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Monbiot: Any real effort on climate change will hurt. Start with the easy bits: war toys
George Monbiot, Guardian
Our brains struggle with big, painful change. The rational, least painful change is to stop wasting money building tanks
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… So environmentalists seek to persuade us that we’ll love the green transition. Downshifting, voluntary simplicity, alternative hedonism – whatever they call it, it’s presented as a change for the better. A new green deal will save the planet, the workforce and the economy. Energy efficiency will protect the bottom line as well as the biosphere. A less frantic life will allow us to enjoy the small wonders that surround us.
There is both exaggeration and truth in all this, but effective action also involves a change for the worse: regulation, rationing, austerity, state spending. “Little by little,” the Roman historian Livy wrote 2,000 years ago, “we have been brought into the present condition in which we are able neither to tolerate the evils from which we suffer, nor the remedies we need to cure them.”
Everything we need to do has been made harder by debt. Net state debt now exceeds £700bn. The RBS and Lloyds shambles will add between £1 trillion and 1.5tn. National debt is likely to reach 150% of GDP next year: well beyond the point at which the IMF declares developing countries basket cases.
This introduces two environmental problems. The first is that there is no money left with which to fund a green new deal. The second is that we’ll be able to pay off these debts only by resuming economic growth. Greenhouse gases grow because the economy grows. The UK’s liabilities make the transition to a steady state economy, let alone a managed contraction, much harder to achieve. They appear to commit us to either growth or default for at least a generation. The debt crisis is an environmental disaster.
So we are left with only painful choices. We should be spending tens of billions a year to prevent climate breakdown, but how? Borrow the money and exacerbate the crisis? Raise taxes? Cut the health and education budgets? Any of the above would enhance public resistance to change. The least painful approach is to cut services that are of no use to anyone.
There are plenty of them. The prison building programme would yield a couple of hundred million a year if it were replaced with non-custodial schemes. The government could trim a billion or two from the Olympics budget without much tearing of cloth. The identity card scheme would be unmourned to the tune of half a billion a year.
… At the end of 2003, the Ministry of Defence observed that “there are currently no major conventional military threats to the UK or Nato … it is now clear that we no longer need to retain a capability against the re-emergence of a direct conventional strategic threat”. So why is most of this ministry’s budget spent on retaining a capability against the emergence of a direct conventional strategic threat?
To read the MoD’s spending stats is to read the accounts of a lost world: a faraway land where threats and funds are unlimited.
(22 June 2009)
What California is up to: The War Against the ‘War on Drugs’ .
The Griffin Has Landed (BNP on peak oil)
New Europe
Nick Griffin is a newly elected MEP [Minister to the European Parliament], and the leader of the British National Party (BNP)
Q: There were a range of eurosceptics standing, from left to right, do you stand by withdrawl or do you think it can be reformed to be more representative?
A: My party’s position, that I will stick to, is that we don’t want it at all. That’s why we were elected here to be the voice of the arch-eurosceptics from Britain. As nationalists we don’t accept the right of anyone to have any say in the governing of the United Kingdom than the citizens themselves. End of.
That means that we’re inimically hostile to this place, however it reforms, however pleasant as individuals the people here are.
… Q: You’ve often talked about ‘a nationalist solution’, what exactly do you mean?
A: In the modern world the people who have done it best were the Japanese, who rebuilt their economy from ground zero by attaching banks, subordinate to business, which in turn was subordinate to the Ministry of Finance which was a power in its own right. The modern systems are based on the interests of corporations and not nations and its all based on short term solutions and lot long term stability. We need more national control and the world needs to recognise that growth in a finite world has to be limited. We can’t make China and India like us, the world just cannot support it.
The second threat is mass immigration. People say we have to come together to solve it. Britain doesn’t have to. we’ve still got a moat, we can deal with the immigration problem by controling our own borders.
… There is a serious problem that we need to get to grips with and that’s peak oil. The world is running out of cheap energy and that is going to be catastrophic in five years time. This is a civilisational destroying crisis.
(21 June 2009)
One of the most outspoken politicians about peak oil is Nick Griffin of the ultra-nationalist, far-right British National Party (BNP). -BA
Related from New Europe: Who voted for the BNP?.
See also: Caroline Lucas: Forget the BNP. What about the planet?
Spare me that rubbish about your ‘rights’
David Mitchell, The Observer
I recently found myself in the unprecedented position of agreeing with a French designer. Philippe Starck, who invented that fancy juicer that looks like it’s been regarding this earth with envious eyes only to discover on arrival that we’re much bigger than it thought, has brought out a range of clothes that he insists are “not fashion”.
An anti-fashion French designer! “It produces energy, material, waste and gives birth to a system of consumption and over-consumption that has no future,” he says. Bravo! It’s a strange thing to hear from a man who’s made a fortune designing faddish and weird-looking furniture, but that’s fine – I’d still welcome an anti-drugs quote from Amy Winehouse. Starck describes his new clothes as “non-photogenic” and has designed them to be long-lasting.
… however puny my motives, I am basically right not to buy expensive yet flimsy new togs all the time. Replacing things that aren’t broken causes a lot of environmental damage. I, for one, am keen to find a way of stopping the planet flooding, boiling, freezing, baking or imploding for some reason to do with leaving things on standby, without having to sacrifice electric light, TV or beer.
… Sacrificing our rights and freedoms, or the use of them, for the greater good is much called for at the moment. There’s pressure to recycle, pay higher taxes, not travel on planes, avoid products manufactured by enslaved children, stop borrowing money we can’t pay back, stop lending money to people who won’t pay it back and abstain from tuna. And psychologically we couldn’t be worse prepared.
For decades, our society has trumpeted liberty and its use, choice, self-expression, global travel and all forms of spending as inalienable rights. But only as the environment and economy teeter are we gradually becoming aware that with the power such liberties give us comes the responsibility to deal with the consequences.
What a horrific realisation. I hate it. I was perfectly happy living in my London flat, talking to my friends and ignoring my neighbours, earning my money, spending it on my stuff, going on my holidays, telling my accountant to minimise my tax liability, writing my opinions in my newspaper. And then suddenly, in all sorts of frightening ways, it becomes clear I’m living in a society.
(21 June 2009)
