Espousing conviviality as a life-directing ethos has many consequences for anyone speculating about the future of their community, country and the world.
The alternative ethos of wealth creation is essential for a poverty stricken community or country in order to achieve a satisfying quality of life for its members. This means that beyond the basic needs for food, water, shelter and security, people can at least: enjoy the happiness of family life and social intercourse with their fellows; gain the education that is an entry to the culture of their time and provides them with the skills needed for their adult life; access good health provision to tackle such ailments as may afflict them; and have opportunities for democratic participation in the affairs of their society.
But once this quality of life has been achieved and a society moves on to reach the boundary between decent need and obscene greed, as is the case for most (but not all) of the populations of the so-called developed countries, the ethos of conviviality is needed, not just because it can be held to be morally right, but because it can save mankind from destroying itself.
The ethos of conviviality, as the joy that comes from being in harmony with one’s environment, one’s fellows and oneself, has many facets. It embraces ideas of ecological sustainability, social justice, elimination of poverty at home and world-wide, peace, community and democracy.
The pages of The Guardian and Observer, perhaps because they are governed by the tenets of the Scott Trust and not by the financial and political ambitions of newspaper barons, from time to time carry news and articles which give messages of hope, and sometimes despair, to those who, often without so naming it, seek the path of conviviality. The following extracts from these newspapers are examples that I have recently culled. Inevitably, as short précises of longer expositions, they may do only partial justice to the ideas originally expressed by their authors. Some are news items, the often dramatic if not apocalyptic accounts of what someone has said or done – which of course makes them newsworthy. The extracts from articles reflect the careful thought and considered prose of a number of social commentators – some writing regularly in these newspapers. They are in chronological order which gives a sense of the chaotic way in which ideas assail us and change slowly happens.
They show how the ethos of conviviality has meaning in many aspects of the politics of today and so give a justification for the ambitious title of this website.
‘WE HAVE ONLY FOUR YEARS LEFT TO ACT ON CLIMATE CHANGE – AMERICA HAS TO LEAD’
18 January 2009 Observer Robin McKie (news)
Jim Hansen is described as ‘the grandfather of climate change’: he is one of the world’s leading climatologists. In this interview in New York he explains why President Obama’s administration is the last chance to avoid flooded cities, species extinction and climate catastrophe. “In fact, I am just a grandfather and I do not want my grandchildren to say that grandpa understood what was happening but didn’t make it clear.” In his view only a carbon tax, agreed by the west and then imposed on the rest of the world through political pressure and trade tariffs, would succeed in the now-desperate task of stopping the rise of emissions.
$400BN DEMAND FOR GREEN SPENDING
12 February 2009 Guardian David Adams (news)
Governments across the world must commit to hundreds of billions of pounds in green investments within months in a combined attack on the global economic crisis and global warming – say leading economists including Nicholas Stern. This should be channeled to support low-carbon technologies such as home insulation and renewable energy. Action to tackle climate change could form a central part of fiscal packages to stimulate national economies.
UK’S EX-SCIENCE CHIEF PREDICTS CENTURY OF ‘RESOURCE’WARS
13 February 2009 Guardian James Randerson (news)
Sir David King reckons that the Iraq war was the first of the ‘resource’ wars – to secure energy supplies for the US. With population growth, natural resources dwindling, and seas rising due to climate change, the squeeze on the planet will lead to more conflict. He said that fundamental changes to the economy and society were necessary. “Consumerism has been a wonderful model for growing economies in the 20th century. Is that model fit for purpose in the 21st century, when resource shortage is our biggest challenge?”
COAL-FIRED POWER STATIONS ARE DEATH FACTORIES. CLOSE THEM
15 February 2009 Observer James Hansen (article)
The UK government is expected to give the go-ahead to the coal-burning Kingsworth power plant. Here, one of the world’s foremost climate experts launches an excoriating attack on Britain’s long love affair with the most polluting fossil fuel of all.
The climate is nearing tipping points. Changes are beginning to appear and there is a potential for explosive changes, effects that would be irreversible, if we do not rapidly slow fossil-fuel emissions over the next few decades. As arctic sea ice melts, the darker ocean absorbs more sunlight and speeds up melting. As the tundra melts, methane – a stronger greenhouse gas, is released, causing more warming. As species are exterminated by shifting climate zones, ecosystems can collapse, destroying more species. Our planet is in peril. If we do not change course, we’ll hand our children a situation that is out of their control. One ecological collapse will lead to another, in amplifying feedbacks.
THE TROPICS ON FIRE: SCIENTIST’S GRIM VISION OF GLOBAL WARMING
16 February 2009 Guardian Ian Sample (news)
Tropical forests may dry out and become vulnerable to devastating wildfires as global warming accelerates over the coming decades, warns Dr Chris Field co-chair of the UN International Panel on Climate Change.
HUMAN CO2 EMISSIONS BLAMED FOR DANGEROUSLY ACIDIC SEAS
10 March 2009 Guardian David Adams (news)
Human pollution is turning seas acidic so quickly the coming decades will recreate conditions not seen on Earth since the era of the dinosaurs, scientists from Bristol University warn. The rapid acidification is cause by CO2 belched from chimneys and exhausts that dissolve in the sea. The chemical change is placing unprecedented pressure on marine life and could cause widespread extinctions.
STERN ATTACKS POLITICIANS OVER CLIMATE ‘DEVASTATION’
13 March 2009 Guardian David Adam (news)
Politicians have failed to take on board the severe consequences of failing to cut world carbon emissions, according to Nicholas Stern, the economist commissioned by Gordon Brown to analyse the impact of climate change. More than 2,500 climate experts from 80 countries at an emergency summit in Copenhagen said that there is now “no excuse” for failing to act on global warming. A failure to agree strong carbon reduction targets at political negotiations this year could bring “abrupt or irreversible” shifts in climate.
LET’S SEE CLIMATE CHANGE AS AN OPPORTUNITY
15 March 2009 Observer Editorial
If we continue to pollute the planet at our current rate, terrible consequences will follow. The evidence is there. But our leaders cannot find the will to do anything about it. …There is an antidote to climate defeatism: it is the knowledge that the actions we take now to lead a greener life could boost employment and develop an economy less dependent on wasteful financial services; improve national security by making us less dependent on fossil fuels; and deliver us a better, healthier, happier lifestyle. It so happens they will also preserve the planet for future generations.
‘PERFECT STORM’ OF SCARCITY WILL UNLEASH GLOBAL TURMOIL
19 March 2009 Guardian Ian Sample (news)
A “perfect storm” of food shortages, scarce water and insufficient energy resources threaten to unleash public unrest, cross border conflicts and mass migration as people flee the worst-affected regions, the government’s chief scientist, Prof John Beddington, will say at the Sustainable Development UK conference today.
FORGET GROWTH: LET’S FOCUS ON WELLBEING AND SOLVING CLIMATE CHANGE INSTEAD
23 March 2009 Guardian Aditya Chakrabortty (article)
For all its prominence, GDP is only one yardstick of economic performance, and it is no guide to social progress. It simply indicates the market value of all goods and services produced in an economy. It takes no account of how income is shared, or of how it is generated. Few would celebrate a boom in costly divorce cases – but it would be great for GDP. And there is mounting evidence that, beyond a certain point, greater prosperity does not make us feel any better. Richard Layard says our wellbeing depends on three things: family relationships, satisfaction at work and strong communities. He says: “Many policies to drive up income harm precisely those things from which we derive our quality of life.” Peter Victor, author of Managing Without Growth, says: “We can either design a slower-growth economy over the next few decades, or we’ll get there suddenly, through environmental disaster”.
