These are the notes for a recent speech at my local Constituency Labour Party. The title and the quote at the beginning is from Jason Hickel, who is the Energy editor at the Financial Times; so has something of a horses mouth quality to it.
“There’s too much to do and, given the urgency and the need to get the solutions right, this isn’t a task for your favourite ESG focussed portfolio manager, or the tech bros. The sheer scale of the physical infrastructure that must be revamped, demolished or replaced is almost beyond comprehension. Governments, not Blackrock, will have to lead this new Marshall Plan. And keep doing it. The Western nations that did so much of the damage will have to finance the transition in the developing world – it is astonishing that this is still debated. Massive deficit funding will be necessary.(my emphasis)
For all the clean tech advances and renewable deployment in recent decades, fossil fuels share of global energy use was 86% in 2000, and 82% last year.”
The scale of the challenge
According to Adam Tooze we need to be investing $4 Trillion per year in energy transition.
Others have argued as much as $6.5 Trillion per year
As the world economy is roughly $100 Trillion a year, between 4 and 6% of it needs to be invested in the transition.
A large sum, but to put it in context, last year (2022) subsidies for fossil fuels amounted to $7 Trillion and Fossil fuel profits were $4Trillion.
This is an opportunity – because there’s your magic money tree…but also a problem, because fossil fuels are so entrenched in everyday life and political power.
Fossil fuel companies have known about the effect of greenhouse gases for 60 years, and have reacted in the same way as the tobacco and asbestos companies did over the links between their products and cancer.
Even now, Shell is arguing that – to be compatible with their interests – Net Zero will only be achievable some time in the 22nd century (so between 50 and 100 years too late).
This entrenchment in political power is seen in Sunak’s latest announcements and more structurally in the high level of climate denial in the US Congress – where Senators and Congresspeople are bought up by FF companies. Showing once again that the USA is the best democracy money can buy.
This leads to a mind boggling level of cognitive dissonance. In 2019 the US military produced a report which stated that the impact of climate breakdown would lead not only to states collapsing around the world, but also that extreme weather events in the US itself would lead to infrastructure and civil society collapsing to a degree that they would expect to be called in to fulfil para state roles, before collapsing themselves from the overstretch that would impose. At the same time, they projected a need to be ready to intervene as the Arctic ice melts, to make sure that the US gets its customary lion’s share of the fossil fuel resources revealed under the ice; thereby helping fuel the collapse that they predict.
Which brings us to a related problem. The ratio of military to green transition spending. In the US, for every $1 allocated to green transition via the Inflation Reduction Act, they are currently spending $18 on their military. And this will get worse as the US and its allies, already responsible for two thirds of global military spending, are sharply increasing it.
The figures on this for China might surprise you. For every $1 they spend on their military, they spend $2 on green transition.
This means two things
A shift from military to green transition spending is an urgent task for the climate and labour movement globally – and therefore the Atlanticist foreign policy framework of the current Labour leadership is as wrong as it can be – and will be thrown into complete crisis should Donald Trump be re-elected next year (which is highly possible).
Countries that see themselves as Socialist are more part of the solution than they are given credit for. The one relatively developed country that the UN considers operates on sustainable lines is… Cuba.
Going back to Tooze to underline this point.
$4Trillion per year needed for energy transition.
Last year, $1.7 Trillion invested in renewable energy, but $1 Trillion was invested in fossil fuels. So, the net gain of 700 billion amounts to about 20% of what we need to be doing. Another way of looking at this is that we need to be doing five times as much as we are at the moment.
According to Tooze, China is the only country investing at anything like the scale and pace we need.
This is underlined by the International Energy Agency that reports that last year China invested 70% more in the transition than the USA and EU put together. And next year the projections are that their investment will be double that of the US and EU combined.
Specifically, in 2024, China is projected to account for
50% of global solar installations
60% of new onshore wind
70% of new offshore wind.
Labour’s projected £28 billion a year would get us up to US or EU levels; so about half of where we need to be.
This week the IEA put out an updated road map to Net Zero and keeping under a 1.%C increase.
Their essential point is that this is still possible, but only if advance (rich) countries in particular up their targets and ambitions – the opposite of what Sunak has done this week – with an enhanced target of 2045 for Net Zero. No new oil and gas is a bottom line.
To have any chance of getting to that £28 billion, what we need is Just transition bodies with union and community involvement at every level in every sector – so plans for investment – and community mobilisation around them – can be made. This transition can’t happen as a “trickle down” process. It has to be forced up, and the unions in particular will need to take the lead on this, not react defensively.
Writing about the Greenpeace activists who scaled Rishi Sunak’s mansion in North Yorkshire to drape it with black cloth, the Daily Mail headline was:
HOW ON EARTH COULD THIS BE ALLOWED TO HAPPEN?
‘As eco protestors scale the roof of the Prime Minister’s family home, which is a humiliating symbol of our supine toleranceof a tiny self obsessed bunch of zealots who disrupt everyday life with impunity.’
So I wrote them the following:
With fires, floods and famines already devastating our planet, the real “tiny, self obsessed bunch of zealots” who will make “everyday life” not just disrupted but unsustainable within the lifetimes of children currently in our schools, are the owners of fossil fuel companies; and the think tanks, politicians and newspapers that they buy to defend their profits. People who went on holiday to Rhodes this year will have had their “everyday life” disrupted violently by the impact of climate breakdown. Its time to end the impunity of the tiny minority who are causing it.
And the Daily Express, with characteristic understatement, HEADS MUST ROLL! JUST HOW DID THIS HAPPEN?
So I wrote them this.
Given the increasingly frenzied tone of your articles and headlines on anything related to climate breakdown, and people trying to alert us to the severity of it, I must confess to wondering if your “Heads must roll!” headline was intended to be solely metaphoric.
May I suggest that a suitable set of people who’s head should roll is anyone in government, business or media who downplays the seriousness of the crisis – just ask anyone who went on holiday to Rhodes this year – or slows down the pace of the measures needed to tackle it, putting our children’s futures at risk for short term financial or political gain?
The Express article went on to quote an unnamed Tory MP as saying “I’d say shoot them!” which indicates a state of mind that is a long way from sweet reason.
Recent contrasting visions of housing development from Michael Gove and Lisa Nandy pose some questions about what kind of homes we want to live in, where we build them, in what kind of communities, with what level of facilities, what standards they are built to (in terms of carbon emissions/sustainability size/dimensions and quality) who builds them and how (and what their motivation is) who owns them and is responsible for upkeep?
There is a consensus between both major Parties that “home ownership” is an aspiration and a good thing in itself. This presumes
an atomised pattern of housing that is presumed to be for individuals or families acting as consumers first, members of a community second*.
that those individuals or families are in a position to afford to buy and them maintain them: which is increasingly not the case. Go for a walk around an average suburb and you find a lot of houses in a bad state of repair, with owners unable even to “keep up appearances”.
A market not simply determined by demand exceeding supply – but also massively distorted by the intervention of finance capital seeking assets, and doing so by bumping up land prices to an astronomical extent – requires house prices to stay high, but mortgages to be sufficiently affordable not to cause a crisis. What happened in new developments like Chafford Hundred in Essex during the property crisis in the early 90s, when a slump in prices combined with increases in interest rates and half the properties in the area were repossessed, is a stark warning of what can happen when the market fails – as it must when prices get overheated, as they now are. The attempt by the Bank of England to cut inflation by raising interest rates, thereby paradoxically raising the price of staying in your house if you have a mortgage, is heading in that direction.
This points to a paradox. With a growing population unable to find somewhere affordable to live, with two thirds of childless single adults aged between 20 and 34 still living with their parents, a trend that rose by a third between 2010 and 2020, its generally agreed that the UK is 4.3 million homes short. Hence the pressure on both potential governments to have a plan to build a lot more of them. But, if a lot more of them are built, there is a downward pressure on prices. And a lot of property investment relies on them staying high.
This is putting the market above people’s needs and wants.
Ask almost anyone what they want and its a place to live that’s affordable, spacious enough to spread out in without feeling squeezed, solidly built so there are not a lot of costs in maintaining it, well insulated so energy bills can be kept low, with access to green spaces (if not a garden, then a local park, grass verges and street trees, maybe allotments) and amenities within walking distance and decent transport links. If construction is determined by the market and the demands of developers, the homes that meet and exceed these standards will be for the people who can afford them the most; places like the Welborne development in Hampshire. Homes for the rest of us, for sale or rent, will be poky, crammed together, built with corners cut and materials skimped on.
Gove’s announcement, counterposing dense brownfield urban development to “concreting over the green belt” aims to hit two targets at once.
Defuse the nimby reaction in leafy Tory rural seats that put paid to previous Tory housing growth targets after they lost the Chesham and Amersham by election to the Liberal Democrats in 2021.
Allow population growth to be housed by keeping it urban; so that existing city facilities don’t have to be replicated in new developments, thereby cutting costs.
