Capitalism vs. Democracy in Europe

By Michael Lowy and published at ecosocialist party website Solidarity US

Let us begin with a quote from an essay on bourgeois democracy in Russia, written in 1906, after the defeat of the first Russian revolution:

“It is highly ridiculous to believe that there is an elective affinity between grand capitalism today, as it is presently imported into Russia, and well established in the United States (…) and ‘democracy’ or ‘liberty’ (in all the possible meanings of the word); the real question should be : how are these things even ‘possible,” on long term, under capitalist domination ?”¹

Who is the author of this insightful comment? Lenin, Trotsky, or perhaps the early Russian Marxist Plekhanov? In fact, it is from Max Weber, the well known bourgeois sociologist. Although Weber never developed this insight, he is suggesting here that there is an intrinsic contradiction between capitalism and democracy.

The history of the 20th century seems to confirm this opinion: very often, when the power of the ruling classes seemed to the threatened by the people, democracy was pushed aside as a luxury that one couldn’t afford, and replaced by fascism--Europe in the 1920s and '30s--or military dictatorship: Latin America in the 1960s and '70s. Fortunately enough, this is not the case of Europe today, but we have, particularly during the last decades with the triumph of neoliberalism, a democracy of low intensity, a democracy without social content, which has become an empty shell. Sure enough, we still have elections, but there seems to be only one party, the U.M.P., United Market Party, with two variants which have only limited differences: the right-wing neoliberal version, and the left-center social-liberal one.

The decline of democracy is particularly visible in the oligarchic functioning of the European Union, where the European Parliament has very little influence, while power is firmly in the hands of non-elected bodies, such as the European Commission, or the Central European Bank. According to Giandomenico Majone, Professor at the Europen Institute of Florence, and one of the semi-official theoreticians of the Union, Europe needs “non-majoritarian institutions,” i.e. “public institutions that are, on purpose, not responsible neither towards electors nor elected officials,” the only way to protect us against “the tyranny of the majority.” In such institutions “qualities such as expertise, professional discretion and coherence (…) are much more important than the direct democratic responsibility."² One could hardly imagine a more blatant apology for the oligarchic and antidemocratic nature of the Union.

With the present economic crisis, democracy has descended to its lowest levels. In an recent editorial, the French Journal Le Figaro wrote that the present situation is an exceptional one, and this explains why democratic procedures cannot be always respected; when normal times return, we can re-establish democratic legitimacy. We have therefore a sort of economic/political “state of exception” in the sense of Carl Schmitt. But who is the sovereign that has the right to proclaim, according to Schmitt, the state of exception?

The Sovereignty of Finance Capital

For some time after 1789 and before the proclamation of the French Republic in 1792, the King had the constitutional right of Veto. Whatever the resolutions of the National Assembly, whatever the desires and aspirations of the French people, the last word belonged to His Majesty. In Europe today, the King is not a Bourbon or Habsburg, the King is Financial Capital. All the present European governments--except the Greek one!--are functionaries of this absolutist, intolerant, and anti-democratic Monarch. Whether right-wing, "extreme-center," or pseudo-leftist; whether conservative, demo-Christian, or social-democratic, they fanatically serve her Majesty's right of Veto.

The absolute and total sovereign today in Europe is, therefore, the global financial market. Financial markets dictate to each country the wages and pensions, cuts in social expenses, privatizations, the rate of unemployment. Some time ago, they directly nominate the heads of government (Papademos in Greece and Mario Monti in Italy), picking so-called “experts” who are faithful servants of the financial markets.

Let us have a closer look at some of these all-powerful “experts.” Where do they come from? Mario Draghi, head of the Central European Bank, is a former manager of Goldman Sachs; Mario Monti, former European Commissioner, is also a former adviser to Goldman Sachs. Monti and Papademos are members of the Trilateral Commission, a very select club of politicians and bankers that discuss what to do next. The President of the European Trilateral is Peter Sutherland, former European Commissioner, and former manager at Goldman Sachs; the vice-president of the Trilateral, Vladimir Dlouhy, former Czech Minister of Economy, is now adviser to Goldman Sachs for Eastern Europe.

In other words, the “experts” in charge of saving Europe from the crisis used to work for one of the banks directly responsible for the sub-prime crisis in the United States. This doesn’t mean that there is a conspiracy to deliver Europe to Goldman Sachs; it only illustrates the oligarchic nature of the “experts” elite ruling the Union.

The governments of Europe are indifferent to public protest, strikes, and mass demonstrations, and don’t care about the opinion or the feelings of the population; they are attentive--extremely attentive–only to the opinion and the feelings of the financial markets, and their employees, the ratings agencies. In the European pseudo-democracy, to consult the people by a referendum is a dangerous heresy--worse, a crime against the Holy Market. The Greek referendum was not only about fundamental economic and social issues, it was also and above all about democracy.

The 61.3 per cent Greek NO was an attempt to challenge the Royal Veto of finance. This could have been a first step towards the transformation of Europe, from capitalist Monarchy into a democratic Republic. But the present European oligarchic institutions have little tolerance for democracy. They immediately punished the Greek people for their insolent attempt to refuse the austericide.

Catastroika is back in Greece with a vengeance, imposing a brutal program of economically recessive, socially injust, and humanly unsustainable measures. The German right-wing fabricated this monster, and forced it on the Greek people with the complicity of Greece false "friends" (Hollande, Renzi, etc).

Finding Scapegoats

While the crisis gets worse and public outrage grows, there is an increasing temptation, for many governments, to distract public attention towards a scapegoat: the immigrants. Thus undocumented foreigners, non-communitarian immigrants, Muslims, and Roma (Gypsies) are being presented as the main threat to the country. This of course opens great opportunities for racist, xenophobic, semi-fascist, or outright fascist parties, which are growing and are already, in several countries, part of the government--a very serious threat to democracy in Europe.

The only hope is the growing aspiration for another Europe, beyond savage competition, brutal austerity policies, and eternal debts to be paid. Another Europe is possible, a democratic, ecological, and social one. But it will not be achieved without a common struggle of the European populations, beyond ethnic borders and the narrow limits of the nation-State.

In other words, our hope for the future is popular indignation, and the social movements, which have been on the rise, particularly among youth and women, in several countries. For the social movements, it is becoming increasingly obvious that the struggle for democracy is a struggle against neoliberalism, and, in the last analysis, against capitalism itself, an inherently antidemocratic system, as Max Weber already pointed out a hundred years ago.

Michael Löwy is a Marxist sociologist and philosopher living in Paris. His most recent book is Ecosocialism: A Radical Alternative to Capitalist Catastrophe (Haymarket Books, 2015). This article was written for Avghi (Dawn), the daily paper of Syriza.

