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Cars cause about 40,000 deaths a year in the US.
By John Michael Greer
263 pp. New Society Publishers – May 2011. $18.95
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Palgrave Macmillan: 2010. 280pp. £20.00
Cleo Paskal must be cursing the publishing gods. All anyone wants to talk about these days is purloined emails, errors in the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and the literary pursuits of its chair Rajendra Pachauri. Had Paskal's first book, Global Warring: How Environmental, Economic, and Political Crises will Redraw the World Map, come out last fall, she'd have timed it perfectly.
Consider this series of events: in September, the US Central Intelligence Agency opened a centre on climate change and national security at its Virginian headquarters. That same month, the United Kingdom's newly appointed climate and security envoy embarked on a global tour, talking up the threats posed by rising seas, glacial melt, worsening droughts and other warming-related impacts. In November, international senior security experts warned that climate change could become a 'threat multiplier' in volatile regions. Overnight, it seemed, the term 'climate security' had become a buzzword in foreign policy circles.
Having followed these developments, I assumed that Paskal's book would simply sketch out the hellish scenarios of climate mayhem the CIA is now entrusted with anticipating. So I was surprised to see Paskal, a London-based journalist and a scholar at the think tank Chatham House, instead present a fascinating geopolitical chessboard, on which the United States and the European Union face off against China and Russia as climate change takes hold. If Western policymakers want to see how this game is playing out, they ought to read this book.
Paskal convincingly argues that short-sighted domestic and foreign policies are already eroding “the West's position in the global balance of power”. Exhibit A is the Arctic, where the US and EU are pushing for 'global governance' of the still-frozen Northwest Passage, a route expected to become a prized shipping channel to Asia and Europe with continued warming.
As melting Arctic sea ice opens a shipping channel through the Northwest Passage, China and Russia could forge economic ties to Canada and win major gains in trade. © ISTOCKPHOTO
Canada currently claims the Northwest Passage as part of its territorial waters, but this assertion is being contested by the US and European Union, which want it recognized as an international strait so that they can have unfettered access for their own commercial interests, such as oil and gas exploration. This standoff, Paskal suggests, could prod Canada to explore a strategic relationship with Russia, which has its own designs on the Arctic. Meanwhile, China is knocking at Canada's door, eager to purchase a slice of the country's abundant natural resources. In a 'stateless' Northwest Passage, Russia and China could end up being the big players, especially if they forge stronger economic ties to Canada. This potential development, Paskal argues, poses a long-term security risk to the EU and US.
To understand why the Northwest Passage looms large in global geopolitics, one need only look to China, which has built up a trading and shipping network through state-controlled companies that now manage such chokepoints as the Panama Canal. As Paskal explains, these chokepoints, where a wide flow of traffic is forced through a narrow alley, “are the sorts of things empires go to war over”. The Strait of Hormuz, which leads to the oil fields of the Persian Gulf, is a natural chokepoint. Others, such as the Panama Canal, are man-made. “The melting Arctic sea ice creates new chokepoints of global strategic importance,” asserts Paskal, cautioning those who minimize the Northwest Passage as a Canadian issue, “It is about as much of a Canadian issue as the Suez Canal is simply an Egyptian issue.”
The melding of realpolitik and international relations with climate change is what makesGlobal Warring deserving of attention. Paskal spends much of the book walking the reader through the projected impacts of climate change — but in the context of countries manoeuvring for advantage in a world where imminent and drastic environmental change is taken for granted.
Take the example of the low-lying islands in the Pacific threatened by rising seas: here China is throwing its economic weight around to gain access to natural resources and critical trade routes. This shrewd positioning, combined with China's financial deal-making in Africa and Asia, is cementing strategic alliances that have greatly expanded China's sphere of influence. In just about every corner of the world, Paskal sees the United States being outflanked by China, mainly because China's economic interests are integrated with its foreign policy — what Paskal refers to as 'nationalistic capitalism'. Market economies, by contrast, seek to maximize private profit, not to advance the state's agenda.
On the domestic front, Paskal criticizes the US and China in equal measure on their planning for climate change. Although Hurricane Katrina — rightly or wrongly — provided a megaphone for advocates of mitigating climate change, to Paskal the 2005 disaster served notice on how ill-prepared the United States is for the impacts ahead. And everything the US has done since, such as continuing with coastal development and subsidizing flood insurance, has proven that Americans are not taking climate change seriously. China faces even more daunting environmental challenges, given its breakneck development and pollution problems, yet it shares the same blind spots at the US.
It is unfortunate that Paskal's highly readable and perceptive book is marred by structural problems that keep the whole from cohering. For example, at the end of one chapter the reader is tantalized by a glimpse of decisions “that may dangerously undermine North American and European security”. But the next chapter begins with a tour of the Arctic permafrost by a local nature guide and is followed by chapters covering China's strategic use of nationalistic capitalism and Russia's re-emergence as a global power before Paskal returns, some 50 pages later, to some of those decisions that are undermining Western security.
But that shouldn't put readers off mining this very important book. It would be welcome, after all, if we could turn the public discussion back to the projected impacts of climate change and how they threaten to remake the global political order.
While REDD proponents and critics often provide lists of conditions that should be met before REDD can go ahead, they rarely conclude that REDD should not go ahead if these conditions are not met. As Simone Lovera explains in “REDD Realities” many of the conditions are currently not met and cannot be met – particularly if REDD is to be funded through carbon trading. “The problem with REDD is that there are simply too many ‘ifs’ to be true,” Lovera comments.
“REDD Realities” was published last year by the Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation as part of a book titled “Contours of Climate Justice”. “This collection of interventions contributes to the re-conceptualisation of climate change as an issue of justice, and therefore also of struggle,” DHF writes on its website. “It further seeks to strengthen a climate and energy politics that will prove capable of solving the multiple crises that climate change is part of, and which humanity is facing.”
“REDD realities” is reproduced here in full:
By Simone Lovera, published in Contours of Climate Justice – Ideas for shaping new climate and energy politics, Critical Currents no. 6, Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation, October 2009.
Some six years ago, Kevin Conrad, a close friend and advisor to Michael Somare, prime minister of Papua New Guinea (PNG), had a great idea. The prime minister was complaining to him that the World Bank had forced him to comply with a number of strict conditions on a loan to the PNG forestry sector. The conditions were aimed at conserving the forests in this remote country. As the biodiversity and carbon stored in these forests were of global importance, Mr Conrad advised his prime minister to ask for compensation from the world community for the ‘environmental service’ of reducing deforestation. Thus the concept of payments for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation in Developing countries (REDD) was born.
This anecdote is often told by Mr Conrad himself at international meetings. However, Mr Conrad seldom specifies what the conditions of the World Bank exactly entailed – that the government of PNG would make a strong effort to combat corruption in its forestry service and illegal logging in general. So in fact, the prime minister of PNG wanted to be compensated for complying with his very own forestry laws.
The basic principle of REDD is not necessarily objectionable. In fact, the suggestion that industrialised countries should contribute financially to policies and actions taken by developing countries to reduce emissions from deforestation and forest degradation is very much in line with Article 4 of the Framework Convention on Climate Change (FCCC) and the concept of common but differentiated responsibilities. Reducing deforestation is a contribution developing countries can make towards global efforts to mitigate climate change. As industrialised countries have a historical responsibility for climate change, it is reasonable that they should fully compensate the costs of such actions. So REDD could be a great opportunity to combine climate change mitigation, forest conservation and income provision for forest-dependent communities, if:
The problem with REDD is that there are simply too many ‘ifs’ to be true. Although the overwhelming majority of policy papers on REDD published over the past years, whether by NGOs, indigenous peoples, governments, scientific institutions or multilateral donors,[1] have listed most if not all of the conditions above as preconditions for effective and equitable REDD strategies, few of these policy papers subsequently reach the logical conclusion that REDD should thus not be implemented if these preconditions are not met.[2] This means that the REDD dreams sketched in these policy papers are likely to become REDD nightmares in reality.
