At Last, a Date
Global Warming/Climate Change, peak oil — by George Monbiot December 16, 2008
For the first time, the International Energy Agency has produced a date for peak oil. And it’s not reassuring.
by George Monbiot – journalist, author, academic and environmental and political activist
Can you think of a major threat for which the British government does not prepare? It employs an army of civil servants, spooks and consultants to assess the chances of terrorist attacks, financial collapse, floods, epidemics, even asteroid strikes, and to work out what it should do if they happen. But there is one hazard about which it appears intensely relaxed. It has never conducted its own assessment of the state of global oil supplies and the possibility that one day they might peak and then go into decline.
Whistling in the Wind
Economics, Global Warming/Climate Change — by George Monbiot December 3, 2008
The new climate change report falls miles short of what we need. Here are some of the emergency measures it should have contained.
by George Monbiot – journalist, author, academic and environmental and political activist
Lord Turner has two jobs. The first, as chair of the Financial Services Authority, is to save capitalism. The second, as chair of the Committee on Climate Change, is to save the biosphere from the impacts of capitalism. I have no idea how well he is discharging the first task, but if his approach to the second one is anything to go by, you should dump your shares and buy gold.
His climate change report, published yesterday, is long, detailed and impressive(1). It has the admirable objective of trying to cap global warming at two degrees or a little more. This, it says, means that greenhouse gas pollution in the UK should fall by 80% by 2050 and by 31% by 2020. But there’s a problem. There is no longer any likely relationship between an 80% cut and two degrees of warming. This gets a little complicated, but please bear with me while I explain why Turner’s proposal is about as likely to stop runaway climate change as the Maginot Line was to hold back the Luftwaffe.
Comments (6)One Shot Left
Economics, Global Warming/Climate Change — by George Monbiot November 26, 2008
The latest science suggests that preventing runaway climate change means total decarbonisation.
by George Monbiot – journalist, author, academic and environmental and political activist
George Bush is behaving like a furious defaulter whose home is about to be repossessed. Smashing the porcelain, ripping the doors off their hinges, he is determined that there will be nothing worth owning by the time the bastards kick him out. His midnight regulations, opening America’s wilderness to logging and mining, trashing pollution controls, tearing up conservation laws, will do almost as much damage in the last 60 days of his presidency as he achieved in the foregoing 3000(1).
His backers – among them the nastiest pollutocrats in America – are calling in their favours. But this last binge of vandalism is also the Bush presidency reduced to its essentials. Destruction is not an accidental product of its ideology. Destruction is the ideology. Neoconservatism is power expressed by showing that you can reduce any part of the world to rubble.
Comments (2)Clearing Up This Mess
Alternatives to Political Systems, Economics, Financial Management — by George Monbiot November 21, 2008
John Maynard Keynes had the answer to the crisis we’re now facing; but it was blocked and then forgotten.
by George Monbiot – journalist, author, academic and environmental and political activist
 Delegations at Bretton Woods |
Poor old Lord Keynes. The world’s press has spent the past week blackening his name. Not intentionally: most of the dunderheads reporting the G20 summit which took place over the weekend really do believe that he proposed and founded the International Monetary Fund. It’s one of those stories that passes unchecked from one journalist to another.
The truth is more interesting. At the Bretton Woods conference in 1944, John Maynard Keynes put forward a much better idea. After it was thrown out, Geoffrey Crowther – then the editor of the Economist magazine – warned that “Lord Keynes was right … the world will bitterly regret the fact that his arguments were rejected.”(1) But the world does not regret it, for almost everyone – the Economist included – has forgotten what he proposed.
Comments (1)This is What Denial Does
Consumerism, Economics — by George Monbiot October 16, 2008
The economic crisis is petty by comparison to the nature crunch. But they have the same cause.
by George Monbiot – journalist, author, academic and environmental and political activist
 Click for full view Courtesy: Throbgoblins |
This is nothing. Well, nothing by comparison to what’s coming. The financial crisis for which we must now pay so heavily prefigures the real collapse, when humanity bumps against its ecological limits.
As we goggle at the fluttering financial figures, a different set of numbers passes us by. On Friday, Pavan Sukhdev, the Deutsche Bank economist leading a European study on ecosystems, reported that we are losing natural capital worth between $2 trillion and $5 trillion every year, as a result of deforestation alone(1). The losses incurred so far by the financial sector amount to between $1 trillion and $1.5 trillion. Sukhdev arrived at his figure by estimating the value of the services – such as locking up carbon and providing freshwater – that forests perform, and calculating the cost of either replacing them or living without them. The credit crunch is petty when compared to the nature crunch.
