Two reasons green crime might be difficult to control are:
green crime is socially constructed, thus there is no agreed definition of what counts as green crime.
Green crimes are often committed by the powerful, thus there is no political will to prosecute.
This is a possible 10 mark question for the AQA’s A-level sociology paper 3 (7192/3).
A very similar question came up in June 2022 as a short answer, 4 mark question.
Question: analyse two reasons green crime may be difficult to control (10)
ITEM B.
One of the problems with controlling green crime is that there is no single agreed definition of what kind of acts constitute green crime. Another reason is that Green Crimes are global in nature and often perpetuated by the powerful.
Using material from Item A and elsewhere analyse two reasons why green crime is difficult to control (10).
Analyse two reasons why green crimes are difficult to control: answer
Point 1: Green crimes are socially constructed
The first reason green crime is difficult to control is because there is no internationally agreed definition about what counts as green crime. What counts as green crime is socially constructed and definitions of what environmental harms are allowed (and are NOT criminal) vary from country to country. People within countries also disagree.
For example Kenya may be dumping toxic waste in a river which flows into Tanzania and damages Tanzania’s ecosystems and makes its people sick, even though dumping toxic waste is illegal in Tanzania.
However it might be difficult for Tanzania to control the green crimes being committed in Kenya because Kenya might not have any laws banning the dumping of toxic waste in rivers, thus the act isn’t illegal there. Thus Kenya would have no record of it doing anything illegal.
In the international political system, nation states have the right to set laws in their own countries. There may be international treaties banning the dumping of toxic waste, but there are no enforceable international laws relating to green crime.
Moreover, in the above example, Kenya may even deny it is dumping toxic waste. Tanzania may not even be able to verify that the pollution is coming from Kenya as Kenya doesn’t have to allow access to other countries to check whether it is actually them who are doing the polluting.
Point 2: the powerful commit green crimes
A second reason green crime (defined as environmental harm) may be difficult to control is that the rich and powerful often benefit from committing green crime while it is the poor who suffer the harms.
From a Marxist point of view the powerful establish the laws to benefit them, and if they benefit harming the environment, they are unlikely to make harming the environment a criminal act.
Exploitation of the natural environment has long been part of making a profit in the capitalist system: extracting oil, mining minerals, harvesting wood from forests, all of these destroy local environments and create pollution.
For example, look at Shell in Nigeria. Shell and the Nigerian elite didn’t see pollution in the Niger Delta as illegal. This was because the pollution didn’t harm them, it only harmed the poor locals.
It is only in the last few decades that people have started to campaign to make the worst acts of environmental harm illegal, but it is cheaper for corporations and countries to not regenerate land after they’ve extracted it, and to not bother clearing up their waste.
Developing countries, mainly India and China, think they are justified in using fossil fuels to develop to catch up to the West, because this is what Western Europe and America did to generate wealth over the last two centuries!
Companies have to pay fines if they pollute today. However, companies often choose to carry on polluting and just pay the fines. Companies can make more profit this way because fines are rarely high enough. There is no political will to impose high fines for pollution because the political class think profit is more important.
Sources and signposting
For more help with the A-level sociology exams see my exams page.
For a deeper dive into Green Crimes see my post on Green Crime!
The Ultra Low Emission Zone (ULEZ) is going to be expanded to outer London boroughs on 31st August 2023. Anyone not driving a low emission vehicle will have to pay £10 a day to drive in those areas.
This will affect around 15% of car drivers and almost 50% of van drivers. These are primarily people driving older vehicles. (1)
Labour London mayor Sadiq Khan is enacting ULEZ. It has been blamed for Labour losing the recent Uxbridge by-election by just 500 votes.
Ironically for Labour this is a policy which affects the poor disproportionately. Anyone who could afford to buy a newer, lower emission vehicle would buy one, and drive it with no penalty.
Unfortunately for the environment and younger people this issue has become a battle ground for the coming 2024 election.
The Tories are now thinking of scrapping commitments to ULEZs in order to win votes. They are thinking of trashing environmental policies to try and stay in power.
But what do Londoners actually think about this issue?
What do Londoners think of Ultra Low Emission Zones?
There have been several polls on this issue. The results differ depending on how the questions about ULEZ are framed.
If you ask a question purely about ULEZ, then most people support the expansion. However, if you include reference to charges in relation to ULEZ then most people are against it.
This is a useful example of framing bias in social surveys.
ULEZ Survey, charges not mentioned
Question: “To tackle air pollution in the capital, the Mayor of London and Transport for London are proposing to expand the Ultra Low Emission Zone (ULEZ) London-wide. The proposed implementation date for this is 29th August 2023. Which, if any, of the following comes closest to your view?”
