using agriculture that released soil stored GHG.

Through the interlinked systems, biofuels have the potential to make things worse.

Food

Farming, or extracting, these fuels, can: require fertile land and increase the price of food by taking land away from food production; dispossess small farmers, forest dwellers, and dependent labour from land (increasing food problems); bring about destruction of old growth forests (increasing CO2 emissions); decrease biodiversity lowering ecological resilience; and increase systemic vulnerability to plant disease through monocropping.

A suppressed or confidential World Bank report leaked to the Guardian in 2008 stated that “Biofuels have forced global food prices up by 75%”. Robert Bailey a policy adviser at Oxfam, remarked at the time:

Political leaders seem intent on suppressing and ignoring the strong evidence that biofuels are a major factor in recent food price rises… While politicians concentrate on keeping industry lobbies happy, people in poor countries cannot afford enough to eat.

Aditya Chakrabortty Secret report: biofuel caused food crisis. The Guardian 4 Jul 2008

Dr David King the UK Government’s Chief Scientific Advisor from 2000 to 2007 said:

It is clear that some biofuels have huge impacts on food prices… All we are doing by supporting these is subsidising higher food prices, while doing nothing to tackle climate change.”

Aditya Chakrabortty Secret report: biofuel caused food crisis. The Guardian 4 Jul 2008

In 2010 it was said that:

One-quarter of all the maize and other grain crops grown in the US now ends up as biofuel in cars rather than being used to feed people, according to new analysis which suggests that the biofuel revolution launched by former President George Bush in 2007 is impacting on world food supplies.”

John Vidal 2010 One quarter of US grain crops fed to cars – not people, new figures show. The Guardian 23 January

Lester Brown, the director of the Earth Policy Institute, was reported as saying:

The grain grown to produce fuel in the US [in 2009] was enough to feed 330 million people for one year at average world consumption levels… By subsidising the production of ethanol to the tune of some $6bn each year, US taxpayers are in effect subsidising rising food bills at home and around the world

John Vidal 2010 One quarter of US grain crops fed to cars – not people, new figures show. The Guardian 23 January

Other reports which suggest even more problems. Gro Intelligence, argues that the calories in biofuel production resulting from current and future policies could feed 1.9 billion people annually. The invasion of Ukraine, and the resultant shortage of foodstock sharpened the debate and it was alleged that close to 36% of US corn may be produced for biofuel and 40% of soy went into biodiesel. Another article suggests that a 50% reduction in grain for biofuels in the US and Europe would compensate for the loss of all of Ukraine’s grain exports

But of course there are different opinions. Rob Vierhout, the secretary-general of ePURE, the association of the European renewable ethanol and related industries attacks:

the allegation that millions of people were starving due to EU biofuel policies.  Not a single scientific paper over the past two years gave credence to that theory. The Commission’s own report earlier this year on the historical and future price impacts of EU biofuels policy suggested that the impacts had been negligible, an order of magnitude below what the NGO campaigners have claimed. Major contributions to the field this year include a World Bank paper concluding that oil is responsible for two thirds of price increases…

anti-biofuels campaigners have for the past six months focused on an allegation by IISD that biofuels cost EU taxpayers €10 billion annually…. We and our members have tried for a year to have meaningful and scientifically-relevant dialogue with IISD’s biofuel researchers, and we have pointed out dozens of factual and methodological errors in their work, as well as their constant failure to secure meaningful peer review…. They give the results that their clients order and then try to justify those results through manipulation of data and highly selective use of facts.

Rob Vierhout 2013. Take an honest look at ethanol! Euractiv 2 September

Vierhout adds:

Seventy thousand people owe their jobs to the EU renewable ethanol industry. European biofuels industry now contribute more than €20 billion annually to Europe’s GDP. They are a product made in and for Europe. Every litre of biofuel sold in Europe is a litre of reduced fossil fuel demand.

Rob Vierhout 2013. Take an honest look at ethanol! Euractiv 2 September

The number of jobs is irrelevant if the industry is harmful. Tom Buis, the chief executive of Growth Energy (Supporting American Ethanol) said:

Continued innovation in ethanol production and agricultural technology means that we don’t have to make a false choice between food and fuel. We can more than meet the demand for food and livestock feed while reducing our dependence on foreign oil through the production of homegrown renewable ethanol

John Vidal 2010 One quarter of US grain crops fed to cars – not people, new figures show. The Guardian 23 January

Water is also consumed at all stages of biofuel production: in agriculture in manufacture and in the fuel itself. It may be possible to conserve or recycle water, but it may not without adding more energy consumption to the process. Likewise if forests are felled to provide land for growing biofuels, then the local hydrological cycle may be disrupted, and water flow off the land, helping to produce floods, rather than being absorbed.

The problem here is that the systemic logic of the problem is fairly high. Biofuel crops require land and water to grow. There is limited land and water available. Consequently, this land and water either comes from existing agricultural (food producing) land, which lowers food production and thus puts the price of food up, occupies new land and produces lack of biodiversity, or produces food shortages (unless there is massive food over-production). If the land comes from areas which are cheap and supports local farmers, grazers in commoning, then those people may be dispossessed by mass cropping and forced into wage labour, or have to move elsewhere, and again the local price of food, and the amount of human suffering, is likely to increase along with declines in biodiversity and resilience. If the new land comes from forests, or previously unfarmed land then the loss of a carbon sink my eradicate any emissions lowering from using the fuels. If it comes from previously marginal land, then that may generate systemic problems, such as vulnerability to drought, soil loss and so on. The land was probably not being farmed for some reason or other. Yet there is a clear financial incentive for biofuels to continue.

For what it is worth Exxon remarks:

Many peer-reviewed papers in the scientific literature suggest that the direct life cycle GHG emissions are lower than fossil fuels but that indirect consequences of first generation biofuel development, including changes in forest and agricultural land use change, may result in higher total GHG emissions than petroleum-derived fuels

Exxon Newsroom 2018 Advanced biofuels and algae research: targeting the technical capability to produce 10,000 barrels per day by 2025. 17 September

EU response

The latest Climate negotiations from the EU, Fit for 55, seems to take note of some of these issues. The section on the transport sector does not seem to mention subsidised ethanol production for automobiles but plentiful charging stations and the deployment of a gaseous hydrogen refueling infrastructure. (The infographic refers to “liquified methane” which seems an odd choice for emissions reduction). It does refers to shipping and stimulating “demand for the most environmentally friendly sustainable fuels, particularly renewable fuels of non-biological origin” presumably hydrogen, although whether this is green hydrogen or not is unclear. The main section on biofuels is almost entirely about air transport, so we could perhaps expect that is where the subsidies will go. The discussion says they want to extend “the scope of eligible sustainable aviation fuels and synthetic aviation fuels. For biofuels, the scope is extended to other certified biofuels complying with the RED sustainability and emissions saving criteria, up to a maximum of 3%, and with the exception of biofuels from food and feed crops, which are excluded.”

It might also be useful to make sure transport emissions are low, and that energy efficiency is high so that transport needs less fuel.

Types of Biofuel

The US Energy Information Administration (EIA 2022 another web page which gets updated regularly), remarks that “The terminology for different types of biofuels used in government legislation and incentive programs and in industry branding and marketing efforts varies,” and that “definitions for these biofuels may also differ depending on the language in government legislation and programs that require or promote their use and among industry and other organizations.” This makes it hard to be definitive.

Ethanol

Biofuels are generally made from specially grown biomass, as implied above and burnt releasing GHG emissions which are hopefully absorbed over time by regrowth.  The currently most common biofuel involves ethanol Ethanol is a fermentation product made from plants such as corn, sugarcane, sugar beets etc. with a high sugar content. Fermentation to make ethanol also releases CO2, whether it is possible to lower this release is possibly likely, but still difficult to predict. It is added to petrol to dilute the amount of petrol being used, but as stated previously still produces emissions.

If fermentation is not used, as in ethanol production, then the plant material has to be broken down. One family of methods involves high temperatures, which of course takes energy. If this energy is provided by fossil fuels or further biofuels, then there will be added emissions.

  • Pyrolysis: biomass rapidly heated in an Oxygen free environment at 500-700 degrees Centigrade. The char then needs to be removed.
  • Gasification uses higher temperatures still >700 degrees. It produces ‘syngas’ a mixture of CO and hydrogen.
  • Hyrdothermal liquefaction for wet biomass like algae uses water at 200-350 degrees C and high pressure.

The resultant product needs purification and upgrading.

Ethanol is usually less efficient for petrol engines than petrol, it has less energy density, and in Australia the fuel is lower octane than usual petrol. Some research has suggested that cars use ethanol diluted fuel require more refuelling than those which do not, which may lead to extra fuel burning, and hence reduce the emissions reduction. As far as I can see more research is needed.

Cellulosic ethanol

This kind of ethanol is made from the cellulose and hemicelluloses which are found in plant cell walls, and the fuel tends to be made from agricultural waste, or non-edible remnants of crops. It is considerably harder to ferment the glucose in cellulose than to ferment the sugar rich seeds of corn etc. A story from 2016 states

no company is currently selling microorganisms capable of fermenting sugars contained in hemicellulose to corn ethanol refiners.  Therefore, such ‘cellulosic ethanol’ originates from the cellulose sugars in the fiber or [in] the starch which adheres to it.

Almuth Ernsting Cashing in on Cellulosic Ethanol: Subsidy Loophole Set to Rescue Corn Biofuel Profits

Cellulosic fuels are sometimes called second generation biofuels. This biomass should be able to come from more marginal land or from waste (EPA 2022). However, there is still a risk of soil depletion from the plant material not being returned to the soil, and it appears the energy consumption in making it is high.

Biodiesel [unclear]

Biodiesel tends to be made from vegetable oils, and animal fats, both new and used. Some diesel engines appear to be able to run on pure biodiesel, but in most cases the vegetable oils have too high a viscosity and the oils require heating before they can be used, so they are temperature vulnerable. The NSW department of primary industry claims: “the Australian diesel fuel standard allows up to 5% biodiesel in pump fuel. Higher concentrations of conventional biodiesel can cause issues with current infrastructure and engines.”

When I began writing this, the US Office of Energy Efficiency stated that “Currently one commercial scale facility (World Energy in Paramount, California) is producing renewable diesel from waste fats, oils, and greases.” Presumably more companies have appeared.

One of the possible techniques used is hydrocracking which uses hydrogen to break carbon to carbon bonds, but it is not clear to me what this technique is applied to, or what kind of energy and chemical processes are involved.

Biodiesel is often distinguished from Renewable diesel. The NSW government states:

Renewable diesel is produced from a wider variety of feedstocks than conventional biodiesel including non-food biomass and feedstock such as straw, cotton trash and urban waste streams. It can also use purpose-grown crops such as grass, woody biomass or algae. [Or sewage vegetable oils and animal fats] Renewable diesel is compatible with existing infrastructure and vehicles, but commercial scale production has yet to occur in Australia, though some pilot scale plants are in operation.

