Category Archives: Environmental politics

Books Environmental politics Politics

Touching on conservatives and greens

August 6, 2011 – 12:04 pm

Made a quick whip through Kieron O’Hara’s Conservatism, a chance encounter at the London Library that left me intrigued by its “green” chapter.

It is very explicitly a book about “small c” conservatism – excluding and rejecting all traces of neoliberal economic theory, so a long way from a lot of what we encounter in practical politics.

There’s a couple of things O’Hara identifies as key to this conservatism – one is that knowledge and data, particularly that on which governments make decisions, are limited and uncertain. “Massive government spending based on little or no idea of whether it would do any good: a scandal? [referring to recent stiumulus spending] Possibly, but goverments rarely understand the effects of their actions.This is a dramatic example, but a common type of deficit in knowledge.” (p. 24)

The second is what he calls the change principle “because the current state of society is typically undervalued, and because the effects of innovations cannot be known fully in advance, then social change (a) must always risk destroying beneficial institutions and norms and, (b) cannot be guaranteed to achieve the aims for which it was implemented. It therefore follows that societies should be risk-averse with respect to social change and the burden of proof placed on the innovator, not his or her opponents. It also follows that change, when it does come, should ideally be (a) experimental (b) reversible where possible and (c) rigorously evaluated before the next incremental step.” (p. 88)

Do how does this play out in the environment? Proving that conservatives can have a sense of humour, O’Hara first offers this: “Temperamentally, environmentalists and conservatives are miles apart; while the Tory sups champagne at White’s the green annoys nothing so much as creating a new type of compost. They move in different circles and have different enemies (often each other). Yet I shall argue… that, both philosophicaly and programtically, conservatism is the best-placed ideology for defending our environment.” (p. 273)
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Books Environmental politics

An American view of the disappearance of the bees – more telling than it knows

July 27, 2011 – 12:46 pm

A shorter version was first published on Blogcritics

I was sitting on a terrace in Burgundy, watching a dozen honeybees bustling amid the lavender bushes, when I decided that The Beekeeper’s Lament had to be the next book to come out of the “to read” pile. While the hills of the Morvan National Park, with a mixture of forests and pasture lands, often still divided by hedges, bear little resemblance to the extensive, pesticide-soaked monocultures that characterise American agriculture. But now bees are in trouble everywhere around the globe, and it is a problem for all of us. Indeed, that’s partly why I planted those lavender bushes.

The problem is known as Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) – at least that is the latest, it becomes clear, of a long line of problems that have been haunting beekeepers. The most commonly suggested cause, and certainly still very much in the frame, are neonicotinoid insecticides – used on more than 150 different crops, and in pet flea collars. Genetically modified corn, mobile phone masts, and many other causes have also been suggested. Often, also, traditional pests and diseases of bees – the most destructive of which is the varoa mite – have also been blamed. As Nordhaus amusingly notes, it’s also been claimed as an early sign of Judgement Day – those industrious bees being the first to rise to heaven.

But the explanation that seems to be gaining increasing traction is more complex. Nordhaus notes that CCD seems to share with HIV/AIDS the fact that the condition sees otherwise healthy hives fall prey to conditions laid usually resist -something is weakening the bees. This is not thought to be one single infective agent or other single cause, but fact that these are simply being worked too hard, moved around too much, exposed to too many pesticides, even in tiny doses, facing too difficult weather conditions. But above all, Nordhaus suggests, the of being fed too limited diet – “suffering from the same kind of bad nutrition afflicting humans who eat processed junk food. … Sprawl, mono crops, flawless lawns, weedless gardens, and a general decline in pasture land of make hard for bees to find a suitable diversity of nectar and pollen sources. Bees, it turns out, need natural places.” (p. 249) (And bats, which have ecological similarities to be bees, also suffering hugely –particularly from mysterious “white nose syndrome”.)