ULEZ Survey: charges mentioned
Question: “To tackle air pollution, some places across the UK like London, are introducing charges in Low Emission Zones (sometimes called Ultra Low Emission Zones or ULEZ) where those who drive the more polluting cars or vehicles have to pay a fee or charge to drive into these areas. Would you support or oppose a similar ULEZ charge in your local area? “
Attitudes to ULEZ Conclusions
I’d be inclined to say the question which mentions charges is a more accurate reflection of public opinion. This is because it includes more specific details so people can provide a more informed response.
We can also see from the above that lower social classes are more likely to be against ULEZ. This makes sense because these are the people who can’t afford to buy newer vehicles.
We also see that younger people are more in favour, which reflects attitudes to the environment more generally.
It is shameful that the Tories are prepared to use the environment as a political tool. They are sacrificing the future of younger people to win a few more seats in the hope of staying in power.
The fact that they are prepared to do this shows us they are no longer worthy to govern.
Sources AND signposting
This is mainly relevant to the social research methods topic. It is a good example of how social surveys are more useful with more detailed questions.
COP 27 – where 198 nations met to discuss climate change and agreed to do very little about it!
36 000 people representing 198 nations, companies, international organisations and civil society met in Egypt in November 2022 to try and agree further commitments to reducing greenhouse gas emissions and slow down global warming, but little progress was made.
This post summarises the outcomes and applies some sociological concepts to this contemporary event.
What is COP 27?
Cop stands for ‘Conference of the Parties’ who meet to discuss actions to combat climate change under the United Nations Conference on Climate Change. In 2022 this was attended by representatives of 198 countries and several other representative from companies, international organisations and civil society groups.
2022 was the 27th international meeting on Climate Change since the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, this year it was held in Egypt and was attended by 35 000 people.
Paris 2015
The 2015 COP meeting in Paris was especially signficant because this was the first time countries agreed to try and reduce global warming to within 1.5 degrees of pre-industrial levels by the year 2030.
Nationally Determined Contributions
Nationally Determined Contributions or NDCs are fundamental to reducing global emissions and keeping the rate of global warming in check. They are specific country agreements which contain policy measures countries are prepared to implement to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions.
Countries are supposed to publish these regularly, but only 24 had published revised NDCs since the previous COP meeting in Glasgow in 2021 and only 54 countries have long-term plans for reducing dependence on fossil fuels.
Main Outcomes of COP 27
The main outcomes of Cop 27 were:
The creation of a loss and damage fund to compensate developing countries for the disproportionate damage they have suffered from climate change caused primarily by developed countries which have been the main beneficiaries of the wealth generated by the industrial revolution. However there are no details of who is going to contribute, when, to what organisations or how much money is involved.
Countries failed to agree to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to hit the 1.5 degree increase by 2020 target, although in the last year a few countries have got more ambitious and so now we are on target to only increase out emissions by 10% rather than 13%.
Countries failed to commit to phasing out all fossil fuels, although they recommitted to phasing out the use of coal which had been introduced as part of Cop 26 in Glasgow.
There was a commitment to scale up the use of low emission energy, although gas might be redefined as low emission because it’s less toxic than goal and oil.
There was a recommitment by developed countries to provide $100 billion in funding to developing countries to help them adapt to climate change by funding projects such as sea defences and reforestation. However only $20 billion in funding has been provided since this was first agreed in 2021 and this year some countries tried to remove this commitment.
There are plans in place to restructure the World Bank so that it can provide funding to developing countries to help them adapt to climate change.
Copy 27 recognised that there might be ‘tipping point’s as the climate warms – once we get above a certain temperature things might get rapidly worse as climate change doesn’t happen in a smooth and linear fashion. They also recognised that climate change has a negative impact on people’s health which is a basic human right.
Criticisms of COP 27
Great Thunberg didn’t attend COP 27 because she accused the attendees of Greenwashing which is where governments use the international conference to make it appear like they are doing something about Climate Change but in reality they are not.
If you look back at the ‘achievements’ above you can clearly see that while these commitments are dressed up as ‘progress’ in reality very little has been achieved since Paris in 2015.
More radical climate activists such as Great Thunberg and organisations such as 350.0rg believe that we need to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels much ore rapidly and that it is possible to transition to fully renewable energy supplies such as solar and wind much sooner than 2030, but there just isn’t the political will to do so.
Sociology applied to COP 27
COP 27 is an example of globalisation in action as this is one of the largest international meetings in history, attended by representatives of nearly every country on earth.
There is very little substance to any of the actions agreed upon at COP 27 and specific progress towards reducing our reliance on fossil fuels remains extremely limited. This suggests that if there is any kind of consensus at the level of national governments (or nation states) then that consensus is to do relatively little about getting global warming under control by 2030.
Nation States seem more committed on prioritising economic growth and poverty alleviation and setting up resilience funds to help poor countries deal with the negative effects of climate change, rather than a radical shift away from fossil fuels, suggesting support for the Marxist view that nation states are in alliance with the polluting fossil fuel companies.