The reality is that Northern countries are not willing to commit to deep reductions. The draft US climate legislation that is supposed to be adopted this year is estimated to lead to approximately 0 per cent domestic emission reductions by 2020 compared to 1990 levels (if all non-domestic offsets are excluded).[3] The chances that the US administration will take a position that is more ambitious than this are close to zero. While the EU has at least committed itself to 20 per cent reductions by 2020 even if other Northern countries will not follow, the chances that Canada, Australia, Japan or other industrialised countries will commit to significant emission reductions without the US are equally slim.
The source of REDD funding is another important factor here. If financed through public funds, the reduced emissions from deforestation will at least be additional to the meagre emission cuts proposed. But many Northern countries seem to be in favour of funding REDD through carbon markets. This implies that REDD will, by definition, not contribute anything to emission reductions, as every ton of carbon saved by reduced deforestation will be compensated for by an extra ton of carbon emitted in the global North. REDD without emission reductions will simply mean the end of most of the world’s forests, as climate change itself is the number one threat to forests and other ecosystems.
It is also unlikely that Northern countries will provide the new and additional funding necessary to pay for REDD on top of the ecological debt repayment Southern countries have demanded. The African Union recently demanded between US$ 65 and US$200 billion per year as ecological debt repayment. The additional costs for REDD vary significantly with the kind of policies that will be implemented. However, the original REDD concept as promoted by PNG would imply that landowners will be granted a right to ask for compensation for not cutting down that forest to produce, for example, palm oil on their land. Oil palm plantation owners can earn between US$3,600 and 12,000 per hectare of plantation. Considering that there are 1.5 billion hectares of tropical forests, and that at least 50 per cent of these areas are suitable for oil palm production, the world community would theoretically have to provide between US$2,700 and US$9,000 billion per year to compensate potential oil palm farmers alone. The chances that Northern countries will commit to paying those costs, on top of their ecological debt payments, are, again, very slim. The financial offer by the EU made on 10 September 2009, less than three months before the Copenhagen Summit, is more in the range of US$1.5 to US$4 billion per year, some 0.1 per cent of what would be needed for the PNG version of REDD alone.
Many institutions have argued that REDD should be financed through a “basket of funding options”,[4] that is, by a combination of public funds and carbon markets. As stated above, the first and foremost problem with this is that it will mean that REDD does not contribute to climate change mitigation, but rather to helping the North find cheap reduction options. Allowing carbon offsets for REDD and other projects will also seriously undermine Southern claims to reparations for ecological debt. By absorbing the little development space that Southern countries have left, such offsets will significantly increase inequities in the division of ecological space between North and South (FoE 2009).
Another major problem with REDD is the definition of forests that was adopted by the parties to the Kyoto Protocol in 2001. This definition includes not only a forest as commonly perceived, but also any kind of tree monoculture, and even areas that are ‘temporarily unstocked’ (a euphemism for clear-cut) but waiting to be planted again at an unspecified future moment. This flawed definition will most likely be adopted for REDD activities. As a result, REDD policies might not only ignore serious forms of forest degradation (see also Sasaki 2009) but also the quite common forestry practice of replacing biologically diverse forests with monoculture tree plantations.
While some of the latest proposals include references to the need for ‘co-benefits’ for biodiversity and even reject ‘the replacement of natural forests by tree plantations’, these safeguards, even if accepted, will not prevent significant amounts of funding from being used for the establishment of tree monocultures in non-forest areas. The Brazilian national climate strategy, for example, includes a target of 13 million hectares of additional tree plantations, of which only 2 million hectares will be planted with native species. The more recent “planted forests” strategy sets a target that is more than double that. Most of these plantations will either replace other ecosystems like pampa (grasslands), cerrado (semi-dry woodland) or caatinga (arid woodlands), and/or areas where forests might have grown back provided the land was left undisturbed.
Indigenous Peoples’ Organisations (IPOs) have expressed strong concerns about the potential impact of REDD on their rights and interests, including their land rights. Considering the significant amounts of funding that might be at stake, their fear is that indigenous lands will be subjected to land grabbing for profitable projects. These impacts will be significantly aggravated if REDD is financed through carbon markets, as commercial finance is likely to flow towards projects that are able to reduce deforestation rates significantly. Comparative research in Brazil revealed that deforestation rates in indigenous reserves are between 1.7 and 7 times lower than deforestation rates in surrounding areas (Nepstad et al. 2006). The Center for International Forestry Research has thus recommended that payments for environmental services should not be targeting indigenous peoples, as it would be highly inefficient to pay people who were not planning to deforest their territory anyway.
An analysis by the Global Forest Coalition of the impact of market-based conservation in five different communities revealed that:
[t]he use of market-based mechanisms inevitably means that the odds are stacked against those in a weaker initial negotiating position. This includes people with no legal land tenure and those unable to afford the considerable expense involved in the preparation of environmental impact assessments, the delivery of environmental services, the fulfilment of a range of quantifiable qualification criteria and the provision of upfront and operational finance, including insurance against project failure. This implies that market-based conservation mechanisms will inevitably lead to increased corporate governance over biodiversity conservation, and erode the governance systems of (monetary) poor communities and social groups including Indigenous Peoples and women.[5]
While carbon markets can, in theory, bring some economic benefits to local communities, it is important to analyse any economic costs in terms of decreased food security and food sovereignty and the loss of alternative sources of jobs and income related to, for example, the establishment of labour-extensive tree plantations. The most significant impact was the sense of disempowerment felt by many community members. In all cases, local residents reported that their control over their forests and livelihoods had decreased because “the main decisions were now taken by other actors”. Thus, communities that had their own governance systems promoting collective sustainable management of biodiversity became, under the impact of market-based mechanisms, more likely to act individually and pursue individual economic interests such as jobs, profits and financial rewards. The position of women within the communities was also affected, as women’s interests are more likely to be overlooked in commercial transactions normally closed by men (even in communities where women previously had responsibility for matters related to forests and biodiversity). Women have a disadvantageous position in monetary economies in general, as they spend a significant part of their time on activities such as childcare, household management, procuring clean water and other goods for the family, which are not rewarded in monetary terms.[6]
The challenge of equitable sharing of benefits is felt not only on a sub-national level. By definition, REDD will lead to much higher payments for countries that have failed to halt deforestation until now, as these countries have deforestation to reduce. Recent proposals to include “enhancement of carbon stocks” (that is, reforestation, including the establishment of monoculture tree plantations) and land management practices are unlikely to resolve these inequities, as those countries that have caused much carbon emission through both deforestation and unsustainable land management practices will still receive far higher payments other than countries that have practised sustainable land management. African countries will not be able to compete with the likes of Indonesia and Brazil in reducing emissions from land management. Thanks to its land-based emissions, Indonesia has joined the world’s three largest emitters. A country like Ethiopia will have a hard time competing with that, even if it does decide to plaster its countryside with 27 million hectares of monoculture tree plantations, as Brazil intends to do, according to its draft “planted forests” strategy.
