G20 Summit
Johann Hari: The protesters are the ones we should listen to at this summit
The way out of the credit and the climate crunch is the same - a Green New Deal
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Independent Minds
When this hinge-point in human history is remembered, there will be far more sympathy for the people who took to the streets and rioted than for the people who stayed silently in their homes. Two global crises have collided, and we have a chance here, now, to solve them both with one mighty heave – but our leaders are letting this opportunity for greatness leach away. The protesters here in London were trying to sound an alarm now, at five minutes to ecological midnight.
Many commentators seemed bemused that the protesters focused on the climate crunch as much as the credit crunch. What's it got to do with a G20 meeting on reviving the global economy? Why wave banners saying 'Nature Doesn't Do Bail-Outs' today? Because both crises have their roots in the same ideology – and both have the same solution.
We are facing a collapsed economy and a rapidly warming world because an extreme ideology has dominated world affairs for decades. It is the belief that markets aren't just a useful tool in certain circumstances; they are an infallible mechanism for running human affairs. If the economy ebbs, the market will put itself right by punishing wrong-doers. If the climate begins to unravel, business will rectify its own behaviour voluntarily. Now we know how well this market fundamentalism works.
The climate is currently going the same way as the banks. Last month, the world's climate scientists gathered in Copenhagen to explain we are facing "devastating consequences" – not in some distant future, but in my lifetime and yours. Unless we swerve fast, we are soon going to hit global temperatures that no human being has ever lived through. We don't have much time. By 2015, we will have belched so much carbon into the atmosphere that we will cross the Point of No Return: the climate will start to unravel as all its natural cooling processes break down one by one, guaranteeing we become hotter and hotter. Once we hit an increase of 4 degrees, much of the world will become uninhabitable, and there will be vast wars for what remains.
This isn't the warning of apocalyptic wackos: it's the judgement of the climate scientists who have consistently been proven right up to now. Steven Chu, the Nobel Prize-winning scientist who has been appointed Energy Secretary by Barack Obama, says: "I don't think the American public has gripped in its gut what will happen. We're looking at a scenario where there's no more agriculture in California. I don't actually see how they can keep their cities going either." Goodbye Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego. And that, he stresses, is only the start.
The distinguished environmental scientist James Lovelock warns that climate changes tend not to happen gradually, inch-by-inch. They suddenly flip – in our case from a cool world to a very hot one. He believes the hotter new world we are bringing into being could support, at best, a billion people. That would require 84 per cent of the world's population to die off.
That's why the protesters were talking about the climate. It should be the number one issue at every global meeting. And the way out of the climate crunch and credit crunch is the same – a Green New Deal. Our leaders are divided about whether we need a fiscal stimulus at all. Obama, Gordon Brown, and the Japanese Prime Minister Taro Aso are leading the charge for a burst of big government spending to jump-start the global economy, while Angela Merkel, Nicholas Sarkozy, David Cameron and the US Republicans are arguing this will simply be a debt-funded splurge to nothing.
It's a strange debate to have now, because the opponents of any stimulus seem to be mired in a row that was resolved back in the 1930s. John Maynard Keynes transformed the way that we think about recessions. Before him, everybody believed the Merkel-Cameron-McCain line that recessions are like bad weather: you just need to wrap up and sit it out, even though it hurts. But Keynes transformed all that.
He showed that recessions are actually caused by a failure of consumer demand. When people sense that they might lose their job, they – perfectly sensibly – cut back on their spending. They buy fewer DVDs or restaurant meals or holidays. But this causes a fall in demand for services – and more people lose their jobs, causing demand to fall further in turn, and on and on, in a spiral. He called it "the paradox of thrift": what is rational for an individual consumer is irrational for the society as a whole.
But he also showed that there is a way out: the government needs to spend large sums of money, financed by borrowing, to get all the workers waiting idle back into action. This form of government spending brings consumer demand back – and reverses the downward trend. Then, once you've recovered, you pay off the debt. Keynes stressed you can spend this money on anything: at one point he proposed burying wads of cash and paying people to dig them up. But today, we face an incredible coincidence. At the same moment, we need to spend lots of money on something, anything – and we need an immediate transition to a low-carbon economy. And it gets better: it turns out a green stimulus is best for the economy. A major study by the University of Massachusetts compared the effects of an old-style stimulus that simply gives people more cash to a green stimulus.
