Independent Scotland, United Ireland

Posted: October 20, 2022 | Author: | Filed under: Climate, Politics | Leave a comment

Tuesday September 4th 2035

Daughter Rose was 53 on the 2nd. I booked a ride to Llandew on the community minibus last Friday, and returned yesterday on the weekly post van. We talked about the break-up of the union into which we were born. Cracks were widening before the beginning of the end in the early 2020s. Then it was about the initial repercussions of Brexit, the UK’s dumb decision to leave the European Union. Northern Ireland remained in the European Single Market alongside Ireland, to avoid a new border that could jeopardise the 1998 peace agreement, while England, Scotland and Wales exited completely, despite Scotland’s population having voted in favour of staying. Of course, Scotland’s independence referendum in 2014 had shown a majority for staying in the union, 55% to 45% I think it was, but Westminster’s hostility and belittling did nothing to build on that majority. Wales had an independence movement too, a slow burn because the majority English-speaking population tended to link independence with a wish for secession by the 10% able to speak Welsh with any degree of fluency. Even if all of that 10% voted for the independence party Plaid Cymru it would make very little difference overall. I remember that when English-speaker Leanne Wood was leader for the six years 2012 to 2018, she took the party towards eco-socialism, which turned off many in the very conservative but Welsh-speaking rural population but attracted young English speakers. Adam Price, a Welsh-language enthusiast and former high-profile MP from the Amman Valley in Carmarthenshire, challenged her for the leadership and, backed by the language devotees, won. But for a time his victory made the party less attractive to eco-socialists and to the 90% of mainly English speakers. So the party began to be labelled a ‘pressure group’, and some disillusioned members drifted towards the Greens, but then young people enthused by both eco-socialism and Welsh culture completed the circle. Adam Price signed a co-operation agreement with Labour’s First Minister then, Mark Drakeford, and the two parties resisted efforts from Westminster to back-track on devolution. Wales is behind Scotland, which gained independence in 2030, the same year in which Ireland became one country, but change is coming to Wales because the centre cannot hold.

Yet political alterations mean less than we expected, because the heating planet has forced different priorities on us. A decade ago most of us didn’t really understand what climate change would mean. The term sounds neutral, but the changes have often been terrifying, and each year we have fewer resources to rebuild homes, roads, railways, all the infrastructure of a modern state. We are less connected than in the early 2020s, but that also means we are freer because authorities cannot track us all the time like they used to do. Two cheers anyway.

So humid today. Hard to think clearly.

Why Don’t More People Fight Back: The Kleptogarchy part 29

Posted: October 9, 2022 | Author: | Filed under: Environment, Politics | Tags: , , , , , | Leave a comment

Why Don’t More People Fight Back?

Why do people submit to being pushed around by ‘bosses’ whose main focus appears to be self-aggrandisement? Most people are reasonable folk who just want to live their lives in as pleasant a manner as possible, without upsetting too many others. They like to co-operate, says Dutch historian Rutger Bregman, author of Humankind: a hopeful history.[1] Bregman argues that hunter-gatherer societies operated co-operatively, and that through history most people were not violent. He cites several examples of soldiers who avoided shooting at ‘the enemy’[2]. He questions the accuracy of experiments such as psychologist Philip Zombardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment, in which students role-played as prisoners versus guards, and the guards became brutal;[3] Stanley Milgram’s experiment at Yale University, in which one group of students gave electric shocks to other students who got wrong answers in memory tests;[4] and the apparent refusal of eyewitnesses to intervene in the fatal stabbing of a woman called Catherine Susan Genovese.[5] He also disputes the conventional explanations of events such as the environmental collapse on Easter Island,[6] although his view that conditions after deforestation were not too bad is questionable because after the trees were lost soil erosion was severe, habitats deteriorated, the birds that were important food sources disappeared, competition for food supplies intensified, and the society became more violent.

The story of identical twins Constand and Abraham Viljoen, and the acceptance by white people of the end of apartheid in South Africa,[7] is a fascinating insight into conflict avoidance. Constand became chief of the South African Defence Force while Abraham became an academic with keen to reach out across communities. Abraham backed Mandela and worked with him, but Constand was reluctant to consider the end of white rule. The first elections in 1994 could have been a disaster as the extreme right might have started a civil war, but after hardly speaking for four decades, the twins hammered out an agreement, to accept the results of the election, which saw Mandela take office as a conciliatory president.

If humans generally are well-disposed towards others, how come that Earth is not a beacon of selflessness? Bregman suggests that social psychopaths expect others to behave just like them: “Dictators and despots, governors and generals – they all too often resort to brute force to prevent scenarios that exist only in their own heads, on the assumption that the average Joe is ruled by self-interest, just like them.”[8]

An alternative explanation is that dictators and despots behave as they do because they know most people will not challenge them, preferring to live as quietly as possible under the political radar. People’s willingness to co-exist therefore enables social psychopaths to exert control and to indulge in self-aggrandisement. Only when leaders go much too far, and their disdain becomes blindingly obvious, do swathes of the public want to turn against them. And wanting to turn is not at all the same as actually turning, because giving up a quiet life is a huge step! In the end mass discontent foments revolutions, which are rarely peaceful.

For Bregman, participatory democracy is the way to stop leaders morphing into despots. He gives several examples, such as citizens assemblies in Porto Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, and in Torres, Lara, Venezuela. Instead of professional politicians, subject to intense lobbying from powerful forces, you have citizens chosen at random and for a limited time. Yet citizens assemblies have not made headway as permanent institutions. The World Resources Institute[9] reported in 2018 that when a right-wing party was elected to govern Porto Alegre in 2016, the role of citizens in the city’s annual budget setting process was attenuated, to save money. The assemblies had already become less influential: between 1994 and 2004, 82% of citizen-approved spending plans had been implemented, but between 2004 and 2016, only 42% of a smaller total were enacted. In Venezuela, participatory budget setting began in Torres in 2004, and is the subject of a PhD thesis by Gabriel Bodin Hetland.[10] Citizens assemblies give people a voice, but that voice is granted by governments, and when governments are short of money, or have an authoritarian political stance, the participatory largesse is withdrawn.

Multiple strands of government sow confusion because lines of responsibility tend to be muddled. In addition, populations remote from centres of power are unlikely to know government leaders personally, and when politicians’ decisions damage them, there is scarcely anything they can do. In democracies they can wait for an election, but there are all sorts of ways of fixing elections. Lose votes here and there, add fake votes into the mix, impose criteria for voting such as insisting on official identity documents with the bearer’s photo. Autocratic rulers like bellicose nationalist Vladimir Putin, who has engineered change in the Russian constitution to enable him to remain President until 2036, and China’s Xi Jinping, now potentially President for life following removal of the previous limit of two terms, have subjects who lack even a vestigial democracy. Republics have a habit of transitioning into Empires, until the Emperors overreach themselves. The Roman Republic morphed into Empire in 27BC, with the accession of Julius Caesar’s adopted son Augustus. Only 15 years after the eruption of the 1789 Revolution against absolute monarchs, Napoleon assumed the mantle Emperor of France. Over the Atlantic the USA is no stranger to hereditary dynasties, with father and son presidents George Herbert Walker Bush and George Walker Bush, and the Clintons, President Bill and wife Hillary, the Democrats’ presidential candidate in 2016. The likely Kennedy dynasty was dashed by the assassinations of President John Kennedy in 1963 and of his brother Robert, who was seeking the Democratic nomination, in 1968. Younger brother Edward was also a potential president until the Chappaquiddick accident in July 1969, when his car passenger and aide Mary Jo Kopechne died after the vehicle left a bridge and sank in water.

