Posts Tagged ‘development’

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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‘Development?’

July 21, 2021

I wonder if we can still use the word ‘development’?

This is because ‘development’ has been a word that has excused much abuse of the world, and much harm.

While ‘development’ clearly has had many good consequences, such as better medical attention, longer average life spans and so on, it has also been the term for the change in a ‘nations’ orientation from working with the ecology and people, to unrestrained use of coal, massive hydropower, industrial farming, mining, over-fishing, deforestation, militarisation and so on. It has not been an unmitigated good.

Development formed a track which nations were almost forced to take into significant levels of destruction to gain their place in the modern world, and avoid more colonialist imperialism from others. It is a form of ordering which produces a disorder which is often easy to ignore or dismiss, because of the good being attempted.

One of the moral dilemmas of the last 20-30 years has focused on the argument as to whether India and China, were excused in the massive and dangerous amounts of emissions they released, and ecological destruction they engendered because they were ‘developing’. Objection by the developed world could easily be seen as imperialist and interfering, and as aiming to try and prevent them gaining power and influence and helping their people out of poverty.

Similar events have happened in South America, where forests have been stripped to boost development, and this too has affected the world. The Amazon forest is so devastated, that it may now be releasing more CO2 than it stores.

Development has led to massive pollution in countries and dispossession of people who lived well with forests.

Indeed, development seems to seek sacrifice. Who is it that that gets removed, or suffers so the nation may develop and become powerful? Are people who resist the changes to their landscape reduced to being mere ‘backward’ ‘obstacles’, who can be treated with patronisation, contempt or brutality? Is development a site of ‘class war’? Or even of ‘race war’ when, as in Australia, the Aboriginal people are continually dispossessed for development (even sometimes for development elsewhere in the world – a frequent argument seems to be that our fossil fuels are being sold to charitably help development and end poverty).

Likewise some development of Renewable Energy can also operate in the same way as development through coal, although perhaps less destructively in the long term. This should be born in mind to avoid ill-consequences.

Development has grown to include destruction, when it should involve consultation and political involvement of those who are being developed, and change of path when (or before) the destruction begins to have an effect.

But if development was to be abandoned as a term for attempts at improvement, what should replace it, that does not have these conventions around it?

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Development, Pollution and Emissions

March 10, 2021

Please note this post should make more sense, if it is read after the previous post, and the next post. The next post was supposed to be before this, but it got lost in the system.

One of the problems the world faces is that if the developing world attains the same levels of prosperity as the developed, in the same way, with the same amount of extraction damage, pollution and emissions damage per head of population as the developed world then it is extremely likely we all will suffer.

This is deeply unfair for the developing world, or the global South.

Let me be clear. The developed world, in particular, Australia (because that is where I live), should be doing far more than they are to avoid climate change and ecological destruction. There is no excuse for Australian Governmental support of fossil fuels, fossil fuel exports, land clearing, pretending bushfires are ok, and so on. Australia has one of the worst set of figures for carbon emissions per head of population, and this is without counting the emissions in coal or gas exports, or the emissions from the devastating bushfires. We are reasonably wealthy, and have plenty of room to move. We are relatively resilient.

Given this resilience and the peril, Australia should declare: No more coal mines. No more gas wells. All fossil fuel burning and exports to be phased out by 2030.

This is possibly messy and costly, but so is the alternative. All Australians, who can, need to push for action at all levels, local, State, country, and international, to help ourselves and others. This is not a secondary call to anything else.

However, while some other parts of the developed world are doing ok, most of it is not. Most of it, seems to be refusing to change, whatever the peril. We cannot wait for them to act.

Partly this politics of destruction is coming from belief in economic models which insist on eternal growth, and partly because entrenched and previously successful economic organisations and corporations have political power. These people tend to see the peril not in eco-catastrophe, but in cutting back growth and their profits, so they resist change.

Politics is part of the economy, and always will be.

This also means there is nothing unchangeable about the organisation of the economy. However, it is true, that not all organisations of the economy will work – the current one does not.