One of the things this book makes clear is just how complex and sophisticated bees are. Here’s Nordhaus’s accounts of the production of a pound of honey – which will take a hive a day. “The 50,000 or 80,000 bees who live together in a hive at the height of summer will travel a collective 55,000 miles and visit more than 2 million flowers. … One worker will visit 50 to 100 flowers on each trip from the hive, in the process collecting and dispersing pollen from flower to flower, allowing the plants it touches to reproduce.” (p. 235)

Yet American beekeepers are frequently paid less than the cost production for their honey, and what is sold as honey can be up to 80% corn syrup. Regulation has been judged to be a low priority. (p. 241) And here’s a warning, imports of Chinese honey were banned in 2002, as result of antibiotic contamination, yet curiously after that the top 12 honey-exporting countries now export more than total home production. Few checks are made. (p. 243)
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Books Environmental politics Politics

Control the car and the supermarkets: a recipe for healthier individuals and a happier society

July 3, 2011 – 5:55 pm

(A shorter version of this article was published on Blogcritics)

It’s all too obvious now that in many ways developed societies have lost their way. Climate change, economic crisis, huge inequality of which part is misery for some and fearful uncertainty for many more, many hundreds of millions going hungry while obesity is cutting lifespans in a growing number of cases – economies clearly did not, as Keynes and others thought after the Second World War they would, reach a state of sensible material sufficiency, then look to improve quality of life rather than quantity of stuff.

So where did it all go so horribly wrong? Ian Roberts (writing with Phil Edwards) in The Energy Glut: The Politics of Fatness in an Overheating World has at least part of the answer. He ties together the building of societies and economies around the needs of fossil-fuel powered transport to the rise in obesity and removal of almost all physical activity from many Western individuals’ lives, combined with a huge toll or death and injury on developing, and developed, countries’ roads, and the rise of the supermarkets and foods rich in calories and low in nutrients. He’s very firm that obesity is not an individual problem – simply a reflection of the fact that all of us have got steadily fatter, which has of course pushed the upper end of the distribution curve well into “obese”.

It’s a book that contains many shocking statistics.

* Globally road crashes kill 1,000 children a day and disable many times more. And that’s simply “accidents” – there’s also the cardiac and respiratory diseases road pollution causes, and of course climate change.
* The WHO reports that expenses arising from road injuries cost poor countries around 2% of GDP – nearly $100bn, twice what they receive in aid.
* In England and Wales there were 205 road deaths of children pedestrians between 2001 and 2003 – and children from the lowest social group were five times more likely to die than the highest (which the authors say is simply because the dangers of the roads have driven everyone who can afford it into a car – every step of which of course makes the roads more dangerous).
* In the UK between 1975 and 2003 average miles walked per person fell from 255 to 192; cycled from 51 to 34 (and the authors say these figures would already have dropped hugely from only a couple of decades earlier). (p. 39)
* Shopping accounts for about 20% of car journeys in the UK. (p. 56)
* America’s “security costs” for “defending” petroleum supplies from the Middle East are estimated at between $100 billion and $200bn annually.
* In 1932 General Motor bought up America’s tram system in order to shut it down.
* The overall risk of death from all causes among people who cycle to work is between 10 and 30% lower than for those who drive to work (p. 108)
* English composer Sir Edward Elgar took up cycling in his 40s and cycled up to 40 miles a day around the lanes of Herefordshire (used as a sign of how readily people took on distances considered almost heroic today) (p. 111)

So what to do? One clear action in the developed world is that we need to start to cut away at the social dominance of the supermarket (and for the sake of our farmers there are plenty of other reasons for doing this), and their car-demanding, car-encouraging and obesity-encouraging system.

The authors report that in the UK supermarkets account for 93% of food spending and (as of 2007 and growing fast) 41% of fuel sales. And more than three quarters of British households do their main food shopping by car. “Supermarkets sell energy, either as food or petrol. … as people move less, all things being equal, they tend to eat less. .. we could think of supermarkets as simply the retail arm of the petro-nutritional complex. Supermarkets don’t care how they make profits, whether by selling us food or petrol, but either way it makes us fat…[and] fat populations consume considerably more food than lean populations. It has been estimated that the amount of food energy consumed by a ‘fat’ population (average BMI 29) is around 20 per cent more than that consumed by a ‘normal’ weight population (average BMI 25). The heavier our bodies become, the harder and more unpleasant it is to move about in them and the more dependent we become on our cars” (p. 55-6)

And there’s been a huge change in the balance of food types. Not only has food, relative to other expenses, never been cheaper, (UK household spending percentage has fallen from 20% in 1970 to 10% in 2002), but it is energy-dense, fats and sugars, that have fallen most, while fruit, vegetables and grain have fallen much less. And sugary drinks have fallen in price most of all, and now more than three-quarters of school children drink at least one fizzy drink a day (unsurprising when they see on average 10 food industry adverts per hour of TV). “North American children are drowning in liquid calories. And the rest of the world is jumping to join them Coca-Cola boasts 1.5 billion consumer servings a day.” (p. 59)