If done properly, this should implement 15/20 minute neighbourhoods, which is easier to do in cities; and this should be a cross Party consensus. A dense local population provides demand for shops and services and keeps them viable. There are so many cafes and bakeries in Paris because there are seven storeys of apartments built above them full of people who will be popping in and out for a baguette or expresso. This also, however, has to be combined with integrated town planning that takes account of transport needs – ensuring public transport links and pedestrian/cyclist priority to inhibit space gobbling cars – and green spaces; so the dense population has air to breath and space to share and regenerate its soul.
Gove’s approach is a bit more Wild West and desperate than that.
Part of it is a “make do and mend” set of proposals on buildings conversion that relax the criteria for permitted development rights. As this would be market led and carried out in the interests of developers and landlords, it is likely to see a rash of glorified living cupboards being shoved into old office developments by inserting ticky tacky partition walls. This would be a triumph for the same entrepreneurial spirit that has already led to people living in partly converted garages and family homes carved up into tiny flatlets, but with more of an official nod and a wink.
This could be a further step towards shanty towns, or new suburban slums, accelerating the downward slide we are already seeing in many areas. The absence of space and proper cooking facilities in Homes in Multiple Occupation is a boon for fast food outlets; but also leads to a tsunami of litter and infestations of rats and foxes happy to fatten up on the half eaten chicken wings that alienated people dump in the streets.
We should also bear in mind, when listening to Gove wax lyrical about beautiful architecture uplifting the human spirit, that Conservative MPs voted down Labour proposals that private rented homes should be “fit for human habitation”. Presumably they think that people who can’t afford to live anywhere other than an unventilated room with a bed and Belling in it should just see the black mould on their walls as a motivation to make better lifestyle choices; or, perhaps, that anyone living in places unfit for human habitation do not deserve to be classified as human.
This was not received well.
The Local Government Association noted that “expanding permitted development rights risks creating poor quality residential environments that negatively impact people’s health and wellbeing, as well as a lack of affordable housing or suitable infrastructure.”
Shelter said that “Converting takeaways and shops into homes and restricting building to city centres won’t help. It could risk creating poor quality, unsafe homes that cause more harm than good” and instead the government “should put its money where its mouth is and get on with building a new generation of social homes.”
Moreover, property consultancy Knight Frank’s said the plans are “unlikely to have meaningful impact on housing supply”.
The exception to an insistence on city brownfield sites is “Garden Villages”. Gove rhapsodises about Welborne as an example of these. Semi rural middle class enclaves which look as though they are designed to cement a population of Conservative voters into Blue Wall seats.
Welborne, is a 6,000 home development between Southampton and Portsmouth, that will be built over 30 years with a £2billion price tag. It has self consciously retro architecture, with a limited range of design styles that is almost regimental. Look at the images of how they imagine it on their website and there’s something eery about it. A replica of an imagined past; with the same monstrous quality as if a contemporary composer were to write in exactly the same style as Haydn. No matter how good it was, it would still sound wrong; out of time and out of place. About half of the houses have chimneys as a motif (hopefully not for wood burners, which would be worse) and there is no sign of solar panels. It looks like a Homes fit for Heroes Council estate but with more generous proportions, steeper roofs and semi bowed windows – for that Georgian gentrification look – and wider grass verges; each house defended from the others by a dense wall of privet. It presents itself as a place for people who are so nostalgic for the past that they want to live in a replica of it, but with lots of mod cons. Presumably it will be possible to twitch the curtains by remote control.
Needless to say the proportion of homes that will be classified as “affordable” will start out at 10% (rising to “up to 30%”, which seems unlikely). So, 90% of the homes will be unaffordable for people on average incomes, which will define the sociology of the place and determine its character from the off. They might as well have a sign reading “No Riff Raff” on the approach roads.
And it will be roads. Connections to anywhere else will be via a new Junction on the M27 that is a confirmed part of the development. The possibility of a rail link is at a more exploratory stage, though essential if a vision of green streets designed to facilitate walking and cycling internally is not to be fatally undermined by a need to have a car to get anywhere else. The images on the site have nice mature tree lined streets with relatively few parking bays. How this would stand up to the pressure of frustrated, and well heeled, car owners demanding a place to park can only be imagined.
This is at conception stage. Garden villages that have actually been built have been described as “Amazon deserts”. Sparsely served with amenities, so nowhere to go or meet people locally, socially isolating, dependent on cars to get anywhere that has anything worth getting or doing. Places to store people when they are not working, or while they are, if doing so remotely. Exactly the opposite of what we need.
Lisa Nandy, for Labour, proposes to
Restore centrally determined local housing targets and make it mandatory for LAs to have housing plans.
Organise new construction through Local Development Corporations.
Build on the green belt -and make it easier to reclassify agricultural land to build on it.
Shift balance in renting so social housing is more common than private renting.
make house building central to Labour’s investment plans.
This poses a number of questions.
What standards will these homes be built to?
Building anything now that is not zero carbon emissions is storing up an expensive retrofit job for the future. If these homes are not part of the proposed £28 billion annual green transition investment they become part of the problem. Apply proper standards and they are part of the solution.
Will they have solar panels and heat pumps fitted as standard?
Will they be designed to be properly insulated to keep cool in summer and warm in winter without too much use of energy?
What specification will there be for design(s) to minimise construction waste and recycle unused material from one site to another?
What specification will there be for minimum spaces/facilities per person, so that total numbers are not inflated by building lots of small units.
Will any sophisticated control technology be designed to be as simple as possible to operate?
Will they be built in communities?
What local commercial, social and community facilities will be required to make any development viable on the 15 minute model?
Will the transport infrastructure require affordable, regular and reliable public transport links to larger centres with streets designed around people not parking spaces?
Will there be car clubs so the flexibility of occasional car use does not require the – personal and social -burden of owning one?
How will they be built and who will build them?
If Councils have the responsibility to develop the local housing plans to meet the local housing targets, will there be a mandated target that most of them will be social housing at the highest standards (as above) at genuinely affordable rents? The imperative to squeeze out the deplorably neglectful and chaotic private rented sector clashes here with Nandy and Starmer’s obsession with the “dream of home ownership”. The notion that inequality is best dealt with by means of “aspirational social mobility” up a structure that remains increasingly unequal, rather than actually reducing inequality was never viable, but in the Anthropocene is an absurdity. Building a massive new wave of Council Housing at genuinely affordable rents would be the best solution to meet people’s needs. This is crucial, alongside scrapping “right to buy” because housing associations have become developers rather than social landlords and council estates contain a mix of tenures because of it. Many of the houses or flats where tenants have exercised the right to buy are now owned by developers or large-scale private landlords who invariably charge much higher rents than councils. This will only stop when renting socially is restored as a good thing in itself, and no longer denigrated as just safety net for people who can’t afford to buy. Affordable social renting also allows geographical mobility. There are streets, even towns, where people are stuck with deteriorating properties and no work to pay for improving them, unable to afford to go anywhere else or to sell house that as no-one wants. To deal with a similar situation in the 1970s Housing Improvement Areas were introduced and the local state stepped in, took over these streets through Compulsory Purchase Orders, improved them and then rented them.
This relates to who will build these homes. The best way to do it would be Local Authority Direct Labour Organisations, with a unionised workforce on decent terms and conditions, proper training through FE College hubs (including a climate module to develop a sense of mission) and an option for workers building new Council Homes to take up a tenancy after working for six months. When this was done in New Towns like Stevenage, it had a knock on effect of greater civic engagement after it was built. This is in contrast to the sense of resentment that comes off luxury housing construction sites; where workers are putting up places to live (or invest in as an absentee owner) that are so far beyond their wages that it can’t help generate a profound alienation. If this work is contracted out to developers, as it is at the moment, their imperative to maximise profit will determine everything else; and all other goals will be subordinated. Developers prioritise the latter. they are building profits first and homes a long way second.
Which relates to the question of who will be on the Local Development Corporations and who will have the whip hand? Will there be community and trade union representation or will it primarily give developers quasi state powers? It has to be said that Gove aims to develop outer East London using an LDC to override the powers of the London Mayor and any local accountability at all, building Docklands 2 down through Thamesmead, a linear riverside development (on a flood plain) that when first envisaged in the late 80s was referred to as Heselgrad.
There is an additional problem with leaving developers in the driving seat, which is that if the private housing market begins to collapse, as it is now, developers will stall developments as they fear they won’t be able to sell; then any ‘affordable’ social rented property that is part of it will also be stalled because they are tied together.
We should note that the current definition of ‘affordable’ requires a minimum income of about £80,000, especially if through shared ownership, more than double the average UK income of £38,000 pa. Council rents, are the only level that is genuinely ‘affordable’.
What parts of the green belt will be built on; and is it necessary?
Nandy usually refers to brownfield sites within the green belt, disused garages and so on, but by making it easier to reclassify agricultural land, its clear enough that a wider range of places is envisaged. So this poses all the questions above about standards, community facilities and public transport links.
However, there are over 35,000 empty properties just in London and 100,000 around the country that could be CPO’d by local authorities, and this could limit the extent of any need to build on the Green Belt. In London in particular, many of the luxury flat developments built in the last decade or so along the Thames are empty because they are bought by finance capital as investments. In Kensington and Chelsea one in eight homes is long term unoccupied and one in three in the City of London. It is scandalous that they are lying empty when it takes hundreds of thousands of pounds and 80 tonnes of CO2 to construct a new house. So, CPO first, new build second would save time, money and resources; in the case of London about a year’s worth of new builds.
