From racism to rock dust; by way of "cancel culture", a "reparations ecology" and fossil fuel subsidies; in 2020 "THE YEAR OF TRUTH"

Mixed messages . . .

. . . the visible and invisible signs!

Lewis Hamilton vows to spend life fighting racism after black power salute

Giles Richards reports for the Guardian (Sun 12 Jul 2020) on Lewis Hamilton performing the black power salute after the Styrian Grand Prix win. Giles Richards writes:

Lewis Hamilton said he is in a lifelong struggle to fight racism after he gave the black power salute following his win at the Styrian Grand Prix. Hamilton raised his right fist in the gesture made famous by the athletes Tommie Smith and John Carlos at the 1968 Olympic Games when he climbed from his car and again when he was on the podium.

“Racism is going to be here for longer than our time here,” Hamilton said. “People of colour who are subject to racism don’t have time. We have to commit to push for equality and continue to raise awareness.

“A lot of work needs to go on in F1, the FIA need to be part of it, the drivers need to be a part of it. We are going to be fighting and pushing for it all year. For me this is going to be a lifelong thing.”

Hamilton, who claimed his first victory of the season at the Red Bull Ring in Austria, is the only black driver in F1 and has been outspoken in his support for the Black Lives Matter movement since the killing of George Floyd. He had not previously given the black power salute, however.

Before the race there was another anti-racism gesture on the grid, with drivers wearing “End Racism” T-shirts, as was the case at last Sunday’s opening grand prix at the same venue, and Hamilton and 11 other drivers again took a knee. Some drivers were not present and others remained standing, with the togetherness shown in the Premier League and Test cricket absent in F1.

Mercedes are running their cars in black rather than the usual silver livery as part of their commitment to the campaign.

Hamilton insisted his stance is vital in making a difference. “There are people out there who go on the defensive, there are many people out there who say all lives matter, white lives matter, which is not what we are contending,” he said.

“It seems that people of colour for a long, long time, hundreds of years their lives seem to be less important. So it is to encourage people but some people put up a wall, put up a barrier. It is stuff that has been shielded from us at school, in our upbringing, in our communities.”

There is not yet unity among F1 drivers on whether they should take a knee before races and the Mercedes team principal, Toto Wolff, accepted their position but believed the sport had to be proactive. “We need to respect everyone’s point of view,” the Austrian said. “What we know though is not being racist but being silent is not enough.”

His Mercedes team also took a knee before the national anthems and Hamilton acknowledged their support. “We are so united,” he said. “You can see this on grid when all the team took a knee, it’s not something I asked for but it was a beautiful thing.

It doesn’t take a lot to do and maybe not changing the world but it is hopefully changing perceptions and shifting ideals.”

Vox has the story behind the iconic black power salute at the 1968 Olympics protest

Tommie Smith and John Carlos’s 1968 US national anthem protest, explained.

By Coleman Lowndes Jul 9, 2020,

The image of sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos raising their fists during a medal ceremony at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City is an enduring image of silent protest. But the key to understanding it goes beyond the black-gloved fists.

All three medal winners, including silver medalist Peter Norman of Australia, wore buttons that read “Olympic Project for Human Rights.” The Olympic Project for Human Rights (OPHR) was a coalition of prominent athletes formed in 1967 that threatened to boycott participating in the upcoming Olympic Games to draw attention to systemic racism in the United States.

The group, led by professor Harry Edwards, ultimately voted to compete in the games and hold their demonstrations there, which led to the now-iconic display on the medal stand following the men’s 200-meter final. This act got Smith and Carlos kicked off the Olympic team, but it left a lasting legacy about making political statements through sport.

In 2012 Gary Younge interviewed John Carlos for the Guardian (Fri Mar 2012) that was published in this article by Gary Younge under the headline:

The man who raised a black power salute at the 1968 Olympic Games

Under the subheading:

When John Carlos raised his fist in a black power salute at the 1968 Olympics, it changed 20th-century history – and his own life – for ever. How does he feel about it now?

Gary Younge writes:

You're probably not familiar with the name John Carlos. But you almost certainly know his image. It's 1968 at the Mexico City Olympics and the medals are being hung round the necks of Tommie Smith (USA, gold), Peter Norman (Australia, silver) and Carlos (USA, bronze). As the Star-Spangled Banner begins to play, Smith and Carlos, two black Americans wearing black gloves, raise their fists in the black power salute. It is a symbol of resistance and defiance, seared into 20th-century history, that Carlos feels he was put on Earth to perform.

"In life, there's the beginning and the end," he says. "The beginning don't matter. The end don't matter. All that matters is what you do in between – whether you're prepared to do what it takes to make change. There has to be physical and material sacrifice. When all the dust settles and we're getting ready to play down for the ninth inning, the greatest reward is to know that you did your job when you were here on the planet."

Carlos's beginning was, to say the least, eventful. Raised by two involved, working parents, he learned to hustle with his friends in Harlem and fight his way out of and into trouble. As a teenager, he used to chase Malcolm X down the street after his speeches and fire questions at him. Carlos always knew he was good at sports and originally wanted to be an Olympic swimmer, until his father broke it to him that the training facilities he needed were in private clubs for whites and the wealthy. He used to steal food from freight trains with his friends and then run with it into Harlem and hand it out to the poor. When the police gave chase, he was often the only one who never got caught. Running came so naturally, he never thought of it as a skill.

That single moment on the podium cost Carlos dear. More than four decades later, you'll find him at his desk in a spacious portable building behind the basketball courts at Palm Springs High School in California, where he works as a counsellor. Among the family photographs on the wall are the vaguest allusions to his moment in history. Pictures of Malcolm X and African-American writer Zora Neale Hurston, the pledge of allegiance, which American schoolkids must say to the flag every day, and a small poster saying Go For Gold Olympics.

For all its challenges, Carlos loves his job. "Being a counsellor, you have to talk to the children as though you're talking to a thousand people," he says. "Sometimes you say, 'I love you' and they say, 'I don't want your love' and you say, 'Well, it's out there, so you're going to have to deal with it.' And I learn a lot from them, too."

"The first thing I thought was the shackles have been broken," Carlos says, casting his mind back to how he felt in that moment. "And they won't ever be able to put shackles on John Carlos again. Because what had been done couldn't be taken back. Materially, some of us in the incarceration system are still literally in shackles. The greatest problem is we are afraid to offend our oppressors.

"I had a moral obligation to step up. Morality was a far greater force than the rules and regulations they had. God told the angels that day, 'Take a step back – I'm gonna have to do this myself.'"

The image certainly captures that sense of momentary rebellion. But what it cannot do is evoke the human sense of emotional turmoil and individual resolve that made it possible, or the collective, global gasp in response to its audacity. In his book, The John Carlos Story, in the seconds between mounting the podium and the anthem playing, Carlos writes that his mind raced from the personal to the political and back again. Among other things, he reflected on his father's pained explanation for why he couldn't become an Olympic swimmer, the segregation and consequent impoverishment of Harlem, the exhortations of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X to "be true to yourself even when it hurts", and his family. The final thought before the band started playing was, "Damn, when this thing is done, it can't be taken back.

"I know that sounds like a lot of thoughts for just a few moments standing on a podium," he writes. "But honestly this was all zigzagging through my brain like lightning bolts."

Anticipating some kind of protest was afoot, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) had sent Jesse Owens to talk them out of it. (Owens's four gold medals at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin themselves held great symbolic significance, given Hitler's belief in Aryan supremacy.) Carlos's mind was made up. When he and Smith struck their pose, Carlos feared the worst. Look at the picture and you'll see that while Smith's arm is raised long and erect, Carlos has his slightly bent at the elbow. "I wanted to make sure, in case someone rushed us, I could throw down a hammer punch," he writes. "We had just received so many threats leading up to that point, I refused to be defenceless at that moment of truth."

It was also a moment of silence. "You could have heard a frog piss on cotton. There's something awful about hearing 50,000 people go silent, like being in the eye of a hurricane."

