Socialists jumping on the environmentalist bandwagon?

Sent to tle local Shields Gazette

Mr MS (Gazette, 26th March) , criticising my letter on climatic change suggests Socialists are jumping on the environmentalist bandwagon. For the record socialist have been warning about the dangers capitalist production methods pose the environment for 130 years.

In 1875, in Dialectics of Nature, Fred Engels had this to say:

“At every step we are reminded that we by no means rule over nature like a conqueror over a foreign people, like someone standing over nature – but that we, with flesh and blood and brain, belong to nature and exist in its midst, and that all our mastery of it consists in the fact that we have the advantage over all other creatures of being able to learn its laws and apply them correctly. We are gradually learning to get a clear view of the indirect, more remote social effects of our productive activity, and so are afforded the opportunity to control and regulate these effects well. This regulation, however, requires a complete revolution in our existing mode of production…in our whole contemporary social order”

And, Mr MS, there has been no “shift in socialist priorities”, as you say, “from world peace and global poverty, to solar panels and energy-efficient light bulbs.” Our priority remains the same – abolition of the profit system and the establishment of a system of society where the earth’s natural and industrial resources are commonly owned and democratically controlled.

Socialists are no different from others in desiring an envirionment in which the safety of all animal and plant spieces is ensured. Where we differ from our poitical opponents is in recognising that their demands have to be set against a well entrenched economic and social system, based on class privilege and property and governed by the overriding law of profits first.

It has long been our case that human needs can be satisfied without recourse to production methods that aversely effect the natural environment, which is exactly why we advocate the establishment of a system of society in which production is freed from the artificial constraints of profit. We are not talking about nationalisation or any other tinkering with the present system, but rather its entire abolition and replacement with a global system in which the earth’s natural and industrial resources are commonly owned and democratically controlled; a society in which each production processes takes into consideration not only human need but any likely effect upon the environment.

Once the Earth’s natural and industrial resources have ben wrested from the master class and become the common heritage of all humanity, then production can be geared to meeting needs in an ecologically acceptable way, instead of making profits without consideration for the environment. This the only basis on which we can meet our needs whilst respecting the laws of nature and to at last begin to reverse the degradation of the environment caused by the profit system. The only effective strategy for achieving a free and democratic society and, moreover, one that is in harmony with nature, is to build up a movement which has the achievement of such a society as itsobjective.

Climatic change again

sent to the local Shields Gazette

Climate change due to global warming is perhaps the greatest danger facing humanity as a whole at the moment (though others make out a good case for this being the spread of the ability to make nuclear bombs). Environment minister, and South Shields MP, David Miliband wrote about this in the Times (12 February):

"Climate change is, according to Sir Nicholas Stern, the greatest ever market failure, but the answer is not to replace markets. Instead, we need to price pollution into markets and extend market mechanisms so that they work more effectively".

In other words, the Market has Failed, Long Live the Market! This from somebody billed as New Labour's bright young intellectual, though it does show the extent of Labour's commitment to capitalism.

Socialists take a different view. Miliband of course is no socialist (though his father wrote a couple of books -- "Parliamentary Socialism" and "The State in Capitalist Society" -- of interest to them). We say: the Market has failed, so let's replace it with something better that doesn't produce problems like global overwarming.

The "carbon trading" and "green taxes" favoured by Miliband are just tinkering with the market system, whereas if carbon emissions are to be stabilised and the consequences of global overwarming tackled effectively it is the whole market system of competitive production for profit that must go.

Its replacement would be a world without frontiers where the Earth's natural and industrial resources have become the common heritage of all humanity. Only then will a world body capable of taking the necessary co-ordinated global action exist. Only then can the Earth's resources be used to satisfy people's needs not to make a profit for those who own and exploit them.The buying and selling of the market system would be replaced by giving and taking in accordance with the principle "from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs".