There is a considerable portion of civil society (i.e. ordinary people) who think governments aren’t doing enough fast enough to combat global warming and climate change. For example Just Stop Oil have been active recently shutting down motorways, mainly representing the young rather than the old, and another organisation is 350.0rg who believe that a much faster transition to renewable energy is possible!
Anthony Giddens has said that Nation States are too small to deal with global problems – maybe we are seeing that here – while some nation states have committed to reducing emissions, most have not, and there’s not very much the committed states can do to force the others into following suit!
Signposting
The environment and development is one of the topics within the Global Development option on the AQA’s A-level sociology specification.
You’re more likely to live next to a waste incinerator in the UK if you’re black compared to if you’re white, and thus more likely to be breathing in toxic fumes.
The same trend is also true globally: ‘people of colour’ living in the global south are more likely to suffer environmental harms associated with climate changed compared to the majority white populations of the global north.
This report makes the very dramatic claim the current environmental crisis is based on a history of systemic racism rooted in Colonialism and in this post I summarise this report and suggest some limitations of it.
The Environmental Crisis is Built on Systemic Racism…
(Quite a claim!)
The report notes that it is mainly countries in the global south – mainly Pakistan, India, Bangladesh and Africa – which have to bear the costs of global warming. It is these poorer countries which suffer economic setbacks because of increased sea level rises flooding land and destructive ‘extreme weather events’ such as cyclones. The report estimates that Mozambique, in Southern Africa suffered more than $3 Billion of environmental damages in 2019, for example.
Another dimension of ‘environmental racism’ is how the mainstream media under-reports man-made environmental humanitarian disasters in the global south compared to ‘white victories’ such as Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos space flight programmes….
And one further example lies in how Indigenous activists lives are put in danger.
Colonialism, Extractivism and Racism
The report also highlights three case studies of how colonial powers set up in developing countries (then simply their colonies) and systematically went about displacing indigenous peoples in order to extract resources for profit.
The three examples provided are Shell extracting Oil in Nigeria, and the displacement of the Ogoni people; the destruction of the Amazon rainforest in Brazil and the establishment of meat and soy production and also the establishment of industrial scale fishing in Western Africa which has ruined local communities which used to rely on small scale fishing.
The report also covers the waste aspect of Environmental Racism – countries such as the UK tend to ship their toxic waste to poorer countries who often have lower pollution standards – so poor people end up recycling metal from plastic by burning the plastic for example….
Find out More…
There is more in the report such as how environmental racism works in the UK and how we can tackle climate change by simultaneously tackling racism in society, and I recommend you give it read: Confronting Injustice: Racism and the Environmental Emergency.
Relevance to A-Level Sociology
This contemporary report is clearly relevant to the Environment topic within the Global Development module, and you will also find lots of supporting case studies which support Dependency Theory.
In terms of social theory, this is a great contemporary example of ‘grand theorising’ – there’s nothing postmodern about this, and in fact reports leading to theorising such as this implicitly criticise the concept of postmodernity.
This post explores the extent to which Global Warming poses a threat to continued social and economic development.
According to the latest data from Climate.gov global warming is currently causing sea levels to rise by 0.3 centimetres a year, which means that sea levels may have risen by up to 2.5 metres by 2100.
A recent report by Climate Central (2019) suggests that 300 million people live in areas that will be subject to severe flooding due to climate change, China and Bangladesh have the most people living in at-risk areas.
The Polynesian Island of Tuvalu, population 11 000, is on the frontline of Sea Level Rise – located in the Pacific Ocean this is a thin slip of an Island where the residents are now struggling to survive because of rising sea levels. This Guardian article (2019) takes an in-depth look the problems the residents face. There is a very real chance all of these people could end up being climate change refugees within the next decade. NB the United Nations is aware of their plight, but it’s difficult to see what we can do that is practical.
This documentary from 60 Minutes Australia (2019) explores the rapid disappearance of parts of the Solomon Islands, where sea levels have increased by up to 15 centimetres in the last 20 years:
From a research methods perspective this is interesting as one researcher used old photos to compare where some of the islands used to be compared to their reduced sizes today; and there are also interviews with people who grew up on the islands – some of the places they used to picnic as kids are now gone forever, completely under water!
The Global Climate Risk Index is a useful broader source than the above – it focuses more on all extreme weather events, so not just flooding (also droughts and extreme weather events).
NB – just to reiterate that the latest modelling suggests that if anything sea levels are rising FASTER than previously projected, so these problems are set to get worse!
Does industrial development lead to environment decline?
This is one of the key questions in the Global Development for A-level sociology.
The historical relationship between industrialisation and harm to the environment
Historically, both Capitalist and Socialist models of development have largely ignored the environmental impact of development for most of the last 200 years, with the environment only appearing on the International Development Agenda until the late 1980s (see later).
