ByWill Barnes

Liberal critics assume that climate change is a ‘man-made’ process, not a natural phenomenon. Against this view, Will Barnes argues that global warming does indeed have an inhuman agent behind it – not nature but capital

Capitalist Criminality

With invaluable assistance from modern science and technology, capital is perpetrating a crime for which there is no name, the enormity of which has hitherto been and, apart from the literary holocausts of anti-utopian science fiction, largely remains unimagined.

Capitalist development, whether expanding or contracting and crisis-ridden, merely intensifies and exacerbates ecological degradation. The mindless and extraordinarily destructive disregard for the ecological consequences of the profitable pursuit of exploitable ‘natural resources’ has led, for example, to the consumption of hydrocarbon-based fossil fuels that are producing a warming of the earth that is melting the ice caps and raising sea levels, thus threatening the vast seaboard populations of the world. It has produced specifically the denuding of tropical forests, which, in the end, will deprive humanity of incalculable medicinal wealth. This pursuit has produced the strip mining and clear cutting of vast tracts of land – which have, in turn, created desertification rendering potentially agriculturally productive lands depleted. It has created a biotechnology centred on genetic engineering that has introduced transgenes transmitted through natural interspecies crosses which, in turn, have allowed emergence of resistant superweeds and superpests, which, in their turn, demand the application of further chemical poisons, i.e., herbicides and pesticides, that end up in groundwater, waterways and oceans and poison the food chain. The profitable pursuit of exploitable ‘resources’ of nature has further led to industrialisation of poultry and livestock production that, in the interests of a greatly enlarged worldwide markets for meat consumption (chicken, beef, pork), has generated life threatening strains of antibiotic resistant bacteria (E coli, Campylobacter, etc.) and highly pathogenic, potentially pandemic viruses. It has led to the massive and criminal termination of animal species and micro-biotic life forms, an extraordinary contraction in the very basis of life itself. More precisely, the pursuit of exploitable ‘natural resources’ for capitalist production on a world-scale has created a geological and biological regression reversing thousands and millions of years of natural evolution.

Indeed, species, new ones, comes into being and they disappear: Human beings, abrupt climatic changes, and even the occasional (by geological standards) natural calamity originating from beyond the earth in the solar system bring about extinctions, even the rare mass extinction. Yet, if the Arctic polar bear dies out (as a consequence of its inability to gain access to food sources as global warming melts the ice fields it uses to traverse distances and as a result of the early death of its young as PCBs, the product of industrial emissions that fall in their greatest concentration to earth in the Arctic, lodge in milk of lactating mother bears), it is an unnecessary loss of a majestic creature, one that is final. Extinct species do not make evolutionary reappearances. Nonetheless this loss, unintended and undesired, is not of the same order or magnitude as that at which bourgeois civilisation unknowingly takes aim. The problem is that specifically capitalist social transformations are borne along by an objective logic whose outcome is necessarily the very destruction of the natural world in its autonomy, cohesion, and otherness, that is, in its abiotic coherence, as living, and as a presupposition of specifically human life: It is the natural world as the totality of earthly nature (earthly nature as a totality and in its totality) that capitalist social transformation takes as its object.

The grand sweep of capital’s movement at the beginning of the 21st century can only portend a future in which nature, because for capital nature is raw material for commodity production, at the very least undergoes continuous and ever greater homogenisation. Homogenisation means in the most minimalistic sense the ongoing destruction of ecological diversity, of species-specific ecological niches and, accordingly, species destruction. It entails, first, the loss of nature as an aesthetically beautiful setting and context in which human and other life forms live. Second, homogenisation of nature is characterised by the emergence and proliferation of a limited number of dominant species (e.g., coyotes, rats, starlings, cockroaches) that, highly adaptable to disrupted habitats, will be increasingly unsettling to life practices of other species. Third, it means the gradual disappearance of real, organic foundations of human (and generally animal) health and medicine as centres of biodiversity (such as the Amazon forests) disappear or collapse. Fourth, produced in and through the movement of capital, homogenisation of the earth will tend toward the creation of nature existing at two poles, uglified raw material basins (denuded forests, open mines, desertified grasslands, etc.) at the start of a cycle of commodity production and toxic wastelands and garbage cesspools (wetlands turned into landfills, decaying urban centres, vast stretches of ocean densely littered with plastic refuse, etc.) at the end of that cycle, i.e., with commodity consumption. Human beings acting and interacting in nature in this form will tend over several generations to become organically, physiologically, and perhaps even anatomically and morphologically a degenerating species.

The presupposition of homoeostatic, biospheric nature (i.e., nature as a self-regulating totality capable of internally modifying and adjusting its moments to maintain stability and equilibrium in the face of external changes, e.g., increases in ultraviolet radiation) is sufficient internal diversity. This diversity includes, among other things and relations, a variety of different climatic regimes and zones, a multitude of regional landscapes, and, centrally, a huge assortment of different life forms. Thus, it is precisely this internal diversity that the movement of capital is destroying and destroying independently of climate change, and, accordingly, it is the self-regulating character of nature, and life as it has developed over tens of thousands of millennia, that is disappearing.

Climate Change

What is important to recognise here is that the criminality of capital goes beyond the vast and potentially catastrophic problems that climate change has introduced. Even if societies of capital at the level of the world come to grips with ongoing climate change in a manner that allows them to maintain the ‘achievements’ of capitalism (densely populated reserve industrial armies and objective substance, i.e., built environment, means of production and the mass of circulating commodities) on capitalist terms, generalised ecological collapse as described above is encompassed by capitalist development itself, that is, by the practical reduction of surrounding nature to raw materials for capitalist production.

Let us, here and now though, consider climate change. The earth as we immediately apprehend it, what we call the biosphere, is a unitary phenomenon, its various partial systems (weather, oceans, atmosphere, abiogenic matter, organic life including ‘man’) are fully integrated and mutually dependent. It is a self-regulating ‘system’ whose internal diversity (precisely that which capital without regard to climate change is destroying) provides its own coherence and guarantees the preservation of life on earth. As the ‘external envelope’ of earth, it orders the constant energy inflow from space (solar energy) on which it is dependent. The constitution of earth’s biosphere has qualitatively changed over geological time, meaning its composition, hence its structure (or the ‘laws’ governing its ‘behaviour’) has also changed. For any evolving, real totality such would have to be the case. What is basic for the earth as self-regularity is comprehended physically: The earth, from this perspective, is grasped as an energy system that makes ‘self’ adjustments to maintain an energy equilibrium (inflow of solar heat equals its outflow over time). Climate change is the mechanism of this adjustment, and climate is the immediate expression of this constitution of earth’s biosphere.

To understand climate, and climate change, we must consider reconstructions of the earth’s geography on a geological time scale. While the earth, at some 3.8 billion years of age, is estimated to be nearly as old as the solar system, geological dating begins in earnest 570 million years ago with the emergence of truly complex, highly developed life forms (fish, insects, reptiles). For the entirety of this vast sweep of geological time down to the present, we can designate ‘cool’ and ‘warm’ climate modes on earth. A simple determination of a climate mode is offered, namely, the presence of ice … ranging from periods of intense glaciation (emanating from the poles covered with permanent ice caps) to phases in which the high altitudes have been seasonally cold. Tectonic activity, because it is capable of shifting continental-sized landmasses, has played the largest role in making possible intense cold, especially glaciation. For the latter only occurs when there are landmasses very near or over the poles. It should be obvious that over this simply enormous stretch of geological time, there were periods when landmasses were near or at the poles, and periods when they were not.

Antarctica split off from the ancient, gigantic continent known as Gondwana (encompassing present day Australia, Antarctica, South America, Africa and Asia Minor and Arabia) and arrived at it current locale over thirty million years ago. But by the time it reached what we identify as the southern pole it had already begun to glaciate (in response to tectonic changes, to plate uplifting and volcanism). The formation of the Southern Ocean, as an open waterway (with accompanying winds) sweeping round the earth, isolated Antarctica creating an atmospheric barrier against weather systems beyond this continent. Until recently, Antarctica has largely made its own climate, one very cold and dry, which, in turn, has helped cool an earth that hitherto (prior to its separation and drift) was warm and wet, Gondwana largely a temperate rainforest. Some twenty million years ago, tectonic activity entered a period, still ongoing, of considerable diminution (after the continents as we know them today formed), lessening, for the geological time being, its determination in the formation of climate. (Continental drift has brought large landmasses near to the poles thus allowing the earth’s orbital eccentricity to cyclically create ice ages.) These cooler, drier conditions were particularly noticeable in Africa. And, under these newly forming climatic conditions, species, especially some of the truly large species (ancestors to many of today’s large mammals who to them stand only as dwarf instances), died off and new ones appeared. Among the latter group were hominid lines, including the larger brained hominids who appear to be our ancestors.

Beginning about two and half million years ago, the dynamic climatic structure (‘laws’) characterising the most recent geological epoch stabilised. So what does our geologically ‘contemporary’ climatic structure look like?

