SOLUTIONS with market mechanisms was largely continued by New Democrats like Clinton in the USA and New Labour's Blair and Brown. This agenda has shaped the world, often with devastating results as can be seen from the current financial crisis.
Traditionally environmental policy in Britain has been weak, but international pressures have prompted some modest progress in dealing with pollution. The Montreal Agreement of 1989, aimed at halting the thinning of the ozone layer, led to the phasing out of CFCs and similar damaging chemicals. Such a system of regulation became unthinkable, however, with the victory of neoliberals. Pollution permits should be sold rather than more fundamental restrictions introduced, they decided. DEREK WALL EXPLAINS WHY THE GOVERNMENT'S CLIMATE POLICY DEPENDENT ON MARKET FORCES OFFERS NO REAL
The entire post-Kyoto approach to global climate change is based on the concept of'cap and trade. Carbon dioxide levels are capped so that each country can only produce a certain amount of CO,. Permits to produce CO2 are then given to individual companies. The companies can buy additional permits if they want to generate more CO2 or they can sell them if they do not need them, which is where the trade element comes in. The theory is that carbon trading provides an economic incentive for companies to cut CO, production and turns the diffuse environmental costs of climate change into a clear money cost that consumers have to pay for.
The European Union has introduced an emissions trading scheme into which the New Labour policy fits
ECOLOGY like a Russian doll of market economics. The problem is that cap and trade does not work! Large scale structural solutions are essential for real progress and such solutions cannot occur via market mechanisms.
For example, if communities want to use less CO, they need access to good public transport, electricity generated by renewable sources and food which is local and organic. However millions is being invested by companies in a global system of food production, where food is shipped and increasingly flown across the globe.
With neoliberal globalisation, corporations prefer to create global chains of food production, despite the energy cost, so they can produce in the parts of the world where labour and land prices are the lowest. Governments, meanwhile, are turning a blind eye to the creation of infrastructures for global food transportation.
The New Labour approach is part of a wider framework which leaves climate change solutions to market forces. Obviously to reduce the carbon footprint from transport, investment in transport infrastructure is necessary so that collective
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ECOLOGY solutions can reduce the dependency of individuals on the car. Yet Gordon Brown, far from expanding rail travel, has been a cheer leader for a new runway at Heathrow.
The privatisation of public transport with Margaret Thatcher's bus deregulation and John Major's rail sell off means that many people are still highly dependent on cars. Without a local bus or rail service they have no alternative no matter how much the cost of using a car goes on increasing.
Renewable energy is another example of where the market fails. Building new power stations of any type is expensive and private companies are reluctant to invest because of the short term cost. Government control of energy is necessary. Britain has a tiny proportion of energy derived from renewable resources and lack of investment in new power stations means that a decaying stock of nuclear and coal fired power stations is likely to lead to energy shortages. Countries such as Denmark and Germany are decades ahead in harnessing renewable energy resources.
Clearly even within a market-based paradigm the New Labour approach is particularly poor. Ken Livingstone's policies when he was Mayor of London, though far from a radical alternative to New Labour, at least led to a sharp reduction in car use in the city, even though London Underground remains one of the most expensive underground systems in the world.
In many Northern European countries provision for cycling and walking is far better than in Britain, where the government astonishingly does not support such practical ways of reducing CO, consumption.
The cap and trade approach is dangerous because it allows those with wealth to buy their way out of real reductions in CO, use. The government's climate bill may have a target of an 80% cut in CO, but carbon offsetting allows companies and individuals simply to continue using CO, while buying cuts elsewhere. Groups such as Carbon Trade Watch have carried out extensive research to show that carbon trading may lead to no net reduction in CO,.
The so-called Clean Development Mechanism whereby companies can purchase the right to continue polluting by supposedly producing cuts in the south of the globe, is little more than a system of worldwide carbon fraud. For example if steel producers in India built a more efficient smelter they could then gain a certificate that showed a reduction in CO, production. This in turn would allow them to be paid out of the Clean Development Mechanism by a British airline. The likelihood is that the Indian producers are being paid for a change they would have made anyway while the British airline is allowed to maintain its current CO, emissions.
The trading also shifts the burden from rich to poor. Even where it does reduce climate change it tends to favour local and international elites. The World Development Movement cites a Clean Development Mechanism project in South Africa to extract methane residential area to use for electricity generation. The project's aim is to reduce emissions of methane gas, a more potent greenhouse gas than the CO,, released when methane is burnt.