Will Labour stand up to the developers?
Developers will want new build first, subsidies, the minimum of demands and the maximum profit.
In recent years, they have pushed back hard against net zero standards on grounds of cost – and the Cameron government caved in to them. They are now campaigning hard against a demand from Natural England that they take into account the impact of new developments on water tables, and look like they are going to get away that too.
They will do so again. Building homes to the standards we need will cut into their bottom line, or cost more. They will argue that targets can only be met if standards are relaxed. In the same way that Harold Macmillan built a record number of houses in the late 50s by relaxing the standard size expectation for each unit. Architectural shrinkflation.
The signs in this are not good. Labour’s overall approach to business was summarised by an unnamed executive in a long report in the Evening Standard (25/7/23) as “the plan is clearly ‘don’t force us into loads of new rules by your behaviour. Sort it out yourselves, make some money, then we’ll take the tax to pay health and education’.”
In building its a starting point that there will have to be “loads of new rules” if we don’t want to replicate what we’ve had up to now.
*With 36% of households being single individuals in Scotland and 30% in England and Wales the scope for the exploration of more shared accommodation to cut costs (all round) and loneliness should be much more on the agenda than it is.
This poster is displayed on the side of the Dutch Embassy in Moscow and shows the number of people killed in the Donbass between 2014 and 2022.If you walk down the Arbat in the same city you will see hundreds of poster sized billboards memorialising the children killed by Ukrainian shelling into the Donbass in that time. If you go to Donetsk City, you will see a memorial garden for these children. That shelling continues dailyeven now.
Framing an argument to bury the truth
There is a manipulative form of polemic that starts with a particular image, or emotive incident, that is guaranteed to mobilise an empathetic emotional response from a viewer or reader. If you watch BBC News reports on Ukraine, and think about what they are doing as well as what they are saying (and not saying) you will see this in an almost perfect form. Everything is geared to eliciting an emotional, sympathetic response on the calculation that – because emotion always trumps reason – this will then blot out questions about why these events are taking place; because it will be taken for granted who is to blame.
You might argue that that’s what I’ve done here, but images like that above will never appear on the BBC, or in the Guardian, because its the wrong sort of emotional response. The wrong dead children. The wrong sympathy. None of these kids will have Fergal Keane deployed, with sad backing music and beautifully filmed mordant images of grieving parents, your heart strings will not be expertly plucked to resonate with theirs. But they are just as dead. And the imposition of an ideological no fly zone, through the current banning of RT and policing of social media, means that you are very unlikely to see them anywhere else either. But they are just as real. So, this is just a small challenging counter image to stick onto the gigantic montage of images that have created the one sided picture that you’ve been exposed to already.
And if the deaths of those poor people in the pizza restaurant in Kramatorsk this week is to be taken as justification and fuel for sacrificing even more people to pursue this war with an enhanced sense of moral indignation; is that not equally true for the people in Donetsk?
Because in narrative framing, anything that is out of sight is out of mind. In the case of wars, some people’s deaths are framed as their just deserts because they have the misfortune to belong to a people or state targeted by ours. As the infamous Sun headline crowing over Croatia’s ethnic cleansing of the Krajina in the Yugoslav wars put it, “Serbs you right”.
The Climate Movement and truth
There is now a move to align the climate movement in the Global North/West with the war aims of NATO. A press conference in Kyiv at the end of June, with President Zelensky, Mary Robinson and Greta Thunberg, announced a European body to evaluate “the environmental damage resulting from the war, formulating mechanisms to hold Russia accountable and undertaking efforts to restore Ukraine’s ecology”.
A Commission to examine the ecological damage done by the war as such is, however, not what this Commission is. Such a Commission would have to recognise that the way to stop the ecological damage is to end the war. NATO does not, yet, want to do that, so this Commission is structured to attribute all the blame to one side. Participants in this Commission from the climate movement, whatever their intentions, will find themselves providing a moral fuel to continue the war with single minded righteousness: thereby providing a thin green fig leaf for the most destructive militaries in the world. These are now rapidly expanding and increasing their carbon boot print to an unprecedented degree; and intend to use it. This Commission’s effect will be to prolong the war; thereby generating ever greater ecological damage and human loss.
A frame that aims to “hold Russia”… and only Russia…“accountable” means that ecological damage committed by Ukraine or NATO are either outside their purview, or considered not to exist.
Shells and missiles fired by the Ukrainian armed forces are no more ecologically benign than those fired by the Russians. In the case of the depleted uranium shells supplied for British Conqueror tanks, they can be worse. Ignoring this requires a level of cognitive dissonance that can only be sustained by an act of intense will; or generated by a red mist of moral indignation – generated by the the narrative framing above – sufficient to enable people to look straight at it, and not see it.
Anyone arguing that any ecological damage is ultimately the Russians’ fault “because they invaded” should not forget that this war started in 2014; when the Ukrainian Air Force bombed Donetsk city, opting for a military solution to a political crisis. Does anyone doubt that this would have led the Kyiv government being universally denounced in the West as a regime that “bombs its own people” had they been US opponents?
If you think that the road to peace runs through a Ukrainian victory, have another look at the picture of that girl in the ruins in Donetsk, and the picture of the Crimean Theatre students below, and reflect on the fact that the full realisation of Ukrainian/NATO war aims will involve the ethnic cleansing of their whole region; and that Kyiv has been completely explicit about that.
Theatre students in Simferopol Crimea wearing orange and black ribbons and singing songs on Victory Day May 6th 2023. Photo Dan Kovalic. For a view of how Crimea broke from Ukraine in 2014 and what it is like now see Dan’s article with Rick Sterling here.
President Zelensky was quite blunt that this Commission will be “support for Ukraine”, in the context in of him rejecting any prospect of a ceasefire and frozen conflict and promising to continue the war regardless of the cost. That cost will be measured in escalating environmental damage and human lives and the devastation of his country. The remark of the US officer in Vietnam who remarked that “in order to save the village, it was necessary to destroy it” haunts his speeches.
Collusion in confusion
Participation in a Commission on partisan lines will by definition require collusion with an a priori propagandist interpretation of any event. Four extreme examples of this that pass for conventional wisdom in the West so far.
The oft repeated narrative that the Russians were shelling the Zaporozhe nuclear power plant, when it was occupied by their own troops. Even after the Ukrainians admitted they were doing it, the media here still tried to muddy the waters. Ukraine being not only willing to shell a nuclear power station but having actually done it is not something they want us to dwell on. Especially now. The statement from President Zelensky at that press conference with Thunberg and Robinson alleging a Russian plan to blow up the Zaporozhe power station in the coming weeks is particularly alarming in this context; because it might be a cover to resume the shelling – with the blame preemptively allocated -as a pivot for global outrage and mobilisation, as argued by Dmitriy Kovalevich here.*
The bizarre accusation that the Russians blew up their own Nordstream gas pipelines releasing up to 350,000 tonnes of methane, doing an enormous amount of environmental damage. It has been a US aim to cut Europe off from Russian gas supplies for over a decade; well before the war. Blocking the certification of Nordstream 2 in February 2022 was a big victory for them. But only a provisional one, because the Russians remained in control of the pipelines and any peace settlement would see them turned back on. Blowing them up rules that out and stops the Russians having that option. It takes peculiar mental gymnastics to imagine that the Russians would destroy their own infrastructure to hand a geopolitical advantage to the United States. Articles by Seymour Hersch detailing US involvement have been largely suppressed in the media here.
The case of the ammonia pipeline blown up in Kharkiv is similar, in that the flow of ammonia from Russia to the West had been shut down by the Russians weeks previously as a tit for tat for the West not fulfilling its obligations under the Russia- Ukraine grain/fertilizer deal; so blowing it up would only make sense for a force trying to cut all potential trade between Russia and the West.
Claims from the UK Ministry of Defence that the depleted uranium shells they have supplied with their Conqueror tanks are really nothing to worry about, repeated in the media with a straight face. The use of these munitions in Iraq has had horrific impacts. For example The Falluja Hospital’s birth defects Facebook page, where medical staff catalogue cases, reveals the striking diversity and quantity of congenital anomalies. Babies in Falluja are born with hydrocephaly, cleft palates, tumors, elongated heads, overgrown limbs, short limbs and malformed ears, noses and spines. The use of these shells will poison wherever they are used in Ukraine for years after the guns fall silent, while the British politicians who supplied them have roads named after them in Kyiv.
A further example and exemplar of the approach that we are likely to see more of in the framework of this Commission is a recent article on Open Democracy Khakhovska dam destruction is part of the climate emergency. This makes the valid point that the dam’s collapse is environmentally disastrous, but then rests the gigantic accusation of “ecocide” on a conditional presumption, that the destruction of the dam is “likely to have been the work of Russian forces”. “Likely”. Not definitely. Not even probably.
