Knowing ourselves: The Core of Green Political Philosophy

In ancient times the words inscribed in the forecourt to the temple of Apollo at Delphi were: “Know thyself”. Part of the meaning of this aphorism was that we should know that we are mortal men and women, not gods, and behave accordingly. The ancient Greeks condemned the arrogance which they called hubris.

In later centuries Europe adopted a different faith whose god gave man dominion over all living creatures as if he was not one of them. This faith, like the other Abrahamic religions, stressed the special nature of humanity and saw the right goal of humanity as something apart from the everyday world and often to be achieved only after death.

Yet we are living creatures – specifically mammals – and we share the planet with millions of other species. And we do, more than most species, need food, warmth and shelter. This is at once a commonplace of country living and the message of modern science which sees us as one species, evolved from others and connected to others. New research shows these connections to be more intimate than we thought. For instance, our health depends on that of the bacteria that we all carry in our guts.

This ecological understanding is the basis of all Green philosophy. It has some direct implications:

1.     We are part of nature and not apart from it.

2.     We have no moral right to grab the lion’s share of the land, sea and air.

3.     We owe respect to other species and should value them for their own sakes.

4.     Since we depend on other species in many ways – probably more than we yet understand – we should protect the living world for our sake as well as its own.

The green philosophy has consequences for how we live and work and for our politics for all of them have to be decided in the wider context that it gives us. That context sets some limits and its immediately apparent that we have greatly overstepped the those limits, showing the hubris deplored by the Greeks. This is obvious from our destruction of the rainforests, from the number of species recently made extinct or threatened with extinction, from the still growing greenhouse gas emissions that drive climate change and even from the increased congestion in so many major cities.

Now Greens differ in how they understand these follies. Some point to increasing population as the ultimate cause. Yet our impacts on the rest of nature have, in recent decades, increased much faster than our population. In this period it is increasing prosperity that has multiplied our impacts.

Others blame the greed of individuals for consumer goods. Yet much of the world’s consumption is for ordinary things. It does not seem greedy to want a fridge, a house or a car and the impacts are only unsustainable because there are so many of us to want them and because our industry is so wasteful.

Still other Greens blame the greed of industrialists and bankers. Now there are certainly industrialists and bankers who are greedy, irresponsible and corrupt. But even the most honest are constrained by a financial system that demands ever-increasing sales and profits. Industrialists and bankers who don’t deliver will soon cease to be industrialists or bankers. And this system is itself bolstered by newspapers, universities and governments many of which are subject to similar pressures or are simply the paid agents of the corporate world. Nor must we forget that for most of the last 25 years most politicians and commentators in the developed world have sincerely believed that the ‘capitalist’ system was the best possible economic system.

Arguing about blame can be fun but it can easily be a distraction from the real question: What shall we do about the problems? Some answers are obvious:

·       We need to stop the most environmentally destructive activities.

·       We should discourage population growth and must find ways of supporting an aging population.

·       We need to make industry less wasteful. In particular we must cut back greenhouse gas emissions sharply. We may need to actively remove such gases from the atmosphere.

·       We must free the economic system from the tyranny of growth targets.

We have to be honest about the implications of the last two. They imply a fundamental restructuring of the economy and of the governance of major corporations so as to reduce the rights of shareholders and increase those of workers and the community. Also, some way has to be found to represent the interests of the rest of nature and of future human generations in public and corporate decision-making. This will be a revolution – though not the one that traditional Marxists talk about.

They also imply a real reduction in the amount of economic activity dedicated to providing people in the developed world with goods and services. We can take up part of this reduction by producing fewer but longer-lasting products. Even so, we in the West will get poorer in material terms. This is necessary both to reduce total impacts and to give the world’s poorer people a fairer share of the planet’s bounty.

Now the citizens of the developed countries will not accept this unless they are persuaded of the need and that they will get some benefit. Happily some benefits – more leisure, better health, greater well-being from greater equality and stronger communities – are entirely consistent with consuming fewer goods and services. And those are the benefits that matter most in a Green philosophy.

So here we have one of those happy coincidences that are so rare in politics. The very policies that are needed to moderate our impact on the rest of nature – social justice, shorter working hours, stronger community institutions – are policies that most Greens already believe in for their own sakes.

The ecological understanding of the relationship between humanity and the rest of nature lies at the centre of Green politics. It is both the most important and the most distinctive feature of our politics. But it is not and must not be the whole of our politics. There is room for the traditional values of community and mutual respect. And there is room for the enlightenment values of equality, liberty and reason.

