2015 – The Year in Blog Posts

2015 was the first full year of this blog. Below are the most popular posts of each month, as defined by page views, for this year.

The year kicked off with increasing evidence of a Green Party surge.

January

Sustainability Over Growth: The Paradigm Shift At The Heart Of The UK 's "Green Surge"

While hostility from the conservative press was to be expected, I must say I have been quite taken aback by how many Labour commentators have completely failed to grasp the mentality of Green supporters or what the "Green Surge" is all about.

Attention then turned to the General Election, which dominated the blog news agenda.

February

Interview - Green Party Candidate for the General Election - Katy Beddoe, Caerphilly

In the second of a series of interviews with Green Left supporting candidates at the General Election, Mike Shaughnessy interviews the Green Party's Katy Beddoe, candidate for Caerphilly, Wales.

March

Exclusive: Ex Labour MEP, Hugh Kerr says Vote Green in England

I like to tease my Green friends that I was the first Green parliamentarian in the UK! I was elected as a Labour MEP for Essex and Herts in 1994 but quickly fell out with Tony Blair, I think I was a little ahead of public opinion in recognising that Blair was a fraud and a Tory!

April

Interview - Green Party Candidate for the General Election - Lesley Grahame, Norwich South

In the fifth of a series of interviews with Green Left supporting candidates at the General Election, Mike Shaughnessy talks to the Green Party's Lesley Grahame, candidate for the target constituency of Norwich South.

May

Green Party manifesto 2015: policies for a 'peaceful revolution'

Party leader Natalie Bennett and Caroline Lucas, the Greens' only MP, described their policies as an "unashamedly bold plan to create a more equal, more democratic society".

June

Who Voted Green at the General Election?

We'll look here at Green voters, but the graphics here give the full results of which party got votes from which demographic groups.

General Election over, the Greek financial crisis moved to centre stage by mid summer.

July

Videos & Photos - Greece Solidarity - German Embassy - London - 15 July

Around two hundred people assembled at the German Embassy in London this evening, to show solidarity with the Greek people in their fight against the vicious and vindictive bail out terms forced on them by their creditors in the EU and IMF.

The Labour leadership contest and its unlikely winner became the big political news story.

August

Will a Corbyn Leadership Win Steal the Greens Thunder?

I’ve not commented until now on Jeremy Corbyn’s campaign to become the Labour party leader, preferring to leave it as a Labour party matter. But it is becoming clear, that if Corbyn wins, it will have a big impact on the Green party’s fortunes.

Then as a side show to Corbyn’s election the EU referendum made a strong appearance.

September

The Lucas / Corbyn Love Affair Ends Over EU Membership Referendum

I don’t know whether Jeremy Corbyn, the new leader of the Labour Party, reads this blog, but his strategy for the upcoming referendum on Britain’s membership of the European Union (EU) now appears to be remarkably similar to what I recommended here on this blog ten days ago.

Fall-out from the new Tory government’s welfare policies hit the headlines.

October

Victorian Era Diseases and Poverty Return to England

The figures from the Health and Social Care Information Centre show that in the worst affected areas, Devon, Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly, 2.4 people out of every 100,000 were admitted to hospital with a primary diagnosis of malnutrition.

Then the vote in Parliament for the UK to bomb IS in Syria proved popular amongst the readership here.

November

Corbyn is Right – Bombing Syria Will Not Improve Our Security or Destroy IS

The recent history of Britain’s involvement in military action in the middle-east is not a happy one, in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, our interventions have been an unmitigated disaster.

The year ended with the Paris COP21 climate ‘agreement’, which some hailed as a great stride forward.

December

Don’t Believe the Hype – COP21 Agreement is a Recipe for Inaction or Worse

Reading the main stream media you would be forgiven for thinking that the climate crisis has, at one fell swoop, been solved by the agreement reached at the Paris COP21 Climate Summit.

Video - The Transition to Ecosocialism - Joel Kovel

The Transition to Ecosocialism: The Ecological Crisis and the Future of Capitalism

On May 7, 2011, three members from the Capitalism Nature Socialism (CNS) Journal held this seminar on Ecosocialism at the Historical Materialism Conference at The New School in New York City.

This is the first of a four-part video from the seminar.

Featuring Joel Kovel, author of "The Enemy of Nature," co-founder of the Ecosocialist International Network, & Editor of the Capitalism Nature Socialism (CNS) Journal (cnsjournal.org).

For more information, write to: prefiguration@gmail.com.
Shot, edited and produced by Estreito Meio Productions (2011), estreitomeio@gmail.com.

James O'Connor's 2nd Contradiction of Capitalism

James O'Connor is one of the pioneers of ecosocialist thinking, in the modern age anyway. He was the founding editor of the ecosocialist journal Capitalism Nature Socialism in 1988. The magazine is now edited by Joel Kovel. Below is an edited extract from a piece written by Cy Gonick first published here.  

“Capitalism, Nature, Socialism: A Theoretical Introduction,” O’Connor’s title article in the very first issue of CNS, has had an enormous influence in shaping ecosocialism as a system of thought. Sometimes reprinted as “The Second Contradiction of Capitalism,” the argument has put an enduring Marxist imprint on ecosocialism.

The first contradiction refers to capitalism’s tendency towards overproduction with its virtually unlimited capacity to produce compared to consumption, which is constrained by competitive pressures on capital to cut costs by cutting wages and speeding up work (or, in Marx’s terms, increasing the rate of exploitation).

O’Connor argues that capitalism suffers from a second contradiction, arising from capital’s addiction to growth, causing degradation or depletion of what Marx called “the conditions of production.” While O’Connor drew the concept from Marx, he also noted that “he [Marx] never dreamed that the concept would or could be used in the way that I will use it in this chapter and no one could have used the concept in this way until the appearance of Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation.”

