Christmas Refomed by Reform

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I see that Reform has launched a “Christians for Reform” movement for the sort of true believer who thinks that “turn the other cheek” is a reference to mooning someone you don’t agree with.

At the launch Sarah Pochin MP* said that “we are fundamentally a Christian country”; which might be seen as trying to bolt the door after most of the horses have fled. At the last census fewer than half of the population identified as Christian (46%: 13% fewer than ten years earlier); and these combine a multitude of sins. Most of them embracing the sort of values that Nigel Farage sees as “woke”, and gives as a reason for not going to Church.

So, Reform believes in Christianity, but not the Christianity expressed by the Church of England, or, for that matter, Jesus.

Lets see…

“Love thy neighbour as thyself”.

“It is easier for a camel to thread the eye of a needle than a rich man attain the kingdom of heaven”.

Neither of those will fit neatly into the manifesto.

Which makes Anne Widdicombe’s remark that this launch was “the day when Reform and Christianity are merged” sound like an attempted hostile takeover.

Similarly Tommy Robinson’s Union Jack bedecked Carol Service in Whitehall billed as “putting Christ back into Christmas”, comes across as stuffing Him back in there hard whether He likes it or not (once He’s had His head shaved, a bulldog tattooed on his forearm and his sandals replaced with bovver boots). I do wonder what they were singing…

Possible slogans for a Christian Nationalist Christmas.

There is definitely no room at the Inn.

The only good Samaritan is a dead Samaritan.

Blessed are the gobby.

Peace and Goodwill are for wimps.

Forgive us our historic trespasses, but crush those who we fear might trespass against us because of them.

Keep your widow’s mites, we want crypto.

*Last autumn Pochin famously complained about adverts being too “woke” because they were “full of Asian people”. So, she may not have noticed, is the Bible.

Horror shock! Miniscule proportion of sexual offences committed by tiny proportion of asylum seekers!

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

Its not every day that I read the Daily Mail. Finding one abandoned on the train to London, I read through it; which was a bit like wading through a river of sneering bile. One article in particular grabbed my attention, prompting this letter to the editor.

Sir,

Your article “The shocking map of Britain that reveals true scale of sex crimes by illegal migrants”, as a result of “the most comprehensive study of such incidents ever compiled, combing the records of crown and magistrates courts around the UK to document the vast number of asylum seekers…who have committed sexual offences over the last three years” managed to find 59 cases. 

Your reporters must be aware that in that three years 285,523 people claimed asylum in the UK. So, if 59 of those committed sexual offences, 285,464 did not. Which of these two numbers looks “vast” to you? I suppose a more accurate headline reading “Only 1 in every 4,758 asylum seekers committed a sexual offence in the last three years” would not have suited your purposes.

Just to underline this point, during the same three years there were a total of 592,882 recorded sexual offences. If, as you say, 59 of these were committed by asylum seekers, then 592,823 were not. If 59 is “vast”, what word would you use for 592,823?

Indeed, if you were to give coverage to all these offences, most of them carried out by born and bred Brits, to match the two and a bit page spread you gave to the 59, you would have needed a newspaper roughly 20,000 pages long to get them all in. I don’t suppose that would have conveyed the message you wanted either.

Is it too much to expect that you stop distorting the facts on this most emotive of issues?

Whose lives matter?

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

A complaint to the BBC.

In news coverage on TV and radio in the last two days there has been almost blanket coverage of the horrible antisemitic attack at Bondi Beach in Australia that killed 15 people.

Since the “ceasefire” in Gaza, the IDF has been directly killing an everage of 6 people every day (383 up to 12/12/25, so 32 times as many as were killed at Bondi).

People have also died from the less direct impact of malnutrition, illness, hunger and lack of shelter (with at least 12 dying from the effects of the floods over the weekend).

In the last two days, the IDF have shot and killed 2 children – one in Rafah, one in Jerusalem – and shot and injured two more.

May I ask why it is that there has not been similar blanket coverage of these horrible attacks in the interests of “balance”; particularly given the discrepancy in casualties and the suffering that brings?

If the gunmen in Bondi were unfeeling monsters to kill 12, what does that make the IDF to kill 32 times as many?

Where is your sense of proportion?

In anticipation of Remembrance for the next (last) Great European War

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

“If our country falters because it is not prepared to accept – let’s be honest – to lose its children… then we are at risk.” Chief of French Defence Staff General Fabien Mandon

This brings to mind Wilfred Owen’s The Parable of the Old Man and the Young

So Abram rose, and clave the wood, and went,
And took the fire with him, and a knife.
And as they sojourned both of them together,
Isaac the first-born spake and said, My Father,
Behold the preparations, fire and iron,
But where the lamb for this burnt-offering?
Then Abram bound the youth with belts and straps,
and builded parapets and trenches there,
And stretchèd forth the knife to slay his son.
When lo! an angel called him out of heaven,
Saying, Lay not thy hand upon the lad,
Neither do anything to him. Behold,
A ram, caught in a thicket by its horns;
Offer the Ram of Pride instead of him.

But the old man would not so, but slew his son,
And half the seed of Europe, one by one.

In the“season of peace and goodwill” the thoughts of our tiny leaders are turning to Armageddon. On the front page of the Daily Mail on 12th December, Minister for the Armed Forces, former Marine and MP for Selly Oak Al Carns is quoted as saying that “Britain is on a war footing” alongside NATO General Secretary Mark Rutte flagging up NATO intent with “Europe must prepare for the scale of war that our grandparents endured.”

There is something light minded about the way they pose this. As though it were conceptual. Something fictional. As if they can’t fully grasp the consequences of their actions, having never gone through anything on this scale – and lacking the inhibitions of previous generations that have.

In his foreword to Lord of the Rings, J R R Tolkein writes “One has indeed personally to come under the shadow of war to feel fully its oppression; but as the years go by it seems now often to be forgotten that to be caught in youth by 1914 was no less hideous an experience than to be involved in 1939 and the following years. By 1918 all but one of my close friends were dead.” Tolkein himself was at the Somme. As was my grandfather. And there is more than an echo of no mans land in the marshes of the dead outside Mordor, pale faces under water in shell holes reaching up to seize the minds of the living as they pass.

