The Oil Intensity of Food

by Lester Brown from Grist 25 June 2009 Although attention commonly focuses on energy use on the farm, agriculture accounts for only one fifth of the energy used in the U.S. food system, The modern food system that evolved when oil was cheap will not survive as it is now structured.

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It's Official: The Era Of Cheap Oil Is Over

by Michael T. Klare from Countercurrents 12 June 2009 Every summer, the Energy Information Administration (EIA) of the U.S. Department of Energy issues its International Energy Outlook (IEO) - a jam-packed compendium of data and analysis on the evolving world energy equation. For those with the background to interpret its key statistical findings, the release of the IEO can provide a unique opportunity to gauge important shifts in global energy trends, much as reports of routine Communist Party functions in the party journal Pravda once provided America's Kremlin watchers with insights into changes in the Soviet Union's top leadership circle. Continue at http://www.countercurrents.org/klare120609.htm See also Oil price leaps to year's high

Maritime Union: Nat's transport funding plan sends NZ backwards

Maritime Union of New Zealand media release 25 March 2009 The Maritime Union says the Government's transport funding plan is an environmental and economic travesty. The National Government has changed spending commitments of the previous Government and and released a statement on money it will put into developing land transport (including sea transport) for the next ten years. The new plan includes a three year commitment to spending over seven billion dollars on road related expenditure – and even includes $51 million for cycling and walkways. In comparison, it puts forward $1 million for "rail and sea freight" and $3 million for "domestic sea freight development." (Yes - the figure is million not billion.) That's about one cent on rail and sea freight development for every twenty dollars on roads. Maritime Union General Secretary Trevor Hanson says that over 99% of New Zealand imports and exports arrive by sea yet this transport mode was receiving enough money to pay for a few lifeboats. Mr Hanson says the environmental and economic security outcomes of pouring all its resources into more and more roads were staggering. "Does anyone in this Government have their head around the fact that the world is on the brink of an unprecedented energy crisis?" He says that reliance on road transport made New Zealand completely dependent on secure supplies of cheap oil – something that will seem like a bad joke in ten years time. "The only people who will be celebrating this are the boy racers." Mr Hanson says around the world Government's are quickly moving to develop low impact, energy efficient infrastructure as the reality of climate change, peak oil and energy insecurity sinks in. "The world has changed, but here in New Zealand the new Government has invested a thousand times more in the most environmentally damaging, energy wasteful transport modes than the transport modes of the future, shipping and rail." Mr Hanson says the lack of training, infrastructure and investment in coastal shipping has left an island nation in a state of complete vulnerability. "The role of coastal shipping in the future of our ports has been a major discussion point in the transport industry, but seems to have been entirely missed by the Government." The Government says it wants to reduce road accidents, but is planning on increasing the amount of heavy transport and passenger cars on roads, which would obviously increase risks to motorists. "Building more roads means encouraging more traffic in a vicious cycle that will only end when the cost of petrol causes economic meltdown. We need to get heavy freight off the roads and onto coastal shipping or the 'blue highway' and its natural partner rail." Mr Hanson says the previous Government had finally acknowledged the role of shipping with its Sea Change strategy, but the National Government had dropped the ball and shown a mentality that was a generation out of date. He says he believes that road transport lobbyists had taken control of the Government's agenda due to their political connections and the plan amounted to a multi billion dollar subsidy to trucking operators. The statement that the Government wants to rebalance in favour of transport options 'realistically available to New Zealanders now' show this is a document without vision or forward thinking, says Mr Hanson. The only reason that road transport is a realistic option is that it has billions of dollars of taxpayers money poured into it, he says. The Maritime Union would be working to get changes to the plan.