In this rich passage, talking about how the market treats land and labor as if they were mere commodities, Polanyi wrote:

To allow the market mechanism to be sole director of the fate of human beings and their natural environment … would result in the demolition of society. For the alleged commodity “labor power” cannot be shoved about, used indiscriminately, or even left unused, without affecting also the human individual who happens to be the bearer of this peculiar commodity … Robbed of the protective covering of cultural institutions, human beings would perish from the effects of social exposure … Nature would be reduced to its elements, neighborhoods and landscapes defiled, rivers polluted, … the power to produce food and raw materials destroyed.

By the “second contradiction of capitalism,” then, O’Connor means that capital accumulation can be jeopardized by so fouling the natural conditions of production that it totally breaks down — the likely effect of climate change; or by raising the cost of production arising from increasingly depleted raw materials and from the need to invent and develop substitutes; or by the state being forced to allocate increasing amounts of resources for improved health and safety provisions, for restoring ruined soil and forests, polluted lakes, rivers and oceans and shore lines.

Capital can’t prevent itself from impairing its own conditions because it arises from capital’s incessant need to grow. This is of course Marx’s first law of capital accumulation: “accumulate, accumulate, that is Moses and the prophets.” Capital has no choice. Only continuous growth allows businesses to survive the competition for market share and profit.

These tendencies have been analyzed in considerable depth beginning in the 1960s. Erich Fromm and Andre Gorz held that consumer satisfaction, which serves as the main ideological justification of economic growth, arises from our alienation from work and community. We may want good work and decent communities, but we learn to need only more consumer goods. As Fromm put it, “under capitalism man is transformed into a homo consumens who tries to compensate for this inner emptiness by continuous and ever-increasing consumption.” Or, in Gorz’s words, the corporation does not simply sell consumer goods. It sells means of distraction, “means of dreaming that one is human — because there is no chance of actually becoming such.”

Gorz further elaborated on how capitalism avoided the saturation of markets by designing products with built-in obsolescence — reducing the durability of appliances to a half dozen years, for example; by introducing throw-away products; by filling our heads with new wants, thereby generating relative scarcities and new dissatisfactions.

In an essay he wrote in 1973 aptly titled “Affluence Dooms Itself,” Gorz presciently described how capital accumulation impairs the natural conditions of production — cutting down the Amazon forest, the regenerative source of a quarter of the oxygen in our planet’s air; how it exhausts the supply of clean drinking water, forcing cities to haul in water from thousands of miles away; how it kills off marine life; and disables a large portion of the workforce through injury (1 in 6 French workers).

Around the same time, the American biologist Barry Commoner described in detail how, in the first years after WWII, capital systematically switched to more profitable — but more polluting — technologies, materials and processes that substituted cheap energy for labor: detergents over soap, truck freight over railroad freight, aluminum, plastics, and cement over lumber and steel. A year or so after it appeared, I wrote this comment on Commoner’s treatment in his The Closing Circle:

The fouling of the air, land or water, the disposal of waste materials, and the disappearance of non-renewable resources are costs that are seldom borne by the enterprises that produce them. They are passed onto consumers in the form of higher prices, passed back to workers in the form of shorter lives lived due to radiation, mercury or DDT exposure; higher laundry bills due to soot; higher costs of recreation due to pollution of nearby lakes, etc. And they are passed onto future generations. They comprise a massive subsidization by society and by nature to private enterprise.

This is what the economist K.William Kapp meant when he wrote in 1972 that “capitalism must be regarded as an economy of unpaid costs.”

Why capitalism can’t solve the problem

We know that capitalism has shown itself to be enormously resilient, adaptable and flexible. It has already introduced countervailing measures to blunt the degradation of the conditions of production. Capital is producing so-called green commodities like fuel-efficient cars, and it has invented all manner of anti-pollution devices. The state has brought in measures to recycle and conserve resources and to subsidize the development of renewable energy resources, to regulate the use of certain toxic products like pesticides, to increase emission standards for automobiles, to impose a tax on carbon and to create a market for carbon offsets.

Some of these measures will no doubt have effect, even if only in the short term. Capital will not permit reform measures that unduly impair its profit. This is why the emphasis is on technological and market-based solutions. Technological solutions include carbon capture and sequestration and geo-engineering schemes (injecting huge quantities of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere to block a portion of the incoming sunlight). Market-based solutions aim to nudge business and consumer behavior in an environmentally friendly direction, convincing individuals to change their bad habits and promoting devices like carbon offsets that allow corporations to make money out of reducing emissions.

To elaborate, capitalism treats nature as a free resource. But since resources are limited, continuous growth eventually results in depletion, species extinction, toxic radioactive waste, contamination of water resources, destruction of forests, climate change. Finally acknowledged by mainstream economists, their solution, now widely accepted by most environmentalists and policy makers, is to put a price on pollution, to further commodify nature.

But consider. A recent United Nations study found that the world’s 3,000 largest corporations cause $2.2 trillion in environmental damage every year, more than half attributed to greenhouse gas emissions. What would happen if full eco-prices were superimposed by way, say, of carbon taxes, i.e. taxes sufficient to cover the cost of cleaning up pollution produced by each commodity; putting the recyclable parts of each of them back into circulation; developing substitute sources for depleted materials; restoring the ecosystems damaged by each commodity, including health and injuries to humans — think automobiles? Wherever possible, firms would, of course, pass the cost onto consumers or back onto workers in the form of lower wages and salaries. Taxes of this order, likely doubling or more the prices of most commodities, would clearly impact unevenly on the population, further widening disparities. Some firms would go bankrupt. So compatibility with the requirements of the capitalist system obviously imposes strict limits on the results that market-based measures can produce.

