WHO wants change………??

Hot on the heels of David Attenborough’s climate show, along comes this great article by Tim Watkins……..

Goldsmiths kebab

We learned yesterday that a British university had made a small contribution to addressing a climate emergency that its spokespeople argue is going to kill us all just 12 years from now.  As Katherine Sellgren at the BBC reports:

“A university is banning the sale of [beef] burgers to try to fight global warming.

“Goldsmiths, University of London, is removing all beef products from sale – and charging a 10p levy on bottled water and single-use plastic cups.

“It plans to install more solar panels across its New Cross campus, in south-east London, and switch to a 100% clean energy supplier as soon as possible.

“It will spend money on its allotment and identify other areas where planting could help to absorb carbon dioxide.”

Banning beef burgers and deploying a handful of solar panels (made in China in coal-powered factories and shipped to the UK on oil-powered ships; where their addition to the Grid will increase the risk of power cuts) is little more than a gesture which, in any case, involves no real sacrifice for those making the decision.  Indeed, this was called out by an interviewer on the BBC Radio4 Today programme, who pointed out that the meaningful changes suggested by the IPCC, such as refurbishing buildings to make them energy efficient would make a much bigger impact than a burger ban.  And so a Student Union representative was asked whether they would support such a major refurbishment… even if it meant that students at the college might have to pay additional tuition fees.  The predictable response was, “Oh no.  Students want free education.”

This, of course, gets to the nub of the problem with addressing the growing environmental catastrophe.  Three-quarters of us (outside the USA) accept the science.  Two-thirds of us agree that “something must be done.”  Less than half of us are prepared to vote for anyone who promises to do something.  And less than ten percent of us are prepared to make meaningful sacrifices to lower our carbon footprints – and those who are, are seldom those who can most afford to do so.  As John Michael Greer points out:

“For years now, since that brief period when I was a very minor star in the peak oil movement, I’ve noted a curious dynamic in the climate change-centered end of environmentalism. Almost always, the people I met at peak oil events who were concerned about peak oil and the fate of industrial society more generally, rather than climate change or such other mediacentric causes as the plight of large cute animals, were ready and willing to make extensive changes in their own lives, in addition to whatever political activism they might engage in. Almost always, the people I met who were exclusively concerned with anthropogenic climate change were not.

“I can be even more precise. With vanishingly few exceptions, the people I met who were solely concerned with anthropogenic climate change insisted loudly that what needed to happen was that someone else, somewhere else, had to stop using so much carbon.”

The predictable result is that a host of climate change media stars with carbon footprints the size of small countries descend upon conferences around the planet – most recently the Google event on Sicily – to lecture the rest of us on why we must change our lifestyles to combat climate change; just before they leap back on board their carbon-belching private jets and luxury yachts to be whisked away to the next jolly.

The difference today, however, is that the people aren’t buying it any more.  In part, this is due to the hypocrisy of these media stars.  In large part, however, the people have wised up to the fact that while all of the costs of combatting climate change always seem to land on the shoulders of the poor; all of the benefits go to the same elite that the climate change media stars belong to.  As Greer notes:

“Some of what else is going on came to the surface a few years ago in Washington State when a group of environmental activists launched an initiative that would have slapped a fee on carbon. As such things go, it was a well-designed initiative, and one of the best things about it was that it was revenue-neutral:  that is, the money taken in by the carbon fee flowed right back out through direct payments to citizens, so that rising energy prices due to the carbon fee wouldn’t clobber the economy or hurt the poor.

“That, in turn, made it unacceptable to the Democratic Party in Washington State, and they refused to back the initiative, dooming it to defeat. Shortly thereafter they floated their own carbon fee initiative, which was anything but revenue neutral.  Rather, it was set up to funnel all the money from the carbon fee into a slush fund managed by a board the public wouldn’t get to elect, which would hand out the funds to support an assortment of social justice causes that were also helpfully sheltered from public oversight. Unsurprisingly, the second initiative also lost heavily—few Washington State voters were willing to trust their breathtakingly corrupt political establishment with yet another massive source of graft at public expense.”

This is the same phenomenon that caused what should have been a relatively simple increase in the tax on diesel fuel in France to erupt into widespread protest on a scale not seen since the heady days of 1968.  It is also why an Australian Labor Party manifesto that promised radical action on the environment, and that was apparently supported by the majority of Australians, resulted in a “miracle victory” for the pro-fossil fuel Liberal/National coalition at last May’s general election.

In the grossly unequal economies that we have spent the best part of forty years creating, unless the response to the environmental crisis begins at the very top, it isn’t going to begin at all.  And while this may cast ordinary people in the role of Luddites standing in the way of the progress that we supposedly need; the people may actually have a better understanding of the problem than the media celebrities. 

A new documentary Planet of the Humans by Michael Moore and Jeff Gibbs – hardly right-wing climate change deniers – set out to understand how fossil fuel lobbyists and corrupt politicians had thwarted the increasingly urgent transition to a carbon neutral future.  What they found, however – and what the documentary details – is an equally corrupt “green energy” lobby that has no real solutions to the predicament we are in.  As Michael Donnelly at Counterpunch explains:

“The basic conclusion is that we have been following corporate foundation-financed, Democratic Party-tied misleadership and that is why we are where we are.