There are copious examples from other parts of the world, including North Korea, Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan. Even in the United Kingdom, there is a hereditary monarchy with a limited political role but considerable influence and a cornucopia of palaces, estates, artworks and servants, when the housing charity Shelter calculates that well over a quarter of a million people in England are homeless[11]. Millions more are in inadequate housing that is too cold, mouldy, damp, expensive, or small. Shelter calculated that 17.5 million adults, 22 million including children in the UK suffer from poor housing.[12] That is one in every three of the UK’s 67.89 million people, and it’s getting worse due to workers’ falling real incomes, and government failures to ensure that sufficient, well-insulated new homes are constructed. Margaret Thatcher, UK Prime Minister from 1979 to 1990, enabled tenants of homes built by municipalities to buy their homes at large discounts. This was a popular policy, but by 2022 around half of all the homes sold under ‘right to buy’ were owned by private landlords and let privately, often at much higher rents than a local authority would charge. Buyers who took advantage of ‘right to buy’ saw opportunities for big capital gains, because after ten years they could sell on the open market. Owners often had no choice but to sell if they moved into a care home, to fund the fees. Children of deceased buyers often had to sell, to split the asset according to the terms of a will. Right to buy was a short-term feel-good policy with harmful long-term consequences, for which private landlords are often blamed, sometimes fairly but in many cases unfairly because rental properties are expensive to maintain in good condition, and not all tenants are clean and careful.

Margaret Thatcher may have thought she was creating a meritocracy, in which ambitious go-getters would transform the nations of the Union into that reductive term ‘UK plc’, but her pro-private, anti-public policies, and her disregard for old industrial communities, stabbed into the heart of the Union and accelerated the splintering apart. People who know they are viewed as disposable cannot be expected to show loyalty to leaders who worship at the shrine of economic growth.

It is unfettered economic growth that now threatens the existence of humans, and countless other species, on a very small planet with a thin, polluted biosphere. The religion of Economy First is no more than a death cult, yet even when we know this is happening, the psychopathic tendencies of rulers restrict possibilities for radical corrective action.

[1] Humankind: a Hopeful History, by Rutger Bregman, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020. Translated from Dutch by Elizabeth Manton and Erica Moore. First published in Dutch as De Meeste Mensen Deugen by De Correspondent in 2019.

[2] Ibid, e.g. p.217.

[3] Ibid, chapter 7, ‘In the basement of Stanford University’.

[4] Ibid, chapter 8, ‘Stanley Milgram and the shock machine’.

[5] Ibid, chapter 9, ‘The death of Catherine Susan Genovese’.

[6] Ibid, chapter 6, ‘The mystery of Easter Island’.

[7] Ibid, chapter 17, ‘The best remedy for hate, injustice and prejudice’.

[8] Ibid, p.7.

[9] ‘What if Citizens Set City Budgets? An Experiment that Captivated the World—Participatory Budgeting—might be Abandoned in its Birthplace’, by Valeria Lvovna Gelman and Daniely Votto, World Resources Institute, June 13th 2018. https://www.wri.org/insights/what-if-citizens-set-city-budgets-experiment-captivated-world-participatory-budgeting, accessed January 25th 2022.

[10] Making Democracy Real: Participatory Governance in Urban Latin America, by Gabriel Bodin Hetland, University of California, Berkeley, summer 2015. https://escholarship.org/content/qt5hr63406/qt5hr63406_noSplash_d26f8c08d39f37896f1bda31ac4e0f1b.pdf, accessed January 25th 2022.

[11] ‘274,000 people in England are homeless, with thousands more likely to lose their homes’ from Shelter, December 9th 2021. https://england.shelter.org.uk/media/press_release/274000_people_in_england_are_homeless_with_thousands_more_likely_to_lose_their_homes, accessed January 25th 2022.

[12]  ’17.5 million people now impacted by the housing emergency’, from Shelter, May 26th 2021.      https://england.shelter.org.uk/media/press_release/17_5million_people_now_impacted_by_the_housing_emergency_, accessed January 26th 2022.

Landless Billions: The Kleptogarchy part 22

Posted: September 5, 2022 | Author: | Filed under: Land ownership, Politics, Social inequality | Tags: , , , | Leave a comment
English nursery rhyme, about 1764. Kleptocrats have been with us for a very long time!

Land is the foundation of resilience. Most people cannot be fully resilient because they do not have any land. One of the few countries where government is trying to resettle people back on the land is Cuba, where individuals can own and bequeath up to 65 hectares as long as they continue to farm it. But there’s a labour shortage, saline water ingress near the coasts, infestations of thorny Marabu shrubs, droughts and hurricanes, and ancient farm machinery held together on a wing and a prayer.

On our planet now, the majority of people are crammed into tiny spaces: by 2020 more than 55% of Earth’s population were squashed into cities, while huge private estates extend over thousands of acres, up to 14,000 square miles in the case of the Anna Creek cattle station in South Australia. No surprise that people in power sanctify personal property – it’s happened through history. Powerful people take land from less powerful ones, as the ‘steals the common from the goose’ nursery rhyme laments. That’s always been the case, and population pressure leads to greater competition. Yet our collective future demands a more equitable distribution of land, so that families can become more resilient and produce more of their own needs.

The history of my own family shows the impact of external events on access to land. The ancestors I know about who lived before the Industrial Revolution were prosperous in the main. In the case of my father’s paternal line, two early deaths changed everything. William Dod(d) was a vintner in the mid 17th century, a Citizen of London, married to Francis Clarke whose brother Cornelius was High Sheriff of Derbyshire after the restoration of the monarchy to King Charles II. William lived in style in Kingstreete, Westminster, paying a rent of £100 a year, equivalent to over £20,000 a year in 2020, for a house with 16 hearths.[1] A labourer in London in 1675 would earn about 20 pennies a day, about £103 a year in 2020 money: inequality is nothing new, nor is precariousness. William died in 1675 leaving three children aged 7, 3 and 6 months. As they were all minors (and women did not count), most of his assets disappeared into the Court of Orphans, which was sliding into bankruptcy. John, the eldest of the surviving children – an older sister, Elizabeth, died in infancy – married Mary Crannage in 1689 when he was 21 and they already had a baby son, William. Their second son Cornelius appeared in 1690, and in 1692 John died. The Court of Orphans had collapsed, Mary was on her own and London was expensive, so the little family moved to a small farm in Essex, Dial House at Birds Green, Willingale Doe. They could be called downshifters, escapees to the country with what was left of their town resources. There Cornelius stayed, farming 45 acres according to a survey in 1734, and his descendants remained for around 150 years until the farming disaster that unfolded after the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846. From 1815 to 1846, tariff walls protected British grain crops from price competition. Great for farmers, awful for the landless who struggled to afford food. Cornelius Dodd, my great-great-great-grandfather, was a farmer and publican in Essex in 1841 but in 1851, after the repeal of the Corn Laws, he is described in the census as ‘farmer out of business’ and was in Surrey County Prison for debt. He became a brewer, and that is how he supported his family until he died in 1878. His only child William was never a farmer in his own right. William, born in 1827, was a bailiff in 1851, a haulier in 1861, and by 1891 he was a confectioner in Shepherds Bush, London, living with his wife Mary, their youngest daughter Amanda and two of their son William Matthew’s boys. William Matthew emigrated to Australia, but that’s another story.