The Oil Intensity of Food

by Lester Brown from Grist 25 June 2009 Although attention commonly focuses on energy use on the farm, agriculture accounts for only one fifth of the energy used in the U.S. food system, The modern food system that evolved when oil was cheap will not survive as it is now structured. Today we are an oil-based civilization, one that is totally dependent on a resource whose production will soon be falling. Since 1981, the quantity of oil extracted has exceeded new discoveries by an ever-widening margin. In 2008, the world pumped 31 billion barrels of oil but discovered fewer than 9 billion barrels of new oil. World reserves of conventional oil are in a free fall, dropping every year. As I note in my latest book Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization, discoveries of conventional oil total roughly 2 trillion barrels, of which 1 trillion have been extracted so far, with another trillion barrels to go. By themselves, however, these numbers miss a central point. As security analyst Michael Klare notes, the first trillion barrels was easy oil, “oil that’s found on shore or near to shore; oil close to the surface and concentrated in large reservoirs; oil produced in friendly, safe, and welcoming places.” The other half, Klare notes, is tough oil, “oil that’s buried far offshore or deep underground; oil scattered in small, hard-to-find reservoirs; oil that must be obtained from unfriendly, politically dangerous, or hazardous places.” This prospect of peaking oil production has direct consequences for world food security, as modern agriculture depends heavily on the use of fossil fuels. Most tractors use gasoline or diesel fuel. Irrigation pumps use diesel fuel, natural gas, or coal-fired electricity. Fertilizer production is also energy-intensive. Natural gas is used to synthesize the basic ammonia building block in nitrogen fertilizers. The mining, manufacture, and international transport of phosphates and potash all depend on oil. Efficiency gains can help reduce agriculture’s dependence on oil. In the United States, the combined direct use of gasoline and diesel fuel in farming fell from its historical high of 7.7 billion gallons (29.1 billion liters) in 1973 to 4.2 billion in 2005—a decline of 45 percent. Broadly calculated, the gallons of fuel used per ton of grain produced dropped from 33 in 1973 to 12 in 2005, an impressive decrease of 64 percent. One reason for this achievement was a shift to minimum- and no-till cultural practices on roughly two fifths of U.S. cropland. But while U.S. agricultural fuel use has been declining, in many developing countries it is rising as the shift from draft animals to tractors continues. A generation ago, for example, cropland in China was tilled largely by draft animals. Today much of the plowing is done with tractors. Fertilizer accounts for 20 percent of U.S. farm energy use. Worldwide, the figure may be slightly higher. As the world urbanizes, the demand for fertilizer climbs. As people migrate from rural areas to cities, it becomes more difficult to recycle the nutrients in human waste back into the soil, requiring the use of more fertilizer. Beyond this, the growing international food trade can separate producer and consumer by thousands of miles, further disrupting the nutrient cycle. The United States, for example, exports some 80 million tons of grain per year—grain that contains large quantities of basic plant nutrients: nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium. The ongoing export of these nutrients would slowly drain the inherent fertility from U.S. cropland if the nutrients were not replaced. Irrigation, another major energy claimant, is requiring more energy worldwide as water tables fall. In the United States, close to 19 percent of farm energy use is for pumping water. And in some states in India where water tables are falling, over half of all electricity is used to pump water from wells. Some trends, such as the shift to no-tillage, are making agriculture less oil-intensive, but rising fertilizer use, the spread of farm mechanization, and falling water tables are having the opposite effect. Although attention commonly focuses on energy use on the farm, agriculture accounts for only one fifth of the energy used in the U.S. food system. Transport, processing, packaging, marketing, and kitchen preparation of food are responsible for the rest. The U.S. food economy uses as much energy as the entire economy of the United Kingdom. The 14 percent of energy used in the food system to move goods from farmer to consumer is equal to two thirds of the energy used to produce the food. And an estimated 16 percent of food system energy use is devoted to canning, freezing, and drying food—everything from frozen orange juice concentrate to canned peas. Food staples such as wheat have traditionally moved over long distances by ship, traveling from the United States to Europe, for example. What is new is the shipment of fresh fruits and vegetables over vast distances by air. Few economic activities are more energy-intensive. Food miles—the distance that food travels from producer to consumer—have risen with cheap oil. At my local supermarket in downtown Washington, D.C., the fresh grapes in winter typically come by plane from Chile, traveling almost 5,000 miles. One of the most routine long-distance movements of fresh produce is from California to the heavily populated U.S. East Coast. Most of this produce moves by refrigerated trucks. In assessing the future of long-distance produce transport, one writer observed that the days of the 3,000-mile Caesar salad may be numbered. Packaging is also surprisingly energy-intensive, accounting for 7 percent of food system energy use. It is not uncommon for the energy invested in packaging to exceed that in the food it contains. Packaging and marketing also can account for much of the cost of processed foods. The U.S. farmer gets about 20 percent of the consumer food dollar, and for some products, the figure is much lower. As one analyst has observed, “An empty cereal box delivered to the grocery store would cost about the same as a full one.” The most energy-intensive segment of the food chain is the kitchen. Much more energy is used to refrigerate and prepare food in the home than is used to produce it in the first place. The big energy user in the food system is the kitchen refrigerator, not the farm tractor. While oil dominates the production end of the food system, electricity dominates the consumption end. In short, with higher energy prices and a limited supply of fossil fuels, the modern food system that evolved when oil was cheap will not survive as it is now structured.

