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If Tesco and Wal-Mart are friends of the earth, are there any enemies left?
George Monbiot, The Guardian
The superstores compete to convince us they are greener than their rivals, but they are locked into unsustainable growth
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You batter your head against the door until you begin to wonder whether it is a door at all. Suddenly it opens, and you find yourself flying through space. The superstores’ green conversion is astonishing, wonderful, disorientating. If Tesco and Wal-Mart have become friends of the earth, are there any enemies left?
These were the most arrogant of the behemoths. They have trampled their suppliers, their competitors and even their regulators. They have smashed local economies, broken the backs of the farmers, forced their contractors to drive down wages, shrugged off complaints with a superciliousness born of the knowledge that they were unchallengeable. For them, it seemed, there was no law beyond the market, no place too precious to be destroyed, no cost they could not pass on to someone else.
…But hardly anyone believed that change could happen so fast. Through the 80s and 90s, they brushed us off like dust. Then, as a result of powerful campaigns against sweatshops in the US and Europe, some of the big clothing and sports retailers broke ranks. Soon after that, the energy companies started announcing big investments in renewable technologies (though not, unfortunately, any corresponding disinvestments in fossil fuel). But the supermarkets have shifted faster than anyone else. Environmental campaigners are partly responsible (listen to how the superstore bosses keep name-checking the green pressure groups); even so, their sudden conversion leaves us reeling.
Embarrassingly, for those of us who have scorned the idea of corporate social responsibility, some of these companies now claim to be setting higher standards than any government would dare to impose on them.
(23 Jan 2007)
Striking a Chord
As climate concern spreads, Step It Up campaign ready to seize the moment
Bill McKibben, Grist
It’s happening. The 20-year Washington logjam over global warming is starting to break — which means that our Step It Up 2007 plans are suddenly more important than ever.
The last few days have seen all kinds of improbable things: a coalition of businesses starting to talk seriously about carbon caps (though tepid and small ones), reports that President Bush will give his first real lip service to global warming (followed, unfortunately, by reports to the contrary), and, maybe most importantly in the long run, the news that House Democrats plan to set up a special committee to consider climate change — a not very subtle message that Michigan Rep. John Dingell (D) will not be allowed to forever block progress.
None of this would have been imaginable six months ago. And none of it means that there’s going to be great progress — only that there’s an opening. Sometime, somehow, in the next couple of years, there’s going to be a deal made. If there’s a lot of public outcry, there’s some chance that deal will actually sting the fossil-fuel industry and in the process do some serious good for the future of the climate.
Which is why, in our little world, the best news is that Step It Up 2007 is going through the roof. As of today, just two weeks after we launched our website, we’ve scheduled more than 250 rallies — a number we thought, optimistically, we might hit in a month or two.
(22 Jan 2007)
How Iraq and climate change threw the right into disarray
Gideon Rachman,, Financial Times
Ronald Reagan is dead and Margaret Thatcher is in her dotage. The ideological world that those two leaders created is now slipping away with them
From 1979 to 2004, the right won the battle of ideas in the western world. Conservatives triumphed because they got the two big issues of the era right: they were in favour of free markets and against communism. But now the right is in disarray because it has found itself on the wrong side of the two dominating issues in contemporary western politics: global warming and the Iraq war.
Most people’s first reactions to new political issues are instinctive. In 2003, the kind of people going on anti-war marches – or warning of impending climate doom – looked to many right-wingers like the same people who had been wrong about everything else for the past 25 years. They were the people warning the world was running out of oil in the 1970s…
…The thought that these people could be right about anything was frankly intolerable. But, in fact, they were right about two things: global warming and Iraq.
Global warming poses a fundamental challenge to the- right’s faith in markets. It is, as Gordon Brown, chancellor, puts it “the world’s biggest market failure”.
Worse, most of the proposed remedies for global warming involve things the right traditionally abhors. There is global governance in the form of monster international accords such as the Kyoto treaty. There are restrictions on individual liberty as the clamour grows to tax people out of their cars and off their cheap flights. There is a new emphasis on localism as opposed to globalisation. There is also a backlash against the idea that faster economic growth is always desirable or sustainable.
