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REFLECTIONS ON THE REAL ECONOMY

“Simultaneous harvest failures across major crop-producing regions are a threat to global food security”, according to a new report published by Nature. The technical jargon here references a “meandering jet stream” but, for non-specialists, what this means is that we can no longer rely on worse-than-average crop conditions in some places being cancelled out by better-than-average conditions in others.

Commenting on this in The Guardian, George Monbiot says that only five stories about this have appeared in the global media, which he contrasts with “more than 10,000 stories this year about Phillip Schofield, the British television presenter who resigned over an affair with a younger colleague”.

“In mediaworld, a place that should never be confused with the real world, celebrity gossip is thousands of times more important than existential risk”, says Monbiot.

This is a conundrum that affects issues beyond climate change, critically important though this obviously is. We can imagine busy people, with lives to lead and issues to confront, switching off in droves when the media turns to economics.

Moreover, they’re right to do this, if all that’s being presented to them is an outdated, fallacious doctrine which promises infinite growth on a finite planet, and claims that there’s a financial fix for every economic ill.

If it’s difficult for people to find time to think about a real issue like climate change, how can we expect them to take an interest in nonsense about infinite growth and the cure-all characteristics of money?

I’m writing this as the Surplus Energy Economics project closes in on its tenth anniversary.

To be candid about it, I don’t know exactly what I’m going to do next, but I can tell you my immediate plan.

This is the first of two planned articles to appear here. The second will try to sum up what I think we now know about the economy, understood as an energy system.

Here, I’m going to reflect on some of the implications that we can draw from what we know about the economy.

Of reality and perception

There are, of course, two ways in which we might explain the disparity of coverage between hard and important scientific news and the doings of people in the “mediaworld”. One is that ‘the powers that be’ who control the world’s media don’t want us to hear about – or worry and get angry about – threats to global food security.

The other is that the general public is simply more interested in stories about ‘slebs’ than in the complicated science and gloomy prognostications of the experts, and the media have a commercial interest in covering those stories which attract the greatest attention.

The US is a rogue state leading the world towards ecological collapse

December 9, 2022

The US is a rogue state leading the world towards ecological collapse

It’s not just indifference. It’s an active, and deadly, cavalier attitude towards the lives of others: an example other nations follow

Illustration by Eleanor Shakespeare — Illustration: Eleanor Shakespeare

There are two extraordinary facts about the convention on biological diversity, whose members are meeting in Montreal now to discuss the global ecological crisis. The first is that, of the world’s 198 states, 196 are party to it. The second is the identity of those that aren’t. Take a guess. North Korea? Russia? Wrong. Both ratified the convention years ago. One is the Holy See (the Vatican). The other is the United States of America.

This is one of several major international treaties the US has refused to ratify. Among the others are crucial instruments such as the Rome statute on international crimes, the treaties banning cluster bombs and landmines, the convention on discrimination against women, the Basel convention on hazardous waste, the convention on the law of the sea, the nuclear test ban treaty, the employment policy convention and the convention on the rights of persons with disabilities.

In some cases, it is one of only a small number to refuse: the others are generally either impoverished states with little administrative capacity or vicious dictatorships. It is the only independent nation on Earth not to ratify the convention on the rights of the child. Perhaps this is because it is the only nation to sentence children to life imprisonment without parole, among many other brutal policies. While others play by the rules, the most powerful nation refuses. If this country were a person, we’d call it a psychopath. As it is not a person, we should call it what it is: a rogue state.

…click on the above link to read the rest…

‘George Monbiot’s Multi-Level Marketing of Ecomodernism’ – The Meta-Blog, no.24

December 5, 2022

‘George Monbiot’s Multi-Level Marketing of Ecomodernism’ – The Meta-Blog, no.24

The environmental debate in Britain is maintained by a few unaccountable figures elevated to the role of eco-gate-keepers – which is why the ecological debate fails to make any real progress.

To be clear, this isn’t just about George Monbiot specifically. Using George’s recent book, ‘Regenesis’, and his column in The Guardian, this video/blog is a necessarily long and detailed deep dive into the role ‘green pundits’ have in the ecological debate – and whether that role is truly representative given the available evidence.