Thanks to the vocal campaigns of IPOs themselves, especially at recent conferences of the parties of the Climate Convention, concerns about indigenous rights seem to be taken seriously by at least some governments. In this respect, it has been helpful that the two main multinational initiatives to finance countries’ efforts to “prepare” for REDD, the World Bank Forest Carbon Partnership Facility and the UN-REDD programme, are respectively bound to instruments that demand consultation with and participation by indigenous peoples in the development of policies that affect them. UNDRIPs even specifies the right to “free prior and informed consent”, which means that REDD policies should formally be implemented with explicit indigenous peoples’ consent. It is important to note that this pressure from the main REDD donors has been helpful in convincing at least some governments to consult with IPOs in the elaboration of their REDD strategies. For some countries, especially in Africa and Asia, this was the first time ever indigenous peoples were seriously consulted on forest policies.
However, it is important to remain cautious here, as these multilateral donors are mainly funding the preparation of REDD strategies. Once these strategies reach the implementation stage and support comes in from donors and carbon markets that are not bound to indigenous rights’ instruments, these rights could easily be marginalised again. Indications are that the capacity of national IPOs themselves to engage in the national REDD debate are a determining factor on whether REDD will benefit them or not, and regrettably many of them still lack that capacity.
Last but not least, at the international level, REDD is in violation of UNDRIPs, as the negotiations have continued until now without any meaningful participation by indigenous peoples, despite the fact that a REDD agreement by the FCCC will have a significant impact on indigenous territories, which are home to many of the world’s most precious forests.
The need for good governance as one of the preconditions for proper implementation of REDD has been emphasised by many inter-governmental and non-governmental institutions.[6] Without good governance, corporations and other national actors will be inclined to claim overestimated or otherwise fraudulent emission reductions. In order to calculate the reductions caused by a specific conservation project, one has to establish an appropriate baseline in order to ascertain exactly what proportion of the emission reductions is the result of the project. But establishing proper baselines and verification of the added value of REDD activities has proven a tremendous challenge. It is hard to define what would have happened with a forest in a business-as-usual situation. Determining a proper baseline:
would either take the form of a reference period in the past or a scenario which could be used as a convincing projection of the future trends of deforestation. Unfortunately, there is little chance that the future resembles the past; robust predictions of future deforestation seem unlikely given the complex interactions of factors commanding the pace of deforestation, especially as most of them lie outside the forest sector. (Karsenty 2008)
Another major problem is that of “leakage”, which is inherent in forest-related carbon projects. Leakage means that the environmental benefits of a project are undermined or even completely negated because the destructive activities are simply moved to another area. Protecting one forest area from logging, for example, makes little sense for the climate and provides few environmental benefits if the logging shifts to a nearby area, or another country.
Here again, the problems with REDD are seriously aggravated if REDD is funded through carbon markets. If non-additional emission reductions from deforestation are used to compensate for real emissions in the North, the net result will be increased emissions and thus aggravated climate change.
The fundamental dilemma with REDD is that deforestation itself is an indicator of bad governance and thus a good reason not to implement REDD. As practically all countries in the world (the US being the only exception) have not only ratified the Convention on Biodiversity but also committed themselves in 2002 to significantly reducing biodiversity loss by 2010, those countries that still have high deforestation rates are obviously not complying with international commitments. That makes REDD a recipe for disaster in countries like PNG, Brazil and Indonesia, in fact, in practically all countries that still, 17 years after the UN Conference on Environment and Development, have not succeeded in reducing deforestation.
Luckily, there are countries that have succeeded in reducing or even halting deforestation. These countries are complying with the relevant regulations, and they should be rewarded for doing so through the provision of significant new and additional financial resources. Respecting indigenous land rights and community forest management has proven to be one of the most equitable, effective and efficient policy incentives for forest conservation and forest restoration. While these policies require far less funding than compensation schemes targeted at compensating soy farmers for not burning every hectare of their land, they still require institutional capacity, sound monitoring and enforcement systems and resources to develop socially just, participatory and inclusive forest conservation and restoration policies. Both the Convention on Biodiversity and the Framework Convention on Climate Change that were signed in 1992 oblige all governments to conserve forests and require developed countries to contribute new and additional financial resources to reward developing countries for the incremental costs of providing global environmental benefits through reducing deforestation. The fact that the overwhelming majority of developed countries have not complied with these legally binding agreements does not imply that they do not exist anymore. Instead, as pointed out by an increasing number of G-77 countries, the failure to comply with these commitments has created an ecological debt that should be repaid on top of the new and additional resources that were promised 17 years ago.
[1] Accra Caucus statement on forests and climate change http://bit.ly/8v5sok
The Forests Dialogue http://bit.ly/4ye7MT
Rights and Resources Initiative and Rainforest Foundation Norway | Rights-based climate change mitigation and adaptation http://bit.ly/6ycRaS
Tebtebba | REDD and AD and Indigenous Peoples | Climate Change and Indigenous Peopleshttp://bit.ly/75h6PW
CIFOR | Moving Ahead With REDD http://bit.ly/7aVWjP
UN-REDD | Framework Document http://bit.ly/4VSdDJ
[2] A noteworthy exception is the recently published IIED briefi ng paper, Cotula, L. and J. Mayers (2009), Tenure in REDD, Start-point or Afterthought?
[3] The legislation is still being discussed, but this is a conservative estimate. Different US-based NGOs have estimated that the bill will reduce emissions to 1990 levels between 2024 and 2042.
[5] GFC 2008.
[6] ibid.
[7] UN-REDD | Operational Guidance: Engagement of Indigenous Peoples and Other Forest Dependent Communities, 25 June 2009 http://bit.ly/5GSQrz
Rights and Resources Initiative | Climate Change and Governance in the Forest Sectorhttp://bit.ly/6vjnz9
Read more... Sphere: Related ContentCotula, L., and J. Mayers (2009), Tenure in REDD – Start-point or Afterthought?’. Natural Resource Issues NO. 15. London: International Institute for Environment and Development.
Friends of the Earth (FoE) (2009), A Dangerous Distraction, Why Offsetting in Failing the Climate and People: The Evidence.
Global Forest Coalition (GFC) (2008), Life as Commerce: The Impact of Market-based Conservation on Indigenous Peoples, Local Communities and Women.
Karsenty, A., (2008), ‘The Architecture of Proposed REDD Schemes after Bali: Facing Critical Choices’, Département Environnements et Societés, Montpellier.
Lovera., S. (2006), ‘Reducing Deforestation, It’s the Money We Love’, Forest Cover 20. October.
Nepstad, D., S. Schwartzman, B. Bamberger, M. Santilli, P. Schlesinger, P. Lefebvre, A. Alencar, D. Ray, E. Prinz, and A. Rolla (2006), ‘Inhibition of Amazon Deforestation and Fire by Parks and Indigenous Reserves’, Conservation Biology, Vol. 20, No. 1, pp.65-73.
Sasaki, N. and F. Putz (2009), ‘Critical Need for New Definitions of “Forests” and “Forest Degradation” in Global Climate Agreements’, Conservation Letters, Vol. xx, pp.1-7.
Article Link: http://reep.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/4/1/44?etoc
This article surveys selected contributions of economics to the literature on water pollution and the regulation of water quality. While not a comprehensive review, the article highlights water pollution issues to which economics has made important contributions, as well as areas in which further research might illuminate critical questions from the perspective of theory, empirics, or applied policy analysis. The focus is on drinking water regulation and provision; water quality standards in local, national, and transboundary settings; and the issue of policy instrument choice for water quality regulation.
by Sheila M. Olmstead, Associate Professor of Environmental Economics, School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, Yale University, 195 Prospect Street, New Haven, CT 06511, USA. Telephone: 203-432-6247; Fax: 203-436-9150; e-mail: sheila.olmstead@yale.edu; and Visiting Scholar, Resources for the Future.
