The Smearing of An Innocent Man
Global Warming/Climate Change — by George Monbiot August 27, 2010
Has anyone been as badly maligned as Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)?
by George Monbiot: journalist, author, academic and environmental and political activist, United Kingdom
Rajendra Pachauri
In December, the Sunday Telegraph carried a long and prominent feature written by Christopher Booker and Richard North, titled: Questions over business deals of UN climate change guru Dr Rajendra Pachauri.
The subtitle alleged that Pachauri has been “making a fortune from his links with ‘carbon trading’ companies”. The article maintained that the money made by Pachauri while working for other organisations “must run into millions of dollars”.
Comments (3)Words Fail Us
Biodiversity — by George Monbiot August 23, 2010
By Guillaume Chapron and George Monbiot
 Photo © copyright Craig Mackintosh Note by photographer/editor: This photo was taken in a wildlife park in New Zealand. Just a few weeks later the gecko was stolen from the park, and suspected of being smuggled into Asia. It had an estimated ‘value’ of NZ$10,000 according to newspaper reports at the time. If only people would go to such lengths to preserve rare species and habitats rather than cashing in on their rarity…. Please support Guillaume Chapron and George Monbiot’s bid to give the powers that be a bit of a push. |
It’s on course to make the farcical climate talks in Copenhagen look like a roaring success. The big international meeting in October which is meant to protect the world’s biodiversity is destined to be an even greater failure than last year’s attempt to protect the world’s atmosphere. Already the UN has conceded that the targets for safeguarding wild species and wild places in 2010 have been missed: comprehensively and tragically(1).
In 2002, 188 countries launched a global initiative, usually referred to as the 2010 biodiversity target, to achieve by this year a significant reduction in the current rate of biodiversity loss. The plan was widely reported as the beginning of the end of the biodiversity crisis. But in May this year, the Convention on Biological Diversity admitted that it had failed. It appears to have had no appreciable effect on the rate of loss of animals, plants and wild places.
In a few weeks, the same countries will meet in Nagoya, Japan and make a similarly meaningless set of promises(2). Rather than taking immediate action to address their failures, they will concentrate on producing a revised target for 2020 and a “vision” for 2050, as well as creating further delays by expressing the need for better biodiversity indicators. In many cases there’s little need for more research. It’s not biodiversity indicators that are in short supply; but any kind of indicator that the member states are willing to act.
Comments (0)Towering Lunacy
Building, Economics, Energy Systems, Food Shortages, Society, Urban Projects — by George Monbiot August 17, 2010
Green enthusiasm for vertical farms shows that no one is untouched by magical thinking.
by George Monbiot: journalist, author, academic and environmental and political activist, United Kingdom
No one is immune to it; in some respects it is the foundation of our lives. Magical thinking is a universal affliction. We see what we want to see, deny what we don’t. Confronted by uncomfortable facts, we burrow back into the darkness of our cherished beliefs. We will do almost anything – cheat, lie, stand for high office, go to war – to shut out challenges to the way we see the world.
I spend much of my time confronting one aspect of denial: the virulent repudiation of environmental constraints by those who admit no challenge to their vision of the world. But it pains me to report that denial and wishful thinking are almost as common on the other side of the argument. I find myself at odds with other greens almost as often as I find myself fighting our common enemies. I’ve had bruising battles over a long series of miracle solutions supported by my friends: liquid biofuels(1), hydrogen cars and planes(2), biochar plantations(3,4), solar electricity in the UK(5), scrappage payments(6), feed-in tariffs(7). But no green delusion is as crazy as the one I am about to explain. The idea itself might not interest you. But the insight it gives into the filtering techniques human beings use is fascinating. So please bear with me while I spell out the latest madness.
Comments (3)Turning Estates into Villages
Building, People Systems, Social Gatherings, Society, Village Development — by George Monbiot August 10, 2010
How good planning can make us slimmer, fitter, safer and less lonely.
by George Monbiot: journalist, author, academic and environmental and political activist, United Kingdom
It took me a while to recognise what I was seeing. It was an ordinary campsite in Pembrokeshire: a square field with tents around the perimeter. But it had a curious effect on the children staying there. Young people who had seldom experienced daylight slowly emerged from their tents and were drawn towards the centre of the field. Bats and balls left on the grass mysteriously appeared in their hands. Children with no prior interest in sport started playing football, cricket and rounders. Little kids ran around with older ones. As children of all classes played together, their parents started talking to each other. It hit me with some force: we had reinvented the village green.