Footnotes

1. Max Weber, «Zur Lage der bürgerlichen Demokratie in Russland», Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, Band 22, 1906, Beiheft, p. 353.
2. Quoted in Perry Anderson, Le Nouveau Vieux Monde, Marseile, Agone, 2011, pp. 154,158.

Corbyn-mania is too little and too late for this Green Lefty

The last time that I voted for Labour was in 1997. It was great to see the Tories routed so thoroughly, although I didn’t expect much from the new Labour government. Even these low expectations were confounded though by the timidity of Labour in government.

I think it must have been by about 1998 when the penny finally dropped for me, that is, Labour weren’t just getting away with as much as they thought they could get away with. The realisation dawned on me that new Labour didn’t actually believe in or want to implement anything like traditional social democrat policies. They believed in the neo-liberal consensus established by the preceding Thatcher/Major Tory government.

I had always voted Labour, my family did, this is what we did at elections, without even thinking about it. My dad was a union shop steward for the engineering union (AUEW as it was then) in the 1960s and 1970s. He was often on strike or lock out and left politics was constantly discussed at home.

Come the 2001 general election, I’d had enough of new Labour and decided to vote for the Socialist Alliance, who had a strong candidate running in my constituency, Louise Christian, the human rights lawyer. I reasoned that if enough people voted SA, Labour would take notice and move back to the left. Louise Christian got about 1100 votes, and the Labour government got even worse.

I did notice that the Green party candidate got twice as many votes as the SA in my constituency and looked into the Greens policies, and was pleasantly surprised to find them similar to old Labour ones. At the time I was beginning to get increasingly concerned by climate change as well, or global warming as it was known then. I decided to throw my lot in with the Greens, around my way at least. I didn’t join the Green party at this stage but resolved to vote for them.

Then the whole Iraq war debacle started which led eventually to me joining the Greens, but I also made the discovery around this time of ecosocialism after reading Joel Kovel’s ‘The Enemy of Nature’ subtitled ‘the end of capitalism or the end of the world?’ I started to work for ecosocialism within the Green party joining Green Left pretty much immediately it was formed and am here to this day.

And so to Jeremy Corbyn’s campaign for the Labour leadership this year. It reminds me a bit of Ed Miliband’s campaign for the Labour leadership in 2010 although on steroids this time. Against expectations Ed beat his brother with a pitch that moved Labour to the left, but not as much as Corbyn is offering this time. People from the Green party flocked to join Labour thinking it was going back to social democracy, but ultimately what radicalism there was, was watered down and Labour fought the 2015 general election on policies that were only a millimetre or so to the left of the Tories.

I wonder whether Corbyn’s ideas will meet the same fate or whether he will be deposed entirely before 2020? His platform is actually not all that left wing despite the hysteria in the media and from the Labour party establishment. Take a look at the Liberal – SDP Alliance manifesto for the 1983 general election and you can see what I mean.

Jeremy Corbyn himself is a decent, principled man and has been a constant thorn in the side of new Labour over the years. I think the Green party should be supportive of his attempt to drag Labour to the left and hopefully he can be persuaded to support introducing a fairer, proportional voting system, for future elections that should keep the Tories out of power for good.

But my thinking has moved on from 1983, 2003 even, and I am now firmly an ecosocialist which is a word I have not heard Corbyn mention. The fact is, old Labour pro capitalist style politics is out dated and completely inappropriate for the contemporary problems that the country and indeed the world faces. And yes, the Green party is not ecosocialist either, but it is closer to it than even the best case scenario (which is unlikely) that a Corbyn Labour party will advocate. I'm staying put, for now at least.  

Amnesty International: Protecting The ‘Human Rights’ Of Johns, Pimps And Human Traffickers

After a government raid last year on an illegal mining camp in La Pampa in the Madre de Dios region of Peru, a discarded bra lies on the ground outside an informal bar that allegedly employed sex workers. (Photo: Rodrigo Abd / AP)

Written by Chris Hedges and first published at Truthdig.com

The decision by Amnesty International’s decision-making forum, the International Council Meeting, to call for the decriminalization of prostitution is another in a long line of triumphs for heartless neoliberal economics and the grotesque commodification of human beings that defines predatory capitalism.

Salil Shetty, secretary-general of Amnesty International, said: “Sex workers are one of the most marginalized groups in the world who in most instances face constant risk of discrimination, violence and abuse. Our global movement paved the way for adopting a policy for the protection of the human rights of sex workers which will help shape Amnesty International’s future work on this important issue.”

In the sickness of modern culture, the ability to exploit with impunity is distorted into a human right even by a renowned and respected humanitarian organization. That is quite a card trick. We live in a global culture where the wretched of the earth are chattel and where sexual slavery—which is what most prostituted women and girls around the globe endure—is sanctified by market forces. These women and girls are among our most vulnerable. After being crushed by poverty, racism and sexism, they are unable to find other ways to make a sustainable income. They are treated little better than livestock transported to markets for consumption. That a so-called human rights organization parrots vile justifications is emblematic of the depth of our moral degeneration and the triumph of misogyny.

Women and girls who are prostituted should be treated not as criminals but as victims. The criminals are the johns and the pimps and traffickers who profit from the sale of human flesh. Decriminalizing prostitution, which allows these modern slave masters to openly ply their trade, means the exploitation will grow explosively. We must work to create a world where those who are dispossessed of their human rights are not forced into this dilemma. We must not accept a world where poverty destroys the lives of the weak and the vulnerable, including children. Those who profit from prostituting women and girls must be driven out of business.

“In sheer numbers, it is the poor brown women of the world who pay with bruises, humiliation and deaths for this ignorant and hideous decision that has brought Amnesty International so low,” Lee Lakeman, the Canadian feminist, told me by email. “When Amnesty International’s ‘progressive leftists’ blithely refer to ‘free choice to prostitute,’ do they choose to forget prostitution as imperialism? Third world brothel cities, the tourist brothels sprung up where once armies were stationed, man-camps of resource thieves that overrun indigenous communities, UN troops buying sex from women in refugee camps by offering them food? Abandoned migrant addicted kids and women in the ghettos of the world’s cities being bought for the price of a quick hit? Or are they [Amnesty and those who support its decision] imagining this free choice: the women, babes in arms migrating from war zones and environmental deserts who are bought with rides, food, water or with a chance to save a child? Surely they know how indigenous girls are groomed with drugs and alcohol and rides to the city from hopeless homelands. 

But they cannot have missed the inherent racism of prostitution that exoticizes every racial stereotype of woman on the back pages and internet sites of the world. And those of us, women of the global north, who have food and shelter? We fight now for the public life of full citizens. Are we obliged every time we leave our houses to face a barrage of men bloated with entitlement of class and race and sex, who sit scanning as we pass for our price tag? Consciousness is in part knowing who is standing with you. We know Amnesty International sold us out.”

