The exchange was remarkable for what wasn’t said rather than what
Hilary could and should have said. That said, Hilary seems to think
that the ‘choice’ is ours, so for example, it’s our ‘choice’ to use
low-power light bulbs or only to fly once a year. It’s that or figure
how many trips in your car are equal to one trip in a plane, take your
‘choice’, what’s it to be? I kid you not, this is what our thoroughly
(by now) misnamed minister for the environment offered the listener
when questioned about the plan to add another runway to Heathrow
airport, doubling the number of people who will fly in and out of the
place to 50 million a year.
Worse still, he went on to say
that we can eat our cake and keep it, apparently that ‘choice’ is not
ours to make, it’s a force of nature over which poor ol’ Benjy has no
control. According to Benjy, “we can continue to have growth and cut
consumption.”
Frankly, for a man of Benjy’s intelligence and
education, it was an embarrassing display of the total avoidance of the
central issue; economics.
Now I don’t know about you, but it’s
my understanding of the word growth that it means increased output of
everything connected to our economic activities, which, when you think
about it, is just about what most of us ever do for most of our lives
(aren’t they called jobs or work in less prosaic circles?). In other
words, at the root of the situation is the one thing we don’t
apparently have any ‘choice’ over, namely how we conduct our economic
activities.
Which is why Benjy produced so many lame, nay,
dumb, attempts at trying to square the climate circle, square it with
an economic system that must grow in order to survive.
“
Climate deal sealed by US U-turn”
- “I
think we have come a long way here,” said Paula Dobriansky, head of the
US delegation. “The EU came to the talks demanding that industrialised
nations commit to cuts of 25-40% by 2020, a bid that was implacably
opposed by a bloc containing the US, Canada and Japan.”
Later in the piece we read
- “This
dispute was resolved with a text that did not mention specific
emissions targets but did acknowledge that “deep cuts in global
emissions will be required to achieve the ultimate objective”. — BBC
News Website, 15/12/07
Resolved? How can it be resolved if the real
issue, numbers, emission targets etc, has been removed from the final
text? As with Benjy, the BBC piece studiously avoids, indeed
misrepresents, the fundamental issue, the economics of capitalism and
its fundamental connection to climate change.
The ‘Bali
Roadmap’ is much like its Middle East counterpart the ‘Road Map to
Peace’, consisting of empty, useless phrases that ultimately let them
off the hook by agreeing not to agree on anything of real substance.
The
bizarre contradictions become apparent when one investigates any aspect
of capitalist growth. To take one example, the destruction of tropical
rain forests. Not too far away from Bali, in Sumatra to be precise,
where vast swathes of rain forest have been cut down to make, not
furniture or houses (in other words, something actually useful) but
cardboard cartons for the endless stream of consumer products that fill
the malls. Cardboard cartons that get junked in their millions and
perhaps some get ‘recycled’, but forests cannot be ‘recycled’.
The
connection between the two should be obvious but not to Benjy
apparently, who sees no contradiction between increased capitalist
growth and the thoroughly mangled concept, ‘sustainability’.
The
problem would appear to be intractable, after all, we need to have jobs
to pay the bills for all those consumer products we purchase (50% of
which are bought at Christmas, now there’s an irony for you, the
traditional ‘time of giving’).
If any of our governments were
to be really truthful about the situation they would have admit that
the only solution is literally the complete retooling of our domestic
economies (over time obviously). And it doesn’t mean wholesale layoffs
(here we need to look at the studies made for ‘defence’ conversion, for
example the
Project for Defense Alternatives).
But our
political classes have no intention for it is not in their interests to
‘bite the hand that feeds them’ and feeds them extremely well thank you
very much. This is why individuals like Hilary Benn go through the
motions, he has a vested interest in maintaining the status quo, his
job and all the perks that go with it.
To add to capitalism’s
climate woes, it has entered one of its periodic crises (and possibly
its last) but under conditions never encountered before where the
technical integration of the movement of capital now inextricably
connects competing national economies (whether they like it or not).
The old phrase, ‘General Motors catches a cold and Europe sneezes’ now
has a new and even more ominous ring to it: the usual international
economic anarchy but with all the competitors now chained to each other
via global financial institutions which in turn are the proud owners of
the major corporations that determine our collective future (or lack of
one). It’s a fragile house of cards, which needs only a shove for it to
collapse.