Review of Environmental Economics and Policy via Oxford University Press
http://reep.oxfordjournals.org on behalf of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists
Volume 4, Issue 1; 2010; Pages 44-62; Advance Access originally published online on November 12, 2009
Aguiar, Luis, and Andrew Herod, eds. The Dirty Work of Neoliberalism: Cleaners in the Global Economy: Cleaners in the Global Economy. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2006.
In this edited volume Luis Aguiar and Andrew Herod have brought together a collection of articles on the global cleaning industry principally organized into three thematic sections: geography, ethnography and agency. This book takes an expansive approach to considering labour relations in the cleaning industry. Not only do the editors manage to bring together a collection of articles in which the experience of cleaners in the global north and the global south are put into relief. They also manage to provide great depth in terms of the individual experiences of cleaners as they are subject to increasing forms of intensive management. Here a clear line is drawn between classic Taylorist managerial strategies (involving increasing levels of micro-supervision with the goal of work intensification), new innovations in cleaning machinery and surveillance technology and the pressures that a now globalized cleaning industry brings to bear on workers in the modern cleaning sector. The last section of the book is dedicated to an exploration of the different strategies of resistance to work intensification and to examples of the collective struggles taken-up by workers in the furtherance of their common interests. This book thus comprises an ambitious attempt to reveal, what the authors’ stress, is the hidden and largely invisible world of the cleaning industry, cleaning work and the particular challenges facing cleaning workers.
One of the articles I personally found most interesting was that authored by Andries Bezuidenhout and Khayaat Fakier. Here the authors do an excellent job at exposing the continuities and discontinuities between the pre and post apartheid labour relations regimes. Both the continuities and discontinuities will be disconcerting for those who would hold to any simplistic notion of the amelioration of the life of South African workers following the end of apartheid.
Clearly the strength of this book is that it combines the work of several different researchers and their diverse perspectives. As often is the case in projects of this type and scope, however, its strength is also its weakness: the diversity of the researchers and perspectives makes it difficult to achieve a totally coherent whole. For example, as the title of the book makes clear the editors seek to link the research contained inter alia to the broader political economy of what the authors see as a globalized neoliberalism. While I am sympathetic to this project I am not sure the articles manage to come together in a systematic enough fashion to offer a clear workout of neoliberalism as a description of the structure of the global economy, an ideology, or a policy paradigm. In this regard the introductory remarks of the editors are too schematic.
Yet these are minor criticisms. I would recommend this book to those with an interest in critical management studies, industrial relations, trade unionists and those who specialize in the sociology of work.
Read more... Sphere: Related ContentAvatar, James Cameron’s blockbusting 3-D film, is both profoundly silly and profound. It’s profound because, like most films about aliens, it is a metaphor for contact between different human cultures. But in this case the metaphor is conscious and precise: this is the story of European engagement with the native peoples of the Americas. It’s profoundly silly because engineering a happy ending demands a plot so stupid and predictable that it rips the heart out of the film. The fate of the native Americans is much closer to the story told in another new film, The Road, in which a remnant population flees in terror as it is hunted to extinction.
But this is a story no one wants to hear, because of the challenge it presents to the way we choose to see ourselves. Europe was massively enriched by the genocides in the Americas; the American nations were founded on them. This is a history we cannot accept.
In his book American Holocaust, the US scholar David Stannard documents the greatest acts of genocide the world has ever experienced(1). In 1492, some 100m native peoples lived in the Americas. By the end of the 19th Century almost all of them had been exterminated. Many died as a result of disease. But the mass extinction was also engineered.
When the Spanish arrived in the Americas, they described a world which could scarcely have been more different from their own. Europe was ravaged by war, oppression, slavery, fanaticism, disease and starvation. The populations they encountered were healthy, well-nourished and mostly (with exceptions like the Aztecs and Incas) peacable, democratic and egalitarian. Throughout the Americas the earliest explorers, including Columbus, remarked on the natives’ extraordinary hospitality. The conquistadores marvelled at the amazing roads, canals, buildings and art they found, which in some cases outstripped anything they had seen at home. None of this stopped them from destroying everything and everyone they encountered.
The butchery began with Columbus. He slaughtered the native people of Hispaniola (now Haiti and the Dominican Republic) by unimaginably brutal means. His soldiers tore babies from their mothers and dashed their heads against rocks. They fed their dogs on living children. On one occasion they hung 13 Indians in honour of Christ and the 12 disciples, on a gibbet just low enough for their toes to touch the ground, then disembowelled them and burnt them alive. Columbus ordered all the native people to deliver a certain amount of gold every three months; anyone who failed had his hands cut off. By 1535 the native population of Hispaniola had fallen from 8m to zero: partly as a result of disease, partly as a result of murder, overwork and starvation.
The conquistadores spread this civilising mission across central and south America. When they failed to reveal where their mythical treasures were hidden, the indigenous people were flogged, hanged, drowned, dismembered, ripped apart by dogs, buried alive or burnt. The soldiers cut off women’s breasts, sent people back to their villages with their severed hands and noses hung round their necks and hunted Indians with their dogs for sport. But most were killed by enslavement and disease. The Spanish discovered that it was cheaper to work Indians to death and replace them than to keep them alive: the life expectancy in their mines and plantations was three to four months. Within a century of their arrival, around 95% of the population of South and Central America had been destroyed.
In California during the 18th Century the Spanish systematised this extermination. A Franciscan missionary called Junipero Serra set up a series of “missions”: in reality concentration camps using slave labour. The native people were herded in under force of arms and made to work in the fields on one fifth of the calories fed to African-American slaves in the 19th century. They died from overwork, starvation and disease at astonishing rates, and were continually replaced, wiping out the indigenous populations. Junipero Serra, the Eichmann of California, was beatified by the Vatican in 1988. He now requires one more miracle to be pronounced a saint(2).
While the Spanish were mostly driven by the lust for gold, the British who colonised North America wanted land. In New England they surrounded the villages of the native Americans and murdered them as they slept. As genocide spread westwards, it was endorsed at the highest levels. George Washington ordered the total destruction of the homes and land of the Iroquois. Thomas Jefferson declared that his nation’s wars with the Indians should be pursued until each tribe “is exterminated or is driven beyond the Mississippi”. During the Sand Creek Massacre of 1864, troops in Colorado slaughtered unarmed people gathered under a flag of peace, killing children and babies, mutilating all the corpses and keeping their victims’ genitals to use as tobacco pouches or to wear on their hats. Theodore Roosevelt called this event “as rightful and beneficial a deed as ever took place on the frontier.”
The butchery hasn’t yet ended: last month the Guardian reported that Brazilian ranchers in the western Amazon, having slaughtered all the rest, tried to kill the last surviving member of a forest tribe(3). Yet the greatest acts of genocide in history scarcely ruffle our collective conscience. Perhaps this is what would have happened had the Nazis won the second world war: the Holocaust would have been denied, excused or minimised in the same way, even as it continued. The people of the nations responsible – Spain, Britain, the US and others – will tolerate no comparisons, but the final solutions pursued in the Americas were far more successful. Those who commissioned or endorsed them remain national or religious heroes. Those who seek to prompt our memories are ignored or condemned.
This is why the right hates Avatar. In the neocon Weekly Standard, John Podhoretz complains that the film resembles a “revisionist western” in which “the Indians became the good guys and the Americans the bad guys.”(4) He says it asks the audience “to root for the defeat of American soldiers at the hands of an insurgency.” Insurgency is an interesting word for an attempt to resist invasion: insurgent, like savage, is what you call someone who has something you want. L’Osservatore Romano, the official newspaper of the Vatican, condemned the film as “just … an anti-imperialistic, anti-militaristic parable”(5).