Comments (1)The Other Bail-Out
Consumerism, Economics, peak oil — by George Monbiot October 10, 2008
Another set of corporations is pressing for public money. Governments should let them die.
by George Monbiot – journalist, author, academic and environmental and political activist
While all eyes were fixed on the banking bail-out, a bucketload of public money was quietly sloshed into the pockets of another undeserving cause. Last week, George Bush agreed to lend $25bn to US car manufacturers. It’s a soft loan, which will cost the government $7.5bn(1). Few people noticed; fewer fought it. The House of Representatives approved the measure by 370 votes to 58. The great corporate bail-out is spreading like the plague.
It has already crossed the Atlantic. Yesterday European car makers demanded that the EU hand them €40bn ($54bn) in cheap loans to match the US subsidy(2). Where will the public spending spree end?
Comments (0)Congress Confronts its Contradictions
Alternatives to Political Systems, Consumerism, Economics, Society — by George Monbiot October 1, 2008
They baled out of the bail-out, but the money will still have to come from us. It always has.
by George Monbiot – journalist, author, academic and environmental and political activist
According to Senator Jim Bunning, the proposal to purchase $700bn of dodgy debt by the US government “is financial socialism, it is un-American”(1). The economics professor Nouriel Roubini calls George Bush, Henry Paulson and Ben Bernanke “a troika of Bolsheviks who turned the USA into the United Socialist State Republic of America”(2). Bill Perkins, the venture capitalist who took out an advertisement in the New York Times attacking the deal, calls it “trickle-down communism”(3).
They are wrong. The banking subsidies Congress rejected last night are as American as apple pie and obesity. The sums demanded by Bush and Paulson might be unprecedented, but there is nothing new about the principle: corporate welfare is a consistent feature of advanced capitalism. Only one thing has changed: Congress has been forced to confront its contradictions.
Comments (1)Strange Fruit
Consumerism, Food Plants - Perennial, Health & Disease, Processing & Food Preservation, Trees — by George Monbiot September 5, 2008
A hard commercial logic dictates that the only way to get good fruit today is to grow your own.
by George Monbiot – journalist, author, academic and environmental and political activist
I feel almost shy about writing this column. It contains no revelations, no call to arms. No one gets savaged: well, only mildly. The subject is almost inconsequential. Yet it has become an obsession which, at this time of year, forbids me to concentrate for long on anything else.
Hypocrites Unite!
General — by George Monbiot August 9, 2008
At least we have some ideals to fall short of.
by George Monbiot – journalist, author, academic and environmental and political activist
In her new book, Not In My Name, Julie Burchill reserves her grandest fury about hypocrites for environmentalists. We are, she says, pious, sexless and contemptuous of humankind. All of us are posh and rich, and have found in environmentalism a new excuse for lecturing the poor. We tell other people to live by rules we don’t apply to ourselves.
Like all stereotypes, these claims are lazy, familiar and sometimes true. Burchill knows nothing about environmentalism and, almost as a point of pride, hasn’t bothered to find out, but when you use grapeshot you are bound to hit someone. Yes, many prominent greens are posh gits like me. The same can be said of journalists, politicians, artists, academics, business leaders: in fact of just about anyone in public life. But it is always the greens who are singled out. In truth, while the upper middle classes are, as always, over-represented in the media, the movement cuts across the classes. A recent ICM poll found that more people in social classes D and E thought the government should prioritise the environment over the economy (56%) than in classes A and B (47%)(1).
Comments (0)Small is Bountiful
Food Shortages, Population, Soil Conservation, Soil Erosion & Contamination — by George Monbiot July 30, 2008
by George Monbiot – journalist, author, academic and environmental and political activist. Originally published in the Guardian, 10 June 2008
I suggest you sit down before you read this. Robert Mugabe is right. At last week’s global food summit he was the only leader to speak of “the importance … of land in agricultural production and food security”.(1) Countries should follow Zimbabwe’s lead, he said, in democratising ownership.
Of course the old bastard has done just the opposite. He has evicted his opponents and given land to his supporters. He has failed to support the new settlements with credit or expertise, with the result that farming in Zimbabwe has collapsed. The country was in desperate need of land reform when Mugabe became president. It remains in desperate need of land reform today.
Comments (1)The Bottom of the Barrel
peak oil — by George Monbiot August 1, 2005
The world is quickly running out of oil – so why do politicians refuse to talk about this huge problem?
George Monbiot
The oil industry is buzzing. In November the government approved the development of the biggest deposit discovered in British territory for at least 10 years. Everywhere we are told that this is a “huge” find, which dispels the idea that North Sea oil is in terminal decline.
You begin to recognise how serious the human predicament has become when you discover that this “huge” new field will supply the world with oil for about five and a quarter days.Every generation has its taboo, and ours is this: that the resource upon which our lives have been built is running out. We don’t talk about it because we cannot imagine it. This is a civilisation in denial.
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