The new environmental proletariat

O’Connor believes that just as labor exploitation threw up working class movements that fought to constrain capital’s werewolf tendency to consume workers in its quest for profits, capital’s recklessness with nature leads to a “rebellion of nature” as “powerful social movements demand an end to ecological exploitation.”

Following O’Connor’s thinking, the outcome of the second contradiction will depend a great deal on the strength of these movements to force capital to fully confront the impairment of production conditions and then block it from shifting its costs onto the working class, farmers and indigenous peoples.

Further, the outcome of capital failing to stop world temperatures from reaching the tipping point beyond which all manner of natural disasters would befall the planet also depends on the strength of the social movements. This of course is the starting off point to create a global ecosocial movement.

In 1998, in what is likely one of the last things he wrote on the subject, James O’Connor raised the question: Is it possible to organize an international red-green movement — a coordinated response to global capital — to institute new democratic, ecologically rational ways of life?

Ten years later, as if to answer, Joel Kovel declared “global warming puts the entire history and the pre-history as well, of industrial capital, into the dock. In a word: a moment for the global realization of ecosocialism has arrived.”

More recently still, Victor Wallis, editor of the publication Socialism and Democracy, has argued that it is among the peasants and indigenous peoples of the global South that “the most radical expressions of environmental awareness” have arisen. “For these populations capitalist plunder of the environment … is a direct assault on their homes and livelihoods.” Moreover, their occupation of the land and direct ties to its long-term sustainability place them in a strong strategic position. “Their own ‘parochial needs,’” writes Wallis, “embody the collective needs of the entire human species — not to mention other endangered life forms — to stop the relentless destruction of the ecosphere…. Although such peoples are among the world’s poorest, they have been thrust into a vanguard position.”

In a similar vein, John Bellamy Foster, the most prolific of contemporary ecologists, writes: “Today, the ecological frontline is arguably to be found in the inhabitants of the Ganges-Brahmaputa Delta and of the low-lying fertile coast area of the Indian Ocean and China Seas — the state of Kerala in India, Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia. They too, as in the case of Marx’s proletariat, have nothing to lose from the radical changes necessary to avert (or adapt to) disaster…. This, then, potentially constitutes the global epicenter of the new environmental proletariat.” 

Cy Gonick founded Canadian Dimension magazine and was in the NDP government in Manitoba from 1969–1971. This article was originally published in part in Canadian Dimension.

How emissions trading at Paris climate talks has set us up for failure

Written by Steffen Bohm and first published at The Conversation

The Paris Agreement has mostly been greeted with enthusiasm, though it contains at least one obvious flaw.

Few seem to have noticed that the main tool mooted for keeping us within the 2℃ global warming target is a massive expansion of carbon trading, including offsetting, which allows the market exchange of credits between companies and nations to achieve an overall emissions reduction. That’s despite plenty of evidence that markets haven’t worked well enough, or quickly enough, to actually keep the planet safe.

The debate over whether to include carbon markets in the final agreement came right to the wire. Some left-leaning Latin American countries such as Venezuela and Bolivia vehemently opposed any mention, while the EU, Brazil, and New Zealand, among other countries, pushed hard for their inclusion – with support from the World Bank, the IMF and many business groups.

Play with words

What we have ended up with is some murky semantics. Though terms such as “carbon trading”, “carbon pricing”, “carbon offsetting” and “carbon markets” don’t appear anywhere in the text, the agreement is littered with references to a whole range of new and expanded market-based tools.

Article 6 refers to “voluntary cooperation” between countries in the implementation of their emissions targets “to allow for higher ambition in their mitigation and adaptation actions”. If that’s not exactly plain speak, then wait for how carbon trading is referred to as “internationally transferred mitigation outcomes”.

The same Article also provides for an entirely new, UN-controlled international market mechanism. All countries will be able to trade carbon with each other, helping each to achieve their national targets for emissions cuts. While trading between companies, countries or blocs of countries is done on a voluntary basis, the new mechanism, dubbed the Sustainable Development Mechanism (SDM), will be set up to succeed the existing Joint Implementation and Clean Development Mechanism, providing for a massive expansion of carbon trading and offsetting while setting some basic standards.

Carbon market proponents have already celebrated this as “a new era of international carbon trading”, allowing the linking of existing national and regional trading schemes, such as the EU-ETS, as well as the soon to be established Chinese market.

Forest offsets included for the first time

Richer countries can also make deals to reduce deforestation and enhance sustainable forest management to enhance forest carbon sinks in developing nations. This forest-based offsetting has been debated since 2005 but, due to political controversies and complexities of measuring how much carbon is actually stored in a forest, it has been left out of any international agreements so far. It is now included in Article 5.2 of the Paris text.

But will these carbon trading and offsetting tools save the planet?

Carbon markets create more problems than they solve

The short answer is no. These tools will not save the planet from overheating. In fact, they might be counter-productive to the goal of limiting warming to 2℃, never mind the unrealistic 1.5℃ ambition.

Carbon markets basically function as a delaying tactic. It’s been that way ever since their first inclusion in the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. The EU-ETS for instance, the first, biggest and most significant of all trading schemes, simply hasn’t delivered. It took the best part of ten years for it to start after Kyoto, and once in action it was riddled by fraud, corruption, over-allocation of permits and perverse incentives for carbon offsetting – all contributing to the fact that the price for carbon is so low that nobody cares.

Offsetting projects in developing countries have been responsible for the expansion of polluting industries and land grabs among other unintentional yet real negative consequences. We’ll see more of this once forest-based offsets are included. Many bilateral forest and UN-REDD projects have been running for years, while critics say they have led to fraud, support of monocultures, forest enclosures, and forced displacements and evictions of indigenous people from their land in countries such as Kenya, Congo, Papua New Guinea or Brazil.

The Paris Agreement is keen to avoid such pitfalls, explicitly stating that it wants “environmental integrity and transparency" with “robust accounting”. Such promises have been given numerous times before, yet carbon trading and offsetting keep running into problems.