Source: Wikipedia
We are, to a surprising extent, what the built environment makes us. Academic papers show that many of the problems we blame on individual behaviour are caused in part by the places in which we live. People are more likely to help their neighbours in quiet areas, for example, than in noisy ones(1). A long series of studies across several countries, beginning in San Francisco in 1969, shows unequivocally that communities become weaker as the volume of traffic on their streets increases(2,3).
Comments (3)Sending Off the Ref
Alternatives to Political Systems, Economics, Society — by George Monbiot July 13, 2010
The government’s disastrous new deregulation programme means that the poor will be fouled by the rich.
by George Monbiot: journalist, author, academic and environmental and political activist, United Kingdom
Twelve bookings and one dismissal: the World Cup final wasn’t pretty. Both sides argued with the referee, but no one was stupid enough to believe that the match would have been a fairer or a better one without him. Yet we have been asked to imagine that the outcome of the power struggle between corporations and the public would be fairer and better if there were no referee.
The referee is government. It is always biased and often bought, but in principle in a democratic society it exists to prevent us from being fouled. More precisely, it is supposed to prevent those who have agency – the rich and powerful – from planting their studs in the chests of those who don’t. When the government walks away from the game the rich can foul the poor with impunity. Deregulation is a transfer of power from the trodden to the treading. It is unsurprising that all conservative parties claim to hate big government.
Comments (13)A Bookful of Bookerisms
Global Warming/Climate Change, Society — by George Monbiot July 7, 2010
The climate change deniers are digging themselves an ever deeper hole over ‘Amazongate’
by George Monbiot: journalist, author, academic and environmental and political activist, United Kingdom
Well this becomes more entertaining by the moment. Those who staked so much on the “Amazongate” story, only to see it turn round and bite them, are now digging a hole so deep that they will soon be able to witness a possible climate change scenario at first hand, as they emerge, shovels in hand, in the middle of the Great Victoria Desert.
Here’s the story so far. In January the rightwing blogger Richard North claimed that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had “grossly exaggerated the effects of global warming on the Amazon rain forest”. In 2007 the Panel had claimed that “up to 40% of the Amazonian forests could react drastically to even a slight reduction in precipitation”. Reduced rainfall could rapidly destroy the forests, which would be replaced with ecosystems “such as tropical savannahs.”
Comments (9)BP’s Dumb Investors
Economics, Society, Soil Erosion & Contamination, Water Contaminaton, peak oil — by George Monbiot June 22, 2010
The companies now threatening to sue BP have only themselves to blame.
First published in November 2007, by George Monbiot: journalist, author, academic and environmental and political activist, United Kingdom
Image courtesy: Marc Roberts
Call me a hard-hearted bastard, but I’m finding it difficult to summon up the sympathy demanded by the institutional investors now threatening to sue BP. They claim that the company inflated its share price by misrepresenting its safety record(1). I don’t know whether this is true, but I do know that the investors did all they could not to find out. They have just been presented with the bill for the years they spent shouting down anyone who questioned the company.
They might not have been warned by BP, but they were warned repeatedly by environmental groups and ethical investment funds. Every year, at BP’s annual general meetings, they were invited to ask the firm to provide more information about the environmental and social risks it was taking. Every year they voted instead for BP to keep them in the dark. While relying on this company for a disproportionate share of their income (BP pays 12% of all UK firms’ dividends), they refused to hold it to account.