However, this post, unlike most of my others, is not about the uselessness of the developed world but about the problems of further development in the developing world, and the lack of fairness which is present, because of the urgency of change, and because the limits of the planet are now different, to what they were.

Let us be clear. Developing nations quite possibly should give themselves some leeway with emissions if they choose. That may be necessary, but the levels of leeway need to be thought out carefully.

However, the argument, which is often made by Westerners, that the developing world should be able to do as much polluting and destruction as developing authorities like, because ‘the West’ already did so, is suicidal for everyone. There is no point developing, to find it all crashes down, or your water supplies decline, land mass shrinks and people flee. Something else needs to be done, and the developed world should probably help, without telling people what should be done.

I also have to say that a moral argument of the form:

  • “Someone else did X (which is morally dubious, or physically harmful), therefore no one can protest about us doing X as well – even when it is not necessary – as we have never done it before,”

is not the most compelling moral argument I have ever heard. E.g:

  • “You guys got wealthy plundering and starving India and Africa. Now its our turn.”

Really?

[In case it needs to be said, I’m not implying anyone is making that particular argument. It is supposed to illustrate the problems with this kind of argument]

No one needs to build coal energy, or gas energy and the huge infrastructure that it requires. There are other routes.

Again, I’m not denying ‘the West’, or ‘the North’ has greater responsibility for the problem (and indeed a whole load of problems), and should get on with taking responsibility and fixing those problems as best they can, but I’m also asking everyone: “Why don’t we all pursue a different path?” “Why stay on the path of destruction?”

If we know a path will lead to death, inequality, corporate domination, destruction of land and precariousness, as well as material prosperity, why is there such a hurry to take that path, rather than to find something better?

Again it probably comes down to economic power, and conceptual difficulty.

This is one reason for setting clear targets. Faced with known, non-shifting, targets, people tend to get ingenious.

Let’s hope the ingenuity which goes beyond rule bending works quicker.

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The UN has failed Climate: What Next?

February 1, 2020

This post is based in two insightful posts by Richard Hames from 2012. [1], [2] I think it is important to summarise them. All the good bits are his, the rest of it is mine. The unsourced quotations come from the blogs just referred to.

We all know the assertion that

Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results.

which was apparently written by someone from Alcoholics (or Narcotics) Anonymous in 1981. It was not Einstein. It is also not quite correct. If you practice a musical instrument you would hope you would get better at playing from doing the same thing over and over, indeed you learn through repetition. Anyway let’s change the cliche to “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, failing to improve every time, and expecting different results.” Not as neat perhaps, but it makes the point…

Pedantry aside, we have been hoping that UN sponsored Conference of the Parties would help us solve climate change and come to an agreement since the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.

They haven’t. They have not delivered better results and, by now it should be clear, that even with increasing disruption from turbulent weather events, they probably won’t.

When something fails repeatedly that is part of its pattern and existence. And the pattern cannot be ignored, without retreating into some kind of inability to deal with reality, or simply wasting energy which could be better expended elsewhere.

So let us propose that the UN Conference of the Parties, nowadays, primarily exists as an excuse for those parties not acting ethically or responsibly. Parties can always use the UN to find someone to blame for their own failure, so as to deflect criticism from a task they never took up whole heartedly in the first place, or that they expected others to solve without them having to sacrifice anything significant.

Not everyone has to refuse to take the conference seriously, and use it as an excuse for not acting, but if enough do, then it will fail. Consensus, of any other kind than ‘it failed again’, is unlikely.

What is the primary dynamic behind this? Hames suggests the Nation State.

Nation States are geared to compete with other Nation States, and to defend themselves against other Nation States. This goes back a long way, but it was reinforced by Colonialism and Developmentalism. Colonialism basically showed the importance of superior military technology and organisation, steel manufacture and highly available cheap energy from coal. The British were leading the world in the mid to late 19th Century and other countries emulated their processes, both as a mode of gaining resources and enforced markets (from colonies), and as a mode of defending themselves from British (and then European) power and dominance. The leaders of the Communist Revolution in Russia saw the development of Russia in terms of survival; they had been attacked and just managed to defend themselves: electrification and the coal to power it, was vital. After World War I, the US slowly shifted into dominance using the same kind of techniques, and lack of concern about environmental destruction, even if they set aside areas to be protected.