For an answer to this question we must consider physical theory aimed at solving the problems of recurrent ice ages (glaciation). Today, our understanding of glaciation in the geological time frame we live in (it more or less slowly began fifteen million years ago) has largely been resolved into three great cycles that drive the earth’s climatic variability. The earth’s orbit around the sun is elliptical completing a cycle every 100,000 years. At its greatest as opposed to its smallest distance from the sun, a determination of the earth’s eccentricity, there is a 20-30 percent reduction in the amount of radiation (heat) that reaches the earth. At that eccentricity, it is this relation (of sun to earth) that has produced ice ages at regular intervals over the past two thousand millennia. The second cycle concerns the tilt of the earth on its axis, its obliquity. Tilt determines where the most radiation from the sun will fall on the earth. A full cycle occurs every 42,000 years. As the earth revolves around the sun, tilt produces seasons. The last, shortest cycling, periods of 19,000 and 23,000 years, turns, so to speak, on the earth’s wobble (called precession). Created by the magnetic mass distributed unevenly and off-centre between the earth’s inner core and mesosphere, wobble creates a shift on average every 21,700 years in its ‘true (celestial) north’ (north determined along its axis in contradistinction from the Geographical North Pole) from Polaris to Vega. This shift affects seasonal intensity (e.g., hot summers, frigidly cold winters). In the case of all orbital cycles, the changes in radiation that reach the Earth are amplified by the amount present (more or less) of those gases, especially carbon dioxide, that trap solar radiation in the atmosphere.

We note that once the current warming synonymous with the last interglacial (the end of the last ice age ended roughly 11,600 years ago) was under way, ‘archaic’, stateless communities first began to form. Early on during this interglacial (effectively extended by the greenhouse gas emissions warming of the last century and a half) the rudiments of agricultural, sedentary social life, the state and civilisation emerged for the first time.

Relative to over two million years of ‘contemporary’ geological time, historically constituted patterns of weather, such as the regularity of seasons each with its own predictable structure, are today disappearing. Instead, weather patterns that have existed over millennia are vanishing, and based on these vanishing patterns ‘the weather’ itself is losing its predictability. Similarly, climatic ‘regimes’ characteristic of specific geographical regions (e.g., a temperate region with mild summers and cold winters) are losing their defining features as these regimes become much more ‘elastic’. Destabilised, under conditions of global warming induced climate change, the occurrence of weather at its extremes becomes more and more frequent (increased intensity of hurricanes in the Gulf and El Niño effects) because warming radically increases the moisture content in the atmosphere and thus produces extreme weather. (The unpredictability and extremism of global warming is perfectly consistent with instances of ‘normality’ by historical standards, e.g., frigid cold such as in Moscow last winter. It should be added that those extremes are not fixed. What is an extreme today may be ‘normal’ five years from now, and what is extreme then might very well hardly be conceivable today. In an abstract way, the only requirement for such warming is that over time the average annual temperature rapidly rises for the planet as a whole.)

Consequences – a ‘New Nature’?

Climate change and in particular warming, as we now understand it, can be abrupt, occurring over years or decades and not over millennia (or hundreds or maybe thousands of millennia). Abrupt climate change has certain ‘tipping points’ that ‘force’ change. Under geologically current conditions, there are three components of the self-regulatory system of the earth that are crucial for the constitution, if you will, of a ‘new nature’, that is, a different regime of climate, seasonality and weather. They are a shut down of thermohaline circulation in the North Atlantic (the Gulf Stream as it warms Europe, a shut down of which would be disastrous for Britain and North Europe), the destruction of the Amazon rain forests, and the release of gas hydrates (clathrates, ice crystal trapped methane, a carbon-based gas) from the ocean floors. All three are threatened by warming as it is generated by capitalist activity on the scale of the world. For example, sufficient warming (say, by no later than 2080) would melt enough of the Greenland ice sheet to shut down the Gulf Stream in the North Atlantic (melting of which pushes fresh water into the Stream’s current – a vast conveyor of hot water from the Gulf, diluting the heavier because saline Gulf water, thus, preventing it from dropping toward the ocean floor in the area of Iceland, further preventing it from pulling more warm water in behind it, i.e., effectively shutting it down). The shut down would induce cooling which, in turn, would bring a halt to ice sheet melting that, in turn, would eventually restart the current and start a re-warming, all of which could go on for centuries until the ice reserve had reached a reduced threshold at which point it could no longer add enough fresh water to stop the circulation. Climatic see-sawing of this sort is one possible, under current conditions likely, outcome of warming. Climatic see-sawing is not, however, a lawful creation of a ‘new nature’, for example, a ‘warm’ or ‘cold’ mode, or better, as long as see-sawing continued, a new mode would not be firmly established, as climate at least in some parts of the world alternated between the two. (On the other hand, a massive release of clathrates premised on sufficient warming of the oceans, leading to species extinctions on the order of the Permo-Triassic extinction event, is another, this time abrupt, shift that could usher in a new climatic regime in just decades.)

Suspending consideration of the shape of a ‘new nature’, let us briefly reflect on the some of the features of warming as it is now occurring. These include, among others, increasing frequency and intensity of extreme weather (ice storms, hurricanes or cyclones, tornadoes spun from hurricanes, etc.), rising sea levels, and, possibly, the cooling of northern Europe (not to mention elsewhere the shift northward of subtropical seasonality and temperature into temperate zones).

To even the casual observer here in the United States, the incidence of extreme weather has qualitatively been on the upswing since the 1980s. For example, in 2005 the North-West experienced a severe winter drought; western states had a record heat wave in July; in the South-West, a marked increase in winter storms included record rain and snow; the central states had a major drought worsen throughout the summer; the South and South-East experienced a record number of hurricanes, fourteen, seven of which were major; and, the North-East had flooding in April and record precipitation in October… In two decades, rising sea levels will flood as much as a quarter of the land mass of Bangladesh; Dhaka, now on average 137 miles (221 kilometres) from the sea, will front the Bay of Bengal at 60 miles (97 kilometres); and, thirty million people will be displaced, countless others dead. Today, the freshwater wells immediately south of Dhaka have become increasingly saline, the water nearly undrinkable. Or, again, in two decades parts of Sydney, Australia, beginning from its harbour, will be underwater… As we write (28 February 2007), the temperature in London (latitude 51.52 °N) reached 47° F (8 °C); in the region of Moosonee (latitude 51.31 °N) in eastern Ontario at the southern tip of James Bay temperatures ranged from 9 to 14 °F (-13 to -10 °C). Both are roughly seasonal averages. And while London may generate 10F/6C degrees of its temperature as a consequence of its concentration of built environment, Moosonee is London’s fate under conditions of a shut down of the thermohaline circulation in the North Atlantic.

'Man-Made’ Climate Change?

The overwhelming consensus among scientists and spokespeople of capitalist states in the world today (and even in the U.S., Australia and Bangladesh among the most recalcitrant of states, there is grudging acceptance) that, in terms of causation, ‘man’ is responsible for warming induced climate change.

While the evidence is straightforward, the attribution both of culpability and the liable agent are effectively ideological, masking real agency and responsibility. Consider, first, the evidence.

From the outset of the current interglacial some 11,600 years ago down close to the end of the 18th century, average global surface temperatures have risen slowly, very slowly, but steadily. This increase, it should be noted, is relative. Plot the average from the peak of the last ice age (last glacial maximum) 22,000 years ago, and that incremental increase (circa 9600 BC to 1760 CE) is not noticeable. But plot average global surface temperature from 1760 to 1870 and the line of temperate approaches a positive 15° angle of incline. Plot it from there to the present and the angle of incline rises to roughly 45°. Back up and plot it from 8000 BC to the present, and those last 235 years present a nearly straight vertical rise.

Note the dates: As suggested earlier, circa 8000 BC is the point at which we mark the beginnings of sedentary agriculture, social division and the rise of the state. And 1760 marks that point at which we can date the commencement of the mechanisation of industry in the West (i.e., in capitalist England). In the former case, initial sedentary life and, with it, rising population began to generate a human input, methane (CH₄) and carbon dioxide (CO₂), into the atmosphere, nothing that before 1760 might delay a glaciation, but incrementally in the short view, noticeable. The development of capitalist industrial production after 1760, however, has indeed transformed the chemical make-up of the atmosphere. How?

On a geological time scale, atmospheric CO₂ has ranged from lows of 200 parts per million (ppm) during major glaciations to highs of 280-300 ppm during warm interglacials. Today, atmospheric CO₂ concentration stands at marginally more than 380 ppm, and is rising in geological terms at an extraordinary and unprecedented rate with, at this moment, no end in sight. Best estimates put a tipping point (qualitatively hastening ice cap melting) as low as 480 ppm, reachable with even modern emissions reductions before 2080. This, then, is the major piece of evidence for anthropocentric based warming.

Second, consider the attribution of agency and, accordingly, responsibility for climate change. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change tells us ‘man’, ‘his’ activity, is altering climate. In one sense, a very crude argument can and has been made (though not explicitly by the IPCC) that sheer human numbers, a global population of six billion, and the outputs that result from the volume of activity of so many people, bear direct responsibility. While the quality of human (animal and plant) life may well be grounds for limiting population growth, global warming does not result merely from the activity of masses of humans at any level of development: Today, an Indian child (the Indian subcontinent being one of the most densely populated regions on earth, India having the second largest population in the world) consumes 1/90th of the annual energy that her American counterpart does. The problem is forms of consumption, energy inefficient consumption not to mention profligate consumption, and the type of development that underpins that consumption.