There is not and perhaps will never be a Green creed or a universal Green political programme. Either would be a recipe for tyranny. Healthy Green politics consists precisely in the interplay of our knowledge and values in the light of our ecological perspective. And that is stronger than the ideologies of left and right which must always suppress truth and dissent in the interests of political purity.

Climate change threat to one third of species

In a previous post I commented on one aspect of the threat world trade poses to amphibians. Now there's evidence that climate change poses an greater threat to birds, corals and amphibians.

A team of scientists at the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) has assessed species as at  risk if their climate is changing, they are vulnerable to the changes and they are unable to adapt or relocate. The proportion of species they find to be at risk are:

• Birds              24 to 50%.
• Amphibians   22 to 44%
• Corals            15 to 32%.

Many of these species, and most of the bird species rated at risk, are considered safe by the Red Book - the usual reference for such judgements - so we now need to treat all Red Book assessments as optimistic.

Commenting on these results Chris Thomas of the University of York said "the conservation programme you might need to put in place [is] mind-boggling". But this, as he surely knows, is fantasy. Nither the money, nor the will nor the land needed are available. We can keep the threatened species only if we put a stop to climate change.

Water in the Desert: A Tale from Mali

The River Niger is a geographical oddity. It starts in the hills of Guinea then runs away from the coast into Mali, finally reaching the ocean thousands of miles later.

Each year seasonal flows flood the wetlands near Mopti in Mali, creating a rich ecosystem that feeds fish, migrating birds, cattle and some 1.5 million people who live there. Not, perhaps, for much longer.

Fred Pearce has reported two threats to this ecosystem. Upriver from the wetlands engineers are diverting water from the river to create, by irrigation, new farmlands; farmlands that the government of Mali has given to foreign companies. In 2012 the proportion of river water averaged 8%, but went as high as 70% during the dry season. According to Lansana Keita, the engineer in charge, the barrage is supposed to release at least 40 cubic meters per secoind at all times but sometimes doesn't: "We do our best, but irrigation has priority."So far the wetland area has been reduced by 600 square kilometers and fish yields have fallen. The government of Mali plans a tenfold expansion in new commercial farmlands. Irrigation for this will require the whole flow of the river during the dry season.

And further upstream, in Guinea, the government plans a new hydroelectric dam. This would capture most of the wet season flow. According to dutch hydrologist Leo Zwarts, who has modelled the effects, the combined effect will be to dry out the wetlands about every four years creating poverty, starvation and driving more than a million people off the land.

There's an obvious precedent for this - the Aral Sea. The sea lost 80% of its volume between 1960 and 1998 due to diversion of water for agriculture. The results for pollution, health and losses of livelihoods and biodiversity that have been horrible and widely reported. We might have hoped that the government of Mali and its foreign partners would have noted the lessons. Yet Jane Madgwick, head of Wetlands International, has described the likely results for Malean wetlands as a “human catastrophe as vicious and shameful as the drainage of the Aral Sea". 

Finally (I think) we should note that the mighty river Niger does not end in Mali. What about the downstream users?

When the River Niger leaves Mali it flows into Niger and then into Nigeria. (You can tell its importance from the country names can't you? It's the largest river in both countries!) What will be the consequences for them? And what might they do to avoid those consequences?

Comments
This is a depressing tale with a number of lessons:

• Intensive commercial farming and irrigation schemes may increase food production in a country. Much of the extra food, and profit, will be exported making the local benefits somewhat uncertain and likely to accrue to the local elites.
• They may create poverty and hardship for existing farmers, fishers and herders. These people are unlikely to be compensated for their losses.
• We should therefore be highly skeptical of plans to address Africa's problems by encouraging large-scale commercial farming.
• These problems are not specific to either capitalist or state socialist systems. They reflect drives for status, profit and production that are found in all economic systems plus the fact that national planners are remote from the people and places most affected and are unconstrained by an effective political system.

Has the US cut its emissions?

You may have seen reports that US greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions fell 3.8% last year; they were all over the media last week. The fall since 2005 is said to be 12%. The main factor driving the fall is a switch from coal to natural gas due, in turn, to the availability of cheap gas from fracking (shale gas) though the recession has also contributed.

That’s good news – but nothing like as good as it looks.

The emissions numbers count gas burnt but ignore gas lost during extraction and transfer to users (Wall Street Journal (18/4/13, http://tinyurl.com/WSJ-US-GHG). Since natural gas is mainly methane and methane is much worse for the climate than CO₂ (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_gas) it takes only a little methane leakage to offset that saving in CO₂ emissions.