We need an MMP type campaign for free public transport

UNITYblog editorial 11 July 2008 A just released Australian report claims petrol could hit $A8 ($NZ10) a litre within a decade. The report confirms that people on low incomes will be the worst affected by Peak Oil scenarios. See 'Fuel for thought - The future of transport fuels: challenges and opportunities' But still NZ's Labour government wants to spend billions of dollars on new roading projects. They've been deafened by the honks of the roading lobby and aren't hearing the voices of people calling for a 21st century public transport system. Green Party co-leader Russel Norman responding to the Aussie report in the NZ Herald says: "Petrol at that price would make the Government's entire motorway building project a white elephant - modern day Easter Island statues. Our new motorways would be monuments to short sightedness and profligate waste of resources." "We have no choice but to move to a far less oil-dependent economy, because rising prices will give us no choice." That's why we need to forget about tinkering around with emissions trading schemes that are next to useless and build a nationwide, multi-organisation, campaign for free and frequent public transport. This is the solution that's desperately needed and which hundreds of thousands of people in NZ - and around the world - will see the sense of. Free and frequent public transport needs to be turned into the kind of high profile broad-based campaign that won MMP voting.

Nationalise big oil, enemy of people and planet

by Dick Nichols

from Socialist Alliance website, Australia

The latest surge in the spot price of crude oil (to $US139 a barrel - 87.4 cents a litre) dramatises the urgent need for our society to wean itself off dependence on “black gold”. The longer we remain hooked the greater the devastation both to our environment and to the living standards of millions, especially the poorest peoples of the planet.

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What Would a Liveable City Look Like?

by Dave Holmes from Green Left Weekly 30 May 2008 (abridged)

When one sees a modern city from the air, especially at night, it is a truly awe-inspiring spectacle. The immensity of the project is a testimony to the power and creativity of human beings. However, on the ground and actually living and working in this wonder, things are quite different: the social and ecological problems crowd in and fill your view. The truth is that our cities have always been dominated by the rich and powerful, and built and operated to serve their needs rather than those of the mass of working people who live and toil in them.

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Is the world about to be running on empty?

by Stephen Foley
from The Independent
23 May, 2008

In France, fishermen are blockading oil refineries. In Britain, lorry drivers are planning a day of action. In the US, the car maker Ford is to cut production of gas-guzzling sports utility vehicles and airlines are jacking up ticket prices. Global concerns about fuel prices are reaching fever pitch and the world's leading energy monitor has issued a disturbing downward revision of the oil industry's ability to keep pace with soaring demand.

Yesterday's warning from the International Energy Agency sent the price of a barrel of oil to a new record for the 13th day in a row. The latest high – $135 for a barrel of light sweet crude – was reached in New York barely five months after the price hit $100. Experts in London and on Wall Street predict that prices will rise to $200, regardless of the protests of consumers and the complaints of politicians. It is simple economics, they say: supply and demand. The former is short, the latter growing. Consumers are feeling the pinch in almost every area of their daily lives. The pain is felt most obviously at the pumps. In Britain, the price of petrol has risen to an average of 114p for a litre of unleaded – £5.15 per gallon. In the US, where drivers pay much lower prices, gasoline is more than $4 (£2) a gallon. Beyond that, energy bills are rising for households across the globe, hitting the poorest the hardest. British Gas, the nation's biggest gas and electricity supplier, is mulling further price rises, on top of the 15 per cent average increase it introduced in January.

Airlines which once limited fare increases to temporary "fuel surcharges" are now raising ticket prices and – as American Airlines did this week – starting to charge for checked baggage. Meanwhile, manufacturers are putting up the price of goods to compensate for higher energy bills at their factorues, ending many years of price deflation that began when firms started transferring production overseas.