William’s eldest son Charles was a carpenter, his son Cyril rented a smallholding in Chertsey in 1934, and his son, my father Lionel, bought a farm of his own in 1956, with a loan from mum’s brother-in-law George Stanford, a dairy farmer with a milk pasteurisation plant and a milk delivery business. It was pure luck that mum had a brother-in-law able and willing to provide a loan.

Bad luck killed vintner William in 1675, bad luck saw his assets pass into the ‘protection’ of the Court of Orphans, bad luck left his grandchildren William and Cornelius orphans as babies. Four generations later, it may well have been bad luck that prevented farmer Cornelius from meeting his debts after the repeal of the Corn Laws. But it was good luck for mum and dad that George had the wherewithal for them to buy a farm.

I had another great-great-grandfather who lost his farm in Victorian England. Solomon Crowhurst was born in 1819 in Ash, Kent, and at the 1861 census was farming 34 acres at Hodsell Street, Ash, living with his wife Harriet, children Mary and George, and employing two labourers and a boy. By 1881 he was a servant and ostler in The Vigo Inn, Stansted, near Malling in Kent. He died in North Aylesford Union Workhouse on February 13th 1895, aged 78. No old age pensions in those days; if you had no money and either no children, or children who could not look after you, you went into a workhouse.

Solomon’s daughter Mary Ann married Thomas Warinton, whose astute daughter-in-law Lavinia probably helped persuade her son-in-law George to make a loan to her other son-in-law Lionel.

When did markets in land develop? For thousands of years, humans wandered, seeking sustenance. In the 21st century (according to Christian counting) land is essentially private property. In what is now the United Kingdom, the first codified record of land ownership that has come down to us is the Domesday Book, completed 20 years after the Norman invasion of 1066. King William I seized vast tracts of land for himself and his followers, creating a pattern of landed estates that has characterised English society to this day. By the 19th century concentration of land ownership had become a hot political issue. The 1861 census indicated that there were just 30,000 landowners in the population of 30 million, wrote J V Beckett in ‘The Pattern of Landownership in England and Wales, 1660-1800’.[2] This was apparently incorrect: doubts over the accuracy of the census led to a new survey, the Return of Owners of Land, in 1872-73, which found that just 7,000 or so landowners possessed four-fifths of the total acreage, but also that more than one million people owned some land. Between the mid-17th and mid-19th centuries, roughly, law had a bigger impact than money on landholdings. Owners often entailed their property on their closest male heir, to avoid the splitting up of estates. In addition, Parliament was controlled by landowners, who enlarged their estates by Acts of Parliament permitting them to enclose land classed as common, i.e. without a recorded owner, but used by local communities to provide food and fuel. Beckett commented that “if the magnates were increasing their acreage someone had to suffer, and the corollary to large estates was seen to be the expropriation of the small owner “.[3] Landowners who did not want to be bothered with day-to-day management let their estate farms to tenants, who formed a substantial stratum of the rural population in England and Wales for around 200 years, some making the switch to ownership when high death taxes led to forced sales. Death taxes peaked at 85% on sums over £750,000 in 1969, subject to a maximum take of 80% of an estate’s total value. Labour was in power, Harold Wilson was Prime Minister, and Rupert Murdoch started buying UK newspapers. Elevated death tax rates, high since the late 1940s, encouraged landowners to create trusts and companies as tax shelters, and no subsequent government has tried such aggressive wealth redistribution. Progress towards a more equal pattern of wealth ownership on the island of Great Britain happened between the end of the First World War and the era of Margaret Thatcher, slowly until 1945 and then rapidly, but since the late 1980s/ early 1990s, the process has reversed.[4] Between April 2018 and March 2020 the richest 1% of the UK population owned more than the least wealthy 80% combined. [5]

While many in the 1% can afford to dabble in the land market, most in the 80% cannot. The price of land in the United Kingdom became divorced from its likely economic return during the 18th century, when the rise of capitalism and alternative investments – whether in mines, factories, transport, money-lending, speculative housing, wealth extraction from colonies, and so on – meant that the nouveau riche were looking for estates to bring them social standing. By the 1860s, Beckett concluded, “it was only incomers from the business world who could afford to purchase” the estates that came onto the market.[6]

The differences between families and classes are profound. Members of individual families move up, down and across the social spectrum, from one class to another. Good luck, bad luck, it’s a game of snakes and ladders, more of a game of chance than we are encouraged to recognise. The greater the distance between the most and least affluent, the less mingling there is between the extremes, and this helps families with large landholdings to retain them. Classes are more stable socially than individuals in families. The ruling class, whether composed of kings, aristocrats, plutocrats, oligarchs, theocrats, or any other -arch or -crat, remains. Revolutions may change the personnel and the source of their authority, but in nearly all complex societies, power is a force appropriated by a hierarchy. Soviet Russia was supposed to be a people’s state but the people were still bossed around, and in Stalin’s time maybe seven million to over nine million inhabitants of Mother Russia died because of repression, cruel policies and Stalin’s persecution complex.

[1] Inflation calculator from the Bank of England. Labourers’ wages from ‘The pay of labourers and unskilled men on London building sites, 1660–1770’ by Judy Stephenson, https://www.academia.edu/23668168/The_pay_of_labourers_and_unskilled_men_on_London_building_sites_1660_1770, re-accessed July 4th 2022.

[2] In The Economic History Review, second series Vol.37, No.1, February 1984, pps.1-22.

[3] Ibid p.2.

[4] The History of Inequality: the Deep-Acting Ideological and Institutional Influences, by Simon Szreter, Institute for Fiscal Studies, November 2021. https://ifs.org.uk/inequality/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/IFS-Deaton-Review-The-history-of-inequality-1.pdf, accessed June 13th 2022.

[5] ‘Household Total Wealth in Great Britain: April 2018 to March 2020’, Office for National Statistics, January 7th 2022. https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/personalandhouseholdfinances/incomeandwealth/bulletins/totalwealthingreatbritain/april2018tomarch2020#:~:text=The%20wealthiest%2010%25%20of%20households,of%20%C2%A315%2C400%20or%20less, accessed June 13th 2022.

[6] Ibid p.15

Energy Charter Treaty with Knots: The Kleptogarchy part 17

Posted: August 27, 2022 | Author: | Filed under: Energy, Politics | Tags: , , , | Leave a comment

Energy Charter Treaty with Knots

In the more optimistic times after the breaking of the Berlin Wall and the parting of the Iron Curtain, the Energy Charter Treaty came into being. It’s had a low profile. The idea was to encourage international co-operation in the energy sector, and the treaty, signed in 1994, started with a plan to integrate the energy industries of the former USSR into the world energy market. Russia, the largest nation emerging from the USSR, was a signatory then, but in August 2009, before Vladimir Putin had achieved constitutional change and was prime minister (but still in charge) after his first two terms as president, Russia withdrew, a decision reiterated in 2018. 

