SPOKESMAN BOOKS
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Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation
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Catalogue
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Reviews
What Price the Planet?
Al
Gore, An Inconvenient Truth, Bloomsbury, 2006, 324 pages, ISBN 978-
0747589068,
£14.99
Steve
Jones, Coral: A Pessimist in Paradise, Little Brown, 2007, 242 pages,
ISBN
978-0316729383, £15.99
Larry
Lohman, Carbon Dating in Development Dialogue, no. 48, September
Colin
Leys & Leo Panich, Coming to Terms with Nature, Socialist
Register,
2007,
364 pages, Merlin Press, ISBN 978-0850365788, £14.95
James
Lovelock, The Revenge of Gaia, Penguin, Allen Lane, 2006, 192 pages,
ISBN 978-0713999143, £16.99
It
has been said that human beings are the only animals which foul their own
nest. The damage we have done to our planet, Earth, is detailed in these
books, with due warnings of the destruction that is to come if we do not
change our ways. The main threat comes from our insatiable extraction of
fossil carbon deposits from the earth’s surface to fuel our whole economic
system, and the release of these deposits as carbon dioxide into the air and
oceans with the consequent global warming. At the same time we are cutting
down forests, over-fishing the seas, ruining the coral reefs, polluting the
air, turning land into desert, while expanding populations as if the resources
of the planet were endless. These are the matters dealt with in these books,
but all the authors who, with the exception of Al Gore, are scientific experts
in their own fields, regard global warming as the most serious threat, and all
see this as primarily the result of human actions. Sun spots and the wobble of
the earth on its axis are not regarded as the prime suspects. And yet, one
cannot forget that it was only 70,000 years ago that the last ice age ended,
and the coming and going of this massive climate change was sudden and no
fault of the tiny human population on earth at the time.
The main concern of all these authors is naturally, what can be done in time to avert total human catastrophe. In the much vaunted Kyoto Protocol the governments of the Developed Countries, the main perpetrators of carbon emission, promised to make planned reductions in their emissions. President Bush withdrew the United States from this agreement, since he did not believe in global warming, but the US negotiators had already inserted into the Kyoto Protocol a whole series of measures for a system of carbon trading which would allow the big energy companies to buy exemptions from the planned carbon reductions.
These
have not been so widely advertised, but they form the substance of the 350
page Swedish study under review and of one of the Socialist Register studies.
In effect these exemptions make a nonsense of the whole agreement. As one wit
put it, it is as if a bigamist or polygamist found an unmarried person or
persons of the same sex who were then paid to abstain from marriage so that
their illegal practices could continue. It is in fact worse than this. First,
because it is the poor countries which are persuaded to contribute to the rich
countries’ immunities. Second, because there is no adequate regulation of
the bargains, many of which are phoney, and the result is that no actual cuts
in carbon emissions are made. The allocation of carbon allowances, so-called
‘emission rights’ under the Kyoto Protocol, was made to countries at a
certain percentage below what they said they were emitting in 1990. Then these
rights in Europe were transferred to countries which transferred them to their
several industrial sectors, leading in the case of the United Kingdom to
annual ‘gifts’ in excess of actual average emissions over the years
1998-2003 (Carbon Trading Table 2. p.89).
When
it comes to the trading of rights by individual companies, this has
been compared to the medieval Christian practice of the sale of indulgencies
to offset sins (Achim Brunnengraber of the Free University of Berlin in Socialist
Register,
p.220).
Two instruments are provided to states – to issue certificates corresponding
to their assigned amount of emissions. Trading is planned for 2008 onwards.
One instrument, the Joint Implementation provision (JI), relates to projects
involving investment in carbon reducing measures in an industrial country
(mostly Eastern Europe) by another such country. The other, the Clean
Development
Mechanism (CDM), relates to investment in a Developing Country. Several
hundred projects were already under consideration by June 2006.
Examples
of such investments are more efficient power stations, windmills and water
power and, most popular, forestation schemes. These investments can then be
set as credits against reduction obligations. There are several difficulties
about both Joint Implementations and Clean Development Mechanisms. Such
investments might have taken place without this incentive and it is not easy
to calculate what the actual carbon savings are and how comparable they are to
what is being reduced from the investor’s carbon emission obligations.