At the start of the Paris climate talks I warned that they would fail. I’m afraid I was right. While the final agreement contains words of urgency, ambition and action, I have serious doubts that the actual tools that are supposed to deliver the much needed emissions cuts will work fast enough, if at all.

By adopting carbon trading and offsetting as main mitigation tools, the Paris Agreement has created the possibility for years, if not decades, of further delays. Time we can ill afford.

Steffen Böhm is Professor in Management and Sustainability, and Director, Essex Sustainability Institute, University of Essex.

Libertarian Eco-Socialism

Written by Joe Corbett and first published at Integral World

I'm posting this not because I necessarily agree with the piece, but it is interesting and another strain of ecosocialist thinking that I have not come across before.

Mike Shaughnessy

The Political Philosophy and Organizational Form of an Integral Society

Any discussion of socialism these days must keep in mind the developmental distinctions of socialism: Stalin and Mao were red-authoritarian and blue-traditional state socialists, with orange-industrialist aspirations. The USSR and Mao's China never had communism, those were state socialist dictatorships in a mostly agrarian society (red-blue), something Marx suggested could not develop into communism because you can't skip levels of development, meaning you can't skip the stage of orange-capitalism and its dialectics of development for the means (technology and resources) and capabilities (knowledge, skills, and organization) to emerge whereby a global communist society could eventually thrive.

Castro and Chavez (as well as present day China to a lesser extent) are orange-industrial state socialists by virtue of their need to develop their underdeveloped countries (although the American embargo has made this difficult for Cuba). Even America could be considered an orange-socialist state insofar as there are massive welfare subsidies to corporations and the rich. Orange-green or modern-postmodern socialism can be found mainly in the European and Scandinavian models of the pre-austerity welfare state. An integral yellow socialism has not yet existed on a large scale, but when and if it does emerge I think it will be the precondition for the eventual emergence of an egalitarian or communist non-dual turquoise society that would simultaneously create and be created by Buddha-Christ citizens.

Keeping these socio-developmental distinctions in mind, if what we want at this point in the crisis or failure of modern and postmodern capitalist values and institutions is an integral post-postmodern society at yellow, it's probably not going to be a kinder-gentler 'conscious capitalism' (a functional modern-postmodern system), but rather a libertarian eco-socialism; that is to say, a low fossil-fuel permaculture based society organized around self-managed decentralized local communities of direct democracy federated into regional, national, and global governing bodies. Local communities would be much more energy generating and autonomous than they are today, and the people themselves would decide directly how they would live among themselves, not mediated by representatives "under the influence" of big money or far removed from the lives of the citizenry, but through the independent municipalities where they live and work in citizens' assemblies, workers councils, trade unions, and peer-2-peer cooperatives. So it's not that there wouldn't be a city, state, and national structure under an organizational mode of libertarian eco-socialism (a post-postmodern integral society), but how that structure operated within and between the parts would be vastly different.

Small business practices could be encouraged between local communities, while local communities would decide for themselves the laws and regulations they would follow. State and national governing bodies couldn't come in and raid your marijuana garden, for instance, but if a community wanted to burn coal or burn witches at the stake the larger governing bodies could intervene, as well as deliberate over the larger projects of a collective humanity for the purposes of common safety, sustainability, and civilizational advancement. So there would be much greater freedom and diversity at the local level, but at the same time an integrated vision of the common good, hence, libertarian yet socialist. Of course, the many details of self-governance cannot be planned in advance or dictated to posterity but can only be worked-out by the people themselves in dialogical participation in a flex-flow self-governing mode of being and consciousness, which is also the pre-condition for human development to yellow post-postmodernism.

How then are we to get there from here? If we look at history, particularly the transition from feudalism to capitalism, a new level of development in civilization was brought about largely as a result of seizing power from a failing system and imposing a “higher standard” of values and practices on the previous level. And I think it's no different now, now that we need to seize power from the prevailing elites and impose green and yellow values and practices on the masses who must be and can only be lifted-up by the leading edge of the historical moment. The only other option is to have this new world order of decentralization imposed by a catastrophic collapse of the global capitalist system, where everyone is forced into local survival groups at the archaic and brutal red worlds of the mad-max warlords. But wouldn't the conscious choice to decentralize social organization by social revolution, rationally and relatively orderly, be preferable? Of course it would.

However, social revolution to the next level is not about persuasion (idealists be damned). Again, it's about seizing power and imposing the higher level to which the masses must follow, like teaching children through an enforced system of rewards and punishments to grow up. In this case, to grow up and out of orange individualism and industrial technologies and into a green and yellow techno-collectivist libertarianism, by the force of law and the institutional habit of the long (normative) revolution. Indeed, history is made not by the force of persuasion but by the persuasion of force, and ultimately by the newly habituated beliefs and practices.

The crucial thing in the next stage of our collective development is getting the collective center of gravity to an orange, green and yellow alliance rather than the red, blue and orange one that we have now. The current problem is firstly the failure of the mean-orange meme to sustain human communities and the natural environment on which they are based, and secondly the failure to move beyond the modern narrative of meritocratic hierarchy based on individual achievement to a new narrative of social liberty and equity based on the spiritual integrity of each and all, otherwise known as libertarian eco-socialism (yellow).

But all this isn't so simple to see, at least in America. A century of anti-socialist propaganda and oppression has muted the masses to its vision, to its own collective potential, and the socio-political and cultural fragmentation of green-postmodernism has distracted the progressive arch of history away from the prize of enlightened diversity in unity toward the disintegrating order of the global neo-liberal dystopia.