While more than 50 countries and organisations are signed up, many like Macedonia, Slovenia, Estonia and Cyprus have limited presence in energy markets. Canada, China, Iran, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, the USA and Venezuela, all with substantial energy resources, are among the ‘observers’ and do not have membership.

Probably the most notorious case raised under the treaty relates to the Russian oil and gas company Yukos. In 1995 and 1996 Mikhail Khodorkovsky, then the boss of the Russian bank Menatap, acquired over 90% of Yukos. The stage was set for a violent struggle between Putin and Khodorkovsky, resulting in the Russian state forcing Yukos into liquidation on charges of tax evasion. The Russian state nationalised Yukos in November 2007, and Khodorkovsky was jailed in December 2010, alongside his business partner Platon Lebedev. Having secured the assets of Yukos, Putin’s government freed Khodorkovsky in December 2013 and Lebedev in January 2014. Legally, this was not the end of the matter. Following Russia’s original commitment to the Energy Charter Treaty, disputes against the Russian state could be and were opened. The Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague began hearing claims from the pre-nationalisation shareholders of Yukos in 2005, and in 2009 ruled that the shareholders could continue their case. Menatap’s new incarnation Group Menatap Ltd (GML) sued the Russian Government for over $100 billion, and in July 2014 the court in The Hague awarded GML and minority shareholders $50 billion in damages. Russia has never paid up, a refusal that was given succour by a Dutch court which decreed that Russia was not bound by the Energy Charter Treaty, having refused to ratify it. Four months earlier, Russia had invaded Crimea and removed the region from the jurisdiction of Ukraine. Putin was set on ‘Making Russia Great Again’.

The Yukos tale illustrates the havoc that a small number of ultra-powerful individuals can create as they try to maximise rent value for themselves, and the difficulties in the way of regulation by international treaty. Action to try and cope with other crises – including global heating, land degradation, pollution, poverty – is similarly hampered by rent seekers’ ferocious efforts to preserve their privileged status, and their levels of consumption.

The treaty itself protects fossil fuel networks by enabling companies to sue member countries which pass laws to restrict greenhouse gas emissions, the argument being that companies will have invested in their production operations and thus deserve compensation if governments order them to stop. Equal Times, a news service funded by the International Trade Union Confederation, International Labour Organization, the European Union and others, revealed in September 2020 that several such disputes were ongoing. Uniper, a German energy company which started generation from a coal and biomass plant in the Netherlands in 2016, was suing the Dutch government for its 2019 law to stop coal-fired power generation by 2030. Germany itself has opted to phase out nuclear power plants, resulting in a claim for €6.2 billion from Vattenfall, a renewable energy company owned by the Swedish state. Vattenfall operates two nuclear power stations in Germany and has a minority stake in a third. Equal Times gave several other examples of companies suing countries, creating conflicts between states’ desired climate policies and the commercial objectives of companies (even state-owned ones).[1] By autumn 2020, 131 compensation cases had been opened under the terms of the Energy Charter Treaty, two-thirds of them involving members of the European  Union. Germany’s own plans to close nuclear power stations and to phase down generation from fossil fuels were shoved off course in 2022 when Russia’s invasion of Ukraine led to popular demand for imports of Russian gas to stop. This gas provides about 30% of Germany’s energy usage, and despite the German public’s green credentials, to prevent widespread power cuts old coal-fired power stations might have to be brought back into use. Meanwhile, Germany set about amassing strategic coal reserves.[2]      

[1] ‘How the Little-Known Energy Charter Treaty is Holding Environmental Policy Hostage’ by Benjamin Hourtica, September 7th 2020, https://www.equaltimes.org/how-the-little-known-energy?lang=en#.YkQzHCjMLIU, accessed March 30th 2022.

[2] ‘Germany Reactivates Coal Power Plants Amid Russian Gas supply Threats’, by Nikolaus J Kurmayer, March 9th 2022, https://www.euractiv.com/section/energy/news/germany-reactivates-coal-power-plants-amid-russian-gas-supply-threats/, accessed March 30th 2022.

Why Don’t They Care? The Kleptogarchy part 10

Posted: August 20, 2022 | Author: | Filed under: Law, Politics, Social inequality | Tags: , , , , | Leave a comment

Why Don’t They Care?

It’s a head scratcher. When the science is now so well understood, why do the planet’s most powerful people not do more to protect their, our, only home?

The geographical and experiential distances between the wealthiest and the poorest, who might as well be in different galaxies, are among the culprits. The Industrial Revolution in the UK, a source of pride during my schooldays, set fossil fuel use on an explosive trajectory. The new industrialists needed workers, who migrated into cities, pushed by the distress of the rural economy after ‘free trade’ became the leaders’ cry, enacted from 1846 onwards. Farmers fell into debt, a trap worsened by landlords’ enclosure of commons that had provided pasture and timber. One of my great-great-great-grandfathers, a farmer on about 40 of his own acres, was in prison for debt when the 1861 census was taken. He had to reinvent himself as a brewer. Britain became the workshop of the world, extracting raw materials from colonies and exporting finished goods. The model was failing after the chaos of the First World War and in terminal decline by the 1980s, when most nations of the British Empire had achieved independence.

The 1980s were years of de-industrialisation, under Margaret Thatcher in the UK and Ronald Reagan in the USA. The British miners’ strike of March 1984 to March 1985, in which Mrs Thatcher and the police defeated the National Union of Mineworkers under Arthur Scargill, was a turning point. Coal is a source of cognitive dissonance for me, because despite its harmful contributions to the carbon dioxide emissions that are heating up the world, since the miners’ defeat in 1984, work on the archipelago of Britain has become more impermanent and precarious. Although demand for industrial workers is slack, even if they wanted to, they cannot return to the self-sufficient agricultural life of pre-Victorian Britain because they cannot afford land.[1] The top-dog elites have less need of workers than hitherto, because robots and artificial intelligence can labour on indefinitely, provided there is power, and they do not require industrial relations departments. If global elites in wealthy countries have less need of workers, why would they want to pay taxes to maintain the public services for and shore up the living standards of people who are no longer central to their world view? They seem to forget that workers are often customers for the producers of goods and services in which they invest.

“Trespassing scum”, thundered an annoyed Robert Venables QC, tax barrister, in an elite gathering in 2012 to mark the retirement of Dave Hartnett from his role as chief executive of Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs. Mr Hartnett, a proponent of individually negotiated tax payments for multinational corporations, was the target of protestors against tax evasion. To call people who oppose tax evasion “scum” to my mind reveals the gulf between masters of the financial universe and citizens who depend on public services funded from taxation.

The encounter featured in The Spider’s Web: Britain’s Second Empire, a 2017 documentary by independent film maker Michael Oswald. I watched it on Netflix in June 2022. At its height the British Empire governed a quarter of the world’s landmass and a fifth of the population. The agents of empire extracted resources from the colonies and exported finished goods, at a nice profit. The colonies mostly achieved independence by the end of the 1970s. but a few small territories remained, and these became vital to a new form of empire – the ghost financial empire.

