In October 2018 the world’s leading climate scientists on the IPCCC warned that there is only a dozen years for global warming to be kept to a maximum of 1.5C, beyond which even half a degree will significantly worsen the risks of drought, floods, extreme heat and poverty for hundreds of millions of people. The Guardian covered this story under the headline:
Urgent changes needed to cut risk of extreme heat, drought, floods and poverty, says IPCC
and also offered readers, perhaps feeling overwhelmed by the scale of the challenge in addressing climate change, something positive that they could do, with the link:
This mixing of reporting with suggested actions for readers to take, shows how the Guardian is taking a responsible stance in relation to this news story and others, and to what the Guardian now terms Global Heating. To directly quote The Guardian on this:
As the climate crisis escalates...
… the Guardian will not stay quiet. This is our pledge: we will continue to give global heating, wildlife extinction and pollution the urgent attention and prominence they demand. The Guardian recognises the climate emergency as the defining issue of our times.
(referenced at the top of this post) points to the upcoming COP 26 to be held in Glasgow in November 2020, as an opportunity for citizens in the UK to organise, in order to exert maximum pressure on politicians, and to hold them accountable.
She writes:
Last year, people across the world took to the streets to demand governments act to slash greenhouse gas emissions.
Did you watch and wonder what you could do to help the global climate movement?
If so, this year presents a remarkable opportunity. With the 26th Conference of the Parties UN climate conference taking place in Glasgow this November, there has never been a better time to add your voice to those calling for urgent action to end our reliance on fossil fuels, cut greenhouse gases and protect the planet from global heating.
At COP 26, world leaders will be under huge pressure to come up with an international, united and effective response to the climate emergency. Those involved in the recent wave of climate action believe much can be done beforehand to ensure nations take effective action. “There is no doubt 2020 is going to be a really big year,” says Kim Bryan, of the US group 350.org.“In Glasgow, nations will be expected to agree formal commitments to tackle climate change. And people pressure is really making a difference.”
And, if you want to show your support for Greta Thunberg, this Guide suggests:
Fridays for Future is the schools strikes movement Thunberg inspired. According to 350.org, which works with the movement, joining in the school strikes is one of the best ways to support her. The next day of action is 14 February.
The global movement inspired in part by the school strikes helped give Thunberg the profile to speak at the UN, says Bryan (of the US group 350.org). “Building this movement, growing it, making sure it has more profile and drives more action is important in the coming year.”
A key month is April, when there will be three days of action across the world, including a global strike and a rebellion led by XR.
Are there groups that ensure BME and indigenous voices are heard?
This Guardian Guide says:
Finding a group that embraces diversity may be hard. Craig Bennett, chief executive of Friends of the Earth, has warned of the environmental movement becoming stuck in “a white middle-class ghetto”.
That said, Daze Aghaji of XR youth recommends her own organisation, “because we are extremely diverse. We have really worked on this because we know that XR was coming under criticism over lack of diversity. We are creating bonds with activists in the global south, and we are taking on topics that are hard to talk about, like mental health and climate change.”
Bola, meanwhile, says that people of colour should join local groups where they feel comfortable doing so, and that many grassroots groups in metropolitan areas are more diverse and representative of society.
Clare Rodger of the UK Student Climate Network says: “There is more that we could be doing to make sure that everyone is equally valued and listened to. This includes encouraging more boys to get involved in the climate justice movement.”
This is an important, and perhaps crucial area of concern, vital to the creation of a unified response to those interests maintaining the existing environmentally unsustainable status quo.
The mainstream transatlantic left has been acting different lately. Having been subsumed into third-way politics for several decades, it seems we are growing back some teeth in our bite on the big systemic issues of today. From Labour calling for a national climate emergency, to prominent Democrat congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez declaring capitalism “irredeemable” – we are slowly unzipping ourselves from the straitjacket of incrementalist politics. The left has a new centre, and it’s not messing about.