With the decline of colonialism, most of the ex-colonial states, no matter what their political system, embraced development and the implied rivalry behind it. Part of this embrace means embracing ‘GDP’ growth driven by cheap fossil fuels.

The Nation State:

defends and protects those citizens who choose to live within its borders , in return for which its citizens compete with those in other states for resources, territory, influence and wealth.

Hence the difficulty of any state giving something up which will perhaps weaken them and empower others.

The problem the UN faces is that there can be no losers, other than generous or unconcerned losers, if they are to preserve unity.

Hence the targets they issue are aspirational, and they have no enforcement mechanisms. Few States will voluntarily give any sovereignty to the UN and their potential enemies. This is why we have the security council and the power of the historically most important States to veto anything. The less “important” states are already afraid of less sovereignty, so they also resist. Not only do the numbers of negotiators, and their lack of authority or responsibility, inhibit negotiation, but a significant percentage are driven by Nationalist and Developmentalist loyalties.

So far most of the desperation and loss of life produced by climate change has appeared in the poorer States, and this is ignored by States with most of the power and producing most of the pollution. Recently, we have learned the wealthy states are quite capable of ignoring massive destruction in their own territory, if they choose. So the pressure to do something declines, as the results of action gets worse.

As the targets are aspirational, they tend to be pleasing and “possible” rather than based in our changing knowledge of what is actually required. They also tend to be manipulable, and interpretable in different ways, rather than fixed or meaningful. As a result the emissions from planetary industries have not declined, although they may have declined in some countries.

The UN is not geared towards producing alarm, for fairly obvious reasons of trying to keep the peace and status quo, so its warnings tend to be couched in vague terms, its science tends to be tilted towards conservatism.

This, as Hames notes then translates into the language used in the proclamations of the COPs.

Any effective communication, such that conveys compelling ideas or provokes collective action, is deliberately avoided or understated. Almost all briefing documents, reports, pledges, commitments, protocols, conventions and records of the meeting, supposedly intended to expound and inform, are invariably bogged down by a babel of weasel words – ambiguous, tortuously verbose or deliberately vague. This results in a weird kind of bureaucratic etiquette where nothing meaningful is said. Indeed the art of drafting these documents is to avoid saying anything explicitly that could cause offence to anyone at all.

The prime way of imparting information at the COPs is through instructional documents written by experts, according to the above restraints. But instruction does not necessarily result in new learning nor lead to behavioural change. It may just get people’s backs up, and reinforce their resistance. The documents fail on all levels, but do so in order to avoid complete dismissal as politicised. Not that it works.

The aim of consensus becomes impossible, and the aim may inhibit action. It allows any ‘recalcitrant’ State to blame others. For example:

  • “If the US does not reduce its emissions to zero immediately, it is not fair to ask us to reduce emissions at all.”
  • “If the Chinese can’t reduce emissions, neither will we.”
  • “We are only a small country, and acting would destroy our economy. Others need to act first”
  • We cannot reduce emissions without sacrificing our people to poverty

You all know the excuses and the blame game.

The most obvious other problem is that climate change is an unintended consequence of what are supposed to be beneficial acts, working through complex systems.

Consequently Nation States can be particularly reluctant to give up what they consider to be beneficial acts for themselves, in order to benefit other people in general. The costs of giving up the supposedly beneficial acts are obvious, the benefits of giving them up are not. Especially the benefits of being amongst the first to give them up. Its obviously better to let other people give up first. And if everybody waits for everyone else to give up first, then very little will happen.

As I have suggested previously, Climate Justice merely bogs us down in this fairness paradox, while climate generosity may free us to act in our and other people’s best interests, without waiting.