To be “caught in youth” in 2029 has every prospect of being not only “no less hideous” than 1914 or 1939, but also terminal for the rest of us too if we let them unleash the war they have in mind.

This is not solely a European problem, as this New York Times editorial openly calling for a US war with China, shows.

The UK Strategic Defence Review approaches this as a “whole society” mobilisation. That includes militarisation in our schools. Most of this will be about chilling dissent, but it will also involve a sharp increase in the number of Combined Cadet Corps that will be grooming our children to be killers (and be killed). In a secondary boys school I know of that has had a long tradition of having a CCF – as part of its aspiration to be as much like a public school in the 1920s as it can get away with – one of the consequences of it is that the War Memorial in the Hall is raw with recent names, former students barely into their twenties, dead in Afghanistan or Iraq. And those wars are side shows compared to what they are trying to get us to accept now. Like the late colonial skirmishes that preceded the mass slaughter after 1914. Just an overture.

In Germany a move to reintroduce “voluntary conscription” (as contradictory a phrase as you could even hope for – if its voluntary, it isn’t conscription, and if its conscription it can’t be voluntary) has already led to large scale youth and student mobilisations against it all across the country last weekend. We will need Refuseniks here too; and a movement of them.

In the spirit of Tom Lehrer’s remark that “if there are going to be any songs about World War 3 we had better start writing them now”, mourning the consequences of the war that the leaders of NATO in Europe are preparing for in advance is an essential part of preventing it.

There has been a sharp division on the Left over the war in Ukraine, but not such a division over opposition to increased military spending. Whatever anyone’s view of the former, its vital to be clear about the motivation of our own ruling classes. As they pose it, the need for increased arms spending and “putting our country on a war footing” is a response to “a rising threat” from Russia.

Leaving aside the strenuous effort that every power always makes in the run up to a war to convince itself and its population that its aggressive intent is solely defensive – Christopher Clark’s The Sleepwalkers details this for all the Great Powers in the run up to 1914, also emphasising how far they all genuinely believed that the best deterrent to war was being stronger than their opponent, which posed an escalating cycle or rearmanent and preparatory planning that locked them into the apocalypse that followed – that poses three questions.

  1. Does such a threat exist, is it “rising” and, if so, what scale of response is needed to face it?

This is the current balance of forces between Russian and the European NATO countries, leaving the USA and Canada out, as printed in the Observer during the Summer. To spell it out, it shows that Euro NATO, leaving aside Ukraine, has twice as many service personnel, three times as many tanks and artillery pieces and twice as many combat aircraft as the Russians have. And thats now. Are they seriously trying to convince us that doubling what is already a huge advantage is necessary to stop an attack from an evidently weaker power?

Doubling military expenditure only makes sense if they are not contemplating defence but attack. They would have a 7 to 1 advantage in military spending. Its a conventional military cliche that, to be sure of success, an attacker has to have a 3 to 1 advantage. 7 to 1 seems a bit excessive even for that, but for the powers planning to build it to be posing that as “defensive” – because they feel threatened by a power that currently has less than half their capacity stretches credulity a bit far.

2. What does Russia want? Strenuous efforts go into avoiding even posing this question. The source of the war in Ukraine is put down either to some inherent expansionist quality in the Russian character, or megalomaniac psychic flaws in its current leadership. What they have said they want is an end to NATOs eastward expansion – because they feel threatened by it – Ukraine to be a neutral country, a mutual security treaty with the rest of Europe and NATO; and for the Russian speaking areas of Ukraine to be recognised as having seceded and become part of the Russian Federation. Russia has no desire for a war with the rest of Europe. They will fight one if they are attacked, but they are not going to try to expand Westwards.

You don’t have to accept that this is solely from peaceful intent to recognise that any such ambition is militarily and politically impossible. The areas of eastern and southern Ukraine that consistently voted for Russia leaning Parties before 2014 could be absorbed into the RF and there be some prospect of peace afterwards. Absorbing Western Ukraine would be like “trying to swallow a porcupine” as US conservative analyst John Mearsheimer puts it. Poland and the Baltic States even more so. Let alone anywhere further West. As the USSR found out in Afghanistan, and the USA (and UK) in Iraq, you can’t hold a country that really doesn’t want you in occupation of it. There just aren’t enough troops.

3 How would such a war go? If we get to a point that the war preparations stumble, or are manipulated, into a confrontation that escalates into full scale war, there are two scenarios.

  • The better one is that it rapidly bogs down into the sort of horrific slog that has been going on in Ukraine for the last three years but on a bigger scale, killing, brutalising and impoverishing all of us as it consumes more and more of our children, lays waste to all the towns and cities on and around the front line, devastates energy and other infrastructure far behind the front. Thats the better scenario.
  • The other is that, it all goes very well for Euro NATO forces and they stand poised to break through deeply enough into the RF to crush and dismember it. At that point, Russia’s nuclear weapons would be deployed. Russia’s nuclear war fighting doctrine is that these weapons would be threatened/used in the event of an existential threat to the state. They do not have a “no first use” policy. Nor, in fact does any other nuclear armed power with the exception of China. US nuclear war fighting doctrine has been based on the notion of a succesful nuclear first strike since the early 1960s. So, in the context of Euro NATO “winning” there would be every prospect of the Russian leadership invoking a Europe wide Samson doctrine and bringing the whole continent down with them. A nuclear strike on that scale would not spare the rest of the world, as the nuclear winter effect from even the self immolation of a single continent would have a devastating impact, posing a sharp drop in temperature, harvest failure and global famine.

Remembrance for the victims of all this is best done in advance; and to take the from of mobilising to stop it and make sure there aren’t any.

In 1922, just after WW1, the Danish composer Carl Nielsen wrote part of his 5th Symphony as a battle between the percussion, representing war, and the rest of the orchestra, representing the forces of life. In the opening movement there is a point at which the snare drummer is asked to improvise “as if at all costs he wants to stop the progress of the orchestra” as loudly and intensely as possible to try to drown it out in volleys of explosive detonations, before the forces of life finally triumph and the drums retreat in an elegaic mourning for their previous frenzy.