It is nonetheless critical to ground these struggles in their long history. Indeed, many post-independence struggles in the global south have been struggles against capitalism and the political and ecological injustices it produces. Take climate change. We are finally seeing something of a start to the kind of mass mobilisation and political will needed to rise to the challenge. Most importantly, Labour’s successful call to declare a national climate emergency marks a well overdue shift from the idea we can solve this by changing individual behaviours, in which climate change becomes the responsibility of working-class people who just need to behave themselves – eat less meat, use fewer plastic bags, have fewer kids. If real action follows, the move signifies promising recognition that this crisis requires rapid, large-scale political action and systemic change – and it is the companies and institutions responsible for the crisis that need to pay.
It is nonetheless critical to ground these struggles in their long history. Indeed, many post-independence struggles in the global south have been struggles against capitalism and the political and ecological injustices it produces. Take climate change. We are finally seeing something of a start to the kind of mass mobilisation and political will needed to rise to the challenge. Most importantly, Labour’s successful call to declare a national climate emergency marks a well overdue shift from the idea we can solve this by changing individual behaviours, in which climate change becomes the responsibility of working-class people who just need to behave themselves – eat less meat, use fewer plastic bags, have fewer kids. If real action follows, the move signifies promising recognition that this crisis requires rapid, large-scale political action and systemic change – and it is the companies and institutions responsible for the crisis that need to pay.
However, alongside the hope, we also need to acknowledge we are miles away from where we need to be. While our political leadership has continually acted as if rising global inequality and conflict is merely bad management of an otherwise rational system, communities in the global south and indigenous populations have been giving their blood, sweat and tears to resist an economic system that puts profit above people and planet. Whether it’s Ken Saro-Wiwa, who was murdered in his struggle to break the political bond between Shell and the Nigerian government, or the 1977 Egyptian bread riots, in which hundreds were killed resisting the IMF-mandated neoliberalisation of the economy, the connection between capitalism as a system and its injustices is something the global majority is well-versed in.
This isn’t limited to popular movements – governments across Latin America and the Pacific Islands have harboured an organised resistance to the manifold ways in which global capitalism poses an existential threat to the lives and livelihoods of millions. Many of these efforts have not only been ignored, but actively sabotaged by US and European state leaders. This history of resistance does not emerge from some kind mystic internal knowledge held by black and brown people. It is down to the material fact of white supremacy, which means the brutalities of neoliberalism have been felt in their most extreme by what we call “developing countries”. The IPCC report declaring us to be in “decade zero” was not a shock in Dominica, where a single hurricane set back development by a generation. Or in Pakistan, where the 2015 heatwave claimed 2,000 lives. 1.5C might seem like new science to us, but the chant “1.5C to stay alive” has been screamed from across the global south for years.
However, a certain colonial mindset sees many of these struggles as heavily localised; as part of the pathological conflict of black and brown people, rather than politically salient movements we could do with learning from. And this can be seen in the framing of the US and UK as “leading” the fight against neoliberal capitalism and climate change. Not only is this historically wrong, but it risks sabotaging the very aims of our movement going forward.
We certainly have a role in the urgent action required to face up to the crisis. We must contribute our fair share to the global effort to stay under 1.5C warming. This means no more incrementalism: it means immediately dismantling the neo-colonial role played by our energy companies throughout the world; contributing our fair share to the global transfer of wealth needed for mitigation programmes in the global south, and breaking the political bond between the City of London and the fossil fuel industry. It also means radically changing the role we play in global climate negotiations, which has historically been one of talking over those suffering the sharpest edge of climate chaos. These negotiations need to be democratised, legally binding and a space in which we listen, learn and then take action.
This means understanding that any “Green New Deal” or “green industrial revolution” cannot be bound within our nation’s borders, or prioritise the wellbeing of westerners over black and brown lives in the rest of the world. As we make these moves towards climate emergency, it is important that progressives do not internalise the colonial principles that got us in this mess, either by simply ignoring the global historical context of resistance to emergency issues, or even actively arguing we should under-develop “Bombay” to deliver growth in Wigan. Indeed, the industrial revolution was financed and sustained by the blood money and infrastructure of slavery and colonialism; a “green” version of this is no better.
By centring ourselves in the resistance to neoliberal capitalism and ecological crisis, we will likely repeat the mistakes of the past. A “green colonialism” or “socialist imperialism” is no victory worth claiming, and it is the default left position if we do not actively fight for a different vision. We must come into this space not as self-appointed leaders, but figures of solidarity. We are the last to join the party – let’s not behave once again like the world’s policeman and have it shut down before it’s even begun.