The industrial capitalist model of development favoured by Modernisation Theorists is based on achieving economic growth through industrialisation and exporting goods to other countries in order to increase income. Both of these processes have been historically dependent on consuming large amounts of natural resources and have tended to create large amounts of pollution. This is because the efficiencies of industrial production are achieved through mechanisation, which has historically been fuelled by polluting fossil fuels, mostly coal (which aren’t needed when people grow their own food and make their own clothes in subsistence systems), and the exporting of goods around the world also requires more energy for transportation compared to subsistence systems, which has increased the demand for oil.
The Modernisation Approach also aims to achieve the ‘high age of mass consumption’, implying that the ultimate aim of development is for everyone in the world to consume at the level of people in the western, developed world. Today this would mean the average person eating a lot more meat, owning a car, taking holidays abroad and having a higher turnover of material goods (mobile phones and clothes for example), and the more people who move towards this, then the greater the demand on the earth’s natural resources (land, water, fossil fuels, minerals) and the greater the pollution that is created in the manufacturing and distribution of these goods.
While it remains easy for people in the West today to ignore the environmental impacts of the industrial-capitalist mode of development there is a growing body of evidence that suggests that this path to development has resulted in significant harm to the environment. We have already seen this in case studies such as the coal mining fuelling industrialisation in Northern India, Deforestation in Haiti, and the toxic waste resulting from ship-breaking in Bangladesh.
A clear relationships between industrial development and increasing CO2 emissions…
CO2 emissions are effectively a measurement of how much oil and coal a country uses, the burning of which lead to global warming which is widely regarded as the major environmental problem of our time.
Based on the table to the chart above (taken from Our World in Data) ,there seems to be a clear relationship between Industrial Capitalist Development and environmental decline.
Increasing Awareness of Environmental Decline in Recent Decades…
Increasing awareness of the damage we are doing to the environment has led to the emergence of numerous conservation groups, such as the World Wide Fund for Nature who have successfully campaigned for the establishment of various nature reserves around the world, and also to well-known international environmental pressure groups such as Greenpeace and the Friends of The Earth who campaign more broadly to get governments to introduce measures to slow the pace of environmental decline. These groups today have wide ranging support from the general public to the extent that Green Parties around Europe have gained steady support in the last three decades (not that you’d know this because the media under-reports it).
There are numerous ways of categorising the harms we are doing to the planet, and one way of doing so is to break down environmental challenges into the following categories…Global warming and sea level rise
Global Warming and Sea Levels Rising
Deforestation
Desertification
Pollution and toxic waste
Resource Depletion
Species Extinction
New ‘Risky’ Technologies
We will explore these challenges further in future posts!
The UK is generating more energy from zero carbon sources than from fossil fuels for the first time since the industrial revolution, the National Grid announced recently.
Gas and coal generated 46.7% of Britain’s power in the year to the end of May, while zero carbon sources generated 47.9%. The rest came from biomass.
A decade ago coal plants generated almost a third of the UK’s electricity. Now there are only 7 left, two of which are going to close in the near future.
Energy from renewables has risen from 2% in 2009 to almost 25% with most coming from wind (18.8%).
What’s the relevance of this to A-level sociology?
For anyone studying the module in Global Development, this is a great counter trend to the doom and gloom of the ‘environmental decline’ we see in so many parts of the world.
It might also be a sign of a new value consensus emerging about the ‘right way’ to generate energy? At least at the level of the UK.
However, I guess we shouldn’t overstate the importance of this, the UK is only home to >1% of the global population after all!
Only an estimated 9% of the world’s plastic waste is recycled. A further 12% is burnt and the rest, 79% is buried in land fill or just dumped.
China used to be the main dumping ground for the world’s rubbish, but it banned the import of plastic waste in 2017, which then lead to a surge in the amount of used plastic sent to other countries in South East Asia such as Malaysia.
In Malaysia, much of the world’s used plastic is either burnt, releasing toxic chemicals into the air or dumped in rivers, polluting local water supplies and ultimately the oceans.
The BBC recently made a documentary about the harmful effects of the vast plastic-waste mountains in Malaysia, caused by wealthier countries such as the UK not dealing with their plastic waste at home, but rather outsourcing its disposal to a poorer country, because it’s cheaper to do so.
From a traditional criminology perspective there is nothing necessarily ‘criminal’ about a company in one country engaging in ‘law evasion’ by exporting plastic waste to a second company in another country with slacker environmental protection laws and then that second company burning or just dumping the waste – it is up to each individual country to establish its own environmental laws, after all.
However, this case study may well be an example of a ‘green crime‘ from a green-criminological perspective – in the above example company A is knowingly doing something that will result in pollution and thus do environmental harm – even if it is thousands of miles away.