Suggestions

So we may need to recognise:

  • The UN is not the place for climate action.
  • People competing for advantage and past benefit are unlikely to act. Ever.
  • Nation States cannot all reach agreement, because of their nature and history.
  • A treaty is currently impossible.
  • We need to be doing something else.

What has been successful are things like the climate cities movement, in which cities compete to become more climate resilient, and to ameliorate their affect on climate. Of course such cities have faced attack from their federal governments, because it makes the government’s inaction look a little odd. In Australia, for example, despite confusion at the federal and state level:

nearly 40 per cent of the surveyed local governments had made commitments to reach a zero emissions target by or before 2050 for their community emissions – that is those generated by residents, businesses and visitors. ….

The report also found that 58 per cent of assessed councils had set targets to bring their own operational emissions to zero by 2050.

One Step Off the Grid

These moves are also acts of generosity, because they doe not expect others to act first. It allows people to take responsibility for their emissions now.

While there are conferences outside the conference in which history and power relations are explored, these secondary conferences seem to be kept isolated from the main proceedings – perhaps because the nation state is less important, and the conferences are less driven by wealth and power. International NGOs have also participated in such acts.

However, in the model proposed, we start to ask what can people at these conferences do without waiting for their Nation States to act, or to recognise their acts, or waiting for other places to act..

The Nation State, and the UN, cannot save us, so we have to stop expecting them to do so. We have to take action at the local level, or wherever we can act, and start building new institutions which will express our collective interests and enable us to co-operate to build local solutions, and to oppose local pollutions.

This is not easy, but it is also not impossible.

We further need to understand the history and dynamics of our position. As Hame writes:

“You must know where you have come from, where you are now, and where you want to get to,” to get there.

This knowledge seems more likely to happen at the local level or at the ‘secondary conference’ level than at the UN or the State level.

We also need a change in our psychology and our understanding of systems and complexity. In particular we need to attend to the notion that what we do may not just have the effects we are hoping for, we have to explore all its possible effects, and be prepared to change if our actions do not produce the results we expect.

Solutions to problems in complex systems cannot be worked out completely in advance, they must be discovered, at least in part, as we proceed, and that again is easier at the local level, where people have their senses and their direct concerns.

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Problems of Transition 07: Neoliberalism and Developmentalism

November 9, 2019

Continuing the series from the previous post….

Of these two political and economic movements (Neoliberalism and Developmentalism), Developmentalism is the oldest, but has since the 1980s been blended with Neoliberalism. As powerful movements and ideas, they can form obstacles to transition.

Developmentalism

Developmentalism can be argued to have its origin in the UK with coal-powered industrialisation and mass steel manufacture, which formed a reinforcing positive feedback loop; steel manufacture helped implement industrialization and also increased military capacity to allow plunder of resources from colonies. Industrialization helped increase demand for steel. Fossil fuel energy was cheap with a high Energy Return on Energy Input. This loop provided a model for the ‘development’ of other countries, partially to protect themselves from possible British incursion.

While the UK’s development was developed alongside and with capitalism, capitalism was not essential for development, as was shown by developmentalism elsewhere. The earliest deliberate developmentalism was probably in Bismark’s Germany, followed by Meiji Japan, neither of which were capitalist in any orthodox sense. Japan rapidly became a major military power defeating both Russia and China. Revolutionary Russia also pursued developmentalism, and after the second world war developmentalism took off in the ex-colonial world becoming the more or less universal model for progress, or movement into the future, and flourished in many formally different economic systems.

During the 1980s, but especially with the collapse of European Communism, and the birth of the so-called ‘Washington Consensus’, developmentalism became more strongly tied to international capitalism, and especially neoliberal capitalism. We can call this ‘neoliberal developmentalism’.

Neoliberalism 1

As I have argued elsewhere, neoliberalism is the set of policies whose holders argue in favour of liberty in free markets, but who (if having to make a choice), nearly always support established corporate plutocracy and appear to aim to destroy all political threats to that plutocracy.

