WorleyParsons suppressed CSG report, says BZE
Non-profit climate research group Beyond Zero Emissions(BZE) has slammed global engineering company WorleyParsons, saying the firm has suppressed a damning report into the emissions produced by coal seam gas (CSG) mining.
BZE executive director Matthew Wright told ABC radio’s Greg Borschmann on November 14 that the group had commissioned WorleyParsons to produce the report, which was due for release in September. But Wright said WorleyParsons “upper management or the board has actually stopped us from receiving the report and we believe that’s on the basis that the report has some pretty explosive detail”.
Wright said: “We were told ‘great news, it’s finished. It’s just going to be sent up to the legal team in Queensland’. [Then] we started to hear less and less of the Worley team, and we were basically told it had become too difficult and general comments around ‘its too politically sensitive and you know, we work in this field and we can’t be releasing this kind of report for you’.”
Earlier this year, WorleyParsons produced a report for the CSG industry lobby group APPEA, the Australian Petroleum Production and Exploration Association. APPEA used the report to bolster its claim that CSG is a ‘clean’ energy source.
In June, BZE contracted WorleyParsons to produce a new report, which studied evidence for significant greenhouse gas emissions (due to gas leakage) ignored in the industry-funded report.
Wright had little doubt as to why the multinational firm had not delivered on its promise. “One would assume it’s related to WorleyParsons having a huge vested interest in the [CSG] industry’s development,” he said.
WorleyParsons has disputed the claims, saying in a November 14 statement that BZE had agreed to suppress its own report – something Wright denied. The company refused to be interviewed by Borschmann or respond to his questions.
By November 17, a new statement emerged – this time minus the claim that BZE agreed to put its report under wraps. WorleyParsons said the report was undergoing peer review and will be published in a scientific journal “within weeks”.
It denied the delayed report will any different. But BZE says it will continue to pursue WorleyParsons until it releases the original report in full.
In a November 17 opinion piece on ABC’s The Drum, Wright drew a parallel between government support for today’s CSG industry and past government’s support for the asbestos industry.
He said: “We’ve seen the consequences of vested interests suppressing information before. The dangers of asbestos are now well known, but for a long time the asbestos industry’s conflict of interest prevented them from releasing accurate information that would threaten their profits.
“The government’s slow response to the issue allowed dire health problems for generations. The Australian public should not be burdened with another.”
Wright called for the government to launch its own scientific investigation into the CSG industry’s impacts on farming, water and climate change. He also called for a moratorium on all new CSG projects and said the government should urgently test all existing sites.
No better time to be a climate activist
Debate about the Labor-Greens carbon price has dominated Australian politics for the past year. So it is little surprise that the passing of the carbon price laws through parliament on November 8 received widespread media attention.
But the media’s coverage overshadowed two shocking new reports on the climate emergency released in the past week.
The first was from the US Department of Energy, which said on November 4 that greenhouse gas emissions jumped by a record amount in 2010. The 6% rise — an extra 512 million tons of carbon — put global emissions higher than the worst-case scenario mapped out by the UN’s International Panel on Climate Change in 2007.
The UN’s worst-case scenario would mean the planet would be at least 4°C warmer (on average) by 2100. The UN said as little as 2°C of warming is enough to push the climate past a point of no return. Many scientists say a 1.5°C rise is still too high.
The second shock came from the International Energy Agency (IEA), which said on November 9 the world had just five years left to change course on fossil fuels.
IEA chief economist Faith Birol told the British Guardian: “The door is closing. I am very worried — if we don’t change direction now on how we use energy, we will end up beyond what scientists tell us is the minimum [for safety]. The door will be closed forever.”
Even worse, it’s likely the IEA’s call for action is still too conservative. The agency said governments should aim to keep carbon in the atmosphere to 450 parts per million to stay under 2°C. But the world’s top climate scientists, including NASA’s James Hansen, say we need to get below 350ppm (and it’s more than 390 now).
At least two conclusions can be drawn from these stark warnings. First, there has never been a better time to be a climate activist. Strong grassroots movements for science-based climate action are our best hope.
Second, the Coalition’s hysterical climate denial is suicidal, but the Labor government deserves little praise for its carbon price laws. Labor is still right behind the fossil fuel lobby. It’s still part of the problem.
Several Labor ministers told the November 10 Australian that its Clean Energy Future package is designed to boost the use of gas-fired power, especially coal seam gas.
Prime Minister Julia Gillard said of the carbon price scheme: “There will be a diverse range of energy sources. We believe coal seam gas will be part of the energy mix of the future.”
Now the carbon price has passed, there is a new opportunity for the climate movement — which divided over the scheme — to unite around a renewed push for genuine climate action.
This means a rollout of renewable energy (especially large scale solar power) and putting a stop to industry plans for new coal and coal seam gas projects.
We’ll also need a lot more public investment in clean energy, transport, agriculture and manufacturing to bring Australia’s emissions down to a safe level quickly. And the science says we cannot do it slowly.
Spoof website mocks new mining company ad campaign
Climate action group Rising Tide Newcastle has released a website that spoofs the NSW Minerals Council’s new advertising campaign, which claims the state’s mining companies are “world class”.