Another action needed is to stop the subsidising of the motor and associated industries. As the authors say: “Although most of the world’s population will never own a car, road building is invariably funded by public funds, in rich and poor countries alike. Road transportation is 95% oil-dependent, and ensuing a steady supply of cheap oil also involves massive public expenditure. Then there is the automobile industry…(with huge subsidies and bailouts).” (p. 68)

It’s here that the book is likely to be most controversial, even among those likely to broadly back its conclusions. It says that there’s no evidence to show that roads encourage economic development, while noting that congestion hampers economic output and the poor bear the majority of the negative costs of road building. (p. 73) The only real benefit lies, the authors say, is in profits for big, often foreign, companies. What Africa (with which it is chiefly concerned in this context) needs is not fancy roads for cars, but simple solid paths for bicycles – and the bicycles to use on them.

And it’s also clear we need to curb the lobbying power and influence of the motor industry. Roberts tells the astonishing tale of the Federation Internationale de l’Automobile’s Commission for Global Road Safety, which has an industry members — oils, tyres and car making among their origins — and as patron Prince Michael of Kent, former racing driver and member of the British Racing Drivers Club. It’s keen on pedestrian education, Roberts says, decide decades of research showing this to be wholly ineffective, as well as sending the message that “road space belongs to drivers and pedestrians and cyclists must look out or die”. (p. 83) Driver training too, has a negative impact on safety (p. 124).

But above all, the message that Roberts wants to deliver is that we need to go back to bicycle and walking as the primary form of individual transport (while also improving mass transit systems). The arguments are on both climate change/environmental and health grounds.

First health: “Take a 50-year-old office worker who drives 4.5km to work every day, a distance that is easily manageable by bicycle. If he switches from driving to cycling for 90% of these trips, at the end of the first year he could have shed up to 5 kilos of adipose tissue and will enjoy a 20 to 40% reduction in the risk of premature death and a 30% reduction in the risk of type 2 diabetes. He will also have better mental health and improved fitness.” (p. 108) (And if you think it will take longer, note that the average car speed in London is 11kph – for bicycles it is 10kph – p. 110)

But conversely, in the developing world, cycles (rather than walking) would reduce calorie consumption and thus improve health: “The lion’s share of transport in Africa is in rural areas, on unpaved paths and tracks, carrying crops from the fields to the villages…. (70-80% by women) carrying headloads of crops, typically weighing 30kg or more over an average distance of about 5km… A 2m-wide unpaved bike trail would cost less than 10% of the cost of a 6m-wide rural road for motor vehicle use…. One study in the Makete District of Tanzania found that, whereas building a feeder road saved households 120 hours per year, investing in a bicycle saved the family 200 hours a year…. a ‘before and after study’ of subsidised bicycle provision in Uganda found a range of beneficial effects, including more frequent trips to market and health-care facilities and increased household income.” (p. 104)

Second, there’s the argument of quality of life. Cars and trucks destroy community life, removing people (particularly children) from the streets. And above all, there’s climate change – cars simply cannot continue to rule.

This is a book every council planner, every councillor, should read. It’s not without faults. The writing has a hasty feel, as does the editing – it sometimes harms its argument by quoting different figures for the same facts in different places and is extremely uneven in its treatment of units of measure; some parts of the text appear to fit rather awkwardly with the rest (no doubt cooperative writing isn’t easy). Nevertheless, I can pretty much guarantee that if you read this, there’ll be at least one gripping fact you’ll continue to quote for years to come.

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Books Environmental politics

“The responsibility for managing this world of wounds we’ve created is uniquely ours”

May 29, 2011 – 5:49 pm

A shorter version of this post was published on Blogcritics. (Yes sorry, this is very long, but really you should read the book!)