Joe Corbett has spent the last ten years living in Shanghai and Beijing, China. He has taught at American and Chinese universities using the AQAL model as an analytical tool in Western Literature, Sociology and Anthropology, Environmental Science, and Communications. He has a BA in Philosophy and Religion as well as an MA in Interdisciplinary Social Science, and did his PhD work on modern and postmodern discourses of self-development, all at public universities in San Francisco and Los Angeles, California. He can be reached at oversoul2001@yahoo.com.

Don’t Believe the Hype – COP21 Agreement is a Recipe for Inaction or Worse

Reading the main stream media you would be forgiven for thinking that the climate crisis has, at one fell swoop, been solved by the agreement reached at the Paris COP21 Climate Summit. Even some hard-nosed climate groups have welcomed the agreement, and it is much better than the abject failure of the last climate meeting in Copenhagen, which merely kicked the climate can down the road. Reducing the target limit to 1.5C from 2C is sensible and a step forward but it is only to be an aspiration, at this stage anyway.

The can kicking this time, is that no binding targets have been set, but they will be reviewed in five years time instead. But even if countries do what they say will do, and even if this becomes a binding commitment in 2020, the 1.5C limit will be breached, mainly by the richer countries, who have promised actions that will in all probability raise global temperatures by 3C. They are basing their carbon reduction on very optimistic assumptions about Bioenergy with Carbon Capture and storage, which would inevitably lead to massive land grabs, from the poorest people, putting food security at risk.

Although financing to help the poorest countries was agreed to help them adapt, no amount was agreed, or a date when the finance will be available and for what? The text of the agreement even reduces the obligations on financing from the ricer nations and increases the financial obligations for the poorer ones.

The richer countries have promised to cut emissions, but not by that much. The US will cut 15% of their carbon emissions by 2030 and the European Union a not much better reduction of 20% over the next 15 years. Japan, Canada, Australia, Brazil and Argentina have made similar 1% per year promises of a reduction in the next 15 years.

On the other hand some countries will increase emissions, some quite a lot. These nations now produce two thirds of global emissions, with the countries that have agreed to reductions emitting only one third. China, India and Russia will increase emissions by 25 to 30% over the same period, so even if all promises are kept, it looks impossible to keep below a 1.5C increase globally.

Of course it is only fair that the emerging and developing countries are allowed some increase in emissions, since western nations have been pumping out most of the emissions for 200 years, and now effectively export our emissions to China and India through the manufacturing industries. But western nations need to do more to reduce further our emissions and make sure that finance is available to developing countries for clean energy production.

And our old friend carbon trading is included in the agreement, which will no doubt be rigged in favour of the polluting industries making even bigger profits, and the traders taking a healthy slice.

The rhetoric from the politicians, especially from the rich countries after the conference was also clearly at odds with the real life policies of the time. In Britain, we have just slashed subsidies on solar energy and are making it more difficult to get planning permission for on shore wind turbines. At the same time we are pushing the fracking industry and overturning local government decisions to refuse fracking permission, as in Lancashire.

There was a very respectable turn out of 20,000 at the Paris talks demonstration despite all of the difficulties of protesting in the city after the recent terrorist attacks. We need to redouble our efforts to force some real action, not just words on climate change. The danger is, with all the media hype surrounding this agreement, the public will think everything has been sorted out. The fight goes on. 

Trade Unions and Climate Change: A Conversation with Naomi Klein and Jeremy Corbyn

At a packed meeting in Paris, Naomi Klein, supported by UK Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, calls for mass civil disobedience to break the ban on demonstrations on December 12.

Trade unionists and others discuss the real solutions to climate change: an end to fossil fuels, energy democracy, and a just transition to millions of climate jobs.

Zita Holbourne - Paris COP21 on Migration, Refugees and Climate Change

Zita Holborne's speech at Paris COP21. First published at Black Activists Rising Against Cuts

Some people are forced to spend their entire lives as climate change refugees – people of the Solomon Islands are one example.

Extreme weather, drought and floods have led in part to the migration to European countries from the Middle East and African Continent.

If we don’t address the issues of climate and global warning there will be increased refugees heading towards Europe and other parts of the globe. Not out of choice but because they have no choice.

We have seen increasing demonisation and labelling of migrants and  refugees as benefit tourists and economic migrants coming to steal jobs and responsible for lack of housing and jobs and services by governments with no consideration for the effects of climate change. Wednesday was the UN day for the abolition of slavery but Western governments are fast to forget their colonial pasts, stripping resources from many of the countries most impacted by climate change.

For the past 3 months I have been involved in coordinating and organising aid distributions in Calais.

The so called Jungle in Calais is not a camp – it is a shanty town where people live in inhumane conditions:

30 or so toilets for around 5000 people, 2 showers, inadequate clean water,  dealing with climate issues right there as high winds and storms and heavy rains destroy tents and camping structures – made of tree branches, twigs and tarpaulin / plastic sheets,  Having no mains electricity supply mean that people are walking 2 to 3 hours to collect fire wood, making fires to cook and for heat, using candles for light in the evenings and dependent on generators and gas cylinders – this has led to frequent fires- often very bad – destroying everything they have – including documents and personal items.

Illness is spreading due to inadequate conditions, lack of hot food etc and if you look at the countries those there and in other camps across Europe they are from countries impacted by the effects of climate.

Sudanese make up the majority of people in Calais – 60% - Sudan is the largest African country – arid land and desert impact on food due to climate impact on agriculture – one of the most vulnerable countries to drought in the world.

Syria has had several droughts meaning that people have to leave farmland / rural areas to overcrowded cities.

Other groups include Ethiopians and Eritreans and Iranians who have also experienced drought. Afghanistans are the second biggest community there,  cold winters and hot summers, droughts and floods has led to loss of crops with  6.7 million Afghans impacted by  disasters and extreme weather  between 1998 and 2012.

In turn the countries most responsible for climate change are usually the ones rejecting, demonising and labelling those fleeing its effects.