NB Malaysia recently announced that it will no longer accept imports of foreign rubbish, and has threatened to return 3000 tonnes of non-recyclable plastic waste back to the U.K. other countries.
Greta Thunberg is a a 16 year old Swede who has inspired a wave of student strikes in the name of Climate Justice. She has been hailed as the voice of a generation. She came to popular attention following her speech at COP24 below (it’s only three minutes long and well worth a listen
In this brief speech (which sounds like it’s been written for her) she condemns world leaders for not taking climate change seriously and putting economic growth before protecting the biosphere. She suggests that the majority of people and the planet suffer while a tiny minority profit – essentially the planet and the next generation’s future is being sacrificed so a few people can get very wealthy.
She also suggests that the system might need to change if solutions cannot be found within it, before issuing and warning that the world’s leaders have run out of excuses and that change is coming, in the form of the youth presumably.
Relevance to A-level sociology
I thought this was an interesting example of how there is no global consensus on climate change, and yet maybe a good example of an ‘anticipation of the morality of the future‘, as Durkheim would argue.
It’s also an example of what I’m going to call ‘inverse age patriarch’ – Greta accuses the oldies of not being mature enough to deal with the problem of climate change, rather leaving it to the youth!
NB according to The Week (9 March 2019) – Greta Thunberg also has an interesting backstory – she began learning about climate change at the age of eight. At aged 11 she fell into a deep depression about the issue and stopped eating, talking and going to school. What turned her life around was the realisation that she could change people’s actions on climate change – her parents stopped eating meat and flying for example. She’s a selective mute and has Asperger’s – she says the later gives her a clearer perspective than other people.
The focus of this book is on the causes of climate change, some potential solutions, and the dangers of carrying on with ‘business as usual’. More specifically:
Chapter two provides an overview of how globalised neoliberal policies helped to cause climate change (chapter two)
Chapters three and four explore how governments have a crucial role to play in combating climate change (chapters three and four)
Chapter five reminds us of the possible consequences of carrying on with the extractivist logic of the industrial era which underpins the neoliberal exploitation of the environment (chapter five).
Chapter one alerts us to the strategies which neoliberals employ to deny climate change in order to prevent the collapse of their neoliberal world order and their fall from world power
NB – I changed the order from the actual book because I think my order makes more sense!
NB2 – I’ve changed the arty subtitles of the chapters so they are more meaningful to a mass audience.
Chapter Two – Hot Money: How Neoliberalism Accelerated Climate Change
Klein argues that the three policy pillars of the neoliberal age (1989 – present day ) are each incompatible with many of the actions we must take to bring our emissions to safe levels and bring climate change under control.
The three main neoliberal policies are:
privatisation of the public sphere
deregulation of the corporate sector
lowering of income and corporate taxes, paid for with cuts to public spending.
These neoliberal ideas lie at the heart of the World Trade Organisation, and many of its policies are incompatible with a sustainable future. Specifically Klein says there are three contradictions between the (neoliberal) goals of the WTO and what’s needed to control climate change.
Firstly, the WTO encourages more international trade which has meant a huge increase in fossil fuel burning container ships and lorries. Reduced carbon emissions would require less trade or more local trade.
Secondly, the WTO gave TNCs the rights to sue national governments for preventing them from making a profit out of mining/ burning fossil fuels, whereas to protect the environment, governments would need to be able pass laws to protect the environment.
Thirdly, the WTO has given western companies stronger patent rights over their technologies – whereas if renewable technologies are to be transferred to the developing world, they would need to make their own cheap copies of those technologies (because they would not be able to afford to buy them).
As general evidence of the link between neoliberal policies and the increase in global warming we have the following stats – ‘Before the neoliberal era, emissions growth had been slowing from 4.5% annual increases in the 1960s to about 1% a year in the 1990s, but between 2000 and 2008 the growth rate reached 3.4%, before reaching a historic high of 5.9% in 2009. (Evidence for this comes in the form of the report below (although growth does slow in more recent years!)
To illustrate the link between increasing international trade and global warming Klein gives the following examples:
According to Andreas Malm, China had became the workshop of the world by the year 2000 and by 2007 China was responsible for 2/3rds of the annual increase in global emissions. However, global warming cannot all be pinned on China – because only half of that growth in emissions is down to China’s internal growth, the other half being because of China’s increasing exports to other countries (production being done for TNCs).
This in turn is down to the primary driving force of the trade system in the 1980s and 1990s – allowing multinationals the freedom to scour the globe in search of the cheapest and most exploitable labour force (the ‘race to the bottom’) – it was a journey that passed through Mexico and South Korea and ended up in China where wages were extraordinarily low, trade unions were brutally suppressed and the state was willing to spend seemingly limitless funds on massive infrastructure projects – modern ports, sprawling highway systems, endless numbers of coal-fired power plants, massive dams, all to ensure that the lights stayed on in the factories and the goods made it from the assembly lines onto the container ships in time – A free trader’s dream, in other words, and a climate nightmare.