But at least the right knows what it is attacking. In the New York Times the liberal critic Adam Cohen praises Avatar for championing the need to see clearly(6). It reveals, he says, “a well-known principle of totalitarianism and genocide - that it is easiest to oppress those we cannot see”. But in a marvellous unconscious irony, he bypasses the crashingly obvious metaphor and talks instead about the light it casts on Nazi and Soviet atrocities. We have all become skilled in the art of not seeing.
I agree with its rightwing critics that Avatar is crass, mawkish and cliched. But it speaks of a truth more important - and more dangerous - than those contained in a thousand arthouse movies.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2010
Camilla Toulmin
Global warming above the level of two degrees Celsius would be enormously damaging for poorer parts of the world, leading to crises with crops, livestock, water supplies and coastal areas. Within Africa, it's likely to be the continent's poorest people who are hit hardest. In this accessible and authoritative introduction to an often-overlooked aspect of the environment, Camilla Toulmin uses case studies to look at issues ranging from natural disasters to biofuels, and from conflict to the oil industry. Finally, the book addresses what future there might be for Africa in a carbon-constrained world.
“Climate Change in Africa” is an authoritative, accurate and insightful analysis of what the global challenge of climate change means for the continent. An essential guide to the mind-boggling climate-related issues considered from an African perspective." - Youba Sokona, Secrétaire Exécutif, Observatoire du Sahara et du Sahel (OSS)
'Camilla Toulmin combines a deep and nuanced knowledge of African society with a profound grasp of the impact of climate change on that continent. Covering both threats and opportunities, she shows how, for good or ill, climate change will be a new and critical driver in the next phase of African development. In the run up to the Copenhagen climate summit, this book should be required reading for anyone wishing to get to grips with the multiple interconnections between climate change and development in the world's poorest continent.' - Duncan Green, Head of Research, Oxfam
"Speaking about global warming, who really thinks of Africa? Read Toulmin's book to fully grasp the double injustice of our time: Africa, though without any responsibility for climate change, will dramatically suffer; and yet, the innocent victim is not given much voice at the ongoing climate negotiations."- Wolfgang Sachs, Wuppertal Institute for Climate, Environment and Energy, "author of "Fair Future. Resource Conflicts, Security, and Global Justice" (pick one byline)
"Climate change is already having profound effects in Africa, from the devastating floods of 2007 to wars which are already breaking out over land and water, as people start to move. And this is on the basis of world temperature changes which are small relative to those we risk if we carry on for much longer as we are. Of all the continents , Africa is least responible for these changes. Camilla Toulmin with her long experience of working in rural Africa, her scholarship and her leadership of the IIED, is especially qualified to analyse and explain the issues and to point to the policies which the world must follow. This is a very clear, reasoned and thoughtful book which will be of great importance in the crucial discussions which lie ahead" - Lord Nicholas Stern
Notes
Index
Camilla Toulmin is Director of the International Institute for Environment & Development. An economist by training, she has worked mainly in Africa on social, economic, and environmental development. This has combined field research, policy analysis, capacity building and advocacy. Her work has aimed to understand how societies evolve to cope with changed circumstances, and to demonstrate the links between global and local levels.
We have finally arrived at the main story: what we need to do to solve the climate problem, and how we can save a future for our grandchildren.
People need to make basic changes in the way the live. Countries need to cooperate. Matters as seemingly intractable as population must be addressed. And the required changes must be economically efficient. Such a pathway exists and is achievable.
Let's define what a workable backbone and framework should look like. The essential backbone is a rising price on carbon applied at the source (the mine, wellhead, or port of entry), such that it would affect all activities that use fossil fuels, directly or indirectly.
Our goal is a global phaseout of fossil fuel carbon dioxide emissions. We have shown, quantitatively, that the only practical way to achieve an acceptable carbon dioxide level is to disallow the use of coal and unconventional fossil fuels (such as tar sands and oil shale) unless the resulting carbon is captured and stored. We realize that remaining, readily available pools of oil and gas will be used during the transition to a post-fossil-fuel world. But a rising carbon price surely will make it economically senseless to go after every last drop of oil and gas--even though use of those fuels with carbon capture and storage may be technically feasible and permissible.
Global phaseout of fossil fuel carbon dioxide emissions is a stringent requirement. Proposed government policies, consisting of an improved Kyoto Protocol approach with more ambitious targets, do not have a prayer of achieving that result. Our governments are deceiving us, and perhaps conveniently deceiving themselves, when they say that it is possible to reduce emissions 80 percent by 2050 with such an approach.
A successful new policy cannot include any offsets. We specified the carbon limit based on the geophysics. The physics does not compromise--it is what it is. And planting additional trees cannot be factored into the fossil fuel limitations. The plan for getting back to 350 ppm assumes major reforestation, but that is in addition to the fossil fuel limit, not instead of. Forest preservation and reforestation should be handled separately from fossil fuels in a sound approach to solve the climate problem.
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.
Be prepared for energy experts telling you that a kazillion units of energy will be needed in 2050 or 2100. They will calculate how many square miles of solar power plants must be built every day or how many nuclear power plants must be built every year, and then they will wring their hands and perhaps try to sell you something. Yes, energy use is going to increase--mainly because parts of the world are developing rapidly and raising their standards of living and energy use. But energy growth need not be exceedingly rapid--energy use hardly grew during rapid economic growth in the world's largest economy, even though the great potential of energy efficiency was barely tapped.
Also remember that the solution to the climate problem requires a phasedown of carbon emissions, not necessarily a phasedown of energy use. We will need to slow the energy growth rate and decarbonizes our energy sources to solve the problem.
Why do fossil fuels continue to provide most of our energy? The reason is simple. Fossil fuels are the cheapest energy. This is in part due to their marvelous energy density and the intricate energy-use infrastructure that has grown up around fossil fuels. But there is another reason: Fossil fuels are cheapest because we do not take into account their true cost to society. Effects of air and water pollution on human health are borne by the public. Damages from climate change are also falling on the public, but they will be borne especially by our children and grandchildren.
How can we fix the problem? The solution necessarily will increase the price of fossil fuel energy. We must admit that. In the end, energy efficiency and carbon-free energy can surely be made less expensive than fossil fuels, if fossil fuels' cost to society is included. The difficult part is that we must make the transition with extraordinary speed if we are to avert climate disaster. Rather than immediately defining a proposed framework for a solution, which may appear to be arbitrary without further information, we need to first explore the problem and its practical difficulties.
Two alternative legislative actions have been proposed in the United States: "fee-and-dividend" and "cap-and-trade." Let's begin by looking at the simpler approach, fee-and-dividend. In this method, a fee is collected at the mine or port of entry for each fossil fuel (coal, oil and gas), i.e., at its first sale in the country. The fee is uniform, a single number, in dollars per ton of carbon dioxide in the fuel. The public does not directly pay any fee or tax, but the price of the goods they buy increases in proportion to how much fossil fuel is used in their production. Fuels such as gasoline or heating oil, along with electricity made from coal, oil or gas, are affected directly by the carbon fee, which is set to increase over time. The carbon fee will rise gradually so that the public will have time to adjust their lifestyle, choice of vehicle, home insulation, etc., so as to minimize their carbon footprint.
Under fee-and-dividend, 100 percent of the money collected from the fossil fuel companies at the mine or well is distributed uniformly to the public. Thus those who do better than average in reducing their carbon footprint will receive more in the dividend than they will pay in the added costs of the products they buy.
The fee-and-dividend approach is straightforward. It does not require a large bureaucracy. The total amount collected each month is divided equally among all legal adult residents of the country, with half shares for children, up to two children per family. This dividend is sent electronically to bank accounts, or for people without a bank account, to their debit card.