WE NEED A FIVE-YEAR FREEZE ON BIOFUELS, BEFORE THEY WRECK THE PLANET
27 March 2009 Guardian George Monbiot (article)
In theory, fuels made from plants can reduce the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by cars and trucks. Plants absorb carbon as they grow - it is released again when the fuel is burnt. By encouraging oil companies to switch from fossil plants to living ones, governments on both sides of the Atlantic claim to be “decarbonising” our transport networks. ...
So what’s wrong with these programmes? Only that they are a formula for environmental and humanitarian disaster.
The planting of palm oil to turn into biodiesel for the European market is now the main cause of deforestation in Indonesia. Sugarcane producers are moving into rare scrubland habitats (the cerrado) in Brazil and soya farmers are ripping up the Amazon rainforests. Indigenous people in South America, Asia and Africa are starting to complain about incursions onto their land by fuel planters. But, encouraged by government policy, vast investments are now being made by farmers and chemical companies. Stopping them requires one heck of a battle. But it has to be fought.
BRITAIN'S NO LONGER A WORLD POWER, SO LET'S BE A BETTER, FAIRER NATION
26 April 2009 Observer Will Hutton (article)
We might only have been the seventh biggest manufacturing power in the world in 2007, and about to sink to eighth or ninth, but at least we were the number one financial power. All that is now dust. The importance of the budget is that it formally shows the havoc the credit crunch, the evisceration of financial services and the housing market, together with the severe recession, have visited on Britain's economy and public finances. Over the next decade, Britain's pretensions to be a great power will evaporate. We will become a middle-ranking European country debating how best to grow and alleviate mass unemployment - and with rapidly shrinking military and diplomatic influence. The budget starkly defines what the bursting of the bubble economy means. It is not just austerity ahead; Britain is not going to matter so much. I'm not sure anybody, least of all our political parties, is ready for this much diminished future.
FOR ALL THE DEBATE ON THE WORTH OF AID, WE CAN WELL AFFORD TO PAY THE PRICE
3 May 2009 Guardian Madeleine Bunting (article)
There are two opposing claims about aid. First is the familiar call for donations: give us your money now to transform the lives of these people. The second is that aid fails: after nearly a half century and a trillion dollars, chronic deprivation is still evident everywhere in Africa. It is this second argument that is now gaining critical momentum.
Alison Evans, director of the Overseas Development Institute, argues that the most effective aid in the long run is about building up institutions that ensure the accountability mechanisms whereby the state delivers effective services such as safe water. This is the rationale for the UK's annual £55m in budget support direct to the Ugandan government. But it's a hard one to sell to the voter.Peter Singer, in The Life You Can Save, acknowledges that some aid goes astray, and that some aid is not very effective. But he turns that argument on its head: so what, if the cost to you has been so little – only the price of a meal in a restaurant or a new pair of shoes? Such is the affluence of the west, arguments about the cost of aid are irrelevant – we can afford it. And he puts the threshold very low: anyone who can afford to buy a bottled or canned drink where there is clean tap water available has money they do not need. His challenge is a minimum of 5% of your gross income, and more for those on high incomes. The 2005 Make Poverty History campaign focused on lobbying governments for increased aid budgets, but Singer has shifted the debate into a new territory of direct ¬personal responsibility. He argues that you can make no claim to any kind of morality without making a sizeable personal contribution to tackling grotesque global inequalities.
WHAT IF THE OIL RUNS OUT?
30 May 2009 Guardian George Monbiot (article)
Though the government is planning a massive expansion of transport networks, it has never considered this question. The energy white paper the government published last week talks of new taxes, new markets, new research, new incentives. But buried in another chapter, there is a remarkable admission. “The majority (66%) of UK oil demand is derived from demand for transport fuels which is expected to increase modestly over the medium term.” To increase? If the government is implementing all the exciting measures the transport chapter contains, how on earth could our use of fuel increase?
You won’t find the answer in the white paper. It mysteriously forgets to mention that the government intends to build another 4000km of trunk roads and to double the capacity of our airports by 2030. Partly to permit this growth in transport, another white paper, also published last week, proposes a massive deregulation of planning law. There is no discussion in either paper of the implications of these programmes for energy use or climate change. There are plainly two governments of the United Kingdom: one determined to reduce our consumption of fossil fuel; the other determined to raise it.
CONTEMPORARY SOCIAL EVILS AND THE HOPES FOR COMMUNITARIAN VENTURES
15 June 2009 Guardian Madeleine Bunting (article)
The Joseph Rowntree Foundation has just published the results (Contemporary Social Evils) of asking the public to describe the social evils of today. Individualism is top, closely linked to greed and the decline in community; also a sense of decline in values and a deterioration of virtues such as honesty, empathy, respect and reciprocity. Family breakdown and poor parenting feature, as do misuse of drugs and alcohol, inequality and democratic deficit. Two explanations are offered:(1) In the 1950s 70% of the population were skilled working class, by the end of the century this had declined to 15%. The rest migrated into white collar work or into retail or long-term unemployed/incapacity benefit. Communities that had had very similar income and life experiences were fragmented into widely varying outcomes – some enjoying unprecedented consumer and housing wealth, others found themselves left behind. Social bonds were snapped with people feeling more resentful of those peers who do better than of those who have always been better off.
(2) The move of women into the workplace has vastly reduced the time they have available for the roles of care within the wider family and maintaining community. It was largely women who cared for the elderly, the lonely neighbour, the convalescent, the chronically ill, and small children; many of those tasks have had to be handed over to an inadequate state or private sector, and the gaps are painfully evident. ... In particular, what has gone unaccounted is the crucial role women used to play in sustaining neighbourliness – they were around, at home, often with children – and connecting people within communities.
Jose Harris, in the Rowntree’s book, argues that Britain has faced this kind of unease twice before – in the aftermath of the Boer War and in the 1930s depression. Britain suffered much less than continental countries, she believes because a distinctive British communitarianism served to mitigate the loss of confidence and ultimately to restore it. Perhaps the desperateness of our plight – a discredited political and economic elite – could prompt the revival of communitarianism. An almost wartime spirit of cheerful resourcefulness is taking root in unexpected places, with vegetable plots springing up on street corners and the Big Lunch aiming to get 6 million neighbours sharing lunch in street parties on 19 July – a terrific gamble to see if people will claim for themselves the public space for conviviality. Can we start inventing the new mechanisms to rebuild communities?
THE TRILLION DOLLAR DRAIN ON WORLD’S POOR
22 June 2009 Guardian Ashley Seager (news)
Figures published today by the World Bank show the financial crisis taking a heavy toll, with the flow of money into the developing world halving this year after heavy losses in 2008. Overall, global GDP is likely to shrink by 2.9% this year and world trade flows by 10%.
MARKET DOGMA EXPOSED AS MYTH. WHERE IS THE NEW VISION TO UNITE US?
29 June 2009 Guardian Madeleine Bunting (article)
“It’s the end of the era of market triumphalism” declared the Reith lecturer. Few disagree but the clarity of that conclusion is matched by the confusion about what comes next. Michael Sandel declares that most political questions are at their core moral or spiritual – they are about our vision of the common good; he argues for religion and other value systems to be brought back into the public sphere for a civic renewal.
The documentary film maker Adam Curtis takes another perspective and asks what is paralysing the common will? “what we have is a cacophony of individual narratives, everyone wants to be the author of their own lives, no one wants to be relegated to a part in a bigger story; everyone wants to give their opinion, no one wants to listen. It’s enchanting, it’s liberating, but ultimately it’s disempowering because you need a collective, not individual, narrative to achieve change.”