It is now up to all of us in the labour and peace movements in every country to be that orchestra, and drown out the mad drummers that are trying to lead us to catastrophe.

Please note that Facebook does not allow my blogs to be posted. They claim that some people have complained that they are “abusive”. I find that accusation pretty abusive myself and reject it completely. I suggest that anyone reading this have a look through any of my blogs at random and make your own mind up about whether they are absive or not and, if you like them and really want to annoy Mark Zuckerburg, please post them around on other platforms.

The kindness of “strangers”

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“We risk becoming an island of strangers” Keir Starmer.*

Now that I am old and full of sleep I find that people are occasionally starting to offer me their seat on the tube. It happened twice on a packed Metropolitan line train yesterday. Both the people offering were young women wearing hijabs.

We live almost at the summit of a very steep hill, so coming home laden with luggage is always a bit of a slog once we’ve got off one of the many buses that stops nearby but doesn’t dare try to ascend it. There are no routes. I suspect the drivers might need oxygen. At any rate, there is always a slight air of base camp about us as we pause at the bottom, look ruefully at each other, up at the slope, take a breath...”ready for this?”

Getting to that point close to midnight on Sunday in the rain, and a young black bloke in a car opposite starts shouting at us. We couldn’t make out what he was saying and initially weren’t sure he was talking to us, or had just stopped to shout at someone down his phone, or whether he was being threatening or not. So many urban myths, so little time. Thinking he might need directions, I wander over to talk to him; and it turns out he’s seen our predicament and was offering us a lift, which we very gratefully accepted. Friendly young man. Helped us in and out of the car with the luggage. Good deed for the day.

And on the way back, we struggled out of the lift at West Ham station just as our train was drawing swiftly in. Being a four carriage train it was sweeping ahead of us down to the far end of the platform, so we ran after it – limped in my case – as fast as we could, lugging backpacks, trundling wheely suitcases with bags balanced on top and pulling a heavily laden shopping trolley. On flopping down in a seat, having heaved all this up into the carriage- “pfff!” the Eastern European woman sitting opposite catches my eye, smiles and offers me a drink of water because “you look out of breath”.

Our neighbours aren’t strangers, and nor, it seems, are strangers.

* I know that Starmer now says that he deeply regrets using that phrase, but doing so was not an accident. All speeches of that sort are worked over many times by many people and every phrase is designed with calculated effect – which button will this push, which strings will that pull, what kneejerk reaction can we get with the other? His regret comes from being caught out as these calculations blew up in his face. He doesn’t, however, seem to have learned from this – that the xenophobes and racists he is trying to impress won’t be impressed and anyone who wants to fight them will be repelled – because he’s still on the same course towards disaster.

Reflections on the National Climate and Nature Emergency Briefing

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Introducing the National Climate and Nature Emergency Briefing to a packed Westminster Central Hall last Thursday morning. Chris Packham noted that this was the first briefing of its kind, aiming to present the facts from eminent scientists aimed at “decision makers”; MPs, Local Authority, business, faith and union leaders, cultural influencers, so that the state of the crisis can be fully appreciated and acted upon with the level of urgency that it demands.

It is little short of a scandal that this briefing had to be generated from the bottom up, when it is an obligation of all countries that have signed the Paris Agreement – under Article 12 – to educate their population on the nature and state of the crisis and the measures needed to deal with it. This should be being done by the government, and by the media.

The follow up campaigning from this Briefing is aimed at getting them to do just that, putting a similar event on all major TV channels with a proper level of government support. Everyone should sign their letter demanding that. Link here.

Packham stressed the importance of following the science, and noted the failures to do so that have just come out in the Covid inquiry. The delay to the first lockdown against scientific advice. The “eat out to help out” scheme, devised by Rishi Sunak in the Treasury, with no scientific input at all, both of which led to unecessary deaths. In the case of climate breakdown, ignoring the science will repeat the history, but this time as even more of a tragedy and even less of a farce.

There were nine speakers emphasising different aspects of the crisis, which overlapped in places. I’m summarising here, with a few additional comments.

Professor Natalie Seddon argued that Nature should be seen as “critical national infrastructure”. The UK is in the bottom 10% of most nature depleted countries, with an overall decline of 19% in wildlfie abundance since 1970, only 3% of land area protected and only 25% of peatlands, 14% of rivers and 7% of woodlands considered to be in a healthy condition.

Without the restoration of peatlands and wetlands and measures in urban areas like Copenhagen’s Sponge Parks, the 5 million properties currently at risk of flooding will grow in number and frequency of risk.

The benefits for mental, and physical, health from access to nature and urban green space is recognised by the more than 50% of people who think that the government isn’t doing enough to regenerate it; and the paradox of trying to “build, baby build” by removing environmental regulations on developers is that nature depletion through short termist eco system degradation damages GDP.

Professor Kevin Anderson laid out the bare bones of Greenhouse gas emissions in a way that pointed to the intense weather, social, economic and political turbulence we are heading into at pace.

He noted that the range of variation in GHG emisisons during the ice ages, from deepest ice age to warm interglacial periods, was no more tha 100 parts per million (PPM). During the Anthropocene, the entire period from about 10,000 years ago to the last two centuries, the variation was no more than 20 PPM. Since 1750, the increase has been from 280 PPM to 425 PPM – 145 PPM (half as much again as between ice age and interglacial) in just 300 years. And its still rising. The central – absurd – contention of climate change denial is that this has no impact.

An average global temperature rise of 2C will be extermely dangerous. Current climate impacts are at 1.4C. Getting to 3C or 4C poses generalised social and economic breakdown and war.

The remaining “Carbon Budget”, the amount of total extra emissions allowed before a temperature limit is breached is 130 Gigatonnes for 1.5C. At present rates of emisison, that will be breached in three years. It is 530 GT for 2C. That will be breached in 13 years at current emissions. Current projections are that emissions will begin to fall this decade, but at a rate far too slow to avoid these breaches.

Emissions would have to fall 20% a year to save 1.5C and 8% a year for 2C.