Among those, including women, who have no concept of what being prostituted really means, it has become hip and edgy to talk about the legitimacy of “sex work.” Movies like “Pretty Woman” and the pro-prostitution lobby’s slick portrayals of the “sex industry” bear as much resemblance to the reality of prostitution as “Sands of Iwo Jima” does to war. If you want an honest window into what the prostitution industry is like, read “Paid For: My Journey Through Prostitution” by Rachel Moran, who at 15 was prostituted on the streets of Dublin. She endured this nightmare for seven years.

Moran says, based on her experience, that there are three types of men who use prostitutes: those who treat women as if they do not have human emotions; those who are conscious of a woman’s humanity but choose to ignore it; and those who derive sexual pleasure from crushing the humanity of the women they buy.

Our culture, manipulated by sophisticated forms of propaganda, mesmerized by commercially created images that glorify violence and sexual exploitation and consumption, cannot untangle fantasy from reality. Many, maybe most, men have been indoctrinated by pornography. Pornography has taught them that their personal gratification at the expense and degradation of another is a human right. This indoctrination has twisted feminism, which once fought for oppressed women and girls, into an accessory to misogyny. Why would genuine feminists organize or consider taking part in “SlutWalks”? Why is the election of a female president or the appointment of a female CEO an advance when at the same time—often with the collaboration of elite women—social and governmental programs that provide assistance to poor and working women are abolished? The current generation of neoliberal “feminists” cite the empowerment of a tiny, predominantly white female elite as proof of feminist advance. Women and girls who are poor, racialized or part of the working class, like all of the vulnerable in our age of predatory capitalism, are ignored and discarded, along with most of their advocates. This is not an advance for women. It is a profound setback.

“Capitalism and prostitution are the new method of imperialism and colonization,” said Alice Lee, a member of the Asian Women Coalition Ending Prostitution, whom I reached in Vancouver. “It is no coincidence that pornography and prostitution use racial stereotypes to sell and exploit women. 

Prostitution is a tool that subjugates women, especially women of color, reinforcing sexism and the global racial hierarchy. The normalization of sexualized racism entrenches the idea that women of color and poor women are dispensable/disposable in all nations. The global north no longer has to occupy our lands. They can occupy our bodies and define our worth. This othering enables them to see us as less than human.”

The world has been turned upside down. Every sentence uttered by the pro-prostitution lobby—that prostitution is about choice, that prostitution is about empowerment, that legalizing prostitution protects women—is a lie. But we are a culture awash in lies, and amid this flood it is hard for many to separate illusion from reality.

Being prostituted is perpetual rape. Being prostituted means your orifices are penetrated a dozen or more times a night by strangers who often insult, maul and beat you. This happens in cars, in alleys, in “massage parlors,” in brothels, in motel rooms. And those who make the real money are not the exploited and the abused but the pimps, traffickers and brothel and massage parlor owners. Being prostituted means vaginal and anal tears, bruises, broken bones, sexually transmitted diseases including HIV, and severe psychological damage. And it can mean death. It almost always means early death. Those who must endure this abuse are almost always women of color, many shipped by traffickers from poor countries to relatively affluent countries for the sole purpose of being sexually exploited.

“Rape, wife battering and pornography serve to put women in their place,” Lee said. “That is the function of male violence against women. When women hear and see other women being raped, battered or prostituted, we know this could easily happen to us. Sometimes in the pro-prostitution argument you will hear that prostitution will prevent men from raping ordinary women. But by accepting prostitution we are accepting a class of women being expendable, as if that will prevent men from raping and beating us. Only when all women achieve liberty and autonomy can we be free.”

I suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder from my years as a war correspondent. I instantly recognized fellow sufferers of PTSD in prostituted women and girls when I interviewed them in refugee and displacement camps in Latin America, Africa and the Balkans. Prostituted women in and near war zones are as commonplace as corpses. Once a culture descends into the sickness of violence, once a culture allows human beings to become racialized objects of exploitation, there is an explosion of rape and prostitution, along with pornography. War, like neoliberal economics, sees only commodities, not sentient beings with the ability to feel pain and joy. And making war on people, as well as the planet, lies at the heart of neoliberal economics.

Prostituting women and girls is a lucrative business. Germany, which legalized prostitution in 2002, is now being called “Europe’s biggest brothel.” It has industrialized sexual exploitation with a terrifying corporate efficiency. Over a million men a day engage in these transactions, sexually exploiting women and girls who come mostly from poor countries in Africa and Eastern Europe. 

These women and girls have been shipped to Germany to satiate the physical desires of the affluent and enrich the pimps and traffickers who control them. The women and girls do not do this because it is a choice. They do this because they are desperate and poor. The German magazine Spiegel published an investigative piece that lays out this abuse in detail, “How Legalized Prostitution Has Failed.”

Amnesty International has, in essence, legitimized the weapon of male objectification and violence in the war against women. This weapon exists apart from the evils of global capitalism. The fight to end male violence against women has to be integral to those of us who also fight global capitalism. We need the liberation of women and girls, including those who are poor and of color. Women cannot join the fight for a better world until male violence and male entitlement are eradicated. Freedom from exploitation, especially for women and girls, will define the success or failure of our struggle. To be an anti-capitalist, to be a member of the authentic left who stands with all of the oppressed, is to embrace radical feminism—not the mock feminism of neoliberalism but the true feminism of Andrea Dworkin. It is to recognize that no assault against capitalism is possible, or morally permissible, unless it is accompanied by an assault against male violence and the exploitation of women and girls.

“Capitalism is not wicked or cruel when the commodity is the whore,” Dworkin wrote. “Profit is not wicked or cruel when the alienated worker is a female piece of meat; corporate bloodsucking is not wicked or cruel when the corporations in question, organized crime syndicates, sell cunt; racism is not wicked or cruel when the black cunt or yellow cunt or red cunt or Hispanic cunt or Jewish cunt has her legs splayed for any man’s pleasure; poverty is not wicked or cruel when it is the poverty of dispossessed women who have only themselves to sell; violence by the powerful against the powerless is not wicked or cruel when it is called sex; slavery is not wicked or cruel when it is sexual slavery; torture is not wicked or cruel when the tormented are women, whores, cunts. The new pornography is left-wing; and the new pornography is a vast graveyard where the Left has gone to die. The Left cannot have its whores and its politics too.”

Chris Hedges writes a regular column for Truthdig.com. Hedges graduated from Harvard Divinity School and was for nearly two decades a foreign correspondent for The New York Times. He is the author of many books, including: War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning, What Every Person Should Know About War, and American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America. His most recent book is Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle.