When one of Britain’s ‘leading environmentalists’ is saying that genetically modified bacteria in vats are better than allotments, permaculture, or integrated polyculture – while utterly downplaying the reasons for national and global hunger to support that spurious arguments – we have to question who precisely these ‘green pundits’ are working towards… and do we want to go to that destination?

For the extensively referenced text of this post, goto: http://www.fraw.org.uk/blog/posts/024…

Losing It

January 14, 2022

Losing It

Faced with the gathering collapse of the biosphere, and governments’ refusal to take the necessary action, how do we stop ourselves from falling apart?

No wonder journalists have slated it. They’ve produced a hundred excuses not to watch the climate breakdown satire Don’t Look Up: it’s “blunt”, it’s “shrill”, it’s “smug”. But they will not name the real problem: it’s about them. The movie is, in my view, a powerful demolition of the grotesque failures of public life. And the sector whose failures are most brutally exposed is the media.

While the film is fast and funny, for me, as for many environmental activists and climate scientists, it seemed all too real. I felt as if I were watching my adult life flash past me. As the scientists in the film, trying to draw attention to the approach of a planet-killing comet, bashed their heads against the Great Wall of Denial erected by the media and sought to reach politicians with 10-second attention spans, all the anger and frustration and desperation I’ve felt over the years boiled over.

Above all, when the scientist who had discovered the comet was pushed to the bottom of the schedule by fatuous celebrity gossip on a morning TV show and erupted in fury, I was reminded of my own mortifying loss of control on Good Morning Britain in November. It was soon after the Cop26 climate conference in Glasgow, where we had seen the least serious of all governments (the UK was hosting the talks) failing to rise to the most serious of all issues. I tried, for the thousandth time, to explain what we are facing, and suddenly couldn’t hold it in any longer. I burst into tears on live TV.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Tipping Point That Will Destroy the World

January 12, 2022

The Tipping Point That Will Destroy the World

George Monbiot champions wealth taxes on ultra-rich as best way to prevent environmental collapse

November 15, 2021

George Monbiot champions wealth taxes on ultra-rich as best way to prevent environmental collapse

Why do we tolerate the massive environmental impacts of the very rich? Most of our dysfunctions are caused by pandering to the rich. —

George Monbiot

“Why do we tolerate the massive environmental impacts of the very rich? Most of our dysfunctions are caused by pandering to the rich. The way governments have allowed democracy to be eroded by lobbyists (including politicians with lucrative private interests); the deregulation that lets corporations, oligarchs and landlords squeeze their workers and tenants, then dump their costs on society; the permissive environment for profiteering during the pandemic; the degradation of health, education, and other public services by the constant drive towards privatization: all these are symptoms of the same condition. The same applies to the worst of our predicaments: the destruction of our life-support systems. The very rich arrogate to themselves the lion’s share of the planetary space on which we all depend. It is hard to understand why we tolerate this attack on our common interests…. Big money now buys everything: even access to the meetings that should address these dysfunctions. On some accounts, Cop26 is the most exclusive of all climate summits. Delegates from poor nations have been thwarted by a cruel combination of byzantine visa requirements, broken promises to make Covid vaccines available, and the mad costs of accommodation, thanks to government failures to cap local prices, or make rooms available. Even when delegates from poorer nations can scale these walls, they often find themselves excluded from the negotiating areas, and therefore unable to influence the talks….

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

How Wealth Inequality Fuels the Climate Emergency: George Monbiot & Scientist Kevin Anderson on COP26

November 12, 2021

How Wealth Inequality Fuels the Climate Emergency: George Monbiot & Scientist Kevin Anderson on COP26

The United States and China made a surprise announcement on Wednesday at the U.N. climate summit in Glasgow on a joint pledge to reduce methane emissions and slow deforestation. The United States is the largest historical emitter of carbon emissions, while China has been the largest emitter in recent years. As negotiations continue, we speak with British journalist George Monbiot and British climate scientist Kevin Anderson about how world leaders and even some climate scientists are downplaying the climate emergency. “Everything we’ve been hearing here and at the previous 25 summits is basically distraction,” says Monbiot, adding that global leaders could “fix” the worst impacts of the climate crisis “in no time at all if they wanted to.” Both guests highlight the role of extreme wealth in fueling the climate crisis, with Anderson noting it’s unfair to penalize nations like China, whose rising emissions correlate to the production of goods transported to wealthier countries. “Equity has to be a key part of our responses,” says Anderson.