“The bottom line is that there are: Too many Clever Apes; consuming too much; too rapidly. And ALL efforts on addressing the climate costs are reduced to illusions/delusions designed to keep our over-sized human footprint and out-of-control consumption chugging along without any consumer sacrifices or loss of consumption-based profits…

“Forget all you have heard about how ‘Renewable Energy’ is our salvation. It is all a myth that is very lucrative for some. Feel-good stuff like electric cars, etc. Such vehicles are actually powered by coal, natural gas… or dead salmon in the Northwest.”

Donnelly goes on to list some of the documentary’s “inconvenient truths” such as that the top beneficiaries of solar energy subsidies in the USA turn out to be every leftist’s favourite cartoon villains the Koch Brothers…

“None of these technologies existed, nor could they exist, without fossil fuels. The grid cannot even operate without fossil fuel-derived steam-generated baseloads – in the spring when hydro is surging, the Bonneville Power Administration (BPA) cuts off wind power (and still has to pay its providers after a lawsuit), yet has to keep the Boardman Coal plant (Oregon’s top carbon polluter) running in order to balance the baseload. Even eCon Musk’s famed battery plant in Nevada is powered by…fracked natural gas. The huge bird and desert-destroying Ivanpah Solar array in California also has fracked natural gas as an essential ingredient.”

Worse still, the documentary catches leading stars of the bright green movement admitting in Clintonesque fashion that they have one message for the plebs and an entirely different one for the people who matter:

“Planet examines a range of policy influencers/professional environmentalists/opportunists, etc. and even lets them hang themselves. It not only takes on the obvious bad guys like the Kochs, it lets folks like McKibben, Al Gore, Richard Branson, Robert Kennedy, Jr, who are ostensibly on ‘our’ side, hang themselves by showing clips of them speaking to environmentalists and then clips of them speaking to industry about all the profits to be made.

“McKibben is shown twice praising Biomass (they gave him every chance to condemn it), interspersed with a scene of a mountaintop removal operation in his home state of Vermont – for a wind farm!

“Robert Kennedy, Jr. informs his fellow millionaires of all the profits to be made on ‘green’ energy. Al Gore basically admits it’s all about diversion and profits. Branson, like eCon Musk, of course, is solely in it for the money.

“Fellow billionaire Michael Bloomberg got down to it and basically bought the Sierra Club with tens of millions in donations tied to the Club promoting one of his cash cows, Fracked Natural Gas, as the ‘Bridge Fuel to a Green Energy future!’”

None of this comes as a surprise to those of us who regard climate change as merely one element of a broader three E’s – Energy, Environment, Economy – predicament that is itself driven by having roughly 6.5 billion too many humans on Planet Earth.  What is different, however, is that the realisation that the green techno-utopian celebrity crowd are con artists has begun to seep into the consciousness of the leftward end of the body politic in recent months.  As Donnelly notes, despite Moore and Gibbs fearing the reaction of people in the broader environmental movement:

“’Planet of the Humans’ premiered at the gloriously community-restored State Theatre July 31st at the 15th Traverse City, MI Film Festival with three sold-out/standing ovation showings followed by Q & A’s with the creators.”

Greer observes a similar shift at the leftward end of the US media:

“What sets this year’s conference apart from earlier examples of the same sorry type is that this time, the other end of the political spectrum has finally decided to start calling out absurd climate change hypocrisy for what it is. Here’s the redoubtable Rex Murphy of the National Post, for example, giving the Sicily conference and its brightly burnished celebrity attendees a good sound thrashing. You can find other examples easily enough if you step out of the airtight bubble of mainstream popular culture—and these days, the bubble is not quite as airtight as it once was and some of the criticism is starting to slip through.”

Ironically, the green energy snake oil salesmen have probably brought this reaction down upon their own heads.  By backing increasingly urgent messages about our imminent extinction to sell us billions of dollars’ worth of non-renewable renewable energy-harvesting devices; they have caused people to ask serious questions about why – if the emergency is so urgent – these people are not adopting lifestyles in line with their warnings; and why – if green energy technologies are the solution – governments around the planet have failed to adopt them in meaningful quantities.

The issue here is not with the seriousness of the crisis, but with the way just one solution is on offer; and it just happens to be the one that makes the rich even richer and the poor even poorer.  As Greer puts it:

“It’s as though your house was on fire and someone pounded on your door, insisting that you had to sign a contract giving him your property so he could fight the fire. You shouldn’t sign the contract, and the reasons he brandishes to try to talk you into signing it are bogus, but that doesn’t change the fact that your house really is on fire.”

The BBC too, seemingly, is beginning to grasp some of this cultural shift; and thus is prepared to kebab the “feel good” Goldsmiths story as little more than a futile gesture at someone else’s expense.  Gone are the joyous days of spring, when climate campaigners had the support of most of the media.  From here on in, even those outlets on “our” side are going to be casting a critical eye over environmental policies that will very likely be found wanting.

The stark reality, of course, is that as we slide ever further along the downslope of the industrial age, and as our ability to repair the damage wrought by the global weirding of our climate, higher education itself will be going away.  The lifestyles we are going to be living – whether we choose to adopt them ourselves or whether mother nature forces them upon us – are going to be far less consumptive, far more localised, and far more focused on the production of basic necessities… like food.  And in the near future, those Goldsmiths folk may well find themselves pining for one of those burgers they just banned.