Climate change

Tax the rich to shift from fossil fuels

In The Housing Question Engels mocks the French millionaires of his day for pouring their money into Germany, thus financing a hostile military power. The actions of the French capitalists were rational as an investment decision. But their unrestrained profit-seeking undermined France’s imperialist interests. A similar dynamic has played out between Europe and the Putin war machine. Europe gets 40% of its gas, 27% of its oil and 46% of its coal from Russia. Over many decades, trillions of dollars of European money has flowed into Russia’s state-owned fossil giants. The European capitalist...

Against Putin, move to renewables

Official opening of the Power of Siberia pipeline Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has revealed the geopolitical and ecological insanity of a European capitalist class addicted to fossil fuels. Russia is the world’s largest petro-state, controlling one third of Earth’s oil and gas reserves and producing 68% of the world’s domestic gas supply. Fossil fuels constitute around 60% of Russian exports and around 40% of government income. The overwhelming majority of those fossil fuels are bought by European and other NATO countries. The fossil fuel revenue has allowed Putin to amass the third largest...

Carbon markets are no answer

Stuart Jordan is correct to critique the deceitful nature of “carbon offsetting” and of many claims to “net zero” ( Solidarity 623 ). Yet he stops far short of a much needed fundamental critique of carbon markets. Blockchain has no special power to verify that purported “carbon drawdown initiatives” actually do draw down net carbon. To verify this happening, we would need clear and rigorous standards with independent inspections and evaluation. Capitalist markets have repeatedly demonstrated a failure to regulate themselves and enforce quality control in a decentralised way. Why would it be...

COP26 lessons: the need for workers' climate action

On 17 February, the Office for National Statistics published figures showing that the number of green jobs in the UK is stagnating; in Scotland, host to the COP26 summit in November 2021, it is falling. The lack of progress toward meaningful climate action was one of the issues addressed on 19 February at a day-long meeting of local representatives of the COP26 Coalition. The gathering had been planned to take place in-person in Birmingham together with a local climate festival (which went ahead), but it moved online after Storm Eunice disrupted travel. About 50-60 people joined the ten...

Sceptical about benefits of blockchain

I am extremely sceptical about blockchain (mentioned tentatively by Stuart Jordan in Solidarity 623 ) being the solution to the problems with carbon credits. Let’s put aside the fact that blockchains require immense amounts of energy, and that they are wasteful by design, as this still might be offset by the carbon drawdown. Blockchain enthusiasts’ claim about democratisation is all smoke and mirrors. The company behind the particular blockchain project, the core developers, the “whales” (holders of large amounts of tokens, coins, or what have you) are ultimately much, much more powerful than...

Climate strike on 25 March

“Climate struggle is class struggle... the working class is used as tools to build the very system that is destroying them.” This is from the rallying call of Fridays for Future, the first organisation to coordinate international mass strikes for the climate. The next climate strike has been called for 25 March. School students’ action to date has surpassed anything achieved by all previous climate activism and reached a level of international coordination far exceeding anything achieved by the workers’ movement. The high point of the climate strikes was 20 September 2019. Four million school...

Stop airport expansion

On Saturday 12 February, over 200 people protested against undemocratic and environmentally destructive plans to expand Bristol airport. In 2019, Bristol Airport submitted plans to expand from 10 to 12 million passengers per year, with an extra 23,800 flights. Under pressure from campaigners, North Somerset Council refused planning permission in early 2020. On 2 February 2022 a court of appeal ruled in favour of the Airport's appeal to this decision. This came despite significant evidence that the "airport expansion (and others that are planned across the UK) is not legally compliant with the...

Carbon offset is deceit

Oil giant Total is in the process of opening up a new oil field off the coast of Suriname containing an estimated ten billion barrels of oil and 30 trillion cubic feet of gas. Total’s exploration and drilling takes place in a world where 60% of developed reserves must stay in the ground if we are to have half a chance of halting warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius. However, according to the Total, this project remains within their “Net Zero” goals because of a $50 million carbon offset bought from the Suriname government. The “carbon offset” will not draw down any carbon from the atmosphere; it...

Hasty and dilettante?

Paul Vernadsky’s letter ( Solidarity 620 ) on my review of the RS21 climate pamphlet contains just one substantive criticism: he objects to the use of one word in an article which is 2,000 words in the full, online, version . He extrapolates from there to the suggestion that my review (of a book that he even hasn’t read) is “[un]serious” and a “hasty, dilettante, and unconvincing evaluation”. I hope the irony is not lost on anyone. To try and move us on to a serious discussion of the substantive issues I plan an article for a forthcoming issue reviewing the use of the concept of “metabolism”...

Before Arrhenius

In his review in Solidarity 619 , Stuart Jordan remarks that Svante Arrhenius was the first to foresee the global warming effects of fossil fuel combustion. He predicted that doubling carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere would increase the average temperature by 5-6 deg Celsius. The modern consensus is around half that. He also predicted that it would take over 300 years for this to happen but already CO2 levels are up by about a third since 1950. It is interesting to note that knowledge of the role of CO2 in regulating Earth’s temperature considerably pre-dates Arrhenius’s work. It had...

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