You cannot simply *ask* the rich to reduce their emissions and resource use. The only reasonable approach is to tax them to the point where they are no longer rich.
Jason Hickel, Economic Anthropologist
This week, the COP26 conference being held in Glasgow has dominated the news headlines and reporting. Given the urgency of the climate crisis we are facing, there still seems to be little real commitment to turning pledges into reality. Words are cheap, actions much harder. In a tasteless photo op during the G20 Summit that preceded COP26, world leaders were pictured tossing coins into the Trevi Fountain in Rome, sending an awful message that suggested that a miracle was all we could hope for.
It has not been difficult to see who is dictating the pace in this round of talks. Let’s start with the corporate sponsors of the event, those very same companies which are spending vast sums of advertising money to promote their greenwashing, whilst doing very little, or privately lobbying government in their own interests. As noted in an investigation, eleven of those major sponsors produced, ‘more greenhouse gas pollution than the whole of the UK’, and they were understood to have ‘poured millions of pounds into the talks […] in Glasgow.
Gaston Browne, who is the prime minister of Antigua and Barbuda and the Chair of the Alliance of Small Island States, blamed powerful private sector interests and cuttingly remarked that ‘We are here to save the planet, not protect profits.’
Furthermore, and as Adam Ramsey noted in an article in Open Democracy earlier this week:
“UK government hosts said Big Oil companies wouldn’t be welcome, but BP’s CEO is among fossil fuel lobbyists at the heart of the conference.
[…]. These companies are the greatest perpetrators of the climate crisis, and none of them have committed to rapidly phase out their oil, gas and coal extraction in line with the 1.5°C target. But BP and Chevron still get a platform and the industry still gets access to influential decision-makers behind the scenes,”
Jess Worth, a director of Culture Unstained, quoted in the same article, told Open Democracy:
“While so many vital voices from frontline and Indigenous communities around the world have been excluded from the summit, this clearly demonstrates the injustice baked into the heart of the process.’
The voices of indigenous activists who see meeting net-zero targets via carbon offsetting, through mass reforestation, biofuels and new technologies, as a mechanism for further land grabs and environmental and cultural destruction, often remain unheard. Ita Mendoza, an indigenous land defender from Southern Mexico, attending for the first time, was clear:
‘The Cop is a big business, a continuation of colonialism where people come not to listen to us, but to make money from our land and natural resources.’
These few words sum up the crux of the matter, as western leaders and the global corporations whose interests they serve as a priority, fail to grapple with the concept that the only real way to limit global heating and its destructive impacts is to keep fossil fuels and minerals in the ground. That we have to tackle, with great urgency, carbon emission reduction and the vast inequalities which persist, particularly in the Global South which has borne the brunt of western exploitation for centuries. That we must take into consideration not the financial cost, but the real and finite nature of the resources that will be needed to drive change, and how they can be distributed globally in a fair and equitable manner.
As Jennifer Morgan of Greenpeace was clear in a Guardian article this week:
“The world needs to make immediate, dramatic and consistent emissions reductions now – not push the global south, in particular, further to the brink with offset schemes. They have led to land-grabbing, biodiversity destruction and human rights abuses. To protect nature, and people’s futures, governments must work in partnership with local Indigenous peoples to manage the land justly.”
However, when Boris Johnson suggests that ‘we can build back greener without so much as a hair shirt in sight’, he is promoting a view that we can carry on with no change to the way we do things, that technology will provide all the solutions, (even though many of them aren’t even off the drawing board and time is running out), and that we can carry on with a two-hundred-year-old economic system which has been based on the exploitation of humans, land and finite resources, and which has already done considerable damage.
Even if new technologies have a role to play in creating a sustainable planet, it will still require a transformation of our priorities, a change in our patterns of consumption of goods and services, and crucially, that the global political establishment has the political will to move beyond words and towards urgent action. Government will have to start acting as government, by doing what only government can; make the rules by standing up to myopic corporate power and spend as if tomorrow and future generations really counted.
Up until now, government has ceded its powers to the global corporates, bowing to their demands through lobbying or self-interest. It has also lied about its capacities, as the holder of the public purse, to spend to serve the public purpose. In his recent budget, Rishi Sunak scarcely mentioned funding for climate change action, and there are many others who question its financial affordability, focusing instead on growing the economy in a post-covid age to raise revenue, as if government actually needed to do so to fund its programmes or pay down debt – which it doesn’t. Given the growing challenge by a growing global MMT movement, the fact that the political establishment continues to promote these frameworks says much about the politicians who use them to drive their own political and personal agendas, rather than using such knowledge to deliver an economy that works for everyone. Seeing it in that light, one might be forgiven for wondering what the purpose of government is, if it has simply become a mechanism for an unfair distribution of real wealth and resources.
If we had naively thought that the COP26 was all about saving the planet for future generations, then, so far, we have been sadly disappointed. The continuing global obsession with growth, along with Conference hosts whose commitment to addressing the climate crisis has so far been shown to be lukewarm and always skewed in favour of business, should by now be making clear who is in charge.