However, local people have been campaigning for vears for the landfill site to be shut down, as it exposes them to cancer-causing pollution. There was a good chance of the landfill site being closed down but the Clean Development Mechanism has provided finance to keep the site operating.? amendment to the climate bill, which asked that 70% of cuts be made within Britain, rather than offset, has been rejected by the New Labour government. Meanwhile, according to Nicholas Hildyard of the Corner House environmental justice organisaton, derivative traders have constructed a whole series of climate change bonds and other financial instruments. The trade in potential catastrophe has become another means by which the markets can accumulate capital.
There are number of clear solutions that must be supported. Less fossil fuels must be used - an obvious goal that is absent from the current strategy.
In Britain New Labour are moving in exactly the opposite direction, proceeding with open cast coal production and supporting the construction of new coal-fired power stations. By contrast a number of positive examples show the way forward
In oil-rich Venezuela the dependency on petroleum wealth of a country that proclaims ecosocialism is an obvious contradiction but the government has at least halted a number of coal mining projects.
In Peru a revolt by indigenous people has prevented President Alan Garcia's government from implementing a free trade agreement which would have made it easier for corporations to buy communally owned rainforest land for oil exploration.
In the US the Green Party presidential candidate Cynthia McKinney recently campaigned on the simple slogan of "Keep the oil in the soil".
Cuba has found a way of producing less CO, without a cut in fossil fuel use happening at the expense of poorest. With the end of cheap oil from the Soviet Union, the country embarked on an ambitious programme to "go low carbon". The Cuban environmentalist Roberto Perez who recently toured Britain helped to introduce permaculture agriculture which feeds families without using oil based fertilizers and pesticides. More than 70%
33 of fruit and vegetables caten in Havana is grown locally. There is huge investment in public transport and energy renewables. No carbon trading takes place in Cuba and social workers go door to door replacing wasteful energy appliances with new versions that cut waste.
Rainforest protection is also vital to slow climate change and carbon sinks such as the forests must be preserved. The conventional approach is to enclose and privatise forests, thus providing another profitwinner for finance capital. However across the globe from Peru to West Papua indigenous people are fighting to preserve their communal control of the forests. Their militancy and example makes political leaders nervous and they have even been excluded from conferences such as Kyoto that set climate policy.
Green plans by workers are also part of the solution. In the 1980s green trade unionist Jack Mundy in Australia led his Builders Workers Union in a campaign to reject work on environmentally damaging projects. In the 1980s in Britain the then National Union of Seamen (now part of the RMT) ended the dumping of nuclear waste at sea. Workers' plans for ecology could also be used to convert car and missile plants for the manufacture of renewable
An imaginative ecosocialist strategy is needed that cuts CO,, respects the ecology, and provides real prosperity rather than the perverse poverty of capitalist accumulation. The climate change movement needs to challenge New Labour and build real solutions. 1 Ngugi Wa Thiong'o,
Penpoints, Gunpoints and Dreams,
Clarendon Press, Oxford,
1998 p. 124.
Investigation by World
Development Movement
of Clean Development
Mechanism project in South
Africa www.wdm.org.uk/
newsloopholeinclimatebill
29102008.htm
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34
n 1846, Karl Marx and Friedrich
Engels wrote The German Ideology, the
first mature statement of what became known as historical materialism. This passage was on the second page:
"We know only a single science, the science of history. One can look at history from two sides and divide it into the history of nature and the history of men. The two sides are, however, inseparable; the history of nature and the history of men are dependent on each other so long as men exist. The history of nature, called natural science, does not concern us here....
At the last minute, they deleted that paragraph from the final draft, deciding not even to mention a subject they had no time to investigate and discuss properly.
What the founders of scientific socialism couldn't have known was that a compelling materialist explanation of the history of nature had already been written by an English gentleman who had no sympathy for socialism. They couldn't read that account, because the author, Charles Darwin, was so shocked by the implications of his own ideas that he kept them secret for twenty years.
Darwin's views on evolution were fully developed by 1838, and he wrote, then hid away, a 50,000 word essay on the subject in 1844. But he didn't publish what Marx was to call his "epoch-making work" until 1859. Darwin's insight Others had speculated about evolution before Charles Darwin, but the dominant view in scientific circles and society at large was that all the different types of plants and animals were created by God, and that the various species were forever fixed. The few who believed that species had changed over time couldn't explain those changes without resort to the supernatural - that evolution was God's long-term plan, or that some force (God On the 150th Anniversary of The Origin of Species