Rising Tide’s parody uses a similar layout and design to the NSW Minerals Council website, but points to the industry’s poor track record in the areas of environment, community, economy, health and innovation.
For example, the Minerals Council website says: “We aim to minimise our impact on the land at each step of mining, from exploration, which gives us important scientific information on the geology of an area, to mining activities and regeneration.”
The parody website responds: “The mining industry has many negative impacts on the environment. It pollutes water systems and destroys forests and bushland, impacting on endangered and threatened species.
“Most significantly, the greenhouse emissions from mining and burning coal is the single biggest factor contributing to climate change, which is the most pressing threat to biodiversity and human communities.”
Rising Tide spokesperson and website creator Ned Haughton said he created the spoof website because “communities are fed up with the mining industry’s spin campaigns”.
He said: “Anxious to secure their place in a carbon-constrained world, the mining industry is increasingly resorting to spin tactics and propaganda campaigns to try and resurrect their flailing image. The community knows that spending money on public relations is not going to fix the poor environmental and community track record of the industry.
“Time and again, the NSW mining industry has damaged communities, polluted rivers, destroyed biodiversity and prime agricultural land and created health issues in surrounding communities. If this is “world class”, what does that say about the industry globally?
“The impacts of the industry are real, unlike the spin of the Minerals Council.”
[Visit the NSW Minerals Council website here and the parody website here.]
Annie Leonard: Occupy movement is taking back our spaces
When Annie Leonard put her groundbreaking cartoon The Story of Stuff online in late 2007, she would have been really happy if 50,000 people had watched it.
“To my utter amazement we got 50,000 viewers on the first day,” she told Green Left Weekly during a recent visit to Australia. Almost four years later, more than 15 million people, in every country in the world, have watched The Story of Stuff.
The Story of Stuff is a 20-minute cartoon with a serious message. Leonard said: “It takes viewers on a journey of where all our stuff comes from and where it goes. It’s a really quick whiz-through the lifecycle of all our stuff.”
The story begins with extraction, how the raw materials needed to make our products are taken from the natural environment. From there, Leonard looks at how stuff is manufactured, how it is distributed, how it is consumed (“the very short time we actually own and appreciate our stuff”) and finally how it is disposed of.
It’s a story of the modern, globalised capitalist economy, how little sense it makes and how little it benefits people and the planet.
Leonard said she made the cartoon “after spending more than a decade travelling all around the world, visiting the factories where our stuff is made and the dumps where our stuff is dumped — and I mean all over Africa and Asia and Latin America, and the United States and Europe.
“So by doing that, I got to see firsthand the often hidden environmental, social, economic and even emotional costs, the mental health costs, of our relationship with stuff, of how we make and use and throw away stuff.
“I saw enormous problems, and I saw an enormous amount of opportunities to do things better. And when I came back to the United States I was frustrated at how low the volume was on the conversation about this.
“The mainstream discourse around stuff is just ‘get more’ and you will be happier and better loved and more successful, which is first of all false and secondly it also ignores a huge part of the reality.
“So I was experimenting in different ways to talk about this in a way that is engaging an accessible and fun.”
Leonard’s experiment was wildly successful. Building on the success, the Story of Stuff project has since produced a further five cartoons that “look at key problems in our current materials economy”.
These include The Story of Electronics, The Story of Bottled Water and The Story of Cosmetics. A new cartoon, The Story of Broke: Why There is Still Plenty of Money to Build a Better Future, will be released on November 8.
The Story of Stuff Project films don’t just examine the problems, but also point to solutions. All the cartoons share a common theme: a first step on the road to a sustainable, healthy economy is people taking collective action for progressive change.
Given this, I asked Leonard what she thought of the global Occupy movement and the extent to which it had the potential to raise some of the big questions about our society she raises in her films.
“It’s not just its potential: it’s already raising them,” she said. “The Occupy movement is an inspiration both in process and in content. It is just absolutely beautiful. I’m enormously happy about it.
“The Occupy movement is taking back our spaces, [it is] taking back our discourses, it is striving to take back our government and in many ways it is taking back ourselves.”
Leonard said that one of the things she has noticed based on responses to The Story of Stuff that, as a society, “we are forgetting how to make change”.
“We are bombarded with this depressing list of uncoordinated, individual actions where people say: ‘I can ride a bike’, ‘I can carry my bags to the store’, ‘I can recycle’, ‘I can change my lightbulbs’, ‘I can buy organic’, ‘I can buy PCB free’.
“All of these things are definitely good things to do. But those are not how we collectively make change. Those are how you act as a responsible, functioning adult in society …
“But I feel like we have been bombarded with these messages … that we have lost our sense of identity as collective citizens, who can work together to make change.
“And so I’m enormously thrilled to see people stepping out of their imposed identity as consumers. Being consumers is the main identity we have in the world these days, so much that media often use the words “consumer” and “human being” interchangeably.
“People are stepping out of that imposed identity … and reclaiming that sense of agency. So I’m just absolutely delighted to see the Occupy movement spread all over the world.”
Why #occupy is an environmental issue
The occupy movement is spreading, and in more ways than one. It’s spreading across the globe — by October 11 occupytogether.org could boast of 1273 occupy events planned worldwide. But the movement, united under its slogan “We are the 99%”, is also reaching out to, and involving, other established social movements.