The countries most responsible for historical emissions from 1850 to 2007 are in order

USA 28.8%
China 9.0
Russia 8.0
Germany
UK, Japan, France, India, Canada, Ukraine

Consumption footprints – from import /export of goods put Belgium at the top with 21.99%, followed by USA 20.2, Ireland 16.2, Finland, 15.1, Australia 13.8, UK, 11.5

Principally it is the the developed world that creates the conditions for climate change

Emissions per person

Luxemburg 1429 tons UK 1127, US 1126, Belgium 1026, Czech 1006 followed by other mainly Western countries

Migrants and refugees from the poorest countries contribute little to the causes of climate change in turn suffer disproportionately from its effects.

Higher temperatures and heavier rainfall cause drought and floods, this in turn leads to greater food and water insecurity, deepening poverty and furthering social inequality.

This leads to mass migration, displacement, conflict and millions are forced to move in order to survive.

Human instinct is to survive, human beings have been migrating since the beginning of time.  When those in the West move to other countries they are ex-pats and seen as acceptable, legitimate and respectable, whilst stigmas and hatred are attached to those from poorer countries, not moving as a choice as those in the West usually do, but because they have no choice.

Climate change also threatens rights – rights to safe adequate water and food, access to health services and housing - this has a knock on impact on child poverty and deepens race and gender discrimination and inequality.

Economic instability means opportunities and rights are reduced.

Governments, trade unions and civil society have a responsibility to address and minimise the consequences for human beings of rapid global warming.

We need equitable, just and binding agreements with developed countries acting first and financing for climate change initiatives plus
Adaptation of strategies for capacity building and research.

Social inequality created by the effects of climate change must be addressed as all other social inequality should be.

We need to look at the link to austerity and cuts because there is one.  Economic instability combined with climate change impacts on the poorest but also in times of austerity racism increases and the far right grows as we have seen across Europe.  Racism and islamophobia is deepening every day – I have experienced and witnessed this first hand as an anti racist, equality and justice campaigner. So if you are a migrant / refugee who is black, a person of colour or Muslim you face an added level of discrimination and attack.

An issue for those seeking asylum or a new home and new start in a safe place is that they are not recognised legally as refugees if they are migrating because of climate change.

1951 Geneva Convention regarding the status of refugees says you must prove fear of persecution. The 1950 European Convention on Human Rights says it is not legally possible to apply for asylum from outside the country so for all those refugees in Calais, stuck in limbo between France and the UK, the only chance they have is to risk their lives every night trying to get on trains and in trucks - many have died and even more have serious injuries and disabilities from their attempts to get to the UK.

Those fleeing climate change do not meet the legal definition of refugee.

The UNHCR, UN Refugee Agency says that camps should be the exception for those in forced displacement and they should be permitted to exercise their rights and freedoms.

In Calais there is not even a refugee camp in the proper sense - just a makeshift shanty town on asbestos infested waste land and refugees are frequently brutalised by police in an attempt to keep them boxed into this land.

The UN  says that there should be links to host communities with access to the local economy and infrastructure and service delivery to live peacefully without harassment.

Complete opposite is true in Calais – last month a high court ruled that the Calais authority must provide adequate toilet facilities and collect refuge – it is charities on the ground like L’auberge, and secour catholique together with individual voluntary groups such as my own org BARAC UK that are provided food, essentials, volunteers to sort the warehouse of donations, distribute, clean and build.

There is a gap in international law in terms of protection for climate change migrants who would need to characterise climate change as persecution. Extreme weather is harmful but does not generally meet the high threshold of persecution and they have to identify a persecutor – could be argued that developed countries, industrialised countries or the international community is the persecutor.

But they still have to meet the criteria of persecution being due to race, religion, nationality, political opinion, social group etc.

Climate change does not distinguish but does impact disproportionately – more likely to be black, people of colour, indigenous.

There is an impact on human rights and the right to life, right to adequate standard of living, food, clothing, and housing are all impacted.

For those who have got through the system but are rejected and facing removal they have to show they will be removed to a place of torture, inhumane or degrading treatment, physical or mental suffering.

Refugees in Calais are all suffering from post traumatic stress due to the war, poverty or persecution they fled in the first place and in addition the journey they endured, dangerous, exhausting and frightening – many I spoke had survived the Mediterranean on perilous terrifying journeys and have lost their families, parents – mostly young 18 to 24 and many unaccompanied minors.

But despite this the level of severity required in article 3 is difficult to prove.

Some people are forced to spend their entire lives as climate change refugees – people of the Solomon Islands are one example.

Extreme weather, drought and floods have led in part to the migration to European countries from the Middle East and African Continent.

If we don’t address the issues of climate and global warning there will be increased refugees heading towards Europe and other parts of the globe. Not out of choice but because they have no choice.

We have seen increasing demonisation and labelling of migrants and  refugees as benefit tourists and economic migrants coming to steal jobs and responsible for lack of housing and jobs and services by governments with no consideration for the effects of climate change. Wednesday was the UN day for the abolition of slavery but Western governments are fast to forget their colonial pasts, stripping resources from many of the countries most impacted by climate change.

For the past 3 months I have been involved in coordinating and organising aid distributions in Calais.





The so called Jungle in Calais is not a camp – it is a shanty town where people live in inhumane conditions:

30 or so toilets for around 5000 people, 2 showers, inadequate clean water, dealing with climate issues right there as high winds and storms and heavy rains destroy tents and camping structures – made of tree branches, twigs and tarpaulin / plastic sheets,  Having no mains electricity supply mean that people are walking 2 to 3 hours to collect fire wood, making fires to cook and for heat, using candles for light in the evenings and dependent on generators and gas cylinders – this has led to frequent fires- often very bad – destroying everything they have – including documents and personal items.