If we have raised ourselves to the level of an understanding at which it is intuitively obvious that human population, either in the contemporary sense or the historical sense (going back some 10,000 years) or both, is neither the agent nor, accordingly, responsible for climate change, we have dissolved one mystification. ‘Man’ (here, human population generally) as such is a merely formal concept without a determinately real referent. Perhaps, then, the ‘industrial system’ is at issue. Or, perhaps, it is a question of ‘man’ in the ‘industrial system’. In either case, we are dealing with empty abstractions. The issue is the historically specific configuration of groups of living men and women working within that ‘industrial system’, i.e., capitalist production. More precisely, the issue is the group which dominates that production. We refer, here, to those personifications of economic categories, capitalists (as well as the bloc of classes they have in tow). Capitalists (and states that unify otherwise disparate or competing capitals) make decisions concerning the allocation of monies and capital, concerning what and the manner in which ‘natural resources’ are exploited and utilised, and concerning the technologies on the basis of which those activities are carried out. Still, it is not just those decisions, but the entire system of social relations, that is at issue in climate change. In this sense, it is the subject of society (a part of nature, yet confronting it as raw material for the production of commodities) that is the agent responsible for climate change. It is not ‘man’ that is remaking, as it were, the biosphere; that remaking is a product of ‘his’ own objectified and alienated power. This power is capital: Capital is the real subject of human society under conditions of capitalist production (real domination).

At the ‘price’ of cataclysmic human and social costs abrupt climate change could transform the geography and sociology of social life: Over the period of decades, a qualitative increase in regimentation and repression of domestic populations to insure compliance with draconian restrictions on energy consumption; drought and starvation, massive, unnecessary death; depopulation of coastal areas around the world, forced dislocation, creation of huge frontier zones and camps of displaced persons along national borders, refugees in the tens of millions living in squalor without hope, resource wars between states, ethnic cleansing and genocides as a regular feature of daily life. Nonetheless, while capital cannot stem the ecological collapse which its very movement is engendering and within which climate change is situated, it can and, in our view, will meet the warming-induced, climate crisis. Whatever else, the social relations of capitalist production will neither disintegrate nor disappear in the maelstrom of climate change.¹ The real question is whether capital, at unimaginable human cost, will set the terms on which this change is confronted, or whether we shall.

FOOTNOTE

[1]
In the imperialist centre of global capitalism, governed by that most backward, obstinate of regimes, capital has begun to weigh in. As we write, TXU Corp., a Texas-based energy conglomerate is being sold to a group of finance capital-based private investors in the largest ever private equity deal. The new investment group promises not to build eight out of eleven proposed coal-fired power plants, and to double its investments in wind power and the creation of internal efficiencies qualitatively reducing emissions; at the same time, independently of the American State at the national level, five western state governments including California have signed an agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Biog

Will Barnes <wwbarnes AT yahoo.com> is a long-time activist living in the northern United States

Act Macro: Technological Alternatives to Green Austerity

ByJames Woudhuysen

The emerging capitalist War On Global Warming concentrates on adapting technology and behaviour – particularly other nation-states’ – to mitigate environmental damage. Transformative technological and social innovation is better than meddling micro-action, argues James Woudhuysen

Angela Merkel is chancellor of Germany, a Christian Democrat and a physicist. She also believes in ‘outreach’. Germany’s outreach programme with China, India, Mexico, Brazil and South Africa, she says, allows it to sound out these nations about their ‘general readiness to act’ about climate change. Merkel warns Beijing not to put economic growth ahead of climate change, she warns Russia to let EU energy firms get firmer roots on to its soil. She insists that globally tradable emissions trading certificates are the ‘most sensible instrument’ to cut CO₂ and ‘a very-market friendly one’. She wants a December 2007 UN conference in Bali to begin the 1-2 year process of drawing up a treaty on climate change to succeed the December 1997 Protocol to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change – the Kyoto Protocol, which will expire in 2012. Invoking the Stern report on the economic impact of climate change as her ‘main paradigm’, she argues that ‘whatever happens’, the cost of ‘inaction’ on climate change will be higher than just muddling through.¹

It is nice to know that nation states’ invention of a market for a particular kind of molecule is a market-friendly move and a fine example of the ‘action’ that is now required on climate change. It is also nice to hear Germany and the EU lecture the developing world about how they should develop. But in fact lectures come very easily to Greenish governments. Even environment minister David Milliband, relatively an extremist among ministerial carbonistas, has felt called upon to warn Greens – and perhaps himself – not to be ‘bossy’.

In fact all-round economic development and all-round technological innovation are the only actions that can deal properly with mankind’s problems – of which global warming is one among many. The actions that Merkel proposes are about clipping coupons and austerity, especially in what used to be called the Soviet bloc and the Third World. If Germany gets its way, coal-dependent Poland and China will both suffer. Indeed, Clean Green Angela wants Europe to export, to these countries, the Clean Green technologies in which Germany specialises, and which it believes will be Good For Them.²

To raise the share of renewable resources in Europe’s energy mix to 20 percent by 2020 is now the EU’s highest goal. Yet the innovations with which the Brussels Commission proposes to meet that goal are not very ambitious. Its Energy Policy for Europe mentions wave and tidal power just once: the costs of photovoltaic, solar thermal power, and wave and tide power are, it opines sagely, ‘projected to decrease from currently high levels’. It believes that all new coal-fired plants in the EU should to be fitted with CO₂ capture and storage, and that ‘existing plants should then progressively follow the same approach’. When by? Oh, maybe by 2020 again.³

There is some money going into Green innovations. Not just the Toyota’s hybrid Pious car, but also cars made by Ford and other major manufacturers, are becoming ever more energy-efficient. But generally Merkel’s oh-so-activist, insurance-policy approach to climate change can only make commitments to high-tech environmentalism falter. If Battersea is ever revived with all-green technology, Greens would still object to the scale and urban location of the endeavour. We should, equally, never imagine that restrictions on car and airline use – road pricing, taxes on those stag-night flights to Tallinn – will lead to more investment and technology in public transport, and in particular, on the railways. After all, Mike Mitchell, the director-general of the Department for Transport’s rail group, has told the House of Commons public accounts committee that peak-time rail commuters should expect to stand on their journeys for up to 30 minutes at a go.⁴

The evidence is that corporations and governments are only belatedly, and in a very narrow and leisurely manner, investing in relatively small projects to advance Green technologies; technologies that are more about raising awareness and controlling consumer behaviour than they are about fulfilling the world’s need for more energy and less carbon. But there is a wider perspective that is needed here. If modest, behaviourist technological development – metering your every use of energy every minute of the day, for example – eludes the capitalists, how much more tentative will they be about the comprehensive programme of technological innovations needed to raise Africa from famine and Indonesia from disasters? Solve those truly colossal problems in a spirit of adventure rather than insurance, and global warming will be solved in the process.

What are the main outlines of such a programme? What we need is progress across both the energy sector and beyond.

In energy, we need to give up on micro-generation – the subject of a princely £50m from Gordon Brown in his March 2006 Budget – and instead move toward macro-generation. That means large-scale wave, tidal and off-shore wind. It means large-scale cultivation of biofuels, and perhaps genetically modified biofuels, too (though we all know someone who has died because of these). It means city-wide schemes for Combined Heat and Power. In the longer term, we need to make fewer sneers about the possibility of nuclear fusion: an international budget 10 times the Iter organisation’s £7bn for demonstration fusion in the south of France shouldn’t be too much to ask. And right now, we need a ‘can do’ attitude to nuclear power and nuclear waste.

Wind, solar, wave and tidal energy are intermittent sources of power, and need clever geographical dispersal, mutual complementarity and large-scale back-up power sources if they are to provide energy on any kind of reliable basis. As the science writer Joe Kaplinsky points out, it is true that other scale technologies generate more energy – Drax, the largest coal power station in the UK, makes four Gigawatts of electricity, and the Itaipu dam in Brazil and Paraguay boasts 11 Gigawatts. But at 1 GW, a typical nuclear power station easily beats the 310MW of electricity made by the largest solar installation in the world (over seven sites in the Mojave desert, California), and also exceeds the 735MW racked up by the largest wind farm in the world (Horse Hollow Wind Energy Center, Texas).

Nuclear power isn't a silver bullet. No doubt it will take its place among other energy technologies, old and new. But in terms of output and in terms of familiarity, it has a lot going for it. The next (‘Generation IV’) nuclear systems may, too, finally prove fully economic to run.

Turning now to nuclear waste: The UK has a historic legacy of high and intermediate level nuclear waste that, in volume terms, is estimated to total 475,000 cubic metres of the stuff.⁵ But how much is 475,000m3? Take the cube root of that, and it’s 78 metres. In other words, all the existing bad and really bad nuclear waste in the UK, generated over more than 50 years, occupies a volume well under 100x100x100 metres.

And the new waste that an ambitious nuclear programme would generate is pretty modest too. Modern nuclear plants produce significantly less waste than earlier types. The UK’s official Committee on Radioactive Waste Management suggests that if the current level of nuclear capacity were replaced with new-build, existing waste stocks would increase by about 10 percent by volume. The UK would have to add a 36x36x36 metre cube of nuclear waste – divided up, to be sure – on top of its existing 78x78x78 one.

To store this very modest amount of nuclear waste should not be beyond even British engineers. Are we saying that, in the 21st century, handling these amounts of waste is beyond the wit of man? And there are other possibilities. At Ruhr University in Bochum, Germany, Professor Claus Rolfs has begun experiments in cooling the products of fission in metal, so as to encourage them to accelerate their rates of radioactive decay, and so lower radioactive half-lives.⁶

Beyond energy, we need to tackle the root causes of backwardness around the world, and not get hung up on how climate change supposedly makes them worse. Was it really climate change that led to massacres in Darfur, or the plight of the Palestinians? Or are there more fundamental injustices at stake here, which an obsession with carbon will do little to relieve?

