Tag: Environment

Reflections on the National Climate and Nature Emergency Briefing

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Climate Myth Busting

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

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

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

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

Climate Science itself is very clear.

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

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

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

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

Nevertheless, to briefly touch on these arguments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Looking at some of the things they say.

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

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

Specific arguments they raise…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • Heat pumps don’t work when its cold

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

  • EVs have a higher carbon footprint than FF cars

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cuba’s solar turn

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

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

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

The problems of the grid are based on

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

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

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

The way out of this crisis has had two aspects.

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

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

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

Fig 1 shows the pace of this.

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

This is underpinned by several factors.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

China and Climate – the Question of Leadership

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

Image from Tricontinental Instutute for Wenhua Zongheng China’s Ecological Transition Dec 2024.

This is the full version of a talk I gave as part of a Panel on China’s leadership role in fighting climate change at the Friends of Socialist China Conference in Bolivar Hall on 27th September. As it would have extended to twice as long as I had, a drastically pruned version was delivered, and an even pithier version was published in the Morning Star during the week. I’m putting this up here for anyone who might find the missing bits stimulating.

I edit the Greener Jobs Alliance Newsletter and convene the National Education Union Climate Change Network, but am speaking in a personal capacity because both organisations contain a range of views about China and its role in climate change. These are mine.

Marx used to quote Hegel’s dictum that “The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of dusk” to note that people by and large learn from events only after they have happened. In the case of the climate crisis, dusk is falling already and we know what is happening. 

IPCC Reports are very clear about the increase in greenhouse gases, the increase in global temperatures that arise from that, and the impacts are increasingly documented, as well as reported as they happen. We are experiencing it. It’s not a single cataclysm that may or may not happen some time in the future. It is happening now. Slowly from the point of view of political/electoral cycles, but with terrifying rapidity in geological terms; such that we are in a crucial decade in the century that will make or break human civilization. 

I’d add that from COP to COP the IPCC sets out possible scenarios for how the crisis will unfold. So far, we have been heading consistently along the “unlikely worst case scenario”. 

I’d also add that most people see the unfolding of this crisis as following an almost Fabian path of inevitable gradualism, but, in physics as in politics, the tendency is to have a long period of apparent stasis, in which forces build until you hit a tipping point, and there are then sudden dramatic shifts that are unimaginable until they happen, but make the previous period unimaginable once they have. 

As the joke used to go, “Whoops comrades, yet another unforeseen historical inevitability”. 

The impact of the crisis on China itself is already severe (at 1.3C globally above pre industrial averages, but China already at 1.6C above). 

  • this July 2025 alone, the value of “direct economic losses” due to flooding, landslides, earthquakes and drought was equivalent to $7.3bn and “road damages” amounted to $2.2bn, according to the Ministry of Transport.
  • The 30,000 deaths related to heatwaves in 2023 was almost double the average between 1986-2005. 
  • Droughts in 2024 hit more than 11 million people, more than 1.2m hectares of crops and the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences estimates that climate-related yield reductions could amount to 5% to 10% by 2030 – so, in five years – under current warming trends. 
  • One study estimates that key cereal crops could lose around 2.6% yield per degree Celsius of warming, with more vulnerable regions facing up to a 12.7% loss. Another study projected up to 37% yield decline within decades if warming continues unchecked.

Challenges

China’s response aims to build a moderately prosperous socialist society as an ecological civilisation. The connection between the two is expressed in the Two Mountains proposition popularised by Xi Jinping – that green mountains with clear water are as valuable as mountains of gold and silver.  So, as China grows, it will grow greener. So it’s not Socialism with green bits, let alone a Kruschevite vision of the conquest of nature, but Green Socialism.

And the socialism is essential to the greenness. One Australian commentator put it in the grudging way that Western commentators who grasp the reality nevertheless can’t help but do 

“The authoritarian regime put the heft of the state behind clean technologies at a scale and pace difficult to imagine in most democracies.” 

What this means is that if you have socialist planning you can make strategic decisions for the common good that won’t be sabotaged by the vested interests that buy elections and control “western democracies”.

Or, as a Canadian commentator put it. “China is pushing power sector transformation through central planning. It can build clean infrastructure quickly”, as “China sees the old fossil fuel growth model as not sustainable and increasingly unable to sustain long-term prosperity.” To put that another way, if the socialism that’s built isn’t green, it won’t last.

But China’s colossal state driven investment in what it calls “the three news” – solar power – electric vehicles and batteries – along with wind power-  is leading to a global tipping point as the cost of renewable energy is now cheaper than that generated by any fossil fuel – and set to become even more so. And this is having an impact on countries in the rest of the world that are far from being socialist.

Last year, crude oil imports to China fell for the first time in two decades, with the exception of the pandemic. The International Energy Agency expects China to hit peak oil in 2027.

As China had driven two-thirds of the growth in global oil demand in the decade to 2023, global demand set to plateau then drop before 2030. This makes continued investment in fossil fuel exploration, or power plants, increasingly risky. Banks that have traditionally put huge resources into FF investments are beginning to get cold feet, even as they row back on explicit green commitments. This is, paradoxically, putting the US Fossil Fuel drive at odds with markets.

This is because the sheer scale of China’s investment is mind boggling and this is increasingly the core driver of China’ economy; which in turn is having a global knock on effect.

  • With just 17.2% of the world’s people, China has half of the world’s solar, half of the world’s wind power and half of the world’s electric cars. 
  • Of every four” offshore wind turbines installed globally in 2025, 3 of them will be in China.
  • In April this year, China installed more solar power than Australia has in all its history 45.2GW. In one month – at a rate equivalent to a power station every 8 minutes. 
  • Last year China installed as much renewable power in one year as the US has in its entire history, and this will accelerate.
  • They are building enormous solar and wind farms in arid parts of the Western interior. To give an idea of the scale of these things, they are two thirds of the way through building a solar farm in Tibet that is the size of Chicago. (Projects like this all over arid areas are also having a positive impact on holding back desertification and boosting agriculture, as condensation from the panels feeds grasses which can be grazed by sheep).

As a result China’s domestic emissions are peaking, even as demand for energy increases. In fact energy prices went down in the summer even as demand for a/c boomed during heatwaves. Emissions were down 1.6% in the first half of this year. That’s vital because China’s emissions are 30% of the global total. If China gets this wrong, we’re in real trouble. 

China now has 57% of its energy generated by renewables, compared to just over 50% for the UK. 

Coal power is still massive in China, and its rise to prosperity came through climbing up a mountain of it. 

However, coal is now explicitly being defined as back up to a grid structured around renewables and there is now significant overcapacity – leading to these plants only operating around 50% of the time. Coal consumption dropped by 2.6% in the first half of this year, even as the economy grew by 5%, showing that the shift in reliance is picking up pace.

A question that this poses as quite an urgent matter is planning for transition in heavy coal dependent provinces like Shanxi, which is 75% dependent on coal mining and coal derivative industries. If the transition is as fast as it might be, this could pose a serious problem locally unless alternative industries are planned and built in as part of the process. I’d be interested in any debate going on in China about how that will be addressed.

Global impact

All this is feeding through globally and this is crucial. Taken individually, there are a number of European countries, like Finland, that have made a faster shift away from fossil fuels and have a higher per capita investment, but you’d expect wealthier countries to be able to do that. The stunning thing is not that some have, but that most haven’t. And none of them are having the global impact that China is.

Though there are a few residual projects, China’s decision to abandon coal investment overseas has been a pivotal decision. 

More than 60% of emerging and developing economies are leapfrogging the US and Europe in clean electrification thanks mostly to China’s exports of cheap solar panels. 

  • Pakistan last year added as much capacity in rooftop solar as they’d previously been able to generate from their entire grid. 
  • This is now being picked up in parts of Africa, with solar panel exports from China up 60% this year. This is from a low base, but the potential is enormous. In countries like Kenya, Morocco, Algeria, Ethiopia, the DRC, Botswana, Zambia Nigeria and South Africa solar imports have grown by factors of between 3 to 8. The liberating potential of no longer being dependent on imported fossil fuels, the capacity to install micro grids and distributed power to widespread rural communities could provide the same technological leapfrog as when SATphones (mobiles) made landline technology redundant in Africa. Abundant, cheap solar electricity also allows the continent to be slung together with a High Speed Rail network, not dependent on medium range flights burning kerosene. 
  • Outside Africa, in countries like Brazil and Vietnam, the adoption of solar, wind and battery storage is outpacing not only fossil fuels, but also the business-as-usual strategies of many rich economies, let alone the delirious reactionary stance of the USA. 

China’s clean energy exports in 2024 alone shaved 1 per cent off global emissions outside of China, according to Carbon Brief, and this will accelerate during the next 30 years. 

Reuters reports that  87% of power generation investment in emerging economies and China flowed into clean energy in 2024; and as China is the pivot nation in the global system, three-quarters of global fossil demand is now in nations that have already peaked.

Three factors underlie this. And these are quotes from Reuters, so not from a source the right wing press here would call “eco fanatic”.