And then came the storm. First boos. Then insults and worse. People throwing things and screaming racist abuse. "Niggers need to go back to Africa!" and, "I can't believe this is how you niggers treat us after we let you run in our games."

"The fire was all around me," Carlos recalls. The IOC president ordered Smith and Carlos to be suspended from the US team and the Olympic village. Time magazine showed the Olympic logo with the words Angrier, Nastier, Uglier, instead of Faster, Higher, Stronger. The LA Times accused them of engaging in a "Nazi-like salute".

Beyond the establishment, the resonance of the image could not be overstated. It was 1968; the black power movement had provided a post-civil rights rallying cry and the anti-Vietnam protests were gaining pace. That year, students throughout Europe, east and west, had been in revolt against war, tyranny and capitalism.

Martin Luther King had been assassinated and the US had been plunged into yet another year of race riots in its urban centres. Just a few months earlier, the Democratic party convention had been disrupted by a huge police riot against Vietnam protesters. A few weeks before the Games, scores of students and activists had been gunned down by authorities in Mexico City itself.

The sight of two black athletes in open rebellion on the international stage sent a message to both America and the world. At home, this brazen disdain for the tropes of American patriotism – flag and anthem – shifted dissidence from the periphery of American life to primetime television in a single gesture, while revealing what DuBois once termed the "essential two-ness" of the black American condition. "An American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder."

Globally, it was understood as an act of solidarity with all those fighting for greater equality, justice and human rights. Margaret Lambert, a Jewish high jumper who was forced, for show, to try out for the 1936 German Olympic team, even though she knew she would never be allowed to compete, said how delighted it made her feel. "When I saw those two guys with their fists up on the victory stand, it made my heart jump. It was beautiful."

As Carlos explains in his book, their gesture was supposed, among other things, to say: "Hey, world, the United States is not like you might think it is for blacks and other people of colour. Just because we have USA on our chest does not mean everything is peachy keen and we are living large."

Carlos understood, before he raised his fist that day, that once done, his act could not be taken back. What he could not have anticipated, at the age of 23, was what it would mean for his future. "I had no idea the moment on the medal stand would be frozen for all time. I had no idea what we'd face. I didn't know or appreciate, at that precise moment, that the entire trajectory of our young lives had just irrevocably changed."

During the Jim Crow era, life for even the most famous black sportsmen past their prime was tough. After his celebrated Olympic victory, Owens ran a dry-cleaning business, was a gas pump attendant, raced horses for money and eventually went bankrupt. "People say it was degrading for an Olympic champion to run against a horse," he said. "But what was I supposed to do? I had four gold medals, but you can't eat four gold medals."

Joe Louis, a world champion boxer on whose shoulders rested national pride when he fought German Max Schmeling shortly before the second world war, greeted visitors at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas and went on quiz shows. And these were sporting figures who tried to keep in with the establishment. Carlos was still in his prime, but that single act of defiance ensured his marginalisation.

Paradoxically, the next year was the best of his career. In 1969, he equalled the 100 yard world record, won the American Athletics Union 220-yard dash and led San Jose State to its first National Collegiate Athletic Association championship.

The trouble was, in the years before lucrative sponsorship deals, running didn't pay and few would employ him. In the years immediately following his protest, he worked security at a nightclub and as a janitor. At one point he had to chop up his furniture so he could heat his house. The pressure started to bear down on his family. "When there's a lack of money, it brings contempt into the family," he says. Moreover, his wife was facing constant harassment from the press and his children were being told at school that their father was a traitor. The marriage collapsed.

He tried American football for a few seasons, starting in Philadelphia, then moving north to Toronto and Montreal. He is keen to emphasise that the one thing that never happened, despite claims to the contrary, is that he had his medal confiscated. It's at his mother's house. And while he does not cherish it as you'd expect an Olympian might, he's adamant that this part of the story is set straight. "The medal didn't mean shit to me. It doesn't mean anything now… The medal had no relevance. The one way it had relevance was that I earned it. So they never took my medal away from me. I'd earned it. They can't take it."

As time passed and the backlash subsided, Carlos was gradually invited back into the fold. He became involved as an outreach co-ordinator in the organising committee for the group bringing the Olympics to Los Angeles in 1984 and worked for the US Olympic Committee.

Did he worry, as the picture for which he was famous started to adorn T-shirts and posters, that his readmission into the Olympic world meant his radicalism was being co-opted and sanitised? "The image is still there," he says proudly. "It keeps getting wider. If you look at the images of the last century, there's nothing much like it out there. And 'the man' wasn't the one that kept this thing afloat for 43 years. The man was the same man whupping my arse. And the Olympics are part of my history. I'm not going to run away from that."

Carlos remains politically engaged. Late last year he addressed Occupy Wall Street protesters in New York. "It's the same fight as it was 43 years ago. We fought unemployment; for housing, education. It's the same thing as people are fighting for today."

He defends Barack Obama, who he believes has not been given a fair shake. "Mr Obama didn't get us where we are. He's trying to get us out. Someone fabricates shit to get us into wars, then makes ordinary Americans pay for them. Now someone else is trying to make it right. If George W Bush can have two terms to put this country into this mess, we should give Obama two to get us out of it."

But, unlike during the 1960s, today Carlos sees little hope of resistance emerging through sport, which is awash with too much money and drugs. "There wasn't a whole bunch of money out there back then," he says, "so just a few people were ever going to be shakers and bakers. But today, if an athlete doesn't have a view of their history before them, then they have a view of just that big cheque in front of them. It's not the responsibility of the oppressor to educate us. We have to educate ourselves and our own. That's the difference between Muhammad Ali and Michael Jordan. Muhammad Ali will never die. He used his skill to say something about the social ills of society. Of course, he was an excellent boxer, but he got up and spoke on the issues. And because he spoke on the issues, he will never die. There will be someone else at some time who can do what Jordan could do. And then his name will just be pushed down in the mud. But they'll still be talking about Ali."

Eight years earlier, during a different phase of anti-racist activism in the US, a 17-year-old student, Franklin McCain, had gained his place in the history books when he sat at a Woolworth's lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, with three friends and refused to move until they were served. Many years later, McCain was philosophical about how that experience had affected him. "On the day that I sat at that counter, I had the most tremendous feeling of elation and celebration," he told me. "Nothing has ever come close. Not the birth of my first son, nor my marriage. And it was a cruel hoax, because people go through their whole lives and they don't get that to happen to them. And here it was being visited upon me as a 17-year-old. It was wonderful, and it was sad also, because I know that I will never have that again. I'm just sorry it was when I was 17."

Carlos has no such regrets. He's just glad he could be where he was to do what he felt he had to do. "I don't have any misgivings about it being frozen in time. It's a beacon for a lot of people around the world. So many people find inspiration in that portrait. That's what I was born for."

Gary Younge asks the question of John Carlos:

Q. Did he worry, as the picture for which he was famous started to adorn T-shirts and posters, that his readmission into the Olympic world meant his radicalism was being co-opted and sanitised?

For Lewis Hamilton, does the fact that Mercedes are running their cars in black rather than the usual silver livery as part of their commitment to the Black Lives Matter campaign, signify a degree of co-option as well as commitment? Does Hamilton's adoption of the black power salute provide positive "optics" for the Mercedes F1 operation, and especially Mercedes' sponsor Petronas? Since 2010, Petronas has been the main sponsor of the Mercedes AMG Petronas F1 team.

Petronas

The Wikipedia article on Petronas says:

Petroliam Nasional Berhad (National Petroleum Limited), commonly known as Petronas, is a Malaysian oil and gas company. Established in 1974 and wholly owned by the Government of Malaysia, the corporation is vested with the entire oil and gas resources in Malaysia and is entrusted with the responsibility of developing and adding value to these resources. Petronas is ranked among Fortune Global 500's largest corporations in the world. Fortune ranks Petronas as the 158th largest company in the world in 2019.