"The high-priced energy environment is being driven by the fact that demand has outstripped supply," President George Bush's Energy Secretary, Samuel Bodman, told the US Congress yesterday. "We have sopped up all the available spare oil production capacity in the system .... and there is no silver bullet that will immediately solve our energy challenges or drastically reduce costs at the gas pump."

The world uses about 87 million barrels of oil a day, about a quarter of it in the US. Saudi Arabia is the only country thought to have the capacity to pump oil faster. Meanwhile, China is in the throes of an industrial revolution that demands ever greater supplies of crude, yet global production has stagnated for two years. The Saudi government rejected a recent appeal from Mr Bush to increase production, saying there were no oil shortages at present. Economists worry, though, that shortages are around the corner, as mature oilfields wind down.

The Paris-based International Energy Agency (IEA) said yesterday that it might have overestimated the capacity of oil-producing nations to open new fields to keep up with growing demand over the next decade. Global production, which the IEA previously reckoned could reach 116 million barrels a day by 2030, might not even make 100 million.

Fatih Birol, the IEA's chief economist, said the oil industry had entered "a new energy world order" where it was harder to keep supply and demand in equilibrium. "When the price went up as a result of the Iranian revolution, demand went down," he added. "But what has happened in the last few years has not been in line with economic theory. The price of oil went up sharply between 2004 and 2006 and demand actually increased. That may seem bizarre but it is the result of new buyers coming in, such as China and the Middle Eastern economies where fuel is subsidised by government and rises are not reflected on the consumer side."

Some politicians in the US rail against nationalised oil companies in the developing world for failing to invest in new production that might alleviate stresses in the market. And at every turn, Mr Bush and members of his administration insist that environmentalists should yield to the public hunger for oil and Congress should authorise drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska.

However, the investment bank Goldman Sachs said this month that the oil price could rise as high as $200 over the next year and would remain consistently above $100 until there was a significant fall in US demand. There are small signs of that happening. Yesterday, Ford said it was cutting vehicle production by more than it announced earlier this year. It will make the deepest cuts in its SUV and pick-up truck businesses because US customers are increasingly switching to lighter, more fuel-efficient vehicles. Alan Mulally, the chief executive, said pick-up sales now accounted for 9 per cent of the market compared with 11 per cent a few weeks ago.