“Likely”. So, how likely? If your brief is that all ecocide is carried out by the Russians, it becomes necessary not even to ask this question; allowing carte blanche to the Ukrainian/NATO side to do their worst and just attribute the consequences to the other side. “Likely” is a small word, easily passed on from when reading at speed, but it is an admission that everything that follows by way of emotional mobilisation could very well be applied against the cause the author supports if readers allow themselves to think and question a bit.
Because its a matter of public record that the Ukrainian armed forces have been shelling and firing HIMARS missiles at this dam for months.
Their military and political leaders hastened to delete posts bragging about doing so as soon as it was breached, but many of them have been recorded and are in the public domain.
Taking a step back, there are three possibilities for how this dam was destroyed. Longer analyses of this can be read here and here, but in a brief summary these are the theories.
The Russians blew up the dam to enable them to withdraw troops from the riverside to redeploy them against the main expected thrust of the Ukrainian army offensive further east; even though this would deplete water supplies to the Crimea. Resecuring this supply after Ukraine cut it off has been one of their main military objectives, and remains one. So, it would be an oddly self destructive to imperil it. It has also been reported, from Ukrainian sources, that Russian troops dug in on the east bank of the Dnieper were taken by surprise by the inundation; which would not be likely if their command were responsible for blowing the dam. More to the point, the Russians were in control of the dam. All they had to do to create a flood would be to open the sluice gates. No need to blow it up, so, why do so?
The Ukrainians blew it up to wash away Russian minefields and defensive positions on the lower lying eastern bank of the river. Their earlier attempts to do so, to cut off the Russian forces on the West Bank before their withdrawal last Autumn, are well publicised. So, whatever the case in this instance, it was something they were prepared to do, it was well within their moral compass, with all the consequences that flow from that. They also appear to have been releasing water from dams higher up the Dnieper in order to keep the flood going; which is odd behaviour by anyone trying to minimise damage.
The dam had been so weakened by the long term effects of the shelling and missile attacks on it that a build up of pressure from a greater volume of water building up behind it in the run up to the breach was too much for it; and both the Russians and Ukrainians have had to improvise a response.
Its hard to see the first option as anything other than the least “likely”, but judge it for yourself.
The media narrative in the UK, however, is not characterised by rational analysis or balanced judgement. The sort of spluttering rage you get from Simon Tisdall in the Observer is more characteristic;. “Of course the Russians did it…Only this malevolent Kremlin regime would wilfully inflict human and environmental havoc on so vast a scale…That’s what they do, these mobsters.” The sound of a man shouting down his own doubts because, as he admits “It’s impossible to prove at this point.” Obviously also a man with no memory of the 4.5 million people killed by the “War on Terror”, nor the far greater environmental destruction in Iraq inflicted by us and our US allies nor, more recently Yemen, thanks partly to the expert training provided by the RAF and RN to their Saudi counterparts; not to mention the after sales service provided by BAE systems making sure that their missiles were accurately targeted.
That’s why the argument on Open Democracy that “it is not enough to just lobby against fossil fuel extraction; we must recognise that the end of Russian imperialism is key to the struggle for climate justice” is so disoriented. It lets the the US and its allies, the world’s dominant imperialism, with the biggest military carbon boot print, completely off the hook to such a degree that it lines up behind its war aims. Anyone who thinks that the route away from the environmental damage caused by this war is via a Ukrainian/NATO victory has lost touch with reality; both in the concrete practical terms of the enormous human and environmental damage that would be required to secure one, and the horrendous consequences for the world of a triumphant retooled US alliance seeking to partition the Russian Federation, take charge of its fossil fuel reserves, really get stuck into oil and gas extraction in the Arctic, and get ready for the war in the South China Sea they’ve been pushing for; with Taiwan as the same sort of sacrificial victim that Ukraine has been.
Taking this stance would also sever links with movements and governments in the Global South; where people who have been on the receiving end of the US imperial system for decades see through its pretensions and fear its ambitions. It would be a disastrous course for the climate movement in the Global North to take. This is particularly in the context of governments like the UK cutting its commitment to global climate finance citing, among other things, “the costs of including help for Ukraine being included in the aid budget.”
Instead of becoming partisans of either side in this war, or any other, whatever our individual views, the climate movement here should stand for an end to the war, oppose militarisation, and campaign to get the global military boot print fully included in the Paris process, with a target to measure, monitor and cut it as fast as possible.
Irrespective of what stance you take on the war in Ukraine, or anywhere else, in March last year, US author Meehan Crist wrote the following in the London Review of Books, “One of the worst outcomes of the war in Ukraine would be an increasingly militarised response to climate breakdown, in which Western armies, their budgets ballooning in the name of “national security” seek to control not only the outcome of conflicts but the flow of energy, water, food, key minerals and other natural resources. One does not have to work particularly hard to imagine how barbarous that future would be”.
Crist’s point is simply to describe the world we already have, but a bit more so; and her prediction is exactly what is happening.
The US has raised military spending to $858 billion this year; up from $778 billion in 2020.
France has announced an increase from a projected E295 billion to E413 billion in the next seven years (an average of E59 billion a year).
German spending is rising sharply, from E53 billion in 2021 to E100 billion in 2022 and is set to go further.
Japan aims to double its military spending by 2028 and is also debating whether to start deploying nuclear weapons.
In the UK, the government’s aim to increase military spending from 2.1% of GDP to 2.5% by 2030 comes on the back of what is already among the highest per capita military spends in the world.
NATO, the core alliance of the Global North, already accounted for 55.8% of global military spending in 2021 before any of these increases.
Other direct US allies – with a mutual defence pact – accounted for another 6.3%.
So, the direct US centred military alliances account for three fifths of global military spending and yet they are now raising it further at unprecedented rates. These are the world’s dominant imperial powers, acting in concert to sustain a “rules based international order” in which the rules are written in, and to suit, the Global North in general and Washington in particular.
The carbon boot print of these militaries is not measured under the Paris Agreement. It is, nevertheless, huge and growing; and we can’t pretend it isn’t. At the moment, the carbon boot print of the US military alone is the same as that of the entire nation of France. This is incompatible with stopping climate breakdown; both in the direct impact of production and deployment, the diversion of funds which are urgently needed to invest in the transition, and the potential impact of their use – which could kill us all very quickly; particularly if nuclear weapons are used. John Bellamy Foster’s Notes on Exterminism for the Twenty First Century Ecology and Peace Movements should be required reading for both movements.
Because this military is not sitting idle. The first phase of the Wars for the New American Century – in the form of the War on Terror since 2001 – have been calculated by Browns University at 4.5 million people; three quarters of them civilians killed by indirect impacts of US and allied military interventions. The scale of this is because doctrines like “shock and awe” are not simply an impressive displays of explosive power, but specifically designed to smash energy and water systems, both clean water supply and sewage treatment, within the first twenty four hours of an intervention to reduce surviving civilian populations to a state of numbed misery and demoralisation. “Why do they hate us?” I wonder. 4.5 million people is about half the population of Greater London, or three quarters of the population of Denmark and twenty two times as many as have died in the Ukraine war so far (assuming total casualties of 200,000, most of them military on both sides). It’s a lot of people. *
Their deployment and use more widely against opponents that are more resilient than Iraq, Afghanistan or Libya- which this escalation of expenditure and increased integration of alliances makes possible – would, even if it did not go nuclear, be catastrophic both in its direct loss of lives but also in the disruption of global supply chains leading to widespread economic unravelling. According to the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, a war in the South China Sea that closed down shipping lanes would have a rapid impact regionally – “Taiwan’s economy would contract by a third, while Singapore’s economy would fall by 22%, according to the baseline estimate. Hong Kong, Vietnam, the Philippines and Malaysia would suffer falls of between 10% and 15%” – but would have a knock on effect everywhere else affecting 92% of global trade. The attempt in the Global North to set up “secure supply chains” – defining economic policy increasingly around military imperatives (“securonomics”) is not to avert such a conflict, but to make it economically manageable, and therefore more likely.
This scale of military expenditure also dwarfs their domestic investment in combatting climate change, urgently needed because the wealthiest countries put the heaviest weight of emissions on the rest of the world, both historically and through their per capita footprints now: let alone helping Global South countries develop without reliance on fossil fuels. This has a wider implication, with the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network reporting that progress towards the UN Sustainable Development goals has been static for three years.
Pledged to commit $100 billion a year to help the transition in the Global South, more than ten years ago, they have never been able to eke out this money, have never hit the target, have tried to use loans (debt trap) instead of transfers, sought to apply conditions and control. The US contribution to that is now aiming for just over $11 billion by 2024. This is now reckoned to be a tenth of what’s needed. This is despite 66% of their populations agreeing that this support should go in, and only 11% against. The contrast with the $77 billion they have stumped up to fight the Ukraine war with no trouble at all in the last year is quite startling. News that Finland is planning to cut development aid to countries in Africa that don’t line up behind the Western line on Ukraine is an ominous sign of how far backwards this could begin to go; with any attempt at global governance through structures like the UN abandoned and notions of international obligation and mutual humanity giving way to even more overtly colonial attitudes and practices than we already have. Although the notion that the Global North can “build a wall” and keep the human consequences of climate breakdown out is a fantasy – as the climate is breaking down behind the wall too – it probably won’t stop them trying.