Since its incorporation, Petronas has grown to be an integrated international oil and gas company with business interests in 35 countries. As of the end of March 2005, the Group comprised 103 wholly owned subsidiaries, 19 partly owned outfits and 57 associated companies. Together, these companies make the company, which is involved in various oil and gas-based activities. The Financial Times has identified Petronas as one of the "new seven sisters": the most influential and mainly state-owned national oil and gas companies from countries outside the OECD. Petronas provides a substantial source of income for the Malaysian government, with half of the government's budget dependent on the company's dividend.

The new Seven Sisters . . .

Back in 2007, this article by Carola Hoyos in the Financial Times (March 12 2007) is cited in the Wikipedia article on Petronas: 

When an angry Enrico Mattei coined the phrase “the seven sisters” to describe the Anglo-Saxon companies that controlled the Middle East’s oil after the second world war, the founder of Italy’s modern energy industry could not have imagined the profound shift in power that would occur barely half a century later.

As oil prices have trebled over the past four years, a new group of oil and gas companies has risen to prominence. They have consolidated their power as aggressive resource holders and seekers and pushed the world’s biggest listed energy groups, which emerged out of the original seven sisters – ExxonMobil and Chevron of the US and Europe’s BP and Royal Dutch Shell – on to the sidelines and into an existential crisis.

The “new seven sisters”, or the most influential energy companies from countries outside the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, have been identified by the Financial Times in consultation with numerous industry executives. They are Saudi Aramco, Russia’s Gazprom, CNPC of China, NIOC of Iran, Venezuela’s PDVSA, Brazil’s Petrobras and Petronas of Malaysia.

Overwhelmingly state-owned, they control almost one-third of the world’s oil and gas production and more than one-third of its total oil and gas reserves. In contrast, the old seven sisters – which shrank to four in the industry consolidation of the 1990s – produce about 10 per cent of the world’s oil and gas and hold just 3 per cent of reserves. Even so, their integrated status – which means they sell not only oil and gas, but also gasoline, diesel and petrochemicals – push their revenues notably higher than those of the newcomers.

Robin West, chairman of PFC Energy, an industry consultancy, says: “The reason the original seven sisters were so important was that they were the rule makers; they controlled the industry and the markets. Now, these new seven sisters are the rule makers and the international oil companies are the rule takers.”
Carola Hoyos sets out the "new Seven Sisters" respective industry profiles, and says of Petronas: 

Malaysia’s Petronas has also spread out internationally, notably into Sudan and Burma. It receives about 30 per cent of its corporate revenues from abroad and operates in more than 26 countries, producing oil from about 50 projects, more than half of which it runs, Rice University’s report notes.

The origins of Petronas are tangled up in the history of British colonialism and the role played by some of those original "Seven Sisters". Malaysia has its origins in the Malay kingdoms which, from the 18th century, became subject to the British Empire, along with the British Straits Settlements protectorate. Peninsular Malaysia was unified as the Malayan Union in 1946. Malaya was restructured as the Federation of Malaya in 1948 and achieved independence on 31 August 1957. Malaya united with North Borneo, Sarawak, and Singapore on 16 September 1963 to become Malaysia. In 1965, Singapore was expelled from the federation.

Before the formation of Malaysia, Royal Dutch Shell first began the oil exploration in Miri, Sarawak; after Charles Brooke signed the first Oil Mining Lease in 1909. In 1910, the first oil well was drilled in Miri. This oil well is later known as the Grand Old Lady. In 1929, oil was discovered in Brunei. There were no other drilling activities in Borneo or British Malaya until 1950s. In 1966, the enactment of Petroleum Mining Act gave Exxon and Shell rights to explore oil territories and produce oil royalties and tax payments to the government. In the late 1960s, Esso and Continental Oil were given concessions to explore oil off the shores of the east coast of Peninsular Malaysia. 

Several factors converged in the early 1970s to prompt the Malaysian government into setting up a state oil and gas company. In 1972, the oil price per barrel was US$1.50, which later rose to US$2.28 per barrel. War in the middle east and the oil embargo by the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) had caused the price per barrel to rise up to US$12.00, and providing a clear incentive for Malaysia to set up a nationally owned oil company. Several countries such as United Arab Emirates, Egypt, and Indonesia have adopted the production sharing agreement instead of a concession system for oil revenue distribution. The Malaysian government also believed that foreign oil companies did not properly inform the government regarding the oil exploration activities in their own concessions (such as the new discovery of oil fields), thus resulted in a loss of revenue to the government. The formulation of the Malaysian New Economic Policy in the early 1970s encourages Malaysians to take control of various modern industries and to open more economic opportunities for bumiputera (Malaysian natives), a term derived from the Sanskrit which was later absorbed into the classical Malay word bhumiputra [Sanskrit "भूमिपुत्र"], which can be translated literally as "son of the land" or "son of the soil". Along the LODE Zone Line in Indonesia, this term is known as "Pribumi". In 1974, the Petroleum Development Act was tabled in parliament and approved. Petronas was incorporated on 17 August 1974. Initially, Exxon and Shell refused to surrender their concessions and refused to negotiate with Petronas. Petronas then served a notice to all foreign oil companies that after 1 April 1975, all the foreign oil companies would be operating illegally in Malaysian waters if they do not start negotiations with Petronas. After a few rounds of negotiations, foreign oil companies finally surrendered their concessions to Petronas.

Petronas in Sudan . . .

Under the heading:

War crimes in Sudan

the Wikipedia article on Petronas states:

In June 2010, the European Coalition on Oil in Sudan (ECOS) published the report "Unpaid Debt", that called upon the governments of Sweden, Austria, and Malaysia to look into allegations that Petronas, Lundin Petroleum, and OMV may have been complicit in the commission of war crimes and crimes against humanity whilst operating in Block 5A, South Sudan (then Sudan), during the period 1997–2003. The reported crimes include indiscriminate attacks and intentional targeting of civilians, burning of shelters, pillage, destruction of objects necessary for survival, unlawful killing of civilians, rape of women, abduction of children, torture, and forced displacement. When the consortium that Petronas took part in operated in Block 5A, approximately 12,000 people died, and 160,000 were violently displaced from their land and homes, many forever. Satellite pictures taken between 1994 and 2003 show that the activities of Petronas in Sudan coincided with a spectacular drop in agricultural land use in its concession area.

In June 2010, the Swedish public prosecutor for international crimes opened a criminal investigation into links between Sweden and the reported crimes. In 2016, Lundin Petroleum's Chairman Ian Lundin and CEO Alex Schneiter were informed that they were the suspects of the investigation. Sweden's Government gave the green light for the Public Prosecutor in October 2018 to indict the two top executives. On 1 November 2018, the Swedish Prosecution Authority notified Lundin Petroleum AB that the company might be liable to a corporate fine and forfeiture of economic benefits of SEK 3,285 million (app. €315 million) for involvement in war crimes and crimes against humanity. Consequently, the company itself will also be charged, albeit indirectly, and will be legally represented in court. On 15 November 2018, the suspects were served with the draft charges and the case files. They will be indicted for aiding and abetting international crimes and may face life imprisonment if found guilty. The trial is likely to begin in the Autumn of 2020 and may take two years.

The Swedish war crimes investigation raises the issue of access to remedy and reparation for victims of human rights violations linked with business activities. In May 2016, representatives of communities in Block 5A claimed their right to remedy and reparation and called upon Petronas and its shareholders to pay off their debt to them. A conviction in Sweden may provide some level of remedy and reparation for the few victims of human rights violations who will testify in court, but not for the other 200,000 victims who will not be represented in court. The Swedish court cannot impose obligations upon Petronas.

On 23 May 2019, the T.M.C. Asser Institute for International Law in The Hague organized the conference 'Towards criminal liability of corporations for human rights violations: The Lundin case in Sweden'.

The international standard for business and human rights, the UNGP, underlines the duty of business enterprises to contribute to effective remedy of the adverse impact that it has caused or contributed to. The company has never publicly showed an interest in the adverse effects of its activities on the communities in its concession area. According to the Dutch peace organisation PAX, Petronas, Lundin Petroleum, OMV, as well as their shareholders are disregarding the human rights standards that they claim to respect, because they;

A. never conducted appropriate due diligence for their Sudanese operations;

B. made no effort to know their human rights impacts;

and C. do not show how they address alleged adverse human rights impacts.