Nationalise big oil, enemy of people and planet

by Dick Nichols from Socialist Alliance website, Australia The latest surge in the spot price of crude oil (to $US139 a barrel - 87.4 cents a litre) dramatises the urgent need for our society to wean itself off dependence on “black gold”. The longer we remain hooked the greater the devastation both to our environment and to the living standards of millions, especially the poorest peoples of the planet. The challenge is huge. The response must combine defence against the threat to livelihoods from oil price rises with a plan to restructure economies and ways of living so that oil-intensive production and transport becomes a thing of the past. Many pro-market commentators – and not a few environmentalists – welcome the latest oil price hike (which means the real price of oil has risen 400% in the last six years, greater than in 1970s oil crises) as helping achieve that goal. They bemoan the “cheap populism” of the Coalition’s proposed five cents a litre cut in petrol excise and the Rudd government’s FuelWatch scheme. The Financial Review’s economics editor Alan Mitchell says: “What our leaders should be telling voters is that the price of petrol has nowhere to go but up, and that they should take that into account when they buy their next car and make their next decision about where to live.” And what about those millions of consumers of fossil fuels whose lives aren’t focused on getting out of a gas-guzzling 4WD and into a Toyota Prius? Can the urban poor of Jakarta react to the Indonesian government's planned 28.7% increase in fuel prices by switching to solar panels? Should the Yorkshire fisherman whose weekly fuel bill has gone from $4000 to over $9000 in the space of a year respond to this "price signal" by fishing from a sailing boat or the nearest wharf? Less dramatically, what should be done about the $700 a year increase in the average Australian family budget that recent petrol price rises are reckoned to bring? Defending living standards The most immediate challenge that the oil price surge creates is the defence of living standards – to stop the burden of the crisis being placed on the shoulders of working people and the poor. But defence of people’s livelihoods is also critical to make sure that the shift out of fossil-fuel dependent energy actually wins the mass support it will need if it is to actually happen. Here those environmentalists who think that increases in oil prices are to be welcomed because they are producing a (still minor) shift into diesel and hybrid cars and public transport are dangerously deceived. If the movement against global warming doesn’t propose its own solutions to the pain of oil price hikes, it abandons the field to the Brendan Nelsons (and even worse anti-environmental demagogues). Take, as a warning sign, the recent demise at the polls of London mayor Ken Livingston, who with the best intentions in the world introduced parking fees in the inner city, but without sufficient improvements in public transport to reduce people's car and petrol dependence. Here it’s important to grasp is that it’s not true in the short term that the retail price of petrol “has nowhere to go but up”. And that’s not just because the latest oil price hike involves a speculative bubble which will burst sooner or later. It’s also because there’s a huge difference between the cost of extraction of crude oil and the final retail price of petrol. In between come the profits of the oil corporations, the wholesalers (often the same companies), the shippers and government taxes. Start with the cost of oil extraction. According to the Bank of Kuwait oil at $100 a barrel yields the following astronomical rates of profit, which are based on the production cost of a litre (given here in brackets): Kuwait 488% (11 cents); United Arab Emirates 300% (16 cents); Saudi Arabia and Qatar 233% (19 cents); Canadian oil sands 203% (21 cents); and Bahrain and Oman 150% (25 cents). Next along the chain comes refining. According to the December 2007 Australian Competition and Consumer Commission report Petrol Prices and Australian Consumers, “the major refiners have established a comfortable oligopoly” which conducts a “policy of pricing locally refined petrol on the basis [of] an imported equivalent product rather than the actual cost of domestic refining or even the actual cost of imports.” The ACCC calculated that when unleaded petrol retailed for 121.6 cents a litre in 2007 the import parity price (suspect) was 56.1 cents, the refiner margin 3.7 cents, the wholesale margin 8.1 cents, government taxes (petroleum excise and wholesale and retail GST) 49.2 cents and the retail margin 4.4 cents. These figures make nonsense of Kevin Rudd’s claim that the federal government has done everything “physically possible” to contain oil price increases. A government that was concerned to confront the impact of such surges could: * Set a maximum retail price and adjust fuel excise and consumption tax rates accordingly (presently being considered by the Italian, Spanish and French governments); * Set limits to retail price movements and the various margins (refiner, wholesale and retail). In June 2007, the refiner margin in Australia jumped to over 12 cents, provoking the ACCC inquiry. Regulation along these lines has been introduced in Belgium and is presently being pushed in the Portuguese parliament by the Left Bloc. According to Bloc spokesperson and economist Francisco Louça simple anti-speculative rules like these could cut prices at the pump between 10 and 14 cents a litre. Nationalise the oil corporations Nonetheless, in today’s world of long-run rising oil extraction costs these sorts of measures will only bring temporary relief so long as the industry remains profit-driven and in private hands. Seriously tackling the impact of oil prices on living standards will require the nationalisation of big oil (in Australia Shell, Mobil, Caltex and BP). This is not just the only way to expose the true accounts of the oil corporations (which the ACCC was never sure it had in its hands). Nationalisation is also critical to carrying out the program for energy sustainability our environment needs, one which will have eliminating oil dependence at its core. The movement against global warming needs to fight for the nationalisation of big oil for exactly the same reasons that it fights the privatisation of electricity in New South Wales – without public ownership of the commanding heights of energy production the capacity to quickly introduce renewable technologies and phase out carbon-intensive generation practically disappears. It is also the only framework in which a “right price” for oil-based products can be addressed – not so low as to provide no incentive to reduce consumption, nor so high as to undermine the livelihoods of workers and communities. In November 2006, the world price of crude was US 38 cents a litre and retail prices ranged from Venezuela’s three cents a litre (i.e., involving a subsidy of 35 cents a litre) to Iceland’s 186 cents a litre (with the highest fuel taxes in the world). On January 21, 2007, Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez told the audience of his weekly TV program Aló Presidente that the price of petrol was far too low. “We haven’t touched the price of petrol for eight years. It’s really gross to sell petrol the way we’ve been selling it, it would be better to give it away.” Our case in Australia is the complete opposite. Confronted with a Rudd government determined to do practically nothing about soaring petrol prices the union movement must demand full compensation for the increases in the cost of living they produce. Indeed, the oil price surge is a sharp reminder of the need for full indexation of wages and welfare payments, a position that the trade union movement should never have abandoned. There’s only one solution to the oil price crisis: the union and environment movements must fight side by side against the devastation the Shells and Exxons are wreaking on our planet and its peoples. Dick Nichols is the national coordinator of the Socialist Alliance, a broad left party in Australia.