There are plenty of people around trying to redefine the good life – happiness economists and environmentalists among others – and Sandel’s authority adds useful weight to their efforts, but his call for remoralisation seems only to expose how bare the cupboard is – what would it look like? But perhaps the grand narrative has already emerged and it is one of environmental catastrophe – of a world rapidly running out of the natural resources required to sustain extravagant lifestyles and burgeoning population. Perhaps this reinforces the sense of political paralysis and disables rather than empowers us to achieve political change.
THE NARCISSISM OF CONSUMER SOCIETY HAS LEFT WOMEN UNHAPPIER THAN EVER
27 July 2009 Guardian Madeleine Bunting (article)
‘West and Sweeting study of 15-year-olds was conducted in exactly the same place in Scotland in 1987, 1999 and 2006. When the 1999 results were published, there was concern that the incidence of common mental disorders such as anxiety, depression, panic attacks and anhedonia (loss of capacity to experience pleasure) had significantly increased for girls from 19% to 32%. … There has been an increase for both sexes: boys are now on 21% and girls are at a staggering 44%.
MINISTERS’ PLAN TO KEEP BRITAIN FED FOR THE NEXT 40 YEARS
11 August 2009 Guardian (news)
Launching the strategy, the environmental secretary Hilary Benn, said: “Last year the world had a wake-up call with the sudden oil and food price rises, but the full environmental costs and the costs to our health remain significant and hidden. We need to tackle diet-related ill health … We need everyone in the food system to get involved – from farmers and retailers to the health service, schools and consumers. Our strategy needs to cover all aspects of our food production, processing, distribution, retail, consumption and disposal”.
IS THERE ANY POINT IN FIGHTING TO STAVE OFF INDUSTRIAL APOCALYPSE?
18 August 2009 Guardian Debate between Paul Kingnorth and George Monbiot
PK Climate change is teetering on the point of no return while our leaders bang the drum for more growth. The system we rely upon cannot be tamed without collapsing, for it relies upon that growth to function. We need to start thinking about how we are going to live through its fall, and what we can learn from its collapse.
GM However hard we fall, we will recover sufficiently to land another hammer blow on the biosphere. Instead of gathering as free collectives of happy householders, survivors of this collapse will be subject to the will of people seeking to monopolise remaining resources. This will is likely to be imposed by violence. What will we learn from this collapse? Nothing. This is why I fight on. I am not fighting to sustain economic growth. I am fighting to prevent both initial collapse and the repeated catastrophe that follows.
PK We face what John Michael Greer, in End of Days, calls a “long descent”: a series of ongoing crises that will bring an end to the all-consuming culture we have imposed upon the Earth. Our civilisation will not survive in anything like its present form, but we can at least aim for a managed retreat to a saner world. Your alternative – to hold onto nurse for fear of finding something worse – is in any case a century too late. Fear is a poor guide to the future.
GM Strange as it seems, a de-fanged, steady-state version of the current settlement might offer the best prospect humankind has of avoiding collapse. For the first time in our history we are well informed about the extent and causes of our ecological crises, know what should be done to avert them, and have the global means – if only the political will were present – of preventing them.
PK You suggest that I am “proposing to do nothing to prevent the likely collapse of industrial civilisation”. What do you think I could do? What do you think you can do? I’d suggest we get some perspective on the root cause of this crisis – not human beings but the cultures within which they operate. Civilisations live and die by their founding myths. Our myths tell us that humanity is separate from something called “nature”, which is a “resource” for our use. They tell us there are no limits to human abilities, and that technology, science and our ineffable wisdom can fix everything. Above all, they tell us that we are in control. I think our task is to negotiate the coming descent as best we can, while creating new myths that put humanity in its proper place.
GM I note that you have failed to answer my question about how many people the world could support without modern forms of energy and the systems they sustain, but 2 billion is surely the optimistic extreme. I draw the issue of a few billion fatalities to your attention because it’s a reality with which you refuse to engage. What could you do? You know the answer as well as I do. Join up, protest, propose, create. It’s messy, endless and uncertain of success. It’s all we’ve got. Sometimes it works.
FINDING THE BEST ROUTE TO A SUSTAINABLE FUTURE
22 August 2009 Guardian Nicholas Maxwell, Emeritus reader in philosophy of science, UCL (letter)
If we are to make progress towards as good a world as possible, we need to learn how to do it. This, in turn, requires that our institutions of learning are rationally devoted to that task. But at present they are not. Universities seek knowledge, but do not devote themselves to helping humanity learn how to create a better world. Judged from this standpoint, they are a disaster.
22 August 2009 Guardian Patrick Rolfe, Workers Climate Action (letter)
… “our” civilisation is based on the exploitation of natural resources. However, “our” civilisation is also based on the exploitation of people, and unless we fight both of these as one battle, a grim future surely beckons.
FAY WELDON ON REMAKING SOCIETY TO THE BENEFIT OF WOMEN
23 August Guardian Emine Saner (interview with Fay Weldon)
The recession is dreadful of course, but is a chance to remake society, particularly in a way that will benefit women. I’m sure there are lots of women who want to stay at home and look after their children, but I don’t want to force women back into homes. Homes are boring, looking after children is dull. What I mean is, if what was made by a society was needed by a society then everybody should work a lot less hard. I certainly don’t want to go back to the old days, because the old days were a nightmare. But it’s nightmarish now for women, who are just tired. They have to do too much and wages have been kept so low ...
WE’RE PUMPING OUT CO2 TO THE POINT OF NO RETURN. THE 10:10 CAMPAIGN IS THE BEST SHOT WE HAVE LEFT
1 September 2009 Guardian George Monbiot (article)
This afternoon the team that made the film The Age of Stupid is launching the 10:10 campaign which aims for a 10% cut in the UK’s greenhouse gas emissions during 2010. This seems to be roughly the trajectory needed to deliver a good chance of averting 2C of warming. By encouraging people and businesses and institutions to sign up, the campaign hopes to shame the UK government into adopting this as its national target.
10:10 is the best shot we have left. It may not be enough, it may not work, but at least it’s relevant. I take the pledge. Will you?
FROM THE MELTING FRONTLINE, A CHILLING VIEW OF A WARMING WORLD
1 September 2009 Guardian Patrick Barkham reporting from Sermilik fjord, Greenland (news)
The wall of ice that rises behind Sermilik fjord stretches for 1,500 miles from north to south and smothers 80% of this country. It has been frozen for 3 million years. Now it is melting, far faster than the climate models predicted and far more decisively than any political action to combat our changing climate. If the Greenland ice sheet disappeared sea levels around the world would rise by seven metres, as 10% of the world’s fresh water is currently frozen here.
THE CHALLENGE OF OUR ERA CANNOT BE LEFT TO GOVERNMENTS
2 September 2009 Guardian Franny Armstrong, creator of 10:10 and director of The Age of Stupid (article)
All the talking, all the documentaries, all the international negotiations about climate change have resulted in a net achievement of less than nothing: global emissions just keep going up and up. As Pete Postlethwaite’s character says in our documentary, The Age of Stupid, “We wouldn’t be the first life form to wipe itself out. But what would be unique about us is that we did it knowingly.” … The UK going 10:10 may break the deadlock.
WALKING THE CLIMATE TALK
5 September 2009 Guardian Anthony Giddens (article)
We are living in an unsustainable society, whose core rationale – the maximising of economic growth – is incompatible with its long term survival. A great deal of new thinking, and practical action, is needed to break away from our current trajectory.