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. This is Climate Countdown. I’m Amy Goodman, in New York, also joined by Democracy Now! co-host Nermeen Shaikh. Hi, Nermeen.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Hi, Amy. And welcome to our listeners and viewers around the country and around the world.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, we’re going to go right now to the U.N. climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland, where the United States and China made a surprise announcement yesterday about plans to work together to cut greenhouse gas emissions, including measures to reduce methane emissions and slow deforestation…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The climate war won’t work

October 30, 2021

The climate war won’t work

There are, in fact, no human comparisons for the effort required to reverse the global-scale damage wrought by 300 years of industrial growth. Nevertheless, people still reach for past human endeavours to try to spur our political leaders to an action which, in truth, is far beyond them. How many times have we heard that tackling climate change requires an effort similar in scale to the Apollo moon landings or the Manhattan Project? And then there is the stubbornly undead comparison to the Second World War. Every time we think we have successfully driven a stake through the heart of this insane proposition, someone who has failed to understand what the war was really about, resurrects it and drafts it into service in the fight against climate change.

Today it is everyone’s favourite media environmentalist George Monbiot’s turn to suggest that:

“The astonishing story of how the US entered the second world war should be on everyone’s minds as Cop26 approaches.”

Monbiot gives a reasonable summary of the various measures taken by the Roosevelt Administration to mobilise the US economy for war in the wake of Pearl Harbour. Then he asks:

“So what stops the world from responding with the same decisive force to the greatest crisis humanity has ever faced? It’s not a lack of money or capacity or technology. If anything, digitisation would make such a transformation quicker and easier. It’s a problem that Roosevelt faced until Pearl Harbor: a lack of political will. Now, just as then, public hostility and indifference, encouraged by legacy industries (today, above all, fossil fuel, transport, infrastructure, meat and media), outweighs the demand for intervention…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Unrelenting economic growth on a finite planet is laying waste to entire living systems

October 7, 2021

Unrelenting economic growth on a finite planet is laying waste to entire living systems

Meanwhile, governments everywhere are talking about “supercharging our economy.” —

No 2784 by fw, October 5, 2021—

George Monbiot

“There is a box labelled ‘climate’, in which politicians discuss the climate crisis. There is a box named ‘biodiversity’, in which they discuss the biodiversity crisis. There are plenty of other boxes, such as pollution, deforestation, overfishing and soil loss, gathering dust in our planet’s lost property department. But all these boxes contain aspects of one crisis, that we have divided up to make it comprehensible. The categories the human brain creates to make sense of its surroundings are not, as Immanuel Kant observed, the Thing-in-Itself. They describe perceptual artefacts, rather than the world. Nature recognizes no such divisions. As Earth systems are assaulted by everything at once, each source of stress compounds the others…. What would we see if we broke down our conceptual barriers? We would see a full spectrum assault on the living world. Scarcely anywhere is now safe from this sustained assault. A recent scientific paper estimates that only 3% of the Earth’s land surface should now be considered ‘ecologically intact’. …We have no hope of emerging from this full-spectrum crisis unless we ramp down economic activity. Wealth must be distributed – a constrained world cannot afford the rich – but it must also be reduced. Sustaining our life-support systems means doing less of almost everything. But this notion – which should be central to a new, environmental ethics – is secular blasphemy.” —George Monbiot

George Joshua Richard Monbiot is a British writer known for his environmental and political activism. He writes a weekly column for The Guardian, and is the author of a number of books.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

‘Green growth’ doesn’t exist – less of everything is the only way to avert catastrophe

September 30, 2021

‘Green growth’ doesn’t exist – less of everything is the only way to avert catastrophe

It is simply not possible to carry on at the current level of economic activity without destroying the environment

‘Combined impacts are laying waste to entire living systems.’ A dead North Atlantic right whale washed up on a beach in New Brunswick, Canada. Photograph: Nathan Klima/Boston Globe/Getty Images

There is a box labelled “climate”, in which politicians discuss the climate crisis. There is a box named “biodiversity”, in which they discuss the biodiversity crisis. There are other boxes, such as pollution, deforestation, overfishing and soil loss, gathering dust in our planet’s lost property department. But they all contain aspects of one crisis that we have divided up to make it comprehensible. The categories the human brain creates to make sense of its surroundings are not, as Immanuel Kant observed, the “thing-in-itself”. They describe artefacts of our perceptions rather than the world.