The UK tends to be self congratulatory about its record, but has only reduced emissions at a rate of 0.6% a year since 1990. To meet an equitable target, as a wealthy country with a long record of carbon emisisons that are way higher than its global fair share, it would have to reach zero carbon emissions by 2039 and reduce them at a rate of 13% a year to get there. On this basis, the Net Zero by 2050 target allows the UK to have three times its fair share of carbon emissions; so a bit more humility about “global leadership” might be in order.

Doing this requires the right kind of technology and changes in social norms.

We need to go flat out for renewable energy, electric transport and insualtion, while avoiding “delay technologies” like Carbon Capture and Storage (which has been hyped for thirty years but only managed to sequester 0.03% of fossil fuel emissions in 2024). These tend to be high cost (for us) and high profit (for owners).

The damage done by the discretionary income of high income, high emitting people has to be confronted as we need a society of “private sufficiency and public luxury”, as “it is now too late for non-radical futures”.

Professor Hayley Fowler examined oncoming weather impacts, pointing out that the climate we have now is “the least extreme climate you will experience in your lifetime” and that, so far, both rainstorms and heatwaves have been more intense than models have predicted.

Mega storms, in which 8 months worth of rain falls in a few days, are becoming more common. The damage done is unimaginable until it happens.

By 2050, on current trajectories, 1 in 4 homes would be at risk of flooding

Our current infrastructure is built for a world that no longer exists. So, if adaptation to whats coming isn’t built into all planning, we will be in a state of permanent crisis management, as “natural” disasters pile up and intensify. So, every pound spent now to avert as much of this as possible will save many pounds in having to deal with it.

Professor Tim Lenton explored Tipping Points. These are sudden dramatic shifts for the worse just from carrying on doing business as usual. As we are currently at 1.4C additional average global heating and heading for 1.5C by 2030, we are already seeing drastic impacts on coral reefs, the Amazon and methane emissions from melting permafrost in the Arctic. All these together have the potential for a runaway scale of emissions that will be beyond our ability to mitigate.

The biggest and most apocalyptic of these is the risk of overturning the Gulf Stream (AMOC), as the Greenland Ice Shelf pours billions of tonnes of cold fresh water into the North West Atlantic. All surveys show that the AMOC is weakening. The only question is how much and how fast. Some climate models for a 2C increase world project a situation in which the Arctic sea ice in February would reach as far as The Wash, average temperatures in London would be -20C – in Edinburgh -50C – with two frozen months in mid Winter. Summers, however, would be hotter than they are now. It would be impossible to grow food and there would be insufficient water to sustain the population in the South East in the Summer. Infrastructure engineered for a temperate climate would buckle under conditions more severe than currently in Irkutsk. That would mean most people from the UK would find themselves climate refugees: looking for a safe place in a world rapidly running out of them, as in this scenario, harvests from bread basket areas would halve.

Countering these prospects are the need to promote positive technological and social tipping points in power generation, transport, and residential emission, with strong mandates to phase out fossil fuel use.

Professor Paul Behrens looked in more detail at Food Supplies, noting that the Syrian civil war resulted from a several years long drought that forced farmers off the land into cities in conditions of precarity and poverty.

At present, the chance of a major crop failure in major bread basket areas is 1 year in every 16. When we get beyond a 1.5C increase, that comes down to 1 year in every 3. At 2C, its every other year. As we are certain to be beyond 1.5C by 2030, we are heading for hungry times – and everything that goes with them.

The UK has had 3 of its 5 worst recorded harvests in the last ten years. 80% of its farmers see climate change as a threat to their futures. At present the UK grows 54% of its food, so 46% is imported. 25% of UK food imports are from the Mediterranean region, which is being hit hard by climate change too.

A third of price inflation in 2023 was driven by climate impacts, helping generate an increasingly febrile politics. 40% of food experts believe widespread civil unrest linked to food shortages is ‘possible or likely’ in the UK within the next 10 years. Over 50 years, nearly 80% of experts believe civil unrest was either possible, more likely than not.

To avert this, we need a sharp shift in diet to eat a lot less meat. A mostly plant based diet would cut about 60% of UK agricultural emissions and free up a lot of land to grow more food as, at present in the UK, more than half of agricultural land is devoted to animal farming. This would also have positive health impacts, saving the NHS £55 million a year and his remark “if we don’t adapt, it will be forced upon us” drew a spontaneous round of applause.

This point was reinforced by Professor Hugh Montgomery’s contribution on Health, who noted that a shift to a plant based diet and more active travel would have a positive impact on strokes and cardiovascular, cancer, lung diseases, diabetes, and most other common illnesses and causes of death. At the same time, a consequent reduction on obesity could save the NHS up to £126 billion a year.

He also stressed that, as an emergency doctor, when faced with an emergency “you don’t treat it with words and homeopathy” and you have to be very frank with patients about what their situation is and whether they are prepared for the struggle to get through it.

He noted that actuaries, not climate scientists, have assessed that, in a 3C world there is a likelihood of 4 billion deaths from socio political failure (almost 1 in every 2 people) and concluded that we need “transformational change”.

At present, the food industry is concerned that it cannot rely on “predictability of supply”.

This was again underlined by Lt General Richard Nugee, speaking on National Security, who noted that food inflation is already at 4.9% and cited Alfred Henry Lewis’s 1906 remark that “There are only nine meals between mankind and anarchy.” He argued that climate change is a “threat multiplier” that parts of the world are becoming uninsurable and there is a grave risk of “cascading crises” which erode trust and social solidarity, overwhelming governments and undermining consent, leading to an ungovernable state. In this he echoed the assessment of the US military in 2019 that, as climate impacts broke down US society, the armed forces would be drawn in, first as emergency support, but inexorably taking on state functions as civil society broke down and, eventually, overwhelmed themselves.

More problematic was his stolid framing within the UKs current “defence” orthodoxy, enshrined in the Strategic Defence Review; which cements the UK’s alliance with the United States which, under the Trump adminstration, is a complete rogue state on climate; seeking “global energy dominance” by doubling down on fossil fuels and trying to drag the rest of the world down with it. Any country that allies with that, and everything that flows from it, is part of the problem.