Environmentalists and climate campaigners have linked up with Occupy Wall Street protests in New York. Hundreds of climate activists joined a 5000-strong march there on October 5. Their message was well received by other protesters.
Justin Haaheim, an organiser with 350.org, told environmental blogger Russell McLendon that the march “was one of the most inspiring things I’ve seen in a long time in terms of the environmental movement.
“I was surprised by how much there was a really common message among all the protesters. It would be really easy for something like that to have a million different messages, but it was encouraging to see that the environmental message was very widespread and very meshed in with the broader Occupy Wall Street movement.”
The coming together of the two movements is a good sign because there is no way out of our ecological crises as long as the world’s richest 1% keep control over the economy and our political systems.
Climate writer and activist Bill McKibben said in an October 10 speech to protesters in New York the global 1% is the biggest environmental problem.
He said: “The reason that it’s so great that we’re occupying Wall Street is because Wall Street has been occupying the atmosphere. That’s why we can never do anything about global warming. Exxon gets in the way. Goldman Sachs gets in the way. The whole fossil fuel industry gets in the way.
“The sky does not belong to Exxon. They cannot keep using it as a sewer into which to dump their carbon. If they do, we’ve got no future and nobody else on this planet has a future.”
McKibben spoke of the climate justice movement in the Third World, which is leading the fight against dangerous climate change. “They need us to act with them and for them,” he said, “because the problem is 20 blocks south of here. That’s where the Empire lives and we’ve got to figure out how to tame it and make it work for this planet or not work at all.”
In Australia, occupy protests will take place in several Australian cities from October 15. The politics and demands of the Australian events cannot be set out in advance. Part of the occupy movement’s success is to first bring people together and then work out the movement’s shared goals in an inclusive and democratic way.
But, as the Occupy New York declaration says, we live in “a time when corporations, which place profit over people, self-interest over justice, and oppression over equality, run our governments”.
The recognition that 99% of us share a common enemy, and that we must organise together to challenge injustice, is a central dynamic of these protests. Like in the US, there’s every reason to think that Australian environmentalists can find a place in the occupy movement.
Ecosocialism cuts to roots of ecological crisis: interview with Derek Wall
British-based economist, activist and writer Derek Wall is a member of the Green Party of England and Wales and is the author of several books on ecology and politics.
Wall will speak via video link at the Climate Change Social Change activist conference in Melbourne over September 30 to October 3. He maintains the ecosocialist blog Another Green World.
He spoke to Green Left Weekly’s Simon Butler about the politics of ecosocialism.
* * *
What are the most valuable insights ecosocialists can bring to discussions about the source of our ecological problems?
Ecosocialism, without being reductionist, cuts to the roots of the ecological crisis. The destruction of the environment is not an accident. It is not simply a problem of false ideas and it is not a product of inappropriate policies that can easily be dealt with by electing a new set of politicians.
The assault on the basic life support system of our planet, the basic biological cycles, climate being just one, is caused by our economic and social system. We live in a capitalist society and capitalism tends towards the destruction of the conditions necessary to sustain life.
To deal with ecological problems we have to focus on capitalist assaults on the rest of nature. I don’t condemn individual lifestyle change but changing ones consumption is not key to creating social change.
The present system demands that we work harder, produce more, consume more and throw more away at ever increasing rates.
Ecosocialism is pragmatic, not utopian. It is strategic. One example will suffice, the Peruvian Amazon. The Amazon is key as a carbon sink, absorbing CO2. It is fantastic for biodiversity.
Why is it under assault? Primarily because corporations aided by corrupt elites in Peru want to slice it up for gas, oil and biofuels.
Environmentalists don’t like to use the “c” word for risk of offence, but it’s about “capitalism”.
Yes, we can try not to buy timber from the Amazon. Yes, we can support NGOs. But the political and economic realities of Peru, to give one example, must be recognised.
The indigenous organise to fight for the Amazon. They formed a federation of over 40 ethnic groups — Aidesep — to gain unity. They ally with workers in the cities and social movements across Peru.
They have used non-violent direct action to stop the forests being taken and for their pains they were massacred at Bagua [in 2009]. They have intervened politically in Peru and helped elected [Ollanta] Humala, another left leader in the mould of [Bolivia’s Evo] Morales and [Venezuela’s Hugo] Chavez.
They have achieved new forest laws to protect their land. If they are betrayed, they will take militant but non-violent action.
Ecosocialists give solidarity. Aidesep have worked closely with the legendary ecosocialist and indigenous leader Hugo Blanco.
Ecosocialism, with its focus on fighting capitalist destruction and articulating with indigenous [people] and workers, is a pragmatic, effective response to the crisis on our planet.
Capitalism is an articulated system. A key node is of course property rights, but capitalism links economics, culture and politics — it’s a whole system and it’s a process that exploits and degrades both humanity and the rest of nature.
To fight the enemy one must know the enemies name: ecosocialism names.
How does ecosocialism differ from most 20th century interpretations of socialism?
Well I am tempted to say unlike 20th century interpretations of socialism, ecosocialism places Marx at the centre of its analysis.