“#COP26 is no longer a climate conference.
This is a Global North greenwash festival.
A two-week celebration of business as usual and blah blah blah.”
Whilst the World Meteorological Organisation published its report ‘State of the Climate in 2021: Extreme Events and Major Impacts’ this week, we clearly have some still in denial and a Prime Minister existing in a complete disconnect, not just to climate threats, but also how that is bound up so closely with resource use and delivery of a green agenda. There are no limits to green growth in his rosy picture of the future, it would appear.
But as the UN Secretary, Antonio Guterres, attending the Conference made clear;
‘The report shows our planet is changing before our eyes. From the ocean depths to mountain tops, from melting glaciers to relentless extreme weather events, communities and ecosystems around the globe are being devastated. […] Scientists are clear on the facts. Now leaders need to be just as clear in their actions. We must act now, with ambition and solidarity, to safeguard our future and save humanity.’
[…]
Recent climate action announcements might give the impression that we are on track to turn things around. This is an illusion. “Our addiction to fossil fuels is pushing humanity to the brink. We face a stark choice: either we stop it, or it stops us. It’s time to say, ‘Enough … Enough of treating nature like a toilet. Enough of burning and drilling and mining our way deeper. We are digging our own graves.’
When Boris Johnson stood up at the conference podium and talked about it ‘being a minute to midnight moment’, it was, according to the reports, greeted with stony silence. The audience were surely open-mouthed at the hypocrisy falling from his lips, with a government claiming on the one hand that it was committed to reducing reliance on coal, whilst at the same time, supporting a controversial new mine opening in Cumbria, or proposing to give the go-ahead for a new oil field in Shetland. And that’s without the other failed measures such as the government insulation scheme, or the reduction in foreign aid (because apparently balancing budgets was more important than the planet or people’s lives).
While other countries are being asked to take action to prevent global temperatures from spinning out of control, it would appear that it doesn’t apply to the UK. We are the exception to the rule, and all we need to do is a bit of reforestation, promote expensive heat pumps (for which the proposed government spending will scarcely scratch the surface of the task) and encourage us to buy electric cars, and everything will be just fine and dandy. Business as usual, in a country where over 10 years, austerity has done huge damage, left the nation impoverished and public and social infrastructure in a state of decay.
We have a Prime Minister who can’t even manage to speak with the necessary gravitas on such an occasion as this, which requires us to move beyond rhetoric and silly references to James Bond, or Kermit as he did at a UN meeting in September. When Johnson said at that meeting, ‘It’s not only easy being green, it’s lucrative […]. We have the technology’, one immediately understands that being green for him is a business opportunity for his friends and their technology will deliver that ‘brave new world’. Only it won’t. Reality is much more complicated than that.
Shamefully, later in the week, we were then treated to another piece of astonishing hypocrisy, as the Prime Minister, whilst entreating the world to behave responsibly, climbed into a private plane to fly back to London. But according to his propaganda team, we don’t need to worry, because the aircraft was run partly on sustainable aviation fuel.
This ignored the uncomfortable fact revealed by research carried out by the Swedish government in 2019, that biofuels in aeroplane tanks were a ‘false solution for the climate’, and that if we are serious about saving the planet then we would have to fly a lot less than we do today. Lina Burnelius, one of the authors of the report, was clear that biofuels were not a sustainable solution as flight fuel, given the intense pressures on land use on an already strained ecosystem. She noted that:
‘If we increase the amount of bio-fuel from crops, enormous areas will have to be cultivated for this purpose. To replace half of our fossil fuels with bio-fuels, a third of the world’s croplands would need to be taken out of other production. This type of unprecedented expansion will require enormous additional forest areas to be logged, resulting in exposure and atmospheric release of vast quantities of carbon. On top of this, it will have a strong detrimental effect on our biodiversity.’
She also discounted another proposed solution for sourcing biofuel – the use of food waste. It should be clear that in a world with increasing pressures on land use as climate change affects agriculture and food production, that in the future we should be aiming to reduce fuel use considerably instead.
In the face of a political class and a corporate body that has no real solutions but continuing growth, and the maintenance of the status quo nurtured under the now ubiquitous greenwashing brand, without real commitment we are staring over the precipice as wealth inequality and lack of fair access to real resources becomes ever more marked.
In a report published this week by Oxfam, which commissioned the study by the Institute for European Environmental Policy and the Stockholm Environment Institute, the policy lead, Nafkote Dabi, said that ‘a tiny elite appear to have a free pass to pollute’, and that ‘their oversized emissions are fuelling extreme weather around the world and jeopardising the international goal of limiting global heating.’
Scientists have urged governments to ‘constrain luxury carbon consumption’ of private jets, mega-yachts and space travel. The report noted that:
“The world’s richest 1% are set to have per capita consumption emissions in 2030 that are still 30 times higher than the global per capita level compatible with the 1.5⁰C goal of the Paris Agreement, while the footprints of the poorest half of the world population are set to remain several times below that level. By 2030, the richest 1% are on course for an even greater share of total global emissions than when the Paris Agreement was signed.”