Petronas Carigali Overseas Sdn Bhd, a wholly owned subsidiary of Petronas Group of Companies, held a 28.5% share in the consortium that acquired the right to explore and develop oil deposits in Block 5A.

In 2003, Lundin Petroleum and OMV sold their interest following a public outcry about the role of the consortium in Sudan's oil war.

Petronas picked up Lundin's 40.375% working interest for a cash payment of US$142.5 million. As the operator of the consortium, Lundin Petroleum was responsible for day-to-day management. Still, it stood under the supervision of the Operating Committee, that exercised "overall direction and control of all matters pertaining to the Joint Operations and the Joint Property".

Petronas was permanently represented in the Operating Committee and has never publicly distanced itself from any of its decisions.

Petronas has never publicly responded to the allegations of negative impacts in Sudan or discussed the issue with local communities. The company is not known to have taken adequate measures to prevent involvement in human rights violations during the oil war or to undo the adverse impacts of its consortium's operations.

Petronas was a loyal participant in the consortium that operated in Block 5A and had a substantial say in the way it operated. Therefore, the suspicions against the consortium's top managers also concern Petronas. The company is wholly owned by the Malaysian State. According to the UN Guiding Principles, abuse of human rights by a business enterprise that is wholly or partially controlled by a State, may entail a; 

violation of that State's own international law obligations.

. . . a shocking history

The Dutch Peace movement PAX is a partnership between IKV (Interchurch Peace Council) and Pax Christi. In 2006, the two organisations merged under the name IKV Pax Christi. As of 29 January 2014, the new name of the organisation is PAX.

“PAX works together with committed citizens and partners to protect civilians against acts of war, to end armed violence, and to build a just peace.”

PAX’s Experience with the Climate Crisis

I have come to find that already, PAX programs are troubled by climate-related developments. In South Sudan, water and food shortages constitute severe challenges to the everyday life of (especially rural) communities. The country has experienced a temperature increase of 2,5 times the global average, and by 2050 agricultural yields could be down by an additional 5 to 25% compared to the year 2000. Violent disputes over land are not new in the region, but statistically speaking they do often follow droughts or floods, both of which have risen significantly over the past century. It is social factors, however, that enable the violence itself. The colonial heritage of a severely unequal distribution of land is partly to blame, but so are cultural and economic issues. A colleague working on the Human Security Survey in the country explained how within the regional culture it is common to look down on farming as a task ‘for the weak or women’, while considering ownership of livestock a masculine status symbol. Yet, South Sudan still experiences grave food insecurity, with around 87% of the population dependent on a fragile agricultural sector that contributes little to the economy. Poor access to global markets makes economic growth even more difficult. And in its pursuit of oil extraction, the South Sudanese government is distracted from investing in a sustainable agricultural sector. In short, South Sudan is not only ill prepared for a warmer, more extreme climate but is already suffering from increasingly frequent tensions over land due to a colonial past, wrong economic priorities, cultural challenges around agriculture and, indeed, a more stressful climate.

By Arjan Laan

PAX, the Dutch peace movement that used to hold the secretariat of ECOS, will be maintaining this site.

ECOS

Unpaid Debt 

A comprehensive overview of the role of the Lundin Consortium in the oil war. ECOS calls upon the Swedish, Austrian and Malaysian governments to investigate whether, as a matter of international law, Lundin, OMV and Petronas 'were complicit in the commission of war crimes and crimes against humanity by others during the period 1997-2003.’

In response, the Swedish Public Prosecutor for International crimes opened a criminal investigation into ‘links between Sweden and the reported crimes’.

The Dark Side of Sudan’s Oil by InfoNile

Mapping stories on water issues in the Nile Basin. The geodata journalism of InfoNile has more information on the environmental impact of oil and war upon life in the region.

The "Seven Sisters" oil companies were and are capitalism par excellence, characterized by a colonial approach to the exploitation of natural resources, no matter what the cost to an environment and its inhabitants. This has been replaced by a new generation of State owned fossil fuel industries that continue to exploit resources for profit, regardless of the consequences, in exactly the same way.

When it comes to "unpaid debt" the case for British slavery reparations is not going away

Afua Hirsch writes for the Guardian Journal (Thu 9 Jul 2020) in this Opinion piece under the subheading:

There is now a global debate focused on all those nations who built their wealth by denying black people humanity

I once asked a British cabinet minister why the country had never apologised for the transatlantic slave trade. After all, this nation trafficked more enslaved Africans than almost any other – at least 3 million on British ships – yet it has only ever expressed “regret”. It’s a strange choice of words for playing a leading role in the greatest atrocity in human history.

The minister explained to me that the UK cannot apologise, because the case against it – watertight in moral and ethical terms – might then become legal too. In short, Britain won’t use the language of apology, out of fear this might pave the way for reparations.

That admission made me sit up and take notice. Because, passionate as I have always been about racial justice, I’m also not immune from the perception of reparations as – in the words of American writer Isabel Wilkerson – especially “radioactive”.

Yet I’m now seeing with increasing clarity how this perception only serves to reinforce systems of race and power. The debate about reparations has, conveniently, been branded extreme and unrealistic by those who don’t want to pay them. We happily listen to the heir to the throne – who on Windrush Day said Britain owed a “debt of gratitude” to the people of the Caribbean – while ignoring the reality that what Britain owes is, in fact, a straight-up financial debt.

The case is unequivocal. The African American intellectual WEB Du Bois was right when he described the enslavement of at least 12 million Africans as “the sum of all villainies, the cause of all sorrow, the root of all prejudice”. In the Caribbean, Britain received, in the words of Nobel prize-winning economist Arthur Lewis, 200 years of free labour – from over 15 million black people, and those who were indentured from India.

The proceeds from this enslavement, and the heavily exploitative years of “apprenticed” labour that followed it, provided the profits with which Britain modernised its economy. The systemic poverty that remains in the Caribbean can be directly traced to the era of enslavement and colonialism, at the end of which Britain walked away leaving 60% of the region’s black inhabitants functionally illiterate.

The conditions in the Caribbean were so bad that, during the second world war, Britain tried to prevent deployment of African Americans on military bases in the islands. Whitehall feared the sight of better-off black Americans might wake its colonial subjects out of the ignorance of their condition on which British exploitation depended.

The Caribbean’s “pandemic of chronic diseases” – as historian Hilary Beckles, vice-chancellor of the University of the West Indies, has termed it – can be directly traced to British slavery and colonial practice. It is now a global hypertension hotspot. The high diabetes rate has left two of Britain’s former colonies, Barbados and Jamaica, vying for the dubious honour of being the per capita amputation capital of the world. “For 300 years the people of this region were forced to consume a diet based on what we produced, sugar,” Beckles explains.

Beckles was speaking this week as the Caribbean Community (Caricom) demanded reparations for Native genocide and African enslavement from 10 European nations, including the UK. It’s not a fringe set of demands but the formal position of Britain’s former colonies in the region, now its Commonwealth “friends”, including Jamaica, Guyana and Barbados – whose prime minister, Mia Mottley, is a committed advocate of reparations.

These demands are not about money per se. To borrow the language of postwar Jewish reparatory justice claims, which rightly run into the billions, it’s about the “mass murder, the human suffering, the annihilation of spiritual, intellectual, and creative forces, which are without parallel in the history of mankind”.

In fact, reparations speak a language of apology that western nations should understand. They have been profoundly comfortable receiving them.

In the US, the Confederates who lost the civil war received compensation for the loss of their property. France had no issue extorting huge sums from Haiti for generations, as reparations for that nation’s audacity in overthrowing slavery in 1804. This arrangement, euphemistically designed to “indemnify” French colonialists, persisted until 1947.

A common complaint about reparations is the alleged unfairness of burdening today’s generation with debt arising from their ancestors’ wrongs. Yet where is the outrage that my generation contributed towards the more than £300bn in today’s money notoriously paid to Britain’s slave owners for the loss of their human “property”? Their compensation under the Slavery Abolition Act – comprising an astounding 40% of the national budget at the time – was so large that it wasn’t paid off until 2015.

