Sights & sounds of climate justice protest in Wellington

by Grant Brookes  

The collapse of the UN climate talks in Copenhagen, aimed at reaching a binding deal on greenhouse gas emissions, has dismayed people around the world. But it has also made it clearer that we can't rely on business leaders and politicians to solve the problem. The finger pointing has already begun, as political leaders from different countries blame each other for the failure to reach a deal.  

Conflict, rather than cooperation, was built into the talks from the start. The framework for negotiations was all about market mechanisms like emissions trading schemes, where businesses, nations and trading blocs try to secure competitive advantages over their rivals. Even if a deal had been reached at Copenhagen, it would not have been enough to prevent catastrophic climate change.

Emissions trading schemes – proposed by the National-led government and supported in principle by all the other parties in parliament except ACT, and by "Big Green" organisations like Greenpeace – simply allow corporations to pay for the right to cook the planet to death. Emissions trading schemes won't stop climate change and are unjust, shifting costs away from business and onto grassroots people and developing nations.  

This was the message of 150 people who took to the streets in Wellington on the morning of Monday, December 21. The protesters included a group of "Radical Cheerleaders" and a samba band. They took aim at the root causes of climate change, disrupting business at the NZX stock exchange and scaling the Ministry of Foreign Affairs & Trade building to unveil a banner, and were met by a group of counter-demonstrators claiming to belong to "Capitalism Represents Acceptable Policy" (C.R.A.P.). 

The protest came at the culmination of the first Camp for Climate Action Aotearoa in Upper Hutt, where 200 people came together for five days of sustainable living, education, direct action and movement building. Climate Camps (there have been at least 19 worldwide this year) seek to address the real causes of climate change and build a people's movement that can stop it. "

After the inevitable failure of yet another UN climate summit, it should now be clearer than ever that the only people we can count on to stop runanaway climate change are ourselves", said Climate Camp participant Claire Dann. 

  "Just like the New Zealand Emissions Trading Scheme, the UN climate talks are part of the problem, not the solution", added Gary Cranston. "Both put profit before people, both are infested with polluter friendly loopholes and as a result, neither are capable of achieving climate justice.  

"Trading carbon credits is used to give people the impression that something is being done about climate change, when it actually isn't.

"Ordinary people have the power to stop the government and big business from throwing away our future for continued profit. We invite everybody in Aotearoa to come and join the global movement for climate justice that will address the climate crisis".

Turn up the sound and click on the slideshow below. This is what the movement looks like, and sounds like.

 

For more info, visit http://withoutyourwalls.wordpress.com/

What we need is a just transition to a low carbon economy

by Tane Feary
8 November 2009

Mining in national parks in New Zealand is one of the National Governments suggested "solutions" to the economic crises and New Zealand's place in the financial world. This is yet another example of short term profit and long term environmental destruction. Nick Smith, the New Zealand climate and environment minister talks about balancing economics and the environment, what he is really talking about is bank balances.

New Zealand plays on a brand and image of being a "clean and green" country, yet reality suggests otherwise. Dirty dairy from corporate agriculture companies, coal mining and energy, motorway expansion and a raft of industries are being given the go ahead as they are financially lucrative, and provide a fast buck, the long term cost is not factored in, neither is the environmental cost.

Creating pollution markets does not alter the unsustainable nature of an economy built to make economic growth and profit out of the destruction of ecosystems. Until economics has environmental and social considerations, big business will continue to profit from ecologically and socially destructive activities. A low carbon economy would provide what carbon pollution markets never can.

Climate justice movement to converge on UN climate talks

from Without Your Walls The following statement was produced at the Climate Justice Action (CJA) meeting in Copenhagen 19-21 June. CJA is calling on all peoples around the planet to mobilize and take action against the root causes of climate change and the key agents responsible, both in Copenhagen and around the world.

Change the system, not the climate! Climate justice movement to converge on UN climate talks The UN climate talks will not solve the climate crisis. We are no closer to reducing greenhouse gas emissions than we were when international negotiations began fifteen years ago: emissions are rising faster than ever, while carbon trading allows climate criminals to pollute and profit. At present, the talks are essentially legitimising a new colonialism that carves up of the world’s remaining resources. Faced with the profound crisis of our civilisation, and the destructive impacts of the climate crisis on already marginalised communities, all we get is a political circus playing to the interests of corporations. In response to this madness, a global movement for climate justice has emerged to reclaim power over our future. As part of this, the international network Climate Justice Action is mobilising for mass actions across the world during the international climate negotiations in Copenhagen in December 2009. No more false solutions We cannot trust the market with our future, nor put our faith in unsafe, unproven and unsustainable technologies. Contrary to those who put their faith in “green capitalism”, we know that it is impossible to have infinite growth on a finite planet. Instead of trying to fix a destructive system, we should be:

• leaving fossil fuels in the ground
• reasserting peoples’ and community control over resources and production
• relocalising food production
• massively reducing overconsumption, particularly in the North
• recognising the ecological and climate debt owed to the peoples of the South and making reparations
• respecting indigenous and forest peoples’ rights

Real solutions to the climate crisis are being built by women and men, in both the South and the North, who fight every day to defend their environment and living conditions. We need to globalise these solutions and work for a just transition towards a zero-carbon future. Agreed at the Climate Justice Action meeting Copenhagen, 21 June 2009.

See Oxfam's recent dire report on the impact of Climate Change on the world's poorest

The Myth of the Efficient Car

Without divine intervention – which seems to be the basis for most energy reduction schemes – there is simply no way to maintain both the atmosphere and personal transportation. The personal automobile must be abandoned, and quickly. Read more at http://climateandcapitalism.com/?p=684

Global warming: NZ can and must act

by Auckland union activist 8 April 2009 A huge ice shelf in Antarctica is collapsing. See NZ rearranges deckchairs while ice shelf collapses This is more dramatic evidence that global warming is a reality. Yet still the right wing, who in the past denied that global warming was real and therefore we should do nothing, are still saying that we should still do nothing, because New Zealand's CO2 emissions are so small (less than 0.01% of world’s total) that curbing them will make no discernable difference and would just hurt business interests. But New Zealand can make a difference. When New Zealand declared itself Nuclear Weapons Free in 1987 the nuclear powers, in particular, the US, were so concerned that New Zealand's example could spread that they pressured and bullied Prime Minister Lange to make a globally circulated public statement that "this policy was not for export." Of course, people all over the world were inspired by NZ’s stance. And following our lead this policy was taken up within other Pacifica countries. The Fiji Anti Nuclear Group (FANG) in alliance with the powerful Fijian union movement was very influential, and influenced the anti-nuclear policy of the briefly elected Fiji Labour Party, before it was deposed by the US supported military coup in 1987. What NZ does is important. If we took serious steps to halt greenhouse gas emissions here, we could announce boldly that "this policy is for export". I’m sure we would be supported by our Pacifica neighbours and friends, who are already being directly affected by global warming. We can make a difference. A Climate Camp is being held at Parihaka 24-26 April. Participants will be discussing how to build a people's movement against climate change. Visit http://www.climatecamp.org.nz/HOME.html for more information. And for some background reading on NZ's nuclear-free policy read The Kiwi that Roared: Nuclear-Free New Zealand in a Nuclear-Armed World by Wade Huntley, an American academic.