Climatic Change

Sent to the Shields Gazette

The threat of global warming is clearly a global problem that can only be dealt with by co-ordinated action at world level. But this is not going to happen under capitalism. As a system involving competition between profit-seeking corporations backed up by their protecting states, it is inherently incapable of world-wide cooperation. There never has been such cooperation. Just the opposite, in fact. The inevitable clashing interests between different states, each seeking to pursue the interests of its profit-seeking corporations, breeds war rather than cooperation. Look what happened last century. Look at the invasion of Iraq this century.
So it’s not going to happen. There is not going to be any coordinated world action to deal with global warming as long as capitalism is allowed to continue. Something will be done but it is bound to be too little, too late.

It’s certainly going to be too little. These days, when private corporations have governments under their thumb much more than in the recent past, what is being proposed is not even state intervention to force carbon-polluting corporations to limit their emissions in the overall capitalist interest. It’s to try to use the mechanisms of the market to solve the problem: fiddling about with the tax system to make investment in anti-pollution measures more profitable; establishing an artificial world market and price for carbon. Anybody can see that this is not going to work.

Governments are also proposing that individuals play their part, as if individuals rather than the system were to blame. They want us to drive smaller cars, even cycle to work, turn off the lights when we leave a room, not leave our TV on standby, not fly to our holiday destination. That’s all very well but unless they want us to reduce our standard of living that will just mean we would have money to spend on something else. As the capitalist class are always wanting us to reduce our standard of living since this means more for them as profits - and provoke strikes and impose austerity to try to do so - , socialists are naturally suspicious of the motives behind the government propaganda here.

In any event since the great bulk of carbon emissions come from energy generated for industry, offices and commercial transport, as well as from deforestation, even if we did all the things they want - and we’re not saying we shouldn’t, that’s an individual life-style choice - it wouldn’t make much difference. Changing life-styles is no more a solution to global warming than letting the invisible hand of the market have a go.

Having said this, individuals do have some responsibility in the matter. Capitalism - the cause of the problem - only continues in the end because people put up with it. Most people don’t see any alternative to working for wages, producing for profit, using money, the world divided into states, the existence of armies. These attitudes both reflect and sustain capitalism. And every time people get a chance to vote, a majority back politicians committed to maintaining the capitalist system as the way of organising the production and distribution of wealth. So capitalism continues. As do its problems, including the threat of global over-warming. Maybe as this gets nearer people will be driven to consider an alternative.

Global warming can only be tackled by global action. And effective global action will only be possible within the framework of a united world. A united world is only possible on the basis of the Earth’s natural and industrial resources being the common heritage of all humanity.

Whoops Apocalypse

The beginning of February saw the world’s top experts on climatic change descend on the Met Office’s HQ in Exeter for a meeting called by Tony Blair and in advance of the coming into force of the Kyoto Protocol two weeks later. They painted a picture of a world not unlike that portrayed in the film The Day After Tomorrow, where humans have destroyed their own planet through their disregard for the environment – melting polar ice caps, rising sea levels, global warming and drought.

Evidence was presented by Professor Chris Rapley, director of the British Antarctic Survey, showing that the West Antarctic ice sheet is beginning to melt, threatening eventually to raise sea levels by 15ft. He reminded his audience that 90 per cent of the world's people live near current sea levels.