They found that a green stimulus creates four times more jobs, and three times more "good jobs", defined as those that pay more than $16 per hour. Why? Because a green stimulus is labour-intensive: you spend more money on people and less on machines. And the money you spend stays at home, making it easier to sell: you can only insulate a loft in Hull in Hull; you can only build a wind farm in the Mid-West in the Mid-West.
But it's not happening. A study by HSBC has found that only 6 per cent of Britain's stimulus so far has gone to green projects. In the US, it is just 16 per cent. It is nonsense to claim there aren't enough green projects "shovel-ready": during World War Two, the industrial capacities of our countries was transformed from making consumer goods to making tanks and weaponry in less than sixty days. We could do the same.
But this alacrity shouldn't surprise us. The weight of conventional wisdoms and the sway of powerful corporations with vested interests in the old sickening world holds back even the better leaders.
The first New Deal wasn't handed down by Franklin Roosevelt as a benevolent gesture. On the contrary: he came to power as a budget-balancing centrist, and only became a great President because he was confronted by massive riots and civil disobedience across the United States. The American people pushed him in a more radical direction, often with behaviour that made this week's riot in London look like a Buckingham Palace reception.
On Wednesday, one of the young protesters sat in a tent at the edge of the City of London, looked out towards the glistening towers of the financial district, and said to me: "The dinosaurs were killed by an asteroid. Suddenly, we are realising that we are our own asteroid." She shook her head. "How can so many people just sit at home and watch it happen?"
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Comments
Nonetheless I agree the issue should have been centrally part of what happened today. It is possible that the greatest achievement was simply getting them all together - in an atmosphere (mostly) of cordiality. As much as such top level eghos can be cordial around each other anyway.
If anything is to be done, about climate change, about recession, about the evils of market fundamentalism, then it has to mean the powerful of the world working together. The UN and other organisations that aim at that have been sidelined since Iraq. Perhaps now they can get some fresh fuel from this.
Further down the heap maybe the example can stimulate a less atomised less isolated, individualistic culture. There is the feelgood factor of leaders meeting peacefully together, taking tea with a matriarchal iconic figure.
There is also the pressure of thrift, austerity, making do, which is making inroads on our glitzy tatty Thatcherite yuppie frantic attempts to dress to impress. Thank the Goddess for that.
But this will not only force a more realistic material way of life. It will relaunch old forgotten skills of working together, cooperating, patching individuals and families into communities.
That is for me what I care about most. But perhaps such a sea change of paradigm can also bring people to finally sort out what is going on about the climate, which is what you care about most.
As for ... "How can so many people just sit at home and watch it happen?" - because young lady not all of us are young or fit enough to walk the streets with you. I am not. That's a young, strongbodied response. WE can and do fight it in other ways.
But I admit I did not send my precious strong young son because of sheer terror. Of police, of their weapons, of the many laws that have destroyed our freedoms, and made demonstrating far far different to my girlhood experiences.
The database state and its foul surveillance habits invaded and wrecked our little family. It has taken six years to regain our sanity and health after being devastated by so-called Child Protection. Once I was a brave person. I thought I would meet you on the barricades. Now having lived through the hell of a ruined life I am not risking our fragile safety to go there again.
You see there is so much to fear now. The British Stasi can break your spirit - however strong you are. I never thought to know the day when my formidable spirit could be beaten. It is something you cannot know unless it has happened to you.
But there ARE other ways to resist, to fight, than going on the streets.
The way out of the credit and the climate crunch is the same - a Green New Deal.
I defer. The reporters listen to both, the protestors and the G20. Why restrict the G20 and call Prince Phillip and Canada as absent? John, I agree to certain extent that we ought to listen but in the doldrums when the bottles are thrown, eyes pierced, blood on the streets and Police beating the heads of the ones who have come out to buy bread is no fun. It is scary. Will they speak? No. They have interest but are too scared after the blood and the skulls rolling come to TV. They do not want to say anything. , ?I have no idea. I saw this in the TV and I am no part of this. Yes, we want the change not on my head but the economy?. However, the Police charge etc is useless and the teargas at the stadium, just in case you have forgotten the demonstration of the football, it bad. Do you want to listen to them?
I thank you
Firozali A. Mulla
I thank you
Firozali A. Mulla
In blatcherist Britain, the good citizen, after thirty years of brianwashing, is still a gluttonous, rat-racing, planet-busting, consumer, of a anything and everything.
I do believe we waste our resources and no doubt there is pollution, but I also think the issue of global warming has been blown way out of proportion. I hope these same scientists who have been "spot on" in their past predictions aren't the same ones telling us about british weather.