The pattern is clear. Reparations have been paid to those who profited from African enslavement, rather than those who were enslaved.

As the historian Ana Lucia Araujo has written, to this day no former slave society in the Americas, no former slaves or their descendants, and no African nation, has ever obtained any form of reparations for the Atlantic slave trade.

Some would argue that, with the slavery era having ended so long ago, it’s now too late. But this is a piece of circularity par excellence. During the time of enslavement, and unceasingly since the 18th century, black people have stated the case in petitions, correspondences, pamphlets, public speeches, slave narratives and judicial claims – advocating in English, French, Spanish and Portuguese.

As the French colonial writer Prince Marc Kojo Tovalou Houénou wrote of Benin, black people “cry ‘Reparations!’ without ceasing”. That this cry was deliberately ignored for so long in the past cannot logically form the basis of a denial in the present.

The language of reparations continually evolves. Recently, it has taken the form of Beyoncé’s Black Parade (“Need peace and reparation for my people”); Belgians’ resurgent condemnation of the brutalisation, rape, exploitation and deaths of 5 million Congolese during colonial rule; and Ta-Nehisi Coates’ powerful testimony before the US House of Representatives that, if the US wants to say D-day matters, then so does the 1921 “Black Wall Street” race massacre. Human Rights Watch has launched a formal investigation into that atrocity, which saw an organised white mob, armed by city officials, destroy a successful black economic hub in Tulsa, Oklahoma, killing hundreds.

The case for reparations is becoming a global conversation to which every nation that systematically enriched itself by stealing black people’s very humanity – not to mention unquantifiable torture and cultural destruction – now finds itself exposed.

Instead of going away, these reparatory justice movements will continue to reinforce each other across the black diaspora. As Beckles puts it, there’s no carpet in the world with enough space under it for this legacy to be swept away.

BLACK PARADE
"Black Parade" is a song by American recording artist Beyoncé. It was released as a charity single on June 19, 2020, also referred to as Juneteenth, a day that originated in Beyoncé's home state, Texas, commemorating the end of slavery in the United States. Released in the wake of George Floyd's death and the protests that followed it, the song serves as a celebration of black culture and the support of black activism. All proceeds from the song benefit BeyGOOD's Black Business Impact Fund, which helps black-owned small businesses in need. 

An online directory of black-owned businesses called "Black Parade Route" was launched alongside the single's release. The song was later included on the deluxe edition of The Lion King: The Gift, following the release of Beyoncé's visual album Black Is King.

Prior to the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, the singer has repeatedly used her platform to raise her voice against racial inequality. A few days after the killing of George Floyd, Beyoncé took to social media to demand justice for his death, urging fans and followers to sign the petition "Justice for George Floyd". 

On June 14, 2020, she issued an open letter to Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron, calling out the lack of arrests in the case of Breonna Taylor, an unarmed black woman who was fatally shot by police in her own home in March 2020. Beyoncé urged Cameron to "take swift and decisive action in charging the officers".

Re:LODE Radio - Slavery and the maritime histories of Liverpool and Hull 

Claire Shaw's article for History Today reminds readers back in March this year (3 March 2020) on the anniversary of the abolition of slavery, how visible the memory of Britain's slave trade remains, and especially in Liverpool. 

The LODE project and the LODE Zone Line includes the two original and principal nodal locations that define the LODE Line pathway that Re:LODE Radio follows as it girds the planet, the maritime cities of Liverpool and Hull. When it comes to Liverpool's slave trade legacy, Hull's legacy is shared with Liverpool in the history of the Abolitionist movement. 

Claire Shaw writes: In 1787 the Quakers of Portsmouth made their anti-slavery campaign official by forming The Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade, joining forces with prominent abolitionists such as William Wilberforce. So organised were they in their methods of activism, such as civil disobedience, research and evidence-gathering, that they set the blueprint for many future lobbying organisations.

One of their most effective actions was to commission an illustration of the Liverpool slave ship the Brookes, named after its owner, Joseph Brookes, and present it to the nation in poster form, appearing in newspapers, pamphlets, books and coffee houses. The horror it showed quickly established the illustration as a hugely influential part of the abolitionists’ anti-slavery campaign.

The architect of the use of the Brookes as political propaganda was the Quaker abolitionist Thomas Clarkson. In The History of the Rise, Progress, and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade by the British Parliament (1808), he wrote that the ‘print seemed to make an instantaneous impression of horror upon all who saw it, and was therefore instrumental, in consequence of the wide circulation given it, in serving the cause of the injured Africans’.

Clarkson’s choice of the Brookes proved to be a revelation to large numbers of people. As he travelled around England, galvanising the anti-slavery campaign, he was attacked in Liverpool in 1787 and nearly killed by a gang of sailors paid to assassinate him.

Over 25 years, Brookes’ ship made ten Atlantic crossings, carrying in total 5,163 captured Africans. Of those, 4,559 survived, meaning that over ten per cent of its prisoners died. Records from The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database show that on its 1785-86 voyage it carried 740 enslaved Africans, 258 more than the 1788 poster showed. In 1788 The Regulated Slave Trade Act had been passed, the first British legislation to regulate slave shipping. It limited the number of slaves an individual ship could transport.

Although Liverpool was late entering the slave trade, by 1740 it had surpassed Bristol and London as the slave-trading capital of Britain. In 1792 London had 22 transatlantic sailing vessels, Bristol had 42 and Liverpool had 131. The Brookes was built at the height of Liverpool’s slave-trading empire and, by that time, the city’s shipbuilders had mastered the art of constructing custom-built slave ships: in the early 18th century the average size of a slave ship was 70 tons; by the end of the century this had tripled to 200 tons.

Such was Liverpool’s dominance of the North Atlantic slave trade that one in five African captives crossing the ocean was carried in a Liverpool slave ship. The city had the capacity to build bespoke ships to the exact specifications and requirements of the slave merchants. Consequently, the industry employed 3,000 shipwrights, alongside other ancillary trades, such as rope makers, gun makers and those who supplied comestibles to be carried on board.

Liverpool’s economy and the economies of neighbouring Lancashire and Yorkshire benefited, too. Ships bound for Africa would be laden with goods to appeal to African traders to make the outbound journey profitable. Textiles from Lancashire and Yorkshire mills were the most attractive commodity and made up perhaps 50 per cent of the outbound cargo, alongside guns and knives, brass cooking pots, copperware, clay pipes, beer and liquor. Local craftspeople and small industries supplied the ships and estimates suggest that one in eight of Liverpool’s population – 10,000 people – depended on trade with Africa and 40 per cent of its income derived from the trade.

The slave trade was the backbone of the city’s prosperity and the reinvestment of proceeds gave stimulus to trading and industrial development throughout the north-west of England and the Midlands. Liverpool’s Rodney Street was built between 1782 and 1801, providing town houses for many elite merchants, including John Gladstone, father of prime minister William Ewart Gladstone.

It was named after Admiral Rodney, who defeated the French in St Lucia in 1782 to preserve the British influence in the West Indies. Rodney supported the slave trade. Elsewhere in the city, the Port of Liverpool Building displays stone carvings of slave ships and dolphins on its façade and the Cunard building carries sculptures of a native American and an African man and woman.

The Liverpool street immortalised by the Beatles in their song ‘Penny Lane’ takes its name from the slave trader James Penny, who was vocal in his opposition to the abolition movement. Eager to protect his business, he boldly claimed in evidence to the Lords Committee of Council set up  in 1788 that: ‘The slaves here will sleep better than the gentlemen do on shore.’ He was not the only Liverpool figure  to campaign – in the build-up to the 1788 Act, Liverpool  slave traders submitted 64 petitions to Parliament arguing against abolition.