To see how much we have to set a timescale and I choose 20 years because that is the critical period for addressing climate change. If we have not solved it well within that period it will be a lost cause.

Because methane is such a potent greenhouse gas there will only be a saving of greenhouse gas emissions relative to coal if leakage is less than 0.7%. In 2011 Robert Howarth and co-workers at Cornell University estimated the leakage in the US at 3.6% to 7.9%, exclusive of accidents. They conclude that switching from coal to shale gas will increase the greenhouse effect of this fuel use by a factor of 1.2 to 2 over 20 years! The effect over 100 years is roughly zero.

Suppose that half of the apparent fall in greenhouse gas emissions was due to a switch from coal to shale gas (which is plausible).  Then the 12% reduction in CO₂ would imply that the reduction in total greenhouse gas emissions has been somewhere between 5% and nothing. 

The switch from coal to shale gas is not a solution to the problem of climate change and has no part to play unless the leakage can be very greatly reduced and the other environmental effects eliminated. 

Nor is that the end of the bad news – unlike the policy-driven reductions we seek the US reduction is price-driven and is therefore not locked in. Specifically:

• Part of the GHG reduction is due to the recession and will likely be reversed as the recession ends.
• Natural gas prices have been rising so US users have begun to switch back to coal.

Finally, low gas prices in the US have led the US to export the coal it would otherwise have burnt – mostly to Europe!

Fossil fuels are a global market and local prices falls will only increase fuel usage. We can only reduce GHG emissions if we raise the price of fossil fuel.

Nasty but necessary.

Good News 4: Heat pumps and heating schemes

New Scientist (13 April 2013, p 30-33) reports a number of related initiatives based on ground-source heat pumps. The Vancouver Olympic Village meets 70% of space and water heating needs from heat pumped from untreated sewage whilst in Helsinki ground-source heat warms 93% of the city's heated spaces.

The UK, as always, drags behind with only 172,000 homes are warmed this way even though half the country's heat load is in areas where district heating would be viable.

Lots of opportunities then.

Another nail in the climate coffin

Japan has started drilling into deposits of methane hydrate off its eastern coast. The deposits are thought to contain enough methane to power Japan for a hundred years. That's probably enough to push the world's climate over the edge.

Source: New Scientist  9/3/13 p 12-13.

The Deniers' Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

It's been obvious for years that climate change deniers are not motivated by respect for evidence but by something else; almost certainly hostility to the policies that they suppose to be needed to stop climate change. Last week New Scientist's Feedback column gave a rare insight into this hostility. It reports the hostility of various US local authorities and right-wing pressure groups to the UN because, to quote one, it has a plan to "destroy the sovereignty of the United States of America".

Of course, that sounds like arrant nonsense. But is it?

The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change was signed in 1992. It aimed to to stabilise greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent catastrophic climate change. That, we now see, was about 25 years before the date by which those concentrations needed to reach their peak. If the nations had acted promptly there would have been enough time to solve the problem by a judicious mixture of carbon taxes, permit trading, investment in renewables, low-energy building design, etc. This would have been demanding and mistakes would have been made. But there would have been time to correct them in ways that are quite normal in a democratic society. Nothing in this required a transition to a command economy; indeed many corporations would now be enjoying healthy profits from low-carbon investments.

There are many reasons that this did not happen and opposition by right-wing American groups is just one, though an important one.

But look at the consequences of this opposition.

We are now past the point at which the ordinary processes of democratic politics and international negotiation can solve the problem. So either the problem will go unsolved or it will be solved by some nation or group imposing a solution, as in my Emergency Braking scenario.

If it's unsolved catastrophe will follow. Climate zones will move north, extreme weather events become more common, etc. The US will probably become unable to feed its population and will certainly be unable to sustain its current standard of living. Latino immigration will increase whilst the rich and the smart relocate to Canada. Since similar changes will happen throughout the world resource wars will increase and the US will likely be forced to support the UN in controlling them.

But effective action will create some similar demands. Since geo-engineering will be part of the solution - the time for less drastic measures to be sufficient having passed - and since such measures have global effects there will be pressures to bring these measures under international control.

Thus those who oppose effective action on climate change because it would undermine US influence will have made it likely that the US is ultimately subject to foreign influence. In the circumstances I foresee this influence will not be benign and the achievements of the West in establishing democracy, human rights and the rule of law will be undermined or lost.

Some rightwing extremists may expect their cause to benefit from this. Perhaps a few plutocrats and military strongmen really will benefit. But it will undermine the values they claim to espouse.

Truly, "be careful what you wish for".