MELTING ICE WILL TRIGGER WAVE OF NATURAL DISASTERS
6 September 2009 Observer (news)
Prof Bill McGuire of University College London, warns that climate change will not only affect the atmosphere and the sea but will alter the geology of the Earth. Melting glaciers will set off avalanches, floods and mud flows in the Alps and other mountain ranges; torrential rainfall in the UK is likely to cause widespread erosion; while disappearing Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets threaten to loosen underwater landslides, triggering tsunamis that could strike the seas around Britain. At the same time the disappearance of ice caps will change the pressures acting on the Earth’s crust and set off volcanic eruptions across the globe.
REASONS FOR DOING THE RIGHT THING REGARDLESS
8 September 2009 James Garvey, secretary of the Royal Institute of Philosophy (article)
Why go green when it makes no difference what you do? It’s hard to see how a single green choice, even a whole green life, could make the difference to our warming world. … Before you worry too much about this, remind yourself that the right thing to do is the right thing to do, whether other people do it or not. You don’t get out of your moral obligations just because other people ignore theirs. … The point is that consequences are not our only reasons for thinking that we ought to do something.
NUCLEAR POWER IS NOT THE ANSWER TO CLIMATE CHANGE
9 September 2009 Guardian Prof David Elliott , Open University (letter)
The Labour government has moved from a position of supporting a programme of replacing older nuclear plants to one of radical expansion, with talk of a UK nuclear contribution of 35-40% “beyond 2030”. Currently the UK gets 13% of its electricity from nuclear sources. The government has also indicated that it sees a major role for exporting UK nuclear technology and expertise. Gordon Brown has indicated that he believes the world needs 1,000 extra nuclear power stations and has argued that Africa could build nuclear plants to meet growing demands for energy. In 2009 a new UK Nuclear Centre of Excellence was announced to “promote wider access to civil nuclear power across the world” with an initial budget of £20m. This is not the answer to climate change.
FRANCE TO BECOME BIGGEST ECONOMY YET TO LEVY A CARBON TAX
10 September 2009 Guardian (news)
France is following other successful schemes introduced by Nordic countries in the 1990s. The tax – initially set at £15 per tonne of carbon dioxide emissions – will be levied on individuals and businesses for fossil fuel consumption. Family fuel bills will rise, while business will pay more for factories run on fossil fuels. It will not apply to electricity because 80% comes from nuclear power in France. Sarkozy said, “It’s a question of survival of the human race”.
‘DIG FOR VICTORY’ REVIVED IN PLAN FOR ALLOTMENTS ON PRIVATE GROUND
14 September 2009 Guardian (news)
Temporary leases from landowners could serve the entire 100,000 strong waiting list of people wanting a vegetable patch, according to the New Local Government Network think tank. … The decline of allotments, from a peak of 1,400,000 in the mid-1940s to 200,000 today, was criticised last year by a Commons select committee.
END OF RECESSION? NOT FOR THE UNEMPLOYED
14 September 2009 Guardian Ashley Seager (article)
The jobless total is likely to rise above 2.5m this week as the recession continues to take its toll on ordinary people across the country who had nothing to do with the banking system’s excess and collapse.
THIS IS THE GREATEST GOOD: ONE TRUE YARDSTICK FOR SOCIETY’S PROGRESS: HAPPINESS
14 September 2009 Guardian Richard Layard (article)
What is progress? That is the question President Sarkozy of France has posed to a distinguished commission. It is exactly the right question, and the future of our culture depends upon the answer. GDP is not the answer, and the Stiglitz commission – whose report, What is Social Progress?, is published today – is clear about that: progress must be measured by the overall quality of people’s lives. At this point the Commission identifies two possible approaches. One is to focus on how people feel: are they happy and contented? … The other is to focus on people’s objective circumstances: do they have the capabilities conducive to human flourishing? The commission does not choose between these approaches, and both are infinitely superior to GDP. But it matters greatly which way we choose. …
So I propose a campaign for the Principle of the Greatest Happiness. This says that I should aim to produce the most happiness I can in the world and, above all, the least misery. And my rulers should do the same. This principle would lead to better private lives and better public policy. We desperately need a social norm in which the good of others figures more prominently in our personal goals. Today’s excessive individualism removes so much of the joy from family life, work and even friendship.
FRENCH PRESIDENT URGES FOCUS ON QUALITY OF LIFE
15 September Guardian Lizzy Davies (news)
Nicolas Sarkozy called for a “great revolution” in the way national wealth is measured yesterday, throwing his weight behind a report which criticises “GDP fetishism” and prioritises quality of life over financial growth. Endorsing the recommendations of a report given to him by Nobel prize winners Joseph Stiglitz and Amaryta Sen, he said governments should do away with the “religion of statistics” in which financial prowess was the sole indicator of a country’s state of health.
CHINA AND INDIA ARE LEADING THE WAY. YES, I’M OPTIMISTIC
24 September 2009 Guardian Nicholas Stern (article)
By 2050, 9 billion people must produce no more than two tonnes of carbon per year each. … At the moment, the rich industrialised countries of the European Union average about 10-12 tonnes per head of population, while the figure for the United States is almost 24 tonnes. China, by contrast, emits about 6 tonnes per head. Japan’s prime minister, Yukio Hatoyama, has outlined how his country will reduce its emissions by 25% by 2020, compared with 1990.
SATELLITE REVEALS RAPID THINNING OF GLACIERS IN GREENLAND AND ANTARCTICA
24 September 2009 Guardian (news)
A comprehensive satellite survey of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets has revealed an extensive network of rapidly thinning glaciers that is driving ice loss in the regions.
PRESIDENT: AN END TO US UNILATERALISM AND CALL FOR UNITED ENDEAVOUR TO SOLVE WORLD’S PROBLEMS
24 September 2009 Guardian Ewen MacAskill (news)
Obama, in the most sweeping foreign policy speech he has delivered since becoming president, set out [at the UN general assembly] four priorities: nuclear non-proliferation, Middle East peace, climate change and addressing poverty among developing nations. “The choice is ours. We can be remembered as a generation that chose to drag the arguments of the 20th century into the 21st … Or, we can be a generation that chooses to see the shoreline beyond the rough waters ahead; that comes together to serve the common interests of human beings, and finally gives meaning to the promise embedded in the name given to this institution: the United Nations.”
AIRLINES TO CUT CARBON EMISSIONS
22 September 2009 Guardian Dan Milmo (news)
The aviation industry will today make a dramatic pledge to slash carbon dioxide emissions in half by 2050 in a move that will force up air fares and spark a green technology race among aircraft manufacturers.
THE FATE OF EVERY NATION HANGS ON COPENHAGEN
22 September 2009 Guardian Ed Miliband, climate change secretary (article)
“The fate of every nation of earth hangs on the outcome of Copenhagen. It is too important to play the cards-close-to-your-chest poker games that marked diplomacy of the twentieth century.”
CHINA’S CARBON PLEDGE
23 September 2009 Guardian Julian Borger, Suzanne Goldenburg (news)
The world inched closer to an elusive deal to combat climate change yesterday when China, the world’s biggest polluter, made its most substantial commitment yet to curbing its carbon emissions and investing in clean energy.
CATASTROPHIC WARMING ‘IN OUR LIFETIMES’ – MET OFFICE
28 September 2009 Guardian David Adam (news)
Unchecked global warming could bring a severe temperature rise of 4C within many people’s lifetimes, according to a new report for the British government that significantly raises the stakes over climate change. Prepared by scientists at the Met Office it challenges the assumption that severe warming will be a threat only for future generations. The study updates the findings of the 2007 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. ... This rise would threaten the water supply of half the world’s population, wipe out up to half of animal and plant species, and swamp low coasts. A poll of 200 climate experts for the Guardian earlier this year found that most of them expected a temperature rise of 3C-4C by the end of the century.