COP 21: The No Hope Climate Summit

By Alex Scrivener 'The Paris COP is not going to save the world,' writes Scrivener. 'But that doesn’t mean that there is nothing we can do.' (Photo: Daniel Pfund/flickr/cc with overlay)

The following was first written as a briefing paper for the UK-based Global Justice Now and the original can be read and downloaded here.

Climate change is already hitting the world’s poorest people hardest and it needs to be stopped. The responsibility for the climate crisis lies squarely on the shoulders of the rich, whose consumption and greed has driven us to the brink of disaster. This makes it a problem of social and economic justice.

Some groups consider the upcoming Paris climate summit to be the answer. Campaign messages exhorting us to take action over the UN climate summit include ‘24 months to save the world’ and ‘show David Cameron our love’.

Progressive newspapers and blogs carry a similar message of false hope. The Paris summit, a recent Guardian editorial argues, is ‘the world’s last, best chance’ to combat climate change.

The bad news is that the Paris Conference of the Parties (COP) to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) won’t work because it will not be dealing with the underlying problem – the unfair economic system that puts the interest of fossil fuel addicted corporations above those of the people.

Climate change will never be solved through negotiations dominated by corporate interests. Many of the same governments that are supposedly fighting climate change in Paris are also pushing corporate trade deals like the EU-US trade deal, TTIP, that will benefit the fracking industry and supporting big agribusiness companies that undermine the ability of farmers to adapt to climate change. As this briefing explains, these same governments use bullying and bribery tactics to ensure that the interests of their corporate friends takes precedence over the fight against climate change.

So we already know that the Paris COP will be a cop-out at best, and actually damaging at worst. Just as in 2009, when the climate summit branded as ‘Hopenhagen’ collapsed into farce, any agreement reached in Paris is destined to be an unambitious fudge.

So instead of being distracted by the false hope of a summit breakthrough, we should concentrate on putting pressure on our politicians to reduce emissions at home and building a broad and diverse movement to change the political context of climate policy. This means fighting trade deals that bestow rights on fossil fuel corporations. It means fighting the politics of austerity that forces us to accept ‘cheap’ coal instead of investing in clean, democratically controlled energy systems. And it also means fighting against the privatisation of energy globally.

Bullying and bribery: how the rich countries get their way

Not all countries have equal clout at the talks. The richest countries are also the biggest polluters and therefore tend to be in a position to dictate the terms of debate. Unlike some low income countries, the industrialised countries can afford to run a PR machine that churns out their message and come to the talks with teams of hundreds of negotiators, diplomats, lawyers and media officers. In addition, rich countries use an array of dirty tricks to ensure they get their way.

Excluding those who disagree

One of the most commonly used of these underhand tactics is exclusion. Although all 196 countries that are parties to the UNFCCC send delegations, not all of them are allowed to be actively involved in the negotiation process.

In practice, the formal procedures are bypassed as rich countries set up parallel informal negotiations with countries that are likely to agree with them, excluding those who are likely to disagree (most often the poor countries). These ‘agreements’ are then presented to everyone else as a ‘take it or leave it’ deal.

These ‘green room’ negotiations happen behind closed doors and most developing country delegations are unaware of them until they finish. This tactic was used to great effect during the catastrophic Copenhagen climate summit in 2009. The Danish delegation drafted what would become the infamously unambitious ‘Copenhagen Accord’ in secret negotiations with just 26 other (mostly rich) countries, all the while denying that such talks were even taking place. The excluded delegations were then given just one hour to read the document which superseded two years of official negotiations.

The same tactic has been used at every subsequent summit, including at Durban in 2011 when the decision was made to delay any meaningful agreement until Paris in 2015. There is no chance that Paris will be any different. In fact, this time the big countries are rigging the deal before the talks have even started to make absolutely certain that no real action is taken. The criminally unambitious bilateral deal between the US and China will mean that the summit is almost certainly destined to fail months before it will open.

Lost in translation

Another more subtle, but nevertheless effective tactic is holding meetings in English without translation. While the formal negotiations offer translation, the backroom side-meeting where most of the real action takes place are often English-only, putting delegations with less strong English language abilities at a disadvantage.

Death by meetings

Another way that rich countries and some of the bigger emerging economies manage to cut out the poorer countries is by choking off the process with parallel meetings. Low income countries can often ill afford to bring more than a handful of delegates to climate conferences, while rich countries often have hundreds of delegates. For example, South Sudan, Serbia and Somalia were all represented by just one delegate each at the last COP in Lima, while the USA had almost 100 delegates. At one point during the 2009 Copenhagen climate talks, there were 26 meetings taking place simultaneously.

Spying

Secret documents leaked by former CIA agent Edward Snowden have revealed that the US was spying on other delegations at the Copenhagen talks in 2009. At the time, a developing country delegate said that he would only talk in a room where they were sure they weren’t being bugged, commenting that the US delegation ‘seemed to know what our position was before we did.’ It’s highly possible that this sort of eavesdropping by the US and other countries with powerful intelligence services will happen at Paris as well.

Bribery and threats

More powerful countries are in a position to threaten poorer countries with repercussions if they vote the wrong way. But rich country delegations use the carrot as well as the stick in their negotiations. Individual countries can often get picked off by the richer countries, accepting short term sweeteners in exchange for support for an unambitious deal that’s soft on rich countries. This happened on an industrial scale at the Durban summit in 2011, where African countries were offered aid in exchange for concessions in what was dubbed ‘chequebook diplomacy’.

During the Copenhagen summit in 2009, French President Nicolas Sarkozy did a bilateral deal with Ethiopia to get them to back an unfair EU deal. This was then presented as Africa as a whole agreeing to the European proposal despite the fact that no other African country was closely involved in the deal.

Sometimes bullying and bribery aims at excluding particular individuals from delegations. For example, in 2014, the Philippines’ chief climate negotiator Yeb Saño was dropped from the country’s delegation allegedly after pressure from rich countries to side-line a strong critic of their policies.

Corporate takeover

The COPs have changed a lot since the landmark Kyoto summit in 1997. Back then, it was an argument between using ‘cap and trade’ market based mechanisms to fight climate change or having a greater role for regulation. Now, the center of debate has shifted to a situation where we are stuck talking about failed market-based solutions. At the time, activists derided Kyoto as being insufficient. Now, even a Kyoto-type agreement, with legally binding, meaningful carbon cuts on rich countries, seems almost out of reach. How did things get so bad?

The most important factor in the hobbling of ambition at the UN climate negotiations are the people who don’t have a single delegation officially, but in practice exert undue control on almost everyone there – the corporate sector.