In 1999 Councillor Myrna Juarez proposed that Liverpool City Council debate a motion to ‘express remorse for the effects of the slave trade on millions of people worldwide’. This unleashed a controversy, as some protested the incongruity of this debate taking place in a town hall where images of African slaves were moulded into the plasterwork. Nevertheless, the council acknowledged Liverpool’s involvement in the slave trade and a formal apology was made. Today the city acknowledges its slaving maritime history with the International Slavery Museum, which opened in 2007 as part of the Maritime Museum.

Meanwhile, support is growing for a new British slavery museum in the capital after the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, backed the proposal, arguing that it would help to tackle racism. Other institutions have also acknowledged the role of slavery in their history, such as Harewood House in Yorkshire. In September 2018 Glasgow University, in a welcome move, published a report into its historical links to slavery, acknowledging that, although the university did not invest directly in the slave trade, it did receive donations from those who did.

In 1807 The Slave Trade Act saw the official end of the slave trade in Britain.  As the anniversary of this act on 25 March approaches once more, taking the lead from Liverpool, it is time that more individuals and institutions be transparent about the legacy that slavery has left.

Wilberforce House Museum - Hull

Hull has a museum that tells of the slave trade. Wilberforce House is the birthplace of William Wilberforce, famous campaigner against the slave trade. The museum tells the story of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and its abolition, as well as dealing with contemporary slavery. 

Contradictorily perhaps in the context of reparation, the museum's galleries also offer, what the museum describes as "a fascinating glimpse into West African culture".

William Wilberforce was born in Hull on 24 August 1759, the only son of a Hull merchant whose wealth derived from the Baltic trade. The family had originally come from the village of Wilberfoss near York. William attended Hull Grammar School but his Hull schooldays were cut short by the death of his father and he was placed in the care of his uncle and aunt at Wimbledon.

As an adult William became interested in politics and was elected MP for Hull in 1780. Four years later he became MP for Yorkshire, a very influential position. Wilberforce enjoyed the theatres, clubs and parties of London society and was quickly accepted for his wit, charm and conversation. However he was soon to turn his back on this busy social life. A tour of Europe with Isaac Milner in 1785 marked the beginnings of Wilberforce’s conversion to Evangelical Christianity. He discussed his spiritual crisis with the Rev. John Newton, the Rector of St. Mary Woolworth who had been a slave trader before his conversion.

Newton persuaded Wilberforce to stay in public life and joined the group of leading Evangelical Christians who lived at Clapham and were later to be known as the “Clapham Sect”. Not long afterwards he was approached by several Abolitionists who asked him to take up the cause of slavery. In 1787, during a conversation with Pitt and Grenville, Wilberforce decided to give notice of his intention to raise the subject in the House of Commons.

Wilberforce led the campaign for the abolition of the slave trade in Parliament, whilst the Abolition society collected evidence and organised petitions. Leaflets, songs and badges were distributed to rally public opinion. However, their opponents were also well organised and fought back with their own propaganda. 

The progress of abolition was halted by the outbreak of the French revolution and a slave rebellion in San Domingo, but in 1807 the Act to abolish the Slave trade was finally passed, a great victory for Wilberforce and his friends. They believed that slaves would now be treated more humanely as the supply of slaves dwindled, but the illegal slave trade flourished.

Five years later, Wilberforce resigned his Yorkshire seat in favour of a quieter constituency, preferring to spend more time with his family. During his final years in the Commons he was attacked for not helping the poor in Britain. In 1815 he supported the Corn Laws which raised the price of corn and three years later approved harsh laws following the Peterloo massacre.

Wilberforce died on 29 July 1833, believing the abolition of slavery to be within reach. On his deathbed he heard that the Bill to free all slaves in the British colonies had passed its second reading in the Commons. “Thank God”, he said “that I should have lived to witness a day in which England is willing to give twenty millions sterling for the Abolition of Slavery”. A month after his death the Bill became law.

And the twenty millions sterling went to compensate the slave owners, NOT reparation for those freed from slavery.

Just as important as a museum about the slave trade, but even more so, as far as Re:LODE Radio is concerned, is the University of Hull - Wilberforce Institute - A centre for the study of Slavery and Emancipation:

"We're advancing the end of slavery and exploitation around the world"

Why Hull should be proud of William Wilberforce

Professor Trevor Burnard, Director at the University of Hull’s Wilberforce Institute for the study of Slavery and Emancipation, speaks about the significance of Hull in the abolition of the slave trade, as demonstrations take place across the world as part of the #BlackLivesMatter movement.

“All over the country, councils are currently reviewing statues under their jurisdiction which hold a connection to slavery.

“There are many monuments in this country which celebrate people who made money from slavery and the slave trade. It is reassuring, however, that in such a review in Hull, one statue to be preserved will be the great statue of William Wilberforce, in Queen’s Gardens.

“The people of Hull are proud of their most famous citizen, and rightly so. Wilberforce was not the only person responsible for the abolition of the slave trade, but three days after his death on 29 July 1833, the bill was passed to abolish slavery in the British Empire.

“Black and white opponents of Britain’s extensive involvement with slavery joined him in these historic late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century campaigns. They attacked as immoral something that Britain capitalised on – slave trading – and which brought enormous wealth to highly influential people.

“Many of those abolitionists were women, such as Marianne Thornton, who like Wilberforce, came from a prosperous Hull family. She was so disgusted by learning about the horrors of the slave trade that she joined Wilberforce in turning her Christian beliefs into practical reforming measures.

“We should not underestimate the magnitude of that task. As we are discovering how many statues of slave traders still exist, slavery was accepted in Britain as at worst a necessary evil.

“That it was based on the cruel treatment of Africans did not matter, just as Africans were treated as though they did not matter. What we in Hull can be proud of, as we remember the many things Britain should be ashamed of in its long involvement with African slavery and racial discrimination, is how some people’s strong moral convictions, such as William Wilberforce’s, changed people’s minds.

“What was accepted as normal began to be seen as evil. Wilberforce knew that Black Lives Mattered. That is why we continue to think well of him in the city that he called home.”

The slave trade and the "primitive accumulation" of capital

Karl Marx, in his influential economic history of capitalism, Das Kapital, wrote that; 

"... the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signaled the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production". 

He argued that the slave trade was part of what he termed the "primitive accumulation" of capital, the 'non-capitalist' accumulation of wealth that preceded and created the financial conditions for Britain's industrialisation.

Effects of the atlantic slave trade on the British economy

There is some debate amongst historians as to the benefits or costs to the British economy of the Atlantic slave trade. This map of 1823 is accompanied by a text  arguing that import prohibitions and high duties on sugar were artificially inflating prices and inhibiting manufacturing in England. 1823

The Wikipedia article on the Atlantic slave trade and the effects of this trade on the British economy states:

Historian Eric Williams in 1944 argued that the profits that Britain received from its sugar colonies, or from the slave trade between Africa and the Caribbean, contributed to the financing of Britain's industrial revolution. However, he says that by the time of the abolition of the slave trade in 1807, and the emancipation of the slaves in 1833, the sugar plantations of the British West Indies had lost their profitability, and it was in Britain's economic interest to emancipate the slaves.

Other researchers and historians have strongly contested what has come to be referred to as the "Williams thesis" in academia. David Richardson has concluded that the profits from the slave trade amounted to less than 1% of domestic investment in Britain. Economic historian Stanley Engerman finds that even without subtracting the associated costs of the slave trade (e.g., shipping costs, slave mortality, mortality of British people in Africa, defense costs) or reinvestment of profits back into the slave trade, the total profits from the slave trade and of West Indian plantations amounted to less than 5% of the British economy during any year of the Industrial Revolution. Engerman's 5% figure gives as much as possible in terms of benefit of the doubt to the Williams argument, not solely because it does not take into account the associated costs of the slave trade to Britain, but also because it carries the full-employment assumption from economics and holds the gross value of slave trade profits as a direct contribution to Britain's national income. Historian Richard Pares, in an article written before Williams' book, dismisses the influence of wealth generated from the West Indian plantations upon the financing of the Industrial Revolution, stating that whatever substantial flow of investment from West Indian profits into industry there occurred after emancipation, not before. However, each of these works focus primarily on the slave trade or the Industrial Revolution, and not the main body of the Williams thesis, which was on sugar and slavery itself. Therefore, they do not refute the main body of the Williams thesis.