Illness is spreading due to inadequate conditions, lack of hot food etc and if you look at the countries those there and in other camps across Europe they are from countries impacted by the effects of climate.

Sudanese make up the majority of people in Calais – 60% - Sudan is the largest African country – arid land and desert impact on food due to climate impact on agriculture – one of the most vulnerable countries to drought in the world.

Syria has had several droughts meaning that people have to leave farmland / rural areas to overcrowded cities.

Other groups include Ethiopians and Eritreans and Iranians who have also experienced drought. Afghanistans are the second biggest community there,  cold winters and hot summers, droughts and floods has led to loss of crops with  6.7 million Afghans impacted by  disasters and extreme weather  between 1998 and 2012.

In turn the countries most responsible for climate change are usually the ones rejecting, demonising and labelling those fleeing its effects.

The countries most responsible for historical emissions from 1850 to 2007 are in order

USA 28.8%
China 9.0
Russia 8.0
Germany
UK, Japan, France, India, Canada, Ukraine

Consumption footprints – from import /export of goods put Belgium at the top with 21.99%, followed by USA 20.2, Ireland 16.2, Finland, 15.1, Australia 13.8, UK, 11.5

Principally it is the the developed world that creates the conditions for climate change

Emissions per person

Luxemburg 1429 tons UK 1127, US 1126, Belgium 1026, Czech 1006 followed by other mainly Western countries

Migrants and refugees from the poorest countries contribute little to the causes of climate change in turn suffer disproportionately from its effects.

Higher temperatures and heavier rainfall cause drought and floods, this in turn leads to greater food and water insecurity, deepening poverty and furthering social inequality.

This leads to mass migration, displacement, conflict and millions are forced to move in order to survive.

Human instinct is to survive, human beings have been migrating since the beginning of time.  When those in the West move to other countries they are ex-pats and seen as acceptable, legitimate and respectable, whilst stigmas and hatred are attached to those from poorer countries, not moving as a choice as those in the West usually do, but because they have no choice.

Climate change also threatens rights – rights to safe adequate water and food, access to health services and housing - this has a knock on impact on child poverty and deepens race and gender discrimination and inequality.

Economic instability means opportunities and rights are reduced.

Governments, trade unions and civil society have a responsibility to address and minimise the consequences for human beings of rapid global warming.

We need equitable, just and binding agreements with developed countries acting first and financing for climate change initiatives plus
Adaptation of strategies for capacity building and research.

Social inequality created by the effects of climate change must be addressed as all other social inequality should be.

We need to look at the link to austerity and cuts because there is one.  Economic instability combined with climate change impacts on the poorest but also in times of austerity racism increases and the far right grows as we have seen across Europe.  Racism and islamophobia is deepening every day – I have experienced and witnessed this first hand as an anti racist, equality and justice campaigner. So if you are a migrant / refugee who is black, a person of colour or Muslim you face an added level of discrimination and attack.

An issue for those seeking asylum or a new home and new start in a safe place is that they are not recognised legally as refugees if they are migrating because of climate change.

1951 Geneva Convention regarding the status of refugees says you must prove fear of persecution. The 1950 European Convention on Human Rights says it is not legally possible to apply for asylum from outside the country so for all those refugees in Calais, stuck in limbo between France and the UK, the only chance they have is to risk their lives every night trying to get on trains and in trucks - many have died and even more have serious injuries and disabilities from their attempts to get to the UK.

Those fleeing climate change do not meet the legal definition of refugee.

The UNHCR, UN Refugee Agency says that camps should be the exception for those in forced displacement and they should be permitted to exercise their rights and freedoms.

In Calais there is not even a refugee camp in the proper sense - just a makeshift shanty town on asbestos infested waste land and refugees are frequently brutalised by police in an attempt to keep them boxed into this land.

The UN  says that there should be links to host communities with access to the local economy and infrastructure and service delivery to live peacefully without harassment.

Complete opposite is true in Calais – last month a high court ruled that the Calais authority must provide adequate toilet facilities and collect refuge – it is charities on the ground like L’auberge, and secour catholique together with individual voluntary groups such as my own org BARAC UK that are provided food, essentials, volunteers to sort the warehouse of donations, distribute, clean and build.

There is a gap in international law in terms of protection for climate change migrants who would need to characterise climate change as persecution. Extreme weather is harmful but does not generally meet the high threshold of persecution and they have to identify a persecutor – could be argued that developed countries, industrialised countries or the international community is the persecutor.

But they still have to meet the criteria of persecution being due to race, religion, nationality, political opinion, social group etc.

Climate change does not distinguish but does impact disproportionately – more likely to be black, people of colour, indigenous.

There is an impact on human rights and the right to life, right to adequate standard of living, food, clothing, and housing are all impacted.

For those who have got through the system but are rejected and facing removal they have to show they will be removed to a place of torture, inhumane or degrading treatment, physical or mental suffering.

Refugees in Calais are all suffering from post traumatic stress due to the war, poverty or persecution they fled in the first place and in addition the journey they endured, dangerous, exhausting and frightening – many I spoke had survived the Mediterranean on perilous terrifying journeys and have lost their families, parents – mostly young 18 to 24 and many unaccompanied minors.

But despite this the level of severity required in article 3 is difficult to prove.

Trade Union Response

Things unions can do:

Lobby governments

Work with orgs supporting refugees and support them

Fight racism and islamphobia

Include refugees and migrants in policies, strategies and campaigns on climate change, anti austerity and anti racism/ anti fascism work.

Lobby and strengthen human rights and immigration laws – campaign against racist immigration laws such as the UK Immigration Act which seeks to create an apartheid state -

Recent landlord pilot – means not only those who are actually migrants but those perceived to be because of name or colour will be rejected for housing or exploited – I am part of the Movement of Xenophobia and one of the organisations that form MAX,  JCWI, research identified threatening, rogue landlords would exploit migrants with a disproportionate impact on women – asked to perform sexual favours and threatened with reporting to the home office if they go to the police.