Marx and Engels were contradictory thinkers — if you understand Marxism as a slogan or something empirically flat you ignore the nuances of the system.
So yes Marx and Engels praised globalisation, argued that a raising of the productive forces created working class agency and the potential to create a society that met human needs.
However, it is equally true that they were profoundly aware of environmental problems and the way that capitalism attacks through the environment.
This flows from Engels’ early concern with river pollution and his masterful analysis in The Condition of the English Working Class as to how industrial pollution harmed workers, right through to Marx’s writings at the end of his life where he plunged into the study of indigenous societies.
From the Paris Manuscripts to Das Kapital, environmental concern is prominent in Marx’s work.
It is often repeated but needs repeating again, all socialists if they are sincere should perhaps learn off by heart Marx’s brilliant statement of ecosocialism from Volume 3 of Das Kapital.
“Even an entire society, a nation, or all simultaneously existing societies taken together, are not the owners of the Earth. They are simply its possessors, its beneficiaries, and have to bequeath it in an improved state to succeeding generations as boni patres familias [good heads of the household].”
I don’t think [all] Marxist thinkers and leaders [of the twentieth century] read this far! Marxism was transformed into a form of positivism, crude productivism dominated and Stalinism took its toll. Twentieth century socialism in its reformist, social democratic flavours was also productivist.
Of course there were exceptions. Lenin had some green tinges but, alas, after he died socialism was deformed in so many ways. While I am not a Leninist, I would acknowledge there is a big difference between his ideas and many later interpretations of Leninism.
In the early years after the Russian Revolution, conservation was very important. Rosa Luxemburg cared for animals and birds.
Ecosocialism is focused on democratic property rights — the commons. Socialism is primarily about property relations — these are articulated together with productive forces, of course, but Marx was primarily interested in a communist society, that is, a society based on democratic ownership of the means of production by the population.
This is key and this, as Marx reminds us in the quote from Das Kapital, must be achieved in ways that sustain future prosperity. That is, ecology is vital.
In your recent book The Rise of the Green Left you track the development of ecosocialist ideas but also the growth of social movements that are influenced by, and are helping to further develop, ecosocialism. Where are these movements the strongest?
Well Australia deserves an honorable mention. You people at Green Left Weekly have been real pioneers and I learnt about ecosocialist ideas first from reading Alan Roberts’ The Self-Managing Environment.
An Australian, the late great Nick Origlass, who was a revolutionary and in his last years a Green Party member, fought all his life using elections, strike action and direct action and is a real hero to me.
In Britain, although more formally anarchist than ecosocialist, the direct action environmental movement since the anti-roads protest of the 1990s and more recent climate camps have used militant direct action to challenge the destruction of the planet.
They have linked with workers like the occupying wind turbine workers at Vestas on the Isle of Wight and they have seen capitalism as the root of environmental destruction.
However, the real action is in Latin America — from the Mapuche revolt in Chile to the struggles of indigenous peoples in countries like Ecuador, the social movements for ecology and social justice are racing ahead.
In turn, leaders like Morales and Chavez have been arguing for ecosocialist ideas. It was nice to see, for example, the recent car-free day in Bolivia.
The relationship between states and social movements is vital. State lefts have not always fully delivered but without left victories space for social movements would be reduced.
At their best, the socialist states aspire to ecosocialism. Witness how the ALBA [Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas] countries Ecuador, Venezuela, Cuba and Bolivia lead the world in militancy at international climate conferences.
However, there are stark contradictions. Venezuela, Ecuador and Bolivia are “extractivist” economies based on oil and gas.
The social movements need to keep pushing the states. However, make no mistake, the Western media, who want a return of the old comprador elite states that will crush the social movements, use ecological failures to attack these countries.
As I have noted the most militant and effective of the social movements in the world are Aidesep in the Peruvian Amazon. We can all learn from them — they are seriously good and strategic.
The social protests from Chile to here in Britain show that people are growing tired of neo-liberalism and are prepared to challenge the system.
Some environmentalists and writers have pointed to the dangers of endless economic growth and have offered various proposals for a zero-growth or steady state economy. Is zero growth possible in a capitalist economy?
The short answer is no. Firms compete to make profit. Those who make the most profit can reinvest in capital and with more efficient machinery they out compete other firms.
Firms have to make profit to survive. It’s not a case of wicked capitalists but instead a system with a built in growth imperative.
The problem is, from declining oil to diminishing fish stocks, an environmental wipeout is occurring.
We could rollout good public transport, eat lower on the food chain, make goods that last longer — there are all sorts to ways of gaining prosperity without growth.
You can make goods repairable or modular for easy upgrade, but in an irrational system we throw away and buy more and the system works. But the better the system works the worse it is for us and the rest of nature.
But capitalism only works if we work harder, consume more and throw more away. Capitalism without growth is capitalism in crisis, as we can see at present.
You have written much about how the concept of “the commons” provides the basis for an alternative, ecological economy that is democratic, resource-efficient, decentralised and sustainable. What do you mean by “the commons” and how could it be applied across whole economies?
The commons is collectively-owned property, as opposed to state or privately-owned. To me it is the essence of ecosocialism, involving the democratic ownership of the means of production.
Communities, including indigenous and peasant farmers, have collectively regulated resources including land, forests and fisheries for thousands of years.