In agriculture the starving countries need mechanisation, not what junk-mail inserts in British magazines tell us they need – ploughs, donkeys, hand-drawn wells. In hydrology we need to save more than Venice, and do it with more than a charitable donation at Pizza Express. Among older people we need to build on the way the US firm iRobot has sold more than two million floorcare robots. We need to think about how today’s manufacturing techniques, which allow Boeing to make planes on a moving assembly line, can also help meet the UN’s estimate of the 100,000 new homes the world needs to build every day to meet popular demand.

Image: iRobot's floor care robot

By thinking big and having faith in our talents, a programme of transforming the planet in the direction of humanism could do much for energy supply and carbon reduction. But can US, Chinese or Indian capitalism really deal with this kind of challenge?

The evidence is that they cannot. In fact, as we have seen, they have taken a cautious, gingerly attitude even to Green technologies, let alone transformational ones.

Since the end of the Cold War and 9-11, the capitalists have lost their nerve. But that’s their problem, not ours. Mao Tse Tung’s dumbed down slogan, ‘Serve the people’ has been transformed into ‘Slave for the planet’ – walk everywhere, consume less, don’t overpopulate the land, reduce your footprint, bend over and grow your own food. Everywhere in energy innovation there is minimal impact and maximum regulation.

These are dark days. Happily, though, it will be up to us, not governments and imperialist NGOs, to do the big stuff that tomorrow’s youthful billions will demand.

Footnotes

‘German chancellor lays our roadmap to follow-up treaty on climate change’, Financial Times, 7 March 2007.

‘Merkel to press for EU deal on climate’, Financial Times, 7 March 2007.

Brussels Commission, ‘An Energy Policy for Europe’, 10 January 2007, on http://ec.europa.eu/energy/energy_policy/doc/01_energy_policy_for_europe_en.pdf

Robert Wright, ‘Row as commuters told: don't expect a train seat’, Financial Times, 18 January 2007.

DTI, ‘Energy Review: the Energy Challenge’, 11 July 2006, p.118, on http://www.dti.gov.uk/energy/review/index.html

Institute of Physics, ‘Cool Solution to Waste Disposal’, Press release PR22(06), 1 August 2006, on http://www.iop.org/Media/Press%20Releases/press_6762.html . Professor Rolfs: ‘We are currently investigating radium-226, a hazardous component of spent nuclear fuel with a half-life of 1600 years. I calculate that using this technique could reduce the half-life to 100 years. At best, I have calculated that it could be reduced to as little as two years. This would avoid the need to bury nuclear waste in deep repositories — a hugely expensive and difficult process.’

Biog

James Woudhuysen <James AT Woudhuysen.com> is professor of forecasting and innovation at De Montfort University, Leicester, and a regular contributor to SPIKED. His website is: www.woudhuysen.com

Climate Change CO2lonialism

ByTim Forsyth and Zoe Young

In their tango with grassroots green activists, inter-governmental policy makers are taking the lead. Tim Forsyth and Zoe Young analyse the ‘new green order’ and the carbon offset colonialism that accompanies it

According to Tony Blair, the climate change debate is ‘finally over.’ Who can dismiss the economic arguments of the Stern Report on Climate Change? Only a Channel 4 controversialist or two, perhaps, and a few (mainly oil-funded) scientists. The bigger policy debate, about who should carry the burden of tackling the problem, should now begin. Instead, however, there seems to be consensus among global elites about where to start (be afraid, be very afraid … but always trust the government), how to address the challenge (change development patterns in the South to ‘offset’ carbon emissions produced by business as usual in the North), and who is responsible (mainly you and me). Real doubts and arguments are suppressed while market-friendly ‘solutions’ are served up on a nice, glossy plate. Last time western Greens had the ear of their governments it lead to the creation of the World Bank’s Global Environment Facility (GEF). Today, this ‘new green order’ is still evolving before our fearful, blinkered eyes.

This ‘order’ limits space for collective rethinking of energy, production or consumption policies. There is no room to challenge the political assumptions that inform them nor the pattern of investment in public energy infrastructure. Mainstream ‘climate’ discourse focuses instead on marginal interventions such as switching to more efficient light bulbs and expanding pine plantations. For as long as the ‘logic’ of capitalist economic expansion remains unchallenged, it seems hardly possible for high energy-consuming societies to adapt in time to escape a grim Malthusian fate. But Malthus wanted to be proved wrong, and if brave, we still could be.

According to the first assessment in 1990 by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the scientific body responsible for assessing recent research into climate change, Green House Gas (GHG) emissions had to be reduced by 60 percent below then current levels in order to prevent dangerous climate change. In 1999, Greenpeace said that only about 25 percent of declared fossil fuel reserves can safely be burnt; the New Economics Foundation noted in 2006 that the demand reduction required in the oil sector is now five or six times that resulting from the OPEC oil price hike of the 1970s. Even the Stern Report, with its ‘old economy’ rationale, noted this year that

the stocks of hydrocarbons that are profitable to extract [under current policies] are more than enough to take the world to levels of greenhouse gas concentrations well beyond 750 parts per million of carbon dioxide [a ‘safe’ level has been set as 450ppm].

If governments were to follow the advice of these experts they might work less from the premise of what big business wants today than from a calculation of how much oil, coal and gas can still safely be burnt, and then allocate the remaining energy across our species’ basic needs: food, shelter, warmth, fresh water, health care, sanitation, security and a minimum of entertainment and travel for all.

Instead, the Kyoto Protocol is the main international agreement to address the threat of anthropogenic climate change. If you read the BBC News website or The Independent newspaper, you would think that supporting Kyoto is an acid test of green credentials. But what would Kyoto achieve, were it fully implemented? Signed in 1997, it came into force in 2005, and committed the world’s industrialised countries to reducing greenhouse gas emissions just 5.2 percent by 2012. Now the USA and Australia have pulled out, and only a few European countries are likely to achieve their target.

Debate about how to achieve even these minimal reductions is barely off the starting blocks. We now know it is up to us to use alternative light bulbs, green energy companies etc., or even to offset our emissions on the carbon market. Meanwhile, tax and subsidy incentives for big companies to shunt ever more goods around the world in pursuit of comparative commercial advantage remain in place, and publicly funded international financial institutions such as the World Bank still invest billions of dollars in oil and gas development – many times more than they devote to energy efficiency measures or renewable energy technologies.

Radicals have no effective space other than the streets in which to challenge the elite’s preference for economic growth at all costs. Interim mechanisms designed to ‘do something’ and yet still maintain the political status quo are constantly renewed and re-advertised. Each is shown to be as empty as the last (for example, the GEF, inaugurated at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, is underfunded and now almost forgotten – despite its claims to the contrary) while ever more glossy ‘solutions’ emerge.

The latest of these is the market in emissions ‘indulgences’ for the energetically sinful. The ‘flexible mechanisms’ of the Kyoto Protocol include so called ‘Emissions Trading’ between industrialised countries that have agreed to set targets for reduction. In this system, Russia and the Ukraine were allowed 0 percent growth on their 1990 levels. At present, these countries now emit about 25 percent less CO₂than in 1990 because of deindustrialisation following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Under ‘Emissions Trading’, Russia and Ukraine can ‘sell’ this 25 percent reduction to governments who continue to pollute, as if it reflected genuine energy saving and reduced emissions. Critics call this the ‘hot air’ problem, the exchange of certificates for reductions that would have happened anyway. Overall energy use – and hence GHG emission – is not reduced thanks to this highly flexible mechanism.

Other ‘climate-friendly’ investments are available under schemes called Joint Implementation (JI) and the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM). These allow industrialised countries to achieve some emission targets by investing in renewable energy or plantation forestry abroad. (JI is investment between industrialised countries; CDM involves investment from North to South).

The idea is that policy should encourage emission-reducing investments wherever they are cheapest. This logic is valid on some levels, but can be criticised for picking the ‘low hanging fruit’. Unfortunately, many such projects are also not properly monitored, and who knows what happens to the ‘benefits’ once the initial, publicly advertised phase is over. Fixing carbon into soil and forest plantations is not straightforward and requires fast-growing trees with little disturbance; usually monocultures, requiring high water, fertiliser and pesticide inputs to survive, with all the social and environmental consequences implied.

Some critics suggest that offset forestry’s ability to absorb carbon can be exaggerated because protecting, or planting, forests in one region may displace deforestation to other regions. It is also not always clear that the companies involved have full rights to the land – in Brazil for example, ownership of much of the land used for plantations is contested since the time of the dictatorships, if not the original conquistadors. Executed cheaply by companies who make a business out of pulp or charcoal, such plantations tie up land into a forest monoculture that would otherwise be wild nature with all its joys and benefits, or used for vital agricultural development.

These topics have provoked intense emotions, and popular resistance. One climate change negotiator from an African country angrily told participants at a London meeting, ‘Our countries are not toilets for your emissions!’. Farmers, ecologists and trade unionists in South America have formed the ‘Alert Against the Green Desert’ network and take action to counter conversion of large areas of land to plantations.

Some political intentions underlying carbon-offset forestry are fairly clear. The environmental writer, Larry Lohmann, reported a US Department of Energy official as saying ‘tree planting will allow US energy policy to go on with business as usual out to 2015.’ Rightly or wrongly, these statements create fear that more industrialised countries are not interested in addressing climate change, or in encouraging ‘development-friendly’ investment in the South. Various critics say carbon forestry is ‘CO₂lonialism’. Some southern governments, notably Costa Rica, have welcomed forestry-based projects; their potential for creating rural livelihoods, or playing a part in a climate policy portfolio, should not be dismissed. But forestry in itself is not going to bring about real change.