Since the 1990s, big corporations, most notably those in the oil and gas, mining, banking and agricultural sectors, have been lobbying hard. The fossil fuel companies try to shift the conversation away from an end to fossil fuels and towards false solutions such as carbon capture and storage which allow them to continue business as usual.

The financial sector and private sector energy companies are also trying (very successfully) to get a slice of the money earmarked for helping poor countries mitigate and adapt to climate change. This has meant that much climate finance is being channelled through the financial sector. The UK has been instrumental in pushing for the creation of a private sector facility (PSF) as part of the UN Green Climate Fund (GCF) which is meant to become the main channel for rich countries to disburse climate finance. While developing countries want the PSF to focus on supporting small green businesses, the UK wants PSF money to be channelled through financial intermediaries (including big private sector banks) to big corporate projects.

At the Warsaw COP in 2013, this corporate takeover reached new heights when the Polish hosts set up a conference for big coal companies right next to the main summit. Activists at the summit were shocked to hear ‘clean coal’ being promoted as a large part of the solution to climate change. And as if to add insult to injury, Poland’s environment minister was sacked halfway through the summit because he was too slow in allowing fracking in the country.

While it’s unlikely that the French will be as brazen in promoting the fossil fuel industry at the Paris summit, the power of the fossil fuel and financial sectors is likely to ensure that big business will receive much of any climate finance promised to the Green Climate Fund at the talks.

Undermining previous agreements

Since the inception of the UNFCCC process more than 20 years ago, a number of key principles have underpinned the negotiation process. The most important of these is the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities (CBDR). This is the recognition that because the rich countries of the global north have historically emitted far more carbon dioxide than southern countries, the burden of carbon cuts should fall primarily on the richer countries. The principle also means that rich countries must compensate southern countries for the fact that they cannot use as much fossil fuel by paying the additional cost of using new renewables technology and by paying the cost of adapting to the effects of climate change.

CBDR is hard-wired into the UNFCCC system by the division of all countries into two groups – annex I (industrialised countries) and annex II (poor countries).

But for many years now, rich countries, especially the USA, have been trying to undermine this system so that southern countries are made to ‘share the burden’ of fighting climate change. This is fundamentally unfair as, for example, on a per person, the USA emits over 44 times more than Bangladesh, a country that could end up being largely underwater as a result of climate change.

For rich countries, Paris is an opportunity to get rid of CBDR and move to a system where poor countries have to sign up to binding targets as well. Rich countries argue that CBDR has become outdated because since the early 1990s developing countries’ emissions have increased. But while Chinese per person emissions have caught up with Europe’s (partly because it produces consumer products for Western markets) no other developing country has per person emissions equivalent to that of countries in Europe and North America. Even India’s per person emissions are just a tenth of those of the USA. So while there is a genuine argument to be had about whether China should take on more responsibility than countries with very low emissions, abandoning the principle of CBDR is dangerous as it is likely to allow the established rich countries to blame southern countries for a problem they largely caused themselves.

So what do we do?

The Paris COP is not going to save the world. But that doesn’t mean that there is nothing we can do. By concentrating on piling pressure on our own governments and corporations – the UK is still one of the world’s biggest per capita emitters – we have a better chance of achieving tangible progress towards climate justice.

That’s not to say that we should abandon the summits completely – they are useful places to mobilize civil society and express popular protest against the damaging policies of our governments.

But it is time for activists and campaigners across the world to realise that the system is rigged against us and that progress will only be made if the governments that represent us feel the pressure for change from below.

However, this kind of climate campaigning is unlikely to work in the context of an economic system that is geared towards the interests of a few high-carbon corporations. We need to go beyond seeing the fight against climate change as something we do during big summits or around issues such as airport expansion.

The reality is that the climate battle is going on in parts of government policy that aren’t usually associated with climate change such as tax, trade policy, the privatization of public services and agriculture. If we succeed in fighting corporate control in these areas we will also be destroying the economic system that is feeding climate change, freeing up government to concentrate on the best ways of reducing emissions without having to kowtow to these strong vested interests.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License

Alex Scrivener is the policy officer at Global Justice Now.

The Labour Establishment Plot to Stop Corbyn

As the latest YouGov Labour leadership election poll spreads panic through the Labour party right wing establishment, a picture is emerging on how they intend to fight back against the MP for Islington north. The poll shows Corbyn as having a big lead in all voting constituencies (members, union affiliates and £3 supporters).

Failing Corbyn’s body being found in a side street near Finsbury Park tube station (joke), an attempt will be made to destabilise his leadership and eventually to depose him.

The first tactic was to have a parade of Labour party grandees appealing to members/supporters not to vote for him as his ‘left wing’ policies would be a disaster for the country and make Labour unelectable for a generation. Neil Kinnock, Tony Blair, Peter Mandelson, Alan Johnson and now Alistair Campbell have all made this point through an eagerly compliant media. Labour right stalwarts working for this media (The Guardian in the main) have also weighed in with a similar message, Polly Toynbee, Martin Kettle, Rafael Behr for example with leader comments in the same vein. To be fair to The Guardian, there has been some balance, from Seamus Milne and Owen Jones principally.

When this tactic didn’t appear to work, a second line of defence had to be established. De-legitimise the ballot. Labour MP Barry Sheerman has called for the ballot to be ‘paused’ because the £3 supporter’s constituency has been infiltrated by the ‘hard left’ and Tories, wishing ill for the Labour party. He is not alone amongst Blairite MPs in seeking to de-legitimise the ballot, who ironically were the most insistent on introducing the ‘supporters’ to make it more like an open US ‘primary’, to reduce the influence of the unions.

This line was also trumpeted by Labour MP and supporter of rival for the leadership candidate Liz Kendall, Simon Danczuk. Danczuk goes even further in concluding that Labour MPs would have every right to depose Corbyn from ‘day one’ of his leadership of Labour. Labour peers may join the rebellion.

With only 47 MPs required to force another contest (presumably after changing the rules for the election) and probably only about 30 Labour MPs supporting Corbyn, this would not be a surprise.

The only problem with this is that Corbyn is ahead (according to the polls) in the Labour members section, so why would they vote differently so soon after electing Corbyn?

There would need to be a campaign of off the record ‘briefing’ against Corbyn by Labour MPs and I’m sure the media will be compliant in this. The tactic is well established when MPs feed information to journalists that is damaging to a political opponent, a slow drip, drip of stories of the ‘chaos’ in Corbyn’s leadership team etc.

No doubt some new Labour supporting business people can be found to tell the media how ‘anti-business’ Labour has become, which will cost jobs etc etc.