The British Virgin Islands, Cayman Islands, Bermuda, Hong Kong, Jersey, Guernsey and the Isle of Man are all among the ‘secrecy jurisdictions’ with links to the United Kingdom. Secrecy jurisdictions, known as tax havens, enabled the shadow banking system, unregulated by central banks like the Federal Reserve in the USA and the Bank of England in the UK, to inflate into a many-headed, dangerous Hydra. Dangerous, that is, to people outside the realm of masters of the financial universe.

The UK has thousands of clever accountants. Of the world’s 2.5 million or so professional accountants when the film was made, 330,000 were based in the UK, The Spider’s Web reported. That is more than one in eight, when the UK’s population amounted to about one in every 113 across the globe. An over-concentration of crack number-crunchers, one can argue, but a huge shadow banking system requires accountants galore. Money itself does not travel, transactions are digital through secrecy nodes, via anonymous trusts and shell companies.

The Spider’s Web calculated that about half of the global wealth ‘kept’ offshore is in overseas jurisdictions of the UK, like the Cayman Islands south of Cuba. The Caymans have a population of about 66,000, but some 80,000 companies are registered there, and it is home to about 75% of the world’s hedge funds.

“The Cayman Islands imposes no taxation on the income or capital gains of investment funds or their investors, and no transfer taxes on the transfer of interests in investment funds. Exempted companies, LLCs, limited partnerships and unit trusts can obtain undertakings from the government that if any such taxation is introduced during a 20-year period (companies) or 50-year period (limited partnerships, LLCs and unit trusts), as applicable, from the date of the undertaking (or date of creation of the unit trust), such taxation will not apply to the entity to which the undertaking is given”, according to The Asset Management Review in September 2001. [2]

Quite an incentive. How much money is sheltered in the Cayman Islands? In 2019 there were US$4.229 trillion just in mutual funds, according to the Cayman Islands Monetary Authority. For comparison, the entire annual GDP of the United Kingdom in 2020 was $2.76 trillion, the World Bank reported.[3] If even 0.5% tax were paid on the Cayman Islands’ $4.229 trillion, it could yield more than $21 billion, or nearly 25 times more than the UK spends annually on fighting economic crime. But who should tax the funds recorded as lodged in tax havens? How should such a tax be distributed? Theoretical questions, because if funds in tax havens were disclosed and routinely taxed, they would be considerably less attractive to investors and their agents. Investors who use tax havens can accumulate money faster than people who do not try to escape tax, and the chasm between the two groups yawns wider.

Author Nicholas Shaxson, who appears in The Spider’s Web, has made a deep study of tax havens and their wider impacts. In his view, the tax haven circuit works against the interests of small and medium-sized enterprises because:

“It subsidises multinationals by helping them cut their taxes and grow faster, making it harder for the innovative minnows to compete. And when small innovative firms do emerge they become targets for predators who seek to ‘unlock value’ from ‘synergies’ created by bringing the small firm into the bigger, more diversified one. Some synergies may be useful – economies of scale, for instance – but too often the predator unlocks value simply by being better at obtaining abusive, unproductive offshore tax privileges.”[4]

When escaping tax is a priority, no surprise that there is resistance to the abandonment of a currently lucrative system in favour of measures to mitigate global heating impacts, for which the costs and effectiveness would be unknown.

Leaders are far more likely than the population at large to show psychopathic personality traits, such as a will to dominate regardless of the consequences. Désiré G C Palmena, Emile W KolthoffbJan and J L Derksenc proposed in the journal Aggression and Violent Behavior that:

“…we hypothesize that the need for domination may be the core motivational trait for those psychopathic individuals who pursue positions of leadership in business and politics. Because for psychopathic leaders the need for domination may have value in of itself [sic], we hypothesize that this motivational trait may best clarify the estimated high prevalence of psychopathic leaders.”[5]

The authors point out that “[s]tudies on those high in psychopathy have shown that they are not motivated by moral traits such as honesty, consideration for others, and fairness”. Their struggles to the top are for their perceived benefit, not for humanity in general:

“…those high in psychopathy score low on appreciating moral values and collective values and instead value the enhancement of oneself. What are the goods, aspirations, and goals psychopathic individuals want for themselves? Studies have found that they are looking for rewards, they enjoy risk-taking, are in need of stimulation, are looking for thrills and adventures, and are experience seekers.”

Leaders are less likely than those they dominate to prioritise a liveable planet. As many as 20% to 25% of leaders are reckoned to show psychopathic traits, compared with 4.5% in the general population (including leaders).[6] The threat of total war, as Earth and its life forms suffer from climate breakdown, shortages and unrest, is dangerously close. Kleptocracy and war are closely aligned, because the whole point of a kleptocracy is to acquire resources that others also need or want. Alex de Waal, executive director of the World Peace Foundation at the Fletcher School, Tufts University, studied governance in South Sudan, leading to a paper titled ‘When Kleptocracy Becomes Insolvent: Brute Causes of the Civil War in South Sudan’.[7] South Sudan exhibited a neo-patrimonial system of governance, in which “political office is used primarily for personal and factional advantage”, wrote de Waal. Quoting Stanislav Andreski, author of the 1968 book The African Predicament: a Study in the Pathology of Modernisation,[8] de Waal added that the “essence of kleptocracy is that the functioning of the organs of authority is determined by the mechanisms of supply and demand rather than the laws and regulations”. Economics before law – a similar concept to the ‘law and economics’ viewpoint that decisions based on justice are subordinate to those informed by economic cost-benefit analyses. (See ‘The Cold Philosophy of Law and Economics’, The Kleptocracy part 7.)

South Sudan seceded from Sudan on July 9th 2011 after civil war and a referendum, but without strong institutional checks and balances. According to de Waal, South Sudan’s president since independence, Salva Kiir Mayardit, rewarded aides’ loyalty with “licence to commit fraud” and the new country was a kleptocracy from the beginning. In 2012, the president “acknowledged that at least $4 billion and possibly much more had been diverted by leading figures in government and taken abroad”.[9]

Tax havens are, of course, ideal for laundering funds obtained dishonestly. South Sudan is one example among many, where sequestration of funds by elites is accompanied by force, or the threat of it, and by instability that elites attempt to regulate through force.

“There may be bubbles of integrity, due to the efforts of committed and influential individuals to carve out a sphere of public spiritedness, but they are fragile and subordinate to the kleptocratic operation of the broader system,” de Waal concluded.[10]

Kleptocrats don’t care, because they can achieve economic dominance through force, and they often value wealth for themselves and their circle above a liveable planet for the populations they control.

[1] See Chapter 4 in The Kleptogarchy, to be published here later.

[2] The Asset Management Review: Cayman Islands, by Tim Coak, Malachi Sweetman and Michael Richardson, Maples Group, September 27th 2021. https://thelawreviews.co.uk/title/the-asset-management-review/cayman-islands, accessed June 23rd 2022.

[3] https://data.worldbank.org/country/united-kingdom?view=chart, accessed June 23rd 2022.

[4] Treasure Islands: Tax Havens and the Men Who Stole the World, by Nicholas Shaxson, 2011. Quote from p.190 of the 2012 Vintage Books edition.