Other scientists presented evidence that the world’s oceans are turning acidic, threatening marine life and there were many experts on hand ready to present their latest findings on the effects of global warming on ecosystems. Significantly, the number of scientific papers that have recorded changes in ecosystems due to global warming have increased from 14 to over a thousand in just five years.
Blair did not need to call a meeting in Exeter to find about the threat to the environment. Experts from every field have been flailing their arms around frantically for years trying to get governments to sit up and notice.
While Blair pursues policies aimed at securing Britain’s share of Iraq’s oil stores for the foreseeable future, we are warned by scientists that oil production will peak within 10 years; that half of the earth’s available oil is estimated to by used by then, and that within another 20 years countries like China and India will have huge demands that will far outstrip supply. Consider the conflicts this will create!
Far worse than a shortage of oil is a shortage of water. We already know that 500 million people live in regions prone now to chronic drought. Scientists now warn us that within 20 years that figure is expected to increase fivefold to between 2.5bn and 3.5bn people. Already over 5 million people die - including 2 million children - from diseases caused by drinking contaminated water. Again, what desolation does this foreshadow for the human race?
In the oceans, almost 50% of fish stocks are fully exploited, 20% are over-exploited, and only 2% are recovering. On land, soil erosion and degradation mean that half a billion people live in countries whose arable land can no longer support their own crops. The natural habitats of many animal species are being lost on an alarming scale, which with the decline of bird species, plants, forests - on which, ultimately, the human race depends - signals a real crisis for biodiversity.
Back in 1997, to head off some of these problems, governments met in Kyoto, Japan, to negotiate a treaty according to which the industrialised countries each agreed a target to control emissions of six gases know to cause global warming.
The Kyoto protocol, for those countries which have ratified it, came into effect on 16th February this year, with Russia finally signing up after a EU bribe in order for the 55% quorum to be reached before the treaty could come into effect, but minus the support of the USA who, with only 5% of the world’s population produces 36% of carbon emissions. And the reason for US obstinacy? They simply felt that China and other developing countries, not facing the costs of cutting emissions, would gain a competitive edge on them.
The agreement, the first “legally binding” treaty on the environment, gives each of the industrialised and ratifying countries of the world their own limit to the greenhouse gas emissions they can pump into the atmosphere. It is envisaged that this will eventually lead to a situation in which the world produces no more greenhouse gasses than the environment can tolerate.
Will the Kyoto treaty stave off the unimaginable? Well, it would seem that not only are the treaty’s formal greenhouse gas emission reduction objectives infinitesimal compared to what scientists say is actually necessary, the treaty’s corporate-friendly, market-based mechanisms to achieve these reductions appear counterproductive.
To start with, the treaty requires that Annex One countries (the industrialised countries), which have hitherto been the biggest polluters, reduce their greenhouse gas emissions on average to just 5.2% below their 1990 levels by 2012. However, even though a 60-80% reduction is said to be needed by 2050, no additional reduction goals or timetables are in place for beyond the year 2012.

Plenty of opportunity is provided by the treaty’s “flexible mechanisms” for the governments of richer countries to indulge in creative accounting. It is possible for governments, with a bit of nifty handwork, to claim cutbacks in their country’s overall greenhouse gas emissions although actual reductions may not have taken place. Furthermore, a country might even increase its emissions and still be credited with a reduction.

Industrialised countries who find they have in fact made reductions in greenhouse gas emissions below that required of them are moreover entitled to sell on their spare polluter credits to those countries either unable or unwilling to adhere to their own set reduction targets. This arrangement – to sell the right to pollute –also became the privilege of corporations in January when European carbon markets became operational.

Emission measurements are by and large taken from a starting date of 1990, and the targets for each country must be reached by the period 2008-12. Former state capitalist countries (ie the former Soviet Union) , referred to in Kyoto jargon as "countries in transition", were allowed to chose a different date since, after the collapse of the Kremlin’s empire, a lot of heavy industry closed, resulting in a 40 per cent fall in emissions. This means that countries such as Russia and Ukraine will be in a position to sell other Annex One countries the right to increase their greenhouse gas emissions by that figure.

There are numerous accountancy tricks that help countries reach their Kyoto commitments, without them actually reducing their very own emissions. Little wonder that since 1990 annual greenhouse gas emissions from the Annex One countries have increased overall by more than 7%.

Consider the treaty's ‘Clean Development Mechanism’. This will allow the governments of highly industrialised countries to claim credits if they can prove they have invested in schemes aimed at reducing emissions in underdeveloped countries.

Wealthy countries will be able to finance the planting of fast growing forests in poor countries and then claim credits for the amount of CO2 they claim these will absorb.