The USA and its allies pose themselves as “Global Leaders”. They could and should be, as they are the countries with the greatest concentrations of wealth, power and technical know how, communications and education, but they are falling horribly short; because they see leadership as the same thing as dominance – and subordinate everything else to that.
In fact, in 2022, China – usually presented in our media as a negative force on climate – invested 70% more in renewable energy generation than the USA and EU combined, just under half the global total on its own. Next year, according to the International Energy Agency, China will account for 70% of new offshore wind, 60% of new onshore wind, and 50% on new solar PV installations. So, the “international leaders” have a lot of catching up to do.
The US and EU are some way behind, and nowhere near where they need to be. Instead of investing on the scale needed to hold the global temperature increase below 1.5C, they are tooling themselves up militarily to try to deal with the consequences of failing to do so; in an effort to sustain their global dominance. If they are leading us anywhere, its to Armageddon.
A report from the US military in 2019 sums up the paradox. Reflecting that, if climate breakdown continues at its present rate, countries that are already water stressed will be getting beyond crisis point within two decades and that this will lead to “disorder”. Their conclusion was that this means that
1. they will be intervening in these crises, and
2. will therefore need to build themselves in a secure supply chain of water so that the troops who are dealing with people in crisis because their environment has run out of it, will have enough to keep them going in the field!
Reflecting further, that on our current trajectory, climate impacts within the United States itself would lead to infrastructure breaking down, followed by the social order breaking down, followed by the military itself breaking down; as it faced overstretch trying to maintain order as civil society failed. Nevertheless, they also note that the rapidly increasing melt of the Arctic ice shelves and permafrost means that new sources of the fossil fuels that are causing the crisis in the first place to be available for exploitation and that a key task for them would be to make sure that the US gets the lion’s share of them. As a study in self defeating thinking, it can’t be beat.
To repeat the point at the beginning, regardless of anyone’s stance on any given war taking place now, and who should “win” it, its this drive and acceleration of military spending that the climate and peace movements should be combining to hold back – both to avert the growing risk of conflict, because arms races tend to end in wars on the momentum of their own dynamic (which requires a lot of demonisation and conflictual stances to fuel and justify it) and to allow saved funds to be used to avert the climate crisis itself. A bottom line demand is that the military carbon boot print must be accounted for in the Paris Process and a mechanism agreed for reductions to a common per capita level, combined with common measures and investments for increased global cooperation in lock step with it.
*Casualty figures in Ukraine are easy to come by but hard to trust. 200,000 assumes a parity between the Ukrainian and Russian militaries; whereas figures from Mossad, among others, indicate significantly lower Russian losses (at perhaps a fifth to a third of the Ukrainian level) so 200,000 may be a high estimate. One notable feature of this war is that civilian casualties have been a fraction of the military losses – the opposite of the trend from the mid twentieth century onwards; during which “there has been an increase in civilian fatalities from 5% at the turn of the 19th century to 15% during World War I (WW I), 65% by the end of World War II (WW II), and to more than 90% in the wars during 1990’s, affecting more children than soldiers”. From https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2021.765261/full#B12
Crop burning in Northern India. By the end of the decade almost half the Indian population will be trying to live in an average temperature of 29C. Photo: Ishan Tankha / Climate Visuals Countdown
Coverage of the climate crisis in the media is usually pushed to the margins and framed to deflect serious attention to it. The BBC seems to be on a mission to normalise it, to make it background. The tabloids mix oh goody, we’re going to be“Hotter than Morocco” front pages with shrieking calls for the “Eco Mob” to be banged up so we can enjoy the snooker (or whatever) and weird articles in rightist broadsheets like the Telegraph that spread misinformation – their latest that solar panels becoming less efficient at above 25C is a fatal flaw, not the marginal problem that it actually is – in that peculiarly gloating tone always used by people trying to take refuge from a changing reality in a timeless common sense that has actually long past its expiry date.
In the face of all this, its worth having a go at times, so…
My complaint to the BBC (The World Tonight).
You reported on Antonio Gutierez’s warning that the world is heading for a 2.8C average temperature increase, with all that follows from that, without seriously addressing it – and then didn’t seriously address it. There was no follow up. No comment from anyone else. It was then not referred to again during the summary of the news in the middle and end of the programme.
On any objective judgement, this was overwhelmingly the most significant item on the news and should have been treated as such. None of the other issues threatens the whole of human civilisation within the lifetime of children living now. Simply reporting the warning then treating it as somewhat less significant than the well merited demise of Boris Johnson, or the sad death of Glenda Jackson, is part of the process whereby a fundamental crisis in our civilisation becomes wallpaper, as if it is “something we have to get used to”, as one of your anchors put in in a previous programme, as if we are going to be able to, as if the crisis we are at now is going to stop there.
A warning like that should be stopping the clocks and making us sit up to deal with it, not passing quickly on to all the displacement activity we are busy with while we wait for things to fall apart around us. Could you please, please live up to your mission as broadcasters and treat this with the seriousness it deserves? Thank you
Their reply; which reads like stalling…
Thank you for contacting us and for sharing your concerns about The World Tonight, broadcast on June 15.
However, we’re not able to reply to your complaint without more information. If you could provide us with the specific time at which the relevant news item was heard, we may then be able to address your complaint.
If you’d like to listen back, we’ve provided a link to the programme below…
My response
You asked for details of when the item occurred in the programme. Its 5 minutes 50 seconds in. As the essence of what I was saying was that Antonio Gutierrez’s warning is something that should be taken seriously and be given far more extensive coverage – instead of being mentioned once then passed over in silence for the rest of the programme – the fact that you couldn’t find the clip rather illustrates my point. By contrast, diverting though it is, Boris Johnson’s latest shenanigans will barely be a footnote if there is anyone left to write History in 2100. I honestly despair of your coverage sometimes; like the way that Labour’s pledge to stop new oil and gas exploration on PM on Monday (about half way through) wasn’t debated in the framework of this being imperative but very difficult – leading on to a serious examination of what would need to be done to do it and what changes would need to be made – but a sneery and fatalistic dismissal from Evan Davies and his guest that it could be done at all. Perish the thought that this country might be able to rise to a serious challenge. Not your finest minutes.
The Metro Letters Page is full of letters that their authors think are “gotcha!” challenges, which are actually deflections from having to think through an issue that, if they took it seriously, would scare them shitless. Here’s one I responded to earlier.
Tuesday 6thJune
Kate Taylor (Metro Talk Mon) says that demonstrators from Just Stop Oil are neither “moronic” nor “cowardly” . People cause greenhouse gases and the UK population today is 67 million and will be 77 million by 2050. World population today is 8 billion, up from 2 billion 100 years ago.
Will Kate Taylor and members of eco-groups pledge to have no more than one child, never to travel in a petrol/diesel vehicle, turn off their gas supply, take no foreign holidays, eat less meat, use no mobile phones nor electrical goods and never attend music festivals or sporting events? Eco talk is cheap.
Clark Cross, Linlithgow
Thursday 8th
Clark Cross (Metro Talk Tuesday) says “eco talk is cheap”. What he’s missing is that failure to act on the breakdown of our climate will be very costly in all respects, and sooner than we think.
On our current trajectory 2 billion people will be trying to live in an average temperature of 29C by 2030; including half the population of India.
So, while it’s a bit late for me just to have one child, I have to admit that I’m extremely grateful not to have any grandchildren (much though I’d love them) because the world we are heading for unless we make drastic changes will be a nightmare by the time they are adults.
So, whatever we can do we must do, as individuals and as a society.
Paul Atkin, London
Friday 9th
Paul Atkin (Metro Talk, Thurs) says “we must do all we can as individuals and a society” to fight climate change. The oil, gas and coal-rich countries are still exploiting their reserves, while China, India and others have agreed only to “phase down” not “phase out” coal. What would Paul suggest the UK, with one per cent of global emissions, can do to penalise these countries before we all fry?
Clark Cross, Linlithgow
This was my reply that they didn’t print, perhaps because it poses questions outside any framework acceptable to them.
Clark Cross (Metro Talk Friday) suggests that the UK should “penalise” China and India before doing anything serious to avert climate breakdown on its own behalf.
Leaving aside the suicidal quality of this, and awkward facts that India’s per person carbon footprint is a third that of the UK, and that China is the only country in the world investing in renewable energy on the scale needed – half the global total last year and 70% greater than the USA and EU combined – we are still left with historic responsibility.
This country became wealthy partly through burning vast quantities of coal. Our contribution to the greenhouse gases currently over heating the world is about 7% of the global total. Seven times our fair share. So, we have a responsibility to fulfil there; and we need to cooperate with the rest of the world to do it, not look for conflicts. Time is frighteningly short.
the sky all along the North American Atlantic seaboard turned orange from wildfires in Quebec,
and the two year drought in Northern Italy was broken by six months worth of rain in 36 hours,
and on the first day of “Big Green Week”,
Rachel Reeves announced that Labour’s modest plan to bring the UK up to the European average by investing £28 billion a year into green transition would be subject to “fiscal rules” that meant they would have to “ramp up” to get there.