  1. Physics: Fossil fuels are wasteful: two-thirds of the energy in coal, oil or gas is lost to heat or inefficiency. Solar, electric motors, and heat pumps are two to four times as efficient. We can do more with less energy at far lower cost. That is expressed very well in this graphic. 
  1. Economics: Fossil fuels are commodities built on extraction: as reserves deplete, it gets more expensive to access what’s left. Look at the North Sea. Electro-based technology is manufactured: so the more that gets built, the cheaper and better it becomes. On average, costs fall by around 20% every time deployment doubles. In most of the world, solar and wind are now the lowest-cost new power. Investment follows – today, two-thirds of global energy capital flows into “electrotech”, while oil majors are investing more in stock buybacks than in new wells.
  2. Geopolitics: The old energy system left three-quarters of humanity dependent on expensive, imported fuels. Electro-based technologies unlock local resources. Almost all countries have enough sun and wind to meet their energy needs many times over. In fact, emerging and developing economies hold 70% of the world’s solar and wind resources and 50% of the critical minerals for the energy transition.

What this means is that the Western model of development is not needed for the majority of the world. Thanks to China’s investments in renewables, they can modernise in their own way – and that means that the future does not, and cannot, look like the USA.

So, to elaborate on the last point, China is leading on climate because it is not doing what the US is doing, nor following it in a race to the bottom

Ma Zhaoxu ,China’s vice-foreign minister says, “regardless of how the international situation evolves, China’s proactive actions to address climate change will not slow down”.

The Trump administration, as we know, is locking the US into a suicidal entrenchment in increasingly outmoded FF technology. “Drill baby drill”. 

In rolling back Biden’s attempt to suck green investment into the US, Trump has, as many commentators have noted, abandoned the future. This doesn’t simply involve domestic economic self sabotage, with more expensive FF plants kept running and pushing up bills, offshore wind farms cancelled imperilling supply in regions like New England, but also a completely reckless wrecking ball taken to disaster emergency relief and any state scientific or academic research related to the climate and the impacts of it – setting up a vetting committee to make sure that published papers don’t challenge the administration’s line (so US academics at international conferences have taken to using burner phones). 

That means that US policy is based on a set of lies about climate change, and actively has to suppress the truth about it. Ultimately, a policy based on lies comes back to bite you.

The US is now the world’s leading petro state. And part of Trump’s trade offensive has been to get the US’s subordinate allies to buy its exports of LNG – whether they need it or not. 

Some of this involves fantasy figures. The EU deal to buy $750 billion worth of US LNG exceeds the capacity of the industry to produce it, tanker fleet to transport it and European LNG terminals to process it (and the EU can’t mandate member states to buy it anyway). The US/UK nuclear deal is similarly fanciful. They are aiming beyond the capacity of their own system.

But the purpose of it is to lock as much of the world as possible into FF bondage. They actually have a Department of Energy Dominance. And it’s why the increasingly shrill arguments coming from the most overt political subordinates of the US – Reform here, with the incredible shrinking Conservative Party yapping along in their wake, with an increasingly panicky right wing press in full sneering support – are actually aiming at consolidating UK energy dependence on the US, no matter how ruinous the cost. 

Which is why they have to invert the truth and argue that getting to sustainability is too costly. The OBR reckons it  will cost 19p a day per person up to 2050, a cost already eclipsed by just the food price rises from two bad harvests in the last two years. But, having to buy US LNG instead of using the sun and wind will impoverish us and risk the future.

This sets up a politics and diplomacy of volatile delirium based on wishful thinking backed up with open and extreme violence. The renaming of the Dept of Defence at the Dept of War shows how they have taken the mask off now. 

Given the factors outlined above, a success for the US would lock the world, and the US itself, into climate collapse. The sort of scenario outlined by one of their own think tanks in 2008 as a situation in which “countries with resources would have to engage in nightmarish episodes of triage. Deciding who, and what, can be salvaged from a disordered environment. The choices would primarily have to be made among the poor, at home and abroad”.

Something it’s in all of our interests to avoid. 

But, while the US still makes some of the weather – literally in this case – it’s no longer able to determine the direction of the world and, in my view, Trump is increasingly looking like the Emperor Diocletian, who restored the old pagan rites for the last time when their time had already gone. He is standing on thin ice, that’s getting thinner as the ice caps melt. As Bill McKibbon puts it in his optimistic article “Here comes the Sun”; “Big Oil spent more money on last year’s election cycle in my country than they’ve ever done before. And it’s why they’re now being rewarded with a whole variety of measures designed to slow this transition down, which may succeed. I mean, it’s possible that 20 years from now, America will be a kind of museum of internal combustion that other people will visit to see what the olden days were like.

But it’s not going to slow the rest of the world down much, I don’t think.” 

There is obviously a tension now in the UK government, with its attempt to dodge tariffs by bending the knee and crippling any possibility of positive investment by committing to an annual £77 billion black hole in “defence” spending, and the stated direction of the Department of Energy Security and Net Zero to make the UK an “electrostate”, which involves some cooperation with China, but would require more investment than the military spend will allow. US pressure has already excluded Huawei from 5G telecoms, and from the nuclear programme (which will make it unaffordable as well as useless). 

As this crisis unfolds and deepens, the cost of being shackled to the US and the cold war stance it requires against China will become more and more apparent. And a more live debate in the climate movement. And something we need to inject into “mainstream politics” in and through the unions, Labour, the Greens and Your Party.

What UK school leavers do – and do not – understand about the climate crisis; and why this is a problem.

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

The conclusions of the December 2024 research report into climate literacy among school leavers in England makes worrying reading. The survey conclusions are republished below.

  • My comments are in italics.

Through asking a selected sample of Year 11 school leavers in England a broad range of questions, this survey presents a nuanced view of climate literacy amongst school leavers. While there is a general awareness of anthropogenic global warming as a cause of climate change and its global impacts, there are several knowledge gaps and misconceptions demonstrated by the responses collected.


Basic knowledge:
While most school leavers recall having been taught about climate change, only just over half remember having covered it in their last year at school.

  • As Climate change is an existential crisis for humanity, for almost half of students to go sailing through a year of school without being challenged to consider any aspect of it shows an alarming level of baked in complacency that we need to change.


There is a general understanding that the climate has warmed, but many overestimate the extent of warming since 1850. This specifically highlights a poor understanding of messaging related to limiting climate change to within 1.5°C/ 2°C, as many school leavers thought that the climate had already warmed more than this.

  • This fits with a sort of “common sense” approach that uses shifts in temperature in everyday experience of weather as a benchmark. In that, a shift or 1 or 2 degerees doesn’t seem like much, but as an average shift across the whole planet, it has enormous consequences. Students will be seeing an increasing series of news items – on TV or social media – that show these disastrous impacts. The fires in LA and recent storms and floods here will be the latest. Stressing that these impacts are happening at just a 1.2C average increase; so increases above 1.5C or 2C will be so much worse, is essential to challenge this. Some students will have experienced climate impacts, like these: 1. “A primary school in Carlisle had classroom windows blown in during a lesson today, leading to kids diving under their desks. 86mph winds predicted and some HTs “bravely” opened. We’ve got a long way to go on the notion of “adapatation” as well as prevention.” 2. A school in Teeside evacuated due to storm damage after students placed on ‘lockdown’ https://www.gazettelive.co.uk/news/teesside-news/egglescliffe-school-evacuated-stockton-storm-30857248 These are new impacts that will become more common, so staff and students, LAs and Multi Academy Trusts should be aware of them and adapt their risk assessments accordingly.


Most school leavers are ‘fairly concerned’ about climate change but, for those communicating on climate change, it is worth noting that more are ‘not very’ or ‘not at all’ concerned about climate change than are ‘very concerned’.

  • Without wanting students to be overwhelmed by anxiety, being lulled into complacency is doing them a profound disservice. It provides a foundation based on misunderstanding that allows for policies that backslide in a way that puts all our futures at risk.

Unsurprisingly, there is a correlation between those school leavers who think that climate change will affect them directly and those who are concerned about climate change.

  • The obvious question here is, on what basis does anyone think climate change will not affect them? Recognising that this is a threat to all of us is the foundation for the necessary debates, policies and actions.


A substantial proportion do not appreciate that future global warming can still be limited or avoided.

  • Students should not be left with this false impression. It leads to despair, fatalism, or indifference; none of which will help them address the crisis, either as individuals or citizens.

Causes of climate change
Most school leavers can identify carbon dioxide and methane as greenhouse gases and recognise that greenhouse gases affect the temperature of the Earth, but there are misconceptions regarding their respective sources. Similarly, whilst understanding of fossil fuels as a source of carbon dioxide is generally good, in general, the impact of natural causes of changes in the Earth’s climate and, in particular, orbital changes, are overstated. There is a lack of awareness of the contribution of cement to greenhouse gas emissions and uncertainty around wider sustainability issues relating to the production and use of plastics.