Again, corporation’s investing in new technology will be able to palm their decrepit technology off onto poor countries, to whom such technology is an advance on what they currently have, and again demand emission credits. And of course, there is further logic to this – with such outdated technology, factories in poorer countries are hardly going to steal a competitive edge on their western counterparts.
Greenhouse gasses are suddenly commodities to be bought and sold on the world market, a market in which the underdeveloped countries are duped by the richer ones and their corporate elites. And when the time comes for underdeveloped countries to make reductions they will find themselves in a fix, unable to afford the technology needed to curb their own rampant pollution.
Kyoto is hardly going to save the planet as it stands. For one thing it was only ever foreseen as a first step to curb global warming and to be replaced after 2012 with tougher legislation. But even in seven years time there will be trouble. At last year’s climate summit in Buenos Aries, China and India could be found joining the US, the major villain of Kyoto, in an attempt to scupper any post-2012 agreements. Interestingly, and as The Christian Science Monitor recently noted, by 2012 coal-fired plants in those three same countries will be emitting 2.5 billion tonnes of CO2 annually, five times the cuts ordered by the Kyoto protocol
Add to this projections from the International Energy Agency that there will be a 60 per cent rise in global energy within 25 years, the bulk of this coming from carbon-emitting fuels and you begin to wonder just what lies ahead.
Currently, global CO2 levels are the highest they have been for 20 million years. Meanwhile the Intergovernmental Panel on Climatic Change predicts that by the year 2100 temperatures will have risen by anything up to 5.8 degrees centigrade.
Kyoto looks nothing more than some environmental monopoly board on which governments can buy and sell and trade the air we breathe.

Ironically, Whilst the world’s governments will heed calls for such an early warning system that can warn of natural disaster which we have no control over - such as one warning of tsunamis in the Indian ocean - they are somewhat deaf when it comes to those blaring in our ears, the early warning systems scientists have been shouting about for decades: acid rain, soil erosion, poisonous seas, melting glaciers, a hole in the ozone layer etc.

And it’s not as if these are new problems. The world has known about them for so long that the facts seem hackneyed and you feel something of a wally quoting them repeatedly. The point is, these early warning systems are ringing non-stop. Capitalism’s problems are hitting the human race with the force of many tsunamis a day, killing millions, and more, threatening global disaster. Yet governments believe the problem can be traded away, camouflaged by a creative accounting that ‘mother nature’ won’t notice.

And the simple truth is that we place our trust in governments to solve environmental problems within the context of capitalism at our peril. They serve to administer the present system on behalf of a minority for whom environmental protection is an obstacle to profit, to whom any means is legitimate in the pursuit of that profit.

When you consider the future of the planet you are faced with two choices. You can continue to support the defenders of capitalism – they come in many disguises - and acquiesce in the destruction of the natural global environment or stand in their way by joining the struggle for socialism and the destruction of a system that will nonchalantly prioritises profit over not only human well-being but the world we live in. But, hey, don’t wait until your living room is a foot deep in water to make up your mind. Think hard and now. Capitalism, and with it the worsening of every environmental problem we cite, or socialism, a world social system that places control of the earth in the hands of a global majority who will tend to it with respect and without the barriers profit places in the path of production?

History repeats itself at The Hague

As much anticipated, the global summit at The Hague, called to debate the issue of pollution that causes global warming collapsed on 25th November. We were not alone in foreseeing the debacle – environmentalists had in fact warned months previous that the Hague round of talks would be doomed to failure for the same reasons we cited.


At its simplest, the meeting ended in disaster because European countries, headed by France, shunned an eleventh hour compromise brokered by John Prescott – the self appointed mediator between the US and the EU. If accepted, it would have necessitated the US ditching its plans to offset forests planted abroad against its domestic targets for the reduction of carbon emissions.