[5] ‘The Need for Domination in Psychopathic Leadership: a clarification for the estimated high prevalence of psychopathic leaders’ in Aggression and Violent Behavior Vol.61, November–December 2021. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S135917892100104X, accessed June 26th 2022.

[6] Estimate of psychopathy in the general population from ‘Latest Estimate of Psychopathy in the General Population’, Sapien Journal, November 28th 2021. https://sapienjournal.org/latest-estimate-of-psychopathy-in-the-general-population/, accessed June 26th 2022.

[7] In African Affairs Vol.113 No.452 pps.347-369.

[8] The African Predicament was published in New York by Atherton Press.

[9] ‘When Kleptocracy Becomes Insolvent: Brute Causes of the Civil War in South Sudan’ by Alex de Waal, p.358.

[10] Ibid p.349.

The Damocles Sword over Global Heating Mitigation: The Kleptogarchy part 8

Posted: August 18, 2022 | Author: | Filed under: Climate, Politics | Tags: , | Leave a comment

The Damocles Sword over Global Heating Mitigation

Scientists from around the world have furnished the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) with increasingly alarming studies on the rates and impacts of climate change, but governments do not respond with anything like the urgency required. Within the legal straitjacket of law-and-economics, they cannot.

The Sixth Assessment Report on Mitigation of Climate Change, from Working Group III and published on April 4th 2022, was the usual dry compilation of facts, the wording approved by participating countries, but the emotions escaping from the bland language conveyed fear, resignation, desperation. Scientists have stated the facts but powerful people ignore them, the scientists and the facts. For the kleptocrats, ‘less’ is a supremely uncomfortable demand. The politicians they control/influence do not have the freedom to ‘follow the science’. For the people, forced reductions to material standards of living spark protests, instability, and the risk of ever nastier technologies of control. At the same time as the release of the Mitigation of Climate Change report, there were riots over rising fuel costs in France, Spain, Italy, and Peru, and in the UK the Conservative government continued trying to pass its new draconian restrictions on protests in the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill. The House of Lords had delayed the bill, but the Boris Johnson administration succeeded in passing it on April 26th 2022.

It’s not the scientists’ job to tell governments how to manage dramatic changes in the availability and cost of energy, and most governments have preferred to ignore the task, maybe offering a little window-dressing to electors who are worried. Then Vladimir Putin, president of the world’s largest country by land mass, decided to invade Ukraine and blitz bomb cities, towns and even villages, which can be rebuilt only with massive amounts of energy and raw materials.

The Mitigation of Climate Change report said that

  • Greenhouse gas emissions continued to rise between 2010 and 2019 to a higher total than in any previous decade, although the rate of growth was less than between 2000 and 2009.
  • Emissions increases from industry, energy supply, transport, agriculture and buildings were greater than emission falls from fossil fuels and industrial processes.
  • The 10% of households with the highest emissions per head are responsible for “a disproportionately large share “ of all household emissions.
  • Innovation in low-emission technologies has “lagged in developing countries “. Digitalisation can help to cut emissions, but there are “adverse side-effects unless appropriately governed”.
  • Progress on aligning financial flows towards the goals of the Paris agreement is slow, and “distributed unevenly across regions and sectors”.
  • It is likely that global warming will exceed 1.5 deg C in this century, and without fast acceleration of mitigation efforts from 2030, 2 deg C will be reached by the end of the century.
  • Future emissions from current and planned fossil fuel infrastructure will exceed the total required to keep the temperature rise to 1.5 deg C, unless successful abatement measures are installed.
  • Unless further emission reduction measures are put in place straight away, the median global temperature could be 3.2 deg C higher by 2100.

A world more than 3 deg C hotter within 78 years would be disastrous for biodiversity, water and food supplies, and for human settlements drowned under rising sea levels. The timescale does not allow for slow, steady adaptation to the new conditions, which will themselves be inherently unstable, like the oscillating Jetstream but far, far worse.

Unholy Alliances: The Kleptogarchy part 5

Posted: August 15, 2022 | Author: | Filed under: Corporations, Politics | Tags: , , , , , | Leave a comment

UNHOLY ALLIANCES

Climate change sceptic James Delingpole has spoken at the Heartland Institute, a US-based organisation promoting free markets, oil and gas, petroleum products, in fact the whole range of fossil fuels. The Heartland Institute is vehemently anti-Socialist and one of its websites is called stoppingsocialism.com. The institute fits into a nexus of evangelical Christian, extreme conservative, environmentally uninterested groups.

In a previous book – Empty Plates Tomorrow? – published in 2007, I wrote about a climate dissenter called Dr Arthur Robinson, founder of the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine and publisher of a newsletter called Access to Energy. Dr Robinson was a director of the Heartland Institute from 2016 to 2019 and is senior fellow for environmental policy in the institute’s Arthur B Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy. The Heartland Institute, which claims that 78% of state elected officials in the US read a Heartland newspaper ‘sometimes’ or ‘always’, is one of 100 associate members of the State Policy Network, a web of like-minded organisations dedicated to free markets. Fellow associate members include the American Conservative Union Foundation, Cato Institute, Charles Koch Institute, Donors Trust, National Tax Limitation Committee, and in the UK the Institute of Economic Affairs. They all promote small government and low regulation. Donors Trust exists to channel money to conservative causes. “We – and the conservative- and libertarian-minded donors with whom we work – believe in preserving the ideals of limited government, personal responsibility, and free enterprise”, the Donors Trust website states.

Multi billionaire Charles Koch, 86 on November 1st 2021, is a lynchpin of the American libertarian Right, opposing environmental regulation, government interference, and warnings about the damaging impacts of climate change. He is chair and chief executive of Koch Industries, the successor to his father Fred Koch’s Rock Island Oil and Refining Company. Koch Industries was, according to Forbes, the largest private company in the USA in 2019 with revenues of $115 billion, and is still heavily invested in oil and petroleum products, including the dirty oil of the Athabasca Sands, Alberta, Canada. Koch Industries’ revenues come from the extraction and processing of raw materials, commodity trading and even large-scale cattle ranching. Several public and state-owned companies are larger, but Koch is of similar size to US oil company Chevron, and China’s top e-retailer Alibaba, and large enough to influence politics globally. Koch money appears at numerous nodes in the State Policy Network. For example, Charles Koch is a board member of the Mercatus Institute, a State Policy Network associate at George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia; also he co-founded the Cato Institute and he has his own institute.

Fred Koch and his wife Mary neé Robinson had four sons: Charles, Frederick, David and William. Only two, Charles and David, were active in Koch Industries in recent decades. David died in 2019, aged 79. Frederick, who died in 2020 aged 86, was uninterested in the family business but inherited enough wealth in it to support the arts and architecture as a philanthropist. William, 81 in 2021 and David’s twin, is a sailor, winning the Americas Cup in 1992 with the yacht America 3, and he collects art and wine, besides supporting favoured causes financially. It seems to be Charles Koch in particular who has skilfully extended the low regulation, small government agenda across the world, helping to build organisations that spread libertarian concepts and oppose socialism in even its milder forms.