Seen from this perspective, there are questions to be asked about how global corporations and their CEOs, get the ear of government, or can be allowed to speak at the Conference as Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon and an excessively wealthy individual, did this week. Referring in his speech to his four minutes in space, he said, ‘Looking back at Earth from up there the atmosphere seems so thin, the world so finite and so fragile.’
Surely Bezos didn’t have to travel into space in a penis-shaped spacecraft that cost $5.5bn or $1.38 bn a minute to tell us that? Climate activists could have told him for free without ever stepping off terra firma. Questions need to be asked as to why indigenous people, whose livelihoods are threatened by climate change, and the neocolonial exploitation which serves to sustain a rotten economic system have no voice, but the rich can use their wealth to influence what happens next in their favour. One can only conclude that it is to save that rotten economic system to maintain the status quo, the existing power structures, and excessive wealth, while the rest remain an exploited, enslaved underclass.
When another wealthy entrepreneur, Elon Musk, says that his ‘plan is to use the money to get humanity to Mars and preserve the light of consciousness (whatever the light of consciousness means) one must ask which planet is he actually on, and wouldn’t it be preferable to put all our finite resources into saving the planet on which we actually live, and create a sustainable and equitable living space for all?
As growth is promoted as a solution, even in these days of climate crisis, people are being encouraged to save the economy rather than the planet, by endless appeals to consume in the aftermath of the pandemic. However, as the Australian economist Steven Hail noted on social media in 2015:
“The reluctance of heterodox, as well as orthodox economists, to accept that we do genuinely have limited wants, still surprises me.
They put so much effort into trying to prove that ever more consumption gives people ever more utility, that they miss the point, where well-being is concerned.
Most people, beyond a critical level, unless encouraged to compare themselves with others, are not made significantly happier by the ability to acquire ever greater quantities of goods and services.
What most people crave is security, and a sense that they are being treated fairly.
The security which would come with a job guarantee, and the fact that a job guarantee at a living wage with fair working conditions would protect those with less bargaining power from being treated unfairly, could make a permanent and very significant difference to people’s feelings of subjective well being.
We could change the lives of many thousands of people for the better, permanently.
What do our politicians do, instead?
Talk about a ‘once in a generation’ opportunity to introduce ‘tax reforms’ which are likely to drive the distribution of income to even greater levels of inequality and inequity, and which are otherwise largely irrelevant to the interests of people who just want to know they will have decent paying, and socially worthwhile job opportunities, and a guarantee of security and self respect.”
This should be the subject of a big conversation about how we can move away from satiating our endless desires for what is often useless consumption, to create a society that operates in the interests of people and the planet. There is an alternative, but without the political will to achieve it, all we are left with is leaders tossing coins into the Trevi Fountain in the hope of a miracle.
It was, therefore, once again depressing to read an article in the Morning Star this week, in which the MP Richard Burgon, proposed a budget amendment that the ‘UK’s richest 1% should pay more tax to finance a just transition away from fossil fuels’.
Quite rightly he suggested that it is vital to reform the tax system to tackle damaging over-consumption by the very wealthiest elites, but to suggest that money raised could be used to fund a transition is yet more bunkum. The idea that taxing the wealthiest will finance anything is just more handbag economics which bears no relationship to monetary reality. It is sad to have to keep noting that progressive politicians are still accepting Thatcher’s lies with no challenge.
Let’s talk about public money. Let’s make it clear that this government lacks the political will to act, (unless it’s in favour of the wealthy elites), and this has nothing to do with financial affordability where the government is a fully sovereign currency issuer, as the UK is. Let’s make it totally unambiguous that the only constraints any sovereign currency-issuing government faces when it spends, are real resources, and that is what must be managed.
Shortly before Johnson left for London in his private plane, he told a roundtable of developing nations that ‘when it comes to tackling climate change, words without action, without deeds are absolutely pointless.’ How right he is. But it is equally clear that so far, corporate power is still dictating the game, the commitments lack real backbone and the financing for change still falls short of what is needed.
As David Wengrow, co-author with David Graeber of ‘The Dawn of Everything’, so succinctly expressed it in a Guardian article this week, the challenge is to ‘re-imagine and then remake our societies and our relationship with our planet in a new form.”
The big question that should be in our minds is whether we will, and whether the current global corporate power structures will allow us to.
On Friday it was Youth Day in Glasgow. Young people demonstrated in their thousands, and spoke passionately and articulately. One demonstrator held aloft a placard which said: ‘Your failure will be our future’.
And therein lies the challenge we face. So far, the response is not enough. With still a week to go, as negotiations progress, we can only hope that leaders grasp the nettle, and that governments around the world recognise that they are the only bodies that have the legislative and spending powers to oversee change. That we live on one world, and those with the most, must act in concert with those with the least, to ensure their voices are heeded and respected as equal partners, rather than being viewed as opportunities to exploit to deliver a western green agenda. And finally, that individual and corporate responsibility will only ever be as good as the willingness of governments to make it happen.
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