NSW Department of Primary Industries Biodiesel, renewable diesel and bioethanol 7 June 2022

Again we have the problem of the pollution through manufacturing and agricultural processes. It also appears that the NSW government at least is currently more interested in Hydrogen power than in biodiesel, but hydrogen production requires excess green energy to produce clear hydrogen, or working Carbon Capture and Storage to make from methane.

Wood

Wood has better have better energy density and higher EREI than most other plant materials but it is less energy dense and has higher moisture levels than fossil fuels and produces more particulate pollution. As said previously deforestation or monoculture trees tend not to be good for resilient ecologies.

Algae

Algae is essentially an experimental venture, even though it has been worked with since the oil crisis of the 1970s. Often called the third generation of biofuels. In theory algae should be wonderful. It is much quicker growing than other biomass (even when compared to burning time). It is rich in lipids and this, and growth rates, could possibly be boosted even further by genetic engineering. However, the record does not match the enthusiasm.

From 2005 to 2012, dozens of companies managed to extract hundreds of millions in cash from VCs in hopes of ultimately extracting fuel oil from algae [and failed]

 In 2015, EnAlgae, an EU-funded coalition of 19 research bodies, concluded (p2) that “it now looks highly unlikely that algae can contribute significantly to Europe’s need for sustainable energy,” although the research had helped algae be useful for “food, nutraceuticals, etc.” and help cut back fishing.

Similarly, in 2017, the International Energy Agency made the ambiguous comment that:

• The single biggest barrier to market deployment of algae remains the high cost of
cultivating and harvesting the algal biomass feedstocks, currently a factor of 10-20
too high for commodity fuel production…

• Algae-based production to produce bioenergy products like liquid or gaseous fuels
as primary products is not foreseen to be economically viable in the near to
intermediate term and the technical, cost and sustainability barriers are reviewed
• Macroalgae have significant potential as a biogas, chemicals and biofuels crop in
temperate oceanic climates in coastal areas. Their commercial exploitation also
remains limited by cost and scalability challenges

IEA 2017 State of Technology Review – Algae Bioenergy

By 2012, Shell had ended its algae biofuel research and development program, news had dried up of BP’s $10 million deal with bioscience firm Martek, and Chevron’s five-year partnership with the government-funded National Renewable Energy Laboratory had produced no significant breakthroughs. By early 2018, Chevron’s website had gone from promising that algae biofuel development was “still in the research stage” to openly admitting its work was unsuccessful.

Joseph Winters 2020 The Myth of Algae Biofuels. Harvard Political Review 26 January

Apparently Exxon are still interested in algal fuels and genetic modification as the solution.

Genetically engineered high reproduction rate algae is ecologically risky, as the chances are high, that some will escape, and if they can breed in the wild, which given the reproduction rates and lack of predators that often lead to algal blooms is likely, they could produce massive damage. Other problems include co-products, waste, nutrients, harvesting, drying and conversion technology.

In 2017 Exxon announced that:

Using advanced cell engineering technologies at Synthetic Genomics, the ExxonMobil-Synthetic Genomics research team modified an algae strain to enhance the algae’s oil content from 20 percent to more than 40 percent.

Exxon Newsroom 2017 ExxonMobil and Synthetic Genomics report breakthrough in algae biofuel research 19 June

Later they moved to outdoor testing of.

naturally occurring algae in several contained ponds in California…

ExxonMobil anticipates that 10,000 barrels of algae biofuel per day could be produced by 2025 based on research conducted to date and emerging technical capability.

Exxon Newsroom 2018 ExxonMobil and Synthetic Genomics algae biofuels program targets 10,000 barrels per day by 2025 6 March

Finally in late 2018 they declared:

algal biofuels will have about 50 percent lower life cycle greenhouse gas emissions than petroleum-derived fuel…

producing algae does not compete with sources of food, rendering the food-vs.-fuel quandary a moot point

Because algae can be produced in brackish water, including seawater, its production will not strain freshwater resources the way ethanol does.

Algae consume CO2, and on a life-cycle basis have a much lower emissions profile than corn ethanol given the energy used to make fertilizer, distill the ethanol, and to farm and transport the latter.

Algae can yield more biofuel per acre than plant-based biofuels

Exxon Newsroom 2018 Advanced biofuels and algae research: targeting the technical capability to produce 10,000 barrels per day by 2025. 17 September

There seems to be no record of progress since then. The US EPA simply remarks in 2022: “algae biofuels are not yet produced commercially”. However the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy Bioenergy Technologies Office (BETO) states it is “working to build the algae bioeconomy of the future, where fossil fuels could be replaced with a renewable, abundant, and flexible source of energy.” It is offering awards to students for advances in algal tech.

Biogas

The decay of much biomass produces methane, or ‘natural gas’. The idea is that it is possible to capture or generate methane from waste, and rather than release it to the atmosphere, burn it to produce energy and presumably some GHG. The point here is not that no GHG is released, but it is used as it is released.

China has more than 100,000 biogas plants, and a large number of household biogas units, followed by Germany with over 10,000 plants.

Methanol is another form of biogas made from biomass at extremely high temperatures and in the presence of a catalyst

Plastics

It is also possible that plastics could be converted to biofuels  – exchanging one form of pollution for another less noticeable form. Australian energy startup Licella was funded by Renewable Chemical Technologies Ltd (RCTL) and Armstrong Energy (£5m) to convert plastics to oil suitable to blend in with hydrocarbon fuels. It can work with broken and mixed plastics, and paper. However, the production of plastics locks away carbon, while conversion and burning releases it, so you get rid of the plastic from landfill or oceans but put it in the air, – along with any other pollutants. This is the case even if the production process is lower in emissions than usual. Given plastics are usually made from fossil fuels, fuel made from plastic should probably be classified as processed fossil fuels.

Waste

Waste or rubbish is one of the more confusing categories. It can include biogas but also high temperature burning of rubbish such as plastics and other materials which might be otherwise put into landfill. It may add to transport emissions if trucks carry the waste from the landfill area to the incinerator. The heat is usually used to produce steam and drive turbines to produce electricity. (A commercial description can be found here). It is dubious that burning mixed materials will have low emissions, or low particulate pollution, and the ash left behind is likely contaminated with heavy metals, salts, and persistent organic pollutants. Modern incinerators also have air pollution control equipment, which adds to the energy and cost of operation. The US EPA claims:

A typical waste to energy plant generates about 550 kilowatt hours (kWh) of energy per ton of waste. At an average price of four cents per kWh, revenues per ton of solid waste are often 20 to 30 dollars… [another] stream of revenue for the facilities comes from the sale of both ferrous (iron) and non-ferrous scrap metal collected from the post-combusted ash stream.

The United States combusted over 34 million tons of Municipal Solid Waste [MSW] with energy recovery in 2017…

 The ash that remains from the MSW combustion process is sent to landfills. 

EPA Energy Recovery from the Combustion of Municipal Solid Waste (MSW)

A medical survey of evidence concluded that:

A range of adverse health effects were identified, including significant associations with some neoplasia, congenital anomalies, infant deaths and miscarriage, but not for other diseases. Ingestion was the dominant exposure pathway for the public.

More recent incinerators have fewer reported ill effects, perhaps because of inadequate time for adverse effects to emerge. A precautionary approach is required.

Peter W Tait et al. 2020. The health impacts of waste incineration: a systematic review. Aust N Z J Public Health 44(1):40-48.

Another article on the same topic claimed:

We found a dearth of health studies related to the impacts of exposure to WtE emissions. The limited evidence suggests that well-designed and operated WtE facilities using sorted feedstock (RDF) are critical to reduce potential adverse health (cancer and non-cancer) impacts, due to lower hazardous combustion-related emissions, compared to landfill or unsorted incineration. Poorly fed WtE facilities may emit concentrated toxins with serious potential health risks, such as dioxins/furans and heavy metals; these toxins may remain problematic in bottom ash as a combustion by-product. 

Tom Cole-Hunter 2020 The health impacts of waste-to-energy emissions: a systematic review of the literature. Environmental Research Letters,15: 123006

Not unreasonably they call for further research before expanding the industry.

In the US, The Department of Energy announced:

$46 million for 22 projects that will create biofuel energy to help decarbonize the transportation and power generation sectors.

Turning waste and carbon pollution into clean energy at scale would be a double win—cleaning up waste streams that disproportionately burden low-income communities and turning it into essential energy,” said U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer M. Granholm.

Unusually, they try to sell the waste burning, as removing waste streams from low-income communities, and lowering pollution, both of which seem dubious.

In Australia, the government has also seen incineration ‘renewable energy’ and as creating revenue streams for industry, and then allowing industry to apply for grant programs, through people such as the renewable energy agency Arena and the Clean Energy Finance Corporation. Promotion of rubbish for energy also came about shortly after China refused to take more Australian rubbish exports, and this allows recycling centres to sell on otherwise unwanted recycling materials.

Burning rubbish would seem to be a way of not having to lower rubbish-pollution, increase recycling, or find new ways of recycling. In other words it allows freeloading polluters to continue to freeload and rubbish-collectors to make extra profits. It may even encourage more plastic manufacture. to provide feedstock.

Sustainable Aviation fuel

Aviation fuel is a major cause of GHG. By 2019, the total annual world-wide passenger count was 4.56 billion people.

passenger air travel was producing the highest and fastest growth of individual emissions before the pandemic, despite a significant improvement in efficiency of aircraft and flight operations over the last 60 years…

if global commercial aviation had been a country in the 2019 national GHG emissions standings, the industry would rank number six in the world between Japan and Germany.

Jeff Overton 2022 Issue Brief | The Growth in Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Commercial Aviation. Environmental and Energy Study Institute 9 June


In 2017 the aviation industry promised carbon neutral growth by 2020.  The “green jet fuel” plan, promised and increase use of biofuels to 5m tonnes a year by 2025, and 285m tonnes by 2050, which is about half the overall demand, assuming it remains stable, and stops growing. This is also about three times the amount of biofuels currently produced, and that suggests that the blowback would be considerable. Nearly 100 environmental groups protested against the proposal. Klaus Schenk of Rainforest Rescue said: “The vast use of palm oil for aviation biofuels would destroy the world’s rainforests” and Biofuel watch estimate it would take an amount of land more than three times the size of the UK.