Monbiot: We cannot afford to surrender

by George Monbiot 17 March 2009 from The Guardian It will be difficult and expensive to keep climate change to a minimum, but the alternative is unthinkable.Quietly in public, loudly in private, climate scientists everywhere are saying the same thing: it’s over. The years in which more than two degrees of global warming could have been prevented have passed, the opportunities squandered by denial and delay. On current trajectories we’ll be lucky to get away with four degrees. Mitigation (limiting greenhouse gas pollution) has failed; now we must adapt to what nature sends our way. If we can.

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See also:

• Scientists Issue Six Blunt Warnings on Climate Change
• Hansen: Protests and direct action needed to stop emissions
• Aussie Socialists Adopt 10 Point Action Plan to Stop Climate Change
• The Belem Ecosocialist Declaration
• Ten lessons for the climate movement: looking back, moving forward
• 350 - new international initiative calls for global action to stop climate change

Aussie Socialists Adopt 10 Point Action Plan to Stop Climate Change

Our Common Cause: Climate Change − the Danger is Now from Green Left Weekly 24 January 2009 The fate of advanced human civilisation − and perhaps of our species itself − hangs in the balance. Fuelled by human-induced greenhouse gas emissions, global warming is advancing at a pace inconceivable to scientists just a few years ago. The complete melting in late summers of Arctic sea ice − something that scientists used to predict for the final decades of this century − is now widely expected by 2013-15. As the highly reflective ice is replaced by dark water, much more of the sun’s heat is captured. Mean Arctic temperatures in recent years have been as much as 3°C above their long-term averages.

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Monbiot: One Shot Left

by George Monbiot

from The Guardian

28 November 2008

George Bush is behaving like a furious defaulter whose home is about to be repossessed. Smashing the porcelain, ripping the doors off their hinges, he is determined that there will be nothing worth owning by the time the bastards kick him out. His midnight regulations, opening America’s wilderness to logging and mining, trashing pollution controls, tearing up conservation laws, will do almost as much damage in the last 60 days of his presidency as he achieved in the foregoing 3000(1).

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See also Timebomb ticking away under Arctic

Production-Side Environmentalism: Can we produce less and consume more?