The latest book by Australia’s foremost science intellectual, Tim Flannery, Here on Earth: A New Beginning should really be read with at least one other person in the room. That way you can look up and say: “Whow, did you know that continental drift ensures the saltiness of the ocean remains constant?” (Flannery explains that while water takes 30,000 to 40,000 years to recycle from evaporation in the ocean through precipitation and hence through soil and rock (picking up salt) and down rivers back to the sea, but over 10 million to 100 million years it passes through hydrothermal vents in the ocean crust, which remove the salt. – p 53)

“Or did you know that soils represent a huge carbon reserve, about 150 billion tonnes, roughly twice that in the atmosphere?” (Flannery explains that soil carbon is made up of humus (which makes it took black and is relatively stable, and can absorb its own weight in moisture), charcoal and roots and other underground parts of plants, which is the most prevalent form, but intensively used croplands have lost from 30 to 75% of their carbon content over the past two centuries. Lots more – though not enough is known to estimate a value – has been lost from poorly managed grazing lands and eroded soils.- p.264)

Or, “gosh, listen to this great Adam Smith quote… ‘The proposal of any new law or regulation of commerce which comes from [the business community] out always to be listened to with great precaution, and ought never to be adopted till having been long and carefully examined, not only with the most scrupulous, but the most suspicious attention. It comes from an order of men, whose interest is never exactly the same as the public, who have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public, and who accordingly have, upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it’.” (p. 220)

Or “did you know there were natural nuclear reactors in Africa about 1.8 billion years ago?” (Flannery explains that in the Oklo and Bangombe regions of Gabon, French miners found mostly Uranium-238 – “spent” fiel, rather than the Uranium-235 used in reactors, and concluded that it had been gathered in algal mats in the estuary of an ancient river that flowed over uranium-bearing rocks, and eventually the concentration was sufficient to start a nuclear reaction. – p. 193)

Or “did you know that the first agriculture in the world was probably in Papua New Guinea, 10,000 years ago – earlier than the Fertile Crescent or China?” (Flannery explains it was based on taro and banana, and probably the most productive, supporting the highest rural population densities on earth. And the two most widely planted varieties of sugar cane originated in PNG. – p. 138)

As those examples suggest, Here on Earth is a wide-ranging book – in fact it attempts not just to tell the story of how life has developed on, and shaped, Earth, but how we as life’s conscious beings might ensure that our own and other life continues. It’s really a fleshing-out of James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis, with some added politics and sociology that consider us as an important part of the tapestry and history of life.

Flannery takes as his frame what he sees as the two great contrasting scientific approaches to evolution and change – “reductionist science as epitomised by Charles Darwin and Richard Dawkins, and the great holistic analyses of the likes of Alfred Russel Wallace and James Lovelock”, arguing that both are needed to understand life on earth “and what sustainability entails” ([. xvii).

Flannery clearly accepts the idea that Gaia can be seen as a single living organism – but in what way? Flannery points out that we humans are made up of a number of independent or formerly independent elements – our cells are powered by mitochondria that were once independent living things “these partners must have started by forming a loose association, but after more than a billion years of evolution they have become indivisible parts of an organism” – p. 55 And within a human are still independent organisms that make up part of what we think of as us – “Without many of these creatures – for example gut bacteria – we could not exist. These fellow travellers make up 10% of our weight, and are so pervasively distributed over our bodies that were we to take away all ‘human’ cells, a detailed body shadow consisting of them would remain – p 56.” If you look at an individual person that way, it is not so hard to look at the Earth as in some sense a single organism.

But of course the Earth lacks what Flannery calls a “command-and-control” system, but as he says, so do extreme complex ant colonies. They rely on pheromones (and can be remarkably “democratic”, for if a colony is looking for a new home ants will spend longer in places they think best, laying a trail of these chemicals, and the greatest concentration of these will be the place selected for the new home). And Flannery suggests potential substances in Gaia that act as “geo-pheromones”, which act to help maintain conditions suitable to life, including ozone, which shields life from ultraviolet rays, the greenhouses gases, which play a critical role in controlling surface temperature, and dimethyl sulphide, produced by certain algae, which assists in cloud formation. There’s also atmospheric dust, much of which is organic in origin.