At the end of Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth he lists ten simple action points. These include using less hot water, recycling more, driving less, and planting a tree, with the advice that ‘a single tree will absorb a ton of CO₂ over its lifetime.’ But some wise elders in Britain may remember the phrase, ‘Plant a tree in ‘73’ – and if it didn’t stop climate change back then, why should it do so now?

Lester Brown of the Worldwatch institute said in 2005:

If [China] consumes paper at the same rate we [in the US] do, it will consume twice as much paper as the world is now producing. There go the world’s forests. If the Chinese then have three cars for every four people – as the US does today – they would have a fleet of 1.1 billion cars, compared to the current world fleet of 800 million.

Clearly, policies adopted in China will be crucial. But portraying this country as the problem seems to give credibility to the belief that industrialisation is a club only for the richer world.

Western governments’ climate change policy should probably stop evaluating success in terms of reducing the level of GHG in the atmosphere. Seeking to reduce hypothetical concentrations without understanding the local impacts of these projects will simply undermine the political accord necessary to move forward together.

The same problem occurs with the Stern Report which, like many economic projections, uses a ‘discount rate’ to calculate the cost of future damage from climate change today. This assumes a conformity in the effect of climate change on different populations, and overlooks the way that palliative projects may create problems of their own. Powerful figures such as Nicholas Stern might be advised to stop treating climate change as a universal risk, addressed by general reductions in energy use or emissions generation, and instead seek more equitable solutions that reduce real people’s risk of living a degraded existence.

The Executive Board of the CDM has often argued that investments in industrial technology are preferable to simply sequestering CO₂. For example, many companies have sought financial support under the CDM for flaring methane gas from landfills (methane has a global warming potential 23 times the value of CO₂, and so flaring may mitigate climate change by effectively converting methane to CO₂). But critics suggest that flaring misses the opportunity to use this gas for local heat or electricity generation. Under the Kyoto Protocol, there are no obvious incentives for such moves. Rather, all CDM projects have to pay 2 percent of profits towards an ‘Adaptation Fund’, money for long-term developments such as reducing vulnerability to sea-level rise. Some critics consider this fund too small; others see it not as an incentive to make CDM projects more development-friendly but as a tax on CDM investment.

Finally, realism about the role of national targets for reducing emissions is important. Many green supporters of Kyoto feel the treaty is useful because it legally binds governments to reduce emissions. But some governments – notoriously the USA under George Bush – have pulled out, ostensibly because the targets are not applied to all countries. Under Bill Clinton, the US had been central to negotiating targets that were too weak anyway, and the ‘flexible mechanisms’ that undermine measures to reduce emissions at source. Most importantly, rapidly industrialising countries such as China and India may well not agree to limit and reduce emissions.

Many companies and NGOs still entertain romantic visions of a carbon offset forestry replacing lost rainforests; and treat politically – rather than scientifically – agreed national targets as the only effective means to reduce emissions. But rather than idealising these, perhaps governments should impose targets for industry and consumers to seek a safe proportion of their energy from renewable sources, and to improve energy efficiency. Such targets would encourage innovation and new investment, which reduces the costs of safer technologies in the longer term. In a context of imminent (or recently passed) ‘peak oil’ production, a member of the UN Climate Change Secretariat noted privately that ‘climate change is like god – if it did not exist, it would have to be invented’. This reflects the urgency of the shifts in energy policy and investment which the threat of climate change could, or should, be provoking.

Why should governments, supposedly working for the good of the people, perpetuate economic analysis and environmental policy that assume and play to the brutish, marketised and greedy side of our nature, and avoid the major changes needed to adapt our societies in the face of the depletion of finite resources? Where is the faith that humans can work together to adapt and seek more equitable solutions to collective problems?

Rather than devising ‘solutions’ to climate change that work only inside the very same market system that got us into this hole, a better approach may be to stop digging altogether. As a species we certainly have the ingenuity to make our governments adopt responses that do not impose new problems on poorer, less adaptable countries while maintaining big business’ record profits. Rather, assisting all citizens to live more sustainable and comfortable lives would mean accepting that the debate about collective responses to the threat of climate change is not ‘over’, but still only just beginning.

Further information

http://www.tyndall.ac.uk/media/news/beyond_stern.shtml http://www.carbontradewatch.org

http://www.sinkswatch.org

http://www.newgreenorder.info

Biogs

Tim Forsyth <t.j.Forsyth AT lse.ac.uk> is a writer and lecturer at the London School of Economics. He is author of International Investment and Climate Change, Earthscan, London, 1999

Zoe Young <zoe AT esemplastic.net> is a freelance researcher, writer and filmmaker. She is author of A New Green Order? The World Bank and the Politics of the Global Environment Facility, Pluto, London, 2002

Promised Lands

ByKate Rich

It’s not just the founders of hippy communes or artists like Amy Balkin who are looking for ‘a breathing space from the State’ in which to experiment with freedom and free-time. Big IT companies like Google apparently share their ideals. With a commitment to ‘me time’, the production of ‘universal access’, and (energy) sovereignty, corporates are leveraging the dream of the commons

Public Domain

This is the Public Domain is a real-estate undertaking by San Francisco artist Amy Balkin: the attempt to create a permanent, international commons on American soil, free to everyone in the world to access, use and modify, in perpetuity. Land shared by anyone who chooses to participate. In order to take this proposition off the high prairie of pure speculation and confront the infrastructural issues it raises head on, a piece of land was purchased by the artist in 2003. The land was visited, documented and, at the time of writing, is in holding for the legal process to transfer perpetual ownership to all humans. An ambitious task, strategies for which are published on the project website [www.thisisthepublicdomain.org]. It is interesting to consider Public Domain in the light of a couple of other property developments that sprang from the fertile northern California soil.

Google Land

In 2006 Google, a California-based company, quietly went and bought a 35 acre chunk of former farmland in the Dalles, Oregon, an industrial and agricultural outpost 80 miles east of Portland. Google will not speak on record, but general understanding has it that the land will be used to site a data centre (server farm). Local amenities include various coffee houses and an array of recreational facilities such as kayaking in the cool Colorado River.

To trace the lovable search giant back to its roots, Google came to be in a landscape orientated around kinship networks, the close-knit corporate community of Silicon Valley, CA. The company was incorporated there in 1998 in the gift-ecology of a friend’s garage in Menlo Park, out of whose humble dimensions it burst forth like Tetsuo to occupy its current HQ – the Googleplex corporate campus in nearby Mountain View.¹

The Oregon acquisition sees Google expand into territory unlinked by kith or kin. The Dalles is previously only famed for the first 20^th century bio-terrorist attack in the USA. In 1984 followers of the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh cult attempted to control a local election by infecting 10 restaurant salad bars with salmonella and according to some sources locals from the area are famously hostile to incoming Californians. However, as well as the ample sporting opportunities to keep Google engineers tired yet happy, the location is noted for a steady excess of cheap, local electricity in the form of bulk-buy hydro-electric power from the town’s own dam; and lashings of fibre optics brought to the area by a forward thinking councillor. Overall, a grounded ecological land move, indicating that in its attention to self-sustainability and energy security, Google may be well ahead of the pack.²

Just like Google, Public Domain found itself guided to land in a location which makes little sense in terms of neighbourliness. A limited acquisition budget (and staff) made for a purchase in landscape of least use-value and hence real-estate resistance. 2.5 acres in Antelope Valley in the California High Desert 125 miles east of Los Angeles was purchased by Balkin via public internet auction in 2003. The site can be seen as a pure distillation of land as commodity – the grid-like layout of property lines in the California desert clearly not attenuated to any coordinates of ecology or use, an artefact of pure speculation. The land is fully landlocked: no public roads access it, there are no antelopes, and its survivalist potential even on a day trip is minimal (low scrub, snakes, 40+ mph winds, desert temperatures, no water). The local sports opportunities are hard to interpret. However the point is not what the land has, but what it can act as.

Public Domain is conceived as ‘breathing space from the state’. A place that you can’t be hounded off of, like public parks where you often have to pay or there are drastic time and behavioural limits on use – for example, subsistence of any kind. It is ironic that this breathing space should, in this first attempt to materialise it, be functionally blocked by the Tehachapi wind farm (the world’s second largest!) that surrounds the Public Domain land on all sides, in its awesome toil of commodifying the air’s movements.³ The concept of open land as refuge from the law was inspired in part by another Bay Area landholder, Morningstar Ranch.

Open Land

Morningstar Ranch was established by comedian-academic Lou Gottlieb who set up a hippy commune in Marin County near San Francisco in the 1960s. In 1969, facing a state-ordered injunction against letting people live on his 31 acre holding, Gottlieb signed over the title of the property to God. When taken to court in 1971 for running an ‘organised camp’, he embarked on an attempted defence of his constitutional right to deed his land to God (which failed, although interestingly).⁴ Lou Gottlieb described Morningstar as a pilot study in survival for a time when leisure is compulsory.

Google as Organised Camp

The affinities between Morningstar and Google are uncanny. Both emerged from the verdant San Franscisco hinterlands, and are characterised by their experimental tendencies. At Google, a culture of campus fun reigns, with free snacks and 20 percent ‘me time’, in which all Google engineers are encouraged to spend 20 percent of their work time on projects that interest them, which interestingly seems to be inventing new Google products such as Gmail. It’s not unlike the production ethos of free/libre and open source software (powered by social recognition and the curiosity for creation), although underwritten in Google’s case by the heavy collateral of salaries, stock options, and an increasing amount of infrastructural resources.