On top of this, many Labour MPs will refuse to join Corbyn’s shadow cabinet, leadership rivals Liz Kendall and Yvette Cooper have already refused to do so. Corbyn may struggle to find enough MPs willing to cover all of the shadow ministerial positions.

And what if a large majority of MPs refuse to vote for Corbyn’s policies in the House of Commons, abstaining or voting with the Tory government? Corbyn’s own voting record and ‘loyalty’ to previous leaders will give them an excuse to rebel. It is doubtful that constituency parties will be able to force MPs to support Corbyn, if as is predicted there will be hundreds of them.

All of this would put a tremendous strain on Corbyn himself, and it will probably start to show. Stories about his health and age will start to surface in the press further undermining his position.

Once this story has run for a year or so, and presumably with Labour trailing in opinion polls, this is the time they will call for a new leadership contest, under new rules.

The danger would be that Corbyn wins again, but after all the bad news and turmoil in the party, I think he may lose.  

Isn’t democracy beautiful?    

The Point of No Return: Climate Change Nightmares Are Already Here

Walruses, like these in Alaska, are being forced ashore in record numbers. 

The worst predicted impacts of climate change are starting to happen — and much faster than climate scientists expected

Written by Eric Holthaus and first published at Rolling Stone

Historians may look to 2015 as the year when shit really started hitting the fan. Some snapshots: In just the past few months, record-setting heat waves in Pakistan and India each killed more than 1,000 people. In Washington state's Olympic National Park, the rainforest caught fire for the first time in living memory. London reached 98 degrees Fahrenheit during the hottest July day ever recorded in the U.K.; The Guardian briefly had to pause its live blog of the heat wave because its computer servers overheated. In California, suffering from its worst drought in a millennium, a 50-acre brush fire swelled seventyfold in a matter of hours, jumping across the I-15 freeway during rush-hour traffic. Then, a few days later, the region was pounded by intense, virtually unheard-of summer rains. Puerto Rico is under its strictest water rationing in history as a monster El Niño forms in the tropical Pacific Ocean, shifting weather patterns worldwide.

On July 20th, James Hansen, the former NASA climatologist who brought climate change to the public's attention in the summer of 1988, issued a bombshell: He and a team of climate scientists had identified a newly important feedback mechanism off the coast of Antarctica that suggests mean sea levels could rise 10 times faster than previously predicted: 10 feet by 2065. The authors included this chilling warning: If emissions aren't cut, "We conclude that multi-meter sea-level rise would become practically unavoidable. Social disruption and economic consequences of such large sea-level rise could be devastating. It is not difficult to imagine that conflicts arising from forced migrations and economic collapse might make the planet ungovernable, threatening the fabric of civilization."

Eric Rignot, a climate scientist at NASA and the University of California-Irvine and a co-author on Hansen's study, said their new research doesn't necessarily change the worst-case scenario on sea-level rise, it just makes it much more pressing to think about and discuss, especially among world leaders. In particular, says Rignot, the new research shows a two-degree Celsius rise in global temperature — the previously agreed upon "safe" level of climate change — "would be a catastrophe for sea-level rise."

Hansen's new study also shows how complicated and unpredictable climate change can be. Even as global ocean temperatures rise to their highest levels in recorded history, some parts of the ocean, near where ice is melting exceptionally fast, are actually cooling, slowing ocean circulation currents and sending weather patterns into a frenzy. Sure enough, a persistently cold patch of ocean is starting to show up just south of Greenland, exactly where previous experimental predictions of a sudden surge of freshwater from melting ice expected it to be. Michael Mann, another prominent climate scientist, recently said of the unexpectedly sudden Atlantic slowdown, "This is yet another example of where observations suggest that climate model predictions may be too conservative when it comes to the pace at which certain aspects of climate change are proceeding."

Since storm systems and jet streams in the United States and Europe partially draw their energy from the difference in ocean temperatures, the implication of one patch of ocean cooling while the rest of the ocean warms is profound. Storms will get stronger, and sea-level rise will accelerate. Scientists like Hansen only expect extreme weather to get worse in the years to come, though Mann said it was still "unclear" whether recent severe winters on the East Coast are connected to the phenomenon.

And yet, these aren't even the most disturbing changes happening to the Earth's biosphere that climate scientists are discovering this year. For that, you have to look not at the rising sea levels but to what is actually happening within the oceans themselves.

Water temperatures this year in the North Pacific have never been this high for this long over such a large area — and it is already having a profound effect on marine life.

Eighty-year-old Roger Thomas runs whale-watching trips out of San Francisco. On an excursion earlier this year, Thomas spotted 25 humpbacks and three blue whales. During a survey on July 4th, federal officials spotted 115 whales in a single hour near the Farallon Islands — enough to issue a boating warning. Humpbacks are occasionally seen offshore in California, but rarely so close to the coast or in such numbers. Why are they coming so close to shore? Exceptionally warm water has concentrated the krill and anchovies they feed on into a narrow band of relatively cool coastal water. The whales are having a heyday. 

"It's unbelievable," Thomas told a local paper. "Whales are all over the place."

Last fall, in northern Alaska, in the same part of the Arctic where Shell is planning to drill for oil, federal scientists discovered 35,000 walruses congregating on a single beach. It was the largest-ever documented "haul out" of walruses, and a sign that sea ice, their favored habitat, is becoming harder and harder to find.

Marine life is moving north, adapting in real time to the warming ocean. Great white sharks have been sighted breeding near Monterey Bay, California, the farthest north that's ever been known to occur. A blue marlin was caught last summer near Catalina Island — 1,000 miles north of its typical range. Across California, there have been sightings of non-native animals moving north, such as Mexican red crabs. 

No species may be as uniquely endangered as the one most associated with the Pacific Northwest, the salmon. Every two weeks, Bill Peterson, an oceanographer and senior scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Northwest Fisheries Science Center in Oregon, takes to the sea to collect data he uses to forecast the return of salmon. What he's been seeing this year is deeply troubling.

Salmon are crucial to their coastal ecosystem like perhaps few other species on the planet. 

A significant portion of the nitrogen in West Coast forests has been traced back to salmon, which can travel hundreds of miles upstream to lay their eggs. The largest trees on Earth simply wouldn't exist without salmon.

But their situation is precarious. This year, officials in California are bringing salmon downstream in convoys of trucks, because river levels are too low and the temperatures too warm for them to have a reasonable chance of surviving. One species, the winter-run Chinook salmon, is at a particularly increased risk of decline in the next few years, should the warm water persist offshore.