Developmentalism and ecology

Developmentalism was built on fossil fuel use, and economic growth through cheap pollution and cheap ecological destruction. It also often involved large scale sacrifice of poorer people, who were generally considered backward and expendable in the quest for national greatness. Sometimes it is said that in the future succesful development will mean less poisoning, destruction and sacrifice, but the beautiful future may be continually postponed, as it was with communism.

Developmentalism was also often ruthlessly competative in relationship to other states and the pursuit of cheap resources. Developing countries often blame developed countries for their poverty, and this may well be historically true, as their resources were often taken elsewhere for little benefit to their Nation. Many developing countries also argue that they have the right to catch up with the developed world, through the methods the developed world used in the past. It is their turn to pollute and destroy. If this idea is criticised, then it usually becomes seen an attempt to keep them poverty ridden and to preserve the developed world’s power.

Developmentalism is related to neoliberal capitalism via the idea that you have to have continuing economic growth to have social progress, and that social progress is measured in consumerism and accumulated possessions. However, after a point neoliberalism is about the wealthy accumulating possessions, it does not mind other people loosing possessions if that is a consequence of its policy. Both the developing and developed world have developed hierarchies which tend to be plutocratic – development tends to benefit some more than others.

After the 1980s with the birth of neoliberal developmentalism, the idea of State supported welfare and development for the people was largely destroyed as developing States could not borrow money without ‘cutting back’ on what was decreed to be ‘non-essential’ spending. The amount of environmental destruction, pollution and greenhouse gas emissions also rocketed from that period onwards, despite the knowledge of the dangers of climate change and ecological destruction. The market became a governing trope of development, as it was of neoliberalism.

Neoliberalism 2: The theory of Free Markets

In theory, ‘free markets’ are mechanisms of efficiently allocating resources and reducing all needs and values to price, or messages about price.

Theory does not always work, because large-scale markets are nearly always political systems rather than natural or impersonal systems.

Big or successful players in the market nearly always attempt to structure the market in their favour. Wealth grants access to all other forms of power such as violence, communicative, informational, legal, ethical, organisational, religious and so on. If there is no State, then successful players will found one to protect their interests and property. If there is a State they will collaborate with others to take it over to further protect their interests and property.

Everything that diminishes profit, especially profit for established power, is to be attacked as a corruption of the market and therefore immoral and to be suppressed. If people protest at not having food, or at being poisoned by industry, they are clearly immoral and not working hard enough. Political movements which oppose the plutocracy or its consequences may have their means of operation closed down, or find it difficult to communicate their ideas accurately through the corporate owned media. The market ends up being patterned by these politics.

For example, neoliberal free markets always seem to allow employers to team up to keep wages down, as that increases profit, and render Union action difficult as that impedes the market.

While these actions may not always have the desired consequences, the market, at best, becomes efficient in delivering profits, but only rarely in delivering other values. Thus people without money are unlikely to have food, or good food, delivered to them. Indeed those people may well be sacrificed to efficiently feed others who have both more than enough food and more disposable wealth, and hence who make more profits for the sellers.

Through these processes, there is an ongoing transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich, increased by the power relations of plutocracy.

In plutocracies, it is normal to think that the poor are clearly stupid or not worth while, rather than they have lost a political battle, or been unfortunate.

Neoliberalism and ecology

If it is profitable to transfer the costs of ecological destruction onto the less powerful, and less wealthy, public then it will be done as with other costs. The cost and consequences of destruction will not be factored into the process, and this will give greater profit.

Even, leaving the natural world in a state in which it can regenerate becomes counted as a cost. If it is cheaper to destroy and move on, most businesses will do this, especially the more mobile wealth becomes. For example, I was told yesterday that on some Pacific Islands, overseas fishing companies bought fishing rights to sea cucumbers (which are extremely valuable given the prices I saw in some shops). They took all the sea cucumbers they could, threw the smallest onto the beach to die, and moved on, leaving the area more or less empty. They had no ties to the place, or to the regeneration of local ecologies. The whole ecology of the islands could collapse as a result of this profit taking, but only the Islanders suffer in the short term.