British Airways abandoned a £340m scheme to make jet fuel from rubbish in January 2016, while Qantas managed a 15 hour flight from the US to Australia using a fuel with a 10% blend of a mustard seed fallow crop. The flight reportedly reduced the normal emissions of the flight by 7% which suggests a long way to go. At the time it was reported that Qantas aimed to set up an Australian biorefinery in the near future in partnership with Canadian company Agrisoma Biosciences. I do not know if this has happened, but they claimed that in Jan 2022 they became the first Australian airline to purchase Sustainable Aviation fuel out of Heathrow in London. It “will represent up to 15 per cent of our annual fuel purchased out of London…. and reduce carbon emissions by around 10 per cent on this route.” The fuel was said to be produced with certified bio feedstock from used cooking oil and/or other waste products. This is then blended with normal jet fuel. Qantas Group Chief Sustainability Officer Andrew Parker said “Aviation biofuels typically deliver around an 80 per cent reduction of greenhouse gas emissions on a lifecycle basis”. This seems unlikely while it is blended with jet fuel, and does not really compare with the 7 to 10 percent reduction they were previously claiming.

Reuters states that “Only around 33 million gallons of SAF were produced last year globally, or 0.5% of the jet fuel pool”. Stuff from the Biden bill

 

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Climate change in 1965

September 4, 2022

The 1965 Report Restoring the quality of our environment presented to US President Johnson gives some ideas of knowledge and approach to climate change. They took it as likely and serious. Here are some paragraphs with a few comments in [ ]s:

President Johnson wrote:

the technology that has permitted our affluence spews out vast quantities of wastes and spent products that pollute our air, poison our waters, and even impair our ability to feed ourselves…. Pollution now is one of the most pervasive problems of our society.

Johnson points out that pollution is a general and serious problem resulting from the way societies have gained affluence. The Report, itself, opens with some history of the knowledge of CO2 Pollution, climate change, and its consequences:

The possibility of climatic change resulting from changes in the quantity of atmospheric carbon dioxide was proposed independently by the American geologist, T. C. Chamberlain (1899) and the Swedish chemist, S. Arrhenius (1903), at the beginning of this century.

They point to some existing evidence of climate change.

One might suppose that the increase in atmospheric CO2 over the past 100 years should have already brought about significant climatic changes, and indeed some scientists have suggested this is so. The English meteorologist, G. S. Callendar (1938, 1940, 1949), writing in the late 1930’s and the 1940’s on the basis of the crude data then available, believed that the increase in atmospheric CO2 from 1850 to 1940 was at least 10%. He thought this increase could account quantitatively for the observed warming of northern Europe and northern North America that began in the 1880’s….

As Mitchel (1961, 1963) has shown, atmospheric warming between 1885 and 1940 was a world-wide phenomenon.

The authors point to the difficulties of prediction of climate….

Even today, we cannot make a useful prediction concerning the magnitude or nature of the possible climatic effects.

Although clearly they recognise that climate change is a problem. They also recognise that sea level rise is a likely result.

It has sometimes been suggested that atmospheric warming due to an increase in the CO2 content of the atmosphere may result in a catastrophically rapid melting of the Antarctic ice cap, with an accompanying rise in sea level…. But such melting must occur relatively slowly on a human scale…. The melting of the Antarctic ice cap would raise sea level by 400 feet. If 1,000 years were required to melt the ice cap, the sea level would rise about 4 feet every 10 years [They add that this is not yet happening]

They think CO2 increase is induced by the actions of a particular social formation, and is therefore humanly induced.

Through his worldwide industrial civilization, Man is unwittingly conducting a vast geophysical experiment. Within a few generations he is burning the fossil fuels that slowly accumulated in the earth over the past 500 million years. The CO2 produced by this combustion is being injected into the atmosphere; about half of it remains there.

We can conclude with fair assurance that at the present time, fossil fuels are the only source of CO2 being added to the ocean-atmosphere-biosphere system.

By the year 2000 the increase in atmospheric CO2 will be close to 25%. [They were wrong, the increase was much bigger than they thought] This may be sufficient to produce measurable and perhaps marked changes in climate, and will almost certainly cause significant changes in the temperature and other properties of the stratosphere. At present it is impossible to predict these effects quantitatively…

Again, they suggest that humanly induced climate change could be bad for humanity

The climatic changes that may be produced by the increased CO2 content could be deleterious from the point of view of human beings. The possibilities of deliberately bringing about countervailing climatic changes therefore need to be thoroughly explored.

The solution they propose, appears to involve an early suggestion of geoengineering, rather than a cutback in fossil fuel consumption.

A change in the radiation balance in the opposite direction to that which might result from the increase of atmospheric CO2 could be produced by raising the albedo, or reflectivity, of the earth.

So, the Report could warn that global heating and climate change was likely to occur because of human burning of fossil fuels, but made no suggestion of cutting back consumption of those fossil fuels.

Sounds pretty contemporary.

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Optimism and Pessimism

September 1, 2022

Optimism

From a study of research on the possibility of going to 100% renewables

“The main conclusion of the vast majority of 100% renewable energy systems studies, is that such systems can power all energy in all regions of the world at low cost”

Pessimism

However we can also read that is appears that tax payers all over the world, are still subsidising their own destruction.

An analysis of 51 countries responsible for 86% of electricity coonsumption, showed that global public subsidies for fossil fuels almost doubled to $700bn in 2021 largely through government subsidies of electricity prices.

Fatih Birol Director of the International Energy Agency remarked “Fossil fuel subsidies are a roadblock to a more sustainable future, but the difficulty that governments face in removing them is underscored at times of high and volatile fuel prices,”

And Mathias Cormann, the OECD secretary general (!!!well known for collaborating with climate/ecological damage denial governments in Australia) said “Significant increases in fossil fuel subsidies encourage wasteful consumption, while not necessarily reaching low-income households… We need to adopt measures which protect consumers [and] help keep us on track to carbon neutrality, as well as energy security and affordability”

Estimates including implicit subsidies, ie the cost of the climate and air pollution damage caused by fossil fuels, are far higher. These amounted to $5.9tn in 2020, according to the International Monetary Fund, or $11m a minute

I guess this is naked power in action

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Ruskin: Wealth, Illth and Degrowth

August 14, 2022

As you might guess none of this is original

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ruskin_Self_Portrait_1875.jpg

Definitions

Let’s begin with some useful definitions from Ruskin:

“Wealth” to Ruskin is what contributes to a good life and adds to people’s capacity to be constructive:

There is no wealth but life. Life, including all its powers of love, of joy, and of admiration. That country is the richest which nourishes the greatest numbers of noble and happy human beings; that man is richest, who, having perfected the functions of his own life to the utmost, has also the widest helpful influence, both personal, and by means of his possessions, over the lives of others.

Unto this Last.

To Ruskin wealth is therefore connected to the power of implementing virtue, ‘nobility’, and being helpful. This is not a definition likely approved by classical economics – partly because these powers cannot be counted or measured and evaluation can be fairly subjective. Wealth being life, also points to the health of the environmental ecology.

“Riches” can be distinguished from wealth as it is collections of money and property which may not contribute to peoples lives. They may even involve cruelty, exploitation and exclusion.

If the king alone be rich, or if a few slave-masters are rich and the nation otherwise composed of slaves is it to be called a rich nation?… [paraphrase]
Since the inequality, which is the condition of riches, may be established in two opposite modes—namely, by increase of possession on the one side, and by decrease of it on the other—we have to inquire, with respect to any given state of riches, precisely in what manner the correlative poverty was produced.

Ruskin Munera Pulveris

Wealth tends to be communal, riches tend to be private and exclusive. I’m not aware of whether Ruskin writes on the virtues of commoning, but it is implied in these definitions. Wealth and prosperity is helpful to all, riches are not. This distinction is again unlikely to be favoured by classical economics, as such economics might even have the aim of confusing prosperity with riches for some.

“Illth” is the harm produced by economic activity. Illth includes obvious(?) devastations produced by pollution, dumped nuclear waste, ecological destruction during extraction and so on, but illth also includes the, perhaps, unintended human consequences which can arise from building riches such as ugliness, ill-health, insensitivity, compulsive selfishness, bad community relationships, exploitation, increasing misery, people crippled or exhausted and insecure from the work they have to do, loss of the ability for the community or individual to support themselves, work injuries, consumerist addiction, people being fed lies and untruth, dispossession of people by market demands, people being sacrificed to the market, destruction of prosperous futures, destruction of virtue, and so on.

There may be conflict here. What one person counts as illth, can be defined by others as riches, or even wealth.

Problems of Measurement

Recognition of the complexity of wealth and the problems of Illth seem vital to living a good life and perhaps even surviving. As Herbert Daly points out, once we start hurting the planet and using up its capacity to regenerate its wealth, we are continually generating compounding illth – even if we apparently generate riches. This is a case in which our economics measures money, but does not measure prosperity or the risk of illth. Again, this is difficult to do, but should probably not be ignored.

The main supposed measure of prosperity is the GDP which measures economic activity or expenditure (riches), not Ruskinian wealth.

There are a number of approaches but basically they all use monetary measures:

  • GDP = C (Private Consumer spending) + G (government spending) + I (investments spent on capital equipment, inventories, and housing) + NX (country’s total exports less total imports)

or

  • GDP = Wages + Profits + small business profits + Taxes – Subsidies

These sums can be adjusted for inflation or not. I used Wikipedia as the source, despite finding many other definitions, on the grounds that informed people would probably alter Wikipedia if it was obviously wrong, but also see this which points to rents, earnings from interest, and depreciation as factors in the second version of GDP etc.

The problem with illth in this scheme, as Daly points out, is that it has little recognised monetary value and is not measured. While few people wish to buy illth, they will happily dump it on others to increase profits and the GDP, and people will buy products that may save them from illth, gas masks, air filters, vitamins, pollution clean ups and so on, also boosting GDP, so that illth not only can help destroy the future but generate economic activity which counts as riches and prosperity as measured by the GDP. Through the measurement process, illth can increase apparent riches more than if the harm had not happened. The actual damage to life that illth creates may not be so easy to calculate.

Likewise if a climate change driven storm flattens an area and leaves people homeless or months or years, then any effort at reconstruction also adds to GDP, when in many cases little wealth may be being added to people’s lives and much may have been taken away.

If a forest is destroyed that can count as good economic activity. If people destroy all the world’s trees that is still a boost to the current GDP, despite having destroyed current and future wealth. Destroying the capacity for life, is almost certainly definitional of illth.

Because humans have apparently already significantly affected the planet’s ability to support us, then we need to lower the mass of the monetary economy, especially the mass of the illth economy. To do this we may have to abandon the current version of the GPD as a measure, and damage will have to be counted as a negative in the same terms, which may not be possible. But it is almost certain that economies will have to shrink in reality until the illth (long and short term) is minimised.

Sometimes harms may be useful when they occur during a re-organisation of the economy into a more democratic form, for example, but that is not usual.

We might even wonder if illth can ever be separated from riches? It may be the case that the global economy (both capitalist and developmentalist) requires illth to ‘work’ or to know it is working.