Koch Industries, though, has benefited hugely from the socialisation of the uncounted downsides of its operations, and the resulting money flows have enabled the conservative Right to outspend and out-influence the hard-up pressure groups of environment and climate activists. Fossil fuels raising CO2 levels in the atmosphere, not counted. Methane from thousands of cattle, also damaging the atmosphere, not counted. Pollution from processing oil sands, not counted. Raw materials depleted, not counted. Leaving others to pick up the tab shows that libertarianism – the freedom to do as you please – is incompatible with the protection of our planet.

But those who take big profits without accepting responsibility for all the costs give themselves the financial clout to spend, spend, spend on persuading politicians to hold back on environmental action, and to convince the public that activists are misguided nuisances.

Limits on political spending in the USA all but disappeared after a January 2010 decision by the Supreme Court to back an organisation called Citizens United against the Federal Election Commission. Citizens United is a non-profit group dedicated to small government, free enterprise, and national security (although that usually requires quite large government), and its President and Chair, David Bossie, was deputy campaign manager for Donald Trump in his successful 2016 presidential campaign. Back in 2008, the group wanted to release a film criticising Hillary Clinton, who was aiming for nomination as the Democratic presidential candidate in the contest that Barack Obama eventually won. At that point, Citizens United was prohibited from showing anything connected with electioneering, because of 2002’s Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act. This stopped corporations, non-profit organisations and labour unions from making any ‘electioneering communication’ within 30 days of a primary election or 60 days of a full election, or from spending anything at all to call for the election or defeat of any candidate at any time. There was also a $5,000 limit on individuals’ donations to political action committees. Citizens United claimed that this law was unconstitutional, that it broke the First Amendment to the Constitution, which enshrined free speech. The Supreme Court agreed by five votes to four, a majority of one – although the writers of the constitution could hardly have been thinking of corporate public relations when they composed their influential text.[1] Since that decision, millions of dollars have flowed into electioneering, especially from conservative and libertarian sources.

In the USA in 2020, lobbyists for oil and gas enterprises spent over $112 million influencing Congress and federal agencies, according to opensecrets.org.[2] The three oil and gas companies with the biggest lobbying bills were Chevron Corporation, $8.93 million; Exxon Mobil, $8.69 million; and Koch Industries, $8.02 million. More than two-thirds of the lobbyists, 68%, were former government employees. The environmental non-profit Greenpeace USA, as a contrasting example, had no recorded spending in 2020, and its highest total in recent years was $78,487 in 2010. Climate and environment activists cannot compete dollar for dollar, pound for pound, with big business’s big spenders. That’s why they try to make headlines on news broadcasts, even if it means they risk ending up in jail. They can’t outspend the polluters and they do not have the money to buy politicians.

In the UK Nadine Dorries, the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, said quite openly in an interview on June 6th 2022:

“The donors have spoken today, the key people in the Conservative Party that you will hear about and see over the next hours.”

Telling it like it is. Politics is for the donors!

[1] Dark Money p.227. Dark Money, by Jane Mayer, was published by Scribe Publications in London and Victoria, Australia, in 2016. The subtitle is ‘How a secretive group of billionaires is trying to buy political control in the US’.

[2] https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/industries/summary?cycle=2020&id=E01, accessed October 21st 2021.

Wales Clobbered by Westminster’s Cuts in Farming Support Cash

Posted: November 30, 2020 | Author: | Filed under: Agriculture, Politics | Tags: , , , | 1 Comment

A horrible suspicion has rooted in my mind that the agricultural rationale for Brexit was to make the UK, including Wales, dependent on ‘food’ from the USA.

Who really wants chicken doused with chlorine? Cereals containing residues of the herbicide glyphosate (i.e. Roundup)? Foods containing antibiotics, growth hormones, pesticides? Not many people would freely choose these, I guess. Farmers use them to cut costs (in the short term, just don’t think about long-term damage to habitats and ecological diversity!) so they can ‘compete’ for sales to the big food processors and retailers. It’s the scruffy back door of capitalism, where the rubbish bins are, and through which food is offered to the public at prices affordable to those on low wages, the low wages that enable the owners of the system to shovel more and more money into their private possessions and to influence, control, politics.

This year I have been struck by news pictures from the USA, showing colossal queues of motorists waiting for groceries from food banks. They don’t appear able to afford even cheapened ‘food’. Why are they driving cars then? you may ask. The USA’s widely spaced suburbs mean that without vehicles, residents would not be able to access work, shops, or anything much else apart from their immediate neighbours. And of course petrol is ludicrously cheap there, about 50p a litre at the pumps in 2020, cheaper than milk at about 54p a litre.

Economies collapse when populations are so impoverished that they lack ‘effective demand’. Before the Civil War in the USA, the rebel states wanting to keep slavery were handicapped by complexes of superiority, and by weak economies resulting from slaves’ lack of resources to demand anything at all. Before the war, in 1857, Hinton Rowan Helper laid all this out in his The Impending Crisis of the South (available as a e-book from the excellent Project Gutenberg).

We may no longer accept slavery, but in the USA and the UK we live in unequal societies, where food banks have become essential for those with low and uncertain incomes. That’s the inevitable result of cut, cut, cut.

Now this philosophy is clobbering the UK’s farmers as they face the UK’s exit from the European Union. The EU’s Common Agricultural Policy was designed to protect small farms so they could continue to produce high quality food, and form large enough populations for essential services to remain in rural areas.

Caerhys, St Davids, is a community supported agriculture scheme in which the farm produces foodstuffs for subscribers in the locality. This photo was taken there in 2012, in the early days of the scheme.

Looking specifically at Wales, which has 9% of the UK’s land but 18% of its permanent pasture and 28% of its sheep, the draconian cuts in farm support, revealed in Chancellor Rishi Sunak’s Spending Review on November 25th, seem destined to lead to bankruptcies. A no-deal Brexit would impose tariffs of 12.8% plus significant amounts per 100 kilos ranging from €167.50 to €311.80, according to the Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board (AHDB).  About 32% of lamb from Wales is exported to the EU, much of it from farms kept operational only with subsidy support. As subsidies are cut, and the cost of exporting rises, farmers are caught between a rock and a very hard place.

The Farmers’ Union of Wales calculates that for 2021-22, the budget for farm support and rural development will be £242 million compared with the £337 million that the Westminster government had previously promised. This is a cut of 28.2%.

The Welsh Government’s release ‘Farm Incomes in Wales, April 2018 to March 2019’ reported that “In each year around 20 per cent of the farms are making an overall loss with a subsidy, and over half would make a loss without subsidy and diversification”. When farmers receive less financial support and have to pay new painful tariffs on exports to the EU, how long are banks going to remain sympathetic?

The Farmers’ Union of Wales president, Glyn Roberts, says: “Direct payments [mainly for each hectare of a farm business] make up around 80% of average Welsh farm incomes. The significant impacts such a cut in funding will have on Welsh farms, agricultural businesses and rural communities are clear, and these will come at a time when the industry is already anticipating major problems due to non-tariff barriers, unfair competition from sub-standard imports and the possibility of massive EU tariff barriers in the event of a no-deal Brexit.”