Likewise spewing poison is good for business as it is cheaper than preventing it. Neoliberal governments will support or even encourage powerful pollutors, if they are established members of the plutocracy, as President Trump is demonstrating nearly every day. These pollutors and destroyers have wealth and can buy both government support and politicians in general. They can pay for campaigns and propaganda. They can promise easy well paid jobs in their industry, and those people who were politicians and are now in the industry demonstrate the benefits of this position and are persuasive. Within neoliberalism, with wealth as the prime marker of success, the destructive business people are also considered virtuous and superior people, so the destruction they produce must also be virtuous.

In this situation, objecting to cheap ecological destruction, or proposing ways of preventing such destruction becomes seen as an attack on the powerful and on morality of the system in general.

One of my friends who studies neoliberalism, seems to be coming to the view that neoliberalism’s first political success came about in the 1970s through opposing the idea of Limits to Growth, and supporting ideas of capitalist expansion through endless technological innovation and creativity. This movement assumes that (within capitalism) desired, or needed, technological innovation will always occur, and be implemented, with no dangerous unintended consequences. This seems unlikely to always be true, and to be primarily based in fantasy and wish-fulfillment. It was also probably more attractive to voters than voluntary austerity. It allowed the continuance of ‘development’.

If this is the case, then neoliberals (rather than Conservatives) have been implicated in anti-ecological thinking from the begining.

The UK and Germany actually have Conservative parts in the mainstream Right, and they seem relatively happy with moving from coal into renewables – so we are not talking about every form of capitalism being equally destructive.

In Australia, neoliberalism is reinforced by the learnt dependence of the official economy on resources exports – whether agricultural or mineral, both of which have tended to destroy or strain Australian ecologies. Most Australians think mining is much more important to the economy than it is, expecially after all the subsidies and royalty and tax evasions are factored in. This visions of success implies that destruction is probably acceptable. Australia is big after all, and most people never see the sites of destruction, even if they have large scale consequences.

These processes have lead to a power imbalance in Australia, in which the mining sector calls the shots, and boasts of its power to remove prime ministers. It not only creates loyalty, but also terror.

Renewables, less cheap pollution, less cheap destruction of ecologies, less poisoning, are threats to established ways of ‘developing’, and to be hindered, even if they are ‘economically’ preferable, or succesful in the market.

In this situation, it is perfectly natural that other forms of economy, or activities which could potentially restructure the economy and disrupt the plutocracy, should be stiffled by any means available. In this case, this includes increasing regulation on renewable energy, suggesting that more subsidies will be given to new fossil fuel power, and increasing penalties for protesting against those supporting, or profiting from, fossil fuels.

In Australia, Labor is rarely much better than the Coalition in this space, as the fuss after the last election has clearly shown. It is being said that they failed because they did not support coal or the aspirations of voters to succeed in plutocracy, and they vaguely supported unacceptable ‘progressive’ politics.

Neoliberalism as immortality project

This constant favouring of established wealth, leads to the situation in which people with wealth think they will be largely immune to problems if they maintain their wealth (and by implication shuffle the problems onto poorer people).

At the best it seems to be thought that wealthy people are so much smarter than everyone else, that they can deal with the problems, and this success with problems might trickle down to everyone else. Thus wealth has to be protected.

These factors make the plutocracy even more inward looking. Rather than observing the crumbling world, the wealthy are incentivised to start extracting more from their companies and the taxpayers, to keep them safe. They become even more prone to fantasy and to ignore realities.

Conclusion

Developmentalism and Neoliberalism constitute the major forms of policy dominating world governance, and visions of the future.

In the English speaking world neoliberalism dominates. We have more totalitarian neoliberals (Republicans, Liberals, Nationals) and more humanitarian neoliberals (Democrats, Labour etc).

In the rest of the world, developmentalism can occasionally dominate over neoliberalism (ie in China), but the idea of economic expansion and a degree of emulation of the supposed economic success of the ‘West’ remains a primary aim.

Developmentalism and Neoliberalism both establish and protect ecological destruction for wealth generation and are among the main social obstacles to a transition to renewables.

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