  • The confusion around natural causes is understandable, given that in the long term – before humans -they have been more significant. It is important to clarify this because this fact is used to confuse understanding of what is happening now by ignoring the timescale for variations in the Earth’s orbit and tilt, which are over hundreds of thousands of years, and the impacts of solar activity (which on its own has been having a slightly cooling effect for the last few decades) or volcanoes, which tend to have a significant, but short term, cooling effect when they erupt.
  • The misunderstandings about the causes of carbon emissions probably reflects the fact that a lot of cross school interventions on climate change come under an extracurricullar pastoral heading – like walk to school week, or a recycling drive. This reflects the weakness of whole school learning on climate as such, which will have to become a core part of the curriculum if it is to addressed.

As school leavers indicated a good awareness of which countries are currently emitting most greenhouse gas, but less awareness of per capita or historical emissions, this could be linked to a poor understanding of issues related to climate justice.

  • This is likely to reflect awareness filtering in through media coverage, not school learning. It should be clarified so that students have an accurate picture of
  • 1. who has done what since industrialisation since playing this down is a way to minimise the UK’s historic responsibility as the earliest industrial power and
  • 2. what the per head carbon footprint is – which gives a more accurate picture of how sustainable different societies are than raw totals, though this should also be tempered with an understanding of consumption emissions, as contrasted with production emissions as, in an interdependent world, countries with economies that are primarily service based which have outsourced their carbon intensive heavy industry (like cement production) to other countries nevertheless consume the embodied carbon in their imports in a way that does not show up in statistics based on production.
  • When you get bad faith political actors, and we are spoiled for choice for those, these misunderstandings provides wealthy countries with alibis, other countries to point fingers at, often unfairly, and represents the abdication of responsibility that is being pushed aggressively by climate deniers. For example, India has the third largest carbon emissions by volume, but has a per capita (per person) total of 2.7 tonnes – about half the global average – because it has a population greater than Europe, North and South America and Australasia combined. China has big overall emissions and a per capita footprint double the global average, but this is half the per capita footprint of countries like the USA, Canada, Australia and Saudi Arabia.

Evidence for and impacts of climate change:

Many school leavers are aware of some indicators of a warming climate such as melting glaciers and rising sea levels, as well as of the impact of climate change on extreme weather events. However, there is limited understanding of the geographical distribution of future temperature changes and their impacts.

  • Again, this will be as a result of the absence of systematic teaching and learning about the scale, scope and likely development of climate breakdown. Knowing about melting ice caps is more or less ground zero. If you don’t know this, you don’t really know anything. But being aware of patterns and projections is essential to avoid a solely impressionistic understanding based on a montage of news items as they come in, which, in the UK focus primarily on serious impacts 1. locally, 2. in other wealthy countries, especially the USA 3. in the global South. This also downplays the scale and potential social impact of these events as they already occur, which again engenders far more complacency than we can afford.
  • A set of serious discussions about possible tipping points is also essential to overcome the false notion that climate change happens with remorseless gradualism, implying that when it hits harder we will still be able to outrun it; whereas it is more likely that if we let things get away from us, the harder impacts will be of a greater intensity, faster velocity and so widespread that they could sweep us away like an incoming tsunami.

Mitigation and Adaptation:
In general, the survey indicated low awareness of these two aspects of climate action, and in particular of climate mitigation strategies. Furthermore, there is a varied understanding between these two approaches, with school leavers often misinterpreting mitigation strategies as adaptation. The impacts of keeping pets and eating meat are generally underestimated whereas the impact of switching lights off
and recycling (from the point of view of greenhouse gas emissions) is overestimated.

  • The strategies school leavers consider effective are those they have done, or been encouraged to do, at school. Switch the lights off when you leave the classroom. Recycle your stuff. Do schools put what they put in their school dinners up front as part of their climate action plan? They should, and be prepared to have the debate with staff, students and school communities – in the same way that many schools with many Muslim students did when they adopted Halal meat as a default.
  • But, all these examples are in the category of individual actions which, though essential, have too often been used as a distraction to avoid strategic social, political and economic policy choices at society level about use of fossil fuels, industrial farming, construction materials and methods (and who controls those), town planning, transport policy and so on.
  • Whether students can identify whether a given action is mitigation or adaptation, or both, is surely a secondary issue to whether they think they are necessary, for themselves as individuals and/or for everyone as citizens. While its better to be clear, there is a slight echo here of Goveish assumptions that if you can name a part of speech you know how to use language effectively.

Concepts such as the 1.5°C and 2°C targets, and net zero, are very poorly understood. With ‘net zero’ in particular being a phrase which is in widespread use, from the Department for Education’s Climate Change and Sustainability Education Strategy to employers and the media, lack of understanding of it is both surprising and concerning.

  • If it isn’t taught, it won’t be understood. The consequences of average temperature rises of 1.5C and 2C, or worse, are widely published. It should be the core of teaching about what we need to do to limit the incoming damage that students have a firm grasp of these projections and understand the basics of the processes that produce them through the IPCC and that this reflects the firm conviction of 97-99% of the world’s scientists.
  • Given the relentless attacks on “Net Zero madness” and “Net Zero zealots” in the media, having a firm grasp of what the term means is essential to be able to navigate what is becoming an increasingly fraught debate based, primarily, on misleading or factually innaccurate arguments from vested interests with a lot of resources to try to conceptually turn reality upside down. We should not leave our students vulnerable to the suggestion that it is the people who want action for a sustainable future who are “mad” or unreasonably zealous, while those who want to carry on as we are until we hit a series of devastating crises, that we won’t be able to recover from, are somehow the sane ones.
  • Discussions about Net Zero vs Zero carbon emissions raise important issues concerning the limitations of carbon offsets, especially as they are actually used.


If climate education is to raise awareness of green careers and, more generally, to increase hope in our ability to take collective climate action, increased awareness of mitigation and adaptation strategies is vitally important.

  • It is also important for students, who will still be quite young by 2050, to grasp that a failure to decarbonise our society will make us all significantly poorer, even if society avoids collapse altogether. It might help if the Chancellor of the Exchequer had an inkling of this too.


Climate Change in the UK:
In general, there is very poor awareness of the projected impacts of climate change in the UK, the need to adapt, mitigation strategies already in place and of the cost benefits of mitigation rather than adaptation.

  • This, again, reflects the unsystematic and fundamentally unserious character of learning about climate in the UK. These are average results, and some schools do fantastic work, especially if they are signed up to Lets Go Zero, Ministry of Eco Education, Eco Schools, or they have a Local Authority that takes this as seriously as they do in Brighton or Leicester for example, or they have an inspirational Head teacher who is on the mission that, frankly, all Head teachers should be on; but that also means that many schools will be doing far too little in the absence of the thorough commitment to climate education that we need running throigh the entire national curriculum. An example of this is that even an officially supported, and very good, initiative like the National Nature Park has only be signed up to by about 10% of schools. This is absurd.
  • Leaving students with the fundamental misunderstanding that the “costs of Net Zero” are greater than the consequences of failing to meet it – which they will have picked up from deliberately misleading media coverage without a thorough going rebuttal in schools- lays them open to dishonest political manipulation that will put their future at risk.

This will be directly relevant to school leavers’ awareness of the green careers available to them. Whereas school leavers were aware of the contribution of melting ice to sea level rise in the UK, they were less
aware of the contribution of the expansion of sea water as it warms, which has made an approximately equal contribution historically. It could be argued that this reflects a need for science teachers to be able to demonstrate that learning in the sciences has applications and contexts relevant to climate change.

  • The overall conception we should be trying to develop is that every job, every career, will have to be green, because every job will have to be sustainable. There can’t be a “green sector” that maintains peceful coexistence with unsustainable sectors; as the key thing we have to grasp is that we have to make all sectors sustainable and all jobs greener, so the process will be the growth of the former and the shrinking of the latter to ever more residual roles.

Communication:
There is a substantial knowledge gap regarding the level of scientific consensus on climate change, with most thinking agreement amongst scientists is notably lower than it is. This potentially relates to past and present education policy related to presenting a ‘balanced’ argument for global warming. Knowledge of international organisations such as the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is also limited. Trust in climate information from science teachers and the BBC is high, but lower for politicians and tabloid newspapers.

