SAVE THE PLANET AND WE SAVE THE WORLD ECONOMY
Campaigners against climate change are not short of ideas when it comes to connecting the issue with measures leading the global economy out of recession. Overcoming economic crisis and avoiding ecological catastrophe are two interconnected aspects of the one environmental project. The idea is simple. The climate crisis is an expression of a crisis in the social system. The new productive forces can no longer be shackled by outdated modes of social organisation and require a new industrial revolution. Green technology works to prevent global heating whilst reinvigorating the moribund global economy.
The continuation of global economic crisis has exposed the world’s finance ministers and central bankers as clueless, not knowing whether to spend or cut, regulate or deregulate their way out of recession. So they seem to try both at the same time. Cut and consume, save and spend they advocate. How? Of course governments and economists are hopeless in the face of the economic determinism which defines the capital system. They do not control the system, do not understand it. Like the generals in Tolstoy’s War and Peace, their job is to pretend to be in control and convince the foot-soldiers that they know what they are doing. That illusion has surely now been shredded. The system proceeds, in Max Weber’s phrase, ‘without regard for persons’. Those at the top no less than those at the bottom carry out their actions in the service of ends which are external to them.
During a visit to the Amazon, Prince Charles was honoured as a "friend of the forest". During his official tour, the Prince warned Brazilian businessmen that humankind has less than 100 months to save the planet. The truth is that the planet will carry on regardless, it’s humankind that is in the gravest danger. But the Prince was right when he claimed: "We are at a defining moment in the world's history. We are facing a series of challenges so immense that we can, perhaps, be forgiven for feeling they are all too forbidding to confront."
We now need to ensure that whenever climate problems are being discussed, solutions, alternatives, ways forward are also proposed. We need to give reasons for hope in order to motivate efforts on the part of citizens. There is a danger of endlessly amassing the evidence for eco-catastrophe whilst giving people no sense of a way out. The governments of the world are bereft of solutions, it’s time to help them out and take matters out of their hands.
This lies behind the idea of a Green New Deal, creating a low-carbon economy not just to prevent the planet from overheating but to create a sustainable and desirable social system that benefits all.
The problems are many and familiar. Scientists are predicting a global temperature increase of 2C. When one considers that the extreme weather we are currently suffering is as a result of just 0.7C of heating, that 2C rise is frightening enough. Many scientists think that we are unlikely to stay the safe side of that 2C threshold. Indeed, many think that a 4C rise or more is more likely, with future generations facing worldwide ecological devastation. If the developed and developing economies of the world fail to make substantial reductions in the carbon emissions that are causing global heating, then there will be no way of avoiding the melting of ice sheets, the rising of sea levels, heatwaves, droughts and extreme weather events and mega-hurricanes, as well as all the conflicts over increasingly scarce resources.
Mass extinctions of species and the loss of biodiversity, the destruction of irreplaceable wildernesses and forests will follow. Indeed, this is all underway. There are many scientists who are pessimistic and think that the damage has already been done.
So where is hope to be found? The climate problems listed above are all the result of human action. The solution, then, is to change the modalities and mentalities shaping human behaviour. That can be done. That is a change that is in our own hands. The doomsday scenario presented by environmentalists is not to be taken as inevitable but as a spur to creative human agency – eco-catastrophe is to be avoided by a change in human behaviour. So it’s not about doom, it’s about inspiring and finding hope. This is where the climate change deniers do the most damage. In denying the science so relentlessly, they force environmentalists to keep parroting the doomsday scenario rather than moving on to the positive message. The skills and the techniques for the Green economy are all out there. Further, renewable energy, eco-friendly technology and Green infrastructures can be shown to generate employment and wealth, attract invest and achieve an economic growth that enhances rather than damages planetary well-being.
We need to make it clear that this presentation of the Green economy is quite distinct from the eco-capitalist utilitarianism which is concerned to put a price on ecosystem services and resources. My argument for Green economics distinguishes value from price, use value from exchange value, social production from private appropriation. Progress may come with an ecological price tag, but nature is all about real value.