Like many a California collective, Google’s corporate philosophy is littered, throw pillow like, with many casual principles, for example, ‘You can make money without doing evil.’ Their Mountain View HQ is also decorated with lava lamps, exercise balls, washer-dryers, video games and snack rooms stocked with various cereals, yoghurt, gummy bears, toffees, cashews. Founder Larry Page said in an interview with Playboy magazine, ‘We think a lot about how to maintain our culture and the fun elements, we think it’s important to have a high density of people. People are packed together everywhere. We all share offices.’ Google’s ‘about’ page confirms this, adding that high-density offices is a great way to save on heating bills.

A search for more energy issues on Google Blog (‘googler insights into product and technology news and our culture’) reveals that Google is planning to install solar panels to decorate the outside of its Mountain View HQ; although a Google Blog search on the Dalles comes back empty. Home grown Dalles online chatter yields more background info, like that the combination of the Dalles Dam (a 1.8 million kilowatt generating facility), and the Columbia River’s cooling capacity, has long attracted mega-energy users such as aluminium smelters to the region.

The Searing Heat of Data

In fact, Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft are all building new data centres in Oregon and Washington, near hydroelectric power plants selling cheap electricity. With the vast concentration of energy needed to run the megaservers – and equal and opposite megawattage needed to remove the excess heat – power and cooling have surfaced as critical issues in the expansion of global IT.⁵

On Blogger.com, another service owned and operated by Google, the typically taciturn search engine let slip, in March 2005, that ‘New machines are not an issue because here at Google we can add them quite smoothly as needed. The real issue is power – actual electricity, if you can believe it’. Further delving finds the company browsing for more land in South Carolina: 520 acres purchased from the state electricity company at Goose Creek; 466 acres with their own electrical substations near Blythewood; 300 acres of wetlands close to a nuclear power station in Columbia. Perhaps Google is bunkering down for some kind of mini-apocalypse where power supply will be intermittent, parochial, fraught; but where being the world’s search engine will still be super-lucrative and handy.

Something for Everyone

Google’s mission statement is ‘to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful’.⁶ Universal access and use is just what Public Domain has in mind. The artist has proposed a number of possible strategies to enact this, such as creating a public land trust to protect endangered forms of social space and donating the land to it (a real property law based strategy); or via a Public Domain Sharing Licence adapted from the Free Software Foundation’s GNU GPL (a copyright law bending approach).⁷ This license is designed to guarantee your freedom to share land (that you receive directions to the land, that you can occupy or modify the land) and forbids you to deny these rights to others.

In transplanting open source principles to the great outdoors, Public Domain highlights an action-gap of Evil Knievel proportions between current discourses around digital and material rights – in particular the broad non-transference of popular interest in implementing an information or knowledge commons, onto the more tufty surface of common ground.⁸

Transfer of protocols across the immaterial-material border can be tricky. Richard Stallman, author of the GNU GPL, claims to be against appropriation of the GPL for other things, insisting that the licence doesn’t make sense beyond software.⁹ Stallman argues that the GPL is based on copyright law and as physical objects don’t have source code or copiers for them, the ‘four freedoms’ of free software (freedom of use; freedom to study how it works and adapt it; freedom to redistribute it; and freedom to make and publish improvements) don’t apply. This raises rapid questions about 3D printers (which enable the automatic construction, reproduction and transmission of physical objects using solid freeform fabrication over data networks), and further the problem of securing software freedoms without acknowledging computer hardware. Without the same ferocity and community safeguarding the infrastructure and knowledge around material resources (circuits, minerals, electricity), the free software utopia might cease to have anything to run on.¹⁰

Back to the Land

At a recent panel discussion organised by Amy Balkin in San Francisco to explore how common land can be created and safeguarded, Ramon Sender, one of the original Morningstar ranchers and the custodian of its archives noted that emparkment (national parks) makes land public thereby criminalising communities who had derived their subsistence from it.¹¹ He positioned open land as a critique of private property and the extinction of use rights inherent in state-owned public land.¹²

Balkin herself found it more poignantly oppressive that the actual borders of the windfarm, while creating immediate physical and legal barriers to land access and use, are lesser impediments to total access and use than the physically more remote borders of the State. However to say that Public Domain will fail due to the world’s people not having access to Antelope Valley is beside the point. To continue the analogy with free software, it is the use of free software (or open land) that activates the rights attached to it – the conditionality of being there is built-in.

Meanwhile, self-searching Google for more on Google Dalles, results bring up not a lot: one New York Times story from June 2006; a few derivative stories; and some others about being unable to file a story because Google wouldn’t provide any information, and some blog chatter about all this. The most recent material is from the jobs section: ‘Hardware Operations Team Manager – The Dalles. Solid understanding of supporting infrastructure for server and network gear, such as but not limited to, power and cooling requirements.’ As well as, ‘Technicians – The Dalles. Excellent understanding of Computer Room Air Conditioners (CRAC units), HVAC, Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS), cooling and ventilating data, humidification/dehumidification, chillers’ plus ‘Temps with Linux knowledge, ability to work on ladders or under raised floor as needed and ability to lift/move up to 40 lbs equipment on a daily basis.’

Energy, Security and Space For All

Patri Friedman, a current Google employee, probably in his ‘me time’ writes of himself in his biog: ‘Having investigated the various options, he’s decided that floating cities are the most realistic path towards true liberty. He believes that sea and space will be conducive to liberty, and is writing a book about Seasteading, or homesteading the high seas.’¹³ Although that idiot savant Hollywood has already captured all these libertarian, extra-terrestrial escapist themes in 2007’s Astronaut Farmer, where another mad rancher Charles Farmer builds a rocket in his barn and intends to send himself into space. When he buys a bunch of rocket fuel, the FBI finds out and threatens a loan foreclosure on his ranch, Farmer fights back: ‘if we don’t have our dreams, we have nothing.’ If Google can see the importance of sorting out the physical as well as the infrastructural, where does this leave the rest of us dreamers? Back on the ground, Public Domain continues its search for real-world frameworks to implement a legal solution for sharing the land. Juridicial expertise and precedents welcomed.

Footnotes

The Bureau of Inverse Technology’s bit plane flew over and photographed this and many other seminal garages, including Hewlett Packard’s birth garage, in its pioneering aerial sortie over Silicon Valley real estate in 1998. http://bureauit.org/plane

Although most of this is highly speculative, this reporter, not having the resources to physically get to Oregon, and with Google’s policy of not answering questions, information is largely gathered from Google through searching on Google.

Commodifying the air is also of interest to Amy Balkin in her Public Smog project which constructs an international clean air park in the atmosphere via buying carbon offsets and retiring them from the emissions market, thereby making them inaccessible to polluting industries. http://www.publicsmog.org

The court case was recently re-encated in San Francisco from original transcripts, details at http://uo.twenteenthcentury.com/index.php/FacultyReenactment. More on Morningstar Ranch at http://www.diggers.org/home_free.htm

http://www.opensparc.net/news/2007-02/union-tribune-going-green-at-your-data-center-building.html Artist Heath Bunting’s project Computer Dried Fruit deals with similar core issues.

Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page explain in a letter to Wall Street ‘Searching and organizing all the world’s information is an unusually important task that should be carried out by a company that is trustworthy and interested in the public good.’

A widely-used free software licence, more at http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html

Eben Moglen, FSFs chief lawyer points out that the GNU GPL ‘creates a contractual commons, to which anyone may add but from which no one may subtract.’ Which neatly reverses the common land problem with endless legal variations for subtracting land from common ownership, but few means by which to restore it. http://emoglen.law.columbia.edu/my_pubs/anarchism.html

Cube-Cola has been developing, modifying and distributing a physical cola drink from an open source recipe at the Cube Microplex Bristol, since 2004. http://sparror.cubecinema.com/cube/cola

See HowStuffIsMade (a visual encyclopaedia that documents the manufacturing processes, labour conditions and environmental impacts involved in the production of contemporary products, [http://xdesign.ucsd.edu/howstuffismade]), Instructables.com (step-by-step instructions for making things you never knew you wanted, [http://www.instructables.com]), Materials & Applications (a research centre dedicated to pushing new and underused ideas for landscape and architecture into view, [http://www.emanate.org]) and NASA (we explore and discover, [http://www.nasa.gov]) for rare exceptions to the highly proprietary culture of fields such as industrial design, engineering and architecture.

This panel was part of the Wattis Institute’s exhibition Radical Software, curated by Will Bradley, http://www.wattis.org/exhibitions/2006/software

http://www.raysender.com/morningstar.html

http://seastead.org

Thank you for sharing: research and advice from Amy Balkin, Jenna Didier, Oliver Hess, Lucia Sanroman and Josephine Berry Slater

Biog

Kate Rich <kate AT bureauit.org> is an artist and trader, based in Bristol UK. She is currently developing amenities for hospitality, sports and survival in the cultural realm

Apocalypse and/or Business as Usual? The Energy Debate After the 2004 US Presidential Elections

ByGeorge Caffentzis

Since 2004 the rhetoric of Bush’s republican party has turned curiously green, integrating climate change as a legitimation for neoliberal imperialism. At the same time the unintended consequence of America’s unsuccessful adventures has been to enrich an ‘anti-neoliberal’ class of oil rentiers in Africa, Latin America and Asia. George Caffentzis plots the changes in the US energy policy as it turns from eco-naysayer to ecowarrior

The 2004 Presidential Election was in part a referendum on energy policy in the US. The Bush campaign expressed scepticism about both the Global Warming and Peak Oil hypotheses and claimed that the unleashing of the free market (including the lifting of some environmental restrictions) is the proper path for dealing with the energy problems of the US and the planet. In other words, there are no problems concerning energy that a dose of neoliberal privatisation and globalisation can’t cure. The Bush ‘Deal’ with the US working class was that if workers supported his policies (including financing and staffing the required imperial military), the bulk of the costs of the new energy regime will be borne by the proletarians in the oil producing countries of Africa, Latin America and Asia. An important corollary to the ‘Deal’ was that there would be no need for a drastic wage decrease (caused by high oil prices) in the US. This was a call for the continuation of neoliberal business as usual. The Kerry campaigners took both Global Warming and Peak Oil seriously and proposed an approach to energy that would emphasise conservation and alternative energy production. Such policy, they claimed, would strengthen ‘national security’ without resort to war (the assumption being that if the US imported less oil, there would be fewer enticements to be drawn into ‘resource wars’ like the invasion of Iraq in the future). The Kerry ‘Deal’ being proffered to the US working class would require in exchange for ‘national security’ tolerance for high oil prices (to incentivise alternative energy production) and hence a dramatic reduction of the real wage in the US. It was a strident call to avoid an energy apocalypse. I criticised the Kerry campaign/ Democratic Party/ Environmentalist NGO position in a previous article in Mute (Mute Vol.1, Issue 29, Winter/Spring 2005). In this article I will discuss some of the twists and turns of this energy debate among global capitalist ‘deciders’ since 2004 and the causes of these changes.