  • This substantial knowledge gap needs to be closed, and fast. This is not simply down to ludicrous notions that it was necessary to have a “balanced” discussion between an almost universal scientific consensus and a few fossil fuel funded mavericks, as if the two had equal weight, but also the previous government’s successful attempt to freeze debate on the social implications of climate change with its “impartiality guidance”, which put campaigning organisations on a blacklist that should not be invited in. This guidance should be scrapped, and the no holds barred debate on how we are going to construct our own futures unleashed.
  • The understanding that the climate breakdown projections we are working to limit are the product of a thorough and painstaking research and analysis, that the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is a UN body and its findings are subscribed to by 195 governments (out of 198) worldwide; so represents an international government consensus as well as a scientific one is essential. As is the understanding that countries, no matter how weighty they are in the world, that break with the science do not have a valid point of view, but are going rogue.
  • That students trust science teachers most underlines the point that schools have the tresponsibility to present them with the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. This trust is likely to extend to other teachers in so far as climate is dealt with, as it should be, across the curriculum. There are three levels to our response to this.
  • 1. The current national curriculm review should incorporate climate learning into the national curriculum in all subjects and in an age appropriate way in all key stages. Part of this will have to be turning, appropriate, anxiety into purposeful action, for individuals, schools, communities and in campaigning/debating ways forward to future proof ourselves in a just transition. If it falls short of this, it will not be providing an appropriate curriculum for the Anthropocene.
  • 2. that will require us to campaign for the DFE to create and mandate additional learning to close all of these gaps in understanding.
  • 3. If they fail to do that, we will have to mobilise through our unions and campaigning organisations to produce such material ourselves – from posters, to lesson and assembly plans, to webinars/online learning materials for colleagues to adapt – and push them through during the trade union year of action starting in September, to build such learning into every school’s climate action plan.
  • Trust in “politicians” is low. This isn’t clearly differentiated, because some politicians are more trustworthy than others. But now that we have every Party from the Conservatives rightwards explicitly opposing action to meet “Net Zero” – thereby breaking with the scientific imperative to meet it – it becomes even more important for schools to ground our future citizens in the facts of the world they will be dealing with. As there is no need to teach a balance between scientific reality and denial, Parties that break from the scientific reality, and fail to rise to the challenge of meeting it, are putting themselves outside consideration as relevant forces that should be taken seriously.
  • Students, sensibly enough, do not trust the tabloids. But the BBC, which they trust more, often has its news agenda, and the framework they put stories in, set by them. Looking at trust, or distrust, in social media will also be a vital part of developing critical awareness of bias and manipulation in media coverage. Perhaps counting the number of times that the tabloids attach phrases like “madness” to “net zero” or “swivel eyed” to “targets”, might make a revealing set of graphs…

A personal note

This image is a montage of times. The factory in the background is the Wouldham cement works in Thurrock in 1951.

The photo is on the wall in the Grays branch of Morrisons, which has a nice line in sepia industrial nostalgia. The Wouldham was already a ruin by the 1960s, but there were several other huge cement works along the side of the Thames up towards Purfleet.

Growing up back then on the wrong side of the prevailing winds is probably one reason I’m so prone to coughs. All these plants are now gone. Lakeside has taken their place. The carbon, and pollution, footprint of retail is a lot less than that of cement, which has been outsourced to other countries, which suffer the pollution and have to carry the can for the carbon footprint, even when some of the products are exported back here.

The Wouldham is significant for me in another respect. My great grandfather, John Henry Ellis, worked there and was killed in an industrial accident – falling into one of the storage tanks he worked in in 1931.

Trump is proof that the World can’t survive another “New American Century”

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

My speech at the “Trump Climate Disaster” Rally outside the US Embassy (11/1/25).

The new US Ambassador that Trump is installing in that Vice Regal fortress behind us – and, I’ve got to say that that’s a very wide moat they’d got there, which makes you wonder what they are anticipating – is a guy called Warren Stephens.

Stephens is an investment banker from Arkansas, whose company holds huge oil concessions in the Gulf of Mexico (which Trump wants to rename the Gulf of America). He is also a climate smartarse – someone who likes to use pseudo scientific one liners to deflect from the seriousness of climate change, which are only convincing for those determined to be convinced and unwilling to ask any questions to puncture their own delusions.

He will have two jobs above all.

One will be to push the UK government off its agenda for green transition.

Trump wants “no windmills” in the USA and “no windmills” in the North Sea.

If renewables are abandoned, the limited reserves in the North Sea means that, even if they were maxed out, they would be unable to fill the gap in energy needs; which would have to be made up by very expensive imports of US Liquifid Natural Gas, which we now know has a carbon footprint 33% worse than that of coal.

If the government succumbs to that pressure -which is being pushed “patriotically” by the Conservativbes and Reform now as Trump’s Fifth Column, with the media in a screaming descant in support – it would be a spectacular act of self harm that will impoverish people on a grand scale and make climate damage a lot worse.

His other main priority will be to push the US militarisation drive.

Trump wants NATO allies spending 5% of their GDP on their militaries. Thats more than double the current average.

Neil Kinnock seems to think that 4% is “reasonable”.

This is NOT because they are under any threat militarily. Direct US allies account for 2/3 to 3/4 of global military spending already (depending on what estimates you use).

This collosal concentration of coercive power polices the transfer of $10 Trillion from the Global South to the Global North every year.

This is why countries want to join NATO. It makes them part of the imperial core. As Anthony Blinken put it, “if you are not at the table with us, you’re on the menu”. The problem now though is that being at the table with the US is a bit like having dinner with “the late, great Hannibal Lecter”, as Trump might put it. You can never be sure when the host is going to trun round and take a bite out of you. But you can be sure that he will do so at some point.

Doubling that level of expenditure cannot be seen as a defensive measure. It only makes sense if they are planning wars of aggression.

That is explicitly proclaimed by the UK Defence Review, which talks of being in a “pre war situation”, and there is overt talk of the British Army having to be ready to fight a major land war in Europe within the next ten years. This is completely mad and suicidal.

The impulse for this is partly that the US is losing ground to China very fast economically, but also because, in the context of the climate crisis, US society as it currently stands – and the wealth of the feral billionaires who are running its government – can only be sustained if they can put the Global South in general, and China in particular, back in its box.

They are fully aware that the climate crisis is real. All the denialist stuff is just prolefeed. An example of this is the US Army Report from 2019 that argued that,

  • left unchecked, the climate crisis would lead to a social collapse in the US itself at some point this century
  • the US Army had to be ready to intervene to make sure that the new oil and gas reserves revealed by melting polar ice caps would be under the control of the US – annexation of Greenland anyone?.

This would be extreme cognitive dissonance if they did not have a perspective where they could maintain a per capita carbon footprint the size of a Diplodocus, so long as most of the world barely has one at all.

So, the United States can no longer pretend to be anyone’s elses future, not even its own.

The problem they will have with this is that the costs of carrying through this massive shift of resources into militarisation will lead to massive economic and political crises.

To be specific. For the UK to spend 5% of its GDP on its military would cost an additional £60 -70 billion a year. Mark Rutte of NATO has very kindly suggested that this could come from Health and Pensions. Nice. We can be absolutely clear that it would also have to come from green infrastructure investment.

Flood defences? Why would we need those when we can trust to luck?

Ditto investing in fire prevention, because there’s no problem with wild fires is there?

Insulating homes? That would have to go. People can stay patriotically cold.

Electrified railways and affordable public transport? Who needs that when there’s weapons to buy?

So, if the government capitulates to this pressure we will face

  • extinction from climate breakdown in the long term, because they won’t have invetsed enough to stop it or limit the damage
  • extinction from nuclear war in the medium term, because they are investing in preparing for that and seem oblivious to the risks
  • misery and impoverishment in the immediate term to pay for it.

All to defend a “rules based international order” in which – as we’ve seen this week with the US sanctions on the International Criminal Court as punishment for the Gaza indictments – the US makes the rules, and the rest of us are expected to follow the orders. The US is not interested in global leadership, it is interested in global domination.

You can’t build a wall to keep this out.

Millions across the world will resist this – including in Europe and the US itself. Trump’s polices are likely to blow up in his face. His tariffs, if imposed, will be ruinous.

People do not want to be poor. They do not want to be killed in a war. They want more action to keep us safe from climate breakdown. Let’s mobilise that majority, with the trade union year of action from this September as a lever.

I’ll end with an advert. Just down the road from here, on Clapham Manor Street, is the only trade union owned pub in the World, called, perhaps inevitably, Bread and Roses. On 23 January at 7pm it is hosting a showing of the latest Reel News film about the inspirational GKN Firenze factory occupation, and another supporting Vauxhall workers resisting Stellantis closing their plant.

Everyone is welcome.

Labour’s Climate Strategy – strengths and weaknesses.

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

This was an introduction given at the Campaign Against Climate Change Trade Union Group’s energy strategy day. Afterthoughts and updates, like the next few paragraphs, have been added in bold.

This introduction was delivered before Keir Starmer’s speech at COP 29, which made the very welcome pledge of an 81% cut in carbon emissions by 2035, but also included the promise that the government would not “tell people how to live their lives”.

This makes the way we live now somehow sacrosanct- and assumes that “people” are incapable of rising to the challenge of changing it if thats whats needed to secure a livable world for their children and grandchildren. It also ducks the government’s responsibility to implement Article 12 of the Paris Agreement which is a call for mass popular information, education and mobilisation campaigns, to enable society to act collectively to save itself.

Parties shall cooperate in taking measures, as appropriate, to enhance climate change
education, training, public awareness, public participation and public access to information,
recognizing the importance of these steps with respect to enhancing actions under this
Agreement.

As 66% of the public want more action to combat climate change, we should be mobilised to do so. We will have to get to sustainability by marching forward on both the technological transformation leg and the social transformation leg. We won’t get there if we have to hop hopefully on just one of them.

Labour’s strengths and weaknesses

I’d like to stress that there are a range of views in the Greener Jobs Alliance, and these are mine.