Building a coalition to create a Green New Deal?
The "Left", for lack of a better term for progressive politics, seems to have a default tendency to fragment, forming fractions in the face of a potential unity, and in many instances, tending towards "factionalism". This is a highly dysfunctional tendency in the face of an organised and resourced "Right".
Right wing interests have successfully utilized all and every aspect of contemporary communication media to render "socialism", as a progressive political and economic project, totally toxic!
. . . and in the UK Brexit has become a fantastic distraction from what is truly important!
Rebecca Long-Bailey launched the political manifesto for a Green New Deal in the Guardian (Sat 27 April 2019). She says:
Earlier in April, and preceding these political initiatives, a pink boat with TELL THE TRUTH emblazoned on its hull, and occupying the centre of London's main shopping district, changed the narrative.
The siege of the Berta Cáceres started started shortly after noon when police in high-vis jackets surrounded the bright pink boat in Oxford Circus, central London, with two cordons and then steadily peeled off the Extinction Rebellion activists stuck to it.
Officers with angle grinders cut through the bars below the hull of the vessel, named after the murdered Honduran environmental activist, which protesters had chained and glued themselves to. Five hours later, however, the tables had turned as hundreds of activist reinforcements swarmed into side roads and blocked the end of Regent Street.
As officers attached the Berta Cáceres to a lorry, the crowd chanted: “We have more boats.”
The pink boat has been captured, and almost 700 people have been arrested, but the Extinction Rebellion protests in London have entered their sixth day.
The environmentalist group kick-started its flamboyant direct actions on Monday, blocking vehicle traffic in Marble Arch and Waterloo Bridge, holding a non-stop demonstration in Parliament Square, and occupying Oxford Circus with the aforementioned pink boat (reinvented as an improvised DJ-set-cum-pulpit). The boat, named after murdered Honduran environmentalist Berta Cáceres, was eventually towed away by the police on Friday evening.
Q. Did something change?
A. Yes, but we are still stuck in a global political and economic system that will not respond to the crisis.
Today, George Monbiot in the Guardian, writes about the opportunities that flow from the science of creating food from water. An alternative to traditional farming, where"farmfree production promises a far more stable and reliable food supply that can be grown anywhere, even in countries without farmland. It could be crucial to ending world hunger. But there is a hitch: a clash between consumer and producer interests. Many millions of people, working in farming and food processing, will eventually lose their jobs. Because the new processes are so efficient, the employment they create won’t match the employment they destroy." A documentary film on his investigations is shown later today on Channel 4.
Channel 4 documentary “Apocalypse Cow: How Meat Killed the Planet” could change the way some environmentalists see meat.
Presented by vegan environmentalist George Monbiot, the documentary explores how animal agriculture is linked to climate change.
The program reveals meat production’s ongoing ecological destruction and cites lab-grown meat as its most likely replacement. Monbiot suggests creating this technology free from patents in order to maximize its impact and allow wider distribution.
Apocalypse Cow: How Meat Killed the Planet aired on Channel 4 last week and is currently available to stream on All 4.
In the Guardian Opinion piece he writes:
It sounds like a miracle, but no great technological leaps were required. In a commercial lab on the outskirts of Helsinki, I watched scientists turn water into food. Through a porthole in a metal tank, I could see a yellow froth churning. It’s a primordial soup of bacteria, taken from the soil and multiplied in the laboratory, using hydrogen extracted from water as its energy source. When the froth was siphoned through a tangle of pipes and squirted on to heated rollers, it turned into a rich yellow flour.
This flour is not yet licensed for sale. But the scientists, working for a company called Solar Foods, were allowed to give me some while filming our documentary Apocalypse Cow. I asked them to make me a pancake: I would be the first person on Earth, beyond the lab staff, to eat such a thing. They set up a frying pan in the lab, mixed the flour with oat milk, and I took my small step for man. It tasted … just like a pancake.
A technology arrives - just in time?