FUTURE HUNGER: CLIMATE CHANGE
30 September 2009 Guardian Suzanne Goldenburg (news)
Twenty-five million more children will go hungry by the middle of this century as climate change leads to food shortages and soaring prices for staples such as rice, wheat, maize and soya beans – says a report by the Food Policy Research Institute for the World Bank and Asian Development Bank.
COMMUNITY COLLABORATION CRUCIAL IN THE FUTURE
5 October 2009 Guardian Madeleine Bunting (article)
Transition Town is just one of many groups now organising around place and using the argument that community collaboration will be crucial in generating energy and growing food in a carbon-lite future with less or no oil; Ed Miliband signalled his support with an announcement last week of £10m to fund community energy projects. This is not just about pragmatism, but a belief that it is in understanding a place that you begin to grasp the limits of its natural resources. Do you know where your drinking water comes from or what happens to water after it disappears down the plughole? It is intimacy with a place which prompts responsibility to sustain it. Our giddy mobility, which ensures that many people only ever see the countryside at 50 mph from a car window, is part cause of the willful degradation of our environment.
FAIR TRADE
10 October 2009 Guardian (news)
A three-year research project has shown that coffee growers are already being forced uphill to higher altitudes, at a rate of three to four meters a year on average, as temperatures rise. “A huge number of growers are now experiencing increased instances of pestilence and disease from rises in temperature. They are also facing prolonged drought and changing weather patterns” said Cafédirect Chief exec Anne MacCaig.
Fairtrade products pay a premium to relatively small-scale growers, helping to protect them from the vicissitudes of global commodity markets and the buying power of vast multinationals. The Fairtrade mark is celebrating its 15th birthday and now covers a wide range of products, from bananas to chocolate. Sales were up by 43% in 2008.
10 October 2009 Guardian Douglas Alexander, International Development Secretary (article)
Seven out of ten UK households now support Fairtrade. In fact, people in Britain see buying Fairtrade products as the number one way they can help to reduce poverty – from Fairtrade Palestinian olive oil to Fairtrade footballs from Pakistan, cotton from Mali and flowers from Kenya. Fairtrade has never been more necessary than now. The UN estimates that the global recession has pushed 100 million people below the poverty line, with more than 60 million becoming unemployed over the last two years. … The success of Fairtrade shows how we can, through the daily choices we make, help to build a safer, more sustainable and more prosperous world.
MILLIONS FACE HUNGER AFTER $2bn AID GAP
11 October 2009 Observer John Vidal (news)
Tens of millions of the world’s poor will have their food rations cut or cancelled in the next few weeks because rich countries have slashed aid funding. The result, says Josette Sheeran, head of the UN’s World Food Programme, could be the “loss of a generation” of children to malnutrition, food riots and political destabilisation. “We are facing a silent tsunami. A humanitarian disaster is unrolling.” The WFP feeds nearly 100 million people a year. Food riots in more than 20 countries last year persuaded rich countries to give a record $5bn to the WFP to help avert a global food crisis brought on by record oil prices and the growth of biofuel crops. … Food aid is now at its lowest in 20 years. Countries have offered only £2.7bn in the first 10 months of 2009
BANANA PRICE WAR IN SUPERMARKETS BRINGS FEAR TO THE DEVELOPING WORLD
11 October 2009 Observer Jamie Doward (news)
Asda’s decision to repeatedly slash the price of bananas now threatens to undermine the fair trade movement and spells catastrophe for those who work in the industry. Renwick Rose, chief exec of the Windward Islands Farmers Association, whose 4,000 banana farmers export almost exclusively to Britain has described the price war as “a scandalous way of doing business at the expense of farmers.” In the Windward Islands, bananas pay for schools, buses and crucial infrastructure.
VISION OF GREEN BRITAIN CALL FOR A SWIFT EMISSIONS POLICY
12 October 2009 Guardian Felicity Carus (news)
A green and pleasant land, with millions of electric cars powered from wind turbines and travelling between super-cosy homes and offices: that is the vision for Britain in 2020 set out today by the government’s climate watchdog. That is both possible and affordable, says the Climate Change Committee – but only if the government acts immediately to implement radical policies on energy efficiency and low carbon technologies. … The committee recommends insulating 10 m lofts and 7.5m cavity walls by 2015, plus solid wall insulation for 2.3m homes by 2022. This would require a “whole-house approach” under which an audit of each house is carried out and schemes that would see work carried out street by street. The Chief Exec, David Kennedy, said that the changes remain affordable at 1% of GDP and would improve our quality of life. Paul King, chief exec of the UK Green Building Council, said, “Current government policies will not deliver the programme of home refurbishment that is needed to tackle energy security and climate change. …The industry is crying out for strong political leadership”.
CHALLENGE TO THE ‘TRAGEDY OF THE COMMONS’ THEORY
13 October 2009 Guardian Editorial
Prof Elinor Ostrom and Oliver Williamson of Indiana University share the Nobel prize for economics for their study of how individuals can work together and share scarce resources. In the dog-eat-dog worldview of most modern economics, individuals are out for themselves and will scrap over land or fish or anything else – until it is all gone. This simplistic notion of the “tragedy of the commons” has been successfully challenged by Prof Ostrom’s research in countries such as India, Kenya, Guatemala and Nepal.
NELSON MANDELA (RE HIS ARCHIVES: ‘I HOPE THIS MATERIAL WILL REMIND US WHAT HE FOUGHT FOR’)
14 October 2009 Guardian Justin Cartwright (news)
The central fact of Mandela’s life is his extraordinary humanity. In South Africa they like to call this Ubuntu, a sense that one’s uniqueness on earth is the quality of humanity one extends to others.
THE ECOCIDAL MOMENT
14 October 2009 Guardian Rowan Williams: extract from a lecture
How do we live in a way that honours rather than endangers the life of our planet? Or, to put it slightly differently, how do we live in a way that shows an understanding that we genuinely live in a shared world, not one that simply belongs to us?
We must begin by recognising that our ecological crisis is part of a crisis of what we understand by our humanity; it is part of a general process of losing our “feel” for what is appropriately human, a loss that has been going on for some centuries and which some cultures and economies have been energetically exporting to the whole world. It manifests itself in a variety of ways. It has to do with the erosion of rhythms in work and leisure, so that the old pattern of working days interrupted by a day of rest has been dangerously undermined; a loss of patience with the passing of time so that speed of communication has become a good in itself; a loss of patience which shows itself in the lack of respect and attention for the very old and the very young. It is a loss whose results have become monumentally apparent in the financial crisis of the last 12 months. We have slowly begun to suspect that we have allowed ourselves to become addicted to fantasies about prosperity and growth, dreams of wealth without risk and profit without cost. … We have seen growing evidence in recent years of a lack of correlation between economic prosperity and a sense of wellbeing, and evidence to suggest that inequality in society is one of the more reliable predictors of a lack of wellbeing. It looks very much as if what we need is to be reconnected rather urgently with the processes of our world. We shouldn’t need an environmental crisis to establish that the developed world has become perilously out of touch with the experience of those living in the least developed parts, and with their profound vulnerabilities and insecurities.
We have to ask whether our duty of care for life is compatible with assuming without question that the desirable future for every economy, even the most successful and expansionist, is unchecked growth. Unless we re-evaluate our obsession with growth in consumerist terms, we can be sure of two things: inequality will not be addressed (and so the powerlessness of the majority of the world’s population will remain as it is at the moment); and the dehumanising effects of the culture of consumer growth will worsen. …
When we believe in transformation at the local and personal level, we are laying the sure foundations for change at the national and international level. If I ask what’s the point of my undertaking a modest amount of recycling my rubbish or scaling down my air travel, the answer is not that this will unquestionably save the world within six months, but in the first place it’s a step towards liberation from a cycle of behaviour that is keeping me, indeed most of us, in a dangerous state – dangerous that is, to our human dignity and self-respect.