To start with a statement of the obvious, it doesn’t look as though the government sees itself as an instrument to mobilise society to transform itself to sustainability.

They treat the climate crisis as an item on a list – limited to a mission to make the UK a “Green Energy Superpower” – not the framework in which everything else has to be posed.

That leaves huge gaps. Some examples.

1.The current curriculum review for schools does not explicitly have addressing the climate crisis at the heart of it, although the current Ministerial team are open to a discussion about it in a way that the last was not.

2.A climate conscious budget would, as a minimum,

i) have raised fuel duty and hypothecated the revenue to keep the £2 bus fare cap and invested the rest in enhanced public transport.

ii) raised a wealth tax on incomes above £10 million per annum, as suggested by Greenpeace – to raise £130 billion over 5 years (1% of GDP) which, they argue, would raise the revenue to cover insulating 19 million homes, cap bus fares outside London at £1.65, and free for under 25s, fund an unlimited rail ticket for £49, provide retraining for the 3.2 million workers at risk in high carbon industries and shift agriculture onto an agro- ecological basis.

That might be optimistic, but its that scale of ambition thats needed, along with a relentless explanation of why its necessary as a national and international mission.

And to play fantasy Chancellor a little longer, a recommitment to the £28 billion a year future proofing investment with a plan for every sector that works with the relevant unions to develop it and identify the skills gaps that have to be filled. This applies to expanding sectors as well as high carbon sectors that will have to shrink.

Reeves and Starmer’s overall strategy is for “growth” – any growth – conceived in completely traditional terms, not framed as transformation. This can sometimes even be framed in a way that undermines the government’s own targets -as expressed in the recent Sun article under Starmer’s name headlined – “I will never sacrifice Great British Industry to the drum beating, finger wagging Net Zero Zealots”.

I guess that’s us. Perhaps we should all get badges.

Also, I don’t know if its just me, but does all this “Great British this, Great British that” have a really early Victorian feel to it?

3. This can also be seen in housing. The challenge is to build 1.5 million new homes a year. The GJA wrote to Angela Rayner in October last year whether all new homes would be

i) built to a zero carbon standard, with a sound level of insulation, heat pumps, electric cookers and hubs, solar panels as standard and no connection to the gas grid (as this would be a wasted investment).

ii) with all essential facilities within walking distance, integrated green spaces and trees, good public transport links and car clubs to reduce the burden of individual car ownership.

iii) zero impact assessments on water tables and sewage and other questions including who will build them? Arguing that there needs to be a plan to expand Local Authority Direct Labour Organisations with a link to local FE colleges to skill up the new workers we will need to do it

iv) And, crucially, the last question. If the aim is to use existing developers, how will you prevent them from blackmailing the government to water down standards to enable them to squeeze in more units, cut the proportion of social housing, sit on land banks and refuse to develop them, or claim that necessary environmental standards impact on their profits too much?

We didn’t get a reply, but there are indications that they could let developers rip through reducing planning restrictions even on the water table and sewage – which is quite extraordinary, given the massive concern about sewage in our rivers – and there are signs of a retreat on a solar panel default after push back from the industry which shows where the battle is. New rules ensuring that no new homes are connected to the gas grid are, however, scheduled to come into force by 2027 and implemented from 2028. The key question now is how stringent the environmental standards for new builds will be and not allowing the developers to kick the costs of meeting them onto households.

All this poses a question for the trade union approach to Just Transition. At the moment, the new TUC Worker Led Transition Team is focussed on enabling a transition in threatened high carbon sectors – cars, cement, steel etc – which is vital and important work, but we also need campaigns for employment that doesn’t currently exist. Construction and retrofit are probably the most promising sector for this.

The TUC WLT have been working since May and you can read about them and find their contact details in the latest Greener Jobs Alliance Newsletter.

Just Transition doesn’t have to mean like for like jobs. I saw in Edie this week that there’s a skills gap for 50% of the jobs projected as “green” by 2030 – which indicates a huge demand and potential, but also a risk if that gap isn’t filled.

4. This also applies to Foreign Policy. David Lammy made a speech in September stating that the government would put climate change at the heart of UK foriegn policy.

Wouldn’t it be lovely if it did?

For him this had three components.

i) A “clean power alliance” to scale up finance for “clean power” in the Global South.

ii) Measures to unlock global finance to “leapfrog fossil fuels” there.

iii) Implementation of the 30 by 30 agreement (safeguarding 30% of land and oceans by 2030).

The problems with this are that the UK went to the recent Nature COP without a plan for 30/30. “Clean power” is sometimes used as a synonym for “green power” but it is also often used, especially in the US, as a specific description for the cluster of technologies being posed as an alternative to renewables; nuclear, hydrogen, carbon capture and storage.

Most crucially, unlocking finance does not mean increasing aid levels – which are still at 0.5% of GDP, with no plans even to get back up to 0.7%.

What Lammy means is trying to find investment opportunities for the City of London/UK finance sector. For this to work it would have to be profitable for them, as banks follow the money; which is why they have invested twenty times as much in carbon bombs as the Global South has received in climate finance since the Paris Agreement was signed in 2015.

So this is a bit greenwashy, especially as the actual heart of UK Foreign policy is not prioritising fighting the climate crisis, but its strategic subordination to the United States; expressed this week by Starmer “looking forward” to working with Trump “in defence of our shared values” – even as Trump is poised to exit the Paris Agreement and trash all domestic environment protection measures and even the bodies that monitor them.

The question posed by this is the extent to which the government will adapt to US pressure; particularly as this is finding expression here in the alignment of every political force from the Tories rightwards on opposition to “the madness of Net Zero” or the “costs of Net Zero” as they put it. The use of these phrases is now ubiquitous and serves to associate “Net Zero” with “madness“ in people’s minds – pushed as it is by “eco zealots” and therefore by definition unreasonable – without the inconvenience of having to make an argument to justify the association; which they have to do because both are the opposite of the truth. The only thing mad about Net Zero is not reaching it in time, the costs of not getting there are enormous and, indeed, fatal.

As will be the end result of the increased military spending that they falsely pose as keeping us “safe”.

One aspect of US pressure is to sharply increase and prioritise military spending. Starmer is due to announce a schedule for the UK to increase its military spending to 2.5% of GDP straight after Trump’s inauguration, which will do little to appease him when he’s pushing for an eye watering 4%. This is dangerous in itself, but also sucks resources away from investing in transition and/or improving people’s lives; thereby deepening the cost of living crisis and the risk of war.

This is in the context of some EU leaders going to Trump, according to the FT, and suggesting “lets avoid a tariff war and team up against China”; thereby proposing to form a bloc with a climate rogue state against the world’s largest investor in renewable energy.

At the same time they are relaxing their formerly sacred fiscal rules to allow stepped up investment in military production and military focussed infrastructure investment, like strengthening bridges “so tanks can pass in safety” – to prepare for a continental war with Russia which, were it to happen, would kill us all. It is an explicit presumption of the current UK Defence Review that we are in ” a pre war period” with Russia, Iran, China, North Korea, or all four. This is suicidal lunacy and we don’t have to accept it.

In the context of Trump expecting these ruinous increases in military spending from all US subordinate allies, a better course for all of them is to seek peace and mutual security with the targetted countries. In Europe, that means finding a modus vivendi with the Russians that would allow a lasting peace in Ukraine – not just a pause while both sides feel they have to tool up for Armageddon – and a reduction in tensions and barriers across the whole of Eurasia.

5) Lastly, on the “Green Energy Superpower” project, there is good news and bad news.

The good news is

i) the unblocking of onshore wind and solar farms,

ii) the 2.5 times increase in offshore wind in this years Contracts for Difference auction – though this needs to double again next year and stay at that level to meet the 2030 target

iii) getting a fast feasibility study done from NEOS that its possible to get the grid in shape to take on all the new renewable energy sources – and finding that this would cut people’s bills

iv) moving zombie projects out of the planning system so those most ready can go first

…all this is positive and means there will be a substantial increase in renewable energy by 2030.

But,

i) The investment in CCUS and blue hydrogen announced last month is a misallocation of funds that could have more of a climate impact and create more jobs elsewhere.

ii) The failure to maintain the original plan for retrofit means that demand and emissions will be higher than they need to be.

iii) As does the insufficient focus on sustainable transport and the continued low funding for local authorities that makes most local climate action plans well intentioned and doing some good things – from bee corridors to LTNs and cycle paths, public EV charging points, officially approved guerilla gardening, school streets programmes and so on, but not resourced enough to qualitatively impact neighbourhoods.

Above all, and overarching, this is the lack of just transition bodies with mass participation at national. regional and local levels because, if I can misquote Lenin, Sustainability = electrification plus Just Transition Commissions.

Judge not, lest ye be judged.

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

In Colin Welland’s 1989 adapatation of Andre Brink’s novel A Dry White Season, the barrister played by Marlon Brando comments “Justice and law, Mr. Du Toit, are often just… well they’re, I suppose they can be described as distant cousins. And here in South Africa, well, they’re simply not on speaking terms at all.”