In addition because landlords are expected to be immigration police and check papers, if papers are with the home office then they can’t access housing.

But not just housing, access to other services, such as driving licences, NHS, medical services, marriage license are more.  Impact on students from abroad.

So support for migrants and refugees should not stop when they get asylum, because the labelling, demonisation, discrimination and disadvantage continues.

Form trade union policy on this internationally, regionally and nationally.

Support orgorganisations like my own taking aid to refugees - BARAC and MAX campaigning on issues like the immigration act.  Most of us have little or no funding at all – another impact of austerity and rely on people power – I am proud my union does this and is affiliated to both orgs,  example:  PCS has been  sponsoring our  aid  distribution travel and transport to Calais.

Put pressure on govs to provide humane faculties for refugees and camps.

Its winter and many could die – this is about humanity. Humanity and equality should be at the heart of our union movement.

Countries like the UK who are agreeing to woefully low numbers of asylum seekers need to be lobbied and shamed.

Speak about these issues to your union members. We know that our memberships represent a cross section of society – some of them will hold racist, biased, negative views about refugees and blame and scapegoat fuelled by government and media narrative.

We have a responsibility to provide a counter narrative and educate, mobilise and organise from a position of truth  on an ongoing basis and also to form policy through our democratic structures – model motions, articles, briefings all help.

This week Indigenous Peoples released a joint statement to the UN talks.

Extract; World leaders in Paris must lead us away from the commodification of mother earth which places our lives and future on an unstable foundation based on money greed and power.

I support their position, Western countries that have benefited and profited from colonial rule, Empire, enslavement, taken from African, Asian, Latin American, Indigenous etc people now seek to bar and block the descendents of those people after they have stripped them of everything. They have a collective responsibility to act.

Climate Change will continue to displace people and so it's totally outrageous to then demonize and ostracise the victims and blame them.

Those nations that hold the most power and privilege cannot be allowed to create a climate of fear racism and displacement and must be held accountable and stand up to their responsibilities.

Trade Unions have a key role in holding them to account but also ensuring these issues are on the agenda when working and campaigning on Climate Change.

Zita Holbourne, PCS Union National Executive, BARAC National Co-Chair

4 December 2015, Le Bourget Climate Change Conference, COP21, Paris.

Bombing Syria is Merely Gesture Politics

Photo from aljareeza.com

I don’t often agree with what Max Hasting the ex-Daily Telegraph editor says, but I have to say he has played a blinder in the last week, with his sober and negative assessment of the case for bombing Islamic State (IS) in Syria on BBC TV Question Time last week. Last night I watched him give his view of the vote in Parliament for approval of bombing on the BBC TV Newsnight programme and he was spot once again. 

Hastings called the decision ‘gesture politics’ and concluded that MPs were ‘bonkers’ for going along with the Prime Minister, David Cameron’s desire for Britain to join the multi-national air campaign in Syria. This is an accusation normally levelled against left wing politicians, not least the Labour Party leader, Jeremy Corbyn. It usually involves attending anti-government demonstrations and advocating things like a boycott of Israeli goods, as a protest against some perceived misjustice. Hastings added that is also a dangerous policy.

What Hastings meant by using this term gesture, was that, important though it may be to stand in solidarity with our French allies, it is not a rational justification for dropping bombs on a country when there is no credible plan for destroying IS or for it making the British people safer, at home or abroad.

This is the rub really, the Labour MP Margaret Beckett, an ex-Foreign Secretary, who voted in favour of the airstrikes made the point in the debate in Parliament. She said ‘our French allies has explicitly asked us for such support, and I invite the House to consider how we would feel, and what we would say if what took place in Paris had happened in London – if we had explicitly asked France for support and France had refused.’

Hiliary Benn, shadow Foreign Secretary, who won plaudits in Parliament and the media for his rounding off speech, probably because Cameron was so poor at arguing his case, made similar points. He referred to the Labour Party’s tradition of internationalism and the United Nations resolution which he said authorised the bombing, although that is contested by many international law experts. He also referred to France’s government as ‘socialist’, which is only true if you accept the very broadest definition of the term.    

We heard a lot of MPs listing the atrocities committed by IS, but this is uncontested, everyone would like to see IS stopped from murdering more people, but how will a handful of British warplanes dropping a few bombs make the slightest difference?

Emotional arguments like this were put forward by others too, including the Prime Minister, but on the substantive issue of what will this air campaign achieve, there was little or nothing, and what there was, was wishful thinking, not a clear headed assessment of the military and diplomatic situation in Syria and the region.

In the end the government got a 174 vote majority in Parliament, with 66 Labour MPs supporting the airstrikes, and others abstaining. 153 Labour MPs voted against along-side 53 SNP (and their 2 suspended MPs), 3 SDLP, 2 Lib Dems, 7 Tories, 2 PC MPs and Caroline Lucas the Green Party MP. A total of 223 against and 397 for.

And so, we have got ourselves into another foreign military adventure, probably for the foreseeable future, with all the loss of civilian life in Syria it will entail, and perhaps elsewhere too. I admit it made me despair watching the debate last night, after all we have gone through since the 2001 attack by hijacked aeroplanes on New York and Washington DC. No lessons have been learned despite all the evidence that this will likely inflame the situation even more.

We elect MPs to take difficult decisions on our behalf, but we should be able to expect that these representatives take an intelligent, informed and rational view. Instead many MPs last night based their decision on emotion and a knee jerk reaction to the mass killing in Paris last month. The MPs who voted for this air campaign have let us down.

Is it any wonder that over a third of those registered to vote in general elections do not use their vote, let alone all those who don’t even bother to register?