After the election, Bush continued to push ahead on the effort to increase oil drilling in the US (especially in the Arctic and the Gulf of Mexico) and to apply military pressure on oil producing nations to neoliberalise their oil industry, with Iraq being at the centre of the strategy. However, over the last two years there has been an evident change in the Bush Administration’s rhetoric. In the 2006 State of the Union Address Bush unveiled his ‘Alternative Energy Initiative’ with these words: ‘America is addicted to oil, which is often imported from unstable parts of the world.’ In the 2007 State of the Union Address Bush held out hope that the research into new energy technologies his administration is supporting ‘will help us confront the serious challenge of global climate change.’ Neutral or even positive references to the reality of Global Warming and Peak Oil have begun to appear in official administration documents. This should not be surprising, if one looks at what has transpired in the last two and a half years concerning the class politics of global energy. The neoliberal effort, supported by the guns of the US military, to overturn the nationalisation of energy resources (especially oil and natural gas) has met reverses across the planet. Let me list a few of the more spectacular ones:

– the failure of the US invasion of Iraq to impose a neoliberal regime on the nation’s oil production;

– the renationalisation of the natural gas industry of Bolivia;

– the electoral triumphs of Chavez that have given his government the legitimation to use oil revenues to create a ‘socialism for the 21st century’ in Venezuela;

– the successful ‘stealth renationalisation’ of the Russian oil industry by President Putin’s government;

– the oil companies’ and Nigerian government’s inability to crush the armed resistance of local Niger Delta groups demanding property rights in the oil reserves and reparation for past environmental damage.

This is not a pretty picture for the Bush Administration’s neoliberal globalisation plan. When these reversals are summed up across Africa, Latin America and Asia, a remarkable phenomenon can be observed: the formation of a new ‘rentier’ class that is in opposition to neoliberalism. A rentier is someone who lives off rents and returns from investments, in other words, someone whose revenue arises from the transfer of surplus value from other parts of the capitalist system. In early modern Europe, the landed rentier class was made up of aristocratic families that rented out their land to capitalist farmers. The problematic part of the contemporary oil rentier class is made up of governments (e.g., mullah-ruled Iran, ‘21st century socialist’ Venezuela) and ethnic organisations (the U’wa of Colombia, the Ijaw of the Niger Delta, and the indigenous West Papuans) that are demanding the right to use the rents and transferred surplus value they receive (or ought to receive) in a non-, or even an anti-capitalist manner (to the point that the U’wa would ban all drilling into the flesh of mother earth!).

This part of the oil rentier class worries the Bush Administration more than the apocalyptic scenarios Peak Oil and Global Warming activists delight in telling. In fact, much of the Bush Administration’s newly found attraction to Peak Oil and Global Warming is part of the effort to justify the failure to deliver on the promises of cheaper oil and a threat to troublesome oil rentiers. For after all, there are only two major threats that can be used against the rentiers: (a) direct military force threatening to dispossess them of their resources; (b) the development of alternative non- oil/natural gas energy sources threatening to devalue their resources. The failure of the Iraq invasion to lead to either increased oil production or even a legal change opening up the oil industry to foreign company control has shown the limits of the military effort. Consequently, the Bush Administration, even as it continues to surge ahead in its occupation of Iraq (and threatens to bomb Iran in the bargain), must develop the other threat so openly described by the Saudi oil minister, Sheik Ahmed Zaki Yamani in 1981:

If we force the Western countries to invest heavily in finding alternative energy sources, they will. This will take them no more than seven to ten years and will result in their reduced dependence on oil as a source of energy to a point which will jeopardise Saudi Arabia’s interests.

Capitalist concern over the anomalous behaviour of the landlord or rentier class is not new. Rentiers affect the struggle between capitalists and workers in complex and often problematic ways. In Britain, for example, the rentiers sided with the capitalists for the most part during the rise of capitalism (with occasional violent falling outs in the 17th century). But by the 18th century, capitalist thinkers were debating the negative consequences of ‘absentee’ landlords’ ‘luxury’ consumption and by the early 19th century political economists like David Ricardo argued that rents reduced profits because of the high price of grain that the working class consumed. If the price of grain went down, wages would fall and profits would rise. But the only way for this to occur was to open up the importation of grain by reducing or eliminating the tariff on cereals. The Corn Law (so called because in England ‘corn’ refers to any ‘cereal grain’) legislated this tariff and so Ricardo called for its repeal. He urged his fellow capitalists to end their alliance with the rentiers, since the flourishing of the latter would threaten the survival of the former. Ever since this period, ‘rentier’ became a synonym in economics for a lazy, obstreperous and parasitic being. ‘Rent’, when it was not the object of opprobrium, was barely mentioned in the economics text books. But like it or not, rents and rentiers have played an important role in capitalism down to the present, especially in the oil industry.

The oil industry also has another kind of transferred surplus value besides rent that arises because oil production is technology intensive and almost labour-less. Hence the oil industry creates very little surplus value. On the other side, the oil industry is quite profitable. Where does this profit come from? It arises from other parts of the system that create much surplus value while requiring relatively little technological investment. This leads to the owners of the oil companies receiving transferred value and if these owners are landlords who own the oil resources as well, they can receive two kinds of income.

Until the early 1970s the oil rentiers (the recipients of both these transfers of value) were relatively amenable to capital’s desires, but since then and especially in the last couple of years many rentiers have become dangerous to the neoliberal accumulation of capital. The most visible example is the political movement that brought Hugo Chavez to presidential power in Venezuela, of course, but there are many other actual political and social movements that are rejecting the neoliberal claim that the best way to maximise everyone’s utility is to denationalise the oil industry and return it to the hands of the global energy companies. In fact, they are using oil revenues to increase wages and invest in the reproduction of workers. For example, the Chavez administration is financing a major land redistribution drive to benefit the slum dwellers of Caracas using the oil revenues.

The true worry of the Bush Administration is that these troublesome oil rentiers will unite with each other and form an alliance with the working classes of their territory that will harm the exploitation of workers across the planet. After all, what concerns Bush’s class is a shortage of value, not a shortage of oil or natural gas. Workers should be politically concerned by ‘Peak Oil’ scarcities and by ‘Global Warming’ apocalypses, but we must remember that capital is not. Scarcity and apocalypse are capitalist business as usual. In capital’s history thousands of scarcities have been created in order to impose work and make a profit. It has destroyed ecologies and human populations time and again to preserve and extend its rule. What we should be concerned about is that this new turn in the class struggle that brings together working classes in Latin America, Africa and Asia with rentier governments and ethnic organisations in the oil producing regions will be attacked using ‘Peak Oil’ or ‘Global Warming’ as an ideological cover in the same way that nuclear non-proliferation has been used to invade Iraq.

Biog

George Caffentzis <caffentz AT usm.maine.edu> is a member of the Midnight Notes Collective and a co-ordinator of the Committee of Academic Freedom in Africa

Heavy Opera

ByAnthony Iles

John Jordan and James Marriott’s operatic audio tour set in London’s Square Mile is intended to awaken city workers to the impact of financial systems on climate change. But not only does And While London Burns misgauge how much the suits already know, its hysterical tone also harmonises too easily with the coming new eco-order

Image: activists cool off under a burst water mains during the Carnival Against Capital, June 1999

A fountain of water from the river Walbrook shoots up above my head, drums are pounding, a sound system’s bass rumbles. I hear cheers but I can also hear the clatter of police shields and batons around the corner. Seven years after London’s Carnival Against Capital, when protesters outside the LIFFE exchange broke a water mains sending a thirty-foot jet of water into the air, I am walking just a half a mile north of the same spot. Now I can hear the Thames rushing up the valley the Walbrook follows, bursting its banks, laying waste to the tall glass-fronted buildings as some of the most expensive real estate in London collapses around me. I’m swept up in a sonically induced fantasy driven by the tracks on my MP3player. I am taking part in And While London Burns, an operatic guided walk written by John Jordan and James Marriott, set to music by Isa Suarez and produced by the cross-disciplinary art and education group Platform.¹

John Jordan has played a role in both these participatory dramas, firstly as a member of Reclaim the Streets – one of the anti-capitalist groups that coordinated the Carnival Against Capital in June 1999. This time around as an artist commissioned by Platform – an interdisciplinary arts, campaigning and research group committed to longer term, less partisan approaches to transforming the activities of the financial institutions and corporations with head offices in the Square Mile. The walk is an attempt to dramatise the research Platform has conducted into climate change. James Marriott, its co-founder, explains:

‘It's a way of dramatising and humanising these systems [the role of multinationals and financial systems in fuelling climate change]. It's over-dramatised like all opera, which is why we chose the medium.’²

The walk begins at 1 Poultry. At a Starbucks opposite the ruins of the Roman Temple of Mithras our attention is drawn to the multinational’s logo with its allusions to paganism and older gods. The audio tour’s protagonist remembers that before Starbucks went global its logo (designed after a 15th century print by Seattle hippy entrepreneurs) bore nipples and ‘a pair of provocatively spread fishtails’. The mermaid allegorises both allegiance to, and fear of, the sea. She is exotic and, like the valuable cargoes on which the City’s wealth was originally founded, unattainable for those doing the shipping. The City is still resplendent with powerful iconography from the 18th and 19th centuries, pineapples and other exotic objects appear frequently as architectural ornaments advertising the City’s plunder. Today, retail spaces and spaceship architecture adorned with surveillance cameras predominate. At the Royal Exchange (now a luxury shopping mall) our protagonist remembers:

I used to work here in 1989, when it was the Futures Exchange ... the place was a permanent carnival, traders in bright coloured jackets shouting and gesturing to each other ... it couldn’t be more different now.