Judge Christopher Hehir, in his conduct of the case against the Just Stop Oil defendants, Roger Hallam, Daniel Shaw, Louise Lancaster, Lucia Whittaker De Abreu, and Cressida Gethin, who he has just sent down for 4 to 5 years in prison for “conspiracy to cause a public nuisance”, has done his best to make people realise just how true that is of the UK too.

His summing up is almost beyond satire in its sophisticated mulishness. Talking of the breakdown of the climactic conditions needed for human civilisation to survive, this bewigged buffoon said, “I acknowledge that at least some of the concerns are shared by many, but the plain fact is that each of you has some time ago crossed the line from concerned campaigner to fanatic”.

Lets break that down. “some of the concerns are shared by many”. The issue is not “concern” at climate breakdown it is the FACT of climate breakdown. This is not in serious dispute. Even the outgoing government’s “Impartiality guidance” for teachers noted that climate denial is not serious science and should not be taught.

Parliament has voted that we are in a “climate emergency”. This does not seem to have got through to Mr Justice Hehir.

So, this is not about opinions. Nor is it about how “many” people share them. It is a matter of UK law that the government has to decarbonise society by 2050. The last government’s plans to meet this target have been ruled inadequate by the UK High Court TWICE in the last two years. The consequences of a failure to meet this target will be considerably more severe than the £750,000 worth of disruption that the M25 protest is estimated to have caused. Would the Judge think it reasonably therefore to bang up Rishi Sunak, Claire Countinho, and the “Net Zero Scrutiny Group” (now happily depleted by the democratic process) for “conspiring” to put the UK well off course for reaching them, as they did in the more salubrious surroundings of the Cabinet Office, and probably on a few zoom calls as well?

It is also a matter of International legal obligation under the Paris Agreement that countries are working together to make this work. Except that the course taken by the last government clearly, in the judgement of the Climate Change Committee – the cross Party body set up to hold government to account for its actions, “signalled a slowing of pace and reversed or delayed key policies” which put the UKs progress below the curve.

In the context of an emergency that has not not been treated as an emergency, in which a lackadaisaical business as usual laziness was passed off as “pragmatism”, any “concerned campaigner” might reasonably conclude that more serious action was needed to make it plain that this is not OK, that the majority opinion, that wants more action on climate not less, should be heard. A “fanatic”, on the other hand, is someone who holds a view unreasonably and in the face of evidence to the contrary. The “plain fact” is that there is no evidence to the contrary in the case of climate breakdown. We can feel and see it happening around us. The consequences of failing to act to limit the damage will be catastrophic. Providing the protection of the law to, for example, banks that finance climate wrecking fossil fuel investments and making an example of people who, for example, take a demonstrative hammer to one of their windows, with punitive multi year sentences for a bit of cracked plate glass shows the same sense of proportion that, 220 years back, hanged Luddites for smashing stocking frames.

A keen advocate of crushing dissent on climate or Palestine by criminalising it has been the last government’s “Security Adviser”, Lord Walney, or plain old John Woodcock MP as he used to be. An acid test for whether the new government will continue down this path will be whether Walney retains his role and continues to be given credence. He should be sacked.

A basic principle of common law is that, for it to retain consent, it has to be seen to be “reasonable” to “the average man (or woman) on the Clapham onmibus”. The lengths to which the judge in this case went to silence the defendents in court, ruling that defendents were not allowed to speak to the jury about why they had done what they did, underlines his fear that the judgement of their 12 peers would be that this was a reasonable and proportionate response to the scale of the crisis and the paucity of action taken to address it. Defendents allowed to put this kind of public interest defence, however unpopular many of the JSO actions have been, have tended to be aquitted by Juries in the last few years. Can’t have that. Where will it all end?

When a judge orders the arrest of people standing outside the court holding placards affirming the rights of juries to hear the whole truth, for contempt of court, it is clear that the legal process as an arbiter of justice is being held in contempt by such a judge; which invites popular scorn for “the rule of law”, “Fundamental British Value” or not.

Mae West put it rather well in 1927.

Judge: “Miss West, are you trying to show contempt for this court?”

Mae West: “On the contrary, your Honor, I was doin’ my best to conceal it.”

Mythbuster 1. Over heating is good for you?

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

As we move into a period in which the powers that be will be retreating and retrenching on climate policy, we can expect discredited arguments and factoids to be churned out with dreary regularity; so that anyone who does not want to confront the realities we face has a set of one liners to trot out to deflect thought and effort.

This series of blogs is aimed at giving workers and activists the information we need to debunk these claims if a workmate, friend or relative comes out with one of them.

A recently distributed leaflet, very glossy but with no publisher acknowledged, makes the claim that Humans thrive in warm climates straight after arguing that the world is not heating up; stating Humans have always thrived in warm climates. Even if the world were warming, warmth is by no means a threat, ice ages ARE. Every year many more people die in the colder winter months, even in the UK, see ONS data”.

The key word here is “warm”. We are already getting well beyond that. Here’s some examples, with thanks to Simon Erskine for compiling them. These arguments will be useful in the context of “Phew! What a scorcher!” and “Hotter than Morroco!” headlines in the tabloids. For those who can absorb anecdotes more easily than statitsics, a useful question is, “Have you noticed how, until a few years ago, every time we had a heatwave people used to go out and sunbathe, but now, have you noticed how people go out and sit in the shade under the tres because the heat is becoming uncomfortable?”

  • Zimbabwe’s president Emmerson Mnangagwa has declared a national disaster amid a prolonged drought that has destroyed about half the country’s maize crop, BBC News reports. He joins neighbouring nations in southern Africa, Zambia and Malawi, both of which have recently declared similar states of emergency, the article adds.
  • “Unprecedented” temperatures are being reached across south-east Asia, including in parts of Vietnam, Thailand and Myanmar, according to the Guardian. It points to lengthy spells of dry weather in Indonesia driving up rice prices and fears that coral is under threat in Thailand due to high water temperatures. The newspaper says the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) has “attributed the scorching weather to human-induced climate change, as well as the El Niño event, which brings hotter, drier conditions to the region”.
  • In Santiago, Chile, an 11-day heatwave has ended, becoming “the longest in history,” according to Raúl Cordero, a climatologist at the University of Santiago, La Tercera reports.
  • The UK may face water shortages and hosepipe bans this summer, despite recording record-breaking rainfall over the past 18 months, the Times reports. The i newspaper notes that the UK population has increased by 10 million over the past three decades, while “climate change has put pressure on existing reserves”. The Guardian reports that the Environment Agency released a report last week, which “predicts a growing shortfall of water in coming years, leading to a deficit of almost 5bn litres of water a day by 2050”. The National Farmers Union has warned that flooding and other extreme weather linked to climate change will undermine UK food production, BBC News reports. The article says this comes after “record-breaking rain over the past few months”, which “has left fields of crops under water and livestock’s health at risk”.
  • Russia and Kazakhstan have ordered more than 100,000 people to evacuate after melting snow swelled rivers beyond bursting point, leading to the worst flooding in the area for at least 70 years, reports Reuters.
  • The United Arab Emirates has been hit by an intense storm, with the country experiencing its heaviest rains in 75 years, according to meteorological authorities, reports the Financial Times. Almost 6 inches (152mm) of rain fell on the capital Dubai on Tuesday, a year and a half’s worth of rain in a single day, causing travel disruptions, reports the Independent. In related news, the death toll from flooding in Pakistan has risen to 63, the Associated Press reports.
  • The deadly heatwave that hit West Africa and the Sahel over recent weeks would have been “impossible” without human-induced climate change, scientists have said, reports BBC News. Temperatures in Mali soared to above 48C, with one hospital linking hundreds of deaths to the extreme heat, it continues. Researchers found that human activities such as burning fossil fuels made temperatures up to 1.4C hotter than normal, the article adds. On 3 April, temperatures hit 48.5C in the south-western city of Kayes in Mali, with intense heat continuing for more than five days and nights, giving no time for vulnerable people to recover, reports the Guardian.
  • The “unprecedented” warming of the oceans over the past year has had widespread repercussions on marine life, an EU environment chief has warned, reports the Financial Times. This includes impacting already dwindling native fish species such as Baltic Sea Cod, the European commissioner for the environment, oceans and fisheries Virginijus Sinkevičius said, citing the migration of the cod towards colder waters near Russia and Norway as an example of the impact on biodiversity of rising temperatures, it adds.
  • The past 10 months have all set new all-time monthly global temperature records, with April 2024 on track to extend this streak to 11, wrote Dr Zeke Hausfather in his latest quarterly “state of the climate” report for Carbon Brief. The graph at the end of this email shows monthly temperatures over 1940-2024, plotted with respect to a 1850-1900 baseline. Based on the year so far and the current El Niño forecast, Carbon Brief estimates that global temperatures in 2024 are likely to average out at around 1.5C above pre-industrial levels.
  • The Independent reports that a “punishing heatwave” has forced the government in Bangladesh to shut schools for 33 million children “as the country battles the hottest April in three decades”. The Guardian has an article with the headline, “Wave of exceptionally hot weather scorches south and south-east Asia”. It says millions of people across the Philippines, Thailand, Bangladesh and India are facing dangerous temperatures as the hottest months of the year are made worse by El Niño.
  • Mexico: Drought spreads to almost 80% of the country; there are 10 states with 100% of municipalities affected.
  • As India heads to polls amid 45C heat, fears mount over voters’ safety. Bloomberg columnist David Fickling asks: “How can India hold elections when it’s too hot to vote?”
  • The Washington Post carries a feature headlined: “Earth’s record hot streak might be a sign of a new climate era.” It says Nasa’s Dr Gavin Schmidt indicates that what happens in the next few months…could indicate whether Earth’s climate has undergone a fundamental shift – a quantum leap in warming that is confounding climate models and stoking ever more dangerous weather extremes”.