OUR SPEECHLESS OUTRAGE DEMANDS A NEW LANGUAGE OF THE COMMON GOOD
19 October 2009 Madeleine Bunting (article)
Don’t look to economists to get us out of this hollow mould of neoliberal economics and its bastard child, managerialism – the cost-benefit analysis and value-added gibberish that has made most people’s working lives a mockery of everything they know to value. Economics developed brilliant technical skills for monitoring and managing complex economics, but an interpretation that allied them to grossly crude understandings of human nature came to dominate.
[She refers to two recent publications: Amaryta Sen’s The Idea of Justice and Michael Sandel’s Justice]. Bluntly, they are urging people to ask the difficult questions, and not to accept the straw man arguments … such as human nature is only motivated by self-interest. Sandel argues that the dominant theories of justice – the utilitarian greatest happiness of the greatest number and the liberal freedom of choice – have been inadequate and have generated a public preoccupation with rising GDP and the rights of the individual. What has largely been abandoned is any meaningful debate about the common good.
Here is a clarion call to put ethics back into daily life and at the centre of public debate, and give proper attention to how we cultivate in citizens an ethical life of mutual responsibility and respect.
THE NUCLEAR OPTION
20 October 2009 Guardian Terry Macalister (news)
In 2007, the government committee on radioactive waste management recommended the use of a deep geological repository. Finland and Sweden have built vaults deep below the ground where the high-level waste can be stored for the thousands of years it needs to become harmless. In the UK, the government has so far called for expressions of interest from areas willing to consider housing such an underground repository … The energy department is known to be increasingly concerned at the slow progress …The next generation of nuclear reactors it hopes to see built will generate more highly radioactive waste.
ibid George Monbiot (comment)
To commission a new generation of nuclear power stations before we know what will happen to the waste we already have offends the most basic environmental principle: you don’t make a new mess before you’ve cleared up the old one.
NO BURYING THIS NUCLEAR DILEMMA
26 October 2009 Guardian Emeritus professor Andrew Blowers, co-chair, Nuclear Consultation Group (letter)
It is true that government expects high-level radioactive waste to be buried in a deep repository, but this solution is nowhere near in sight and applies only to legacy wastes. Meanwhile, the government, in effect, is about to announce up to 11 sites where highly radioactive spent fuel and other wastes will be stored indefinitely in vulnerable coastal locations.
Given that the new power stations creating these wastes have an expected life of 60 years, and that the new high-burn-up fuels will require cooling for at least 100 years, wastes will remain stored at each site until near the end of the next century and possibly beyond. By that time it is highly likely that sites such as Bradwell and Dungeness will be inundated as a result of more frequent and severe storm surges, coastal processes and sea-level rise. The assumption that many of the proposed new highly active waste stores can be protected into the indefinite future is a fantasy parading as a policy.
THE BERLIN WALL HAD TO FALL, BUT TODAY’S WORLD IS NO FAIRER
31 October 2009 Guardian Mikhail Gorbachev article
Many politicians of my generation believed [that] with the end of the cold war, humankind could finally forget the absurdity of the arms race, dangerous regional conflicts, and sterile ideological disputes, and enter a golden century of collective security, the rational use of material resources, the end of poverty and inequality, and restored harmony with nature. …
However, for many millions of people around the globe, the world has not become a safer place. Quite to the contrary, innumerable local conflicts and ethnic and religious wars have appleared like a curse on the new map of world politics, creating large numbers of victims. Alas, over the last few decades, the world has not become a fairer place: disparities between the rich and the poor either remained or increased, not only between the north and the developing south but also within developed countries themselves. …
After decades of the Bolshevik experiment and the realization that this had led Soviet society down a historical blind alley, a strong impulse for democratic reform evolved in the form of Soviet perestroika. But it was soon very clear that western capitalism, too, deprived of its old adversary and imagining itself the undisputed victor and incarnation of global progress, is at risk of leading western society and the rest of the world down another historical blind alley.
Today’s global economic crisis was needed to reveal the organic defects of the present model of western development that was imposed on the rest of the world as the only one possible, it also revealed that not only bureaucratic socialism but also ultra-liberal capitalism are in need of profound democratic reform – their own kind of perestroika. …
In the present situation, even a concept like social progress, which seems to be shared by everyone, needs to be defined, and examined, more precisely.
TWO CHEERS FOR THE WORLD AFTER THE FALL OF THE BERLIN WALL
8 November Observer Andrew Rawnsley article
Millions have become freer and more prosperous since the seismic events of 1989, but the battle for liberal values goes on. …
Capitalism rampant has been spread across the planet by globalization. On the positive side, it is estimated that half-a-billion people have been lifted out of subsistence-level poverty into decent lives by the economic growth of the past two decades. In the negative column, Karl Marx has been proved at least partly right about the capacity of capitalism to sow the seeds of its own destruction. As a result of the recklessness of the financiers and the ineptness of the politicians who failed to control them, we are now in the most severe recession since before the Cold War.
GORDON BROWN HAS BACKED A TRULY RADICAL PLAN TO TRANSFORM THE WORLD’S BANKING SYSTEM
Observer 8 November Will Hutton report
The prime minister’s support for a tax on financial transactions [Tobin tax] marks a startling change in his response to the economic crisis. But he faces a struggle to win international support for the idea. … His declaration that “it cannot be acceptable that the benefits of success in this sector are reaped by the few but the costs of its failure are borne by all of us” is what everyone outside the City of London and the British Bankers’ Association now thinks….
Many of the financial instruments allegedly used to avoid risk are merely forms of gambling. When it all goes wrong, the taxpayer picks up the bill, the bankers walk off with the bonuses, while ordinary people lose their jobs. … Some of the first reactions to his paln have been very negative. But some Europeans will almost certainly support him , and probably the Japanese. The swing country is the US. The response yesterday was not encouraging, but President Obama knows he needs to do something about the unfair bargain between Wall Street and the US taxpayer.
Observer 8 November Kathryn Hopkins and Heather Stewart report
Global Revenues from the [Tobin] tax could be up to £420bn a year, according to an authoritative Austrian study. They would be divided between the country where the trading took place and an international fund, which could be used to tackle poverty or climate change. … France and Germany have championed the tax, but until now the British government has resisted it.
MOST PEOPLE IN THE FINANCIAL MARKETS START WITH A WORKING MORAL COMPASS, BUT RETAINING IT BECOMES EVER HARDER
Observer 8 November Will Hutton article
One of the lessons of behavioural economics is that when people think that everybody else is honest, they are honest too. When people believe that sharp practice, double-dealing and the pursuit of greed are the norms, they follow. … Capitalism had its origins in a Protestant commitment to saving and investment, along with an Enlightenment commitment to truth. Great companies still have a strain of moral purpose; they seek to do something great from which they make their profits. Today’s financial markets mock such sentiments. Their destructiveness and awesome power goes well beyond the credit crunch. This culture of amorality reaches everywhere.
IN THE SAME LEAKY BOAT: THE CLIMATE CRISIS UNITES THE MALDIVES AND BRITAIN
10 November 2009 Guardian Douglas Alexander (International Development Secretary,UK) and Mohamed Nasheed (President of the Maldives) (article)
Be in no doubt. Climate change is not tomorrow’s future menace. It is today’s growing catastrophe. … This very human crisis is already being felt in parts of the world. This year, entire communities in Bangladesh are being forced to leave their homes due to rising sea levels; women in drought-ridden parts of Ethiopia have to walk five miles a day to collect water; and natural disasters are occurring with increasing frequency and ever more devastating results. Climate change threatens us all. If we fail to bring it under control in the next decade we may move past the point of no return.