If we then add growth of the GDP as a supposed necessary mark of success or even of economic “sustainability”, then this holds a demand that the economy will have to continue to increase resource extraction and consumption, which may require even more violent, and illth producing, forms of extraction, which incidentally add more to GDP because the cost is greater but which add very little wealth. Daly again remarks that a low destruction oil well that produces much oil without much labour or danger, would currently add less to the GDP than would a dangerous deep sea well, in a storm racked area, which produces heaps of pollution and a need for clean ups. The second well would probably only be countenanced when the easy wells are almost used up.

The difficulty is measuring illth purely in monetary terms. If illth is not completely repaired, which is possibly impossible, then there is no cost, and as we have seen currently the cost of repair hides the damage as riches. If illth is freeloaded upon to generate riches, then it cannot be costed other than by estimate, and if the illth of human misery is to be factored in, then it can always be denied by those with riches….

A more useful measure????

Nowadays, according to some claims, economic activity uses up a year of the Earth’s capacity to regenerate in just under 8 months. This is illth creation in action. Economic activity is creating riches but destroying our capacity to produce future prosperity. It indicates the seriousness of illth production. I presume this is a disputable measurement, which is why it is not in official use, but it does seem to be a useful measure. We simply cannot afford to be in a situation in which our use of the planet is greater than the planet can regenerate, for long periods of time.

Hence, again we go to the necessity of

  • degrowth
  • the recognition of the unintended harms coming from the production of riches, and
  • the need to produce real wealth in human life.

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Dealing with Complexity again

August 8, 2022

This is a summary of an fairly straight forward book.. Jenifer Garvey Berger’s Unlocking Leadership Mind Traps: How to thrive in Complexity.

The book essentially argues that our ways of approaching complex and uncertain problems is likely to generate even more problems, because of psychological programming (or perhaps human nature – I’m not going to assume these problems are universal). Non-work lives do not help either, as we have a lot of interconnecting and interrupting problems to face even when we are not at work, and this takes away lack of urgency from around the problems and piles on the pressure. There is no space for slow thinking or contemplation. Our issues get worse.

The five psycho-social problems involve

  • Simplification
  • Rightness
  • Agreement
  • Control
  • Ego protection

So lets look at what this involves….

Simplification: Using simple and repetitive stories

Humans tend to live by simple stories, which fit into a standard narrative frame. These stories can help bond us together, because they are, or become, shared. However, simple stories narrow focus and freeze creativity….

It is common that we use repetitive stories to give ourselves an interpretations of events, without bothering to check if they are true…. We may see people in specific (and repeated) roles, such as being unhelpful, hostile, or even evil. We may see ourselves as perpetually failing, or suffering, or triumphing, and add more examples to ‘illustrate’ our stories. We turn fragments of ‘evidence’ into a familiar story, or plug them into familiar stories, and that often seems like its enough. Without any check whatsoever if the story is true… We may not even know what we are doing.

We don’t look for new solutions or new information, because we feel we ‘know’ what happened, because of the story we tell ourselves. Not only is our story likely to be wrong, because the world is complex, but it is likely to shape what we perceive and what we ignore. It is also likely to replace complex interactional causality, with linear causality, to make the explanation easy. People are also likely to give a story a beginning and an end, when in complex systems beginnings and endings may never be clear.

The simplicity of stories tends to mean that we feel it is ok to simplify the world. We don’t have to look for unexpected connections, or unexpected causalities, unintentional consequences and so on – all of which are features of normal life in complex systems.

One way to get out of this harmful simplicity, is to see if we can tell multiple stories, change people’s roles in the story etc… tell the story from other people’s point of view (as our views of any complex system are likely to be different). We can add things which might seem irrelevant. We can wonder how the story or the simplification could be wrong. The more stories we can tell the more we might notice or imagine.

We may not be able to avoid simple stories, and simplifications, but we don’t have to believe them, and we can expand the range of possible events we consider, or even just change the story…..

A simple story in a complex world is probably wrong.

Rightness

We often think something is correct because it feels right, and assume we are right most of the time, or again we may get carried away by the story. We seek data that confirms our rightness, rather than our wrongness, and we tend to reinforce this attitude by ignoring areas in which we are uncertain – It is other people who are wrong and need teaching, rather than ourselves who need to learn.

Being right has similar problems to reducing things to simple stories, it causes us to ignore things which may be going on. It can also cause us to make situations worse, as we ignore data that is telling us we are wrong, when we cannot be. People thinking they are inevitably right, are dangerous.

If you feel certain about something then ask questions, anyway….

Agreement

Agreement is not inherently bad, but Humans tend to agree with people who they identify with too quickly. If everyone has the same bias, then an agreement can just reinforce that bias, and again stop exploration. Agreement gives us a sense of belonging in the chaos, and thus reassurance we are right, or that it is not just our fault if everything goes wrong. On the other hand, people may disagree with people they identify with as outgroup, as quickly as they agree with those defined as ingroup. As usual this process removes information from people.

Try disagreeing to expand our sense of the problem.

Control

Complex systems are very hard to control, or to master. They slip out of our hands or our machines. Yet in modern societies, its generally expected that leaders be in control, so leaders can insist on simple targets which are actually distractions from the real job. They can assume that because some practice has worked before, it will automatically work again.

Leadership in complex systems involves letting go and allowing things to happen, in the best way that seems to be possible.

We cannot control many outcomes, but we can influence, conditions, events and what is emerging – having a direction rather than a fixed destination. We can experiment, without knowing what will happen in advance.

Ego protection

We can’t avoid egos, because we cannot perceive or understand everything; we simplify, we try to fit in and be part of the ingroup, we try to control our lives, random events and other people, and so on. In a sense, our sense of self is unreal or dependent on what we think others will want or observe, and we try to protect it from attack from others, and attack from the world. We try and protect our reputations, and our group membership and respect, rather than reacting to the world as it is, and so on. Protecting our ego is to some extent trying to enforce the past, and not react to the present, or our present position.

Summary

The problem is that complexity is not simple. It is not possible to know everything relevant about a complex system, although we might model it well enough for short term purposes.

Our habits of:

  • Isolating simple parts of reality and giving them prominence, and linking everything together through standard stories which we use as detailed interpretative maps of reality
  • Of insisting that we are right, and know everything important
  • Of reinforcing our rightness by agreement, so that understanding becomes a group activity tied into identity, which reinforces the processes of not looking for alternatives or exceptions
  • Of trying to control and force the system to behave in particular ways, and being upset when there are unintended and disruptive consequences,
  • Of trying to not risk our status, and keep in well with those people in our ingroup

All increase the tendency to ignore reality and make it personally and socially acceptable, so we tend not to deal with complexity, or life, very well. As a result, we can head towards some kind of destruction.

Realising these 5 processes are mind traps, not mind virtues, helps us to undo them and get more perception and information. This can be thought of as a negative process. Lowering the influence of the mind traps won’t ensure you can deal with complexity, but it will help. It’s a basic first step.

Another problem occurs when we have political movements which get trapped in these processes, and we ignore the world’s complexity and attempt to suppress that complexity. This may work for a while, but the long term prospects are not good. As I’ve said before, in an organisation which reinforces the mind traps with a punitive hierarchy, punishing people for not agreeing with the organisation’s stories, their rightness and demands for control, then the upper layers of the organisation will have very little idea of what is going on, as people will make sure they don’t tell those people anything which will get them punished, and the whole organisation becomes a mind-trap.

This is why some generals make sure they talk to the troops in an informal and safe situation, to find out what is really happening; to get new stories, new information, and stories of failure of control and action. They avoid their officers telling them what those officers think the general wants to hear.

Just as a footnote, it seems to me that talking of complex adaptive systems is a story which helps confuse people. It implies that the systems will adapt to whatever we might do, or that they will adapt to support us. This is simply not necessarily true. Systems can adapt to be hostile to any of the life forms that currently occupy them – especially if those life forms continually disrupt the system.

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The US right and Hungary 2

August 7, 2022

Orbán’s speech in Texas, opens with lots of flattery and a few jokes, but it soon settles into a rhythm more familiar from his last speech to CPAC. He is:

A leader of a country that is under the siege of progressive liberals day-by-day.

Obviously there is a huge army of progressive liberals outside the gates. Like Russia in Ukraine???

I can already see tomorrow’s headlines: “Far-right European racist and anti-Semite strongman, the Trojan horse of Putin, holds speech at conservative conference.” But I don’t want to give them any ideas. They know best how to write Fake News. 

He was pretty accurate, but the level of reportage seems to have been pretty low key, just as it was when CPAC went to Hungary. My experience then was that many on the US right had no idea it was happening, and regarded reports as fake news “why would CPAC go to Hungary?”. On the whole, the US media likes to pretend that authoritarian pro-corporate governments are not a threat.

The Obama Administration tried to force us to change the Fundamental law of Hungary, and delete Christian and national values from it.

I’m guessing they tried to support some group which was being declared non-human, but I’ve no idea, he does not say. An accusation is always better if its too vague to be denied, or you don’t look bad making it.

Progressive liberals didn’t want me to be here because they knew what I would tell you. Because I am here to tell you that we should unite our forces.

Fair enough. If you are going to tell lies about progressive liberals and declare war on them, they probably won’t be happy you are here, but it does not prove your virtue.

If somebody has doubts whether progressive liberals and communists are the same, just ask us, Hungarians. We fought them both, and I can tell you: they are the same.

So the technique is as before, try to combine different groups in the one smear of guilt by association. Is it possible that communists and progressive liberals both opposed Orbán for different reasons and did not join together?

political life is ruled by liberal hegemony

If only it was. This is about scare mongering, and suggesting the right has been stripped of rightful power.

So, first and foremost: we need to trust our Judeo-Christian teachings. They help us decide what actions are right and what actions are wrong. If you believe in God, you also believe that we humans were created in God’s image. Therefore, we have to be brave enough to address even the most sensitive questions: migration, gender, and the clash of civilisations. Don’t worry: a Christian politician cannot be racist. 

Interesting. Presumably this statement above means that racism is bad, but if you are Christian you just can’t be racist and don’t have to trouble your conscience about it. Which given his speech just before he came in which he supposedly said, seems to be what he thinks.

There is a world in which European peoples are mixed together with those arriving from outside Europe. Now that is a mixed-race world. And there is our world, where people from within Europe mix with one another, move around, work, and relocate. So, for example, in the Carpathian Basin we are not mixed-race: we are simply a mixture of peoples living in our own European homeland. 

 Conor Friedersdorf Why Viktor Orbán’s Racism Matters in the U.S. The Atlantic 4 August 2022

In Texas he said:

I’ll tell you the truth: in Hungary we introduced a zero-tolerance policy on racism and anti-Semitism, so accusing us is fake news, and those who make these claims are simply idiots.