Now that this is the trend, unions are developing stronger guidelines for working in extreme heat. This is a serious matter as some right wing

TUC guidelines are here. Individual unions will also have their own polices. Joint guidelines for the education sector are here.

Of Pies and Doughnuts – 30 theses on Political and Economic issues in Green Transition.

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

“I wouldn’t start from here if I were you…” Trad.

  1. The first point that we have to be clear about is that we are now in a period of damage limitation. Continued emissions of greenhouse gases are putting humanity well behind the curve of saving ourselves from the breakdown of the climactic conditions needed for the survival of human civilisation. In the current relationship of forces, the question is not whether we can avoid the crisis, but how much damage we can avoid. As we need far more dramatic shifts that current political and economic relations allow, we have to seize and build on any and every change that is immediately possible in order to bank it – limit the damage – and build on it to have any prospect of breaking through the limits of those conditions. It is imperative to do both.
  2. The paradox is that fossil fuel interests are now under such a threat from the transition that is already taking place, even at its current slow pace, that they are putting significant resources into political movements that are either denialist, like Trump, Bolsonaro, Milei, or go slow, like Sunak. The dynamic of this is towards denialism; in practice if not in theory. This dovetails with the impasse of neoliberalism, which requires a dramatic shift in the balance of power against the working class and Global South to restore profitability and capital formation in the US allied countries. This tends towards fascism; because “normal” politics will be incapable of imposing that scale of defeat required. The question here is not whether Trump, for example, is a fascist, but whether the movement he fronts up (and which is an expression of very powerful class forces) is heading in that direction. This tendency is not inevitable, but has to be seen for what it is. As the inequality of wealth, and stratospheric concentration among the wealthiest has increased, political acceptance of democratic constraints among the wealthiest has declined sharply. Resistance to this is one of the motors of transformation.
  3. Fascism is a last resort for ruling classes because it is ultimately suicidal, requires exponential escalation of confrontation to a point of total victory or total defeat: but the prospect of ecological collapse makes this less of an inhibition in a kind of last days of Nazi Berlin recklessness; and generates the sort of exuberantly self indulgent celebration of irrationality that is such a feature of movements like MAGA.
  4. The capitalist class is divided on climate, however. Significant capital is going into renewable energy, electric vehicles, and other key transition sectors. Others are perturbed about the future, and want there to be one. We should note that there was a significant participation from private school students in the climate strikes for example. If you expect the world to be your oyster, then find out it is going to hell in a handcart, you’re going to be upset about it. It is also noticeable that the active cadre of climate denialism in the Global Warming Policy Foundation are not only rich enough to be part of the global 1%, they are also almost entirely over 70 years old. Lord Lawson, of course, is already dead.
  5. This division also plays out not simply in “green sector” businesses, among scientists and academia, but also at different levels in government. Cities are vital laboratories for a green social shift. The C40 movement, the most important legacy of the Livingstone Mayoralty in my view, knits together the Mayors of nearly 100 of the world’s biggest cities from New York to London to Jakarta to Beijing, Paris and Buenos Aires. All of them are working on ways to green construction, transport, urban planning, waste and recycling; and sharing the results in a vast process of mutual experimentation and shared learning. You can read about that here. The need to make such a conscious shift in every aspect of life is a new challenge and no one has all the answers. We are making it up as we go along, and any and every lever we have any access to is vital. Every small step that works is a seed, because it shows what might be done on a bigger scale. These cities cover a multitude of political sins, and at present it could not be otherwise. And they make a big contribution to the Paris process. Actions taken by US cities aligned with C40, and to some extent States, reduced the impact of Trump’s rollback on climate measures during his last Presidency by about half. Whatever the political character, and limitations, of the Mayors of NY and LA and the other cities involved, this is essential work. This could be seen as an application of Gramsci’s notion that we are in a war of position, seeking to gain ground in a myriad of social forms and organisations as part of the process of shifting hegemony towards a point that the old unsustainable order cracks.
  6. Nevertheless, pro Net Zero views among capitalists tends to a kind of techno Micawberism – the view that technological changes alone, leaving existing social and economic structures intact – will be enough. Given the studies by Oxfam and others that show that the carbon emissions of the wealthiest 10% will, at current consumption rates, take us beyond 1.5C on their own, regardless of what the rest of us do, this poses the limits of any bloc with them, and also a rule of thumb guideline for how much income is too much in global terms; roughly anything above £75,000 per person at the moment. For people above this, getting to sustainability will be harder than a camel threading a needle, but there we are. We can travel to sustainability, but not in private jets or yachts.
  7. The climate movement is necessarily broad. We should be prepared for united fronts across wide disagreements on other matters and to have debates within the movement; and also form blocs with different class forces on particular issues without doing so on their terms. Offshore wind companies, for example, are as ruthless to their workers as any others. This is a contradiction that we have to fight out within the imperative to have as many of them built as we can.
  8. The same applies to limited and inadequate political choices which reflect capitalist interests first and human imperatives a long way below. A continued Biden Presidency, for example, would continue to pursue an “America First” green transition, as well as its global war drive against China, arming the IDF assault on Gaza, channeling capital into military spending and sucking green investment away from even its subordinate allies. A Trump Presidency would make the US a complete rogue state on climate, smash up the Paris process, double down on fossil fuels, and spice up the war drive with what Boris Johnson calls “unpredictable violence”. Leon Trotsky’s argument in The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany –that when you are confronted by two people who are going to kill you, but one has a gun and the other some slow poison, you bloc with the poisoner against the gunman, while building up your own forces so you can deal with the poisoner later – is relevant to this.
  9. Either way, the dominant ruling class in the US centred Global North bloc, for all its protestations of global leadership, will not lead humanity into sustainability. The ease with which they have found billions for wars, and now escalating military spending, compares starkly with the difficulty they seem to have providing climate finance for the Global South.
  10. The ideologues of the world’s imperial core have warned us of what they are going to do. In “The Age of Consequences” a projection of potential climate scenarios drawn up by allies of Al Gore in the US Democrat Party in 2008 stated quite clearly that in conditions in which climate driven “massive non linear events” began to unravel societies, “Governments with resources will be forced to engage in long, nightmarish episodes of triage, deciding what and who can be salvaged from engulfment by a disordered environment. The choices will need to be made primarily among the poorest, not just abroad but at home.” When someone tells you who they are, believe them.
  11. This is not simply a question of a confrontation with capitalism, it is a question of confronting imperialism in the first instance. The concentration of the major imperial powers into a US led Global North bloc – described by the Tricontinental Institute as Hyper Imperialism – is the last stand of an order that extracts wealth from the rest of the world, seeks to make its own working classes complicit in doing so, is arming itself to the teeth to confront the consequences of its failure to deal with the climate crisis; and is risking war rather than peacefully come to terms with China becoming economically weightier than the US, thereby accepting multipolarity. This means that we may not live long enough to experience the full consequences of climate breakdown, should the kind of US strategic thinkers advocating a war with China in the next five years manage to provoke one. If we manage to avert this – and it will take efforts on our part – the diversion of investment into military spending will cut essential investment in climate transition and do enormous and unnecessary damage anyway. We won’t get this time back.
  12. John Bellamy Foster’s call for an anti imperialist climate movement to address the twin threats of 21st Century exterminism, the US war drive and climate breakdown, is essential, in that there needs to be clarity on this on the Left, but also insufficient, in that there need to be united fronts with forces that are not on the Left, and forces on the Left that don’t see themselves as anti imperialist in the way that Bellamy Foster (or I) would; and this is a dynamic process.
  13. The role of the countries that see themselves as Socialist is a more positive one than they are usually given credit for in the climate and labour movements in the Global North. Whether this is Cuba being considered a sustainability model by the UN, or China investing twice as much in energy transition as the US and EU put together this year, or high speed rail investments as part of the Belt and Road initiative. This is examined in some detail here.  I use the phrase “countries that see themselves as Socialist” because large parts of the Left in the Global North don’t think that these countries are what they think Socialism is, but its important to take on board the fact that 90 million Chinese Communist Party members disagree with them – and that should pose (at least) a debate, with them, not about them. A good place to start getting a flavour of their views, and that of quite a broad range of the non Party Left is Wenhua Zongheng.
  14. Monthly Review has also made a serious reassessment of the Soviet Union’s ecological record, stressing that the ecological disasters, for which it is well known, generated a significant environmental movement, and big shifts in state policy with real impacts, particularly in the 1980s after Chernobyl; and that its overall environmental impact was no worse than that of the US. Anyone who has seen post industrial wastelands in the US will not find that hard to believe.