Seymour Drescher and Robert Anstey argue the slave trade remained profitable until the end, and that moralistic reform, not economic incentive, was primarily responsible for abolition. They say slavery remained profitable in the 1830s because of innovations in agriculture. However, Drescher's Econocide wraps up its study in 1823, and does not address the majority of the Williams thesis, which covers the decline of the sugar plantations after 1823, the emancipation of the slaves in the 1830s, and the subsequent abolition of sugar duties in the 1840s. These arguments do not refute the main body of the Williams thesis, which presents economic data to show that the slave trade was minor compared to the wealth generated by sugar and slavery itself in the British Caribbean.

Cancel culture . . .

Latest edition

Harper's magazine is the second-oldest continuously published monthly magazine in the U.S. On 7 July 2020, Harper's published an open letter on the internet called "A Letter on Justice and Open Debate" criticizing "illiberalism" and promoting a tolerance of different viewpoints. This open letter is to be published in the October edition, but since its release on a web page, is now known as the Harper's Letter, intended to be a defence of free speech.

The Harper's Letter

With 153 signatories, the letter criticizes what it calls a "cancel culture" spreading across society, and denouncing President Donald Trump as "a real threat to democracy".

Notable signatories include linguist Noam Chomsky; fiction writers J. K. Rowling, Salman Rushdie, Margaret Atwood, Martin Amis, John Banville, Daniel Kehlmann, and Jeffrey Eugenides; world chess champion Garry Kasparov; political scientist Francis Fukuyama; feminist Gloria Steinem; cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker; journalists Fareed Zakaria, Malcolm Gladwell, Anne Applebaum, Ian Buruma, David Frum, and David Brooks; composer Wynton Marsalis; writer and former Leader of the Liberal Party of Canada Michael Ignatieff; political theorist Michael Walzer; economist Deirdre McCloskey; poet Roya Hakakian; surgeon Atul Gawande; music journalist Greil Marcus; and social psychologist Jonathan Haidt.

The letter was spearheaded by Harper's and New York Times writer Thomas Chatterton Williams, although around 20 people contributed to the contents of the letter. He was initially worried that its timing might cause it to be viewed as a reaction to the George Floyd protests, which he viewed as a legitimate response to police brutality in the United States, but ultimately decided to publish it, citing various recent events such as the firing of David Shor.

Shor was fired as the result of public backlash from tweeting a paper by Omar Wasow, which argued nonviolent protest was more effective at shaping public opinion.

Vox writer and signatory Matthew Yglesias faced pushback from a transgender coworker, who criticized the letter for being signed by "several prominent anti-trans voices". This included J K Rowling, who attracted controversy for recent comments on transgender issues.

Signatories generally did not know who had signed the letter until it was published. At least one, Jennifer Finney Boylan, retracted her endorsement, but others, such as Katha Pollitt, reaffirmed their support for the letter's contents despite disagreeing with some of the signatories on other issues.

DW picks up the story . . .

08.07.2020
Author Stuart Braun writes for DW under the headline and subheading:

Cancel culture war inflamed by letter on 'open debate' signed by J. K. Rowling

The publication of a letter in Harper's Magazine signed by 150 world-renowned academics, writers and artists to further free speech has amped up social media outrage after it was signed by "canceled" J. K. Rowling.

An open letter signed by international writers that expresses support for the ongoing Black Lives Matter protests also voices fear over the "vogue of public shaming" from people with opposing views.

A veiled reference to so-called "cancel culture," the letter, which will be published in Harper's Magazine in October, was released online on Tuesday. Signed by the likes of Margaret Atwood, Gloria Steinem, Martin Amis and Salman Rushdie, it is concerned that an "open debate" over the complex issue of police brutality and racial inequality is giving way to "dogma or coercion."   

"The way to defeat bad ideas is by exposure, argument, and persuasion, not by trying to silence or wish them away," states the letter. "As writers we need a culture that leaves us room for experimentation, risk taking, and even mistakes."

Inevitably, the letter quickly sparked a backlash, due largely to the fact that among the 150 signatories was J. K. Rowling, who has been labeled transphobic and a trans-exclusionary radical feminist (TERF) for her controversial views on transgender people.

Jennifer Finney Boylan, an author and transgender activist, said in a Tweet that she had not realized who else had signed the open letter and was rescinding her signature.

"I thought I was endorsing a well-meaning, if vague, message against internet shaming," she wrote, adding: "I am so sorry."

She then inevitably received criticism from supporters of the letter. Some saw this backlash as an ironic example of the cancel culture the letter opposes.

"This letter perfectly illustrates my issue with the 'cancel culture' trope," wrote political commentator Judd Legum on Twitter. "The signatories of this letter have bigger platforms and more resources than most other humans. They are not being silenced in any way."

After dissident thinker Noam Chomsky added his name to the 150 scholars, authors and artists who signed the letter, many of his supporters expressed their disappointment on social media.

A number of journalists and commentators on the left such as Glenn Greenwald agreed with the letter's principle, but believed many who signed it were being hypocritical, including author Malcolm Gladwell, who welcomed the shutting down of the Gawker news and gossip website in 2016 after it regularly parodied him. He wrote on Twitter that several signatories have in the past behaved in a way that reflects "the censorious mentality they're condemning here."

Freedom of opinion or hate speech?

Critics of the letter argued that it was too vague and generic and did not address the subject of hate speech, with some putting J. K. Rowling's views on trans people in this category.

And in the wake of Black Lives Matter calls to defund police and remove Confederate monuments in the US, reactionary political forces have invoked freedom of speech to decry what they also deem as cancel culture.

“President @realDonaldTrump stands against defunding our great police officers, caving to mob rule, and cancel culture which seeks to erase our history," stated an official White House tweet from June 29.

During Trump's vitriolic speech at Mount Rushmore to mark Independence Day, he again railed against what he called a "merciless campaign to wipe out our history."

With the controversial Harper's letter showing that liberals in the US are equally opposed to cancel culture, some on Twitter saw this crossover as the potential end of a long-running culture war.

Is free speech under threat from 'cancel culture'? Four writers respond

A panel of four writers, including Nesrine Malik, Jonathan Freedland, Zoe Williams and Samuel Moyne contributed to this Guardian Journal item on censorship (Wed 8 Jul 2020).

The debate will continue . . .

. . . Re:LODE Radio chooses to highlight the point made in the DW story by political commentator Judd Legum on Twitter. "The signatories of this letter have bigger platforms and more resources than most other humans. They are not being silenced in any way."

A response letter, "A More Specific Letter on Justice and Open Debate", organized by the lecturer Arionne Nettles and signed by over 160 people in academia and media, critiqued the Harper's letter as a plea to end cancel culture by successful professionals with large platforms while excluding others who have been "cancelled for generations". The response named specific incidents in which black people were silenced by their institutions.

The Objective - A More Specific Letter on Justice and Open Debate

"The content of the letter also does not deal with the problem of power: who has it and who does not. Harper’s is a prestigious institution, backed by money and influence. Harper’s has decided to bestow its platform not to marginalized people but to people who already have large followings and plenty of opportunities to make their views heard. Ironically, these influential people then use that platform to complain that they’re being silenced. Many of the signatories have coworkers in their own newsrooms who are deeply concerned with the letter, some who feel comfortable speaking out and others who do not." 

Blast and Counterblast

Commentary on this letter includes this article by Jennifer Schuessler in the New York Times, published July 10, 2020. She begins the article, writing: 

Three days after an open letter signed by more than 150 cultural luminaires darkly warning of a growing “intolerant climate” stirred intense response on the internet, another group issued a counterblast on Friday accusing them of elitism, hypocrisy and complicity in the bullying they decry.

The first letter, titled “A Letter on Justice and Open Debate,” was posted online on Tuesday by Harper’s Magazine. Signed by prominent figures in the arts, media and academia, including Margaret Atwood, Wynton Marsalis and J.K. Rowling, it warned of a growing tide of illiberalism and a weakening of “our norms of open debate and toleration of differences in favor of ideological conformity.”