Access is free, but those with access must conserve the resource. Commons is key to Marx’s ideas, as we can see from the quote from Das Kapital above. In 2009, [US political economist] Elinor Ostrom won a Nobel Prize for economics, incidentally the first woman to do so. Her research shows that, with care, commons can create sustainable and prosperous economies.
There are numerous examples of norms within commons that tend to encourage sustainable use.
Chris Hannibal-Paci’s examination of conservation of sturgeon by the Cree and Ojibwe at Lake Winnipeg, Canada, is a good example of a successful commons.
The lake fisheries were a commons used by indigenous people until commons rights were eroded during the colonial era. In recent years, overfishing has been a problem. Thus, as private property rights and the commodification of fisheries have increased, sturgeon catches have fallen.
Before colonial times, fish catches were fairly and carefully regulated. There are thousands more examples.
Commons is simply about collective and ecological regulation. Private ownership of resources encourages short-term waste and destruction. Commons is an appropriate alternative.
The commons is always under threat of enclosure. To me, ecosocialism is about defending, extending and deepening commons.
Cyberspace is to a large extent commons. The wiki principle is commons. Collective, creative solutions are possible.
While commons work at a community level, with the web we can nest commons and use wiki principles to democratically plan regional, national and international economies.
The notion of workers’ plans for green production is also an important manifestation of the commons principle. Markets and states are not going to disappear. but 21st century socialism and especially ecosocialism is about democratic, creative, common pool property rights, not top down Stalinist perversions of a democratic vision.
Land, cyberspace, factories — you name it, it can, with care, be made commons. Ostrom is fascinating: coming from a background in neo-liberal Hayekian economics she was convinced by research into existing commons that sustainable collective property rights can work well.
She has been a great friend of the indigenous and the green movement. While there are weaknesses in her work — for example, she lacks a class analysis — she is a tremendous inspiration.
This is a nice quote of hers: “Our problem is how to craft rules at multiple levels that enable humans to adapt, learn, and change over time so that we are sustaining the very valuable natural resources that we inherited so that we may be able to pass them on.
“I am deeply indebted to the indigenous peoples in the US who had an image of seven generations being the appropriate time to think about the future.
“I think we should all reinstate in our mind the seven-generation rule. When we make really major decisions, we should ask not only what will it do for me today, but what will it do for my children, my children’s children, and their children’s children into the future.”
Dick Smith’s population book obscures causes of ecological crisis
Dick Smith launching a $1 million prize for anyone who develops an idea to limit Australia's population growth.
Allen & Unwin, Sydney
2011, 228 pages
Those who say today’s big social and ecological problems stem from there being too many people on the planet face a special difficulty.
As the Australian ecologist Alan Roberts once said, populationist authors need “to persuade their readers that the main thing wrong with the world was the existence of those readers themselves”.
But the “too many people” argument keeps cropping up partly because it gives a neat, simple solution to our environmental problems.
It has often been used to shift the blame for ecological destruction to the poorest parts of the world where the human population is growing the fastest.
Once you accept that “too many people” cause our environmental problems, the next question is which people are surplus to requirements?
Which people pose the most threat to the planet? Invariably, the answer given is “somebody else”.
“When an ecologist, a population theorist or an economist voiced [their] alarm at the plague of ‘too many people’,” said Roberts, they were “not really complaining that there existed too many ecologists, too many population theorists or too many economists: the surplus obviously consisted of less essential categories of the population.”
Millionaire businessperson Dick Smith’s new book on population, Dick Smith’s Population Crisis, never escapes this framework.
It claims to be a book about making the world a more sustainable and healthy place. But it’s really an extended argument for slashing immigration to Australia to protect living standards and the environment.
Smith is genuinely worried about climate change and the broader ecological crisis, and wants to find solutions.
He says population growth is at the root of the most serious environmental problems. For Smith, more people will equal less food, more pollution and more pressure on frail ecosystems.
His explanation for the cause of the climate crisis is typical: “If the answer to accelerating climate change is a reduction in carbon emissions, then it is absolutely ridiculous not to consider who is causing most of those emissions in the first place.
“And that, of course, is humans — yes, all of us.”
Nowhere does Smith try to prove this “people equals pollution” argument. He simply says it’s true.
But the argument does not bear up to scrutiny.
In 2009, Dr David Satterwaite from the International Institute for Environment and Development crunched the numbers on population growth and carbon emissions.
He found that between 1980 and 2005, sub-Saharan Africa had 18.5% of the world’s population growth but contributed just 2.4% of the growth in carbon dioxide emissions.
Meanwhile, the United States had 3.4% of the world’s population growth but accounted for 12.6% of growth in carbon dioxide emissions. China’s had 15.3% of the world’s population growth, but 44.5% of carbon emissions growth.
Clearly, a focus on human numbers does not explain very much at all.
Smith also repeats a falsehood often made by other populationist writers: that the world’s population is growing at an exponential (ever-increasing) rate.
The mistake is hard to fathom.
The world population growth rate is slowing down, not growing exponentially. The United Nations says global population will likely peak mid-century at somewhere between 9 and 10 billion people and fall thereafter.
