Andrew Simms's Blog, page 8

Climate change: we must terminate this market madness | Andrew Simms

Arnold Schwarzenegger's financial ties to companies implicated in illegal logging shows the markets do not have the answer

"If climate change is a total downer it's going to be really hard to take action," said one of the scientists behind the UN climate panel's recent report on climate-driven threats to food, health and infrastructure.

One reaction is to talk up the business opportunities of doing things. Without doubt, there are many, and there is enormous scope for climate entrepreneurs. But there is a trap in hyping markets as the answer.

We keep moaning about population, but ignore consumption habits

Sharing planet Earth's finite resources in a better way is a more practical way of managing the needs of a rising population

At any public meeting on the environment over the past decade , there's one question that almost always came up. It is a variation of 'Why will no one talk about population?' As a result, population is discussed endlessly while people grumble that no one ever talks about it.

The Olympic legacy is that it proved public funding works

London 2012 gave a glimpse of a more fortunate Britain a triumph of direct funding and volunteering over austerity

Welcome to the Britain that actually learned from the best of the Olympics. You take a day off work to potter around your community allotment, paid for by a national public health fund. Next week you fancy another day off to take an interesting elderly person who attends the same GP surgery as you for tea. They talk in fascinating detail about how grim things were before the NHS. After that, maybe a day building a garden at the local school, or helping to set up a publicly funded community green energy scheme. At the end of the month you'll have a big party with everyone else doing similar things, then start all over again. Better still, your employer cheers you on, the national press treats you like a hero and the prime minister lauds the example you have set.

You're a Games Maker who never gave up. You're living in a nation that stumbled on an extraordinary idea that instead of chaining ourselves to desks, working ever longer and throwing ourselves on the mercy of the markets, there is another way. A new book, London 2012: How Was It For Us? argues it could be like this for everyone a publicly funded good time: working less, getting to know complete strangers, feeling better about life and watching the economic and social benefits flow.

Never mind the economic deficit. What about the environmental one?

Today is Earth Overshoot Day, when we've consumed more natural resources than our biosphere can replace over a year

Two contradictory ideas shape UK politics. First, the argument for austerity, that the nation cannot and should not live beyond its financial means. Second, the notion that we can and must, in effect, live beyond our environmental means. That is why any increase in our spending and consumption is hailed as economic success.

Today, the world goes into ecological debt, or "overshoot" an estimate of the moment in the year when humanity has consumed more natural resources and created more waste than our biosphere can replace and safely absorb over a 12-month period.

The green new deal is the antidote that UK desperately needs

Five years after it was first proposed, the deal is relevant now more than ever. So why are politicians dragging their feet?

What does a recovery look like? On current evidence it involves an increasingly divided workplace with more people, especially the young, caught in low-paid, insecure employment.

A matching economic accessory comes in the form of spiralling consumer debt, with rising reliance on overdrafts, credit cards and pay-day loans. And the UK's carbon emissions are rising.

Climate change is happening, so don't shoot the messenger

Despite the attention given to climate change sceptics, the overwhelming majority of scientific evidence supports those sounding the alarm including the IPCC

Emperor Hu Hai of the Qin dynasty in ancient China had an aide killed when he tried to tell the emperor his power was ebbing away. There was an uprising against his brutal reign. It's one of history's earlier known examples of shooting the messenger. No one likes uncomfortable news and we can go to extraordinary lengths to avoid or suppress it.

When it comes to conveying messages about climate change all kinds of things can happen to the messengers, few of them pleasant. As a Greenpeace activist you might have a Russian gun shoved in your face at sea. Concerned members of the British public worried about fracking might experience violent arrest. Scientists presenting the world with an extraordinary consensus on climatic upheaval find themselves subjected by the media to a standard of evidence that it would be unthinkable to apply to, say, economists.

Why Cameron's company ownership list helps the climate change fight

Secrecy is key to the running of illegal trades that harm the environment. This new register helps shed some light

It might seem arcane, irrelevant even, to the thumping challenge of preventing catastrophic climate change, but the UK publishing a publicly accessible register of company ownership, as David Cameron announced yesterday, is an important step. How so?