Despite these brave words from Ed Miliband, “Some people don’t want Britain to borrow to invest in the green economy. They want us to back down. But Keir, Rachel and I will never let that happen. Britain needs this £28bn a year plan and that is what we are committed to”; the way that Reeves framed her argument implied that the “ramp” is likely to be be long and shallow, and the chances of getting to then end of it slight.
This poses a number of questions.
Are we in a climate emergency or not?
Outside the wilder reaches of the Tory back benches and the cluster of delusionary think tanks clustered around Tufton Street and the Spectator, it is generally agreed that we are; so does this not require emergency measures?
As the breakdown of the conditions for human civilisation to survive is a greater existential threat than any we face apart from nuclear war, and certainly more overwhelming than the Second World War: do you think anyone in 1940 would have said, “we are committed to fighting the Nazis, but we have to be fiscally responsible about it and make sure the books are balanced as we do it?”
Given that a failure to invest on this scale will mean that the UK will be unable to match levels of subsidy and support going in from the EU and the USA, does this not imply a collapse in any prospect of “investing in the industries of the future” and therefore the prospect that, as the industries of the past are outmoded and superseded, the UK becomes a deindustrialised backwater – as the private sector investment you want to attract is drawn elsewhere?
As you have previously calculated that £6 billion a year will be needed to meet your pledge on insulating homes, is this an irreducible bottom line, or are you also abandoning your pledge to cut energy bills for everyone “for good”?
As unnamed Shadow Ministers have been quoted in the press arguing that some investment in, for example, housing and transport will be needed that are not part of “the net zero agenda”, how will you make sure that any investment that could contribute to net zero does; as any investment that is not part of the solution is part of the problem?*
If your plan is to “ramp up”, at what point will you start, with how much investment in what projects; and how do you calibrate the return on the investment?
If your problem is a lack of government income, why are you not planning to tax the energy producing companies on every penny of their windfall profits, which would pay for the £28 billion a year several times over?
If these fiscal rules are sacrosanct, will they also apply to military spending and, when there is a choice between military escalation and saving our society, which will take precedence?
*An example that links the two is what kind of housing development Labour will push. There is a world of difference between
the current paradigm of cookie cutter, ticky-tacky houses with poor insulation, with the maximum number of units squeezed in so developers can get the biggest possible profits, built in the green belt in car dependent “amazon deserts” (like an American suburb but meaner)
and 15 minute neighbourhoods built as communities with all necessary facilities within walking distance, good public transport links to larger centres; and made up of homes built at zero carbon standard with very low energy use and bills.
Being in support of “the builders not the blockers” without legislating the latter as standard will mean that the next generation of mass house building will follow the line of least resistance – with developers cutting corners, skimping on materials, maximising units and profitability; and dumping the ensuing problems on a future that is getting shorter and more threatening all the time.
This is, approximately, the text of a speech I gave at the Climate, Class and Crisis meeting at Goldsmiths College on 6th June. The full meeting can be viewed here **with some very interesting contributions from Claire Fuller, one of the founders of XR, who is still very much involved, Damian Gayle, Environment correspondent for the Guardian and Matt Huber author of Climate Change as Class War and a Professor in the Geography and Environment Department at Syracuse University New York and chaired by Feyzi Ismail of Goldsmiths Media Studies Dept.***
I’m going to be speaking in a personal capacity so I can be more heretical, which tends to get more of an interesting discussion. The whole question climate breakdown is a class struggle and it’s a global one; and the working class movement has to step up and lead it because the ruling class is failing to do so.
Globally, I think we have to get a handle on what’s needed and who’s doing what.
There was a very interesting article recently by Adam Tooze which identified that in order to actually make the energy transition we need to be investing $4 trillion a year.
According to the International Energy Agency, last year 1.7 trillion was invested in renewables ( though, as they are including nuclear in that, that’s a little optimistic.
But one trillion was still invested in fossil fuels.
So you’ve got $1.7 trillion going more or less in the right direction, but one trillion going the other way.
So overall, a move of $0.7 trillion in the right direction, but we need to be doing more than four times as much.
So, that’s the scale of what we need to be doing.
Tooze also notes that, of that renewable investment, 49.7% of it was by China; which was 70% more in total than the United States and the EU combined.
We don’t hear about that a lot. We usually get China as the villain of the piece because of its coal fired power stations…
So, that’s the scale of the investment; and those three big continental economies make up more than 75% of the time.
And those figures are confirmed by the IEA for the next year. Their projection is that China is going to account for 55% of new renewable capacity in 2024.
So, whatever your view of China, Tooze ‘s comment that it’s the only country in the world investing on the scale required poses a question for all of us in the Global North/West. Why aren’t our much richer societies/ economies/ polities, matching that, or doing more?
Some of it is that climate breakdown, as well as representing an existential challenge for the survival of humanity, in a more immediate limited sense represents an existential challenge for the ruling class as a class.
Oxfam did an analysis that showed that the top 10% – which is basically anyone or more than about £80,000 a year – will take us beyond 1.5 degrees on their own; which underlines the point that for most of us 80,000 quid is a lot of money, but for people like Boris Johnson, you know that this is a fraction of the “chicken feed” that he said he was being paid to write for the Daily Telegraph, which I think was a quarter of a million a year. So for people like him, a very, very, very high standard of living is is really roughing it: the other phrase he used for this was “hairshirtery”. And, for him and people like him, it would be.
And there’s also very worrying thing at the moment, which is the misdirection of investment into military spending. In the US debt ceiling negotiations last week they agreed to cut welfare but increase the military budget to $850 billion a year.
And that’s going on throughout the Global North. Japan, Germany, are doubling expenditure; Britain’s going up to 2.5% of GDP; and the implication of that is that the Global North, rather than invest in actually combating climate change, is tooling itself up to defend itself against the consequences of failing to do so.
So what do we do, given that it’s the top 10% that run the show, control capital, the markets, buy politicians and set the media agenda?
This isn’t about protest.
It’s not about getting the people in charge to notice in the hope they’ll do the right thing.
They know; and prioritize other things.
The fossil fuel companies put money into climate denial and and confusion in the same way that the tobacco and asbestos companies did about the links between their products and cancer.
The private sector won’t lead.
There’s only 5% of big companies have “gold standard” transition plans. And that’s this government’s gold standard, so that’s probably going to be fairly generous to them.
For small companies, it’s not really on their agenda.
One of the big U.S. Investment banks that withdrew from Mark Carney’s Climate Finance initiative last year did so because they said putting climate concerns ahead of profits for shareholders was “immoral.”
So all of this now requires a kind of massive cognitive dissonance – not simply on their part but across the whole of society; to keep us all thinking in a strange kind of way, with an emotional disconnection from what’s actually going on – and the promotion of all that via the media across society.
That ranges from outright denial, people like the Global Warming Policy Foundation, through a kind of Technical Micawberism; you know, something wonderful and technological will turn up and save us all at the last minute…and with one mighty bound we’ll be free! Just illusion and ideological delusion.
I remember Nadim Zahawi at the launch of the DFE net zero strategy at the Natural History Museum last year saying very, ebulliently “We are going to be saved by the British entrepreneurial spirit!”
Yeah…
OK, so you get denial in various forms.
And it ranges from Sunak, who says it’s “economically illiterate” to block New North Sea oil and gas.
To people like Gary Smith from the GMB, who says it’s “naïve” to block New North Sea oil and gas.
So the first thing is we have a fight in the labour movement.
And we need to organize to have it, and I’ve got a bit of a checklist, which is a bit obvious, you know, grandmother sucking eggs situation.
But we need
a network of Climate activists in each union that’s organized.
Sound policy passed in each union; and on the wider issues, not simply the sectoral concerns, but the overall issues. Because we’ve got to think strategically. We’ve got to think hegemonically. We’ve got to think that our movement has got to lead this fight. It’s not about defending our members from it. It’s about getting ahead of it. Of course, there’s different challenges in different unions.
Taking that policy up to the TUC.
Get the Union apparatus partly organizing around the issue. In the NEU for instance what used to be health and safety is now health, safety and environment and we’re doing things like getting out heat guidance – which never used to be an issue, but it is now. And we’re having our first ever green bargaining reps training at the beginning of July. So that sort of thing is happening. The UCU is way ahead of us btw. They’ve been doing it for about five years longer than we have.
To organize across unions in the same sector. We put a united front together of all of the unions in the education sector, whether they’ve got network or not, around the DFE Net Zero Strategy producing a joint critique of it, and we’re continuing to liaise.
The activists to coordinate across the whole movement. And you’ve got lots of formations for that. You’ve got Climate Justice Coalition, Campaign Against Climate Change, Greener Jobs Alliance.
To take this politically and by politically I mean in a very narrow sense, in slightly Parliamentary sense at this point. Obviously it’s got to be taken up much more broadly in terms of the kind of mobilization Claire was talking about. But in terms of government, because it’s what states do that’s going to make the immediate difference, there’s the whole question of what Labour’s going to do. Because we’re very likely going to have a Labour government and it’s going to be a Starmer led Labour government not a Corbyn led government: so it’s a rather different kettle of fish and the current discussion on North Sea oil and gas and the £28 billion investment, whether they’re going to do it or not, is absolutely the frontline of the argument at the moment. And we’ve got to fight that one through. So, for example, the just transition demands that UNITE says it wants to promote -they should be very clear about what those are, to coordinate that with other people in the movement, and fight that through the Just Transition body that Labour actually has; which UNITE is part of. It’s not a matter of saying ohh we want a just transition but not actually putting it forward. We got to make sure they put it forward. I haven’t seen it yet. I’m sure they will come up with something, but it’s it’s a matter of urgency that they do it.