Smith’s arguments illustrate what the US ecologist Alan Schnaiberg called “thinking in nonsocial ways about social systems of production and consumption”.
That is, if we are to find solutions to the climate emergency, the food crisis and other environmental ills, we have to explore and act upon the causes. These lie in the unequal relationships that exist between different groups in society.
We have to look at the huge differences in power between the super-rich and poor, the First World and the global South and, crucially for understanding population growth, the relationships between men and women.
Of course, endless population growth is not sustainable or desirable on a finite planet.
But the answer to this also lies in fundamental social change, as the US population writer Betsy Hartmann has pointed out.
“The best population policy is to concentrate on improving human welfare in all its many facets,” said Hartmann. “Take care of the population and population growth will go down.
“In fact, the greatest irony is that in most cases population growth comes down faster the less you focus on it as a policy priority, and the more you focus on women’s rights and basic human needs.”
Smith does not neglect this argument entirely in his book.
He says the quickest way to address population growth is to address poverty, admits “the rich westernised countries created the [ecological] problem” and argues “the god of capitalist economic growth is a false god” that puts ecosystems in peril.
So how should we tackle capitalist economic growth?
Smith says: “It’s estimated that fewer than 1000 corporations are responsible for about 80% of economic activity … they will object to change and do their best to prevent it, but ultimately they will come to accept that a sustainable economy is in their own best interests too.”
Again, we are confronted with a double standard. Chinese bricklayers, Filipino nurses and Fijian shopkeepers searching for a better life must be turned away from Australia’s borders because they will supposedly cause too much environmental damage.
But the world’s biggest corporate polluters that make billions by driving greenhouse gases up, bulldozing forests and worsening social inequality — they “will come to accept” that they should voluntarily relinquish their power and privilege for the greater good.
Smith’s brand of “border-control ecology” may be well intentioned, but that doesn’t make it any less dangerous or naive.
It suggests the main threat to natural ecosystems and social welfare lies in the relatively powerless people outside Australia’s borders who may migrate here sometime in the future.
This obscures the real problem, which remains the tiny “home-grown” minority that hold political and economic power and are resisting sustainable change.
Like most populationist explanations of the environmental crisis, Smith’s book urges us to worry the most about the world’s least powerful people — the so-called over-breeding poor.
Because of this, Smith’s “too many people” argument is most likely to weaken environmental movements and presents a barrier to finding real solutions.
[Simon Butler is the co-author (with Ian Angus) of the new book Too Many People? Population, Immigration and the Environmental Crisis. The book will be launched at the Climate Change Social Change conference
Green reasons to oppose Australia’s carbon price
Critics of the Gillard government’s proposed carbon price get daily coverage in Australia’s mainstream media. But some types of critic — those who want Australia to stay a polluter’s paradise — are heard the loudest.
Other views, which argue the carbon price plan is a dangerous diversion from real climate action, are mostly frozen out.
Below are four green reasons to oppose the carbon price.
1. Emissions and fossil fuel use go up
For a policy that is supposed to drive Australia’s carbon emissions down, the carbon price does a very bad job.
Treasury modelling for the carbon price says Australia’s domestic emissions will rise by about 10% in the next 15 to 20 years.
It says by 2020, coalmining will rise by 45%, gas mining by 100% and iron ore mining by 104%.
By 2050, it says coal production will be 109% higher than in 2010. Gas production will be 155% higher and iron ore production will be a whopping 408% above today’s level.
Output in the Australia’s other main emissions-intensive industries — aluminium, alumina, cement, chemicals, oil refining, paper and steel — go up under the carbon price.
Road passenger transport will go up. Road freight transport will go up. Forestry will go up. Air travel … you get the drift.
Meanwhile, the world’s top climate scientists are emphatic that we cannot afford to delay driving emissions down.
German climate scientist Hans Schellenhuber told ABC’s Lateline the world is on track for four degrees of warming by the end of the century.
“And, by the way,” Schellenhuber said, “Australia is surrounded by oceans – four degrees sustained for a while would mean at least seven or 10 metre sea level rise; probably it would melt down all the ice on this planet. That accounts to 70 metres, seven oh, metres in the long term.”
We need a plan to phase out polluting industries and replace them with clean ones. But the government’s plan will entrench the fossil fuel economy for decades to come.
2. It pays out to polluters
The whole point of the carbon price scheme is to create a price signal that makes pollution more expensive and clean technology cheaper. But the billions of dollars it gives out to big polluters sends the signal the other way.
The polluters’ compensation package rewards their bad behaviour. It turns the polluters pay principle on its head: now polluters get paid.
The excuse for paying polluters is to protect jobs. It would be much better to spend these billions creating new green jobs for workers and communities that now depend on polluting industries to make a living.
Some have defended the carbon price on psychological grounds, saying it sends a strong message to business that they will eventually have to change their ways.
But surely the message business has learned is that lying, scaremongering and manipulating the political process pays off — big time.
The big polluters have learned that if they make false claims about company shutdowns and job losses, the government will take money that could be spent on renewables and hand it to them instead. It’s a bad precedent.
We need a plan that ends government subsidies to polluters. But the government’s plan gives them more.
3. Markets are bad at structural change
Modelling for the carbon price says not to expect Australia’s emissions to fall soon, but it does predict the carbon price will help cut emissions in other countries.