by Don Fitz from Climate and Capitalism 12 January 2009 Corporate “environmentalism” is consumer-side environmentalism. “Make your dollars work for the Earth.” “Buy green!” “Purchase this green gewgaw instead of that ungreen gadget.” “Feel guilty about driving your car.” Consumer-side environmentalism is loath to discuss production. Consumer-side environmentalism does not challenge the manufacture of cars. Rather, it assumes that producing more and more cars is a sacred right never to be questioned. Production-side environmentalism places blame on the criminal rather than the victim. It looks at the profits oil companies reap from urban sprawl rather than demeaning people who have no way to get to work other than driving a car. Production-side environmentalism looks at an agro-food industry which profits from transporting highly processed, over-packaged, nutrient-depleted junk thousands of miles rather than the parent giving in to a child bombarded with Saturday morning pop-tart-porn TV. Production and consumption: A broken connection Okay. Corporations are the root of environmental evil. What’s the point of differentiating between production and consumption? Aren’t they just two parts of the same process? Production goes up so consumption can go up — right? Since the United States is a “consumer society”, environmentalists typically assume that decreasing consumption would force a decrease in production and these two steps would merge into an integrated whole. Through more than 99% of human history, this simple connection characterised economics. If people wanted more, they produced more, they had more, and they consumed more. During the last century, this connection has been increasingly broken. It has become possible to steadily increase the amount of production (about 2-3% annually) with little to no increase in meaningful consumption. 'Meaningful' consumption The word “meaningful” is key in understanding whether consumption goes up, goes down or stagnates. If a stove is manufactured to last 10 years instead of 50 years, a couple may purchase five stoves instead of one during a 50-year marriage. This is an increase in consumption in only the most frivolous, non-meaningful way. In the world of real people, as opposed to the fantasy world of economists, there has actually been a decrease in meaningful consumption. There were four times when the couple was without a stove. Since WWII, and especially since the 1960s, the United States has witnessed a massive overproduction of what is profitable and an obscene shrinking of what is needed. There has been a mushrooming growth of nuclear weapons and other war toys that nobody can eat, wear or live in. Being able to get from here to there has been replaced with traffic jams and commercials telling us how happy we are to consume individual automobiles. The construction industry has shot up as buildings last fewer years. Food epitomises simultaneous overproduction and underconsumption as Americans are increasingly obese and less nourished. Clearly, production can go up while [meaningful] consumption goes down or stagnates. But, could the opposite be true? Is it possible to decrease production while increasing consumption? Yes. Society can reduce the total amount of time spent manufacturing objects at the same time individuals in that society have more to consume. While this was not true for our ancestors, it is the most important principle of environmental economics at the dawn of the twenty-first century. This basic principle pervades all aspects of climate change, peak oil, toxins and species preservation. The reason why it is an economic rule now, but not previously, is simple. Some time after WWII there began to be sufficient production to meet the basics of food, clothing, shelter and medical care for every person on the planet. The only way the market has continued to expand during recent decades has been through the expansion of goods and services that do nothing to improve the quality of life, often worsen it, and always put profitability before human needs. By reducing and fundamentally changing entire areas of production, it is possible to reduce the overall mass of stuff while having zero effect on meaningful consumption. Dramatically reducing production would profoundly reduce CO2 emissions, extend the use of available oil by centuries, and eliminate human expansion into species habitat. If people working at and living near manufacturing facilities were the ones making decisions about production, it would become possible to eliminate toxins that poison humans and other species. Preaching to people that they “have to learn to do without” what a corporate society forces them to purchase will accomplish little more than antagonising them. In contrast, organising people to make corporations “learn to do without” the profits from destructive production is an essential for confronting ecological crises. Let’s look at a few economic sectors. Militarism The military is the only sector of the economy where emissions of greenhouse gases (GHG) can be reduced by greater than 100%. This is because militarism is the only type of activity whose primary purpose is destruction. When a road is bombed in Serbia, energy is used to rebuild it. Energy usage translates to the emission of GHG, primarily carbon dioxide (CO2). When a home is leveled in Afghanistan, reconstruction requires energy. Every hospital brought down and every person maimed in Iraq means CO2 emissions during the treatment of patients and construction of new treatment facilities. Military production is unique. If it were halted, GHG emissions would be reduced by an amount equal to (a) GHG emitted from repairing what the military bombed, plus (b) GHG produced during its regular activities of building bases, using weapons and transporting troops and equipment. Though the official figure for the US military budget is US$623 billion, the War Resistors League [1] calculates total military-related spending at $1118 billion by including NASA, Department of Energy nukes, vet benefits and interest on past military debts. Another $110 billion should be tacked on for extra spending on the war in Iraq. The gross domestic product (GDP) is $13,246.6 billion. [2] Putting these together leads to an estimate that just under a tenth of the US economy is military-related spending: [$1188B + $110B] / $13,246.6B = 9.80% This only accounts for military sales to the Pentagon. Since US arms manufacturers are major providers for regimes throughout the world, military spending actually accounts for considerably more than 10% of the GDP. Militarism may contribute more than any other 10% of the economy to oil depletion, creation of toxins and habitat destruction. Yet, the one area of the economy where a greater than 100% reduction in greenhouse gases is possible is the area least likely to be discussed in connection with climate change. Food The most basic necessity is food. It illustrates what “decreasing production” of a commodity means. It does not mean decreasing the amount of the commodity produced. The “production of food” encompasses the labour and other inputs that go into what Americans eat, including: * huge agricultural equipment, its manufacture, and the oil to operate it; * chemical fertilisers and pesticides, research to create them, and everything to transport and store them; * genetically engineered seed, its research, and Monsanto’s legal team and seed police which perpetrate criminal trespass to steal plant samples; * the entire chain of food processing and packaging (up to 99% of the cost of some products); * transportation of 1400 miles from “farm to fork” for the average morsel of food; * manufacture of trucks, boats, planes, roads and docks to transport food; and, * growing eight to 10 times as much grain to produce a pound of beef protein as would be contained in the grain itself. Adding everything together means that it could be possible to produce as much or more food than the United States currently consumes with less than 10% of the inputs that currently go into agro-industry. It would greatly increase the amount of “meaningful” food we eat. Clothing Until the last few decades consumer goods were designed to endure. Post-WWII corporations faced the dilemma that increasing the durability of products would mean that people would have what they needed with little reason to purchase more. By the 1960s planned obsolescence had slammed clothing, appliances and household items full force. People of my generation and older can tell dozens of stories of things that “used to last” — shoes, dishes, coffee pots, desks, furniture, everything bought for the home or office. The most vile form of commoditisation is the disposable bag, bottle, cup, plate and camera, designed to be used a single time and then spend centuries contaminating groundwater or choking distant aquatic life. Business is not immune to the ever-decreasing durability that plagues consumers. Computers and computer software suck capital from industry as they drain family budgets with their out-of-date-by-design formatting. Take all the useless junk that people are persuaded that they need, add it to those useful goods with a premeditated plan to fall apart, and ask “How much manufacturing is truly needed for the consumer goods that make for a quality life?”. The answer has to be that production could decrease by at least 70% (maybe 90%) with zero decrease in the quality of life and the increase in mental health that would come from knowing that you probably don’t have to fix or buy something tomorrow. Shelter Current standards for urban planning anticipate that 2% of buildings in the US will be replaced every year. That means the average house is expected to last 50 years. Does that make a 50-year-old home an old building? Many European buildings went up 500 years ago. That proves, again beyond any doubt, that 500 years ago architects knew how to design buildings that would last for 500 years. Unless lead poisoning has irretrievably damaged the brains of architects, they should be able to replicate that in the 21st century. Or maybe the problem isn’t individual architects, but a building sector pushing to have each generation of homes constructed to worse standards than the generation before. After I spoke about global warming at an area high school, the principal privately challenged my figure that US buildings are designed to last 50 years. “I went to a city council meeting last week”, he told me. “And they were approving construction of a new government building that the architect said would last 20 years.” “And did the architect promise it would be covered with eco-gadgets?”, I wanted to know. “Solar panels. Double-flush toilets. It would have everything.” The amount of energy saved with green gadgets is lost many times over by erecting new buildings when existing ones will do fine. What could be more absurd than building tens of thousands of new eco-homes at the height of the 2007-08 real estate collapse when more homes are clearly not needed? Imagine a “green building” plan that said: 1. No building could go up unless there was an absence of unused comparable building space within 50 kilometres; and, 2. Any new building would have to be constructed to a 500-year standard. It should be obvious that if buildings were constructed to last 10 times as long we would need one tenth as many new buildings. Intelligent planning should be able to ensure a home for every family (increase in consumption) at the same time there is much less construction (decrease in production). Health care The life expectancy in the US is 78 years. The life expectancy in Cuba is 78 years. The annual cost of health care in Cuba is $193 per person. The cost of health care in the US is over 20 times as much, more than $4500 per person per year. A reasonable American could conclude that when s/he spends $100 on health care, less than $5 goes to keeping her/him healthy and over $95 goes to the cancerous bloating of the sickness industry. [3] This suggests that the US could decrease health care costs by 90% and still spend twice as much per person as does Cuba. Just how could the US make such incredibly deep cuts in the cost of “medical production” without damaging (and even improving) the quality of health care? Eliminate health insurance companies. This parasitic growth diverts billions of dollars to enormous office buildings, their construction and maintenance, and labour wasted judging who gets treatment and who is left to die. The entire industry should be surgically removed. Focus on community preventive care rather than hospital care. Hospitals are necessary for many emergency treatments. Childbirth and locked mental health wards