It’s wider as well, because we’ve got to look at local authorities. Can we get local authorities to set up Just Transition bodies to plan for things like insulation, the expansion of the workforce that we need, training those new workers in the FE colleges, including a climate awareness module so that they know what they’re doing and why they’re doing it? So they’re on a mission. Not just doing a job. They’re on a mission and they believe in that mission. It’s about social transformation and linked to community campaigns for local energy generation and things like onshore wind.
Do you know how many onshore wind turbines were put up in this country last year?
2! Both at Keele University. Just staggering.
Just a few points on protest.
I think we’ve got to try to avoid public antagonism.
I don’t think it helps having people, you know, really hacked off – people going about their ordinary business really hacked off – but to target ruling class over consumption, so that you’re actually connecting with all the resentment that people feel about the inequality that we’re going through at the moment – and it’s being put on the right targets; all these people flying about in private jets, why aren’t we targeting that?
And to undercut all this bullshit that you get in the media – that the climate movement is all posh people inconveniencing “ordinary folk”, in the words of Andrew Neil. So you get this stuff from Farage, who says “Just Stop Oil is all posh girls called Imogen and India”, right?
This is from a stockbroker from Sevenoaks who went to Dulwich College and his name is Nigel. Man of the people?
So we have to undercut that narrative.
We’re also going to have to target the media in my view, because it is really poisonous. We are absolutely flooded by denial and drivel; I mean, how many more articles on Phillip Schofield can you take?
And we also need to coordinate the mass actions. I think the turn of XR to mass organization is the right move. The Big One was terrific. It was like a four day outdoor teach in. Everybody was learning from everybody else and it it was brilliant. We need more of that. But I think we need to coordinate it, organise it with other currents; and organise it at key points like the COP. You know, there’s been some students occupying universities recently. Would it be possible to organize a mass wave of that in November? Don’t know… throwing it out there.
Last thing, I think we also need to highlight demands that cut costs and accelerate the transition. Insulation is the obvious one, but what about a demand for free travel cards for every worker, paid for by the employer to facilitate the transition to public transport and away from cars?
To sum up, however we do it, let’s not mourn, let’s organise.*
*I didn’t actually say this bit, but thought about it afterwards as the conclusion I should have used…instead of “er, that’s it” so, to that extent, this text is backdated.
**If you watch the video and look at the machine generated transliteration that runs alongside, it provides hilarious food for thought for anyone who believes that the activity of reading is solely phonetic. The same thing can be seen if you ever watch the transliteration of the News that runs in a strip along the bottom on the BBC 24 hour channel a few seconds after the speaker.
What the machine is doing is taking the sounds it picks up and putting them into words that sound like the sounds. This is the theory of synthetic phonics in action, in an almost pure form, because the awkward middle stage of recognising and attributing a sound to the graphemes (letters) is cut out.
Because there is no reference to syntax, and the meaning of the sentence up to that point, the results are a bit hit and miss. Sometimes accurate. Sometimes gibberish.
Which underlines the point that in actual reading – done by people – the meaning of the text read so far helps guide what you think is coming next; so the recognition of letters and sounds is in a dialectic with that.
Children learning to read do this quite slowly – and you can see them doing it; sometimes reading on a bit before noticing that what they are saying doesn’t match what they are seeing, so going back to have another go. Adults and proficient readers do that too, but at such a terrific pace that its below conscious attention.
***In Feyzi’s intro she says that I was the founder of Thurrock Friends of the Earth in 1971, one of the first local FOE groups. I was actually one of several people, including Angela Monck, Bob Moorman and others, all of us school students; and at that point we had no inkling of climate change, but were worried about nature depletion – all the local elm trees were dying of Dutch Elm disease – and a wasteful use of resources. At one point we picketed the local Tescos about overpackaging and got in the local paper looking purposeful and frighteningly young.
I don’t know what they were expecting, but there were dozens of armed police at Westminster tube station on Friday morning; sub machine guns casually displayed like a militia that had just staged a coup. Perhaps its a sign of harsher days to come, if the government gets away with its restrictions on protests, closing down dissent and nibbling away at the right to vote, and the state becomes fully rhinocerised to cope with the fall out from economic stagnation and environmental collapse.
It seemed an unlikely response to a protest that has been flagged up as completely peaceful for months, with not even any non violent direct action that might cause someone to be arrested; and those of us heading for it looked at them with bemusement. But, if they were there for a tip off about something else, there was nothing in their demeanor to indicate that they expected trouble. They were quite relaxed, as though standing around a tube station entrance with a machine gun was as normal as leaving your copy of the Metro on the seat on the tube. Perhaps they are just getting us used to it.
It certainly didn’t seem to be a response to the shrill panic in headlines from the Sun and Daily Mail this week – when will someone get a grip on the eco fanatics?– presumably by putting us all under martial law and locking us up, so their readers can watch the snooker without being disturbed by any thought that the world is beginning to burn around them. Displacement anxiety on their part, in a way.
Sometimes there is a protest in central London that overwhelms and redefines it for a while. On the first day of The Big One, it was almost like that. You could hear the drums in the underpass. “Oh God! Those drums! We’ll all be murdered in our beds”, as they used to say on colonial verandas (and possibly still do in Daily Mail editorial meetings). Out of the tunnel and into the reassuring grey of the sort of London Spring characteristic of the epoch we are losing, and the streets are seeded with business like protest organisers in high viz jackets with XR stickers, in an odd balance with lots of tourists, doing the things that tourists do, moving in herds led by guides holding up umbrellas so they don’t get lost, taking photos of each other leaning on the doors of the iconic Gilbert Scott red phone boxes no one uses anymore (with the Houses of Parliament as a backdrop for the perfect evidence of having been here and seen that) school trips in chatty crocodiles up and down the paving stones, in and out of the Abbey.
As the day goes on, the number of protestors increases, so they begin to define the streets much more. The drums have dominated the soundscape from the off, but now there are contingents of people from here or there wandering like pilgrims between ministries, sometimes with drummers, sometimes not. And in the distance those strange silent processions of priestesses proceeding silently in bright scarlet or eery green robes, saying nothing, moving slowly, bearing witness.
By mid day, the cafe in St James Park is mostly occupied by what the Mail calls the “Eco mob”; for the most part middle aged, thoughtful, quite middle class people, more women than men, politely drinking coffee or holding the door open for each other in the long queue for the loo. The mound outside is occupied by the Bristol Climate Choir; about a hundred of them. Polite, peaceful, determined, not singing yet. A couple of curious coots cautiously duck their heads at them, trying to work them out – and probably closer to understanding them than the Daily Mail is.
At the Department For Education to make a speech for the XR Educators picket (see separate Blog). It is drizzling steadily. The road remained open; so anyone speaking, delivering a model lesson to show what the curriculum could be like, or performing -they had dancing later -had to pause from time to time as a vehicle went past. On one occasion – symbolically enough – a Clapham Omnibus, possibly occupied by average people who we will need to convince; though 70% of them already want more action on climate, so they are more on board than the government is. The rain is dismal but the mood determined.
Photo Graham Petersen This is opposite the DFE. The building behind houses the Adam Smith Institute. The last time there was an XR picket of the DFE, the Adam Smith Institute, an offshored annex of Tufton Street, played loud music through the windows to try to drown it out. This was a mix tape of tracks extolling the joys of driving cars or taking trips in aircraft. “I like driving in my car”, “Buy me a ticket for an aeroplane” and so on. Like the Institute itself, an ideological support for the short lived fever dream of the Truss government, their music choices were out of date and out of time. This time, they were silent; which is just as well; and entirely appropriate.
The pickets at other Ministries a little down the road and round the corner, were bigger. And they had drums. Impossible to walk along and not want to dance to them.The crowd outside the Department of Energy was spilling over the pavement. Outside the Home Office there was a “die in” of climate refugees. Alongside the Ministry of Transport a big crowd arrived from South Yorkshire shouting “We’re from South Yorkshire and we want better buses!” Pretty plain and direct. No need for rhymes. They also had a song about how miserable it is to wait for a bus that doesn’t turn up. Especially when its raining. The tragedy of this, for anyone who can remember back forty years or so, is that in the early 80s Sheffield was an inspirational public transport success story. The fares were low. The timetable regular. The buses reliable. People came from all over the world to study it. The GLC based its Fairs Fare campaign to boost public transport in London on it. Then the Thatcher government forcibly deregulated the system, with the usual nonsense about how the private sector will be more efficient; and it all went to shit.