Klein suggests that there is a causal link between the quest for cheap labour and rising CO2 emissions – the same logic which works labour to the bone will burn mountains of coal while spending next to nothing on pollution controls because it’s the cheapest way to produce.
As further evidence that it’s the global trade system/ increasing consumption in general (rather than just China) that’s the problem – most of the increase in emissions in the last decade and a half are a result of the globalisation of the trade in food (as observed by Steven Shyrbman a decade and a half ago). The global food system accounts for between 19 and 29% of global greenhouse gas emissions.
At one level this is a result of the increase in food miles that come with shipping food products around the world (for example shipping New Zealand apples to Britain in September), at a deeper level it is about the intensification of production through the industrialisation of agriculture – which has resulted in larger and larger farms devoting themselves to producing one crop (or one animal in intensive meat-factories) which requires not only tractors, but also artificial fertilisers and pesticides, all of which are derived from oil. At deeper level still, the problem lies in the fact that gigantic food companies such as Monsanto and Cargill are major players in writing the WTO rules that allow them to operate this way.
To illustrate the second point above: How TNCs use the WTO to sue governments Klein cites the following:
(Firstly some context) Fossil fuel companies lie firmly at the heart of the global capitalist system, and presently receive $775 billion to $1 trillion in annual global subsidies, but they pay nothing for the privilege of treating our shared atmosphere as free waste dump.
In order to cope with these distortions (which the WTO has made no attempt to correct), governments need to take a range of aggressive steps – such as price guarantees to straight subsidies so that green energy has a shot at competing.
However, green energy programmes which have been instigated under nation states are increasingly being challenged under World Trade Organisation rules. For example:
In 2010 the United States challenged China’s wind powered subsidy programs on the grounds that it contained supports for local industry considered protectionist. China in turn filed a complaint in 2012 targeting various renewable energy programmes in mainly Italy and Greece.
In short, the WTO encourages nation states to tear down each others windmills while encouraging them to subsidise coal burning power stations.
The sad thing is, when governments subsidise green energy – it works – Denmark has the most successful renewable energy programs in the world, with 40% of its energy coming from renewables, mostly wind, but its programme was rolled out in the 1980s, with most installations being subsidised at 30%, before the WTO was established. Now such subsidies are illegal under WTO rules because it’s ‘unfair’ to fossil fuel companies.
Climate Change Treaties – The 1990s to the Present Day: Free Trade Trumps Environmental Protection
Klein notes that there is startling parallel between the emergence of international treaties on climate change and the neoliberal agenda free-trade agenda advanced by the World Trade Organisation.
1992 marked the date of the first United Nations Earth Summit in Rio – the first UN Framework Convention of Climate Change was signed.
1995 marked the date of the establishment of the World Trade Organisation, which formally put in place all of the above rules which effectively prevent any country doing anything about climate-change.
However, the commitments made in the climate negotiations all effectively functioned on the honour system, with a weak and unthreatening mechanisms to penalise countries which failed to keep their promises. The commitments made under trade agreements, on the other hand, were enforced by a dispute settlement system with real teeth, and failure to comply would land governments in trade court, often facing harsh penalties.
The hierarchy was so clear that the 1992 Rio Earth Summit agreement made clear that ‘measures taken to combat climate change… should not constitute a disguised restriction on international trade.’
To illustrate how weak the measures to combat climate change actually are Klein cites the fact that there are fundamental flaws with the way CO2 emissions are monitored:
Countries are bound by voluntary agreements to keep CO2 emissions low – but the emissions counting system on which nation states are judged is fundamentally flawed because it doesn’t take account of emissions from transportation across borders – and container shipping has increased by 400% over the last 20 years.
Also countries are judged by the emissions which take place in their boarders – not for the pollution produced in the manufacturing of goods which are shipped to their shores – for example the TV set in my living room is not counted on the UK’s emissions count, but on China’s, where it was produced.
Basically, Klein sees the lack of effective monitoring as allowing countries to under-report their CO2 emissions, and thus dodge responsibility.
What can we do?
We need to consume less, straight away, and aim to reduce our emissions to the levels of the 1970s, if we wish to be staying alive…
Chapter Three – Public and Paid For: Arguments and Evidence that Ground-Up Social Democracy Is The Most Effective Way to Combat Climate Change
Much has been written about Germany’s renewable energy transition – It is currently undergoing a ‘transition to green’ – with 25% of its energy coming from renewables. This is up from only 6% in 2000.
Though rarely talked about there is a clear and compelling relationship between public ownership and the ability of communities to get off dirty energy.
