Fighting Climate Change
Presentation by Penny Cole
I’m going to start with today’s headlines – global warming is happening three times faster than previously predicted and the G8 summit was actually a forum for the prevention of action on climate change.
In terms of our own government, environment minister David Milliband appeared in front the Environmental Audit Committee this week with no answer to the view that there is a 90-100% chance that targets in the climate change bill will not be achieved.
That’s what the Tyndall Centre told the committee and they said unless something changes, UK planners should be told to start preparing for “serious and potentially catastrophic impacts”.
This slide shows the reality of the Bill. It did not take into account aviation or shipping and its targets look only at CO2, not other greenhouse gases.
New Labour claims it will put us on the route to the kinds of levels that would lead to 2 degrees warming. In fact it is more like 4 degrees.
+4 degress means:
" Entire regions become agriculturally unproductive, putting over a billion people at risk from hunger. The melting of the Antarctic ice shelf becomes irreversible, causing sea levels to rise 5-6m submerging large areas of the world including London. Nearly 70% of Bangladesh is less than 6m above sea level and it expects to lose about 10% of the country each time the average global temperature increases by about 0.14°C. If Greenland melted, sea levels worldwide would increase by up to 7 metres, putting much of south Florida underwater, drowning large parts of the Netherlands, and displacing more than 40 million people around Shanghai and some 60 million more in Calcutta and Bangladesh." Running a Temperature
So what are we to do.
Well earlier this week I heard Jeremy Leggett, former Science Head of Greenpeace’s climate change campaign, but now a sort of eco-business tycoon.
He said there is a problem of “disfunctional capitalism”.
But in reality capitalism is functioning absolutely correctly, within its own parameters. Focusing solely on generating profits, at the risk of humanity’s future, capitalism is doing the only thing it can.
As we explain in our book Running a Temperature – which some of you have read and I hope all of you will at some point – capitalist globalisation has created a holistic system, which over the past 30 years has rapidly drawn every corner of the planet and every area of human activity, including formerly public ventures like transport and health, into a market with profit as its sole purpose.
And arising directly from this process we have runaway global warming.
And this is important because the view that we have “disfunctional capitalism” is held by most of the mainstream green movement, people like Jonathan Porritt, Al Gore, the Climate Change Campaign, and so on. And it implies that at some time in the future – maybe under pressure from mass public protest, or perhaps because of global government regulation – there can be functional capitalism – the kind that does not lead to poverty, war and catastrophic climate change.
But what we argue in the book is that what is needed is a holistic response to the causes of global warming, where the mass of humanity take democratic control of the situation. And the technology and communications systems exist to do it.
At present, all governments are trying to force people’s concern about climate change in on itself, back inside our own four walls.
There is massive government propaganda about tackling our own carbon footprint.
But in the UK at present it is ONLY individuals who are taking action.
The Office of National Statistics says there was a 0.8 per cent rise in emissions from the non-household sector between 2004 and 2005.
It was driven mainly by air transport - 9.9% increase, communications - 4.4%, and construction - 3.5%.
But these increases were offset by a drop in household emissions, which fell by 2.9 per cent, mainly because of a cut in household use of fuel.
The problem is that households' emissions amounted to just 21.3 per cent of all greenhouse gas emissions, but the non-household sector was 78.7%.
So WE are cutting back, while for the capitalist corporations, it is business as usual.
We are threatened with fines if we don’t recycle. But a Sunday Times investigation last week found that thousands of tons of recycled stuff is being sent to landfill.
Legally required to collect recycled rubbish, but with no additional funding, councils are failing to sort it properly.
The companies who make money from recycling, say aluminium, can’t sort out cans from the other stuff sent to them and still make a profit. So they send it all to landfill and import recycled cans from the Netherlands instead.
So the other end of the process we carefully begin is left to the market to complete – and if it isn’t profitable it is simply abandoned. And this is the core of the problem – this challenge cannot be left to the market.
Each day a new global company claims to be “going green”. Jeremy Leggett stressed how “the guys at Walmart” are really sincere about it, even if they are the worst employers and the most ruthless capitalists on the planet.
It is of course quite possible for capitalism to stir a little greenwash into the marketing mix, or introduce some profitable new “green” lines, or even trade in new and profitable commodities, such as carbon.
The majority of these companies are buying into the cheapest schemes established under the KYOTO Clean Development Mechanism.
A report last week showed that one third of the reduction schemes registered to the CDM in India are commercial ventures which do not produce any cut in greenhouse gases. In South Africa a global energy company has built a gas pipeline – very profitable - and registered it as an emissions reduction scheme. In Brazil a pig iron company registered a scheme on the basis that if it didn’t get the money it would adopt a dirtier process than it already had.
As the Guardian's headline said: "Huge profits - little carbon saved".
At a transition town meeting in Lewes we were all given a kind of psychological counselling, to help us break our addiction to oil. But this is nonsense. We are not in charge of the processes that are wasting the precious oil.
The truth is that the effectiveness of individual action alone has a limit which has already been reached and overtaken.
On this chart, you can see where the majority of energy is being used, and here, no reductions at all are taking place.
We are not in charge of wasteful, profit-driven centralised energy production. We are not in charge of producing cheap goods that expire in a couple of years and must be replaced. We are not in charge of construction methods that emit huge emissions in making cement, and then still, even with all we now know, build houses and offices that are not energy efficient.
Where we are in charge, millions of us do take action. The challenge is to get beyond our own carbon footprint, and create a democracy, political and economic, where we are in charge of what happens here, and here and here (referring to the slide - everywhere else beyond the green circle).
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