Wales has 5% of the UK’s population but 10% of the farmland and 16% of the farms. Farming communities are the backbone of Welsh language and culture, which Westminster’s wrecking ball would weaken, perhaps fatally.

Upland Wales, already a water store for English cities, suffered from the blanket planting of non-native conifers, especially in the 1960s and 70s, resulting in damaging habitat loss and in acidification. Maybe the Westminster government is thinking of Wales as a source of water, timber, and wind- and water-power for England – if so, rather an extractive colonial mindset.

The Chancellor’s swingeing attack on farmers in Wales does not allow much time for adaptation, but that could be part of the plan. To fight back, farmers need to sell direct, or at the very least shorten supply chains so that they can keep a higher proportion of the end selling price.

New mixed family farms, often small and prioritising soil improvement and rich habitats, are also part of the answer, a topic to which Chris Smaje has devoted one new book, and Colin Tudge is devoting another. If mixed family-run farms are part of community supported agriculture, like the Caerhys scheme in St Davids, Pembrokeshire, farmers are helped to stay on the land and communities have a source of fresh food, in both cases improving their resilience — and their independence from unreliable politicians. If money circulates within communities, instead of leaving for the City of London and probably a variety of tax havens, local demand is also protected.

PDR

Chris Smaje’s book is A Small Farm Future, published by Chelse Green in 2020.Colin Tudge’s book is The Great Rethink: a 21st Century Renaissance, to come from Pari Publishing in January 2021.

Less Now, or Nothing Later

Posted: November 25, 2020 | Author: | Filed under: Energy, Low-impact living, Politics | Tags: , , | Leave a comment

Is it really such a hard choice?

Consume less – or in future risk consuming nothing at all. The message is so unpalatable that politicians tend to deny it or bury it. Our whole economic system depends on larger and larger numbers, the adding up of the values of all transactions purportedly to show that economies are ‘growing’. No matter that serious consequences, the uncounted ‘externalities’, such as soil loss, ocean acidification, plastic pollution, greenhouse gas emissions, and  resource depletion, are excluded from the sums! (Although cleaning up polluted sites, rebuilding after floods and other disasters, the drugs trade and even prostitution are included as they can be counted or at least estimated in national accounts.)

New York, home to 8.4 million people, faces an underwater future — as do coastal cities around the world. Photo source: Unsplash

Only the reality of data demonstrating climate change, and of the terrifying experiences of those at the sharp end of weather disasters, forced reluctant governments to show they are doing ‘something’ to slow down – or apparently slow down – damaging emissions that are making the Earth’s climates hotter and therefore more unstable and unpredictable, and are melting ice so fast that coastal zones, where most people live, will often be under water.

The US Geological Survey (USGS) estimates that if every glacier melted, sea levels would rise about 230 feet. Goodbye London, New York, Kolkata, Shanghai and waterside cities, towns, villages and hamlets around the world. Clearly President Trump, aficionado of oceanside Florida, does not pay attention to USGS. Where will the displaced go? To where other people are already living, or more probably trying to subsist.

To stand any chance of avoiding the worst aspects of this scenario, we have to plan economic contraction in countries like UK. If we do not plan, the outcome is worse and economies crash anyway.

Paul Mobbs, author of the 2005 book Energy Beyond Oil, has concluded that we in affluent nations have been living beyond our energy resources for so long that we have to consume far, far less.  Nuclear won’t save us. Hydrogen won’t. Electricity generated from ‘renewables’ won’t.

Problem is that this prospect does not fit into the window frame of permissible thought.  That frame is very narrow.

As Paul Mobbs writes in ‘Britain’s Energy and Climate Crisis’ (fraw.org.uk/weird, issue 3 2020):

“For many trapped within consumer culture, this conclusion [to cut consumption] is dismissed as ‘negative’. It offers no hope of preserving the affluent modern lifestyle as part of solving climate change – which is why the popular political debate ignores this reality.”

The consequences of dramatic downshifting are colossal. Two new books and one older one reviewed on this site here, here and here, address aspects of the issue, especially the necessity to protect soils and farm in what we might call an old-fashioned way, using rotations, cover crops and enough livestock to supply manure.

Jobs in wholesaling and retailing, in road transport, customer services, in selling complex financial products, in tourism and hospitality, would be among those to shrink, given the declining amounts of energy available. What a shame that the UK, unlike Norway, squandered the revenues from North Sea Oil and did not build up a sovereign wealth fund to ease the transition to a post-consumer society.  

PDR

Energy Beyond Oil by Paul Mobbs was published by Matador in 2005, ISBN 1 905237 00 6

Techno Tories and Green Left Diverge Sharply over UK’s Future

Posted: November 22, 2020 | Author: | Filed under: Eco Politics, Politics, Social inequality | Tags: , , | Leave a comment

£12 billion over ten years for Boris Johnson’s ‘Green Industrial Revolution’ is a drop in the ocean. Different minds, in the Transition Economics consultancy, want a huge amount more –£85 billion of public investment in the next TWO YEARS.

The All Party Parliamentary Group on the Green New Deal is more sympathetic to the latter figure, and quotes it in its new report How to Reset: policies to deliver on the public desire for a fairer, greener Britain after Covid —

“The think-tank Transition Economics propose a two-year clean infrastructure stimulus which they calculate would replace the projected jobs lost from Covid and are designed to benefit the people and sectors hit hardest by its economic impacts. Using 10 World Bank-derived criteria including long-term job creation, resilience and sustainability, they recommend 19 infrastructure projects totalling an £85 billion public investment that would deliver structural transformation and create 1.2 million jobs over the next two years, comprising 735,000 jobs in housing construction and energy efficiency retrofits; 289,000 jobs in transport upgrades; 98,000 jobs in energy, waste, and manufacturing infrastructures; 81,000 jobs in land, forestry, and agriculture improvements; 42,000 jobs in broadband upgrades.”

Aircraft trails, all contributing to climate change. The Westminster Government is hoping for zero-emission planes, but they are not yet a commercial reality.

The All Party Parliamentary Group does not have the power to introduce such policies (a pity, speaking personally!) but makes strong arguments for them. Their ideas, apart from the infrastructure transformation, include Universal Basic Income; a jobs guarantee extending to “work that is socially useful, organised around community need” and paying at least a national living wage; creating a new National Nature Service to “employ and train thousands of people in environmental work”; and establishing another national service, for social care.

The group calls for reform of the planning system “to empower local authorities to develop 15-minute neighbourhoods designed to ensure that people’s needs for shops, entertainment, education, healthcare and green spaces can all be met within a short walk or cycle of their home”. This means a lot more green spaces!

A National Investment Bank, and significant re-allocation of current spending to help create a society with “a broader set of human and ecological health and wellbeing objectives” than GDP growth, are also among the group’s ambitions.

The Johnsonian Conservative vision of a Green Industrial Revolution focuses on technologies – current and still-to-be-invented – to achieve emissions reductions while still trying to ratchet up industrial growth. The All Party Parliamentary Group, responding to its surveys of public opinion, concentrates on equity, fairness, and restoration of damaged environments.

The group’s composition helps to explain the contrasting objectives. There are no Conservative MPs in the group of 22, and only two Conservatives in total, both peers. The Conservatives are outnumbered by Green Party (3) and Labour (12) politicians.

PDR

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