"You talk to fishermen, and they all say: 'We've never seen anything like this before,' " says Peterson. "So when you have no experience with something like this, it gets like, 'What the hell's going on?' "

Atmospheric scientists increasingly believe that the exceptionally warm waters over the past months are the early indications of a phase shift in the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, a cyclical warming of the North Pacific that happens a few times each century. Positive phases of the PDO have been known to last for 15 to 20 years, during which global warming can increase at double the rate as during negative phases of the PDO. It also makes big El Niños, like this year's, more likely. The nature of PDO phase shifts is unpredictable — climate scientists simply haven't yet figured out precisely what's behind them and why they happen when they do. It's not a permanent change — the ocean's temperature will likely drop from these record highs, at least temporarily, some time over the next few years — but the impact on marine species will be lasting, and scientists have pointed to the PDO as a global-warming preview.

"The climate [change] models predict this gentle, slow increase in temperature," says Peterson, "but the main problem we've had for the last few years is the variability is so high. As scientists, we can't keep up with it, and neither can the animals." Peterson likens it to a boxer getting pummeled round after round: "At some point, you knock them down, and the fight is over." 

Attendant with this weird wildlife behavior is a stunning drop in the number of plankton — the basis of the ocean's food chain. In July, another major study concluded that acidifying oceans are likely to have a "quite traumatic" impact on plankton diversity, with some species dying out while others flourish. As the oceans absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, it's converted into carbonic acid — and the pH of seawater declines. According to lead author Stephanie Dutkiewicz of MIT, that trend means "the whole food chain is going to be different."

The Hansen study may have gotten more attention, but the Dutkiewicz study, and others like it, could have even more dire implications for our future. The rapid changes Dutkiewicz and her colleagues are observing have shocked some of their fellow scientists into thinking that yes, actually, we're heading toward the worst-case scenario. Unlike a prediction of massive sea-level rise just decades away, the warming and acidifying oceans represent a problem that seems to have kick-started a mass extinction on the same time scale.

Jacquelyn Gill is a paleoecologist at the University of Maine. She knows a lot about extinction, and her work is more relevant than ever. Essentially, she's trying to save the species that are alive right now by learning more about what killed off the ones that aren't. The ancient data she studies shows "really compelling evidence that there can be events of abrupt climate change that can happen well within human life spans. We're talking less than a decade."

For the past year or two, a persistent change in winds over the North Pacific has given rise to what meteorologists and oceanographers are calling "the blob" — a highly anomalous patch of warm water between Hawaii, Alaska and Baja California that's thrown the marine ecosystem into a tailspin. Amid warmer temperatures, plankton numbers have plummeted, and the myriad species that depend on them have migrated or seen their own numbers dwindle.

Significant northward surges of warm water have happened before, even frequently. El Niño, for example, does this on a predictable basis. But what's happening this year appears to be something new. Some climate scientists think that the wind shift is linked to the rapid decline in Arctic sea ice over the past few years, which separate research has shown makes weather patterns more likely to get stuck.

A similar shift in the behavior of the jet stream has also contributed to the California drought and severe polar vortex winters in the Northeast over the past two years. An amplified jet-stream pattern has produced an unusual doldrum off the West Coast that's persisted for most of the past 18 months. Daniel Swain, a Stanford University meteorologist, has called it the "Ridiculously Resilient Ridge" — weather patterns just aren't supposed to last this long.

What's increasingly uncontroversial among scientists is that in many ecosystems, the impacts of the current off-the-charts temperatures in the North Pacific will linger for years, or longer. The largest ocean on Earth, the Pacific is exhibiting cyclical variability to greater extremes than other ocean basins. While the North Pacific is currently the most dramatic area of change in the world's oceans, it's not alone: Globally, 2014 was a record-setting year for ocean temperatures, and 2015 is on pace to beat it soundly, boosted by the El Niño in the Pacific. Six percent of the world's reefs could disappear before the end of the decade, perhaps permanently, thanks to warming waters.

Since warmer oceans expand in volume, it's also leading to a surge in sea-level rise. One recent study showed a slowdown in Atlantic Ocean currents, perhaps linked to glacial melt from Greenland, that caused a four-inch rise in sea levels along the Northeast coast in just two years, from 2009 to 2010. To be sure, it seems like this sudden and unpredicted surge was only temporary, but scientists who studied the surge estimated it to be a 1-in-850-year event, and it's been blamed on accelerated beach erosion "almost as significant as some hurricane events." 

Possibly worse than rising ocean temperatures is the acidification of the waters. Acidification has a direct effect on mollusks and other marine animals with hard outer bodies: A striking study last year showed that, along the West Coast, the shells of tiny snails are already dissolving, with as-yet-unknown consequences on the ecosystem. One of the study's authors, Nina Bednaršek, told Science magazine that the snails' shells, pitted by the acidifying ocean, resembled "cauliflower" or "sandpaper." A similarly striking study by more than a dozen of the world's top ocean scientists this July said that the current pace of increasing carbon emissions would force an "effectively irreversible" change on ocean ecosystems during this century. In as little as a decade, the study suggested, chemical changes will rise significantly above background levels in nearly half of the world's oceans.

"I used to think it was kind of hard to make things in the ocean go extinct," James Barry of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in California told the Seattle Times in 2013. "But this change we're seeing is happening so fast it's almost instantaneous." 

Thanks to the pressure we're putting on the planet's ecosystem — warming, acidification and good old-fashioned pollution — the oceans are set up for several decades of rapid change. Here's what could happen next.

The combination of excessive nutrients from agricultural runoff, abnormal wind patterns and the warming oceans is already creating seasonal dead zones in coastal regions when algae blooms suck up most of the available oxygen. The appearance of low-oxygen regions has doubled in frequency every 10 years since 1960 and should continue to grow over the coming decades at an even greater rate.

So far, dead zones have remained mostly close to the coasts, but in the 21st century, deep-ocean dead zones could become common. These low-oxygen regions could gradually expand in size — potentially thousands of miles across — which would force fish, whales, pretty much everything upward. If this were to occur, large sections of the temperate deep oceans would suffer should the oxygen-free layer grow so pronounced that it stratifies, pushing surface ocean warming into overdrive and hindering upwelling of cooler, nutrient-rich deeper water.

Enhanced evaporation from the warmer oceans will create heavier downpours, perhaps destabilizing the root systems of forests, and accelerated runoff will pour more excess nutrients into coastal areas, further enhancing dead zones. In the past year, downpours have broken records in Long Island, Phoenix, Detroit, Baltimore, Houston and Pensacola, Florida.

Evidence for the above scenario comes in large part from our best understanding of what happened 250 million years ago, during the "Great Dying," when more than 90 percent of all oceanic species perished after a pulse of carbon dioxide and methane from land-based sources began a period of profound climate change. The conditions that triggered "Great Dying" took hundreds of thousands of years to develop. But humans have been emitting carbon dioxide at a much quicker rate, so the current mass extinction only took 100 years or so to kick-start.