A rising carbon price does not eliminate the need for efficiency regulations, but it makes them work much better. The best enforcement is carbon price--as the fuel price rises, people pay attention to waste.
Let's discuss cap-and-trade explicitly. Then I will provide a bottom-line proof that it cannot work.
In cap-and-trade, the amount of a fossil fuel for sale is supposedly "capped." A nominal cap is defined by selling a limited number of certificates that allow a business or speculator to buy the fuel. So the fuel costs more because you must pay for the certificate and the fuel. Congress thinks this will reduce the amount of fuel you buy--which may be true, because it will cost you more. Congress likes cap-and-trade because it thinks the public will not figure out that a cap is a tax. How does the "trade" part factor in? Well, you don't have to use the certificate; you can trade it or sell it to somebody else. There will be markets for these certificates on Wall Street and such places. And markets for derivatives. The biggest player is expected to be Goldman Sachs. What is the advantage of cap-and-trade over fee-and-dividend, with the fee distributed to the public in equal shares? There is an advantage to cap-and-trade only for energy companies with strong lobbyists and for Congress, which would get to dole out the money collected in certificate selling, or just give away some certificates to special interests.
Okay, I will try to be more specific about why cap-and-trade will be necessarily ineffectual. Most of these arguments are relevant to other nations as well as the United States.
First, Congress is pretending that the cap is not a tax, so it must try to keep the cap's impact on fuel costs small. Therefore, the impact of cap-and-trade on people's spending decisions will be small, so necessarily it will have little effect on carbon emissions. Of course that defeats the whole purpose, which is to drive out fossil fuels by raising their price, replacing them with efficiency and carbon-free energy. The impact of cap-and-trade is made even smaller by the fact that the cap is usually not across the board at the mine. In the fee-and-dividend system, a single number, dollars per ton of carbon dioxide, is applied at the mine or port of entry. No exceptions, no freebies for anyone, all fossil fuels covered for everybody. In cap-and-trade, things are usually done in a more complicated way, which allows lobbyists and special interests to get their fingers in the pie. If the cap is not applied across the board, covering everything equally, any sector not covered will be able to lower its price. Sectors not covered then increase their fuel use.
In contrast, the fee-and-dividend approach puts a rising and substantial price on carbon. I believe that the public, if honestly informed, will accept a rise in the carbon fee rate because their monthly dividend will increase correspondingly. The cap-and-trade target level for emissions (defined by the number of permits) sets a floor on emissions. Emissions cannot go lower than this floor, because the price of permits on the market would crash, bringing down fossil fuel prices and again making it more economical for profit-maximizing businesses to burn fossil fuels than to employ energy-efficiency measures and renewable energy technology.
With fee-and-dividend, in contrast, we will reach a series of points at which various carbon-free energies and carbon-saving technologies are cheaper than fossil fuels plus their fee. As time goes on, fossil fuel use will collapse, remaining coal supplies will be left in the ground, and we will have arrived at a clean energy future. And that is our objective.
A perverse effect of the cap-and-trade floor is that altruistic actions become meaningless. Say that you are concerned about your grandchildren, so you decide to buy a high-efficiency little car. That will reduce your emissions but not the country's or the world's; instead it will just allow somebody else to drive a bigger SUV. Emissions will be set by the cap, not by your actions.
Fourth, Wall Street trading of emission permits and their derivatives in the anticipated multitrillion-dollar carbon market, along with the demonstrated volatility of carbon markets, creates the danger of Wall Street failures and taxpayer-funded bailouts. In the best case, if market failures are avoided, there is the added cost of the Wall Street trading operation and the profits of insider trading.
In contrast, a simple flat fee at the mine or well, with simple long division to determine the size of the monthly dividend to all legal residents, provides no role for Wall Street. Could that be the main reason that Washington so adamantly prefers cap-and-trade? Fee-and-dividend is revenue neutral to the public, on average. Cap-and-trade is not, because we, the public, provide the profits to Wall Street and any special interests that have managed to get written into the legislation. Of course Congress will say, "We will keep the cost very low, so you will hardly notice it." The problem is, if it's too small for you to notice, then it is not having an effect. But maybe Congress doesn't really care about your grandchildren.
Hold on! Or so you must be thinking. If cap-and-trade is so bad, why do environmental organizations such as the Environmental Defense Fund and the National Resources Defense Council support it? And what about Waxman and Markey, two of the strongest supporters of the environment among all members of the House of Representatives?
I don't doubt the motives of these people and organizations, but they have been around Washington a long time. They think they can handle this problem the way they always have, by wheeling and dealing. Environmental organizations "help" Congress in the legislative process, just as the coal and oil lobbyists do. So there are lots of "good" items in the 1,400 pages of the Waxman-Markey bill, such as support for specific renewable energies. There may be more good items than bad ones--but unfortunately the net result is ineffectual change. Indeed, the bill throws money to the polluters, propping up the coal industry with tens of billions of taxpayer dollars and locking in coal emissions for decades at great expense.
Yet these organizations say, "It is a start. We will get better legislation in the future." It would surely require continued efforts for many decades, but we do not have many decades to straighten out the mess.
The beauty of the fee-and-dividend approach is that the carbon fee helps any carbon-free energy source, but it does not specify these sources; it lets the consumer choose. It does not cost the government anything. Whether it costs citizens, and how much, depends on how well they reduce their carbon footprint.
A final comment on cap-and-trade versus fee-and-dividend. Say an exogenous development occurs, for example, someone invents an inexpensive solar cell or an algae biofuel that works wonders. Any such invention will add to the 28 percent emissions reduction in the fee- and- dividend approach. But the 17 percent reduction under cap-and-trade will be unaffected, because the cap is a floor. Permit prices would fall, so energy prices would fall, but emission reductions would not go below the floor. Cap-and-trade is not a smart approach.
Contrary to the assertion by proponents of a Kyoto-style cap-and-trade agreement, cap-and-trade is not the fastest way to an international agreement. That assertion is another case of calling black "white," apparently under the assumption that the listener will accept it without thinking. A cap-and-trade agreement will be just as hard to achieve as was the Kyoto Protocol. Indeed, why should China, India, and the rest of the developing world accept a cap when their per-capita emissions are an order of magnitude less than America's or Europe's? Leaders of developing countries are making that argument more and more vocally. Even if differences are papered over to achieve a cap-and-trade agreement at upcoming international talks, the agreement is guaranteed to be ineffectual. So eventually (quickly, I hope!) it must be replaced with a more meaningful approach. Let's define one.
The key requirement is that the United States and China agree to apply across-the-board fees to carbon-based fuels. Why would China do that? Lots of reasons. China is developing rapidly and it does not want to be saddled with the fossil fuel addiction that plagues the United States. Besides, China would be hit at least as hard as the United States by climate change. The most economically efficient way for China to limit its fossil fuel dependence, to encourage energy efficiency and carbon-free energies, is via a uniform carbon fee.
The same is true for the United States. Indeed, if the United States does not take such an approach but rather continues to throw lifelines to special interests, its economic power and standard of living will deteriorate, because such actions make the United States economy less and less efficient relative to the rest of the world.
Agreement between the United States and China comes down to negotiating the ratio of their respective carbon tax rates. In this negotiation the question of fairness will come up--the United States being more responsible for the excess carbon dioxide in the air today despite its smaller population. That negotiation will not be easy, but once both countries realize they are on the same boat and will sink or survive together, an agreement should be possible. Europe, Japan and most developed countries would likely agree to a similar status to that of the United States. It would not be difficult to deal with any country that refuses to levy a comparable across-the-board carbon fee. An import duty could be collected by countries importing products from any nation that does not levy such a carbon fee. The World Trade Organization already has rules permitting such duties. The duty would be based on standard estimates of the amount of fossil fuels that go into producing the imported product, with the exporting company allowed the option of demonstrating that its product is made without fossil fuels, or with a lesser amount of them. In fact, exporting countries would have a strong incentive to impose their own carbon fee, so that they could keep the revenue themselves.