Furthermore, there seems to be a lack of public knowledge that several times in the earths past, the climate has shifted and warmed up to the extent that scientists are warning about now...before our big carbon emissions...and eventually it righted itself again!
I see a lot of smoke and mirrors going on here, a lot of pulling the wool over public eyes to push the towards an agenda that isn't in its best interests.
http://theunpeople.blogspot.com/sea
2. If European Govts want us to break from Saudi oil dependency, we have a 'climate change campaign'.
What's the difference?
I am minded, when reading your climatological sermons, of the infamous Don Whillans, who I will paraphrase: ''E knows he's a world class climatologist, you seem to think so to, I'm not so sure, but has anyone bothered to ask the atmosphere?'
People should stop breeding if they care about the planet - no-one is green if they breed - but being selfish they won't of course so we're all gonna die and humanity will be destroyed. Hoorah!
Even China's one-child-policy is fallible, and results in the death of many female infants and disabled children because there is a preference for healthy males.
But what a corker this is - Keynes changed the way we think about recessions - did he really? You sound like one of Browns little boys spouting off economic theory as fact, which of course it is not. Similarly with climate change - this is all theoretical and the world's experts do also have their own agenda, grants funding etc. Having said that we do need to do more - but I think we need to do so with balance.
You talk of stimulus - what stimulus is that? Your beloved Brown has just given banks money to shore up their balance sheets - this is not a stimulus, it is a disgrace.
Here a different theory - people are not spending due to either a lack of money or work. Rather than use a fiscal stimulus as defined by you to inspire new confidence - we use regime change. People have rightly lost confidence in an incompetent Brown and his tainted advisers and untalented cabinet. You restore confidence easily and cheaply by removing this shower.
By the way re the protestors - great too see people out on the streets again. This should happen more - lets pull together and get rid of the gurning Brown for good, and we can do it and save the planet too. Marvelous.
Yes, it's always argued that we shouldn't frighten people into paralysis. But the truth of our nature as products of evolution is that we as homo sapiens won't do what's needed until we deeply realise, emotionally and not just intellectually, that there is a very serious threat to our own existence.
In WWII, yes, industrial production was redirected towards the war in 60 days. But everyone then suddenly KNEW that the danger was mortal and who the enemy was, and that by pulling together that was a winnable war. We have to be alarmed enough to take action, and so far, most people across the planet don't actually understand, as you and Lovelock and others do, Johann, how urgent the climate threat is.
As the species, so the individual. As I write this, my father is dying, aged 87. He has cancer. Around his bedside, we all know it. He doesn't want to know, and keeps saying how glad he is that the cancer was cured (he's been told several times that it wasn't). Strange, he says, how I can't seem to shake off this cough, and how my legs won't work any more.
We can, of course, and do, collude in his denial. Our own survival doesn't depend on his accepting that he will die within the next few weeks. No point in ramming the message home.
But what if our own survival depended on him recognising what's happening and doing, with us, what's needed that at least some of us can survive. We would be much less sanguine about our collusion.
The truth is, as you set it out Johann, even if it weren't too late (which like Lovelock I believe it is), that modern civilisation can't make these changes fast and far enough. We have to prepare for the very worst.
Surely it is not only the type and level of individuals and nations behaviour that affect the climate, but also the sheer volume and number of people. There is only so much land, fresh water and resources this planet of ours can offer, before it runs out of them. The amount of habitable land on earth is finite. At some point the planet will simply not be able to support more people. A sizable proportion of the World's population is already suffering from acute fresh water shortage.
World's population is close to 7 billion and rising fast, but nothing serious is being done to tackle this. For example, why does it seem that a country like India with a population of 1.2billion and fast rising (soon to overtake China as the World's most populous country - and this doesn't even include another 300milion plus living in Pakistan and Bangladesh that used be parts of India), which roughly has an area no bigger than twice the size of Texas, is doing nothing of any note to limit its enormous population rise?
In the 1940s India's population was around the 300million mark and somehow in the space of a mere 60 years its population has quadrupled to the point that many of its cities and population centres are suffering from chronic overcrowding, shortage of resources, public amenities and poverty with the authorities mostly helpless to implement effective measures to help improve quality of life.
But India's massive population rise, though probably the most obvious example, is far from an isolated case. All across the globe from Indonesia to Nigeria to Brazil, the numbers of human beings are rising at such a rapid rate that in not too distant a future this will surely become unsustainable and also probably lead to international conflict and wars as people will have no choice, but to migrate in huge numbers to other land.