What Would a Liveable City Look Like?

by Dave Holmes from Green Left Weekly 30 May 2008 (abridged) When one sees a modern city from the air, especially at night, it is a truly awe-inspiring spectacle. The immensity of the project is a testimony to the power and creativity of human beings. However, on the ground and actually living and working in this wonder, things are quite different: the social and ecological problems crowd in and fill your view. The truth is that our cities have always been dominated by the rich and powerful, and built and operated to serve their needs rather than those of the mass of working people who live and toil in them. Today the destructive effect on the quality of urban life of the capitalist pursuit of profits before anything else is growing alarmingly: * Modern capitalist cities are absolutely dominated by cars and trucks. This leads to massive, life-threatening pollution and a vast network of roads and car parks that scar the urban landscape. People live on islands surrounded by seas of asphalt and concrete – 40% or more of the city surface is asphalt and concrete. The city creates its own, warmer climate. * Motor vehicles also directly kill and maim large numbers of people each year; still greater numbers die from the pollution. Vehicle emissions are also a major contributor to greenhouse gases and climate change that threatens humanity with utter catastrophe. * Public transport systems are weak and take second place to the motor car. Similarly, the great bulk of freight is carried by trucks not rail. * Developers, aided by governments, have created the appalling urban sprawl with all its ecological and social consequences (erosion of farmland, huge distances between home and work, etc.). The word “developers” is an appalling euphemism – capitalist sharks would be a more accurate description. * And now, in the name of urban consolidation, these same developers are being encouraged to build their often crappy-blocks of units anywhere and everywhere. * Then look at what the developers actually construct. Modern houses and buildings are generally not only hard to maintain but ecologically wasteful and often extremely unhealthy (emissions from building materials, plastics and cleaning agents). They could be designed differently – we could easily have ecologically sensible houses instead of the current extremely wasteful “McMansions” favoured by the building industry. * In the cities, public land – modest though it is – is constantly being alienated by greedy devoured in league with councils and city and state governments. * Not only are house prices soaring beyond the reach of most workers, but homelessness is growing sharply (estimated to be over 100,000 nationally) as governments refuse to build public housing and rely on the market to solve everything (preferring to give subsidies to people to rent from private landlords). * Shopping centres (malls and supermarkets) dominate much of city life. They kill most of the neighbourhood shops and force people to rely on cars to do their shopping. But these juggernauts are purely the result of the capitalist thirst for profit – they appear before us as facts of life; people never get to discuss what is really needed. Moreover, the ubiquitous shopping mall represents a serious privatization of social space – we all have to use them and they thus fulfil a social function but access and control is wholly in the hands of the private owners. * As the supermarkets and malls kill off many of the neighbourhood shops, their place is taken by chain outlets (7-11, Coles Express, petrol station shops) all offering emergency supplies at much higher prices. * Within the city we have the monstrous swelling of the city centre (full of truly ugly buildings all jostling for position) and the bleak wasteland of the sprawling suburbs. * In the 1960s, “decentralization” was a buzzword. Governments encouraged a modest movement of services and industry to regional centres. But today country towns and villages are dying as governments cut services and jobs and banks close branches. This has a multiplier effect. People move to the city (or at least to the big regional centres) and the rural crisis intensifies. * There is a movement back to some regional centres but ‹ under the wonderful capitalist system we have – it becomes a ghastly caricature of what is really needed. The rich and middle classes build holiday homes in coastal towns, forcing up prices and making life impossible for ordinary working-class pensioners and renters who have to move elsewhere. Peak oil and climate change On top of the all this, as the concept of peak oil and the eventual end of this finite resource laid down over millions of years gains currency, the fragility of the modern city is suddenly laid bare. The movie The End of Suburbia demonstrates very well how the American suburbs have been built on the automobile. If the motor vehicle as we know it goes – i.e., can no longer serve as mode of mass transport – then the urban sprawl becomes even more untenable and an alternative way of living becomes desperately urgent. Similarly, climate change has put a big question mark over the modern city. Effecting a drastic and rapid reduction of greenhouse gas emissions is a life-and-death question. In Australia, perhaps the most dramatic manifestation of climate change for the cities is the question mark