It’s not as if the warning signs were hard to spot. One of them is splashed across the front page of BP’s 2009 annual review: the title is “Operating at the Energy Frontiers”(2). Like all multinational oil companies, BP has been shut out of the easy fields by the decline of its old reserves and the rising power of state-owned companies. So, to keep the money flowing, BP takes risks that other companies won’t contemplate. “Risk”, the review states, “remains a key issue for every business, but at BP it is fundamental to what we do. We operate at the frontiers of the energy industry, in an environment where attitude to risk is key … We continue to show our ability to take on and manage risk, doing the difficult things that others either can’t do or choose not to do.”(3)
Comments (0)Madder and Madder
Global Warming/Climate Change — by George Monbiot June 11, 2010
Lord Monckton’s increasingly extravagant claims threaten to destroy the movement he champions
by George Monbiot: journalist, author, academic and environmental and political activist, United Kingdom
The longer this goes on, the better it will be for all those who take science seriously. Lord Monckton is digging his hole ever deeper, and dragging down into it everyone stupid enough to follow him. Those of us who do battle with climate change deniers can’t inflict one tenth as much damage to their cause that Monckton wreaks every time he opens his mouth.
He has now answered the devastating debunking of his claims published by the professor of mechanical engineering John Abraham(1) with a characteristically bonkers article(2). It conforms to the cast iron rules of climate change denial, which are as follows:
Comments (4)The Money Gusher
Biodiversity, Economics, Global Warming/Climate Change, Water Contaminaton, peak oil — by George Monbiot June 9, 2010
The oil industry’s decommissioning costs will dwarf those of nuclear power. The money being made now should be put aside to meet them.
First published in November 2007, by George Monbiot: journalist, author, academic and environmental and political activist, United Kingdom
Has BP ever made a profit? The question looks daft. The oil company posted profits of $26bn last year(1). There’s no doubt that BP has been pumping money into the pockets of its shareholders. The question is whether this money is what the company says it is. BP calls it profit. I call it the provision the firm should be making against future liabilities.
Despite an angry letter from two US senators(2) and a warning from Barack Obama about spending big money on their shareholders while nickeling and diming coastal people(3), despite the fact that it has no idea what its total liabilities in the Gulf of Mexico will be, BP seems to be planning to pay a dividend this year. It’s likely to amount to more than $10bn. As the two senators noted, by moving money “off the company’s books and into investors’ pockets”, BP “will make it much more difficult to repay the US government and American communities”.
Pollution has been defined as a resource in the wrong place. That’s also a pretty good description of the company’s profits. The great plumes of money that have been bursting out of the company’s accounts every year are not BP’s to give away. They consist, in part or in whole, of the externalised costs the company has failed to pay, and which the rest of society must carry.
Comments (5)An Agricultural Crime Against Humanity
Consumerism, Energy Systems, Food Shortages, Global Warming/Climate Change, peak oil — by George Monbiot June 2, 2010
Biofuels could kill more people than the Iraq war.
First published in November 2007, by George Monbiot: journalist, author, academic and environmental and political activist, United Kingdom
 Jatropha plantation |
It doesn’t get madder than this. Swaziland is in the grip of a famine and receiving emergency food aid. Forty per cent of its people are facing acute food shortages. So what has the government decided to export? Biofuel made from one of its staple crops, cassava(1). The government has allocated several thousand hectares of farmland to ethanol production in the county of Lavumisa, which happens to be the place worst hit by drought(2). It would surely be quicker and more humane to refine the Swazi people and put them in our tanks. Doubtless a team of development consultants is already doing the sums.
This is one of many examples of a trade described last month by Jean Ziegler, the UN’s special rapporteur, as “a crime against humanity”(3). Ziegler took up the call first made by this column for a five-year moratorium on all government targets and incentives for biofuel(4): the trade should be frozen until second-generation fuels – made from wood or straw or waste – become commercially available. Otherwise the superior purchasing power of drivers in the rich world means that they will snatch food from people’s mouths. Run your car on virgin biofuel and other people will starve.
Comments (13)Out of Sight, Out of Trouble
Economics, Energy Systems — by George Monbiot May 24, 2010
A new report shows how the UK could tap into vast renewable resources, without any of the aggro caused by existing wind farms.
by George Monbiot: journalist, author, academic and environmental and political activist, United Kingdom
Whenever you suggest that renewables could one day supply a large proportion of our electricity, scores of people jump up to denounce it as a pipedream, a fantasy, a dangerous delusion. They insist that the energy resources don’t exist; that the technologies are inefficient; that they can’t be accommodated on the grid; that the variability of supply will cause constant blackouts.