The idiots obviously include writers on the Jerusalem Post, who report that an official report on anti-Semitism is just a press release with no information on how the data was compiled, that the government has effectively censored Holocaust museums and that:

a European Union survey finds that 40% of Jews in Hungary have thought about leaving the country because of antisemitism, [so] it’s hard to swallow that Hungary offers a high quality of life for Jews.

He implies that mixing is about culture…. ?

Don’t be afraid to call your enemies by their name. You can play it safe, but they will never show mercy. Consider for example George Soros, as you call him here…. He is my opponent. He believes in none of the things that we do. And he has an army at his service: money, NGOs, universities, research institutions and half the bureaucracy in Brussels. He uses this army to force his will on his opponents, like us Hungarians. 

George Soros’s army is a recurring figure in his speeches. Indeed there are huge billboards in Hungary which attack Soros. Soros wants an “Open Society,” with many opinions, something which authoritarians do not want. He has not been very successful given the supposed reach of this army. I suspect that Soros’s prime crime, is that he has not believed in the ideology that the free market always delivers the best result, or that corporations don’t have power. But I suspect that Orbán does not believe in a free market either. I don’t know, but he probably believes in a market which cronies with business to make what looks like the best result for Hungary.

You also have to know how you should fight. My answer is: Play by your own rules! But how do you do that? It is as simple as it sounds. You must play to win. ‘You cannot expect victory and plan for defeat.’ You have to believe that you are better than your left-liberal opponents are. And don’t care what the liberals say! They always say you will lose. They say it cannot be done.

You also have to know how you should fight. My answer is: Play by your own rules! But how do you do that? It is as simple as it sounds. You must play to win. ‘You cannot expect victory and plan for defeat.’ You have to believe that you are better than your left-liberal opponents are. And don’t care what the liberals say! They always say you will lose. They say it cannot be done.

You just have to prove them wrong. 

Again we learn that in war anything goes. Presumably a Christian not only cannot be a racist, they also cannot play dirty, or destroy tradition or principle in their politics; whatever they do is justified by victory.

this war is a culture war. We have to revitalize our churches, our families, our universities and our community institutions. Hungary is an old, proud but David-sized nation standing alone against the Woke Globalist Goliath. 

I’ve already stated many times that the right engages in culture wars, because its real agenda would not be popular and Orbán seems to run similar culture war memes to those of the US Right. Some say he has pioneered the vote rigging the Republicans seem to be engaged with [1]. But that makes sense: if your opposition is evil, you cannot afford the risk of them winning. Again we have the idea of the “Woke Globalist Goliath”. Whatever wokeness is, its not that big a movement, but presumably its an evil giant. Always magnify your enemy while making them look weak?

His next point is that they built a wall and kept out migrants. The corresponding point that Trump said he would build a wall, and failed at enormous cost, after 4 years, is not made.

Progressives claim all over the world that families should not be protected. In Europe they say there is no such thing as family, because love is love and family is family. If you cannot define family, nothing is a family.

This is simply not true. Most progressives do not want violence in families, rape in families and so on. They want families to be protected. This has sometimes been seen as an attack on families, by those people who support violence in families. Who says there is no such thing as family? People do say, however, that there are more complicated families than a married man and woman and their children by that marriage. This is reality, and those more complicated families need protection.

All subsidies are already available to families following conception. Families automatically get tax breaks, the state takes over your student loans after your third child. Women are exempt from paying personal income tax for life after the birth of their fourth child. And we are fighting to extend the same zero tax policy for mothers with three children.

Sounds like communism 🙂 Mother Heroines of the Soviet Unions etc.

He also boasts that children should not know about non-straight people.

We decided we don’t need more genders; we need more rangers. Less drag queens, and more Chuck Norris. We believe there is no freedom without order. If there is no order, you get chaos… In Hungary you will only hear: “more funds to the Police!”

Sometimes you get more chaos the more you try and impose order. But let us remember why people in the US said things like defund the police. This was because many black people, respectable middle class black people, are still treated like criminals by police, even without any criminal record or criminal behaviour. It was because black people are convicted for crimes which are ignored if you are white. It was because black people where killed by police out of proportion to their numbers. It is because police are frightened they are going to be shot if they don’t shoot first. If you can sort out the police, then the police will be more popular. There is no sign that Republicans want to deal with these problems, and maybe they are happy with those problems, and happy to blame the people being shot and arrested. Orbán gives no hints how to solve those problems.

we introduced a flat tax on personal income, which is currently 15 per cent. In just 10 years-time we reduced the tax wedge by 10 per cent, which was the biggest tax cut in Europe. We have the lowest corporate income tax in Europe, which is a flat 9 per cent. With this low corporate income tax last year, we had a 27 per cent investment rate, which was among the best in Europe.

Should it surprise us that corporations pay a lower tax rate than workers? Probably not. That would possibly be pleasing to Republicans as well. The only question is whether corporations pay that 9% or not, or manage to get out of it. If a flat tax works then good.

With the war in Ukraine. He argues that America and Russia need to negotiate peace. I don’t know whether his statement implies that the Ukrainians have a say in this. If they don’t then its a betrayal of peace.

only strong leaders are able to make peace. We in the neighbourhood of Ukraine are desperately in need of strong leaders, who are capable of negotiating a peace deal. Mayday, mayday! Please help us! We need a strong America with a strong leader.

He may just want Russian gas.

We in the West have not faced a crisis like this for a long time. The ideological wars of the twentieth century – against the totalitarian powers of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union – were terrible, but democratic West rallied, and defeated them both. Now the West is at war with itself.

He does not mean the crises of climate change or ecological destruction. It would seem he means people being gay and disobedient, not being professed Christians, having complicated families, resisting being beaten up by police for no reason, or wondering why they are paying higher rates of tax than corporations.

All pretty trivial compared to the challenge of Hitler and Stalin. And let’s not forget that many Christian Churches supported Hitler, and went out of their way not to attack his policies, or refuse to teach “Aryan Christianity.” Hungary might be said to have gone along with Hitler as they later went along with Stalin.

We must take back the institutions in Washington and in Brussels. We must find friends and allies in one another. We must coordinate the movement of our troops, because we face the same challenge

Again its a war. And its a war for ideological space and power. There is no compromise. Only the extinction of liberals having any basis for power. Its a war based on a claim of religious tradition to get some religious bodies onside. It is a war based upon a claim about family and being straight. It is a war based on disliking difference. It is a war in which fixing elections, controlling the media and controlling supposedly independent institutions is considered normal.

Everything is to be held in check and made the same.

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The US right and Hungary 1

August 7, 2022

People may know that the important US rightwing Organisation CPAC (Conservative Political Action Conference) is courting Hungary’s President Viktor Orbán, and getting his advice on how to proceed to win victory in the USA. CPAC has both formally gone to Hungary to observe the results and invited Orbán to speak to them in Texas. So this is not a bit of random noise. This is saying that the USA has no ideas of its own, and it’s a bit like inviting Mussolini to speak to them in the 1930s. It indicates what the US right is looking for, if we did not already know.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Viktor_Orb%C3%A1n_(13581867193).jpg

So its worthwhile looking at Orbán’s two speeches to them. Some of what he says is probably good advice for everyone, and people who are not authoritarian right wingers should pay heed, not only to the authoritarian advice, so they know what is being done against them, but to find out what they might learn.

The first was given in Hungary, when CPAC visited him. It was called “The cure for progressive dominance was invented in Hungary.” Some of us may dispute the idea of progressive dominance, but the idea that progressives are dominant is important to right wing ideology, it makes a good excuse to justify unethical action. Orbán says

four days ago I formed my fifth conservative, Christian government

I guess we can guess that this means he is hostile to non-Christians, and is full of self righteousness, because he has God on his side, and can punish the heathen, or other people he does not like. Some claim that he expelled many Christian denominations from Hungary, so American people should be worried about what Republicans think is Christian. But this might be a bit premature.

How can I contribute to today’s gathering? Perhaps if I tell you how we won: how we first defeated the communist regime; then how we defeated the liberals; and then, most recently, how we defeated the international liberal left when they combined their forces against Hungary in the election.

International people are bad unless they are right wingers, obviously the right is international, but it again conjures the idea that the left is powerful and stretches all over the world.

This problem – if I am not mistaken, both in America and Western Europe – is the domination of public life by progressive liberals. The problem is the fact that they hold the most important positions in the most important institutions, that they occupy the dominant positions in the media, and that they produce all the politically indoctrinating works of high and mass culture. 

He offers no evidence of course, again the point is to officially claim that right wing politics is fighting against a monster. It is hard to believe that Rupert Murdoch and Tucker Carlson are dominating the media as progressive liberals, and its hard to pretend that there is not a large body of right wing literature, rightwing publishing houses, or rightwing corporately sponsored think-tanks, or that the right does not feature in many important institutions (including universities), unless you refuse to look, or unless you consider that everyone that disagrees with you is a progressive liberal, and should be removed or censored.

One way you can detect authoritarianism, is a refusal to admit the other side could win legitimately, and to suspend all restraint against that other side, while pretending to be victims to justify whatever steps you might take.

He talks about the revolution against the communists

We thought we had finally got what we wanted, but we were wrong: under the dictatorship liberals and conservatives entered into an anti-communist pact, but at the first subsequent opportunity the liberals sided with the communists. It turned out that in fact they were natural allies. If I am not mistaken, this kind of sinful covenant has also been seen in the United States.

I’m not familiar with Hungarian history, but talking of “sinful covenants” should ring alarm bells, especially as there is no evidence that current day “progressive liberals” have much more in common with communists than the conservative right.

And then, between 2002 and 2010, we saw what generally happens in such circumstances: the socialists spent the people’s money. Hungary sank into debt, the economy fell into recession, inflation ran out of control, unemployment rose and people were unable to pay their bills. Street violence broke out and paramilitary groups were on the march. It was a long time ago, but let us not forget: strings of ethnically-motivated murders outraged public sentiment. 

We might wonder which side these paramilitary groups were supporting.

the fruit of progressive government speaks for itself: economic ruin and street violence. When a left-wing government comes to power, the story almost always ends in the same way.

Again there is not even an attempt to justify this. There are plenty of governments that he would call left progressive that don’t encourage street violence and that don’t leave economic ruin. More modern street violence occurred under Trump than under Obama, including the attack on the Capitol and the BLM riots in response to police violence, and Obama started the US economy on a road to recovery from the crash of 2008. Biden seems to be doing ok on the US economy as well. Under Trump the U.S. national debt increased by 39%, reaching $27.75 trillion; the U.S. debt-to-GDP ratio the highest since WWII. When he left office there were 3 million fewer jobs in the U.S. than when he took office, which is something of a surprise given the increase spending. However, being able to condemn street violence is probably a good place to be. Most politicians have developed the art of excusing violence by their own.