With all these stressors working against it, a hypoxic feedback loop could wind up destroying some of the oceans' most species-rich ecosystems within our lifetime. A recent study by Sarah Moffitt of the University of California-Davis said it could take the ocean thousands of years to recover. "Looking forward for my kid, people in the future are not going to have the same ocean that I have today," Moffitt said. pagebreak

As you might expect, having tickets to the front row of a global environmental catastrophe is taking an increasingly emotional toll on scientists, and in some cases pushing them toward advocacy. Of the two dozen or so scientists I interviewed for this piece, virtually all drifted into apocalyptic language at some point.

For Simone Alin, an oceanographer focusing on ocean acidification at NOAA's Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in Seattle, the changes she's seeing hit close to home. The Puget Sound is a natural laboratory for the coming decades of rapid change because its waters are naturally more acidified than most of the world's marine ecosystems.

The local oyster industry here is already seeing serious impacts from acidifying waters and is going to great lengths to avoid a total collapse. Alin calls oysters, which are non-native, the canary in the coal mine for the Puget Sound: "A canary is also not native to a coal mine, but that doesn't mean it's not a good indicator of change.”

Though she works on fundamental oceanic changes every day, the Dutkiewicz study on the impending large-scale changes to plankton caught her off-guard: "This was alarming to me because if the basis of the food web changes, then . . . everything could change, right?”

Alin's frank discussion of the looming oceanic apocalypse is perhaps a product of studying unfathomable change every day. But four years ago, the birth of her twins "heightened the whole issue," she says. "I was worried enough about these problems before having kids that I maybe wondered whether it was a good idea. Now, it just makes me feel crushed." 

Katharine Hayhoe speaks about climate change to students and faculty at Wayland Baptist University in 2011. Geoffrey McAllister/Chicago Tribune/MCT/Getty

Katharine Hayhoe, a climate scientist and evangelical Christian, moved from Canada to Texas with her husband, a pastor, precisely because of its vulnerability to climate change. There, she engages with the evangelical community on science — almost as a missionary would. But she's already planning her exit strategy: "If we continue on our current pathway, Canada will be home for us long term. But the majority of people don't have an exit strategy. . . . So that's who I'm here trying to help.”

James Hansen, the dean of climate scientists, retired from NASA in 2013 to become a climate activist. But for all the gloom of the report he just put his name to, Hansen is actually somewhat hopeful. That's because he knows that climate change has a straightforward solution: End fossil-fuel use as quickly as possible. If tomorrow, the leaders of the United States and China would agree to a sufficiently strong, coordinated carbon tax that's also applied to imports, the rest of the world would have no choice but to sign up. This idea has already been pitched to Congress several times, with tepid bipartisan support. Even though a carbon tax is probably a long shot, for Hansen, even the slim possibility that bold action like this might happen is enough for him to devote the rest of his life to working to achieve it. On a conference call with reporters in July, Hansen said a potential joint U.S.-China carbon tax is more important than whatever happens at the United Nations climate talks in Paris

One group Hansen is helping is Our Children's Trust, a legal advocacy organization that's filed a number of novel challenges on behalf of minors under the idea that climate change is a violation of intergenerational equity — children, the group argues, are lawfully entitled to inherit a healthy planet.

A separate challenge to U.S. law is being brought by a former EPA scientist arguing that carbon dioxide isn't just a pollutant (which, under the Clean Air Act, can dissipate on its own), it's also a toxic substance. In general, these substances have exceptionally long life spans in the environment, cause an unreasonable risk, and therefore require remediation. In this case, remediation may involve planting vast numbers of trees or restoring wetlands to bury excess carbon underground.

Even if these novel challenges succeed, it will take years before a bend in the curve is noticeable. But maybe that's enough. When all feels lost, saving a few species will feel like a triumph. 

Renewable Energy Will Never be Enough to Power Capitalism

Figure 1 Source Financial Sense

Many Greens stress the need to move away from fossil fuels and replace our energy generation with renewable energy, solar, wind, hydro, tidal, thermal (and some advocate biomass). This type of power generation doesn’t emit carbon in the process (except biomass) and is reasonably abundant if only we put the money and effort into capturing it. We know about the problems caused to the climate by burning fossil fuels, and to remedy this, we need to instead generate clean power, to reduce our emissions. So far, so good.

If we look at the chart above, figure 1, even if we include the hydro figure with the other renewable sources we are still producing less than a quarter of the world’s electricity from renewable resources. This is a huge gap to make up, although to some extent we could reduce the overall amount we use now, by introducing energy efficiency measures, but even so, the challenge is massive, even if there was the political will to do it, which there isn’t really.

Some may advocate nuclear power as the answer to filling the gap, but this is not completely emission free, since raw uranium needs to be extracted and this is a finite resource anyway, which will eventually run out. The new nuclear reactors are said to be able to be fuelled by nuclear waste from the older style nuclear plants, which does solve the problem of what to do with the waste and increases the raw material available for fuel. Of course, there is still the danger aspect associated with nuclear power plants and the potential to cause large scale disaster as we have seen from time to time. Personally I’m not in favour of nuclear for this reason, the risk is too great.

Figure 2 Source Our Finite World

The diagram figure 2 above shows the increase in energy use over the past few years, including a slight fall in 2009 in the US and Europe (mainly) caused by the economic recession. It also shows GDP following the use of energy closely. You will see that overall the trend is of rising consumption. 

The industrial revolution would not have been possible without the huge increase in energy produced through mainly burning coal to produce steam power. Before this innovation energy was produced by human beings or animals, plus some wind and hydro power for small mills. Indeed the economic growth produced by fossil fuel generated energy, is the lifeblood of the capitalist system. Without growth, capitalism dies and without energy to power the process, there is not anywhere near enough growth to sate capitalism’s demands.

Figure 3 Source Nature

If we think about all the new gadgets we own which we didn’t own twenty years ago, mobile phones, lap tops, desk tops, tablets all of which require electricity to function, and things like HD television screens which use about five times as much power as the old analogue TVs, you get a sense of the problem.

Even if we could produce as much renewable energy as we need today, what about in twenty years time, fifty years time? You see the problem. With the possible exception of nuclear power, if the capitalist system is to survive and prosper, we will need to keep burning fossil fuels. There is enough of this left for hundreds years, but if we do use it, we will have catastrophic climate change.

This is not to say that shouldn’t produce more energy from renewable sources, clearly we should. But we shouldn’t fool ourselves that this will solve our climate problems, on its own.

And so, if we want to avoid destroying the world, we need to ditch the capitalist system. Not so easy I know, but it is the only honest assessment for Greens to hold. System change, not climate change. This is the only answer.