are examples of what the industry has medicalised in pursuit of profit. Eliminate most medications. Require physicians to document that available non-medication treatments have been exhausted prior to writing a scrip. I dumped my last primary care physician after he started yelling at me for refusing to take meds for blood pressure (which is now under control by changes in diet and exercise). Replace most specialists with neighbourhood primary care physicians. Everyone living in a US city should be able to reach a primary care physician by walking or cycling for less than 15 minutes. The fact that the medical establishment cannot conceptualise this shows its contempt for preventive care. Demanding that the government increase funds for a bad healthcare system will make insurance and drug companies richer but it will not make people healthier. That can only happen by totally redesigning health care into a much smaller system than it is now. Transportation The automobile industry would have us believe that improving transportation means increasing the number of cars on the road. Corporate environmentalists nod in agreement, accepting the car culture as an Act of God but wishing it would be based on hybrid, electric or hydrogen cars. Shallow green plans to cope with transportation are consistently devoid of any thought of reducing the production of cars. A deep green approach to transportation would focus on eliminating [at least] 95% of cars in US cities. Such a plan might look something like this: * Redesign cities to rebirth local businesses so that people can make 80% of their trips by walking or cycling. * Ensure that frequent and cheap mass transit allows for people to use it for 80% of other trips. * Establish car sharing or ride sharing for the 4% of trips remaining. * Only after the above are adopted, eliminate parking spaces except for emergency, construction and car-shared vehicles. Would this increase or decrease the “consumption” of a transportation system? Orthodox economists would insist that it would not be increasing consumption because people would not be driving in ever-increasing circles. This rigid mindset fails to realise that transportation means getting from point A to point B, or from all the points A to all the points B you need to get to. The more that destination points are spread apart by urban sprawl and the more that roads are choked with cars, even “green” cars, the longer and more miserable trips are. Despite what economists might tell you, this is increased consumption of agony, not increased consumption of transportation. Try this way of thinking about it. On your lunch break, you want to run over and say “Hi!” to your mom and pick up your shoes from the repair shop. But each is 20 kilometres away from where you work, so you can only do one. In a deep green city redesigned so that everything is closer together, they are each 1 kilometre away and you can bicycle to do both. In the minds of corporate economists and shallow green environmentalists, you would be consuming more of the transportation system if you do one trip of 20 kilometres. In the minds of rational human beings you would be consuming more transportation if you met both goals in two short trips. Not necessarily a good thing to do Though I am one of many who have misdiagnosed environmental problems as being rooted in over-consumption, consumption is not the primary issue. The source of the disease is overproduction. Resolving environmental problems requires us to stop seeing them as the same. Nevertheless, just because you have the ability to so something does not necessarily mean that it is a good thing to do. As a society, 21st century United States has the ability to simultaneously decrease production and increase consumption. But the fact that we can do it does not necessarily mean that consuming more or even the same amount is a good idea. A quick glance at the designed waste and destructiveness of the US economy suggests that we can reduce production by 50-80% (perhaps by 90%) while the average person would have more consumer goods at any one time. If getting serious about addressing climate change and related catastrophes became the norm and if reducing production were to be seen as a virtue, people might think, “Now that shirts last four times as long and only cost a little more, I can afford to have 80 shirts instead of 30. But do I really need 80 shirts?” [4] Once production for human need replaces production for corporate profit, it becomes possible to reconnect production and consumption. When people again produce what they need, reducing what they consume means less will be produced. Multiply 80 shirts by 1000 commodities and hundreds of millions of consumers and we have Phase 2 of the reduction of production. Phase 1 was the reduction of production with an increase of consumption. Phase 2 is an intensified reduction of production based on a reduction of consumption and an improvement in the quality of life. How might it look? Phase 2: Less production, less consumption and a better life Militarism. With the US having a military budget greater than the rest of the world combined, 800 military bases on which the sun never sets, and enough nuclear weapons to disintegrate every person many times over, it could reduce its spending by over 90% with zero threat to national security. A Phase 1 reduction in military production by 90% would be accompanied by spending some of that money at home in useful areas of the economy and some abroad to repair the damage done. Phase 2 reduction would begin if people asked, “If we are already providing the basic necessities of life with other economic changes, instead of using military savings to produce additional goods, why don’t we produce nothing extra at all and use the savings to reduce the work week?” [5] Food. There might be as much as a 90% drop in food inputs by reducing meat, transportation, pesticides, fertilisers, equipment, processing, packaging and genetic contamination. As people watch this happen with no decrease in the quantity but a huge increase in the quality of food, the stage will be set for Phase 2. Wes Jackson, Stan Cox and their colleagues at The Land Institute have provided brilliant guidelines for developing hybrid lines of perennial food plants that would reduce the amount of land tilled, leading to less erosion and less land being needed for food production. Add this to the expansion of numerous techniques of organic and indigenous farming throughout the world to yield continuous ways to reduce agricultural inputs. [6] Consumer goods. Core to the concept of increasing consumption while decreasing production is requiring consumer goods to be manufactured to standards of life expectancy that are many times what they are now. During Phase 1, people could well see their work week getting shorter while they accumulate even more stuff than they have now. Railing against people for personal accumulation does little good for many reasons, one of which is if this person buys less, then that person (or that government, that business or that bank) buys or invests more. It is only when production as a whole drops that reductions in personal consumption can lead to further drops in production. In this context, people might well decide to share tools and washing machines and children might enjoy clothes passed down from older siblings, which, multiplied millions of times, intensifies the downward trend in production. Construction. When we ask how many centuries instead of how many decades a new building should last, it is also time to start thinking about the second phase of decelerating construction. The question for that phase is: If we focus on retrofitting existing structures, how close to zero new construction can we get? How do we modify what we already have to create housing collectives, co-housing communities and urban ejidos [communal land]? In a post-market economy, new social relationships in living would become the dominant factor in architecture. More dense living and a smaller space per person would be the “sine qua non” of deep green urban redesign. Transportation. The great transportation contradiction is that the more people who own cars, the longer it takes to get from point A to point B. As mentioned, increased car ownership increases the distance between destination points as well as obviously putting more cars on the road. The drive can take a dive only if people can get there without four wheels. Phase 1 of transportation reformulation means designing communities for walking and biking in order to reduce car ownership. Phase 2 begins when people collectively identify needs that can be met without their going anywhere. For example, imagine food warehouses replacing supermarkets. Households combine electronic grocery lists into a neighbourhood order that the warehouse delivers and is then disaggregated by neighbours. Instead of thousands of cars each filling a massive parking lot, a few dozen delivery trucks fill orders. Health care. A big reason for bad health care is the industry organising itself separate and apart from communities. If neighbourhood health centres were to replace distant offices, insurance companies, quick fixes, drugs, hospitals and overpaid specialists, people could then ask how else they could chip away at the sickness business while improving the quality of their lives. Though redesigning neighbourhoods so people can walk to their doctor and kicking softdrink machines out of schools are part of this, changes can be much bigger. Communities could ask: How can a neighbourhood share the care of severely disabled people rather than constructing more nursing homes and treatment centres with three shifts per day and a management team that answers to insurance companies? Democratic economy The greatest barrier to coping with climate change, peak oil, toxins and habitat destruction is the total mass of production. This mass is increasing; its increase vastly outpaces any real or imagined increase in consumption; and its increase is made worse by peddling green gadgets as some sort of solution. A deep green view understands that too much production is the core problem. Necessary changes do not require any reduction in “consumption”, at least in any meaningful sense of that word. If a corporate economy cannot allow production to decrease, it only makes sense that preserving the Earth requires replacing corporate power with a democratic economy. A knife going into a person’s stomach can be the death blow of a thief or life-saving surgery. Which is to say: An action can have opposite effects, depending on its context. A plea to replace or reduce individual consumptive habits in a society where market forces dictate that every decrease in energy here is offset by an increase somewhere else is a plea falling on deaf bank statements. But if we could replace production for profit with production for what we need and want, people would have the power to alter society to change its wants and even redesign its needs. With the link between production and consumption restored, lowering consumption would indeed affect production — but only in a deep green society. This is production-side environmentalism. [The article is based on a talk Don Fitz gave on June 29, 2008 at the Surviving Climate Change roundtable in St Louis, USA. It was published in Synthesis/Regeneration: A Magazine of Green Social Thought ] Notes 1. http://www.warresistors.org/ 2. Bureau of Economic Analysis, the US Department of Commerce,http://www.bea.gov/newsreleases/national/gdp/gdpnewsrelease.htm (Table 3). 3. Dresang, L.T., Brebrick, L., Murray, D., Shallue, A., & Sullivan-Vedder, L., 2005. Family medicine in Cuba: Community-oriented primary care and complementary and alternative medicine. Journal of the American Board of Family Medicine, 18 (4), 297-303. 4. While there could be a 90% or greater reduction in several economic sectors, economies of scale may mean that a much smaller drop in basic industry could be achieved, perhaps meaning that less than a 90% overall decrease would occur. 5. If militarism accounts for 11% of the GDP and it were reduced to 1% of the current GDP, that would be a reduction of the GDP by 10%. That could translate to 10% more goods being produced or it could translate to a reduction of the 40-hour work week to 36 hours, or it could translate to 5% more goods being produced and shipped abroad as reparations for US war crimes simultaneous with a 5% decrease in the work week to 38 hours. 6. Cox, S. Sick planet: Corporate food and medicine. Ann Arbor: Pluto Press, 2008. Glover, J.D., Cox, C.M., & Reganold, J.P., August, 2007. Future farming: A return to roots? Scientific American, 297 (2), 82-89.