While he hinted that “authoritarian populism” is a threat to “Western Democracy”, he did not specify whether he was referring to Trump and Farage as enemies within, or whether this was code for the conventional “rising powers” narrative directed at Russian and China that underpins the SDR – possibly both. This left him with an impossible contradiction; that its possible to spend an additional £77 billion a year on “defence” – the amount required to meet 5% of GDP – and at the same time invest enough to avert climate disaster within our existing economic system. It isn’t. And simply asserting that we “must” doesn’t resolve it. A choice has to be made between a military confrontation of choice, and global cooperation to avert climate breakdown and, as the General said himself. “Climate change is a threat now; and one thing I was taught in the military is that you have to face the threat in front of you as it actually is, not how you’d wish it to be”.

Professor Angela Francis looked at the economics of transformation, noting that “the status quo can seem attractive, even if its a dangerous place to be”, but the cost of inaction is far greater than the cost of action; and it won’t be cheaper later.

The All Party Parliamentary Climate Change Committee projection is that the UK’s current Net Zero by 2050 pathway would cost just 0.02% of GDP.

A fast transition would save the global economy $12 trillion of damage. A slow transition just $6 Trillion. No transition… just takes the hit.

An example of this is that energy price inflation would have been 11% lower had we made a faster shift to heat pumps. So, the damage from delay is already being felt.

She stressed that market economics takes the environment for granted. Stable weather. Fresh water. Free pollinators. Fertile soil. And that without regulation, any investment comes as an additional cost. So, strict regulation is essential.

Faced with the consequences of their actions, fossil fuel companies, could have diversified and shifted. Orsted is an example of one that has. But most haven’t, and are digging in on their core product, because fossil fuels are very profitable. We therefore need a massive, permanent windfall tax to make it less so.

Her final point that the transition has to be made to work for “low and middle income” people was underlined by Tessa Khan from Uplift, who noted that the decline of the North Sea, with half the jobs going in the last 15 years even as new investment continued, has to be met by a structured plan for transition to decent jobs in renewable energy and that electrification has to be more affordable than the status quo.

This can be done. Half the UKs recessions since the 1970s have been caused by fossil fuel price spikes. The cost of subsidising the spike in gas prices at the start of the Ukraine war was £64 billion and the additional costs to households and busiensses was another £60 billion. The UK is still dependent on gas to heat over 80% of its homes.

In an energy system based on renewables the fuel inputs from the sun and the wind are free forever. Prices for renewable technologies are falling steeply. Down 50% for offshore wind and 70% for solar and 80% for battery storage in the last ten years.

Renewables are more efficient that fossil fuels. A typical ICE car will only use 25% of its fuel to actually move its wheels and the FF system as a whole wastes about 2/3 of the energy that goes into it.

But, at this point, we need a lot of upfront investment to make the shift; upgrading the grid, shifting to heat pumps. That is a matter of political priorities and energy bills can be restructured to match the lower costs of renewable energy generation.

The governments plan for a million clean energy jobs in the electrification of our energy system needs investment to make it work comparable to the wholesale shift from town gas to natural gas that was done in just under ten years in the 60s and 70s.

A point nudged at here is that this would require the state to take back control of the sectors needed to do this. In the 60s, British Gas was a nationalised company. In the same period it was possible to build hundreds of thousands of affordable council homes because Local Authorities had substantial Direct Labour Organisations (and most architects worked for LAs). When Angela Francis talked of the need for “trusted” companies to carry out the wholesale insulation of housing that we need, she begged the question of which companies they might be – given the fragmentation and fly by night character of far too much of the current UK construction sector. To do the job, we need the right tools. We can’t do it with the broken ones we have.

Professor Tim Berners Lee, chairing and summing up set a challenge to “reset the national conversation” using the clips of the speeches and upcoming film that will be put on tour in the Spring arguing that the “survival of society” depends on a “WW2 level of leadership”, but that the necessary emergency legislation and investment will need consistent public pressure to challenge the misinformation and gaslighting and force the pace so that the UK can “come together and lead the world out of trouble…along with other proactive countries”. Although framed in traditional unreconstructed nostalgic British narratives (that terrible yearning to “lead the world”, when the UK did so much damage the last time it tried to) that recognition that that would have to be done with “other proactive countries” hints at a dawning recognition that geopolitical alignments will have to shift to respond adequately to the imperatives of the climate emergency.

He ended with the point that “hope is a dicipline” which, together with Brian Eno’s remark from the floor that “movements catch fire when they recognise themselves” are good thoughts to sustain us.

There is a further urgent point, implied by the Briefing but not explored by it. Kevin Anderson’s point about the pace at which climate limits are being breached overlaps with the impacts on food supply and severe weather impacts which are already developing. These warnings have usually been posed to political leaders as warnings. This is what will happen if you don’t react enough. The student protests before the pandemic had a similar focus. Here’s the truth. Act on it. These impacts are already beginning, and whatever is done now they are likely to deepen in the immediate future. This poses serious economic and political disruption.

The purpose of political formations like Reform, or Tommy Robinson’s current – here and elsewhere – and the reason they are so lavishly funded by the likes of Musk, is to make sure that the political response to that combines climate denial and xenophobia, to take the heat off the people who have caused the crisis and make us fight each other instead.

This poses a challenge to the labour movement both on how we resist this and, in conditions of social crisis, how we collectivise a response based on solidarity – whether thats to food shortages (which are usually managed by the market with price increases that further impoverish the poorest but could be addressed by rationing policed by unions taking control of resources in supermarkets and warehouses, in the event government doesn’t step up) or whole communities inundated by floods (which private insurance will no longer cover).

This is a link to the materials from the Briefing which can be used to get discussions going with people you know.

Climate Myth Busting

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

This is the content of a talk I gave on a lunchtime Teams meeting with members of the Public and Commercial Services Union (PCS) as part of a series they are holding this week to help kick start the Year of Trade Union Climate Action. Now that, for the first time, elements of the far right launched a physical attack on a climate march in Manchester at the weekend we can see how weaponised lies have violent consequences; making combatting them all the more urgent.

What I aim to do in this brief talk is identify the main sorts of climate denialist mythmaking – firstly on the science, secondly on the social and economic front – identify where they come from and why they can be so potent and suggest sources of info to counter them.

The overarching aim of climate misinformation is to muddy the science, to confuse, deflect and delay. As such it doesn’t have to be coherent or consistent.