  15. The current escalation of extreme weather events is just the overture to impacts that will, on current trajectories, become locally or regionally unmanageable in the coming decades; posing political climate emergencies declared by local ruling classes seeking to survive at everyone else’s expense, confronting working class and popular resistance, forced into revolutionary solutions to seek survival. Developments of this sort can’t help but have a dramatic political ripple effect, transforming debate and actions globally. Columbian President Petro’s insight that Gaza is a dress rehearsal for what the Global North will increasingly impose on the rest of the world as the climate breaks down should also be seen as a promise of the sort of global solidarity it has generated. with the sharp political learning curve, shake up and shake down of allegiances and organisations that goes with it. As Bellamy Foster puts it; “A revolt by the world’s environmental proletariat …, in which hundreds of millions, even billions, of people will inevitably take part, is destined to come about in the coming decades as a result of the struggle for ecological survival.”
  16. We are the majority and should act to mobilise it. When Just Stop Oil in the UK says “We need a revolution”, they are proposing a combination of continued non violent direct actions with assemblies to mobilise local communities around matters of concern. We should not be formulaic about what forms “assemblies” should take; as they will necessarily be multiple and will obviously include workplaces; and in some cases, these will be the core of a wider social mobilisation, as they are at GKN Firenze.
  17. We should also be clear that any NVDA must be directed at appropriate targets and all actions be aimed at mobilising the majority opinion in favour of more urgent climate action, not substituting for that in ways that provide climate deniers with a popular stick to beat us with. JSO has not always been sensitive to that. Nevertheless, initiatives like this are part of the war of position. Revolutions, and counter revolutions, take place when a social order breaks down to a point that it can no longer go on. That is when the war of position becomes a war of manoeuvre and ecological breakdown or economic impasse or military confrontations can all be causes of that. (See point 13 above).
  18. In the UK, the biggest wave of climate activism, and optimism, coincided with the Corbyn leadership of the Labour Party, which held out the prospect of a UK government that would qualitatively up the investment in green transition. This fed off, and fed, a series of mass movements outside Parliament and Parliamentary thinking that nevertheless led to Parliament declaring a climate emergency and embedded concern for climate as a top 4 issue ever since.
  19. A Parliamentary Road to Sustainability now looks too long and winding to get to its destination anything like fast enough; with the level of investment being proposed by Labour quantitatively better than that already in place, but not to the qualitative degree we need. This is a damaging and retrograde choice by the Labour leadership. The failure of economic logic is examined here. Sir Nicholas Stern and others at the Grantham Institute have also demonstrated that the UK needs at least 1% of GDP to be invested in infrastructure every year to keep abreast of other developed countries. 1% of GDP is £26 billion. Which is a familiar sounding figure. Anything short of that allows continued decay.
  20. Rachel Reeves recent Mais lecture got the relationship between climate transition and “growth” completely the wrong way round; with the notion that any investment in green transition will flow from “growth” in the existing economy; within the framework of restrictive fiscal rules and respecting Tory spending plans that have baked in another five years of austerity. Reeves argues that Labour will aim to “grow the pie”, addressing issues of productivity with selective state pump priming. The scale of this is the problem. Cutting planned investment from £28 billion a year to only a little over what the Conservatives have already pencilled in, means that few pumps will be primed. Even with a “growth unit” in the Treasury, there will therefore be little growth, because there won’t be enough investment to generate it; and what growth there will be will primarily reproduce existing patterns of unsustainable production and consumption, not the sharp shift in the economy to a much lower carbon intensity overall that we need. Its not so much that the pie needs to be bigger, but it does need better, more nutritious ingredients, and to be shared qualitatively more equitably. That follows the climate imperative to reduce the overconsumption of the richest 10% outlined above. But Reeves’s approach rejects social redistribution, with all but the most limited taxes on the wealthy ruled out. We should not accept the poverty of low aspirations that passes for “realism” in Labour leadership circles and push for what is realistically necessary.
  21. “Growth” in the sense that Reeves poses it, is a way to generate benefits without confronting unsustainable inequalities of wealth and power; leaving them intact. Without differentiating between what is sustainable and what is not. “A rising tide lifts all boats”, but in current conditions, it also drowns all coastal cities.
  22. However, “degrowth” is not a good description of what we are trying to do; all too easily translated, in current circumstances, as “austerity”, or an unjust transition requiring the 90% to pay the price for the continued indulgence of the wealthiest 10%. Growth is completely legitimate and necessary in the developing world. The importance of a massive shift in investment to it is to enable this to happen without reliance on outmoded fossil fuel technology, in the same way that Africa has leapfrogged landlines to use Satphones. The failure of the Washington Consensus finance structure to make this finance available is structural and condemns the majority world to continued poverty and a pattern of development that is slow and unsustainable. In the Global North our movement has to be about transformation and regeneration, lowering carbon intensity without crashing majority living standards.
  23. The US bloc is trying to unravel globalisation, as it no longer provides it with global dominance. In cutting the world economy into parts, it breaks up shared efficiencies of scale, making all progress towards sustainability more costly. Local production is not always better than working with a global division of labour, and is often less so, even when transport costs are taken into account.
  24. “Extractivism” is also not a useful formulation, as, if we are to make anything at all, we need the raw materials to construct it; and that involves mining, refining and so on. The point here is to have the most economic – sparing – use of these materials, including the most effective possible circular reuse; and the best possible terms and conditions for the workers employed in the global supply chains; which is part of increasing the living standards of workers across the world as we head for sustainability.
  25. The food metaphors used in this discussion are unfortunate as, given the choice, most people would go for a fat pie over a thin doughnut.
  26. It is a statement of the obvious that, if we are to survive, some sectors of the economy have to shrink dramatically and, in some cases disappear, while others have to expand while the overall carbon intensity of everything made or done has to decrease. That requires continued technological innovation. We can’t presume a magic bullet, and can’t afford to wait for one, but at present there is a 2% annual improvement in efficiency and, according to the IEA, that needs to double to get us on track. That needs investment and coordination. So, the transition is necessarily technologically intense. The figures from the study that drew up maximum sustainable per capita energy consumption in Jonathan Essex’s recent article on the Greener Jobs Alliance blog were based on a presumption of everyone having equal access to the most advanced technology available. This is a long way from “Fully Automated Luxury Communism” but the technological dimension of maintaining a decent and sustainable way of life will be huge (and require the commensurate level of skills to sustain it).
  27. At present in the UK, even with stagnant “growth” in the conventional sense, and a transition that is going too slow, the number of jobs being created in “green” sectors is greater than those being lost in carbon heavy sectors.According to the ONS, in 2022, 8,500 jobs were lost in oil and gas, while 40,000 were created in low carbon and renewable energy sectors (almost 5 gained for every one lost). But, they are different jobs in different places. All investment, transition related or not, tends to substitute capital for labour, so transition for workers in threatened sectors must be addressed by any government, or movement, serious about making a shift with public support and avoid devastating local impacts like that at Port Talbot. Our movement should be about anticipating those shifts and for the unions and communities concerned to be ahead of what’s coming to make the appropriate demands for job guarantees, retraining and redeployment. If that does not happen, we end up in the ridiculous position whereby unions representing North Sea Oil and Gas workers campaign against the freeze on new exploration proposed by Labour, even though this is contrary to the interests of the working class as a whole.
  28. If you go to the TUC HQ in London, there is a magnificent painting by Dan Jones of the demonstration outside Pentonville prison in 1972 that was the strongest expression of the General Strike that freed the Pentonville 5. If you look at the banners being carried, most of them are from unions and union organisations that no longer exist. SOGAT. The Port of London Joint Shop Stewards Committee etc. This should stand as a warning to us today. A trade unionism that limits itself to bread and butter issues and the immediate perceived interests of members confines itself to trying to get a better deal in someone else’s world; and leaves strategic decisions about the future in the hands of a ruling class that will make them in a self interested way that will destroy whole sections of our movement. This is trade unionism that Gramsci would have described as “subaltern” and “corporate”. Another way to put it is that it is trade unionism that, however militant, ultimately knows its place.
  29. We need, instead, to push for Just Transition bodies at every level, in every sector and in every community; and push for a government that could, for example, approach the highly skilled workers making private jets and ask them, “with your skills, and this kit, what could you make instead that would benefit everyone?” and coordinates all initiatives through a National Climate Service. There are vast reservoirs of creativity, imagination and preparedness for hard work that could be harnessed in a universally understood human mission to save ourselves.
  30. Article 12 of Paris Agreement states that all signatories have to educate their populations on the nature of the crisis and the measures needed to deal with it. We should not interpret that as a sectoral point, but as a whole society obligation whereby society mobilises itself to deal with the crisis. Our movement has to lead that, or it won’t happen.