…All this makes it sound as if the only role left for the Anglo-American right is to roll over and capitulate. But that is far too gloomy. In this new ideological era, conservatives have two obvious tasks – one defensive and one offensive.
The defensive role is to guard against over-reaction to the emerging consensus on global warming and Iraq. The right was not wrong to spot its old anti-capitalist, anti-western foes in the coalitions that first latched on to these issues. There are radical voices that will try to use global warming to create a world in which nobody takes a cheap flight again – and in which globalisation is put into reverse. It will be up to the right to show that growth and greenery can be reconciled.
(23 Jan 2007)
Jérôme a Paris at European Tribune provides a counter-point from the left (“The right is wrong, but we should still listen to it”):
Actually, I don’t want to mock him too much, because he makes a number of good points (about the right being utterly in the wrong today), but rather encourage him to go even further in his thoughts (and admit that the right was wrong before and that this is precisely what caused today’s problems)…
We are paying today the bill of the past years of right wing indulgence. That’s what this means. Not just that the solutions go against the precepts of the right, but that they are needed because the precepts of the right made things worse. They did not create wealth. They looted.
(Also at Daily Kos)
Oil chief emerges with climate warning
Blair Speedy, The Australian
FORMER fossil fuel mogul John Schubert says the nation has reached a “tipping point” on climate change, with overwhelming public acceptance of the problem making it impossible for business and government to ignore it any longer.
The Commonwealth Bank chairman credits the drought, extreme weather disasters such as Hurricane Katrina in the US and Cyclone Larry in northern Queensland, record global temperatures in 2005 and former US President Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth with dispelling any remaining doubts on the threat of climate change.
“I have to say that the Australian community reached a tipping point about September-October, over about a six-week period, when it was just extremely clear that the Australian community bought in that climate change was a real problem,” he told The Australian.
The respected company director, who sits on the board of mining and petroleum giant BHP Billiton, has now joined calls for Australia to implement a carbon-trading scheme. His push comes just one day after BHP’s great rival, Rio Tinto, said the federal Government should move ahead with emissions trading even if major polluters such as China and the US refused to be involved.
(23 Jan 2007)
The Future is Climate Neutral
Alex Steffen and Sarah Rich, WorldChanging
Historians of the future will almost certainly see the current debate on climate change as a classic example of paradigm rift, where people raised to think the world is one thing are unable to act intelligently when they discover it to be another.
The debate on whether climate change is happening is over, of course, but the debate on what we should do to prevent it from growing catastrophically worse is still stuck in a timid realm. Greenhouse action is seen as something akin to recycling or buying girl scout cookies — morally upright but hardly essential. The reality, of course, is different: creating a climate neutral global economy is now the most pressing item on the international agenda. With the change in composition of our atmosphere has come a change in the reality of our lives few of us have yet grasped.
(22 Jan 2007)
Report has ‘smoking gun’ on climate
Seth Borenstein, Associated Press
WASHINGTON – Human-caused global warming is here, visible in the air, water and melting ice, and is destined to get much worse in the future, an authoritative global scientific report will warn next week.
“The smoking gun is definitely lying on the table as we speak,” said top U.S. climate scientist Jerry Mahlman, who reviewed all 1,600 pages of the first segment of a giant four-part report. “The evidence … is compelling.”
Andrew Weaver, a Canadian climate scientist and study co-author, went even further: “This isn’t a smoking gun; climate is a batallion of intergalactic smoking missiles.”
(22 Jan 2007)
Global warming bubbles to the surface in Davos
AFP
An exceptionally mild and barren first half of winter in the Swiss Alps is helping to fuel growing concern about climate change at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum beginning on Wednesday.
“The year 2006 saw a qualitative change in public perception of the issue,” commented Forum executive director Klaus Schwab, underlining growing pressure on the Forum’s 1,000 corporate members.
…A survey of participants found that they now rate environmental protection as the second most important priority behind economic growth, ahead of tackling poverty, wars or terrorism, according to the Forum.
Some 20 percent of the business and political chiefs polled, compared to just nine percent last year, rated “protecting the environment” as a main priority for the world in the “Voice of the Leaders” opinion poll by Gallup International.
(22 Jan 2007)