The
Swedish study of Carbon Trading emphasises an even more serious
objection. The United States experience of controlling pollution through
marketing devices, on which the Kyoto measures were based, has revealed that
in the words of the Heinrich Böll Foundation of Berlin ‘the “polluter
pays” principle has been turned into “the polluter buys his way out
principle”.’ The result is that emissions markets are only stop-gap
measures, structurally biased against the kind of radical change needed to
tackle global warming. (Carbon Trading, p.117).They do nothing to end
the way the capitalist economy is ‘locked in’, often by state subsidies
and by the International Financial Institutions’ programmes, to high fossil
fuel use – in military spending, untaxed airplane fuel, motorways, out of
town supermarkets, centralised power plants, etc. Similarly, the emphasis on
trading and markets brings in the whole panoply of financial mediation –
jobbers and brokers, consultants and lawyers, insurance and speculation –
the very heart of the capitalist system.
The
Socialist Register’s issue on ‘Coming to Terms with Nature’ is
aimed to find a socialist alternative to the dictates of capital. The
unsustainable nature of the capitalist system is explored in several essays
and the implications of disaster made clear, but answers are not evident. The
trading answer is well disposed of, but nothing put in its place except
suggestions of ‘far-reaching structural change’.
The
volume ends with a lament at the failure of ‘red’ and ‘green’ forces
to work together. The contribution by Frieder Otto Wolf, one-time German
Euro-MP, offers a particularly tragic account of the failure of the German
Greens to build an eco-socialist national party. A final contribution
recognises, however, the limits to ‘eco-localism’. The Socialist
Register editors in the end hope only that the essays will provoke
discussion and perhaps rescue the possibility of democratic planning from the
‘failed practices of authoritarian communism’.
Al
Gore’s book, which is beautifully illustrated (but rather irritatingly
studded with pictures of him and his family) and now made into a film,
describes in detail just what is happening to the planet as a result of global
warming, and what will happen if no steps are taken to reduce carbon use, but
it has a rather limited list of recommendations. Apart from carbon trading and
especially tree planting, he pleads for a more responsible consumerism among
individual families. It is hardly the ‘catalyst for change’ which he hopes
for.
Steve
Jones, Professor of Genetics at University College London, gave the Reith
lectures in 1991 and is the author of several books of popular science. His
book Coral: A Pessimist in Paradise I have included in this review
because of the beauty of his writing, fitting the beauty of its subject, which
our pollution of the seas has almost destroyed, but he has no expectation that
human folly will cease. The coral
reefs, he concludes, ‘only remind us that our extinction is as certain as is
theirs. Whether it will take place in the slow course of evolutionary time or
in the near future, as our own imprudence causes Nature to take her revenge,
neither Newton nor Darwin can tell.’
No
review of books on the prospects for the planet earth would be complete
without mention of James Lovelock’s concept of ‘Gaia’, the Greek earth
goddess who gave her name to all the words we have which begin with ‘ge’.
‘Gaia’ for
Lovelock
is a biosphere which has evolved as an ‘active adaptive control system able
to maintain the earth in homeostasis’ – an equilibrium temperature for
organisms’ growth and optimum acidity, salinity and oxygen. It is all this
which human greed and imprudence are destroying with inevitable dire
consequences for the future of the planet and life on it.
Lovelock
is a distinguished English scientist, Companion of Honour, author of over 200
scientific papers and three books, who at the age of 86 has written this
warning book on ‘Why the earth is fighting back and how we can save
humanity’. The warnings are spelt out with full scientific evidence,
carefully cited mainly from the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
While global warming is accepted as a natural phenomenon between ice ages,
human activity from our excessive consumption of energy using up the carbon
deposits in the earth’s surface is enormously speeding up the process so as
to melt down the ice caps, raising sea levels to a height which will flood
many of the world’s major cities. On top of this we have been polluting the
oceans and destroying the earth’s forest cover both of which absorbed much
of the carbon dioxide (CO2) released by the consumption practices of our
rapidly increasing population.
Lovelock
does not believe that any of the measures being proposed to halt the warming
process – by converting from coal, oil and gas to hydro, wind power, solar,
hydrogen and biofuels or by tree planting , let alone carbon trading – will
work in time to prevent disaster. There is no such thing, he believes, as
sustainable development, only sustainable retreat. We have to learn to replace
economic growth by economic reduction, but how within the next 30 years?
Lovelock sees the only hope in bringing up our children to have faith in a
Gaia who expects care and restraint rather than in a God who requires them to
be ‘fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth and subdue it’. In the
meantime, he says that ‘we should now be preparing for a rise of sea level,
spells of near intolerable heat like that in Central Europe in 2003 and storms
of unprecedented severity’. ‘The immediate need’, he goes on, ‘is safe
and secure sources of energy to keep the lights of civilisation burning and
for the preparation of our defences against rising sea levels’. And here he
will offend most conservationists by recommending nuclear fission, until our
scientists can master nuclear fusion.
Michael
Barratt Brown