The new City outwardly tells little about where it draws value from and it is this occultation of money the walk confronts by whispering its secrets in your ear.

As its website explains:

For over 20 years, PLATFORM has been bringing together environmentalists, artists, human rights campaigners, educationalists and community activists to create innovative projects driven by the need for social and environmental justice.³

Platform has gone some way beyond the statements required to declare oneself a corporate entity in the art world. Operating more like an NGO, Platform sought autonomy from the dependencies of art, eschewing support from established galleries or art spaces. Instead the group concentrates upon building relationships between environmentalists, artists and employees of the core financial and carbon-extracting institutions which, at the same time, are the objects of their research and criticism. Since art has taken a relational turn, Platform’s dialogic practice has been somewhat vindicated and is gaining the interest of institutions with a commitment to engaging with ‘public issues’ outside the institutional safety zone.⁴ The group has often employed organised walks, ‘walking as a research tool, as a ritual, as performance, as intervention, as a political tool’.⁵ Here, in the Square Mile that demarcated the original Roman settlement of Londinium, Platform taps the rich network of influence and accumulation they call the ‘carbon web’ – ‘the web of institutions that extract oil and gas from the ground’.

Walking, I am accompanied by three voices or groups of voices. The protagonist, a disillusioned City worker, drifts, trying to throw off the pressure and hypocrisy of the city in an anguished monologue. The guide, a softly spoken, reassuring female voice, tells me when to cross, to ‘be careful’, ‘look left and right at the lights’, as well as offering information about BP, the financial groups and investors who support it (Morely, Deutsche Bank, Royal Bank of Scotland). The third voice is a chorus which echoes the protagonist’s monologue and riffs eccentrically on it, singing ‘They stole her nipples’, ‘look up, look up to the sky’, and, in the Royal Exchange, chants: ‘More, more and more, give us more money, give us more and more ... ’.

The carefully guided walk sometimes becomes a gallop as I realise I have taken a wrong turn or when the voices urge me to speed up. As I am led under and through the City’s architectural machines of accumulation, the opera emphasises its status as a principal node processing the world’s financial flows. Later, I am spun around Bank station and the Swiss Re tower as the chorus and music builds to a crescendo prefiguring a portentous end to the narrative and the walk.

The accompanying music first appears to me as corporate muzak, like the sound of distilled comfort and class played as one waits for the bank’s outsourced operatives to process your phone call. Later, the strings dramatise my rush around the city while street noise blends in as I lurch across streams of commuters and traffic. Once I accept that my route is programmed, I find myself caught up in what feels like the soundtrack to a live video game, gleefully aware that no-one else is conscious of my directed path.

And While London Burns is really an ‘experience’ – in the sense that a trip to Disneyland is. The walk deploys four dramatic elements: the narrative of personal crisis; the music; the information about the Earth’s decline under capitalism; and the sounds and sights of the City itself. As the slew of information about the Earth’s rising temperature builds to a picture of crisis, the protagonist becomes more erratic – we supposedly take on the burden of his self-realisation as our own. But then our ‘own’ crisis over climate change’s destructive potential is experienced as adventure.

And While London Burns shares this array of simple mechanisms for dramatising the present really impending apocalypse with two recent films, Apocalypto and Children of Men. The latter plays out anarchist fantasies of a biopolitical neofascist state in the UK, presenting us with:

Image: still from Children of Men

a world one generation from now that has fallen into anarchy on the heels of an infertility defect in the population ... Set against a backdrop of London torn apart by violence and warring nationalistic sects, Children of Men follows disillusioned bureaucrat Theo (Clive Owen) as he becomes an unlikely champion of Earth’s survival. ⁶

Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto draws a clumsy comparison between the internal breakdown of Mayan civilisation prior to Cortez’s conquest of their lands and the demise of the US as a global hegemon:

Throughout history, precursors to the fall of a civilisation have always been the same .... It was important for me to make that parallel because you see these cycles repeating themselves over and over again. People think that modern man is so enlightened but we’re susceptible to the same forces – and we are also capable of the same heroism and transcendence.⁷

These films, like with And While London Burns, indulge a reactionary millenarianism apparently appropriate to our times characterised by anxiety over reproduction, environmental devastation, migration and wars over resources. Each locates a subjective response to ‘objective conditions’ in a male subject, and we see an awakening to the real conditions of the societies in which they live.

For And While London Burns’ authors one gets the feeling that it is something of a stretch of the imagination to place themselves in this character’s shoes, that some under estimation of the ignorant and complacent ‘suit’ is operating. The dynamic between the identification of the listener with this disaffected conservative and the more ‘radical imagination’ celebrated through historical references was, for me, unconvincing.

I struggle with the opera’s construction of experience (the listener’s as well as the conditions they ‘objectively’ face) as consensus reality without challenge. It seems that after so long working at the margins of artistic practice, Platform have finally conceded to the monoform. There is no transcendental subject, no lone saviour of civilisation. Although And While London Burns’ authors are the first to admit that they are self-consciously playing with clichés to dramatic effect, this walk is the very opposite of psychogeographic practice.⁸ The work engenders the opposite of an active, critical subjectivity.

If there is a dialectic to be found in And While London Burns it is that of flight versus contestation. The audio guide points to the irony of the City as both a centre of research into the causes and effects of climate change (in particular Swiss Re, whose reinsurance business is predicated upon the mediation of threats to profitability) and the self-satisfied ignorance of continued irresponsible plunder. As the opera’s story unravels we are informed that the protagonist’s partner, Lucy, has left to live ‘off-grid’. This response to the threat of environmental devastation is the conceptual equivalent of self-organising nuclear bunker drills at the height of the cold war – a duck and cover strategy, internalising the nuclear state’s imperative that we be afraid, that we submit to pointless rituals in the face of death. At the opposite pole, the rich shoring up their wealth and access to unadulterated leisure and consumption in Dubai are playing a similar end-game with equally futile consequences. As if, in the context of a global emergency, anyone will be safe in either a low impact woodland home with its own energy supply or in a glass tower surrounded by the best defenses petro-dollars can buy. Both visions indulge in the fantasy that in the globalised world there is some escape or autonomy, a form of denial which hopes to obscure all ties between that secure haven and the reality of ongoing surplus value extraction from a landless, illegalised, starving (sub-) humanity.

And While London Burns puts this contemporary meme of millennial conservatism to work in a locale that is synonymous with unsustainable economics, personal debt and risk-taking. The work chooses to reinforce the personalisation and internalisation of a crisis for which capitalism itself should be paying the costs. Its dramatisation of the Earth’s climactic instability hinges on a predicted four degree rise in temperature that we are now almost certain to reach according to the IPCC’s recent report. The facts relayed during the course of this walk tend to confirm these projections. I am not in a position to challenge these facts. Without even trying to challenge these facts, it is still possible to object to the terms in which the urgency of change is being framed. The injunction of climate change is literally ‘change’; through crisis, capital is reorganising itself and this has immediate social impacts. What is being proposed is a series of small adjustments for capital and many dramatic shocks for us. There appears to be very little going on in terms of large projects to actually reverse this situation, instead there is a confluence of self-righteous self-flagellation at a consumer level and government programmes to bully workers, small to medium-sized businesses and new home owners.

Platform have a background of deeper engagement with these issues and access to research that should allow them to analyse the joined up system of capitalist ‘wealth creation’ and its affect on the social environment. However, as the UK and other governments worldwide absorb green and environmental discourse and re-spin it as command – to eat less, work more, pay extra for energy and waste – some engagement with this instrumentalisation of ecological threat would be useful, rather than continuing to pursue an alarmist politics fuelling the fires of eco-fascism in becoming.

Image: still from Apocalypto

From apocalyptic predictions of dramatic climate change down to fashion tips for the greening of lifestyles, we experience exactly the same ‘terrorism of conformity that underlies all the publicity of modern capitalism’.⁹ The trouble with this work and almost all public discussion of climate, is that rather than critically evaluating the role of this ecological threat as part of the ongoing deterioration of living standards dictated by capital in most of the world, there is a tendency to exaggerate the threat, to rationalise it as a natural fact, and thus approve and provide training for the modificati

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Heavy Opera