However, ecology and economics are not inevitably and irrevocably antagonistic. They have a common origin, oikos, the household. That is our common ground. We need to distinguish the capital economy from the economy as such. Whilst we are right to be sceptical towards notions that we can make money out of saving the planet, we can conceive of a Green growth that remains within planetary boundaries. We need to identify the target clearly, the capital system and the way that its accumulative imperative drives an endless expansion of material quantities. Rudolf Bahro writes: "Almost everywhere in the world people still want a mega-machine which nevertheless doesn't destroy anything, and they don't want to know they can't have one." OK. But we need to be clear that this mega-machine is not ‘the economy’ as such but the capital system resting on an hierarchical and exploitative division of labour and buttressed by techno-science. The system is based upon the process of accumulation. Capital must endlessly expand its values or collapse. This is not sound economics, in the sense of the health and well-being of the household, but expresses the logic of the cancer cell - endless growth without limit. It is growth of this kind that is fundamentally anti-ecological. If we remain within the capital system then, certainly, pricing "ecosystem services" simply encourages the further enclosure and commodification of the global commons, thus confirming that exchange value, not nature, is the ultimate arbiter of our future. If we are to have one.
So, before I proceed to discuss the Green New Deal, I would like to make it clear that the Green industrial revolution has value only to the extent that it has broken free of the constraints of the capital economy and its structural and systemic imperatives and dynamics, and has come to constitute the whole social metabolic order on ecological foundations. In the very least, the Green industrial revolution should be a transitional form prefiguring the future Green economy, building the new economy within the shell of the old, freeing the new productive forces from the shackles of the old capitalist relations.
That’s my general position. I shall now evaluate to the Green New Deal.
The creation of the Green New Deal group is a "response to the credit crunch, wider energy and food crises and to the lack of comprehensive, joined-up action from politicians," its members argue. The panel includes former Friends of the Earth chief Tony Juniper, Green MEP Caroline Lucas, economist and co-director of Finance for the Future Colin Hines. Its 100-month plan for saving the planet includes such measures as:
Substantial investment in renewable energy as part of a wider environmental transformation in Britain;
The creation of thousands of new green jobs;
Reining in the irresponsible aspects of the finance sector whilst making low-cost capital available to fund the green economic shift;
Building alliances between environmentalists, industry, agriculture and unions around the new productive forces in order to foster the health and expansion of the real economy as against "footloose finance".
This is something that Nicholas Stern, economist, academic and author of the 2007 Stern report, has constantly argued. Stern makes it clear that the global economic crisis is an opportunity to create an energy-efficient low carbon economy. "Coming out of this, we have got to lay the foundations for low-carbon growth, which is going to be like the railways, electricity, the motorcars. This is going to be, over the next two to three decades, the big driver in investment."
Stern’s view that the looming threat of climate change is a challenge that we can resolve through a pro-growth Green industrial strategy is one that needs to be adopted. It is time to come off the back foot against the lies and misinformation of the deniers and carry the fight into the economic heart of the global social system. If the science of the climate change deniers is feeble, their economics is in an even worse condition. The old bifurcation between ecology and economics no longer applies. It is a certain economics, the product of specific social relations, that violates ecological principles, not economics as such. The attempts to split workers, who want employment and income, from the environmental must weaken the longer the capital system can no longer deliver on the material promises it makes.
One area that could benefit from the Green New Deal is the building sector. Falling prices in the construction industry will make it cheaper to insulate homes and so conserve energy, argues Stern. Environmentalists are starting to listen to Stern’s economic case.
Andy Atkins, Executive Director of Friends of the Earth in London, backs Stern's case for the Green industrial revolution and demands that governments start to act. "The latest climate science should set alarm bells ringing in politicians' ears - unless urgent action is taken now to cut emissions massive parts of the world could become uninhabitable and millions of species threatened with extinction.”