The rich world must take a lead in cutting emissions and providing sufficient funds for developing countries. They, however, also have their responsibilities. Developing nations need to grow, but their economic growth must be green.
WHISTLEBLOWER: KEY OIL FIGURES WERE DISTORTED BY US PRESSURE
11 November 2009 Guardian Terry Macalister (news)
The world is much closer to running out of oil than official estimates admit, according to a whistleblower at the International Energy Agency who claims it has been deliberately underplaying a looming shortage for fear of triggering panic buying.
COPENHAGEN WILL WITNESS A NEW MATURITY FOR THE MOVEMENT THAT IGNITED A DECADE AGO. BUT THAT DOES NOT MEAN PLAYING SAFE
13 November 2009 Guardian Naomi Klein (article)
The movement converging on Copenhagen [successor to the coalition of activists who shut down the World Trade Centre summit in Seattle in 1999] is about a single issue – climate change – but it weaves a coherent narrative about its causes, and its cures, that incorporate virtually every issue on the planet. In this narrative, the climate is changing not only because of particular polluting practices but because of the underlying logic of capitalism, which values short-term profit and perpetual growth above all else. …
Some of the solutions on offer from the activist camp are the same ones the global justice movement has been championing for years: local, sustainable agriculture; smaller, decentralised power projects; respect for indigenous land rights; leaving fossil fuels in the ground; loosening protections on green technology; and paying for these transformations by taxing financial transactions and cancelling foreign debts. Some solutions are new, like the mounting demand that rich countries pay “climate debt” reparations to the poor. These are tall orders, but we have seen during the last year the kind of resources our governments can marshal when it comes to saving the elites. As one slogan puts it: “If the climate were a bank, it would have been saved.”
ENOUGH IS NOT ENOUGH: WE SHOULD BE ENJOYING THE GOOD LIFE. BUT OUR WEALTH ACCUMULATION HAS BECOME AN END IN ITSELF
23 November Guardian Robert Skidelsky (article)
In 1930 John Maynard Keynes predicted that by 2030 growth in the developed world would, in effect, have stopped, because people would “have enough” to lead the “good life”. Hours of paid work would fall to three a day. …
Keynes did not confront the problem of what most people would do when they no longer needed to work. “It is a fearful problem for the ordinary person, with no special talents, to occupy himself, especially if he no longer has roots in the soil or in custom or in beloved conventions of a traditional economy.”
Here Keynes comes closest to answering the question of why his “enough” will not, in fact be enough. The accumulation of wealth, which should be a means to the “good life”, becomes an end in itself because it destroys many of the things that make life worth living.
Finding the means to nourish the fading “associations or duties or ties” that are so essential for individuals to flourish is the unsolved problem of the developed world, and it is looming for the billions who have just stepped on to the growth ladder. George Orwell put it well: “All progress is seen to be a frantic struggle towards an objective which you hope and pray will never be reached.
DESIGNS FOR NEW UK NUCLEAR STATIONS UNSAFE - WATCHDOG
27 November Guardian Terry Macalister (news item)
Britain’s main safety regulator threw the government’s energy plans into chaos last night by damning the nuclear industry’s leading designs for new plants.
The leading French and American reactors are central to plans for a nuclear renaissance aimed at keeping the lights on and helping to cut carbon emissions.
WESTERN LIFESTYLE UNSUSTAINABLE, SAYS WORLD’S TOP CLIMATE EXPERT
29 November Observer James Randerson (interview report)
Rajendra Pachauri, the chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned that western society must undergo a radical value shift if the worst effects of climate change were to be avoided. A new value system of “sustainable consumption” was now urgently required, he said. “Today we have reached the point where consumption and people’s desire to consume has grown out of proportion. The reality is that our lifestyles are unsustainable. … I think the section of society that will make it happen is essentially young people. I think they will be far more sensitive than adults, who have been corrupted by the ways we have been following for years now.”
FOURTEEN DAYS TO SEAL HISTORY’S JUDGEMENT ON THIS GENERATION
7 December Guardian and 55 other newspapers across 45 countries Editorial
Today 56 newspapers in 45 countries take the unprecedented step of speaking with one voice through a common editorial. We do so because humanity faces a profound emergency.
Unless we combine to take decisive action, climate change will ravage our planet, and with it our prosperity and security. The dangers have been becoming apparent for a generation. Now the facts have started to speak: 11 of the past 14 years have been the warmest on record, the Arctic ice-cap is melting and last year’s inflamed oil and food prices provide a foretaste of future havoc. In scientific journals the question is no longer whether humans are to blame, but how little time we have got left to limit the damage. Yet so far the world’s response has been feeble and half-hearted.
We call on the representatives if the 192 countries gathered in Copenhagen not to hesitate, not to fall into dispute, not to blame each other but to seize opportunity from the greatest modern failure of politics. This should not be a fight between the rich world and the poor world; or between east and west. Climate change affects everyone, and must be solved by everyone.
Social justice demands that the industrialised world digs deep into its pockets and pledges cash to help poorer countries adapt to climate change, and clean technologies to enable them to grow economically without growing their emissions. …The transformation will be costly, but many times less than the bill for baling out global finance – and far less costly than the consequences of doing nothing.
Kicking our carbon habit within a few short decades will require a feat of engineering and innovation to match any in our history.
The politicians in Copenhagen have the power to shape history’s judgement on this generation: one that saw a challenge and rose to it, or one so stupid that we saw calamity coming but did nothing to avert it. We implore them to make the right choice.
[This world-wide front page was in contrast with that of the Daily Express five days earlier where the banner heading read ‘THE BIG CLIMATE CHANGE ‘FRAUD’. WE ARE NOT TO BLAME SAYS TOP SCIENTIST … IT’S A CON TO RAISE TAX. But at least our Prime Minister was on the Guardian wavelength, as the following entry shows.]
COPENHAGEN MUST BE A TURNING POINT. OUR CHILDREN WON’T FORGIVE US IF WE FAIL
7 December Guardian Gordon Brown (Prime Minister) (article)
We need to build a low carbon economy across the world, with a deal that helps developing nations and ensures trust. Our aim is a global agreement that is converted to a legally binding treaty in no more than six months.
DAILY MAIL EDITOR SEES PAY RISE TO £1.64M, BUT DOES NOT GET A BONUS
9 December Guardian Stephen Brook (news item)
The salary of the Daily Mail and General Trust chairman, Viscount Rothermere, leapt to £1.32m from £705,000 in 2008. In the DMGT annual report he said, “I would like to thank our employees for their magnificent response to the torrid market conditions. When the world’s financial system faced meltdown in October 2008, it was clear that we had to act fast to reduce our cost based, particularly in our newspaper divisions. As a result of this, we sadly had to release over 2,500 employees across our businesses.”
WHY BRITAIN FACES A BLEAK FUTURE OF FOOD SHORTAGES
13 December Observer Robin McKie Science Editor
This country faces a ‘perfect storm’ of water shortage and lack of food, says the government’s chief scientist, Professor John Beddington, which threatens to unleash public unrest and conflict in the next 20 years. Add in climate change and crop and animal diseases, and the future looks bleaker still. Professor Janet Allen, research director at the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council said, “We will have to grow more food on less land using less water and less fertiliser while producing fewer greenhouse gas emissions.”