Climate Science itself is very clear.

1 Gases like CO2 and methane trap heat in the atmosphere. As you add more of them, you trap more heat. Do this continuously and you will get a trend of global heating – a greenhouse effect.

2 The main source of greenhouse gases is industrial and agricultural activity, primarily burning fossil fuels. Since the start of the industrial revolution in around 1750 the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere has been pumped up from 280ppm to around 425 ppm today.

You sometimes get people who say that temperatures aren’t rising, most often as sarcky asides during cold snaps – where’s that global warming then, huh? But most people most of the time now know temperatures are going up, because its what they are experiencing. The hottest years on record are all in the last ten.

So the arguments you tend to get are that that these rising temperatures aren’t due to greenhouse gases but due to other “natural” factors. Temperature has always varied. Its been hotter and colder in the past. Its all due to other, natural factors that are way more powerful than anything we are doing. All these arguments amount to an absurd proposition. That you can add 145ppm of ghgs into the atmosphere in just under 300 years with no effect whatsoever.

Nevertheless, to briefly touch on these arguments

1 Volcanic activity tends to have a cooling effect. The year without a summer in 1816 caused by the eruption of Mount Tambora. Not a useful explanation for things generally heating up.

2 Solar activity goes in cycles and in the last 40 years the variation as been below 0.1%. Since 1750, the burning of FFs has had 270 times the impact of solar activity. So, no explanation there.

3 Long term variations in the Earths orbit and tilt, caused by the gravitational pull of the larger planets, which have indeed been responsible for much more dramatic shifts in global temperature than we are seeing now, “snowball Earth”, forests at the South Pole, go in what are called Milankovitch cycles which take place over 100s of 1000s of years. The cycle we are in the middle of now would imply a slight cooling effect at the moment, if we weren’t forcing the pace. So, yes, things have been significantly hotter and colder at points in the past, but those factors are not operating now, while the forcing effect of greenhouse gas emissions IS happening now.

One last one on the science. Farage and the like express incredulity that CO2 is classed as “pollution” when it is actually plant food. A wonderful illustration of the principle that a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing. CO2 is NOT classed as pollution – paradoxically pollution has tended to act to cool the atmosphere, and successful attempts to clean it up, like in China in the last decade or so, has accelerated heating. CO2 is a greenhouse gas. And that’s the problem. It does encourage some plant growth, but this is limited, and counteracted by the impact on plants of rising temperatures on habitats – as trees can’t migrate – and extreme weather on harvests. As we’ve seen in the UK in the last couple of years. And as rising chocolate and coffee prices are witness.

Leaving aside social media, and the algorithms promoted by big tech, which generate excessive attention for emotive misinformation – if you read most UK newspapers you get a very weird and hyped view of the world just from their choice of adjectives.

Climate targets are always “unhinged”, or “lunatic”, or “eye watering”. Politicians identified with them, like Ed Miliband, are always “swivel eyed” or “eco loons” or “hypocrites”.

Renewable energy is always derided as “expensive” and/or “unreliable”.

All of these are free floating. They don’t attach to any reasoned argument, but the constant repetition of “the eye watering costs of net zero” creates a delusion that is taken for granted. Its what the press does on many issues of course.

This venom is being generated from the fossil fuel industry and its political tools, from Trump to Farage to Claire Coutinho.

Like any industry facing an existential threat to its profits FF companies are acting with the same sense of social responsibility as the asbestos and tobacco companies did before them in denying any association between their products and cancer – and are acting from the same playbook – funding “think tanks”, buying up lobbyists and astroturf media outlets like GB News, running bot farms to deny, deflect and delay.

As they now Donald Trump in the White House, pushing for “Global US Energy Dominance” through doubling down on fossil fuels and trying to force the rest of the world to do the same – they now have control of the world’s biggest bully pulpit to speak power to truth.

Part of this is an ideological war on reality. Defunding and closing down government departments scientific and academic bodies that research or monitor or regulate climate impacts or wider harms to the environment, banning use of climate related terms in government documents, even setting up a Federal body to edit academic papers so that they don’t challenge the Administration’s line that “climate change is a hoax”. US academics at international conferences have taken to using burner phones.

This works very directly at home, and there is straight government to government pressure to shift policy against renewable energy, but through the immense financial clout of FF billionaires they are also funding pro Fossil Fuel political formations like Reform in the UK, to which the more traditional Right is bending. As Kemi Badenoch put it to the FT in the summer, for the Conservatives now “the model is Javier Millei”.

The formula that the BBC use about this is “the political consensus on net zero has broken”. What they do not note is that the scientific consensus has NOT. What was a 97% agreement on the human causes of climate change among scientists according to surveys in 2013 has now risen to 99%. We need to be clear that what this means is that Parties like Reform and the Conservatives do not have a policy that grasps reality, which means that having an “impartial” or “balanced” debate on this issue gives undue weight and attention to bad faith fantasists.

Looking at some of the things they say.

Overall, its going to cost too much to meet NZ targets. As if doing nothing, or doing things more slowly, can be done with impunity. We are already in a situation in which the costs of failing to act earlier are starting to hit us. “Natural” disasters are becoming more intense and frequent. Recovering from them increasingly costly and debilitating. Parts of Canada, Florida and California and the rest of the world are becoming uninsurable. The UK environment agency has projected that 1 in 4 UK homes will be at risk of flooding by 2050. And, in a sign of the decline of business ethics that comes with this, a third of the victims of the recent US wildfires were subject to scams in the aftermath. We will have reached a civilisational tipping point when the costs and effort involved in recovery is too great, as we are hit by one impact after another like a flurry of blows from a boxer that will KO us. The OBR has projected that, if unaddressed, climate related risks could drive the UK’s national debt to 270% of GDP by 2070, up from less than 100% today. THAT would be eye watering.

By contrast, the OBR also projects that the cost of meeting the UK’s net zero targets over the 25 years to 2050 is £116 billion; less than £70 per person per year, or 19p per person per day. Are anyone’s eyes watering at the prospect of that. A snip at the price I’d say, and certainly worth the investment to secure a liveable planet for our grandchildren.

Specific arguments they raise…

  • The UK is only 1% of emissions, so what we do doesn’t matter.