An Eruption of Reality
Alternatives to Political Systems, Consumerism, Economics, Food Shortages, Global Warming/Climate Change, Society, peak oil — by George Monbiot April 22, 2010
Has our society become too complex to sustain?
by George Monbiot: journalist, author, academic and environmental and political activist, United Kingdom
Man proposes; nature disposes. We are seldom more vulnerable than when we feel insulated.
The miracle of modern flight protected us from gravity, atmosphere, culture, geography. It made everywhere feel local, interchangeable. Nature interjects, and we encounter – tragically for many – the reality of thousands of miles of separation. We discover that we have not escaped from the physical world after all.
Comments (9)Putting the Pope on Trial
Alternatives to Political Systems, Economics, People Systems, Society — by George Monbiot April 14, 2010
International law presents a radical challenge to the powerful: they could be judged by the same standards as the rest of us.
by George Monbiot: journalist, author, academic and environmental and political activist, United Kingdom
Confession and repentence are not among the Christian virtues practised by the Pope. He has apologised for the rape of children by Catholic priests in Ireland; but this is one of the few paedophilia scandals now shaking the Church in which neither he nor members of his inner circle were involved. He condemned the Irish bishops’ “grave errors of judgement” and “failures of leadership”(1), but of his own grave errors and failures – in Munich(2), Wisconsin(3) and California(4) – he says not a word, except to dismiss the issue as “petty gossip”(5). His response to this scandal reminds you of the origins of the verb to pontificate.
Shut out of his closed, self-regulated world, the victims of sacerdotal rape could only rage in frustration. Until now.
Comments (2)War With The Ghosts
Nuclear, Society — by George Monbiot March 25, 2010
What are our nuclear weapons for, and who controls them?
by George Monbiot: journalist, author, academic and environmental and political activist, United Kingdom
Sharing our nuclear deterrence with France is out of the question. Last week the government slapped down a French offer to reduce the costs of our submarine patrols, by taking turns to prowl the same seas rather than duplicating the effort and occasionally crashing into each other. This proposal, it said, would cause “outrage”, on the grounds that it’s an unacceptable erosion of sovereignty(1). Using a system leased from the United States, on the other hand, presents no such difficulty. When the government says our sovereignty is threatened, it means that another nation might disrupt the orders it receives from Washington.
So we must maintain the pretence that this is ours alone, and sustain our extravagant doctrine of “continuous at-sea deterrence”. Deterrence against what? Nazis? Aliens? Killer jellyfish? Our Trident missiles, due to be replaced and deployed at a cost of several tens of billions(2), have no visible strategic purpose. They are the reification of a fantasy: a fantasy that the United Kingdom is still a defining world power and that our enemies present an existential threat. As usual, the government is preparing for the last war, building a fantastical Maginot Line against the enemies of a previous century, the ghost armies that haunt the official imagination.
Comments (0)The Naming of Things
Biodiversity, Deforestation, Global Warming/Climate Change — by George Monbiot March 23, 2010
Here’s one small way in which the collapse of biodiversity could be slowed
by George Monbiot: journalist, author, academic and environmental and political activist, United Kingdom
The names alone should cause anyone whose heart still beats to stop and look again. Blotched woodwax. Pashford pot beetle. Scarce black arches. Mallow skipper. Marsh dagger. Each is a locket in which hundreds of years of history and thousands of years of evolution have been packed. Here nature and culture intersect. All are species that have recently become extinct in England.
I cannot claim that I’ve been materially damaged by their loss, any more than the razing of the Prado would deprive me of food or shelter. But the global collapse of biodiversity hurts almost beyond endurance. The sense that the world is greying, its wealth of colour and surprise and wonder fading, is so painful that I can scarcely bear to write about it. Human welfare, as measured by gross domestic product, is doubtless enhanced by the processes which drive extinction. Human welfare, as measured by the heart and the senses, is diminished. We have no use for most of the world’s natural exuberance; it cannot be commodified or reproduced. Biodiversity does not belong to us: that is why it is worth preserving.
Comments (4)