The first point in the Hungarian formula is to play by our own rules. The only way to win is to refuse to accept the solutions and the paths offered by others.

Another way of expressing this, is don’t play by conventions, don’t play by the rules, don’t heed tradition. Let the rules inhibit others. Never agree with the others. Politics is total war. There is no reason not to encourage violence in the Streets, or violence against opposing politicians. Stochastic Terrorism is great, if you don’t want to risk normal terrorism.

The second point: national conservatism in domestic politics. The cause of the nation is not a matter of ideology, nor even of tradition. The reason that churches and families must be supported is that they are the building blocks of the nation. This also means that one must remain on the side of the voters….. One must find the issues on which the Left is completely out of touch with reality and highlight them – but in a way that can be understood by people who are not eggheads

Churches are good sources of ideology, and they will support people who go along with them and support them. No immigrants. Walls on borders. Lie about what your opponents want.

Third point: the national interest in foreign policy…. the Nation First! Hungary First! America First!

You might wonder what groups are being identified with the Nation, but people will want to know what is in the policy for themselves and their associates. This is reality. Always portray wars in the national interest, or not being involved in a neighbouring war as in the national interest.

Fourth point, Dear Friends: we must have our own media….  My friend Tucker Carlson stands alone and immovable. His show has the highest audience figures. What does this mean? It means that there should be shows like his day and night – or, as you say, 24/7. 

There should be no media, other than media which supports the right. This is pretty much the case in Hungary, nearly all the media is owned by supporters of Orbán. But yes, the left needs to heed this and build its own media. Hard, when media requires money and there is an established corporate media which generally ignores the left, but it used to be possible: unions could own media.

Fifth point: expose your opponent’s intentions. As a condition for victory, media support is necessary, but not sufficient…. Here in Hungary we expose what the Left are preparing before they even take action. At first they will deny it, but success is all the sweeter when it emerges that we were right all along. For instance, there is the issue of LGBTQ propaganda targeting children. This is still a new thing over here, but we have already destroyed it…. to quote General Patton again: “A good plan, violently executed now, is better than a perfect plan next week.”

Invent stuff about your opponents, and keep repeating it until it is believed, and then act against what you said they were doing, violently. This can be done by any side that does not believe truth is relevant, or who is prepared to say some minor groups of the opposition represent the whole group of the opposition.

Sixth point: economy, economy, economy. We all know that the Left want to operate the economy according to abstract notions…. When we came to power, we decided that we must only pursue economic policies that benefit the majority of voters

This is probably borrowed from Bill Clinton…. not that he would accept of course. But sadly we know that with control of the media, then you can, like Trump, claim to have made economic progress and people will believe you for a while, and some will be able to truthfully say they are doing better.

Our seventh point: do not get pushed to the extreme. I say this because extreme conspiracy theories rear their heads from time to time on the right – just as extreme utopias regularly rear their heads on the left.

No objection to this, just wish it would happen, and that the right would not deny science, and invent imaginary conspiracy theories to attack their opponents. But I suspect he is saying try to keep the conspiracy arguments in bounds

Eighth point: read every day. A book a day keeps the defeat away. I know that this sounds strange. I am not an academic myself, but the fact is that no invention has yet surpassed the book as a vehicle for understanding and conveying ideas. The world is becoming increasingly complex, and we need to dedicate time to understanding it. I, for instance, set aside one whole day every week for reading. Reading also helps us to understand what our opponents think and where their thinking is flawed. If we know that, the rest is mere technique. 

Good advice for everyone. I doubt the Republicans will accept it they seem to be wanting to stop people reading anything that they don’t approve.

Ninth point: have faith. A lack of faith is dangerous. If you do not believe that there will be a final reckoning and that you will be held to account for your actions before God, you will think that you can do anything that is in your power

The problem with this is simply the obvious one that if you think everything you do is guided by God, then you may well think that you can do anything that is in your power.

Tenth point: make friends. Our opponents, the progressive liberals and neo-Marxists, have unlimited unity: they have one another’s backs. 

if only that was true 🙂 but it does make them a monolithic block capable of evil, and unprincipled.

if we want to succeed in politics, we should never look at what we disagree on, but instead look for our common ground. 

another likely truth. This is why Libertarians and Evangelical Christians can live with pagan fascists.

Eleventh point: build communities. My Friends, over the years I have also learned that there is no conservative political success without functioning communities.

This is true for every politics. Politics must become communal. It must build relationships, identity, mutual support and mutual dedication to the cause. However, he also suggests taking over community organisations to gain influence. For the righteous, communities must have no voice of their own.

the twelfth point: build institutions. For successful politics, one needs institutions and institutes. Whether they are think tanks, educational centers, talent workshops, foreign relations institutes, youth organizations or whatever, they should have a political aspect. Let us not forget: politicians come and go, but institutions stay with us for generations.

This is also true, and follows that only the righteous should have a voice, and there should be no institutions which do not support the righteous and their government. No pluralism. Authoritarians see this uniformity as paradise – an echo of the unity in God.

Few people can stand against this gentle coercion.

Now we see that the progressives are threatening the whole of Western civilization, and the true danger is not from without but from within….

We are dealing with the same people: faceless, ideologically trained bureaucrats sitting in Washington DC and Brussels. Progressive liberals, neo-Marxists intoxicated by the dream of wokeness, those in the pay of George Soros, the advocates of the open society. They want to abolish the Western way of life that you and we love so much: what your parents fought for during World War II and the Cold War, and what we fought for when we drove the Soviet communists out of Hungary. 

Again we have the inflation of the progressive evil, to make the fight existential and unbounded. Remember your opponents are evil and faceless. They are completely hostile to civilisation, and they must be removed and driven out. We are right. They are wrong. There is no common point. You might build commonality with those you share goals with, but your defined opponents have nothing in common with you. They must be exterminated. This really is war. And if democracy involves disagreement, and acceptance of disagreement, this is a war on democracy.

continues… the US right and Hungary 2

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Nuclear again…..

August 3, 2022
Stock Photo: https://www.dreamstime.com/stock-photo-hinkley-point-nuclear-power-station-somerset-uk-february-proposed-construction-site-new-image67435962

The Background

The Federal Coalition, now the Federal opposition, is ignoring climate change after helping to subsidise massive ‘climate bomb’ gas projects, such as Woodside’s Scarborough Gas Project, or the Beetaloo Gas Project.

According to reports of a 350.org and Lock the Gate report:

at least $1.3bn and up to $1.9bn in direct funding for the gas industry was promised between September 2020 and the election. They found another $63m was pledged in indirect funding for federal agencies to support the expansion.

Adam Morton, Katharine Murphy and Paul Karp Greens in ‘powerful position’ on climate as Labor faces scrutiny over Coalition’s ‘gas-fired recovery’ projects. The Guardian 3 August 2022

The International Energy Agency made it clear in May 2021:

from today, [there should be] no investment in new fossil fuel supply projects, and no further final investment decisions for new unabated coal plants. By 2035, there are no sales of new internal combustion engine passenger cars, and by 2040, the global electricity sector has already reached net-zero emissions.

IEA Press Release, Pathway to critical and formidable goal of net-zero emissions by 2050 is narrow but brings huge benefits, according to IEA special report. 18 May 2021.

We are also in a position in which

Exxon Mobil made $18bn in profits in the past three months. Shell and Chevron each made nearly $12bn. Those are all record numbers.

A recent study showed that for the past 50 years, the oil industry has made profits of more than $1tn a year, close to $3bn a day. These profits are driven not by some fantasy of free enterprise and perfect competition, but by the exact opposite – cartels, mega-corporations and the regulatory capture of governments..,

Hamilton Nolan The world is ablaze and the oil industry just posted record profits. It’s us or them, The Guardian 2 August 2022

And we still have the figures from MarketForces of corporate tax paying in Australia

https://www.marketforces.org.au/campaigns/subsidies/taxes/taxavoidance/

As well, in Australia we will likely face a gas shortfall next year, as well as this year, not because we have no gas, not because there is no government support for gas, but because it is more profitable to sell it elsewhere, we don’t have enough renewables to avoid dependency on fossil fuels, and we live with fossil fuel companies that behave like cartels. We have massive increase in household electricity bills as a result.

Australia and the World has massive problems with continuing fossil fuel production.

Talking Nuclear

However, after apparently ignoring these problems while it was in government, the Coalition has suddenly promised to talk about nuclear. This is despite the leader, Peter Dutton, saying a couple of months ago “nuclear energy is currently ‘not on the table’ for Liberal Party policy consideration.”

However, more recently, the leader of the opposition said:

It is high time that Australia had an honest and informed debate on the benefits and costs of nuclear energy….

The current energy crisis has shown the importance of getting more dispatchable power into the grid. The average wholesale electricity price in the second quarter this year was three times higher than the same time a year ago – a situation described by the Australian Energy Market Operator as ‘unprecedented’….

Australia is already a nuclear nation.  The Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation has operated a nuclear research reactor at Lucas Heights for over 60 years. A national conversation about potential of nuclear energy is the logical next step.

LEADER OF THE OPPOSITION – STATEMENT – NUCLEAR ENERGY 2 August 2022

Let’s be clear the ANSTO reactor at Lucas Heights, is not a nuclear power plant. It is a small reactor used to manufacture radioisotopes for medicine, and science experiments. It is not relevant to nuclear power.

So why do the Coalition apparently think focusing on nuclear is a good idea?

We need to note.

  • The Coalition could not succesfully start the ‘conversation’ while they were in government and had the power to do anything – despite producing the report: “Not without your approval: a way forward for nuclear technology in Australia” .
  • We have already had multiple inquiries that suggest nuclear power is too expensive without a carbon price which the Coalition will not accept, and few people want to live next door to one.
  • In their mind it appears to ‘excuse’ opposing climate targets, and suggests they might have a plan.
  • They will probably hope to distract from their failure to agree to actually cut emissions by arguing that people disinterested in nuclear energy, such as most people in Labor, Green and Teals, are not really prepared to tackle climate change, and are only interested in crippling the Australian economy, while the Coalition has a practical solution to the problem with zero social cost.
  • However, they have no ability, or probably intention, to get nuclear up before 2030 and thus help phase out greenhouse gas emissions. It’s just empty virtue signaling.

If you want to see the difficulties of modern nuclear then have a look at the Hinkley Point project.

The CSIRO was recently unable to get any pricing from the people claiming to have developed Small and Medium Reactors, and CSIRO Chief Executive Dr Larry Marshall pointed out that:

The latest report shows renewables are holding steady as the lowest cost source of new-build electricity.. With the world’s largest penetration of rooftop solar, unique critical energy metals, a world class research sector and a highly skilled workforce, Australia can turn our challenges into the immense opportunity of being a global leader in renewable energy

CSIRO press release Renewables remain cheapest, but cost reductions on hold. 11 July 2022

The report summary also said:

The status of nuclear SMR has not changed. Following extensive consultation with the Australian electricity industry, report findings do not see any prospect of domestic projects this decade, given the technology’s commercial immaturity and high cost. Future cost reductions are possible but depend on its successful commercial deployment overseas.

