First speaker — on Africa
00:05 [...] that people want to live like people in the West, where you own a car, you've got a house with electricity. I mean, as opposed to either walking or using a donkey cart to [get to] places, which was the traditional way of living and which was eco-friendly. And living in a house with electricity, then you have all the electrical gadgets, as opposed to using the basics like hand washing and all that. Because if you don't live that style, you [are looked down on] [?]. Therefore people go for that.
00:45 And then on the other hand we've got a group of people interested in maintaining their traditional indigenous living, which is the same people. They don't want to be moved from where they are to where civilisation or development is. They want to maintain their hunting [and] gathering, yet the government is opposed to that. Therefore, when you come in and start introducing the subject of the environment, people then look at you as [though] you want to take a step [backward] [?] when you want to move forward.
01:25 And then it becomes a very difficult subject to introduce, to say to people: now, the environment is in danger because of the practices from the West. And it would be interesting to see how we move forward, to go back to Africa and help the Africans to go back to the basics — because going back to the basics saves the environment a lot. I was interested when I saw the statistics, that in Africa the emissions are just that little. And when you look at it, the indigenous people don't contribute to that.
Second speaker — production for need, rationing and transitional demands
02:07 As a medic, I have a bit more hope of the technological potential of dealing with some of the problems, which we didn't cover and which I do think has to be raised. And I think how we approach [this] as socialists — this idea of whether you're in favour of more production or less production, I think, is not the way to pose the question. I think you have to go back a little bit to basics. As socialists we are in favour of production for need, to meet need. Production now does not meet need — one, because of unequal distribution, which is inherent in capitalism, and therefore all of this is very useful propaganda [...] [inaudible]
03:09 But that inequality is also reinforced by production for a consumerism based on an individualist sort of approach to society, which actually makes everything worse. That story about all these products having to be binned and put into the landfill site because they were [not] produced properly according to some of the rules — even though some of the rules mean that kind of approach to consumption where there's ever more consumption that is seen as the goal. I don't think we should be in favour of that form, but we're in favour of producing.
03:53 [We're] at least [arguing for] some programme, an economic programme. I think we need to talk about rationing, and the last point. Rationing — whether it's at a company, country or individual level — the question is not simply what is the rationing, [but] how is it done. If you go back to old-fashioned Trotskyism, which isn't often discussed these days, I think there does seem to be a bit of a clash between the eco-green tradition [?] and the far left [?].
04:22 What Trotskyism [has] got to add here, I think, is the notion of transitional demands, wherein your demands — you're linking immediate needs. So if you have got carbon rationing at an individual [or] company level, you link that to workers' organisations. [That is], we will control and mobilise from the bottom up to control how that rationing is applied. And that rationing does mean: no, you don't go for your holidays here every time. You don't have these people with massive wealth and massive expenditure and wasteful production at the level of companies.
05:00 Workers deciding: right, we've got this. So we don't want to stop production, we're producing things for people that need them. But we're going to actually control how much energy is wasted by putting the heating on, putting the air [conditioning] on, [and so on]. It's actually really integrating workers' control into that. I think that's where we can link in with development in China, in Africa, et cetera. We have to get on board with that, but make it very much better when we're developing it. [inaudible] transitional demands that actually [deal] immediately with [the] requirements of climate reform, which I think [is] one of the ways that we can bring those two things together.
Third speaker — from the Arctic
05:44 My perspective on climate tends to come from living in the Arctic. I've spent many months living with the Inuit. I was quite interested to hear this lady talking, also the gentleman over there, because the Inuit as a race of people are [inaudible — the transcription loops here and recovers at 06:34] indigenous people, as you know. I'll take Canada, Greenland and so on, and Siberia. And they are really feeling the implications of climate change at the moment in a way that we cannot even begin to think about.
06:47 A lot of my work is in southern England, and I deal with people that earn 20 million pounds a year with their basic wage. And if their houses were crumbling, as houses in Alaska are doing at the moment — the permafrost is melting, the houses are falling apart around them — if that was happening in Sevenoaks in Kent, believe me, people [would] have something to say about it.
07:12 A couple of points have occurred to me. This is new to me, and I'm very interested to hear you talking. Although I can appreciate the gentleman over there saying how important all these other issues are, poverty and so on, from what I've seen in the Arctic they will pale into insignificance with the ongoing problems that are just about to happen. If the Greenland ice cap melts — and it is doing so now, it's beginning to melt now — we are in serious trouble. And we're not talking hundreds of years. We're talking 10 years, if that melts and changes the Gulf Stream as it's predicted to do.