Throughout the talks the US insisted on a market for carbon trading – a plan which, if agreed upon, would have given the US the ‘right’ to pollute the planet at will. The details of this issue became increasingly confusing for many delegates, with European negotiators, opposed to a market approach, querying how such a set up could be regulated and without corruption. Neither were delegates from Sweden, France, Denmark and Germany calmed by the fact that Prescott had persuaded the US delegates that they could not buy ‘carbon credits’ by planting forests abroad.


Even if the compromise had have been agreed upon it would have had a negligible effect upon the main problem – the unwillingness of the US – presently producing 25% of global Carbon emissions – to check its insatiable appetite for gas.


Moreover, European delegates were upset that a second key stumbling block – the US insistence that forestry and agricultural changes at home be allowed to be counted as carbon credits – remained unresolved.


Throughout the conference and indeed during the three years it was in preparation the US sought to widen loopholes to undermine the Kyoto protocol. Many now think that with Bush in the White House – himself a fierce opponent of the Kyoto agreement – future compromises will be nigh on impossible.


Many delegates made the same criticism of the US, namely that the world’s most powerful country is reluctant to risk the campaign contributions it gets from oil firms nor to put in jeopardy its cosy relationship with the US corporate elite it represents.


The latter is indeed an indictment on a system that continually prioritises profit to the detriment of matters far more pressing. As Klaus Tapfer, executive director of the United Nations Environmental Programme informed the conference : “Climatic change is not a programme for the future, it is beginning now” (Independent, 26/11/00).


And the facts were well presented to the Hague meeting. For instance, that polar glaciers are retreating faster than in any period during the last 5,000 years; that the Arctic cap is half as thick as 25 years ago and that flooding and droughts have tripled in the past 10 years.


Robert Watson, chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climatic Change presented a report to the conference which showed that global warming was happening twice as fast as previously thought, and further predicted that in coming years successive harvests would fail dramatically in India, Africa and Latin America, that diseases such as malaria would spread and that sea level rises would displace millions of people.


If capitalism is presently incapable of solving the more pressing problems faced by humanity, we can well ponder what a difficult time ahead we face in a world in which we are increasingly at the mercy of the elements.


For many, environmental issues are new. As socialists, forever scrutinising the effects of the capitalist mode of production, we have been aware of them for generations. In fact one of our spokespersons had this to say 125 years ago, a statement that well anticipated the discussions at The Hague:

“At every step we are reminded that we by no means rule over nature like a conqueror over a foreign people, like someone standing over nature – but that we, with flesh and blood and brain, belong to nature and exist in its midst, and that all our mastery of it consists in the fact that we have the advantage over all other creatures of being able to learn its laws and apply them correctly. We are gradually learning to get a clear view of the indirect, more remote social effects of our productive activity, and so are afforded the opportunity to control and regulate these effects well. This regulation, however, requires a complete revolution in our existing mode of production…in our whole contemporary social order” (Frederic Engel’s in Dialectics of Nature, 1875).

CLIMATIC TALKS AT THE HAGUE

As I write, it is with the talks on climatic change in the Hague still in process and looking to last a further week, so I also write somewhat prophetically, albeit basing my judgement on previous knowledge of similar rounds of talks in recent years.


On June 28th 1997, The Guardian announced: “Earth Summit ends in failure.” Six months later, on 12th December 1997, it ran a related story: “Kyoto deal leaves US free to pollute.” On 16th November this year came the headline we well could have anticipated: “Climatic talks stalemate as EU rejects US forest plan.”


The current round of talks in The Hague are about the very agreement which, back in December of 1997, was hailed as a major advance when targets were set for industrialised countries for cuts in greenhouse gas emissions. The problem now is over the issue of loopholes – well anticipated at Kyoto - which allows countries to avoid cutting back on carbon emissions.


Whilst the EU insists that countries should in the first instance cut back on fossil fuels, there is an umbrella group of countries – the US, Japan, Canada, New Zealand and Australia – which believe in alternative methods of ‘reducing ‘carbon dioxide emissions. The latter are taking the ‘flexibility mechanism’, allowed under the Kyoto Protocol, to new extremes. Instead of cutting their fossil fuel (carbon) emissions they buy carbon credits from countries that are not likely to exceed their carbon emission quota as laid down at Kyoto and thus continue to pollute as before.