In Germany, this has taken the form of local citizens groups taking control of their own energy supplies from multinational corporations. There are about 200 of these in Germany, and they take the form of locally controlled energy companies which are concerned with public interests, not profit, which was democratically controlled by citizens, with money earned being returned to the city, rather than lost to shareholders of some multinational.
This movement is actually more widespread than Germany (there are even some cities in America have done this, such as Boulder in Colorado which have gone down this route), and is most prevalent in the Netherlands, Austria, and Norway, and these are the countries with the highest commitment to coming off fossil fuels and pursuing green energy alternatives.
On the other hand, according to John Farrel, the attitude of most private energy companies has been, and still is ‘we’re going to take the money we make from selling fossil fuels and use it to lobby as hard as we can against any change to the way we do business’.
In 2009 Mark Z. Jacobsen and Mark A Deluchi authored a road map for how 100% of the world’s energy for all purposes could be supplied by wind, water and solar resources, by as early 2030. There are numerous studies which confirm the possibility of this, but the biggest barriers to change are social and economic.
Increasing Natural Disasters Require Strong Public Institutions to Manage
In the course of the 1970s there were 660 reported disasters around the world, including droughts, floods, extreme temperature events, wild-fires and storms. In the 2000s there were 2,322 – a fivefold boost…. There is not doubt that man-made climate change has caused this increase.
Yet these are three decades in which governments around the world have been chipping away at the health and resilience of the public sphere – the problem with this is that governments are realistically the only institutions that are up to the challenge of responding to natural disasters (during disasters most people tend to lose their free market religion and wants to know their government has their backs).
A case in point here is the devastation caused by the the floods of 2013-14 – These were particularly awkward for the coalition government because a year earlier David Cameron had gutted the Environment Agency, which was responsible for dealing with flooding. Since 2009, approximately 25% of its workforce has been axed or were lined up to be axed and nearly 300 flood defence schemes had been left unbuilt due to government budget cuts.
The worldwide costs of coping with weather extremes are astronomical – In 2011 the global cost stood at $380 billion.
Given this it is clear that public money needs to spent urgently on reducing the carbon emissions which are causing these crises – and much of that needs to spent in developing countries – and who should pay? The polluters!
The Polluter Pays Principle
A 2011 Survey by the U.N.’s Department of Economic and Social Affairs concluded that it would cost $1.9 trillion dollars a year for the next forty years to overcome poverty, increase food production to eradicate hunger without degrading land and water resources and avert the climate change catastrophe, and at least half of that would have to be spent in developing countries.
The problem is that public spending has been going in the opposite direction, and the fossil fuel companies who profit from climate change have blocked moves to sustainability on every turn.
These companies are very profitable – the top five oil companies pulled in $900 billion in profits from 2001 to 2010. These companies are rich because they have dumped the cost of cleaning up their mess on regular people, and this needs to fundamentally change.
So who should pay?
Oil and Gas companies should be forced to pay by putting in place a steep carbon tax, and laws to prevent these companies from polluting – If these companies are going to stop polluting, it will be because they are forced to do so by law.
The United States – because the US military is the biggest consumer of petroleum in the world, arms companies should also pay.
The 500 million richest of us are responsible for about half of all emissions – so we are going to have to pay for our pollution.
Other suggestions for raising the almost $2 billion annually include:
A low rate financial transaction tax (would raise $650 billion)
Closing tax havens ($190 billion)
A 1% billionaires tax ($46 dollars annually)
Slashing the military budgets of the top ten military spenders ($325 billion)
A $50 tax per metric ton of CO2 would raise $450 billion
Phasing out fossil fuel subsidies – $775 billion.
If these measures were taken, they would raise more than $2 trillion annually.
Our current political class is probably not going to sort out climate change – because
They are not prepared to challenge big money Corporations
They are not prepared to engage in long term planning (real market fundamentalists don’t plan – the market sorts all that out!
Chapter Four – Planning and Banning: Arguments that Governments will need to Plan and Regulate Corporations to Combat Climate Change
In short – Governments need to plan for jobs.
The gist of this section is that the public sector needs to put green jobs creation at the centre of its green strategy – investment in renewables and local agriculture, as well as the renationalising of private companies (like in Germany, but also extended to rail networks in countries like Britain) could create millions of jobs worldwide, many more than a continued dependency on fossil fuels.
Governments need to plan for power (the transition to green energy)
We need to depart from neoliberal ideology to bring about the green transition – like is being done in Germany – this means engaging in long term national planning and deliberately picking green energy, and fixing prices to help young start up renewable companies.
However, what we don’t need is massive state owned energy companies – The highest rates of renewable energy have been achieved in Germany and Denmark with lots of smaller locally run co-operative businesses.
One threat to the green transition is cheap gas – In the US fracking has damaged Wind Power’s position in the new energy market – down from 42% of the market in new energy in 2009 to 32% in 2011.