The UK is responsible for its 1%, as every other country is responsible. No one gets a free pass, or is entitled to freeload on the efforts of others. The UK’s historic emission are far higher than average or our fair share, one estimate in the Lancet was that it was 7%. That’s from a few years ago and might be on the high side as estimates go, but we do have some living down to do. Also, emissions by consumption in the UK are 2% of the global total, so we have to carry our own can.

  • The UK is ahead of other countries, taking on an unfair burden and there are no prizes for coming first

This isn’t an approach they’d advocate for the Olympics, but the prize is a liveable planet; rather more important than a gold medal and worth forcing the pace on.

The UK is not in the lead. We are about seventh – which is pretty good and we should be proud of it – but this isn’t about where we are in relation to other countries, and wanting to slack off and drop back into the pack that’s just jogging along and hoping for the best, its grasping the fact that the faster we move the more we limit the damage. That’s the prize.

  • What’s the point of the UK doing anything when China/India…?

There’s a point because if we weren’t doing anything, everything would be worse, irrespective of what anyone else does.

In the case of China, which has a per capita carbon footprint somewhat higher than the UK but half that of the US, its emissions are peaking and have been at a plateau for about 18 months. Coal production has peaked and their coal fired power stations are currently operating at about 50% capacity as they are redefined as back up. The projection from the IEA and others is that China’s emissions will fall much more quickly than they have in the developed countries because their deployment of renewable energy and EVs is on such a vast and rapid scale – solar farms the size of Bristol. This is having a knock on effect globally, with the export of renewable technology alone knocking 1% off global emissions last year and the impact of EVs replace FF cars significantly reducing global oil demand. India is also moving very fast towards renewables and their per capita carbon footprint is about half that of the UK. Its worth noting that 60% of developing countries are more advanced in getting their electricity from renewable sources, and electrifying their entire energy supply, than the US is.

  • Your energy bills are high because of “stupid net zero”

UK energy bills are high because 1. they are set by the price of gas, which is higher than the cost of electricity generated from renewable sources. In fact Analysis by the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU) shows that in 2024 UK wholesale electricity prices would have been over 30 per cent higher if there had been no wind power generated in the UK 2. 25% of the bill goes in profits for the energy companies.

  • Heat pumps don’t work when its cold

This will come as an enormous surprise to the 60% of people who use them in Norway.

  • EVs have a higher carbon footprint than FF cars

The manufacture of EVs is more carbon intense than for FF cars, but over their lifetime, the impact of the manufacture is cancelled out after about 2 years or 15,000 miles. As batteries become more efficient and last longer, this will become ever more the case. And, in passing, all the elements of batteries, and wind turbines for that matter, can be recycled, so we are not going to be left with mountains of toxic waste (as if we don’t have that now, take a trip to Rainham).

  • We can’t stop global heating, we just have to live with it

Trying to implement the Paris Agreement has cut the projected increase in global temperatures for 2100 from a catastrophic 4C to 2.8C on current policies and between 2.3 – 2.5C on current pledges. That’s still bad, but we’re moving in the right direction and need to accelerate not slack off. Every 10th of a degree makes a difference to how damaging and costly this will be.

Adaptation without mitigation would be impossible because the damage would be so severe that we couldn’t cope with it. Swiss Re has compiled a list of countries that are most likely to face ecological collapse if heating is left unabated. It starts with South Africa and Australia, which the rest of the world might be able to cope with, but number three on the list is India; one in every 5 people on the planet, with conditions deteriorating everywhere else too. Nightmare.

It ain’t (just) what you do, its the way that you do it

Some genuine problems are built into not transition itself, but the way its being done. An example is the botched insulation schemes run by successive governments which have been based on providing subsidies for householders to employ barely competent, or downright fraudulent, white van men – with the same sense of social responsibility as the FF companies – to use inappropriate materials, installed in an inappropriate way leading to 93% of them causing black mould and having to be redone. This growing wheat in flower pots, consumer led approach takes the fly by night, fragmented, micro business dominated UK construction industry as a given and will continue to cause disasters if persisted with in any warm homes programme. What we need instead is a proper level of investment in the reconstruction of Local Authority Direct Labour Organisations, with properly trained and educated unionised workers (who see insulation as part of a social mission to rescue their communities and therefore see their work as important to get right and a source of pride, not just a job) through local FE colleges, working on a street by street plan to get the maximum economies of scale, insulating the areas with the worst fuel poverty first to get the earliest and greatest reduction in costs, in fuel use and carbon emissions and all the health benefits that flow from that (including the mental health benefits of no longer being under the cosh from the meter).

Cuba’s solar turn

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

This is the text of a talk I gave at the National Education Union’s inspirational Cuba Solidarity Education Conference on 15th November.

In the last year there have been numerous reports of the fragility of Cuba’s power grid, resulting from four major incidents of widespread power cuts.

The problems of the grid are based on

  • over reliance on ageing oil fired power stations, supplying 84% of electricity supply, which have been difficult to maintain under the US sanctions regime
  • fuel shortages, as most of the oil is imported from Russia or Venezuela, both of which are also under stringent US sanctions; one of which is in a proxy war with the US, the other threatened with imminent invasion by it.
  • the impact of US financial sanctions choking off access to loans to finance improvements in the system.

Peak daytime demand can reach up to 2500 MW, leaving a gap of between 800 and 1300 MW leading to widespread cuts.

These power cuts – not uncommon in the global South – have a hard impact on people’s lives, from cutting off water pumps and refrigeration (so you’re food goes bad) to knocking out communications. Back up generators are often insufficient because they also depend on diesel, which is in short supply, thanks to the sanctions again

The way out of this crisis has had two aspects.

1) Investment in repair and maintenance and energy efficiency in the existing fossil fuel grid with some engineering support from Russia, firming up 850 MW of supply.

2) Work with Chinese assistance this year to build 55 solar farms capable of generating 1200 MW, which should be enough to cover any shortfalls by the end of the year – with a further 37 solar farms due to be completed by the end of 2028 to account for increases in demand and provide a bit of a buffer. On a smaller scale, 22 wind turbines are being refurbished to generate another 30MW.