Australian companies will pay these other countries some money and get carbon offset permits in return. The carbon price plan allows Australian polluters to cash in these credits and claim to have therefore cut Australia’s emissions.
Carbon offsets are the way the government says Australia will reach its 5% emissions cut target. They are, to put it politely, a gigantic scam.
When you buy a carbon offset, what exactly are you buying? No one can tell you for sure.
Carbon market researcher Larry Lohmann said in a 2008 article, carbon offsets assume “knowledge we don’t have”.
He said: “All these ‘carbon offsets’ are supposed to be climatically equivalent to cutting your coal, oil or gas use.
“But you can’t prove that. You can add up how much greenhouse gas your offset ‘saves’ only if you assume that without it, only a single world would be possible. This assumption has no scientific basis.
“Researcher Dan Welch sums up the difficulty: ‘Offsets are an imaginary commodity created by deducting what you hope happens from what you guess would have happened.’”
When emissions trading begins in 2015, Australian companies will also trade carbon credits between each other.
But even if Australia’s emissions trading scheme worked as it is supposed too — and it has failed everywhere else it has been tried — it would still set us back.
Carbon Trade Watch’s Kevin Smith said in a 2006 BBC News article that all emissions trading schemes favour cheap, short-term measures and penalise rapid changes to cut emissions.
“[Emissions trading] schemes allow us to sidestep the most fundamentally effective response to climate change that we can take, which is to leave fossil fuels in the ground,” he said. “This is by no means an easy proposition for our heavily fossil fuel dependent society; however, we all know it is precisely what is needed.
“What incentive is there to start making these costly, long-term changes when you can simply purchase cheaper, short-term carbon credits?”
Lohmann said it’s not reasonable to rely on carbon pricing to solve the climate dilemma: “Prices can do many things, but one thing they have never done is solve problems that require structural change in so many fundamental areas of industrial life.”
We need a plan that puts people and planet first. But the government’s plan is to extend the market to more aspects of nature and hope for the best.
4. There is a better option
We could redesign our economy along sustainable lines very quickly, if there was the political will. The good news is Australian governments have done this kind of thing before.
Australia’s energy system was built by public investment, as were its transport system, its agricultural system and even its banking system.
A serious response to the climate change emergency would have the government do it again — this time creating many thousands of secure, well-paid green jobs in the process.
Rather than new fossil fuel power stations, the government could invest in large-scale wind and solar thermal plants for all our energy. Rather than new roads, it could build high-speed rail connections and expand suburban mass transit.
Rather than giving handouts to coal companies, it could plow that money into making the Hunter and LaTrobe valleys renewable energy manufacturing hubs.
Rather than yet another big business tax cut, it could increase the rate a few notches and use the money raised to help farmers redesign Australia’s food system so it can withstand a warmer climate.
Public investment in a green economy is the smart economic move too. Once a 100% renewable energy system is in place, there are no more fuel costs. That would save Australia billions of dollars every year, forever. Within decades the investment will be repaid — a nice bonus to go along with a safe climate and an inhabitable planet.
The reason there is no widespread discussion of the public investment option is because vested interests and pro-market true believers dominate the mainstream debate on climate solutions.
Most economists and governments insist that setting up a market — a market that trades in imaginary commodities — is the most efficient and cost effective way to cut emissions. Some big green groups have come to accept this framework and keep their policy advice within its bounds.
But this had not produced the kind of climate policy ordinary people will rally around — as the carbon price polling shows.
The giant holes in the carbon price scheme are helping Tony Abbott’s campaign to become the next prime minister. And Abbott openly promises to take no serious action on climate change whatsoever.
A bad policy like the carbon price makes it harder to convince the Australian people that genuine action on climate change will make their lives better.
We need a plan that is hopeful and inspiring, a plan that can work. But the government’s plan repeats the mistakes of the past and sticks with business as usual.
Offsets: the hot air in Gillard’s climate plan
You could be forgiven for thinking that when the Labor government says its new carbon price plan will cut Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions by 5%, it means Australia’s emissions will fall by 5%. But you would be wrong.
Treasury modelling for the carbon price says Australia’s domestic emissions will go up by about 12% on 2000 levels by 2020.
Most of the emissions cuts predicted under the scheme won’t take place in Australia at all. Instead, big polluters will be able to buy carbon offsets for projects in other, mostly poor, countries. These carbon offsets will be credited as “Australian” emissions cuts.
Carbon offsets rely on the idea that individuals or companies can pay someone else to cut emissions on their behalf.
Australia’s carbon price plan allows companies to pay money to a carbon offset project.
The money is supposed to pay to preserve a patch of forest, or sometimes contribute to an energy-saving scheme. In return, the company will get a permit to pollute.
But rather than encouraging big polluters to cut carbon pollution in Australia, offsets push poor countries — that add very little to climate change — to make the cuts instead.
Friends of the Earth UK said in a 2009 report on carbon offsets: “Offsets are a swap of an emissions cut in developed countries for a cut in developing countries. But action in both is needed.
“Failure to cut in developed countries also results in delays in essential infrastructure changes necessary for deeper cuts in the future. Offsetting results in fewer emissions cuts. No amount of reform can alter this.”