Greenhouse gas emissions keep increasing – NZ one of the worst offenders

The countries that vowed to cut greenhouse gas emissions are churning out more than ever by David Biello Original article from Scientific American 17 November 2008 The 38 countries that pledged to restrain their emissions of climate change — inducing greenhouse gases, most notably carbon dioxide (CO2), are failing, according to new figures released today. The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the body charged with overseeing global emission reduction efforts, says that, overall, greenhouse emissions — measured in terms of the most ubiquitous: carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) — dropped by 894 million metric tons between 1990 and 2006 (the latest year for which figures are available).

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Monbiot: We cannot afford to surrender

by George Monbiot 17 March 2009 from The Guardian It will be difficult and expensive to keep climate change to a minimum, but the alternative is unthinkable. Quietly in public, loudly in private, climate scientists everywhere are saying the same thing: it’s over. The years in which more than two degrees of global warming could have been prevented have passed, the opportunities squandered by denial and delay. On current trajectories we’ll be lucky to get away with four degrees. Mitigation (limiting greenhouse gas pollution) has failed; now we must adapt to what nature sends our way. If we can. This, at any rate, was the repeated whisper at the climate change conference in Copenhagen last week(1). It’s more or less what Bob Watson, the environment department’s chief scientific adviser, has been telling the British government(2). It is the obvious if unspoken conclusion of scores of scientific papers. Recent work by scientists at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, for example, suggests that even global cuts of 3% a year, starting in 2020, could leave us with four degrees of warming by the end of the century(3,4). At the moment emissions are heading in the opposite direction at roughly the same rate. If this continues, what does it mean? Six? Eight? Ten degrees? Who knows? Faced with such figures, I can’t blame anyone for throwing up his hands. But before you succumb to this fatalism, let me talk you through the options. Yes, it is true that mitigation has so far failed. Sabotaged by Clinton(5), abandoned by Bush, attended half-heartedly by the other rich nations, the global climate talks have so far been a total failure. The targets they have set bear no relationship to the science and are negated anyway by loopholes and false accounting. Nations like the UK which are meeting their obligations under the Kyoto protocol have succeeded only by outsourcing their pollution to other countries(6,7). Nations like Canada, which are flouting their obligations, face no meaningful sanctions. Lord Stern made it too easy: he appears to have underestimated the costs of mitigation. As the professor of energy policy Dieter Helm has shown, Stern’s assumption that our consumption can continue to grow while our emissions fall is implausible(8). To have any hope of making substantial cuts we have both to reduce our consumption and transfer resources to countries like China to pay for the switch to low-carbon technologies. As Helm notes, “there is not much in the study of human nature—and indeed human biology—to give support to the optimist.” But we cannot abandon mitigation unless we have a better option. We don’t. If you think our attempts to prevent emissions are futile, take a look at our efforts to adapt. Where Stern appears to be correct is in proposing that the costs of stopping climate breakdown - great as they would be - are far lower than the costs of living with it. Germany is spending E600m just on a new sea wall for Hamburg(9) - and this money was committed before the news came through that sea level rises this century could be two or three times as great as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has predicted(10). The Netherlands will spend E2.2bn on dykes between now and 2015; again they are likely to be inadequate. The UN suggests that the rich countries should be transferring $50-75bn a year to the poor ones now to help them cope with climate change, with a massive increase later on(11). But nothing like this is happening. A Guardian investigation reveals that the rich nations have promised $18bn to help the poor nations adapt to climate change over the past seven years, but they have disbursed only 5% of that money(12). Much of it has been transferred from foreign aid budgets anyway: a net gain for the poor of nothing(13). Oxfam has made a compelling case for how adaptation should be funded: nations should pay according to the amount of carbon they produce per capita, coupled with their position on the human development index(14). On this basis, the US should supply over 40% of the money and the European Union over 30%, with Japan, Canada, Australia and Korea making up the balance. But what are the chances of getting them to cough up? There’s a limit to what this money could buy anyway. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says that “global mean temperature changes greater than 4°C above 1990-2000 levels” would “exceed … the adaptive capacity of many systems.”(15) At this point there’s nothing you can do, for example, to prevent the loss of ecosystems, the melting of glaciers and the disintegration of major ice sheets. Elsewhere it spells out the consequences more starkly: global food production, it says, is “very likely to decrease above about 3°C”(16). Buy your way out of that. And it doesn’t stop there. The IPCC also finds that, above three degrees of warming, the world’s vegetation will become “a net source of carbon”(17). This is just one of the climate feedbacks triggered by a high level of warming. Four degrees might take us inexorably to five or six: the end - for humans - of just about everything. Until recently, scientists spoke of carbon concentrations - and temperatures - peaking and then falling back. But a recent paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows that “climate change … is largely irreversible for 1,000 years after emissions stop.”(18) Even if we were to cut carbon emissions to zero today, by the year 3000 our contribution to atmospheric concentrations would decline by just 40%. High temperatures would remain more or less constant until then. If we produce it we’re stuck with it. In the rich nations we will muddle through, for a few generations, and spend nearly everything we have on coping. But where the money is needed most there will be nothing. The ecological debt the rich world owes to the poor will never be discharged, just as it has never accepted that it should offer reparations for the slave trade and for the pillage of gold, silver, rubber, sugar and all the other commodities taken without due payment from its colonies. Finding the political will for crash cuts in carbon production is improbable. But finding the political will - when the disasters have already begun - to spend adaptation money on poor nations rather than on ourselves will be impossible. The world won’t adapt and can’t adapt: the only adaptive response to a global shortage of food is starvation. Of the two strategies it is mitigation, not adaptation, which turns out to be the most feasible option, even if this stretches the concept of feasibility to the limits. As Dieter Helm points out, the action required today is unlikely but “not impossible. It is a matter ultimately of human well being and ethics.”(19) Yes, it might already be too late - even if we reduced emissions to zero tomorrow - to prevent more than two degrees of warming, but we cannot behave as if it is, for in doing so we make the prediction come true. Tough as this fight may be, improbable as success might seem, we cannot afford to surrender. References: 1. Eg David Adam, 13th March 2009. Stern attacks politicians over climate ‘devastation’. The Guardian. 2. James Randerson, 7th August 2008. Climate change: Prepare for global temperature rise of 4C, warns top scientist. The Guardian. 3. Kevin Anderson and Alice Bows, 2008. Reframing the climate change challenge in light of post-2000 emission trends. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A. Published online. doi:10.1098/rsta.2008.0138http://www.tyndall.ac.uk/publications/journal_papers/fulltext.pdf 4. They are referring to stabilisation at 650 parts per million CO2 equivalent. The IPCC suggests that this would produce something the region of 4C, even before all the likely feedbacks have b een taken into account. See Table SPM6 of the IPCC’s Climate Change 2007: Synthesis Report - Summary for Policymakers. http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/syr/ar4_syr_spm.pdf 5. http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2007/12/17/hurray-were-going-backwards/ 6. http://www.sei.se/index.php?page=newsitem&item=5720 7. http://www.dieterhelm.co.uk/publications/Carbon_record_2007.pdf 8. Dieter Helm, 21st February 2009. Environmental challenges in a warming world: consumption, costs and responsibilities. Tanner Lecture, Oxford.http://www.dieterhelm.co.uk/publications/TANNER%20LECTURE%20Feb09.pdf 9. Oxfam, 29th May 2007. Adapting to climate change. Briefing Paper 104. http://www.oxfam.org.uk/resources/policy/climate_change/downloads/bp104_adapting_to_climate_change.pdf 10. http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/mar/11/sea-level-rises-climate-change-copenhagen 11. John Vidal, 20th February 2009. Rich nations failing to meet climate aid pledges. The Guardian. 12. ibid. 13. Oxfam, 29th May 2007, ibid. 14. Oxfam, 29th May 2007, ibid. 15. IPCC, 2007b. Assessing key vulnerabilities and the risk from climate change. http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/wg2/ar4-wg2-chapter19.pdf 16. ibid, Table 19.1. 17. IPCC, 2007b, ibid. 18. Susan Solomona,1, Gian-Kasper Plattnerb, Reto Knuttic, and Pierre Friedlingstein, 16th December 2008. Irreversible climate change due to carbon dioxide emissions. http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2009/01/28/0812721106.full.pdf+html 19. Dieter Helm, 21st February 2009, ibid.