Rewrite the aims of the economic revolution word for word

Rising environmental and economic instabilities make it imperative to redefine old plans on our own terms

A spasm of interest in radical overhaul of the "system" seems to have foundered on the killer question: "Where's the plan for a different one?"

The UK government is playing both sides of the climate conflict

Massive amounts of money are being spent to clean up after flooding while continuing to create climate disaster

Most conflicts have their profiteers the black market traders exploiting shortages and arms dealers who play both sides for personal gain. If the latter don't actually create conflict by flooding a region with weapons, they'll readily perpetuate existing conflicts.

The UK government is playing both sides of the climate conflict | Andrew Simms

Massive amounts of money are being spent to clean up after flooding while continuing to create climate disaster

Most conflicts have their profiteers – the black market traders exploiting shortages and arms dealers who play both sides for personal gain. If the latter don't actually create conflict by flooding a region with weapons, they'll readily perpetuate existing conflicts.

History's most famous profiteer is probably the fictional, archetypal American capitalist Milo Minderbender, from Joseph Heller's acidic satire on world war two, Catch-22. He strikes deals with the Germans and, in search of financial return, organises for his own airbase and comrades to be bombed.

In a twisted parallel to Minderbender's amoral machinations, the UK government is playing both sides of the climate conflict.

Rather than being flooded by military hardware, when water deluged swaths of England last month, years of ideologically driven policy on austerity was seemingly ditched when the prime minister, David Cameron, declared: "Money is no object in this relief effort. Whatever money is needed, we will spend it." He went beyond his own environment secretary in linking the floods to climate change.

Less than two weeks later, Cameron again created the impression that money was no object. But this time, it wasn't to tackle global warming, but rather to ensure that the climate will continue to be destabilised. He announced measures worth up to £200bn in effective subsidy for the North Sea oil and gas industry resulting in the production of 3-4bn more barrels of oil "than would otherwise have been produced".

It is like promising to rebuild Dresden while ordering more bombers to flatten it again. There is a kind of closed-loop madness in which the only certainty is that massive amounts of money are being spent to both create disaster and are needed to clean up after it. From the vantage point of the Somerset Levels, you'd be forgiven for thinking that neither state nor market has exactly cracked the optimal allocation of resources needed to solve the nation's – or world's – problems.

Our big banks, underwritten by the public but operating according to a reward system of extortionate private gain, are the embodiment of this problem.

When the majority state-owned RBS – which lends massive amounts of support to the fossil fuel industries – handed out nearly £600m in bonuses in spite of making a loss of more than £8bn, it was merely one example of a still unsolved systemic failing.

Across the sector, if bonuses this year match those of last, it will bring to £80bn the amount paid out since the crisis exploded in 2008.

Oddly, and awkwardly, it's about the same amount as the government's planned cuts to public spending between 2010-15.

But while that squeeze progresses, there was no drop in bankers' share of earnings from the peak of the boom in 2007 to mid-crisis 2011.

While the renewable energy sector struggles amid regulatory and policy uncertainty, the oil and gas industry enjoys cheerleaders at the heart of government environmental policymaking. Yet, going as far back as the campaign to abolish slavery, we have known that in order to cure the economy of an unacceptable dependency we have to remove subsidies from what was wrong, regulate against the wrong and shift investment to positive alternatives.

But at the moment, this is a world in which Joseph Heller might have written a book called Climate-22. England and Wales have just had the wettest winter since records began and the world is on course for catastrophic climate change.

But don't worry, Nigel Lawson is getting equal billing on the BBC again, as if his views are as informed and valuable as the climate scientists he derides. And, heck, what does it matter anyway? Any Milo Minderbender can see that there's money to be made from civilisation falling apart.

www.onehundredmonths.org

Climate changeFloodingNatural disasters and extreme weatherFossil fuelsEnergyGreen politicsAndrew Simms
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