Nature recognises no such divisions. As Earth systems are assaulted by everything at once, each source of stress compounds the others.

Take the situation of the North Atlantic right whale, whose population recovered a little when whaling ceased, but is now slumping again: fewer than 95 females of breeding age remain. The immediate reasons for this decline are mostly deaths and injuries caused when whales are hit by ships or tangled in fishing gear. But they’ve become more vulnerable to these impacts because they’ve had to shift along the eastern seaboard of North America into busy waters.

Cutting machines developed for deep-sea mining.

Their main prey, a small swimming crustacean called Calanus finmarchicus, is moving north at a rate of 8km a year, because the sea is heating…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

People want a greener, happier world now. But our politicians have other ideas

July 22, 2020

People want a greener, happier world now. But our politicians have other ideas

Boris Johnson’s ‘return to normality’ will only mean more consumerism at the expense of the planet – we must resist it

A helicopter battles a wildfire in Khanty-Mansi, Siberia, July 2020. Photograph: Denis Bushkovsky/TASS

Out there somewhere, marked on no map but tantalisingly near, is a promised land called Normal, to which one day we can return. This is the magical geography we are taught by politicians, such as Boris Johnson with his “significant return to normality”. It is the story we tell ourselves, even if we contradict it with the very next thought.

There are practical reasons to believe that Normal is a fairyland to which we can never return. The virus has not gone away, and is likely to keep recurring in waves. But let’s focus on another question: if such a land existed, would we want to live there?

The polls consistently suggest we would not. A survey by BritainThinks a fortnight ago found that only 12% of people want life to be “exactly as it was before”. A poll at the end of June, commissioned by the nursery provider Bright Horizons, suggested that just 13% of people want to return to working as they did before the lockdown. A YouGov study in the same week revealed that only 6% of us want the same type of economy as we had before the pandemic. Another survey by the same pollsters in April showed only 9% of respondents wanted a return to “normal”. It’s rare to see such strong and consistent results on any major issue.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Resist and Rebuild

December 16, 2019

Resist and Rebuild

Don’t despair: we will fight back, and, eventually, return stronger than before.

Yes, it’s dark. Darker, arguably, than at any point since the Second World War. We have a government not of conservatives, but of the radical right, who will now seek to smash the remaining restraints on capital and those who accumulate it. They will take their sledgehammers to our public services and our public protections. They cheated and lied to assist their victory; they will cheat and lie even more to implement their programme.

They are led by a man who has expressed overtly racist views, who won’t hesitate to stir up bigotry and xenophobia whenever he runs into trouble, scapegoating immigrants, Muslims, Romani Gypsies and Travellers, the poor and the weak. They will revel in outrage and affront, using every attack on common decency to normalise the unacceptable. This government has no vision for the country, only a vision for the oligarchs to whom it is bound, onshore and offshore.

So I don’t want to minimise the scale and horror of what we face. But documenting it is one task; the other is resisting it. Here, roughly and briefly, is an outline of how we might begin. I am as tired and shocked and frazzled as you are, so please forgive me if I have missed some essential elements.

First, we must park the recriminations and blame. We need to be fully occupied fighting the government and its backers, not fighting each other. Solidarity is going to be crucial over the coming months. We should seek, wherever possible, to put loyalty to party and faction aside, and work on common resolutions to a crisis afflicting everyone who wants a kinder, fairer, greener nation.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

For the sake of life on Earth, we must put a limit on wealth

September 22, 2019

For the sake of life on Earth, we must put a limit on wealth

It’s not just the megarich: increased spending power leads us all to inflict environmental damage. It’s time for a radical plan

It is not quite true that behind every great fortune lies a great crime. Musicians and novelists, for example, can become extremely rich by giving other people pleasure. But it does appear to be universally true that in front of every great fortune lies a great crime. Immense wealth translates automatically into immense environmental impacts, regardless of the intentions of those who possess it. The very wealthy, almost as a matter of definition, are committing ecocide.