Carbon trading is a stupid idea

by Peter de Waal RAM activist 22 August 2008 Carbon trading is a stupid idea and will never work for the simple reason that you can not expect the same "free-market" which created the greenhouse gas problem in the first place is going to be capable of reducing the world's emissions. Added to this, such schemes will only transfer more costs onto ordinary people as the business corporations will push up prices to pay for this nonsense. The only people to benefit from carbon trading will be the business corporations, the banks, the stock market parasites and their lawyers. The Greens need a much better policy centred around the ideas of using new carbon taxes to urgently build a new low- emission infrastructure here in New Zealand, which will also have the beneficial effect of helping keep society running as peak oil begins to bite hard and the 'normal' way of life becomes a distant memory. The Green Party also needs to clearly explain to the public the reasons why this infrastructural investment and extra taxation is necessary, particularly at a time when most families are struggling to survive. If the Greens persist with this free-market carbon tax trading strategy without it being directly tied to local low-emmission infrastructure investment such as free public transport, then the Greens can expect to get a real pasting in the elections this year. The Greens need to leave Parliament with it's jet-set lifestyle at 35,000 feet and put their feet back on the ground and listen to ordinary people who are struggling to buy food, pay bills etc. Green and left voters don't want a bar of this corporate carbon-trading nonsense. The question is: has the Green Party got what it takes to stand up to the business corporations and the Labour Party on this question or have they become captured and sold out to the free-market? Sent to Green Party ets@greens.org.nz (22 August 2008)

Let's introduce free public transport - an example to the world

by Roger Fowler RAM activist & electoral candidate 22 August 2008 Emissions trading is a daft and counter-productive concept. There is one thing all those genuinely concerned with global warming and climate change agree on: we need to take urgent effective action that's big and substantial to have any prospect of averting global disaster. These phony trading schemes will only give a false appearance of "doing something", while letting the big polluters off the hook and making things worse. Carbon taxes should be ploughed into funding fare-free public transport in the cities to introduce a massive upgrade of public transport infrastructure with new, modern emission-free buses, ferries and electric trains. Make them free and frequent to get the bulk of people out of their cars. Government cash earmarked for motorway expansion should be immediately diverted to help fund such a decent free public transport network in all the main cities. This achievable and innovative action will catch the attention of other countries and could lead a world-wide move to dramatically cut traffic congestion, precious fuel wastage, and emissions everywhere. New Zealand could be the first country to introduce fare-free public transport, and set a great example for other nations. Now that would be “big, substantial, urgent effective action” that could have a real chance of rolling back pollution and global warming! Sent to the Green Party ets@greens.org.nz (22 August 2008)

Solar Power Breakthrough

by Environmental News Service (ENS)
5 August 2008

Within 10 years, homeowners could power their homes in daylight with solar photovoltaic cells, while using excess solar energy to produce hydrogen and oxygen from water to power a household fuel cell. If the new process developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology finds acceptance in the marketplace, electricity-by-wire from a central source could be a thing of the past.

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A brief socialist history of the automobile

by Rob Rooke from LINKS - International journal of socialist renewal No single commercial product in the history of capitalism has had a greater effect on the economy and politics than the automobile. No other product has been such a lever to increase consumption and increase markets in the developed world. It could be argued that the car, more than any other product, was at the very heart of the 20th century’s economic expansion. In US society, for over a century, the car has been raised on a cultural pedestal worshipping individuality and defining big business’ vision of freedom. The car hastened the massive sprawl of suburbia and in itself shaped US urban planning like no other product. Today, in the United States, public transport plays a distant second fiddle to the car with nine out of ten workers using their cars to travel to work. In people’s everyday life, the car is now their second biggest household expense, next to housing. The car has reached its zenith. This brief socialist history of the automobile will attempt to give some background and context to today’s car-dominated world. It will attempt to explain how the automobile and the mad chase for profits has shaped the world, and helped in turn lead humanity to its current fork, where one road indisputably will lead to global destruction.

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How the Oil Industry Sabotages Emission Reductions

from Climate and Capitalism
May 14 2008

Friends of the Earth exposes the lies of the oil giants' attack on European emission reduction plans

Oil companies have the potential to achieve more than 10 per cent cuts in greenhouse gas emissions by 2020 without using agrofuels, reveals a report launched today by Friends of the Earth Europe.

Released on the day Shell and BP announced combined quarterly profits of 14.4 billion US dollars, 'Extracting the truth: Oil industry efforts to undermine the Fuel Quality Directive' uses industry's own data to show how oil companies are falsely claiming that the target proposed by the European Commission in revisions to the Fuel Quality Directive is unachievable.

It shows that at least 10 per cent reductions in greenhouse gas emissions could be realised through reduced gas flaring, improved energy efficiency and fuel switching at refineries, and without the need for agrofuels which can have negative environmental and socials impacts and have not been proven to reduce emissions overall.

Darek Urbaniak, extractive industries campaigner for Friends of the Earth Europe said:

“The oil industry is saying that it lacks the financial and technological resources to decrease its greenhouse gas emissions, but according to our research it has the potential to meet, and even exceed, the 10 per cent CO2 reduction target of the Directive. And this is without resorting to harmful agrofuels.

“The false statements being made by oil companies are blatant attempts to undermine the legislation. Instead of taking responsibility for its contribution to climate change, the oil industry is trying to wriggle out of its obligations.”

Friends of the Earth Europe’s report calculates that reductions in greenhouse gas emissions of between 10.5 per cent and 15.5 per cent are possible through measures including less flaring and venting, energy efficiency improvements and fuel switching in refineries.

The report comes at a time of record profits for oil companies and increasing attempts to portray themselves as environmentally responsible. In 2007, ExxonMobil, Royal Dutch Shell, Chevron, TOTAL, BP and ENI together earned together over 125 billion US dollars.

Paul de Clerck, corporates campaigner for Friends of the Earth Europe said:

“Despite their sky-high profits oil companies are not willing to bear the costs of reducing emissions. It seems that since these investments are not profitable, companies will not make them unless they are forced by a regulatory body. The EU has to oblige companies to take the necessary steps. The report shows that it is possible and they have more than enough money to pay for it.”

The analysis released today puts oil industry attempts to obstruct the Fuel Quality Directive in the context of increased “greenwashing.” Behind the scenes oil companies are lobbying against environmental legislation whilst in public they use advertising to suggest that they are reducing emissions. In 2007 Shell was found guilty of misleading advertising for an advert in which it claimed it used waste CO2 to grow flowers.

Darek Urbaniak said:

“Oil companies are not serious about their environmental performance. While they brand themselves as environmentally responsible, their CO2 emissions continue to rise. In reality the emissions of almost all of them are rapidly increasing and they are all investing heavily in energy-dirty tar sands, while their investments in renewable energy remain negligible or decrease.”