As for developing nations, and the poorest nations in the world, how can they be treated fairly? They also must have a fee on their fossil fuel use or a duty applied to the products that they export. That is the only way that fossil fuels can be phased out. If these countries do not have a tax on fossil fuels, then industry will move there, as it has moved already from the West to China and India, with carbon pollution moving along with it. Fairness can be achieved by using the funds from export duties, which are likely to greatly exceed foreign aid, to improve the economic and social well-being of the developing nations.
In summary, the backbone of a solution to the climate problem is a flat carbon emissions price applied across all fossil fuels at the source. This carbon price (fee, tax) must rise continually, at a rate that is economically sound. The funds must be distributed back to the citizens (not to special interests)--otherwise the tax rate will never be high enough to lead to a clean energy future. If your government comes back and tells you that it is going to have a "goal" or "target" for carbon emission reductions, even a "mandatory" one, you know that it is lying to you, and that it doesn't give a damn about your children or grandchildren. For the moment, let's assume that our governments will see the light.
Once the necessity of a backbone flat carbon price across all fossil fuel sources is recognized, the required elements for a framework agreement become clear. The principal requirement will be to define how this tax rate will vary between nations. Recalcitrance of any nations to agree to the carbon price can be handled via import duties, which are permissible under existing international agreements. The framework must also define how proceeds of carbon duties will be used to assure fairness, encourage practices that improve women's rights and education, and help control population. A procedure should be defined for a regular adjustment of funds' distribution for fairness and to reward best performance. Well, what happens if, instead of accepting the need for a rising carbon price, our governments continue to deceive us, setting goals and targets for carbon emissions reductions?
In that case we had better start thinking about the Venus syndrome.
To write a history of water was a good idea. Since life depends on water, it has been man’s constant companion from the moment his forebears emerged from the sea and, you could say, even before. Human affairs have therefore been intricately related to water. But man has mistreated his friend, and now, it is said, the world faces a water crisis. There is too much of it in some places, too little in others. It has been acidified, dirtied and squandered. It should no longer be taken for granted.
The first three-quarters of Steven Solomon’s book is an account of the ascendancy and decline of various civilisations, seen through a watery lens. The survey starts in antiquity with Egypt, Mesopotamia and the areas round the Indus and the Yellow River. It runs through the Roman empire, the building of China’s Grand Canal in the seventh century and the Islamic era that followed. Then come the stirrings of mechanical development in medieval Europe that preceded the invention of the steam engine in Britain, the arrival of the industrial age and the mass production, and consumption, of the American century. Along the way the reader learns about aqueducts, dams, canals, waterwheels and devices for lifting water, as well as sanitary inventions, naval battles and maritime voyages of discovery. The thesis is that enduring civilisations are underpinned by effective water control.
As a contention, this may seem banal, yet the tour d’horizon might also have been a tour de force. One difficulty, though, is that Mr Solomon so often strains to make water more important than it actually was. The Roman empire, it seems, fell apart because it lacked the “unifying impetus” of an inland waterway like China’s. It was hydroelectric power, ie, water, that powered the aircraft factories and aluminium smelters that in turn played a “decisive role” in America’s victory in the second world war. Sewers and piped water gave the West “comparative economic and politically legitimising advantages over its cold-war rivals”. The distance-shrinking Panama Canal was another triumph for water. And it was water, or rather its absence, that obliged eighth-century Islam to go out and trade and conquer. Indeed, the Muslims’ use of camels—a proxy for the precious liquid—in crossing deserts just showed the importance of water. No surprise then to learn that the defining geographical condition of America’s Far West was not its Far Westernness but, yes, water scarcity.
Matching the over-claiming is the overwriting. Clashes are existential, audacity is breathtaking. Almost every change is a revolution, every expansion an explosion. Catalysts abound. Indeed, water, it is said at the outset, has an “extraordinary capacity…to catalyse essential chemical reactions”, making it the Earth’s “most potent agent of change”. In truth, water is hardly ever a catalyst in ordinary conditions.
In other respects, the problem is under-, not over-performance. The 97.5% of water that is salty, for example, is hardly considered, except as a means of transport. This leaves quite a hole in a history of water. And though much is made of the steam engine, ice scarcely merits a mention.
In the last quarter of the book, Mr Solomon abandons history and turns to the water shortages of today and the political clashes they may cause. Competition for Nile water is acute between Egypt and Ethiopia. Fierce disputes also divide Turkey and its southern neighbours in the Jordan basin. With India and China, both prodigious consumers of ever-scarcer fresh water, the rivalries are mostly, though not entirely, internal. And in many places, notably the United States, north Africa and the Middle East, aquifers whose water may have lain undisturbed for 10,000 to 75,000 years are now being recklessly drained, with no prospect of a refill for an aeon or two. Everywhere it is the poor who suffer most.
Mr Solomon is not despairing. He gives some reasons for hope. Too bad he did not devote more of his book to the present and the future, and to the policies that could alleviate the situation he describes.
The Ecological Revolution: Making Peace with the PlanetBy John Bellamy FosterMonthly Review Press, 2009328 pages, $37.95
Karl Marx and Frederick Engels famously urged the world’s workers to unite because they had a world to win, and nothing to lose but their chains.
Today, the reality of climate change adds a further vital dimension to this strident vision of human liberation. We still have a world to win — but we also have a world to lose.
With his previous books such as Marx’s Ecology and The Vulnerable Planet, John Bellamy Foster established a reputation as one of the most persuasive voices arguing for fundamental social change to tackle the looming ecological catastrophe.
His new book, The Ecological Revolution, argues that a solution to the ecological crisis “is now either revolutionary or it is false”.
Foster draws on the warnings from leading environmentalists such as Bill McKibben, James Hansen and Lester Brown among others.
General awareness of the extent of environmental decay is more widespread than ever — even among the world’s elites. The upshot is that two distinct versions of ecological revolution have emerged.
The first tries to paint business as usual economics green. The second, following Che Guevara’s maxim, holds it must be a genuine eco-social revolution or it’s a make-believe revolution.
“The conflict between these two opposing approaches to ecological revolution,” writes Foster, “can now be considered the central problem facing environmental social science today.”
The dominant view says a new green industrial revolution can unleash the technological changes to allow sustainable capitalist development and end environmental destruction.
Foster looks at the work of some of the most well-known promoters of a green industrial revolution including the US economist William Nordhaus and the British economist Nicholas Stern.
The Australian government’s main advisor on the economics of climate change, Ross Garnaut, also fits into this broad category.
All assume continued economic growth, the expansion of markets and the unlimited accumulation of capital.
As a way to deal with the planetary emergency, such market-based responses are absurd, irrational, dangerous, self-defeating and destined to fail. They have also been warmly welcomed by the world’s pro-capitalist governments and provide much of the basis of false responses to climate change such as carbon trading and “clean coal”.
Foster aptly sums up the economics of a market-based green industrial revolution as “the economics of exterminism”.
We need “a more radical, eco-social revolution, which draws on alternative technologies where necessary, but emphasises the need to transform the human relation to nature and the constitution of society at its roots”, Foster says.
The goal of such as revolution must be “to return to a more organic, sustainable social-ecological relations [requiring] a civilisational shift based on a revolution in culture, as well as economy and society”.
He argues that a key point of difference between ecological revolution and a green industrial revolution is the involvement and mobilisation of ordinary people in the process of change.