A few weeks ago, I received a letter from a worker at a British private airport. “I see things that really shouldn’t be happening in 2019,” he wrote. Every day he sees Global 7000 jets, Gulfstream G650s and even Boeing 737s take off from the airport carrying a single passenger, mostly flying to Russia and the US. The private Boeing 737s, built to take 174 passengers, are filled at the airport with around 25,000 litres of fuel. That’s as much fossil energy as a small African town might use in a year.

Where are these single passengers going? Perhaps to visit one of their superhomes, constructed and run at vast environmental cost, or to take a trip on their superyacht, which might burn 500 litres of diesel an hour just ticking over, and which is built and furnished with rare materials extracted at the expense of beautiful places.

Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised to learn that when Google convened a meeting of the rich and famous at the Verdura resort in Sicily in July to discuss climate breakdown, its delegates arrived in 114 private jets and a fleet of megayachts, and drove around the island in supercars. Even when they mean well, the ultrarich cannot help trashing the living world.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

A Bold Agenda for Treating Land as a Commons

June 21, 2019

A Bold Agenda for Treating Land as a Commons

The privileges of land ownership are so huge and far-reaching that they are generally taken as immutable facts of life – something that politics cannot possibly address. A hearty salute is therefore in order for a fantastic new report edited by George Monbiot, the brilliant columnist for The Guardian, and a team of six experts. The report, “Land for the Many: Changing the Way our Fundamental Asset is Used, Owned and Governed,” lays out a rigorous, comprehensive plan for democratizing access and use of land.

“Dig deep enough into many of the problems this country faces, and you will soon hit land,” writes Monbiot. “Soaring inequality and exclusion; the massive cost of renting or buying a decent home; repeated financial crises, sparked by housing asset bubbles; the collapse of wildlife and ecosystems; the lack of public amenities – the way land is owned and controlled underlies them all. Yet it scarcely features in political discussions.” (The six report coauthors are Robin Grey, Tom Kenny, Laurie Macfarlane, Anna Powell-Smith, Guy Shrubsole and Beth Stratford.).

The report contains recommendations to the British Labour Party as it develops a policy agenda in preparation for the next general election. Given that much of the world suffers from treating land as a speculative asset, the report could be considered a template for pursuing similar reforms around the world. (Monbiot’s column summarizing the report can be found here.)

For me, the report is quite remarkable: a rigorous, comprehensive set of proposals for how land could be developed, used, and protected as a commons.

There are succinct, powerful sections on making land ownership data more open and available; ways to foster community-led development and ownership of land (such as a “community right to buy”); and codifying a citizen’s “right to roam” on land for civic and cultural purposes. One effective way to curb speculative development and revive farming and forestry is by creating community land trusts and curbing tax privileges and subsidies.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

As the fracking protesters show, a people’s rebellion is the only way to fight climate breakdown

October 24, 2018

As the fracking protesters show, a people’s rebellion is the only way to fight climate breakdown

Our politicians, under the influence of big business, have failed us. As they take the planet to the brink, it’s time for disruptive, nonviolent disobedience

Illustration by Bill Bragg

It is hard to believe today, but the prevailing ethos among the educated elite was once public service. As the historian Tony Judt documented in Ill Fares the Land, the foremost ambition among graduates in the 1950s and 60s was, through government or the liberal professions, to serve their country. Their approach might have been patrician and often blinkered, but their intentions were mostly public and civic, not private and pecuniary.

Today, the notion of public service seems as quaint as a local post office. We expect those who govern us to grab what they can, permitting predatory banks and corporations to fleece the public realm, then collect their reward in the form of lucrative directorships. As the Edelman Corporation’s Trust Barometer survey reveals, trust worldwide has collapsed in all major institutions, and government is less trusted than any other.

As for the economic elite, as the consequences of their own greed and self-interest emerge, they seek, like the Roman oligarchs fleeing the collapse of the western empire, only to secure their survival against the indignant mob. An essay by the visionary author Douglas Rushkoff this summer, documenting his discussion with some of the world’s richest people, reveals that their most pressing concern is to find a refuge from climate breakdown, and economic and societal collapse. Should they move to New Zealand or Alaska? How will they pay their security guards once money is worthless? Could they upload their minds on to supercomputers? Survival Condo, the company turning former missile silos in Kansas into fortified bunkers, has so far sold every completed unit.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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