07:49 A few comments I'll throw in for you to think about. I was listening to an economist talking on the radio recently, and he was saying, well, I think maybe one solution might be to let the worst happen, and [it would] be cheaper then to sort the problem out. This is a guy that's in charge of the country, as it were. There was another guy talking, and he was saying, well, the problem with green tax incentives is that really, as people shift over to more environmentally friendly ways of doing things, the revenue gets less money — that's not actually a great idea. And these things, I think, are extremely worrying.
08:23 Now, what I'm leading up to here is that this idea of rationing is something that we are thinking about, because we are so used to sort of taking or buying things. If you remember the water shortage in 1976, as I do, there were standpipes in the street. [At] first people were queuing up, they were filling their [containers], trying to get more, more, more of it, because they thought it was going to run out. When it didn't run out, they actually began to slowly go out and collect only what they needed. So I think ultimately rationing may be an immediate solution, but ultimately I think people will take what they need.
09:02 And I've seen this with the Inuit. The Inuit is a race of people — and I've lived with them for months on end, out on the ice and dog sledging — they will only take what they need from an animal. And part of their culture has always been, for thousands of years, to catch an animal, be it seal or walrus or whatever it is, and they take it back and they divide it between their people and their village. They don't [keep] it to themselves, they [don't] stuff themselves so they can't eat any more. They just don't do that. But we've been kind of conditioned to think like that. And I think if we can persuade people to not [need] more, then I think we've [gone] a long way to sort things out. One last point [inaudible].
Phil Ward, from 9:57
09:57 I think it's quite interesting, because what you said about [the] Inuit and the lifestyles and things like that — what you said about [San?] people, there are similarities there. Because as far as I can understand, what changes is what the people actually do at home, but what doesn't change is how do people make a living, or how do people subsist. Right?
10:21 So for instance, the people there will now live in wooden houses, they've probably got access to electricity, mainly through wind power or something, they've probably got televisions and stuff like that — but they still subsist through hunting, for instance. And I think the same things may well apply in Africa. Obviously there's [a] difference if you have to range over a large area. So I don't think having electricity is incompatible with continuing your present way of life. The electricity might be solar powered rather than grid. I think it should be [seen] in that context, and I think there's tremendous potential for that. So there's actually a lot of potential for having a more comfortable living situation but, if you like, making your living in the same kind of way.
11:17 I didn't understand what the comrade was saying about China. I have to say, all these dormitories, all this productivism and so forth, is precisely what puts the people in their dormitories and gives them the disgusting living conditions they have, producing all the goods that they have. [And] if you want to see what's happened to Britain's carbon emissions — they've gone to China. Because the manufacturing industry in this country has gone down there, and manufacturing has gone to China. China's emissions have gone up. We actually own some of those emissions, which is never considered when you have all these quotas and rationing and so forth.
11:57 And lastly, when we're discussing quotas and rationing, a lot of these things are actually already happening. In this country there's the climate change levy, which is a tax on companies. Companies do have quotas. They trade, they trade — actually having no effect [on emissions] [?]. [We should] recognise also that the production of goods is not the main source of carbon emissions. It's actually the use of goods that is the main source, and heating and [cooling] [?] and energy use in buildings. That is the main source of carbon emissions, and these are things that need to be looked at.
Dave Packer, from 12:33
12:33 [...] It creates, in the developing world, cities and slums. It creates Lagos, it creates Mexico City, it creates all these cities. Okay, quite a few people have cars, but it's hell. And if people are all after [that] [?] — if that's their image of what they want, they want hell. And the only way forward for the developing countries is sustainable development. Sustainable development, which actually starts in the beginning with proper transport systems, with proper methods of producing, methods of all these other things.
13:05 But that can only be done if the whole of imperialism is broken, because imperialism controls and dominates these countries and forces through the model of productionism that was developed in Europe and the United States, which is what we have to stop if we're going to solve the crisis.
13:22 And I think carbon capping, or quotas, [or] rationing, is absolutely the way forward, as opposed to forms of taxation — [deeply] progressive taxation. I would support certain progressive taxation. If the London congestion charges were deeply progressive — i.e. BMW drivers, they pay £500 every time they have to drive into the city, whereas a small one-litre car that was running on biofuels had no payment — I think that would be fine. I'd vote for that.
14:01 But what you've got is a flat tax. And what you have is, during the day in London, Lexus, BMW, Mercedes and white vans driving about, and at 6.30 long queues at the Elephant and Castle, the ordinary people waiting for the thing to end so they can drive into the city. That's what happens. It's obviously a tax on the poor. And so therefore, if you're going to build [concrete?] demands that mobilise people — and that is the only way, that mobilising has to be egalitarian — and egalitarianism means quotas. That is the only way to organis[e] —
[the recording ends here, mid-sentence]