Another problem with carbon offsets is whether they represent emissions cuts. The US Government Accountability Office said in 2009 that, “it is not possible to ensure that every credit represents a real, measurable, and long-term reduction in emissions”.
As British writer Johann Hari said in 2010, failed carbon offsets make things much worse.
He said: “When you claim an offset and it doesn’t work, the climate is screwed twice over — first because the same amount of forest has been cut down after all, and second because a huge amount of additional warming gases has been pumped into the atmosphere on the assumption that the gases will be locked away by the now-dead trees. So the offset hasn’t prevented emissions — it’s doubled them.”
US climate scientist James Hansen is another sharp critic of carbon offset plans. He wrote in his 2010 book Storms of my Grandchildren: “The public must be firm and unwavering in demanding ‘no offsets’, because this sort of monkey business is exactly the type of thing that politicians love and will try to keep.
“Offsets are like the indulgences that were sold by the church in the Middle Ages. People of means loved indulgences, because they could practice any hanky-panky or worse, then simply purchase an indulgence to avoid punishment for their sins.
“Bishops loved them too, because they brought in lots of moola.
“Anybody who argues for offsets today is either a sinner who wants to pretend he or she has done adequate penance or a bishop collecting moola.”
Picking winners better than carbon price
The most important thing about the Gillard government’s carbon price plan is to not to take it too seriously.
Action on climate change is one of the most important issues of all. But the package is not a serious response, grounded in the climate science.
The biggest problem: it aims to take ten years to cut Australia’s emissions by just 5% (based on 2000 levels).
But this is not enough. It’s nowhere near enough. It’s so far from enough that even if it succeeds, the world will still be pushed into an unstable, dangerous climate system.
Most other developed countries have pledged much bigger emissions cuts than Australia. Yet most climate scientists say all the promised cuts put together will be too little, too late.
Visiting German climate scientist Hans Joachim Schellenhuber told Lateline on July 12 that the Earth was on track for a 4 degree temperature rise.
“Unfortunately, the political reality of climate diplomacy is telling us that we are on the wrong track,” he said. “Right now we are heading for a world which will warm up by three or four degrees by the end of the century, but even worse is in store if you go beyond 2100.
“We might have – on current course – to speak a warming of six to eight degrees by the year 2300 and that would be a completely different world.”
As part of the carbon price package, the government upped its long-term emissions cut target to 80% by 2050. But again, this is too little, too late. To avoid 2 degrees of warming, scientists say we need to reach zero emissions in about ten years.
Once we pass 2 degrees, there is no going back to the old climate system. Climate feedback processes will kick in and begin to warm the planet further and faster. By then, the window we have to avoid runaway climate change will have closed.
No one can seriously say the government’s carbon price plan is dealing with this reality. It’s not designed to solve this problem.
There is no way to adapt to the changes that are coming – the melting ice sheets, the extreme weather, the climate refugees, the droughts, fires and floods.
Delaying action is a form of denial – a denial of the extent of the climate emergency and denial of the rapid changes needed to reach zero emissions.
But isn’t Gillard’s plan better than nothing? Much more needs to be done, but isn’t it a step in the right direction at least?
One part of the package is welcome news. The government will set aside about $5 billion in extra funding for renewable energy over ten years. It’s not enough, but it is money spent wisely on public investment in renewables.
As for the carbon price plan itself, to say it is a good start means to downplay the bad precedents it sets.
First, the government will give billions in compensation to Australia’s biggest polluters, including the coal, steel and aluminium industries. And this despite the $10 billion the Australian government already gives in fossil fuel subsides each year.
The big polluters are winners under the plan. The money that goes to them could instead be invested in renewable energy. Friends of the Earth Australia called the payout “the greatest corporate windfall of our time”.
Second, Australia’s carbon pollution is not expected to fall at all until the scheme becomes an emissions trading scheme in 2015. But Europe’s scandal-prone emissions trading scheme has not cut emissions sharply – and it’s been going for seven years.
Europe’s experience warns us that the theory behind emissions trading does not work in practice. Relying on emissions trading to do the job here is the same as locking in failure.
The big green groups behind the Say Yes Australia campaign are supporting the government’s carbon price, despite its faults. It’s a very risky strategy: they may win the battle to set up a carbon price, but they are on track to lose the climate change war.
If there is to be a solution to climate change, if we are to really drive emissions down, then government’s must be made to pick winners. At the moment, aside from a small renewable energy budget, the Labor government still sides with fossil fuels. The Coalition opposition is no better.
A serious climate policy would have the government invest to replace dirty energy with clean energy. To get to a safe climate, public investment in clean energy, mass transit, energy efficiency and other measures will be key.
Australia has the economic power and the clean energy resources to change quickly. We could say goodbye to fossil fuels and use the sun and the wind for all our energy.
Australia could develop a job-rich, renewable energy manufacturing industry employing many thousands. It could lead the world on climate action, and help other, poorer, countries meet the challenge.
We’re a long way from this now, but this is the future. It’s the only future worth fighting for.
That future begins the day Australian political parties that support fossil fuel power are made unelectable, in the same way parties that support nuclear power are unelectable in Australia today.