George Monbiot's Opinion piece continues:
The hydrogen pathway used by Solar Foods is about 10 times as efficient as photosynthesis. But because only part of a plant can be eaten, while the bacterial flour is mangetout, you can multiply that efficiency several times. And because it will be brewed in giant vats the land efficiency, the company estimates, is roughly 20,000 times greater. Everyone on Earth could be handsomely fed, and using a tiny fraction of its surface. If, as the company intends, the water used in the process (which is much less than required by farming) is electrolysed with solar power, the best places to build these plants will be deserts.
We are on the cusp of the biggest economic transformation, of any kind, for 200 years. While arguments rage about plant- versus meat-based diets, new technologies will soon make them irrelevant. Before long, most of our food will come neither from animals nor plants, but from unicellular life. After 12,000 years of feeding humankind, all farming except fruit and veg production is likely to be replaced by ferming: brewing microbes through precision fermentation. This means multiplying particular micro-organisms, to produce particular products, in factories.I know some people will be horrified by this prospect. I can see some drawbacks. But I believe it comes in the nick of time.
Several impending disasters are converging on our food supply, any of which could be catastrophic. Climate breakdown threatens to cause what scientists call “multiple breadbasket failures”, through synchronous heatwaves and other impacts. The UN forecasts that by 2050 feeding the world will require a 20% expansion in agriculture’s global water use. But water use is already maxed out in many places: aquifers are vanishing, rivers are failing to reach the sea. The glaciers that supply half the population of Asia are rapidly retreating. Inevitable global heating – due to greenhouse gases already released – is likely to reduce dry season rainfall in critical areas, turning fertile plains into dustbowls.
A global soil crisis threatens the very basis of our subsistence, as great tracts of arable land lose their fertility through erosion, compaction and contamination. Phosphate supplies, crucial for agriculture, are dwindling fast. Insectageddon threatens catastrophic pollination failures. It is hard to see how farming can feed us all even until 2050, let alone to the end of the century and beyond.
Food production is ripping the living world apart. Fishing and farming are, by a long way, the greatest cause of extinction and loss of the diversity and abundance of wildlife. Farming is a major cause of climate breakdown, the biggest cause of river pollution and a hefty source of air pollution. Across vast tracts of the world’s surface, it has replaced complex wild ecosystems with simplified human food chains. Industrial fishing is driving cascading ecological collapse in seas around the world. Eating is now a moral minefield, as almost everything we put in our mouths – from beef to avocados, cheese to chocolate, almonds to tortilla chips, salmon to peanut butter – has an insupportable environmental cost.
But just as hope appeared to be evaporating, the new technologies I call farmfree food create astonishing possibilities to save both people and planet. Farmfree food will allow us to hand back vast areas of land and sea to nature, permitting rewilding and carbon drawdown on a massive scale. It means an end to the exploitation of animals, an end to most deforestation, a massive reduction in the use of pesticides and fertiliser, the end of trawlers and longliners. It’s our best hope of stopping what some have called the “sixth great extinction”, but I prefer to call the great extermination. And, if it’s done right, it means cheap and abundant food for everyone.
Research by the thinktank RethinkX suggests that proteins from precision fermentation will be around 10 times cheaper than animal protein by 2035. The result, it says, will be the near-complete collapse of the livestock industry. The new food economy will “replace an extravagantly inefficient system that requires enormous quantities of inputs and produces huge amounts of waste with one that is precise, targeted, and tractable”. Using tiny areas of land, with a massively reduced requirement for water and nutrients, it “presents the greatest opportunity for environmental restoration in human history”.
Not only will food be cheaper, it will also be healthier. Because farmfree foods will be built up from simple ingredients, rather than broken down from complex ones, allergens, hard fats and other unhealthy components can be screened out. Meat will still be meat, though it will be grown in factories on collagen scaffolds, rather than in the bodies of animals. Starch will still be starch, fats will still be fats. But food is likely to be better, cheaper and much less damaging to the living planet.
It might seem odd for someone who has spent his life calling for political change to enthuse about a technological shift. But nowhere on Earth can I see sensible farm policies developing. Governments provide an astonishing £560bn a year in farm subsidies, and almost all of them are perverse and destructive, driving deforestation, pollution and the killing of wildlife. Research by the Food and Land Use Coalition found that only 1% of the money is used to protect the living world. It failed to find “any examples of governments using their fiscal instruments to directly support the expansion of supply of healthier and more nutritious food.”