CSIRO press release Renewables remain cheapest, but cost reductions on hold. 11 July 2022

The real report states:

We have had a range of feedback into the assumed current costs for nuclear SMR over several years reflecting the difficulty of finding good evidence for costs in circumstances where a technology is not currently being deployed. This year only one submission was received but it continues the theme established in previous years that current costs of nuclear SMR should be lower. Vendors seeking to encourage the uptake of a new technology have proposed theoretical cost estimates, but these cannot be verified until proven through a deployed project.

Graham et al… GenCost 2021-22 Final report p.14

So the chances of getting affordable nuclear in time, seems small. However the cost of renewables is decreasing and they are much easier to build than reactors.

It seems likely that a conversation on nuclear, at the same time as ignoring all the other fossil fuel problems we have, and all the solutions we have, is likely to be an attempted shield for doing nothing.

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Monbiot argues…..

July 31, 2022

This is a set of quotations and arguments from George Monbiot, with an occasional paraphrase. Monbiot is easily the most important journalist who writes on climate change, power and economics, and his work is well worth your perusal, and hopefully this will help. If there are copyright issues, please let me know and I will remove this.

Monbiot. Photo from the Guardian

Summary

Complex Systems can change quickly to a new state of equilibrium – events cascade and reinforce the change – this is what the global eco-system, Gaia if you like, is facing.

The media is engaged in distraction, and blame shifting, partly this could be because the situation is frightening, and partly because we are ruled by a plutocracy that resists change, or awareness of change.

Plutocracy may lead to avoidance even in the powers that be. this can be summarised by the idea of “learning to live with” climate or Covid. This “living with” usually seems to mean ignoring the problem, invoking magic, blaming the relatively powerless, and not learning at all.

Plutocracy leads to confusion, even when governments try to do something, as they also try and support the plutocracy that is causing the problems. For instance, they avoid stopping new fossil fuel development, or removing regulations that support fossil fuel companies.

Much of the technology promoted and imagined as helpful is magical as well. It may not even exist, but will still solve our problems. Carbon Credits and biofuels are good examples of technology which is supposed to help, but which may make the problems worse.

On top of everything else we have a world food crisis. The food system is complex, but has the kind of structure which indicates it is likely to collapse altogether if there is much stress.

Finally we quickly look at a few solutions: basically supporting democracy against plutocracy and getting rid of climate debt to free poorer countries to deal with their own climate crises.

Complexity and mess of information

[Complexity is important, as I keep hammering] Monbiot writes that people who study complex systems have discovered that they behave in consistent ways. It doesn’t matter whether the system is a banking network, a nation state, a rainforest or an Antarctic ice shelf; its behaviour follows certain mathematical rules. In normal conditions, the system regulates itself, maintaining a state of equilibrium. It can absorb stress up to a certain point. But as stress escalates, these same properties start transmitting shocks through the network. [The system] suddenly flips: a small disturbance can tip the entire system over its critical threshold, whereupon it collapses, suddenly and unstoppably. It passes a tipping point, then falls into a new state of equilibrium, which is often impossible to reverse.

If the nodes behave in a variety of [different] ways, and their links to each other are weak, the system is likely to be resilient. If certain nodes become dominant, start to behave in similar ways and are strongly connected, the system is likely to be fragile. [This happened leading up to the 2008 financial crisis, in banking].

Human civilisation relies on the current equilibrium states. But, all over the world, crucial systems appear to be approaching their tipping points. If one system crashes, it is likely to drag others down, triggering a cascade of chaos known as systemic environmental collapse. This is what happened during previous mass extinctions.

[One] way of telling whether [the complex system] is approaching a tipping point [is that its] outputs begin to flicker. The closer to its critical threshold it comes, the wilder the fluctuations. What we’ve seen this year is a great global flickering, as Earth systems begin to break down. The heat domes over the western seaboard of North America; the massive fires there, in Siberia and around the Mediterranean; the lethal floods in Germany, Belgium, China, Sierra Leone – these are the signals that, in climatic morse code, spell “mayday”.

[However, our media are not talking about the problems. They engage in distraction and the pursuit of ratings] Tune in to almost any radio station, at any time, and you can hear the frenetic distraction at work. While around the world wildfires rage, floods sweep cars from the streets and crops shrivel, you will hear a debate about whether to sit down or stand up while pulling on your socks, or a discussion about charcuterie boards for dogs. I’m not making up these examples: I stumbled across them while flicking between channels on days of climate disaster.

Most political news is nothing but court gossip: who’s in, who’s out, who said what to whom. It studiously avoids what lies beneath: the dark money, the corruption, the shift of power away from the democratic sphere, the gathering environmental collapse that makes a nonsense of its obsessions.

This distraction has taken up things like anti-litter campaigns [shifting the packaging industry’s deliberate creation of waste onto consumers] personal carbon footprint [instead of industry footprint, again shifting responsibility to relatively low emitters]. The oil companies didn’t stop there. The most extreme example I’ve seen was a 2019 speech by the chief executive of the oil company Shell, Ben van Beurden. He instructed us to “eat seasonally and recycle more”, and publicly berated his chauffeur for buying a punnet of strawberries in January. [In other words, none of the problems were apparently related to his company’s business. It was the general public, that was the problem. Wealthy polluters have to be protected from anyone doing anything about the pollution they emit.]

[Personally the question arises is this avoidance because of climate change being a scary “turn off” and they fear audiences will go elsewhere, is it because the media is owned by the same class of people as those who profit from climate change, who don’t want people to get the idea that people could have power over the corporate sector, or is it because there is always a corporately sponsored think tank which can point to something optimistic or to the evil consequences of doing something?].

Plutocracy

[We live in plutocracies, and its sometimes pretty overt] The Sunday Times [recently] reported that people who have donated at least £250,000 to the Conservative party have been invited to join an “advisory board”, with special access to the prime minister, cabinet ministers and senior government advisers. They have used this access to lobby for changes in government policy. The 14 identified members of the group have a combined wealth of at least £30bn, and have donated £22m to the Conservatives. The group and its agenda had hitherto been kept secret. 

We have also been told that the Conservative party is helping its donors to apply for key government positions.

The interests of the very rich are not the same as the interests of the nation. We should never forget what the billionaire stockbroker Peter Hargreaves, who donated £3.2m to one of the leave campaigns, said about Brexit: “We will get out there and we will become incredibly successful because we will be insecure again. And insecurity is fantastic.”

[The real] power is oligarchic capital, [and that bends the way that we respond and the ways that the corporate media reports the crises]

Plutocracy leads to UK Water Crisis

[Monbiot suggests that] Absence, [and lack of action from government,] is what the party donors paid for.

[R]ecent prime ministers and their governments have prepared us for none of the great predicaments we face. They have looked the other way as the water companies failed to commission any new reservoirs since they were privatised in 1989, and allowed astonishing volumes of that precious commodity we call treated drinking water – 2.4bn litres a day on current estimates – to leak away. It’s a carelessness so grand that it feels like a metaphor. Instead of forcing them to stop these leaks, the government has allowed these corporations to pump the rivers dry: the living world, as ever, is the buffer that must absorb failure and greed.

So determined is the government to absent itself from decision-making that it cannot even institute a hosepipe ban: it must feebly ask the water companies to do so. Most, with an interest in ensuring their metered customers use as much as possible, have so far refused. Nor have the companies been obliged to upgrade their sewage treatment works. The combination of over-abstraction and sewage dumping is devastating. The water in the upper reaches of some of our chalk streams – remarkable ecosystems that are almost unique to England – now consists of nothing but sewage outflows and road run-off. During this long period of regulatory absence, the privatised water firms have piped £72bn in dividends into the accounts of their shareholders.

To [plutocrats], the duty of care is an abomination. Ten years ago next month, Liz Truss launched Britannia Unchained,… [that blamed] everything going wrong in the UK to “a diminished work ethic and a culture of excuses”. Of her four co-authors, three – Priti Patel, Kwasi Kwarteng and Dominic Raab – are frontbenchers in the current government… They blamed inequality and the lack of social mobility in this country not on the patrimonial spiral of wealth accumulation and the resultant rentier economy, but on “laziness”. Citing no meaningful evidence, they maintained that “once they enter the workplace, the British are among the worst idlers in the world”.

[And to return to a previous point;] When governments are contractually incapable of solving their people’s problems, only one option remains: turning us against each other [giving them a distraction].

Magic and Avoidance

[Avoidance is common in plutocracy, as the plutocrats are part of the problem.] We have a new term for doing nothing: “learning to live with”. Learning to live with Covid means abandoning testing, isolation and wearing masks in public places. Living with it, dying from it, what’s the difference? The same applies to climate breakdown.

[With climate] our primary effort should still be to decarbonise our economies, to prevent even worse impacts. We also need to brace ourselves for the heating [and resultant weather] that’s now unavoidable.

[However,] government policy is to wish away these problems [and shift responsibility on to ordinary people] Doubtless we’ll soon be told we need to take “personal responsibility” for ensuring our homes are not flooded and our power lines are not destroyed by storms.

There is no learning involved in “learning to live with” [hence its easy and makes no demands personal or political]….

A few days ago, a senior executive at the Institute of Economic Affairs suggested that instead of preventing climate breakdown, we could simply “build sea walls”. It is not just denial we’re up against. It’s a belief in magic.

Confusion and Avoidance

[Magical Thinking encroaches everywhere, and often involves ignoring contradictions. Many government policies seem confused. While they want to be thought to be taking action, they don’t want to challenge the plutocrats or the fossil fuel companies]

MPs with no discernible record of concern for poor people, and a long record of voting against them, suddenly claim that climate action must be stymied to protect them. [Or that we must sell poorer countries our fossil fuels to reduce their poverty.]

An analysis by conservation charity WWF suggests that, while the last UK budget allocated £145m for environmental measures, it dedicated £40bn to policies that will increase emissions.

It is still government policy to “maximise economic recovery” of oil and gas from the UK’s continental shelf. According to the government’s energy white paper, promoting their extraction ensures that “the UK remains an attractive destination for global capital.”

Boris Johnson appears to be on the point of approving the development of a new oilfield – the Cambo – in the North Sea.

Since [Joe Biden] pledged to ban new drilling and fracking on federal lands, his administration has granted more than 2,000 new permits. His national security adviser has demanded that Opec+, the oil cartel, increase production, to reduce the cost of driving the monstrous cars that many Americans still buy.