over water supplies. Achieving water security and sustainability is a burning issue. To date, the main response of state and federal governments has been to go for big-budget projects (in Victoria, a desalination plant and a diversion pipeline to take scarce water from the equally drought-affected Murray-Goulburn irrigation area in the north). Arguably, such responses do not address the real problem and will actually make it worse. For instance, Victoria’s projected desalination plant will be a major emitter of greenhouse gases. All in all, climate change calls into question many aspects of our current urban existence: * The motor vehicle culture that big business has foisted on us is no longer viable (if it ever was). If declining fuel supplies and ever-more-expensive petrol costs don’t kill it off, surely climate change will. Public transport systems will have to be developed to replace it. * The urban sprawl especially characteristic of Australian capital cities – which compels people to travel vast distances to get to work – will have to give way to some form of consolidation. The growth of the city centre and the bleakness of much of the suburbs needs to be overcome. A much better spread of jobs would mean that people didn't have to travel vast distances to work. * Over time the fetish of the quarter-acre block – the equivalent of every family owning its own car – would start to ease and eventually disappear as people realized that denser living with radically improved public amenities (parks, transport, services) had a lot to offer (as it does in some European cities). * As currently constructed, our houses and buildings embody huge amounts of water and energy and considerable greenhouse gas emissions. Moreover, their actual operation is characterized by a high and unsustainable energy and water consumption. * Climate change will put our food supply under extreme pressure. What foods we eat, how they are transported and distributed will become important questions. As well as finding ways to guarantee our food security, reducing the water and energy consumed in the whole process will be vitally important. * We need a much more uniform distribution of the population over the countryside. At the very least, the cities must get smaller and the country towns grow. But, unlike what is happening today, this needs to be done in such a way that jobs and services move out also, transport access is maintained and actual living communities are created. In time, the traditional isolation of the countryside would disappear along with the swollen capital city with its bloated centre. In this regard socialists reject the current developer-driven model whereby green field housing estates gobble up precious farmland and create McMansion-style ghettos on the fringes of the city, isolated and with few amenities, a trap for the less mobile and a terrific burden for those who have to travel vast distances to work. We can surely work out something much better. Abandon affluence? As an aside, Ted Trainer, in his 1985 book Abandon Affluence, had a lot to say on the modern city. But his non-Marxist, radical green framework marred a lot of the useful points he made. He saw “over-consumption” by the West as the source of the global ecological crisis. In his book he bases everything on reducing consumption. Marxists, of course, see the fundamental problem not as “over-consumption” but the capitalist drive for profits ahead of all else; achieving a relative material abundance is essential if humanity is to leave class conflict behind and achieve full communism. With modern technology, it would be quite possible to achieve relative material abundance and – by improving production processes and eliminating the wastefulness of capitalist production and society – at the same time actually reduce our ecological footprint massively. One can say generally that the West consumes too many resources but this obscures the reality that these are class-divided societies and a large proportion of the population doesn’t consume very much at all. For example, in the United States there is a huge internal Third World which radically under-consumes the necessities of life. They are not responsible for the reckless extravagance of the US – that should be sheeted home squarely to the ruling capitalist plutocracy. While we oppose the wasteful use of resources and while we too are opposed to capitalist consumerism, posing the problem in terms of reducing consumption as such is wrong and would be political suicide for the socialist movement. For instance, supermarkets, for all their capitalistic form, are actually a tremendous labour – and time-saving convenience. The liberation of women and the whole working class has many aspects; a key one is reducing drudgery to the minimum. We want to go forwards from capitalism, not backwards. Trainer’s city of the future has a very definite reactionary, feudal, labour-intensive feel to it, but even allowing for this rather basic weakness, he does paint a thought-provoking picture of the new city, with the old freeways and roads dug up, with vegetable gardens where the factories once stood, etc. Monstrous beast in the room Making our cities livable and grappling with peak oil, climate change and sustainability are really one and the same thing. Ideally, we would have a big discussion, develop a rational plan and then organize