Nor is the mainstream debate about farming taking us anywhere, except towards further catastrophe. There’s a widespread belief that the problem is intensive farming, and the answer is extensification (producing less food per hectare). It’s true that intensive farming is highly damaging, but extensive farming is even worse. Many people are rightly concerned about urban sprawl. But agricultural sprawl – which covers a much wider area – is a far greater threat to the natural world. Every hectare of land used by farming is a hectare not used for wildlife and complex living systems.
A paper in Nature suggests that, per kilo of food produced, extensive farming causes greater greenhouse gas emissions, soil loss, water use and nitrogen and phosphate pollution than intensive farming. If everyone ate pasture-fed meat, we would need several new planets on which to produce it.
Farmfree production promises a far more stable and reliable food supply that can be grown anywhere, even in countries without farmland. It could be crucial to ending world hunger. But there is a hitch: a clash between consumer and producer interests. Many millions of people, working in farming and food processing, will eventually lose their jobs. Because the new processes are so efficient, the employment they create won’t match the employment they destroy.
RethinkX envisages an extremely rapid “death spiral” in the livestock industry. Only a few components, such as the milk proteins casein and whey, need to be produced through fermentation for profit margins across an entire sector to collapse. Dairy farming in the United States, it claims, will be “all but bankrupt by 2030”. It believes that the American beef industry’s revenues will fall by 90% by 2035.
While I doubt the collapse will be quite that fast, in one respect the thinktank underestimates the scale of the transformation. It fails to mention the extraordinary shift taking place in feedstock production to produce alternatives to plant products, of the kind pioneered in Helsinki. This is likely to hit arable farming as hard as cultured milk and meat production will hit livestock farming. Solar Foods thinks its products could reach cost parity with the world’s cheapest form of protein (soya from South America) within five years. Instead of pumping ever more subsidies into a dying industry, governments should be investing in helping farmers into other forms of employment, while providing relief funds for those who will suddenly lose their livelihoods.
Another hazard is the potential concentration of the farmfree food industry. We should strongly oppose the patenting of key technologies, to ensure the widest possible distribution of ownership. If governments regulate this properly, they could break the hegemony of the massive companies that now control global food commodities. If they don’t, they could reinforce it. In this sector, as in all others, we need strong anti-trust laws. We must also ensure that the new foods always have lower carbon footprints than the old ones: farmfree producers should power their operations entirely from low-carbon sources. This is a time of momentous choices, and we should make them together.
We can’t afford to wait passively for technology to save us. Over the next few years we could lose almost everything, as magnificent habitats such as the rainforests of Madagascar, West Papua and Brazil are felled to produce cattle, soya or palm oil. By temporarily shifting towards a plant-based diet with the lowest possible impacts (no avocados or out-of-season asparagus), we can help buy the necessary time to save magnificent species and places while these new technologies mature. But farmfree food offers hope where hope was missing. We will soon be able to feed the world without devouring it.
A backstory . . . In 2018 George Monbiot had an opinion piece published (Fri 8 Jun 2018) by the Guardian headlined:
Whether human beings survive this century and the next, whether other lifeforms can live alongside us: more than anything, this depends on the way we eat. We can cut our consumption of everything else almost to zero and still we will drive living systems to collapse, unless we change our diets.
Whether human beings survive this century and the next, whether other lifeforms can live alongside us: more than anything, this depends on the way we eat. We can cut our consumption of everything else almost to zero and still we will drive living systems to collapse, unless we change our diets.
All the evidence now points in one direction: the crucial shift is from an animal- to a plant-based diet. A paper published last week in Science reveals that while some kinds of meat and dairy production are more damaging than others, all are more harmful to the living world than growing plant protein. It shows that animal farming takes up 83% of the world’s agricultural land, but delivers only 18% of our calories. A plant-based diet cuts the use of land by 76% and halves the greenhouse gases and other pollution that are caused by food production.
Over the last decade there has been a surge in land acquisitions within developing countries by capitalists in developed countries, and to a degree not seen since the colonial era in the 15th century, when Spain and Portugal conquered and subjugated lands and peoples in the western and eastern "Indies".