The ‘free market’ has proved that it can do nothing
to solve the current crisis, indeed it’s the ‘free market’ that has
caused it. Enter the state (using our money of course), which has been
forced to bail out virtually all the major banking institutions.
In
an unheard of move, we witness the banking institutions of the US
Federal Reserve, the Bank of England and the European Bank actually
getting together to pump billions into the major private banks, which
are all caught in a bind of not being able to borrow from each other
because the cost of borrowing is too high.
Even the name for
the latest crisis of capital, the ‘credit squeeze’ hides the underlying
causes. Find a story in the mainstream media if you can, that unpacks
the ‘credit squeeze’ for what it is, a recurring symptom of the
over-accumulation of capital of which ‘the sub-prime lending’ scam was
merely a symptom. It worked whilst money was ‘cheap’, that is to say,
cheap to borrow and as the banks engaged in this (previously and
possibly still illegal activity) argued, ‘no problem if they default,
we’ll simply repossess the houses.’
With tens of thousands of
(effectively worthless) properties now owned by the banks and nobody
with the means to buy them, entire communities have been devastated.
Worse, the ripple effect of entire neighbourhoods of boarded up
dwellings is obvious; local businesses go bust as localities become
ghost towns.
But printing billions of even more devalued
currencies merely puts off the day of reckoning, for even a capitalist
economist knows that such an act leads to inflation, which means down
the road aways, more and more people will find their devalued pounds,
dollars and euros buy them less, and more will default on mortgage
repayments, credit card bills. It’s a vicious spiral over which our
governments have no real control without direct intervention.
“Will we have another crash?
“Yes.
“Will we have another credit crisis?
“Yes.
“Can we do anything about it?
“No.” — Alan Greenspan, September 2007
So
too with the reduction in the interest rate both here and in the US,
which also leads to inflation, something reflected in the dive stocks
took on Wall Street with the announcement by the Fed.
These
‘remedies’ are no more than short-term fixes, they do nothing to
address the underlying contradictions of an economic system caught
between a rock and hard place; expand or die. The problem is that
without actually removing the competitors (China, India, the EU, take
your pick) and opening up new markets for the handful of corporations
that control the ‘global market’, or, as they have done in the past,
really large wars that burn up all that surplus capital sloshing about
the ‘system’ (not to mention ‘take care’ of an enormous surplus labour
market), there is no solution.
This is what Iraq, Afghanistan,
Palestine, Iran, Venezuela and other points South is really all about,
forget the ‘war on terror’, it’s the political economy of capitalism
and what it needs to sustain itself and the ends it will go to in order
to obtain it.
The depressing thing about this situation is
that it’s not new, it’s been happening for literally hundreds of years,
but made all the more so now because of the inter-connections between
the major economies and the fact that much of surplus value being
generated is composed either of financial speculation (which utilises
the global circuit of capital to print money with) or consumer spending
(almost 60% of the so-called GDP in the UK for example is composed of
consumer spending). In other words, this mythical growth is actually
nothing more than an illusion; real growth, for example in affordable
housing, better health care and education, decent and cheap public
transport, which would constitute real growth, is conspicuous by its
absence.
‘Growth’ consists of an endless stream of consumer
products, all of which are extremely energy and resource intensive in
every phase of their life cycle, a cycle which grows shorter and
shorter as revolutions in production take on an ever more frantic pace.
There’s only one way this can be done sustainably and that is
by the state directing investment not for the benefit of shareholders
but for the public good. There’s an entire world out there desperate
for real development.
Of course if Benjy were to speak the
truth about the situation he would lose his job quicker than he could
say ‘Bali Roadmap’ (just look at what happened to Michael Meacher,
former minister for the environment, who dared to speak out).
When
it comes to public discourse, real economics is a taboo subject,
relegated to the ‘economics’ section of the major media, where only
those interested in the value of their stock portfolio bother to go.
For the rest of us, news on economics is presented as a fait accomplis,
too difficult to understand and in any case, there’s nothing we can do
about it anyway.
Instead, we are presented as the cause of
climate change once it was belatedly recognised as a reality, trapped
as we are in the consumer/debt cycle, with our futures totally
dependent on maintaining an insane system of ever-expanding production.
No wonder the economics of capitalism and its relationship to
climate change and of course to poverty, is a taboo subject, for to
admit it into the mainstream of public discussion would open a can of
worms.
Best therefore that economics is left alone, better
still, make it obscure and too difficult to understand by mystifying
the processes. Even better, present it as a ‘force of nature’ over
which we have no real control.
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