Animal Destinies (The Trees Show their Rings, the Animals their Veins) 1913 Franz Marc
"But there is still time to act. Gordon Brown must show global leadership by agreeing to cut UK emissions by at least 40 per cent by 2020, and put tackling climate change at the heart of next month's Budget.
"And the good news is that a massive investment in clean; green energy and cutting energy waste will not only reduce our emissions - it will create tens of thousands of jobs and exciting new business opportunities."
Given the symbiotic relation between the state and capital, given the state’s systemic dependence upon the process of private capital accumulation, the demand that governments exercise leadership in this way could seem politically naïve. If governments had this freedom of manoeuvre, they would have acted long ago, not just on the environment, but on the economy. So the Green New Deal can only succeed if it is a genuine Green industrial revolution, one which liberates the new productive forces from their capitalist shackles and reorganises them in a Green economy. We have waited too long for governments to act.
The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, Europe's largest conservation organisation, also supports Stern’s environmental economics. Ruth Davis, head of climate change policy at the RSPB said: "Climate change is the single biggest threat to our wildlife. We must act now or risk losing the species and special places that enrich our lives and help define us as a country.
"There should not be panic, but our leaders must take immediate, decisive and cool-headed steps to break our reliance on fossil fuels and build a future based on green, renewable sources of energy."
This may seem idealistic, but when one considers how many people are members and supporters of the various environmental and conservationist groups, there is a large constituency for an ecological sensibility in politics.
Erich Heckel
It’s long been time to settle accounts with the climate change deniers, state the science with respect to climate change clearly and firmly, invite and respond to any contrary evidence and work with the public to build common agreement with respect to the solutions. Such an approach should look to inspire effort and action through giving hope for the future. The vision of a 21st Century Green Industrial Revolution is a winner in that it presents a feasible ideal as an object of political will, inspiring organisation, effort and mobilisation on the part of an active citizenship. In contrast, endless arguments over climate science with the deniers is designed to put people off and drain interest, energy and support. It’s not just governments that need to show leadership here but environmentalists, creating the political architecture that gets people acting, moving, changing the world, changing their views, changing themselves.
In terms of resources, technologies, and know-how, the Green Industrial Revolution is wholly feasible. Alternative technologies, skills amongst the workers, expertise amongst scientists and technicians, as well as within research and development departments in academia and industry, already exist. What is lacking is government will and investment.
Plans to reduce carbon emissions by the necessary amount to prevent global heating requires billions of pounds of investment in major civil engineering projects, public transport schemes and the development of electric car engines. This is a substantial programme, but within technical, institutional and financial reach. All that is required is the political will, buttressed by popular support, compelling the world of banking and finance to supply the investment to develop renewable energy projects and build green infrastructures.
If it is said that that cannot be done, we need to ask why governments keep making commitments they have no intentions of respecting. Britain, for instance, is committed to an 80 per cent reduction by 2050 against a 1990 baseline, and yet invests in forms of energy which can only increase carbon emissions. It is time for clear, strategic thinking, with all the usual shabby short term, self-interested political calculations and half-measures rejected once and for all.
Britain is already a major player in wind-farm technology, but more research and investment is required for other giant projects, such as harnessing the tidal power of the Severn Estuary and the Wash.
Terry Barker, director of Cambridge University's Centre for Climate Change Mitigation Research, is an optimist. He believes that the recession could result in a reduction in carbon emissions. In truth, reductions as a result of economic crisis rather than of deliberate policy are neither here nor there. It implies that when economic health is restored, which is what everyone wants, the emissions go back up. So it’s difficult to evaluate Barker’s position.
He argues: "At the moment the signs are very bad as to when we're going to get out of this depression. I'm very pessimistic about global GDP, but I'm optimistic that carbon emissions are going to come down."
That’s just looking for the silver lining to the black cloud. And the evidence is that emissions have continued to rise, even in the recession. Barker’s other point has more value.
"If all G20 countries adopted a New Green Deal, the world economy could be greatly strengthened, especially the sectors producing low-carbon technologies," he claims. I agree.