Science is striving to come up with solutions … [but] a total of £600 m was cut from the nation’s science funding last week. Scarcely an auspicious start to our battle to survive the perfect storm.
CHILDCARE WORKERS ARE WORTH MORE TO SOCIETY THAN BANKERS, SAYS THINKTANK
14 December Guardian Phillip Inman (news report)
The New Economics Foundation said today that a study of the social impacts of several jobs revealed that City workers, advertising executives and tax advisers destroyed value, while hospital cleaners, childcare workers and staff in the waste recycling industry gave much more to the country than they took out.
The thinktank said it had found a way to calculate how much someone should be paid in relation to the value they create through a series of measures including conventional economic returns, environmental impacts, and knock-on effects for jobs and wellbeing in society.
It said the report challenged the notion that high pay did not matter as long as poverty was eradicated. It argues that high pay is often generated by businesses that destroy other parts of the economy or fail to pay the full costs of their activities.
“We have calculated the costs to society of obesity, anxiety-related mental health problems and indebtedness. Then there are the substantial environmental costs from climate change and resource depletion. It is estimated that in rich countries such as the UK, the level of consumption is three times as much as the planet’s environmental resources can sustain.”
THIS IS BIGGER THAN CLIMATE CHANGE. IT IS A BATTLE TO REDEFINE HUMANITY
15 December Guardian George Monbiot at the Copenhagen summit(article)
This is the moment when we turn and face ourselves. … Today the battle lines are drawn between expanders and restrainers: those who believe there should be no impediments and those who believe that we must live within limits. The vicious battles we have seen so far between greens and climate deniers … are just the beginning. This war will become much uglier as people kick against the limits that decency demands.
Hanging over everything discussed here is the theme that dare not speak its name, always present but never mentioned. Economic growth is the magic formula which allows our conflicts to remain unresolved.
While economies grow, social justice is unnecessary, as lives can be improved without redistribution. While economies grow, people need not confront elites. While economies grow, we can keep buying our way out of trouble. But’ like the bankers, we stave off trouble today only by multiplying it tomorrow. Through economic growth we are borrowing time at punitive rates of interest. It ensures that any cuts agreed at Copenhagen will eventually be outstripped. Even if we manage to prevent climate breakdown, growth means it is only a matter of time before we hit a new restraint: oil, water, phosphate, soil. We will lurch from crisis to existential crisis unless we address the underlying cause: perpetual growth cannot be accommodated on a finite planet.
GUTLESS, YES. BUT THE PLANET’S FUTURE IS NO PRIORITY OF OURS
19 December Guardian Polly Toynbee (article)
Fixing the climate is not a practical conundrum, it is a purely political problem. We could build windmills, the solar, the nuclear and whatever it takes to be self-sustaining with clean energy for ever if we wanted to. But enough people have to want to change to make it happen. So far they don’t, not by a long chalk. … As things stand, politics has not enough heft nor authority. It would take a political miracle to save us now.
DID ED MILIBAND SAVE THE COPENHAGEN SUMMIT FROM COMPLETE FAILURE?
23 December Guardian Fred Pearce (eye witness report)
At 7am on Saturday, with the conference 14 hours into overtime, the visibly exhausted and procedurally confused chairman of the summit, Danish Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen, cast a weary eye over the surviving delegates from an all-night session. After listening to more than 40 speeches from the floor and with dozens more delegates waiting to be heard, Rasmussen said there was no consensus on adopting the draft agreement produced by US President Obama and 25 other heads of state the previous day. "Therefore I propose that we ..." Almost certainly his next words would have been a recommendation to drop or delete the text.
The rejection of what was already known as the Copenhagen accord would have been a catastrophic failure for both climate diplomacy and the climate. The United Nations process to fight climate change, set in train at the Earth Summit in Rio 17 years before, would have lain in tatters. It would have reverberated for years, unleashing accelerating emissions of greenhouse gases and who knows what climatic tipping points in future years.
Then up spoke Ed Miliband, "Point of order," he called from the floor, and asked for an adjournment of the meeting. Rasmussen looked like a drowning man saved.
When the meeting resumed three hours later, a procedural formula had been devised. A new chairman moved that the meeting "take note of the Copenhagen Accord", with those agreeing to it able to add their names to ("note") its title and make pledges to stem their rising carbon dioxide emissions. The many critics, mostly in Latin America and Africa, were assuaged. The gavel fell. The accord was saved. Wild applause broke out. ...
The noting of the accord was a victory for climate diplomacy. For all the travails and disappointment of the last two weeks, it is still possible to be optimistic that the world is approaching a genuine tipping point in how we get our energy. Will it come in time to prevent tipping points in the climate system? Frankly, nobody knows the answer to that.
IF YOU WANT TO KNOW WHO'S TO BLAME FOR COPENHAGEN …
21 December Guardian George Monbiot (article)
[Monbiot blamed the Americans, others blamed the Chinese. At least our Prime Minister and particularly Ed Milliband, as reported above, did well]
The climate talks in Copenhagen ended in failure last week: here is the simplest summary I can produce of why this matters.
Human beings can live in a wider range of conditions than almost any other species. But the climate of the past few thousand years has been amazingly kind to us. It has enabled us to spread into almost all regions of the world and to grow into the favourable ecological circumstances it has created. We enjoy the optimum conditions for supporting seven billion people.
A shift in global temperature reduces the range of places which can sustain human life. During the last ice age, humans were confined to low latitudes. The difference in the average global temperature between now and then was 4C. Global warming will have the opposite effect, driving people into higher latitudes, principally as water supplies diminish.
Food production at high latitudes must rise as quickly as it falls elsewhere, but this is unlikely to happen. According to the body that summarises the findings of climate science, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the potential for global food production "is very likely to decrease above about 3C". The panel uses the phrase "very likely" to mean a probability of above 90%. Unless a strong climate deal is struck very soon, the probable outcome is a rise of 3C or more by the end of the century.
Even in higher latitudes the habitable land area will decrease as the sea level rises. The likely rise this century – probably less than a metre – is threatening only to some populations, but the process does not stop in 2100. During the previous interglacial period, about 125,000 years ago, the average global temperature was about 1.3C higher than it is today, as a result of changes in the earth's orbit around the sun.
A new paper in the scientific journal Nature shows that sea levels during that period were between 6.6 and 9.4 metres higher than today's. Once the temperature had risen, the expansion of sea water and the melting of ice caps in Greenland and Antarctica was unstoppable. I wonder whether the government of Denmark, whose atrocious management of the conference contributed to its failure, would have tried harder if its people knew that in a few hundred years they won't have a country any more.
As people are displaced from their homes by drought and rising sea levels, and as food production declines, the planet will be unable to support the current population. The collapse in human numbers is unlikely to be either smooth or painless: while the average global temperature will rise gradually, the events associated with it will come in fits and starts – in the form of sudden droughts and storm surges.
This is why the least developed countries, which will be hit hardest, made the strongest demands in Copenhagen. One hundred and two poor nations called for the maximum global temperature rise to be limited not to 2C but to 1.5C. The chief negotiator for the G77 bloc complained that Africa was being asked "to sign a suicide pact, an incineration pact, in order to maintain the economic dominance of a few countries".
So what happens now? That depends on the other non-player at Copenhagen: you. For the past few years good, liberal, compassionate people – the kind who read the Guardian – have shaken their heads and tutted and wondered why someone doesn't do something. Yet the number taking action has been pathetic. Demonstrations which should have brought millions on to the streets have struggled to mobilise a few thousand. As a result the political cost of the failure at Copenhagen is zero. Where are you.
Additions last posted on 13 January 2010 to end the 2009 selection