This fact introduces an IMF working paper, the first to provide both theoretical and empirical evidence of farmland globalization whereby international investors directly acquire large tracts of agricultural land in other countries,The Globalization of Farmland: Theory and Empirical Evidence, and authored in 2018 by Rabah Arezki, Christian Bogmans, and Harris Selod.
Their paper begins thus:
Transnational acquisitions of land raise important questions regarding food security and economic development. Looking back in history, the surge in land acquisitions over the past decade brings back memories from the colonial era. In the 15th century, Portugal and Spain, the then most advanced maritime powers, conquered a large number of countries around the world and subsequently secured control over these countries’ land resources and their subjugated populations. Subsequent colonial empires included the French, British, Dutch and Japanese, who also imposed their rules on foreign territories and controlled vast swathes of land. These invasions led to a dramatic expansion of global trade in natural resources and agricultural products, as well as in slaves and indentured servants to work on plantations.
Most recently, following the 2007-2008 spike in food prices, there has been a booming interest in the direct acquisition of farmland in developing and emerging markets, often involving multinational companies and foreign governments. The recent expansion in the globalization of farmland has led to a polarized debate between those welcoming foreign investments, hoping they will help raise agricultural land yields and alleviate poverty, and those who see the phenomenon as a “land grab” (Financial Times, 2016 and Bloomberg, 2017). The present paper is the first to provide both theoretical and empirical evidence of this new wave of investments, which marks a new trend towards the globalization of farmland.
The increased interest of international investors to acquire farmland is part of a broader set of developments that are changing the nature of commercial agriculture at the global scale. These include the increased importance of multinational companies and foreign direct investment in promoting sectoral growth, and a more prominent role for global value chains in expanding food supply (Maertens and Swinnen, 2015). In this ongoing process of agricultural globalization, the volume of international trade in agricultural commodities increased almost five-fold in a period of three decades, from about $200 billion in 1980 to almost $1.1 trillion in 2010, the largest growth recorded by any sector in that period.
Interestingly, the acquisition of large tracts of land by private investors and sovereign wealth funds coincides with the rising demand for food associated with rising incomes and growing populations. This rising interest in farmland suggests that globalization has entered a new phase, one that is defined by the integration of pristine land in developing countries into the world economy. According to Collier and Venables (2012), this transition has parallels with China’s process of economic development. Like the increase in foreign investment into China driven by its abundance of labor, the sudden shift in the foreign acquisition of land in Africa and elsewhere may have been triggered by large spatial differences in factor productivity. But there are also significant differences between the globalization of China’s cheap labor and the globalization of farmland.
In this joint publication from GRAIN and the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP) the point is made that:
The world’s biggest meat and dairy companies could surpass ExxonMobil, Shell and BP as the world’s biggest climate polluters within the next few decades. At a time when the planet must dramatically reduce its greenhouse gas emissions, these global animal protein giants are driving consumption by ramping up production and exports. GRAIN and IATP examined the world’s largest 35 companies and found that most are not reporting their GHG emissions data and few have set targets that could reduce their overall emissions. We need to urgently build food systems that meet the needs of farmers, consumers and the planet. But to do so, we must break the power of the big meat and dairy conglomerates and hold them to account for their supersized climate footprint.
On Thursday 25th April George Monbiot, as featured in this post on the environmental benefits of non-farming of food production, shared with his readers an admission that:
For most of my adult life I’ve railed against “corporate capitalism”, “consumer capitalism” and “crony capitalism”. It took me a long time to see that the problem is not the adjective but the noun. While some people have rejected capitalism gladly and swiftly, I’ve done so slowly and reluctantly. Part of the reason was that I could see no clear alternative: unlike some anti-capitalists, I have never been an enthusiast for state communism. I was also inhibited by its religious status. To say “capitalism is failing” in the 21st century is like saying “God is dead” in the 19th: it is secular blasphemy. It requires a degree of self-confidence I did not possess.
But as I’ve grown older, I’ve come to recognise two things. First, that it is the system, rather than any variant of the system, that drives us inexorably towards disaster. Second, that you do not have to produce a definitive alternative to say that capitalism is failing. The statement stands in its own right. But it also demands another, and different, effort to develop a new system.
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