As the quotas are based on 1990 levels of emissions, countries, for instance of the former USSR which since 1990 have seen a drastic reduction in heavy industry, are selling their unused entitlements to the US. In this respect even moralistic Britain is just as guilty of carbon trading as those countries it criticises, with the UK hoping to sell carbon dioxide it would have produced were the coal mines not closed.


George Monbiot, writing in The Guardian (16th November 2000), poignantly observers that in July, the UK “laid down £30 million to help private companies start bidding for each others’ reduced emissions. A research institute in the US calculates that the weather market will be worth $13 trillion by 2050.”


Whilst the EU insists the US must make at least half of its reduction from genuine energy cutbacks at home, the US is adamant that the loopholes it exploits must remain in place before it is prepared to sign up to any agreement to curb emissions. As well as the carbon trading loophole, there are indeed other loopholes and dodges the US and others are taking advantage of, such as ‘sinks’. As forests absorb carbon from the atmosphere, the US and other countries, now plant and indeed buy forests, at home and in other countries, and count the carbon this is estimated to save against their own emissions. This is already proving a lucrative business. One Malaysian logging firm is presently replacing the forests it depletes with new plantations and selling pollution permits to the US. Another loophole is to be found with countries paying for a project in a lesser developed country, with the aim of reducing carbon and counting it against their own emissions.


You name the dodge and the profit-greedy have thought of it. This includes feeding cattle, pigs and sheep new diets that help reduce the amount of methane they emit when they pass wind and pumping carbon dioxide into the ocean to be absorbed by the seas and sprinkling iron filings across the surface of the ocean to stimulate plankton growth (then calculate how much plankton dies and sinks to the bottom of the seam, taking the carbon with them, and claim credit for it).


The perennial problem is that countries are reluctant to promote the investment in more environmentally friendly methods of production and transport because their respective governments, being the executive arm of the capitalist class, prefer to bow with suppliant knee to powerful oil, coal, iron and steel lobbies, rather than openly acknowledge that we are ecologically fast approaching the point of no return.


When we consider that at Kyoto, it was announced that a global 60 per cent reduction in carbon emissions was necessary to maintain a stable climate, with the US asked to reduce their emissions by 7 per cent of 1990 levels (which would mean a 34 per cent reduction now), and that the US, with 4 per cent of the world’s population is currently responsible for 24 per cent of global carbon emissions, we get some idea of the pathos of the whole issue.


In spite of all the evidence that suggests that deforestation, present production and transport methods are primary responsible for climatic warning – the disappearing polar ice caps, global flooding, rising sea levels, vegetation dieback, the loss of thousands of species of life, and that the speed and scale of global warming has no precedent – the world’s governments still insist these wasteful, though profit-generating methods must remain. And this in spite of recent evidence from the hundreds of scientists that inform the Intergovernmental Panel on Climatic Change that suggests the atmosphere will warm at twice the rate predicted 10 years ago – by 6C.


At the Rio Summit in 1992, at the Earth Summit in New York in June 1997 and at the Earth II Summit in Kyoto, Japan, six months later – all at which carbon emissions were the core issue – the delegates fought and bickered over deals that would best suit their respective paymasters, their countries reneging on the agreements they signed up to. If the Guardian quote for November 16th – published after only three days of talks – is anything to go by, then we can well expect this current round of talks to be another waste of time whilst providing us with further evidence that capitalism has long outlived its usefulness and that it is time to hand over control of the world to those who could best decide its future – a global socialist majority. That companies can get exited about the profits to be made from trading in pollution credits – whilst the planet we inhabit faces environmental catastrophe from pollution – says much about the insanity of the system we live in and very much begs the question: are you with us or against us?