The crowd outside DEFRA blocked the side street completely. A quiet picket, largely made up of Quakers, strings all the way along the pavement outside the Foreign Office, bearing witness to all its accumulated sins; perhaps symbolised by the statue of Sir Robert Clive at the end of the road; founder of the Indian Empire and a man who reduced Bengal, the most prosperous province in the Mughal Empire, to famine within a decade of conquering it. Clive, who gave a strong impression of being able to brass out what he’d done and revelled in the staggering wealth he accumulated, nevertheless committed suicide at the age of 49 by stabbing himself in the throat with a penknife. So, perhaps it got to him after all. Our current masters have better insulated consciences.
Some of the Ministries are quite strange. Digital Culture, Media and Sport, which had a small picket outside; with a few Equity banners. The seeming polar opposites of Digital Culture and Sport glued awkwardly together by Media. And why just digital culture? What about the rest of it? Perhaps it could be renamed the Ministry of Propaganda and Commercially Lucrative Distractions. Time was that Equity was run by a right wing faction headed by Sir Laurence Olivier, challenged by a WRP bloc led by Vanessa and Corrin Redgrave. Meetings must have been really performative.
The statue of Field Marshall Viscount Allenbrooke turns its back on the Nurses not Nukes banner and its nose up at the teach in going on outside the Ministry of Defence (even though he was such a keen bird watcher).
The Ministry of Defence is playing host to an open air seminar being chaired by CND. One of the most dangerous aspects of our current crisis is the deployment of investment that could be going into green transition into building up the military instead. The United States is spending 14 times as much on its military as it is allocating to investment in transition under the Inflation Reduction Act. According to the Campaign Against the Arms Trade, in the UK, there is 30 times as much Research and Development on weapons systems as there is on renewable energy. That could be why the patents for the turbines in wind turbines are held by Danish and German/Spanish firms. And this goes on. In the last budget, £5 billion extra for the Ministry of Defence. For insulation? Nothing.
There is an unacknowledged militarism that runs through the UK, which is by some way the most bellicose nation over the Ukraine war in NATO; and in central London there is a war memorial or statue of a Field Marshal or Admiral every few yards if you have eyes to see them. A few years ago, I was showing two teachers from Limpopo Province in South Africa around Trafalgar Square. One of them looked from Nelson on his column to the busts of Beattie, Jellicoe and Cunningham ranged along the Northern wall and muttered “Hmm. Nation of warriors”. I’d not seen it like that before, somehow just taking it for granted as normative; but after he’d said it, it was impossible to miss how the military side of all that imperial history is celebrated and sanctified in bronze.
The speakers are pointing out that the US and its allies – essentially the core of the Global North – are increasing military spending at a dizzying rate; with the US itself hitting a record level, and sharp increases in France Germany and Japan. Japan is doubling its military spending and working together with Italy and the UK to develop a next generation fighter aircraft. One of the speakers uses a strange formula to describe this. That Japan’s increase is “in response to the rising tensions in the world”. Given that, even before these increases, the US and its direct allies are already responsible for two thirds of global military spending, it would be more accurate to describe them as the source of it. And the trajectory is quite clear. As Meehan Crist wrote in March last year, “One of the worst outcomes of the war in Ukraine would be an increasingly militarised response to climate breakdown, in which Western armies, their budgets ballooning in the name of “national security” seek to control not only the outcome of conflicts but the flow of energy, water, food, key minerals and other natural resources. One does not have to work particularly hard to imagine how barbarous that future would be”.
Not hard to imagine, because that’s the world we’ve already got, but a bit more so.
The Saturday was bigger, younger and sunnier in all respects. Stunts get publicity. Mass events build movements.
I convene the NEU Climate Change Network and edit the Greener Jobs Alliance Newsletter, which brings together trade unionists active on climate breakdown with climate activists serious about working in and through the unions. Please look us up and check us out.
I’m here as a warm up for XR Youth, who will be talking about what schools are for in a few minutes, so lets think about that.
Michael Gove’s favourite Marxist, Antonio Gramsci, said that every society reproduces itself through its education system.
But, if the society we have is unsustainable, schools have to anticipate a sustainable society and transform themselves as part of the process of constructing it. That necessarily challenges the existing social, political and economic order.
In assessing the Department for Education we should measure their performance against the legal obligation under Article 12 of the Paris Agreement; which states
Parties (that’s governments) will cooperate…to enhance climate education, training, public awareness, public participation and public access to information recognising the importance of these steps with respect to enhancing actions under this agreement.
That means that the whole of society – not just schools and universities, but all media, all government at national, regional and local level – should be participating in a mutually reinforcing education and action movement to prevent climate change and respond to its impacts.
Hands up if you think they are doing that… (there were no hands).
I think that Just Stop Oil people on the media are spot on in turning the question “are you bringing the public with you?” back onto media interviewers. Why are they not dealing with it? We have to be here, partly because they are not doing their job.
Photo Graham Petersen Portrait of the author as an old man.
Looking at what the DFE is doing in its Net Zero Plan, there are two fundamental flaws
There is no plan to review the entire curriculum and no integrated skills programme. Some institutions are doing amazing work. Some primary schools integrate their whole curriculum around climate and sustainability. Manchester Met University has a climate module built into every course. But in a climate emergency that should be the norm; and its criminally negligent that it isn’t.
There is no plan – and no budget – to retrofit the entire schools estate to Zero Carbon by 2030. Small pockets of money are made available to be bid for, which allows for partial works in penny packets here and there; but its left to individual schools and Local Authorities to find their own way. Again, some places are taking a lead, Newcastle City Council aims to retrofit all its schools by 2030. Hats off to them, but again, this should be normative and treated with urgency.
Even the good things they are doing, the National Nature Park, which aims to link up all school, college and University grounds into one greening space, and the requirement for all schools to have a Sustainability Lead by the end of this year – have no budget.
By contrast, in the last Budget, the Ministry of Defence got an extra £5 billion, companies were handed £9 billion in investment tax relief for investments they were going to make anyway.
Anticipating this critique, and responding to the school students strike movement, the DFE published, at the same time as their Net Zero Strategy, its guide to teaching “controversial subjects” with “impartiality”. This is a more subtle version of what Ron DiSantis doing in Florida. DiSantis bans books to do with racism, gay rights. What we have here is a requirement to teach “controversial subjects” like world poverty, racism, the legacy of Empire and climate breakdown in a “balanced” manner.
Which is mind boggling. How do you teach about racism in a “balanced” way? On the one hand, Martin Luther King…on the other hand Adolf Hitler? What are you “balancing”?
Let’s be clear about this. Hands up if you think that the impartiality guidance means that you have to teach climate denial in the interests of balance? – (No hands up. Cries of “No!”)
You’re right. We won that one. This is what the guidance says. “Schools do not need to present misinformation, such as unsubstantiated claims that anthropogenic climate change is not occurring to provide balance”.
Its a pity that that message hasn’t got through to the rest of the government. A spokesperson for the Department for Business and Trade said recently “There are various think tanks in Westminster that have sceptical views about climate change, and Ministers meet those people all the time”. One of them is right behind us, right here, the Adam Smith Institute.
And that guidance was just for the facts in the Science and Geography curriculum. Climate breakdown becomes “a political issue” when discussing what we do about it. So, you can see why a governing Party that
abstained on the Parliamentary motion to declare a climate emergency
contains within in the organised core of Parliamentary climate change denial in the form of the Net Zero Scrutiny Group, which includes current Ministers
was taken to court because its Net Zero plans did not meet its targets, and lost
would be sensitive about this and want teachers and students to be inhibited about discussing it. Am I being “partisan” in pointing this out?
There are two aspects to this.
Mainstream Parties, those represented in Parliament, will have different approaches to climate breakdown. The guidance prohibits “partisan” support for any of these. So, you couldn’t walk into a classroom waving the Labour or Green Party Manifestoes over your head and calling for support for them. But, you wouldn’t do that anyway. No one would. And the guidance doesn’t stop you teaching the facts about what different Parties say in relation to the crisis and discussing them through. It also does not prohibit the expression of a personal point of view, as long as you identify it as such and make it clear that other views are available.
“Extremism”. The definition of views that are not expressed within the mainstream parties, particularly when linked to campaigns of Non Violent Direct Action, as “extremist”. As all the mainstream responses are inadequate, this dovetails with overall government attempts to close down the space for protest and dissent and, on this issue, shoot the messenger.
What this doesn’t take into account is that we are the majority. Two out of three people want more action to prevent climate breakdown. It has been a top four voter concern for well over a year and will become more so as the crisis intensifies. At the risk of being “partisan”, is this top voter concern one of Rishi Sunak’s top five priorities? Who is it that’s out of step here?
So, because we are the majority, we should not allow the Thought Police into our heads. We need a full, open, exploratory discussion in schools and society – because no one has all the answers, we’re making this up as we go along and its not all under control. The people in charge do not have a grip, and too often have a vested interest in not getting one.
So, getting colleagues, management, parents, governors, students all on board is crucial.
I’ll leave you with a quote from UN Secretary General Antonio Gutierrez, to put all this “extremist” stuff in context and might make a good start for a Philosophy for Children session.
“The truly dangerous radicals are the countries that are increasing the production of fossil fuels. Investing in new fossil fuel infrastructure is moral and economic madness”.
Urban ramblings 