Governments also need to plan for food.
Here Klein cites the important role agroecology which is about small scale, organic, local production, increasing as far as possible the species diversity on farms, in sharp contrast to the monocultures preferred by big international food companies, which are heavily dependent on fertilisers and pesticides.
In Malawi, agroecology has led to a doubling or tripling of Maize yields, and to date projects world-wide have shown a crop yield increase of 80% in 57 developing countries, with an average increase of 116% for all African projects.
Governments will need to learn to say no to big oil companies.
For example, companies simply should not be given permits to frack, period. Some studies have found that the methane emissions from fracking are 30% higher than those associated with natural gas, and that the warming potential once the gas is emitted is 86 times greater than carbon dioxide.
The government should also say no to projects such as the Keystone XL pipeline which is being built to pump shale gas from Canada to the US – this will require massive acts of civil disobedience to achieve.
Meanwhile, big oil companies are investing in extracting projects like never before, and spending a fortune on lobbying governments – One study found that they spend $400 000 a day lobbying.
Chapter Five – The Decline of Nauru – The Consequences of Carrying on with Business as Usual
In this chapter Klein provides us with a brief history of the tiny Island of Nauru, which offers us a useful warning against the extractivist logic of the industrial era.
Few places on earth embody the suicidal results of building our economies on polluting extraction more graphically than Nauru. Thanks to its mining of phosphate, Nauru has spent the last century disappearing from the inside out; now, thanks to our collective mining of fossil fuels, it is disappearing from the outside in: I covered this in a previous post – The Island of Nauru…..
Chapter One – Climate-Change Proves that Neoliberal Policies are Killing the Planet and Us With It – thus Neoliberals Deny Climate Change in Order to Cling on to Power.
Neoliberals know full well that our global economy is created by and reliant on the burning of fossil fuels and that to change this requires the opposite of neoliberalism – It will require governments to intervene heavily in business – with such measures as
sweeping bans on polluting activities
deep subsidies for green alternatives
pricey penalties for violations
new taxes
new public works programmes
reversals of privatisations.
There is however, little motivation for neoliberals to adopt climate change policies because climate change will affect the poor more than the rich…
For starters, in the wealthier countries we will be able to protect our cities from the effects of sea level rise with expensive flood barriers, and then there’s the fact that climate change will affect poor countries in the South more than rich countries in the North.
And more drastically, in the words of Naomi Klein….
‘Since people who scare Americans are unlucky to live in poor, hot places, climate change will cook them, leaving the United States to rise like a phoenix from the flames of global warming.’
So instead of changing anything, neoliberals have established institutions which fund people to do research which counters the overwhelming (97%) scientific consensus that climate change exists.
The premier institute for doing this is The Heartland Institute, which hosts annual gatherings of climate change deniers, during which little serious scientific debate takes place, with the most popular speakers being right-wing (neoliberal) ideologues who present the issue of climate change as a hoax being perpetuated by the left in order to force people into giving up their high-consumption lifestyles.**
Worryingly, these think tanks seem to be very influential in shaping public opinion – A 2007 Harris poll found that 71% of Americans believed that the continued burning of fossil fuels would alter the climate. By 2009 the figure had dropped to 51%. In June 2011, to 44%. This is one of the largest shifts in a short period of time seen in public opinion in recent years.
Two Possible Futures…
Klein believes that we have a choice….
If we stay on the road we are on, we will get the big corporate, big military, big engineering responses to climate change – the world of a tiny group of big corporate winners and armies of locked-out losers that we have imagined in virtually every account of our dystopic future, from Mad Max to The Children of Men, to The Hunger Games, to Elysium.
Or we can choose to heed climate change’s planetary wake-up call and change course and steer away not just from the emissions cliff but from the logic which brought us that precipice.
That means laying out a vision of the world that competes direclty with neoliberalism….. that resonates deeply with the majority of the people on the planet because it is true: that we are not apart from nature, but of it. That acting collectively for a greater good is not suspect, and that such common projects for responsible for our species’ greatest accomplishments. That greed must be tempered by both rule and example. That poverty amidst plenty is unconscionable.
** That their position on climate-change is not objective is suggested by four facts:
Transnational Corporations which are responsible for climate change (and so benefit from it) such as Koch and ExxonMobil fund such think tanks, to the tune of almost $1bn a year.
Many of the companies funding climate change denial are at the same time insuring themselves heavily against the future consequences of climate change.
A 2013 study by political scientist Peter Jacques found that 72% of climate denial books, mostly published since the 1990s, were linked to right-wing think tanks such as the Heartland Institute.
One’s political outlook predicts one’s views on climate change more so than anything else – only 11% of Americans with hierarchical/ individualistic (right-wing) worldviews rate climate change as high risk, while 69% of those with egalitarian and communitarian worldviews rate it as high risk.)