He sees as a vital mechanism in making this work coevolution “natural selection that is triggered by interactions between related things… it can act at every level, from that of individual amino acids to entire organisms, and it may not be just a property of life…astromers argue that black holes and galaxies develop an interdependence that’s akin to biological evolution”. (p. 65) In simpler terms, antelope have evolved to run just faster than lions (there’s no advantage in running a lot faster), so lions can catch only the old and the weak. And, Flannery says, critically, we humans and our ancestors have been co-evolving with many species of seven million years. He gives the lovely example of the greater African honeyguide, which feeds solely on the larvae, wax and honey of beehives. When it sees a human, it makes a striking call to attract the human’s attention, “then moves off, stopping frequently to ensure that the person is following it, all the while fanning its tail to display white spots that we visually oriented humans find easy to see. When native Africans reach a hive with the help of a honeyguide, they break it open and often thank the bird with a gift of honey.” Yes, sadly says, this relationship is beginning to break down, because with cheap sugar available, humans can no longer be bothered to seek out honey. Flannery sees this a s a symbol of the way we’ve “destroyed many coevolutionary bonds that lie at the heart of productive ecosystems” (p.68).
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Books Environmental politics Politics

What drives the super-rich?

May 14, 2011 – 6:47 pm

I’ve been reading Herve Kempf (Le Monde’s environment editor) How the Rich Are Destroying the Planet. His environmental wrap-up isn’t particularly new – in fact it surprises and rather worries me that for the French audience for which this was originally written he felt the need to run through the basics of ecological catastrophe – but I’m finding his political side interesting and different.

This is his take on the super-rich class, what we he calls today’s oligarchy, after he’s run through a detailed account of how it spends its money on who-can-build-the-biggest-yacht competitions and such like (p. 58)…

“It bears no plan, is animated by no ideal, delivers no promise. The aristocracy of the Middle Ages was not an exploitative caste only; it dreamed of building a transcendent order, dreams to which Gothic cathedrals splendidly bear witness. The nineteenth-century bourgeoisie that Karl Marx described as a revolutionary class exploited the proletariat but also felt it was propagating progress and humanist ideals. The ruling classes of the Cold War were borne along by the will to defend democracy and freedoms in the face of a totalitarian counterexample. But today, after triumphing over Sovietism, capitalism doesn’t know how to do anything but celebrate itself.”

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Books Environmental politics

The politics of climate change and how to change them. Don’t despair, quite…

April 7, 2011 – 11:04 pm

A shorter version was first published on Blogcritics.

You don’t really have to worry about “giving away the ending” in Clive Hamilton’s Requiem for a Species; the author’s done that himself in the title. What he’s seeking to do here is not so much cover the science of climate change, but rather to try to understand why the human race has been so oblivious to the danger, even when it is staring it in the face.

Here’s how he sets out the problem: “If the scientists are right, global emissions must reach a peak within five to ten years then decline rapidly until the world’s energy systems are all but decarbonised. Are the institutions of government in the major nations of the world capable of recognising and responding to the urgency of the problem in time? Are the international institutions that must agree on a global plan sufficiently responsive to agree to, implement and enforce the necessary measures?”

It’s obvious what Hamilton thinks the answer is, in part he says because we are all trapped in the “growth machine”, “which we thought we had built to enhance our own ends, which has taken on a life of its own, and resists fiercely the slow awakening to its perils of the humans it is supposed to serve. The growth machine has, over time, created the types of people who are perfectly suited to its own perpetuation, – docile, seduced by its promises and unable to think beyond the boundaries it sets…. Our political leaders tend to be those who have internalised the goals of the system most faithfully and are therefore most immune to arguments and evidence that might challenge it.” (p. 49) Certainly that sums up Britain’s current Tory-Lib Dem government!

The machine’s “religion”, or romantic belief, is that economics can be studied, and the world understood as a mathematical equation, value-free and entirely detached from the perspective of the thinker. Hamilton says: “The only preferences that [Richard] Tol regards as legitimate are those expressed by consumers in a supermarket and never those expressed by citizens at the ballot box. This is perhaps the ultimate conceit of mainstream economics, the equation of market behaviour with democracy itself.” (p59-60)

Yet the curious thing is that Hamilton finds evidence that huge majorities, even in America, when asked the right questions understand that we’ve gone horribly wrong. He quotes of 2004 poll that found 93% thought fellow citizens were too focused on work and making money, 88% that society is too materialistic, with too much focus on shopping, and 90% thought people were spending beyond their means and getting into debt. It’s worth highlighting the fact that until the 1980s, the era when a lot of things went wrong, working hours were on a steady historic longterm decline, and regarded as the “surest sign of social progress”. (p. 86)
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