The fine art of greenwashing

Helen Clark is backing away from grand pronouncements about “carbon neutrality” as fast as new information emerges showing just how serious and imminent the threat of catastrophic climate change is. The Labour government’s planned emissions trading scheme is being widely condemned for excluding NZ’s biggest polluters until many years from now. Large industrial emitters and the farming sector will get "free credits" based on 90 per cent of their 2005 emission levels, which won't start phasing out until 2018, reaching zero twelve years later in 2030! Current evidence emerging from the climate scientists is that tipping points for irreversible and catastrophic climate change may be only 5-10 years away (see Jim Hansen, the Big Ice Melt & the Mainstream Media). What does this say about the government's commitment to cutting greenhouse gas emissions? But emissions trading was never going to be the answer. It was just one the corporates and their government allies thought they could sell us. It’s been a big con-job from the start. Like the European scheme, emissions were never going to be "capped" at a level that might actually hurt the profits of polluters. And anyway, the big polluters can just pass on any extra costs resulting from the scheme. The costs are pushed down (once again!) on to ordinary people who are forced to pay more for electricity, petrol, food, etc. This is one of the points that's made in a new pamphlet by Ian Angus, editor of the Climate and Capitalism website. How to Avoid Action on Climate Change focuses on the Canadian government’s preference for “market mechanisms”. Ian has collected together nine readable essays on “the fine art of greenwashing as practiced by federal and provincial politicians in Canada”. Something NZ's politicians in parliament have shown a skill for. Climate change activists need to be armed with the arguments against “market mechanisms” so that we can then start campaigning for urgent public solutions to the crisis. Ian's pamphlet is a very good place to start. Also read an earlier recently updated pamphlet from Climate and Capitalism, Confronting the Climate Change Crisis: An Ecosocialist Perspective

$8 billion of public transport would fix this

Auckland's sprawling motorways – the Labour government wants to spend $8 billion on more of them, plus the odd harbour bridge and tunnel. Is this a government committed to making New Zealand carbon neutral?

And why isn't the Green Party kicking up an absolute stink about this madness? And why haven't Green Party leaders come out in support of free and frequent public transport?

That $8 billion could fund thousands of electric buses carrying people for free for decades. It would transform Auckland into a city to be proud of and drastically reduce this countries' carbon emissions.

Greenhouse gas emissions keep increasing – NZ one of the worst offenders

The countries that vowed to cut greenhouse gas emissions are churning out more than ever by David Biello Original article from Scientific American 17 November 2008 The 38 countries that pledged to restrain their emissions of climate change — inducing greenhouse gases, most notably carbon dioxide (CO2), are failing, according to new figures released today. The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the body charged with overseeing global emission reduction efforts, says that, overall, greenhouse emissions — measured in terms of the most ubiquitous: carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) — dropped by 894 million metric tons between 1990 and 2006 (the latest year for which figures are available). But the UNFCCC found that emissions had grown by 2.3 percent —403 million metric tons of CO2e — from 2000 to 2006, and that the 16-year dip was due entirely to the drop in economic activity (factory and power plant shutdowns) in former Eastern bloc countries such as Russia after the 1989 fall of communist governments, which led to a decline of more than two billion metric tons of CO2e emissions. Those countries’ economies have recovered since 2000, leading to an increase in CO2e emissions of some 258 million metric tons, according to UNFCCC. Most industrialized European nations as well as China and the U.S. (which have not agreed to any emissions’ reductions) have been spewing more carbon dioxide since 1990 — up in total some 403 million metric tons of CO2e from 2000 levels. The UNFCCC cautions that emissions may be even worse now, noting that the statistics in the study are already nearly three years old. “UNFCCC expert review teams need two years to verify the data, partly by traveling to the countries concerned,” says UNFCCC spokesman John Hay. “This makes the UNFCCC data not the freshest, but the most reliable on the market.” The U.K. and the Principality of Monaco are the only two European countries that, after pledging to reduce emissions (by 12.5 percent and 8 percent, respectively) by 2012, appear to be on track. In contrast, Austria, which vowed in 2002 to cut emissions by over the next 10 years 13 percent below 1990 levels, is instead pumping out 15 percent more CO2e than it did in 1990. Likewise, Japan is now emitting over 6 percent more greenhouse gases now than in 1990 despite a promise in 2002 to reduce them by 6 percent by 2012. Even countries allowed to emit more greenhouse gases under the terms of the Kyoto Protocol (an international treaty to reduce emissions) to allow further economic development have nearly doubled their allowed growth. Ireland, for example, has seen greenhouse gas emissions grow by nearly 26 percent when, under the terms of the treaty, they should only rise by 13 percent. The treaty signatories have until 2012 to get their acts together. If they continue to exceed their limits by that date, they will be suspended from international carbon trading, which currently allows them to purchase cheaper emission reductions from developing countries in lieu of reducing their own; instead, they would be required to achieve 1.3 times the missed reduction in future years. World governments are set to gather next month in Poznan, Poland, to continue negotiations on a binding international agreement to cut globe-warming greenhouse gases after 2012 — a so-called successor to the Kyoto Protocol currently in force. Under the Bush administration, the U.S. has participated in such talks without accepting a binding emissions reduction target. According to the U.S. Department of Energy, the U.S. emitted nearly six billion metric tons of CO2 last year, up from roughly five billion metric tons in 1990. It remains to be seen how the incoming Obama administration will proceed, though on the stump the president-elect pledged to cut U.S. emissions to 80 percent below present levels by 2050. When releasing today’s report, UNFCC Executive Secretary Yvo de Boer stressed the importance of negotiating a new and binding agreement to cut climate change pollution. “The figures clearly underscore the urgency for the U.N. negotiating process to make good progress in Poznan and move forward quickly in designing a new agreement to respond to the challenge of climate change,” he said. He also noted that President-elect Obama would not attend. [From Climate and Capitalism]. The following are the ten worst offenders according to the UNFCCC report. Figures show the percentage increase in greenhouse gas emissions since 1990, including land use, land use change, and forestry: Sweden: +110.6 Turkey: +102.9 Canada: + 54.8 Spain: +53.5 New Zealand: +33.0 Portugal: +29.6 Greece: +26.2 Ireland: +24.3 Liechenstein: +20.5 United States: +14.0