ourselves to implement it. If we were, say, a small community living in ancient times before the development of class society, that is exactly what we would have done. But today, the problem is not that the population has grown but that the economy on which we all depend – the productive apparatus and everything associated with it – is not owned collectively by society, but by a tiny handful of capitalists. Working people’s labour operates the means of production – in that sense it is social – but only a few per cent of the population privately own it. This is the monstrous, slaving beast in the room. At every turn of the wheel it has to fed. Its ravenous appetite must be satisfied ahead of any human need. What it wants – profits – is not what the rest of us want: meaningful action on climate change and other social problems. For example, in Victoria right now, the big-business-oriented Brumby ALP government is moving at high speed in the opposite direction to what is needed to confront peak oil and climate change: * Rather than a massive program of fitting all dwellings with water tanks and recycling systems, imposing conservation targets on industry and agribusiness, and establishing the infrastructure for large-scale storm water capture, it has signed off on the desalination plant and the northern pipeline – bonanzas for big business but a disaster for the rest of us. Water bills for ordinary households are projected to double within five years. * Rather than a program to phase out our disastrous dependence on brown coal and make the switch to renewable energy, the state government is intent on pursuing the mirage of “clean coal” technology. Power prices are also set to double for ordinary users over the next few years. * It refuses to put the necessary resources into public transport, which exists in absolutely infuriating and permanent crisis; instead its program is roads and still more roads. Now it is inching towards a truly insane monster road tunnel under Melbourne¹s general cemetery. Not even the dead are to be left to rest in peace! * It is going ahead with a radical dredging of Melbourne’s Port Phillip Bay that threatens to lead to the flooding of low-lying suburbs at high tide. And all this is so that bigger ships – laden with yet more consumerist crap – can transit the bay. * It has given the go-ahead to GM canola. Brumby’s utterly ludicrous comment was that this was giving the consumer “choice”! The consumers don’t want this sort of fake “choice” – they want safe foods. GM was given the green light to give a profit bonanza to Monsanto and a few big exporters; the rest of us will pay the price (an increase in allergies and who knows what other long-term health damage). Public ownership and planning In order to grapple with the crisis of climate change we need a total mobilization of society and a drastic, rapid reorientation of our entire economy. But to imagine that anything can compel a horde of profit-crazed corporations to be “responsible” is utterly fanciful. The commanding heights of the economy must be in public hands. * Socialists call for the nationalization of the entire energy sector. This vital infrastructure must belong to the community – whether it is in federal, state or municipal hands. The charter of this sector must be to phase out the fossil fuel power plants and make the “big switch” to renewable energy as quickly as possible. * The public transport and freight systems must also be in public hands. The aim must be to achieve a rapid, substantial reduction in the use of motor vehicles. The roads should be kept safe; apart from that, massive investments must be poured into rail, trams and feeder bus systems. * The automobile industry should likewise be nationalized. The car plants should be retooled to produce public transport stock and renewable power equipment. * As the crisis of climate change bites deeper, food security will become a big issue for society. We can’t leave the bulk of the distribution system in the hands of profit-gouging supermarket chains like Coles and Woolworths, that exploit small suppliers and consumers alike. They too should be brought under public ownership. * The banks, which underpin the capitalist economy, should be nationalized and a single state bank created. This would guarantee bank workers’ jobs, provide services and generate funds for the reconstruction of the economy. Economic planning based on public ownership of the means of production has tremendous power Of course, the capitalist class has immense power and wealth and will not give it up without a tremendous struggle. Only the growth of a vast popular movement, solidly based on the great working-class majority, can succeed. The development of a movement to fight for meaningful action on climate change will at the same time prepare the political conditions for a workers’ government which will finally bring the economy under collective ownership and control. This – and only this – will enable us to begin to construct a society based on the fulfilment of human needs and living sustainably in harmony with nature. Dave Holmes is a member of the Democratic Socialist Perspective, a Marxist tendency within the Socialist Alliance in Australia. This article is based on a talk presented at the Climate Change - Social Change Conference in Sydney in April, 2008. The conference was organized by Green Left Weekly.