We should not that this development is not peculiar to Cuba, but is becoming a pattern across the global South. 60% of developing countries now have a higher proportion of their electricity generated by sustainable sources than the US does.

Fig 1 shows the pace of this.

As the US under the Trump administration abandons Biden’s ambitions for an America First energy transition, with the inflation reduction Act as a magnet to pull green investment into the USA and away from its competitors (and allies) – with, as now the world’s leading petro state – a straightforward reactionary attempt to prolong the fossil fuel era as long as possible- the rest of the world, when it can avoid being strong armed into forced contracts to buy environmentally ruinous US LNG with a carbon footprint 30% worse than coal per unit of energy – is moving fats towards electrification.

This is underpinned by several factors.

1. Its cheaper, especially solar – and getting more so. As a relatively new technology we are seeing rapid gains in efficiency and cost reductions. Costs fall about 20% every time deployment doubles. And we’re currently on course for more than doubling by 2030 and trebling by 2035. So, now 2/3 of global energy capital goes into electro-tech. FFs by contrast are becoming more expensive as old established fields like the North Sea dry up and new fields are relatively difficult and expensive to extract from.

2. It cuts costs long term because once the panels are in and the wind turbines up, there’s no need to import fuel. The wind blows. The sun shines. The batteries store. No charge. This underpins related decisions like Ethiopia banning the import of FF cars because they want to cut their fuel import bills.

3. Fossil fuels are wasteful. 2/3 of energy generated is lost. Electric motors are 2 to 4 times as efficient. So we can do a lot more with a lot less. A way to envisage this is in Fig 2. One container ship of SPs will generate as much electricity as 50 ships full of LNG and 100 ships full of coal. This is also true of mining, in which the total amount of extracted metals required for sustainability by mid century as equivalent to the amount of coal mining that had to be done to meet demand just in 2023.

With 70% of the world’s renewable energy potential in the global south and the massive potential supply, primarily from China, that we can see in Fig 3, there is now a real potential for generating a non polar world, in which each place becomes free to express its unique version of our common humanity by breaking the lock hold that FF based imperialist countries have on them.

The Trump administration’s attempt to assert “US Global Energy Dominance” is currently taking the form of a threatened invasion of Venezuela, to get direct control of the world’s largest energy reserves and the rare earths it needs, not for the energy transition but for its military.

One last domestic point. While delegates at the COP have been heard expressing relief that the US government isn’t there sabotaging the process from the inside – they are corralling their political supporters everywhere on common toxic themes of climate change denial, racism, repression, deregulation and privatisation, militarisation and the insidious intrusion of big US tech companies into monitoring every aspect of our lives. As Kemi Badenoch puts it to the FT, for the Conservative Party now “The model is Javier Millei”.

In this sense, the NEU’s internationalism, anti war, anti racism and climate campaigning come together, and we should coordinate more.

Gaza: A sense of proportion about bodies that matter, and bodies that don’t.

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

This is from the daily UN OCHA Report on Gaza.

On the night between 31 October and 1 November, the remains of three bodies were transferred to the Israeli authorities. According to forensic tests, they do not belong to any of the 11 deceased Israeli hostages believed to remain in the Gaza Strip.

Given the difficulties of finding the right 11 corpses amongst the tens of thousands under the rubble, perhaps the Palestinians should just carry on doing this. Send the Israelis three random bodies a day on the assumption that eventually, the right eleven should show up.

Going on the conservative assumption of 60,000 dead, that should all be done and dusted in 54 years and nine months.

Remembrance 1: “We’re going to need a bigger moat”.

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

Its October and, as the clocks go back in more ways than one, scarlet paper poppies begin to bloom on the lapels of MPs and TV presenters. So begins the annual ritual of Remembrance; using the blood of its victims to turn a warning about the human costs of war into a sanctification of preparing for another.

One of the most striking memorials to the outbreak of the First World War in 2014 was the “Blood swept lands and seas of red” installation at the Tower of London; which planted one ceramic poppy for every British and Empire fatality in the war. Estimates for how many of these there were vary. The installation used 888,246 poppies. The figure in Wikipedia is 887, 858. All the same, a lot of deaths. And the installation couldn’t help but numb and sorrow. Such an accumulation of individual losses made collective. Each individual poppy the colour of blood, and an echo of the scarlet of the state, as seen on phone and post boxes, London buses, the Brigade of Guards outside Buckingham Palace, and lost in it. Theirs had not been to reason why. And they had died.

On the Cenotaph in Whitehall, with an “unknown soldier” buried beneath, they are commemorated as “The Glorious Dead”; regardless of how they died or how inglorious it may have been.

Photo by Richard Croft. Creative Commons.

It is perhaps characteristic of a certain kind of British national narcissism that the only deaths commemorated were “ours”. Which underlines the limits of this sort of “Remembrance”. It becomes acelebration of victory sanctified by “sacrifice”. It tries to make it impossible to think past that sea of poppies to the losses suffered by other countries.

A commemoration of all the service personnel killed in the First World War would require a moat more than twenty times bigger, to register the 20 million or more of them killed. If you were to separate it out into national contingents, the French and Austrian sections would each be one and a half times the size of the British; that of Germany and Russia each more than twice as big. Having them all mixed up, in different colours perhaps, might underline their common humanity and the horrifying waste of it.

Civilian deaths in the First World War were a fraction of the military deaths, unlike the Second World War and most wars since. These are now running at about 67% of the total. Significantly more in Gaza. Commemorations that focus on WW1 tend to obscure that.

Civilian deaths from World War 3 would, of course, be total.

We are now in a period in which people who should know better are agitating for European NATO countries to prepare for a war with Russia by the end of the decade by doubling military expenditure (even though they already outspend them by 3.5 to 1) – a war that could not help but go nuclear – and it is a commonplace of US Foreign Policy thinking to envisage a war with China in the South China Sea – another war that could not help but go nuclear.

And, as Tom Lehrer once remarked, “if there are going to be any songs about World War 3, we’d better start writing them now”.

If we are foolish enough to allow our light headed and light minded leaders to make us collectively “pay undaunted the final sacrifice” in such insane adventures, age shall not weary us, nor the years condemn and at the going down of the sun and in the morning no one will be left to remember us.