Monbiot: One Shot Left

by George Monbiot from The Guardian 28 November 2008 George Bush is behaving like a furious defaulter whose home is about to be repossessed. Smashing the porcelain, ripping the doors off their hinges, he is determined that there will be nothing worth owning by the time the bastards kick him out. His midnight regulations, opening America’s wilderness to logging and mining, trashing pollution controls, tearing up conservation laws, will do almost as much damage in the last 60 days of his presidency as he achieved in the foregoing 3000(1). His backers – among them the nastiest pollutocrats in America – are calling in their favours. But this last binge of vandalism is also the Bush presidency reduced to its essentials. Destruction is not an accidental product of its ideology. Destruction is the ideology. Neoconservatism is power expressed by showing that you can reduce any part of the world to rubble. If it is now too late to prevent runaway climate change, the Bush team must carry much of the blame. His wilful trashing of the Middle Climate – the interlude of benign temperatures which allowed human civilisation to flourish – makes the mass murder he engineered in Iraq only the second of his crimes against humanity. Bush has waged his war on science with the same obtuse determination with which he has waged his war on terror. Is it too late? To say so is to make it true. To suggest that there is nothing that can now be done is to ensure that nothing is done. But even a resolute optimist like me finds hope ever harder to summon. A new summary of the science published since last year’s Intergovernmental Panel report suggests that - almost a century ahead of schedule - the critical climate processes might have begun(2). Just a year ago the Intergovernmental Panel warned that the Arctic’s “late-summer sea ice is projected to disappear almost completely towards the end of the 21st century … in some models.”(3) But, as the new report by the Public Interest Research Centre (PIRC) shows, climate scientists are now predicting the end of late-summer sea ice within three to seven years. The trajectory of current melting plummets through the graphs like a meteorite falling to earth. Forget the sodding polar bears: this is about all of us. As the ice disappears, the region becomes darker, which means that it absorbs more heat. A recent paper published in Geophysical Research Letters shows that the extra warming caused by disappearing sea ice penetrates 1500km inland, covering almost the entire region of continuous permafrost(4). Arctic permafrost contains twice as much carbon as the entire global atmosphere(5). It remains safe for as long as the ground stays frozen. But the melting has begun. Methane gushers are now gassing out of some places with such force that they keep the water open in Arctic lakes, through the winter(6). The effects of melting permafrost are not incorporated into any global climate models. Runaway warming in the Arctic alone could flip the entire planet into a new climatic state. The Middle Climate could collapse faster and sooner than the grimmest forecasts proposed. Barack Obama’s speech to the US climate summit last week was an astonishing development(7). It shows that, in this respect at least, there really is a prospect of profound political change in America. But while he described a workable plan for dealing with the problem perceived by the Earth Summit of 1992, the measures he proposes are now hopelessly out of date. The science has moved on. The events the Earth Summit and the Kyoto process were supposed to have prevented are already beginning. Thanks to the wrecking tactics of Bush the elder, Clinton (and Gore) and Bush the younger, steady, sensible programmes of the kind that Obama proposes are now irrelevant. As the PIRC report suggests, the years of sabotage and procrastination have left us with only one remaining shot: a crash programme of total energy replacement. A paper by the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research shows that if we are to give ourselves a roughly even chance(8,9) of preventing more than two degrees of warming, global emissions from energy must peak by 2015 and decline by between six and eight per cent per year from 2020 to 2040, leading to a complete decarbonisation of the global economy soon after 2050(10). Even this programme would work only if some optimistic assumptions about the response of the biosphere hold true. Delivering a high chance of preventing two degrees of warming would mean cutting global emissions by over 8% a year. Is this possible? Is this acceptable? The Tyndall paper points out that annual emission reductions greater than one per cent have “been associated only with economic recession or upheaval.” When the Soviet Union collapsed, they fell by some 5% a year. But you can answer these questions only by considering the alternatives. The trajectory both Barack Obama and Gordon Brown have proposed - an 80% cut by 2050 - means reducing emissions by an average of 2% a year. This programme, the figures in the Tyndall paper suggest, is likely to commit the world to at least four or five degrees of warming(11), which means the likely collapse of human civilisation across much of the planet. Is this acceptable? The costs of a total energy replacement and conservation plan would be astronomical, the speed improbable. But the governments of the rich nations have already deployed a scheme like this for another purpose. A survey by the broadcasting network CNBC suggests that the US federal government has now spent $4.2 trillion in response to the financial crisis, more than the total spending on World War Two when adjusted for inflation(12). Do we want to be remembered as the generation that saved the banks and let the biosphere collapse? This approach is challenged by the American thinker Sharon Astyk. In an interesting new essay, she points out that replacing the world’s energy infrastructure involves “an enormous front-load of fossil fuels”, which are required to manufacture wind turbines, electric cars, new grid connections, insulation and all the rest(13). This could push us past the climate tipping point. Instead, she proposes, we must ask people “to make short term, radical sacrifices”, cutting our energy consumption by 50%, with little technological assistance, in five years. There are two problems: the first is that all previous attempts show that relying on voluntary abstinence does not work. The second is that a 10% annual cut in energy consumption while the infrastructure remains mostly unchanged means a 10% annual cut in total consumption: a deeper depression than the modern world has ever experienced. No political system - even an absolute monarchy - could survive an economic collapse on this scale. She is right about the risks of a technological green new deal, but these are risks we have to take. Astyk’s proposals travel far into the realm of wishful thinking. Even the technological solution I favour inhabits the distant margins of possibility. Can we do it? Search me. Reviewing the new evidence, I have to admit that we might have left it too late. But there is another question I can answer more easily. Can we afford not to try? No we can’t. References: 1. Suzanne Goldenberg, 20th November 2008. President for 60 more days, Bush tearing apart protection for America’s wilderness. The Guardian. 2. Public Interest Research Centre, 25th November 2008. Climate Safety. http://www.pirc.info/ 3. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Working Group I. Technical Summary, p73. http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/wg1/ar4-wg1-ts.pdf 4. David M. Lawrence et al., 2008. Accelerated Arctic land warming and permafrost degradation during rapid sea ice loss. Geophysical Research Letters, Vol. 35 11506. doi:10.1029/2008GL033985.http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/ccr/dlawren/publications/lawrence.grl.submit.2008.pdf 5. Edward A. G. Schuur et al, September 2008. Vulnerability of permafrost carbon to climate change: implications for the global carbon cycle. Bioscience, Vol. 58, No. 8, pp.701-714. doi:10.1641/B580807 http://www.bioone.org/perlserv/?request=get-document&doi=10.1641%2FB580807 6. United Nations Environment Project, 4 June 2007. Melting Ice - a Hot Topic? Press Release. http://www.unep.org/Documents.Multilingual/Default.asp?DocumentID=512&ArticleID=5599&l=en 7. http://www.congresscheck.com/2008/11/18/obama-promises-return-to-global-climate-change-negotiations/ 8. Kevin Anderson and Alice Bows, 2008. Reframing the climate change challenge in light of post-2000 emission trends. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A. Published online doi:10.1098/rsta.2008.0138 http://www.tyndall.ac.uk/publications/journal_papers/fulltext.pdf Anderson and Bows state that “The framing of climate change policy is typically informed by the 2 degrees C threshold; however, even stabilizing at 450 ppmv CO2e [parts per million of carbon dioxide equivalent] offers only a 46 per cent chance of not exceeding 2 degrees C.” This estimate is given in the following paper: 9. Malte Meinshausen, 2006. What Does a 2°C Target Mean for Greenhouse Gas Concentrations? A Brief Analysis Based on Multi-Gas Emission Pathways and Several Climate Sensitivity Uncertainty Estimates. In Hans Joachim Schellnhuber (Ed in Chief). Avoiding Dangerous Climate Change. Cambridge University Press. 10. This is for stabilisation at 450 ppmv CO2e - well above the level that James Hansen and other climate scientists are now calling for. 11. Anderson and Bows note that stabilising atmospheric concentrations even at 650 ppmv CO2e requires that global emissions peak by 2020, followed by global cuts of 3-4% a year. This means that OECD nations will have to cut emissions by even more than this to prevent concentrations from rising above 650. Meinshausen estimates that stabilisation at 650ppmv CO2e gives a 40% chance of exceeding 4 degrees C. 12. CNBC.com, 17th November 2008. Financial Crisis Tab Already In The Trillions.http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article21263.htm 13. Sharon Astyk, 11th November 2008. A New Deal or a War Footing? Thinking Through Our Response to Climate Change. http://sharonastyk.com/2008/11/11/a-new-deal-or-a-war-footing-thinking-through-our-response-to-climate-change/