“Green industrial revolution is conceived … as a top-down attempt at a technological shift ... The goal of the vested interests is to keep social change in relation to the environmental challenge contained within the limits acceptable to the system, even at the risk of endangering the entire planet …
“In contrast, a genuine ecological revolution … would be associated with a wider social, not merely industrial, revolution, emanating from the great mass of the people,” Foster says.
Foster argues that if we are to make peace with the planet we have to take political and economic power away from the privileged minority who now hold it. Otherwise, they will lead us all to oblivion in a vain attempt to preserve their system.
“A revolutionary turn in human affairs many seem improbable”, he says. “But the continuation of the present capitalist system for any length of time will prove impossible — if human civilisation and the web of life as we know it are to be sustained.”
Foster describes modern capitalism as a system of ecological imperialism.
“At the planetary level, ecological imperialism has resulted in the appropriation of the global commons (i.e. the atmosphere and the oceans) and the carbon absorption capacity of the biosphere, primarily to the benefit of a relatively small number of countries at the centre of the capitalist world economy.”
Along with the stark prospect of new wars and invasions, imperialism’s response to climate change has been to try to push most of the costs of climate change onto the global South.
This analysis is important for environmental movements in the developed world. The politics of the movement against climate change must be anti-imperialist, anti-war and demand the repayment of the ecological debt to the Third World, if it is to succeed.
In the landmark work Marx’s Ecology, Foster explored Marx’s often neglected contributions to ecological thought. The Ecological Revolution includes several chapters that further build on an understanding of Marx as one of the most perceptive environmental thinkers of the 19th century. His insights are of lasting significance today.
The two core ecological concepts in Marx’s writings are the “treadmill of production” and the “metabolic rift”.
The treadmill of production refers to capitalism’s impulse to unlimited expansion without regard to natural limits on growth set by the biosphere. This impulse makes the process of capital accumulation inherently unsustainable and anti-ecological.
The metabolic rift refers to Marx’s theory that capitalist production necessarily creates a sharp break in the relationship — the metabolism — between nature and human society. Marx used the concept of metabolism to describe the complex and co-dependent union between humanity and the environment.
In Marx’s time, the rift was most apparent in the biggest ecological crisis of the 19th century: the depletion of soil fertility by large-scale capitalist agriculture.
Foster argues Marx used the concept of the metabolic rift more broadly than just agriculture. The task of healing the rift and building a truly sustainable society was a central goal in Marx’s vision of a democratic socialist future.
The entire thrust of The Ecological Revolution is that “the transition to socialism and the transition to an ecological society are one”.
Read more... Sphere: Related Content"Academic disciplines are often separated by gulfs of mutual incomprehension, but the deepest and widest may be the one that separates most economists from most environmentalists...What underlies this is not so much disagreements about facts as disagreement about how to think."
~ Never The Twain Shall Meet. (2002, January 31). The Economist.
"This book was inspired by the warm reception I received from a short essay I wrote back in 2005 entitled, 'Why Environmentalists Should Embrace Economics.' The target audience is those interested in environmental issues with an eye towards actually solving them: students, citizens, policy‐makers, and activists. No economics background is required for this text, although some basic microeconomics knowledge is helpful. Even those with more advanced training in economics may find some new perspectives in this volume that they may have not considered before."
~ Jason Scorse
What Environmentalists Need to Know about Economics - Entire Book
Table of Contents and Introduction
Part I: How Economists Approach Environmental Issues
Chapter 1 - The Root Causes of Environmental Problems
Chapter 2 - Determining the "Optimum" Amount of Pollution
Chapter 3 - Valuing Ecosystems
Chapter 4 - Putting Monetary Values on the Environment and Living Things
Chapter 5 - Valuing Future Generations
Part II: Putting Economic Analysis to Work
Chapter 8 - Conservation and Biodiversity Preservation
Chapter 10 - Chemical Pollution
Chapter 13 - Population Growth & Technological Change
Amid growing public awareness about the dangers of global warming, business and political leaders — as well as everyday citizens — are trying to find ways to reduce carbon-dioxide emissions. What is the current atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide?
A. 280 parts per million
B. 385 parts per million
C. 450 parts per million
D. 550 parts per million
What is the current atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide?
For a few millennia before 1800, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was about 280 parts per million. About 200 years ago, the world released about 10 million tons of carbon dioxide per year through burning fossil fuels. By 1950, annual carbon emissions stood at 1.6 billion tons and the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide reached 311 parts per million.
The current atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide is about 385 parts per million, according to the Earth Policy Institute. Almost all of this 38 percent increase since the preindustrial era is due to human activity, with humans having released nearly 8.4 billion tons into the atmosphere through the burning of fossil fuels in 2006 alone. Global carbon-dioxide concentration is increasing by about two parts per million per year. Assuming that current trends continue, the atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases would reach 1,000 parts per million by 2100. This would result in a global temperature increase of up to 11 degrees.
A generally accepted goal of a relatively "safe" level of carbon-dioxide concentration (in terms of its likely climate-change consequences) is about 440 parts per million. A greenhouse-gas concentration of 450 would increase global temperatures by about 3.5 degrees. To achieve this level by 2030, emissions in OECD countries would need to be reduced by almost 40 percent compared with 2006 levels. Other major economies would need to limit emissions growth to 20 percent.
In the long term, atmospheric carbon-dioxide concentration is on a path to easily exceed 550 parts per million. However, limiting carbon dioxide to this level would result in a global temperature increase of 5.5 degrees — reducing the probability of dangerous climate change.
I have fallen behind with my reading. I will be posting some academic abstracts in the next few days that will look at papers that I need to read but are (usually) related to "globalisation and the environment".
This first paper is related to the ETS and looks at how such a scheme can work in a developing country. Given the rise of China and India there are possible lessons to be learnt.
Tradable Permits in Developing Countries: Evidence from Air Pollution in Santiago, Chile [PDF]
Jessica Coria and Thomas Sterner
Santiago was one of the first cities outside the OECD to implement a tradable permit program to control air pollution. This paper looks closely at the program’s performance over the past ten years, stressing its similarities and discrepancies with trading programs implemented in developed countries, and analyzing how it has reacted to regulatory adjustments and market shocks. Studying Santiago’s experience allows us to discuss the drawbacks and advantages of applying tradable permits in less developed countries.
Key Words: Air pollution, environmental policy, tradable permits, developing countries
JEL Classification Numbers: Q53, Q58
Read more... Sphere: Related ContentWhether the ETS is a deemed a success or not depends in part on how the permits are allocated in phase 2 and 3 of the ETS.
This paper by Eva Benz, Andreas Löschel, and Bodo Sturm does a good job of summarising the main issues. This is a non-technical paper and accessible to all.
Auctioning of CO2 Emission Allowances in Phase 3 of the EU Emissions Trading Scheme [PDF]
Eva Benz, Andreas Löschel, and Bodo Sturm
October 2008
The “Climate action and renewable energy package” proposed by the European Commission
Read more... Sphere: Related Contentin the beginning of 2008 suggests auctioning as basic principle for allocation for the upcoming third trading phase of the EU Emissions Trading Scheme that runs from 2013 to 2020. Overall, it is estimated that at least two third of the total quantity of allowances will be auctioned in 2013, to be increased to 100 % by 2020. In this paper, we emphasize the importance of a properly chosen auction design as the significantly higher auction share, compared to the past and current trading phase, is expected to yield a thin secondary market for CO2 allowances. We elaborate main criteria that a viable auction design is supposed to fulfil and propose a specific auction design for the third trading phase. The auction we recommend is a simultaneous dynamic uniform double auction.
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