So is nothing being said about the very probable catastrophe of the population explosion in the environmental debate?
Anyway, these protesters are just childish attention seekers who want to 'belong' - they are utter conformists.
Waving a banner that the Police State permitted you to wave, is not going to change anything.
NON COMPLIANCE is the ONLY way to get rid of this whole Government and their Banker Bosses.
Withdraw the troops from Iraq and Afghanistan and secede from the EEC.
Lets build a new self sufficient and green agricultural economy based UK - no more Wars or Nuclear Technology.
We need to wean ourselves off consumer culture and appreciate the value of energy - electricity should be rationed.
If we were to close down our aiports except for essential flights, we would half our carbon doixide emmisions overnight.
If we were not so reliant on other countries natural resources we would need to operate such subverting foreign policies in general.
Capitalism has failed. America is on the brink of complete economic collapse and invevitable civil war. We in the UK have a unique opportunity to turn our country into a massive vegetable allotment and wind/wave farm , where everyone goes about their business on bikes and we don't go to War or exert subversive political influence on foreign countries.
Ed Milliband, clearly an engineering ignoramus of the first order, has asserted that those who oppose wind turbines should be socially ostracised. Lovelock was savagely attacked in the comments on his article by similarly engineering-challenged posters. But the lessons learnt from other nations confirm Lovelock's position. Thus Denmark has had to increase its carbon dioxide output by investing in new fossil fuelled plant to come in when its major investment in wind turbines stops working.
So, our present policy of wind turbines at 35% of installed capacity is the strategic and economic policy of the madhouse. We must make most of our electricity nuclear power. It is time the posturing greens justify their approach on the basis of real efficiencies, costs and security of supply.
It is so easy to do nothing and to declare ourselves as Mr & Mrs "right on" with no blood on our hands, it is much less easy to face up to our world and its mess and at least try to do something that might help our neighbour (either metaphorically or literally).Doing nothing does not make us better people it makes us moral cowards.
It sounds like we are at the point where we have to be prepared to die for this.
I guess if the 'machine' don't get you, the climate will.
A recent study at the Juan Carlos University in Madrid concludes that every "green" job created kills 2.2 jobs elsewhere. That figure does not account for the indirect job losses because of higher energy prices that accompany green energy technologies. Spain's jobless now stands at 14%. "Green" jobs are heavily subsidised which of course are unsustainable. The Spanish government recently had to reduce subsidies to the "green" industry by 30% and jobs in this industry are now being lost by the tens of thousands. The "green" industry in Spain is now in retreat. California is in the same mess because of its "green" policies..
The author of the Spanish study is Gabriel Calzada.
The question was recently put to someone as what is a "green" job the reply came
"A green job has a minimal impact on the environment." I am sure Mr Hari that you could not have put it better were you asked the same question.
The only snag I can see is that the current system cannot really change course rapidly enough. I reckon it's already too late.
Once the human population is down to a billion or so, maybe less, then it will be in a position to plot a sustainable route forward. The snags are that by then, all the readily-accessible resources will have gone, so we may find ourselves stuck on this one world forever.
And of course in the course of the Great Dying, the biggest since the last one, a quarter of an aeon ago, the Earth will lose most of its species - probably 90% or more of them. Dead, stagnant oceans and howling deserts will be the general rule, with impoverished grasslands and forests near the poles.
All this because people are generally incapable of learning from their own parents' and grandparents' mistakes. Memories are so short.
I pacify all those who have commented on this very beautiful article. When you see a woman, bleed from the eye (Check the net, same paper) first thing any one has is how to talk and sooth the public. Fewer eyes are pierced. Police are soft if not hard ruthless cores. We jump the ass or a horse, wallop to the Arctic, and deny all.
Johann Hari: The protesters are the ones we should listen to at this summit. This is what the article is about. We have Japan etc talk of Wales and Russia and Canada talk of the North ice melting.
The comments are worst then the protesters. The Johann Hari: as softhearted lady is doing a good job. Let her be.
I thank you
Firozali A. Mulla
I don't quite understand the point you're trying to make by calling the people here worse than the protesters. Are the protesters bad and we here are just worse? Or are the protesters good because they took to the streets and we're bad because we didn't?
Our discussion here is just as haphazzard as the protests, because how can say what EXACTLY was being protested? Everyone had something different to say.
It wasn't so much a protest as an internet forum on the streets. There was no unity because everyone had a different agenda. How does anyone expect to be heard if all that's heard is noise?
http://www.thekipper.co.uk/