[Laws and regulations are written to support this corporate death spiral.] A UK oil company is currently suing the Italian government for the loss of its “future anticipated profits” after Italy banned new oil drilling in coastal waters. Italy used to be a signatory to the Energy Charter Treaty, which allows companies to demand compensation if it stops future projects. The treaty’s sunset clause permits such lawsuits after nations are no longer party to it, so Italy can be sued even though it left the agreement in 2016.

There is no realistic prospect of preventing more than 1.5C of global heating unless all new fossil fuel development is stopped. In fact, existing projects need to be retired. Nor can we achieve the government’s official aim of net zero emissions by 2050. [But magically we can work against climate change and keep on with more fossil fuels. that way we don’t have to struggle against the plutocracy.]

Technology and Magic Avoidance

[Other than not facing up to the problem, stopping doing destructive things can be useful…]

Renewable power, for instance, is useful in preventing climate chaos only to the extent that it displaces fossil fuels.

[However, fossil fuel companies are rich] and fossil fuels will become stranded assets only when governments insist that they be left in the ground. [So that probably won’t happen for a while yet.]

[Again there is magic. A reasonably well known economist Oded] Galor claims, without providing the necessary evidence, that “the power of innovation accompanied by fertility decline” may allow us to avoid a difficult choice between economic growth and environmental protection. [We will also develop] “revolutionary technologies” that will one day rescue us from the climate crisis. [Just like that. No problem. Technology will always be found to solve every problem, when we need it.]

[People] appear to believe that the transformations necessary to prevent systemic collapse can happen without political pressure or political change. [So we don’t have to trouble THE Market or face up to the corporations who temporarily benefit from from not paying the cost of their pollution and destruction.]

[Magic innovations would be nice, but we still need to stop burning fossil fuels, just in case they don’t eventuate. If they do eventuate, we just have to deal with less pollution.]

Carbon Credits: Magic or Fraud

[Carbon credits are an idea which depends on] removing historic carbon from the air, and counteracting a small residue of unavoidable emissions once we have decarbonised the rest of the economy.

[However], they are being widely used as an alternative for effective action. Rather than committing to leave fossil fuels in the ground, oil and gas firms continue to prospect for new reserves while claiming that the credits they buy have turned them “carbon neutral”.

The French company Total is hoping to develop new oilfields in the Republic of the Congo and off the coast of Suriname. It has sought to justify these projects with nature-based solutions: in Suriname by providing money to the government for protecting existing forests, and in Congo by planting an area of savannah with fast-growing trees.

If the drilling goes ahead it will help to break open a region of extremely rich forests and wetlands that sits on top of the biggest peat deposit in the tropics, potentially threatening a huge natural carbon store. The rare savannah habitat the company wants to convert into plantations to produce timber and biomass has scarcely been explored by ecologists. It’s likely to harbour a far greater range of life than the exotic trees the oil company wants to plant. It is also likely to belong to local people though their customary rights… In other words, the offset project, far from compensating for the damage caused by oil drilling, could compound it.

Last year, forests being used as corporate offsets were incinerated by the wildfires raging across North America [showing how precarious, this form of carbon store is, in the climate fossil fuels are producing.].

Oxfam estimates that [even if carbon credits worked] the land required to meet carbon removal plans by businesses could amount to five times the size of India – more than the entire area of farmland on the planet. And much of it rightfully belongs to indigenous and other local people, who in many cases have not given their consent. This process has a name: carbon colonialism.

A better strategy would be to spend money on strengthening the land rights of indigenous people, who tend to be the most effective guardians of ecosystems and the carbon they contain. {But that would prevent land from being alienated and purchased (or stolen) by corporations and other wealthy people for their own use.]

Food Crises

[On top of climate, we seem to be developing food problems through capitalism]

The number of undernourished people fell from 811 million in 2005 to 607 million in 2014. But in 2015, the trend began to turn. Hunger has been rising ever since: to 650 million in 2019, and back to 811 million in 2020. This year is likely to be much worse.

Last year, the global wheat harvest was bigger than ever. Astoundingly, the number of undernourished people began to rise just as world food prices began to fall. In 2014, when fewer people were hungry than at any time since, the global food price index stood at 115 points. In 2015, it fell to 93, and remained below 100 until 2021.

[Food forms a complex system, and as remarked above if nodes behave similarly there is a problem. In this case the] features that might impede systemic collapse (“redundancy”, “modularity”, “circuit breakers” and “backup systems”) have been stripped away, exposing the system to “globally contagious” shocks.

On one estimate, just four corporations control 90% of the global grain trade [and] just four crops – wheat, rice, maize and soy – account for almost 60% of the calories grown by farmers.

[Food companies nowadays can depend on just-in time supplies with no redundancy or stores, this is easily disrupted by collapse in supply through company problems, war, bad weather or eco-crises – all more likely in climate change.]

If so many can go hungry at a time of unprecedented bounty, the consequences of the major crop failure that environmental breakdown could cause defy imagination. The system has to change.

The world now is in a major food crisis. Climate breakdown has begun to bite. Heat domes and droughts in North America and storms and floods in Europe and China last year damaged harvests and drove up prices. By February, the cost of food was 20% higher than a year earlier.

Ukraine and Russia produce nearly 30% of the world’s wheat exports, 15% of the maize (corn) and 75% of the sunflower oil. Altogether, they generate about 12% of the calories traded internationally. [This obviously has effects given the current war in Ukraine]

Just as European countries allowed themselves to become hooked on Russian gas and oil, they are also highly reliant on Russian and Belarusian fertilisers. About one-third of the nitrogen and two-thirds of the potassium imported by the UK and western Europe come from Russia and Belarus, and we can expect them to use this dependency as another economic weapon.

The Middle East and north Africa are highly reliant on Ukrainian and Russian grain. Almost 40% of Yemen’s wheat is grown in Russia and Ukraine. Already, millions there are close to starvation. Egypt, the world’s largest wheat importer, relies on the warring countries for roughly 70% of its imports.

Biofuels add to the food problem

[Adding to the precariousness of food supplies we have agricultural land and crops being used to make biofuels, hence reducing the world’s food supplies again.]

Between 2019 and 2021, farmers in England raised the area of land used to make biogas by an astonishing 19%. Now 120,000 hectares (300,000 acres) is ploughed to grow maize and hybrid rye for biogas, which is marketed, misleadingly, as a green alternative to fossil gas. The reopening of a bioethanol plant in Hull that will turn wheat into fuel for cars is likely to take another 130,000 hectares out of food production.

About 450 hectares of land is needed to feed a biogas plant with a capacity of one megawatt. By contrast, a megawatt of wind turbine capacity requires only one-third of a hectare. 

The food used by the UK alone for biofuels could feed 3.5 million people. If biofuel production ceased worldwide, according to one estimate, the saved crops could feed 1.9 billion human beings.

The investigative group Transport & Environment shows, the land used to grow the biofuels consumed in Europe covers 14m hectares (35m acres): an area larger than Greece. Of the soy oil consumed in the European Union, 32% is eaten by cars and trucks. They devour 50% of all the palm oil used in the EU and 58% of the rapeseed oil. Altogether, 18% of the world’s vegetable oil is turned into biodiesel, and 10% of the world’s grains are transformed into ethanol, to mix with petrol.

Since 2000, 10m hectares of Africa’s land, often the best land, has been bought or seized by sovereign wealth funds, corporations and private investors.

[We might be told the biiofuel plants will run on waste, but] Invariably, as soon as the market develops, dedicated crops are grown to supply it.

The UK government, “responding to industry feedback”, increased its target for the amount of biofuel used in surface transport. Worse, it justifies continued airport expansion with the claim that planes will soon be able to use “sustainable” fuels. In practice this means biofuel [and more magic and fantasy]

There’s a limit to how much we can eat. There’s no limit to how much we can burn.

Changing the plutocracy

Society is a complex system, and complex systems can never be sensibly and benevolently controlled from the centre. A centralised, hierarchical system means concentrated power, and concentrated power favours concentrated wealth. [And concentration of power and contacts may favour system collapse.]

Politics is “the active engagement of free citizens” in their own affairs. [Politics is a normal part of everyday life as we organise ourselves to do things together].

Bookchin proposed a structured political system, built on majority voting. It begins with popular assemblies, convened in opposition to the state, open to anyone from the neighbourhood who wants to join. As more assemblies form, they create confederations whose powers are not devolved downwards but delegated upwards. The assemblies send delegates to represent them at confederal councils, but these people have no powers of their own: they may only convey, coordinate and administer the decisions handed up to them. [possible examples include Rojava in Syria and the now defunct participatory budgeting in Porto Alegre, southern Brazil. This kind of proposal might end the problem that] we have no opportunity to engage creatively with each other in building better communities.

Until we change our political systems, making it impossible for the rich to buy the decisions they want, we will lose not only individual cases. We will lose everything.

Debt and solution

[There is a massive global debt crisis] Between 1990 and 2019, external debt in… the poorer nations rose on average from roughly 90% of their GDP to 170%. The pandemic has accelerated the crisis: 135 out of 148 nations in the poorer world are now classed as “critically indebted”.

An analysis in the journal Global Environmental Change suggests that $10tn of value is extracted from poorer countries by richer ones every year, in the form of raw materials, energy, land and labour. That’s 70 times as much money as would be needed to end extreme poverty worldwide….

A report from Green New Deal suggests that debt has been used by the World Bank as a means of obliging Senegal to allow US, Australian and British companies to exploit its oil and gas. In Argentina, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has reportedly pushed for the development of the giant Vaca Muerta shale gas basin, using similar leverage. Impoverished and coerced by debt, poorer nations have little choice but to allow destructive industries to exploit them. 

An analysis by Oxfam suggests that 85% of the Covid loans made by the IMF to poorer nations were connected to austerity programmes: the fund is using the power of debt to push nations into cutting wage bills and spending less on public services and support for poor people.

Rich nations owe a massive climate debt to poorer nations: for the devastating impacts of the fossil fuels we have burned. Yet they have no intention of paying for the loss and damage they have caused. Poor countries are deemed to owe massive financial debts to the rich nations, yet they cannot pay them without destroying their economies and their ecosystems.

The proposal is simultaneously to cancel both the climate and the financial debts, liberating the money poorer nations need to take climate action.

[This sounds good, but it would, like any other climate action which cuts energy, would probably produce some kind of degrowth. However, degrowth will undoubtedly happen when the cost of fixing climate damage starts becoming a significant fraction of the profit made from provoking that damage.]

[Needless to say, it is probable that the plutocracy will oppose this measure, as they or the wealth economy will suffer, and most people will never get to hear of it.]

Conclusion

There is hope. But we have to be prepared to take on the Plutocracy and their promotion of harmful magic and distraction. We have to slow emissions, and keep fossil fuels in the ground. We can’t phase them out immediately, but we can agitate for more democracy, degrowth, and debt reduction as part of a strategy to help poorer countries.

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