The response letter, titled “A More Specific Letter on Justice and Open Debate,” chided the Harper’s statement for what it characterized as lofty generalities, as well as ignoring the realities of who actually gets to be heard. If its more than 150 signers were far less well-known, that was perhaps part of the point.

The Harper’s letter “does not deal with the problem of power: who has it and who does not,” according to the response, published at The Objective, a news and commentary site that explores “how journalism has interacted with historically ignored communities.”

“Harper’s has decided to bestow its platform not to marginalized people,” it said, “but to people who already have large followings and plenty of opportunities to make their views heard.”

It continued: “The letter reads as a caustic reaction to a diversifying industry — one that’s starting to challenge diversifying norms that have protected bigotry. The writers of the letter use seductive but nebulous concepts and coded language to obscure the actual meaning behind their words.”

Almost as soon as it appeared on Tuesday, “That Letter,” as Twitter quickly began calling the Harper’s statement, set off rounds of debate about free speech, privilege and the existence or nonexistence of so-called cancel culture.

Nesrine Malik, in an Opinion piece for the Guardian (Mon 13 Jul 2020) points to the "cancel culture war" being about;

old elites losing power in the social media age,

and, in the subheading for this article, that those;

"decried as 'online mobs' are mostly people who've never been able to influence conversations about their own fates." 

Billy Bragg, the English singer-songwriter and left-wing activist, has made a similar point in another Guardian Journal Opinion piece

'Cancel culture' doesn't stifle debate, but it does challenge the old order

Billy Bragg writes (Fri 10 Jul 2020) under the subheading:

Speech is only free when everyone has a voice – that’s why young people are angry

Outside Broadcasting House in London, the BBC has erected a statue to one of its former employees, George Orwell. The author leans forward, hand on hip, as if to make a telling point. Carved into the wall beside him is a quote from the preface of Animal Farm: “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”

It’s a snappy slogan that fits neatly into a tweet, but whenever I walk past this effigy of the English writer that I most admire, it makes me cringe. Surely the author of Nineteen Eighty-Four would understand that people don’t want to hear that 2+2=5?

For Orwell’s quote is not a defence of liberty; it’s a demand for licence, and has become a foundational slogan for those who wilfully misconstrue one for the other.

Over the past decade, the right to make inflammatory statements has become a hot button issue for the reactionary right, who have constructed tropes such as political correctness and virtue signalling to enable them to police the limits of social change while portraying themselves as victims of an organised assault on liberty itself.

The latest creation in their war against accountability is “cancel culture”, an ill-defined notion that takes in corporate moves to recognise structural racism, the toppling of statues, social media bullying, public shaming and other diverse attempts to challenge the status quo.

An open letter that is clearly decrying cancel culture (without naming it as such), signed by 150 academics and writers from all sides of the political spectrum, appeared this week in Harper’s Magazine. The signatories complained of a censoriousness that was stifling debate and called for arguments to be settled by persuasion rather than action. Lip service was paid to the menace of Donald Trump, but the main thrust of their argument was a howl of anguish from a group that has suddenly found its views no longer treated with reverence.

Many of those who attached their names to the letter are longstanding cultural arbiters, who, in the past, would only have had to fear the disapproval of their peers. Social media has burst their bubble and they now find that anyone with a Twitter account can challenge their opinions. The letter was their demand for a safe space.

One of the signatories, the New York Times opinion columnist Bari Weiss, touched on the source of this malaise when she claimed recently that a “civil war” was going on across publications and companies across the US between those she described as “the (mostly young) wokes and the (mostly 40+) liberals”. Was it really a surprise to discover that some younger people might hold strong views that diverge with those of older generations?

Her revelation seems to be borne out in the most contentious issue in British politics – Brexit. Opinion is divided less on class or ideological lines, and more by age. Political conflict today is increasingly a battle between the young and the old.

Before the rise of social media, the anger of young people was restricted to pop music. Print and broadcast media kept youth corralled on the margins. We may have been angry about Thatcherism, but our ability to sway mainstream public opinion was limited. Today, a 22-year-old footballer with a Twitter account can force the government to make a U-turn in less than 48 hours. Darnella Frazier, whose smartphone footage of four Minneapolis police officers killing George Floyd provoked outrage around the world, is just 17 years old.

The ability of middle-aged gatekeepers to control the agenda has been usurped by a new generation of activists who can spread information through their own networks, allowing them to challenge narratives promoted by the status quo. The great progressive movements of the 21st century have sprung from these networks: Black Lives Matter; #MeToo; Extinction Rebellion. While they may seem disparate in their aims, what they have in common is a demand for accountability.

Although free speech remains the fundamental bedrock of a free society, for everyone to enjoy the benefits of freedom, liberty needs to be tempered by two further dimensions: equality and accountability. Without equality, those in power will use their freedom of expression to abuse and marginalise others. Without accountability, liberty can mutate into the most dangerous of all freedoms – impunity.

We look down on authoritarian societies because their leaders act without restraint, yet in Trump, we see a president who has never been held to account in his personal life or professional career, and his voters love him for it. Boris Johnson’s supporters, when faced with examples of his lack of responsibility, shrug and say it’s just “Boris being Boris”. Impunity has become a sign of strength. You could see it in the face of the former police officer Derek Chauvin as he kept his knee on Floyd’s neck for eight minutes and 46 seconds.

In response to this trend, a new generation has risen that prioritises accountability over free speech. To those whose liberal ideals are proving no defence against the rising tide of duplicitous authoritarianism, this has come as a shock. But when reason, respect and responsibility are all under threat, accountability offers us a better foundation on which to build a cohesive society, one where everyone feels that their voice is heard.

Accountabilty? Reparations?

Q. What happens when you challenge the existing order by "taking the knee"?

A. You have to take the consequences . . .

"I won't humble myself doing it"

This story by Joel Taylor Published in the Metro June 19, 2020, looks like a spoof story, more fake news, but the Foreign Secretary in the current UK government, Dominic Raab, has proved himself somewhat "out of touch" with what is going on, either "at home and abroad".

DOMINIC RAAB has come under fire for saying ‘taking the knee’ is a symbol of subordination which originally came from TV drama Game of Thrones.

The foreign secretary said he would not make the gesture in support of Black Lives Matter because he only kneels for the Queen ‘and the missus when I asked her to marry me’.

He told TalkRadio: ‘This take the knee thing — which, I don’t know, maybe it’s got a broader history but it seems to be taken from Game of Thrones — feels to me like a symbol of subjugation and subordination, rather than one of liberation and emancipation. But I understand people feel differently about it, so it’s a matter of personal choice.’

So, how and why does Dominic Raab have no idea about Colin Kaepernick's story?

Colin Kaepernick's story goes back to 2016, and typically represents the way the current system of power attempts to silence those who "speak truth to power".

It all began with the San Francisco 49ers' third preseason game in 2016, when Colin Kaepernick sat during the playing of the U.S. national anthem prior to the game, rather than stand as is customary, as a protest against racial injustice, police brutality and systematic oppression in the country.

The following week, and throughout the regular season, Kaepernick chose to kneel during the anthem as a way to make a statement of protest.

These protests received highly polarized reactions, with some praising him and his stand against racism and others denouncing the protests.

The actions resulted in a wider protest movement, which intensified in September 2017 after President Donald Trump said that NFL owners should "fire" players who protest during the national anthem. Kaepernick became a free agent after the season and remained unsigned, which numerous analysts and observers have attributed to political reasons.

In November 2017, he filed a grievance against the NFL and its owners, accusing them of colluding to keep him out of the league.

In 2018 Amnesty International honored Colin Kaepernick with its ambassador of conscience award for 2018, lauding the NFL quarterback’s peaceful protests against racial inequality.

Later that year, in 2018, Colin Kaepernick became the face of a Nike advertising campaign. The ad featured Kaepernick with the text: 

"Believe in something. Even if it means sacrificing everything." 

NFL spokesperson Jocelyn Moore responded to the ad saying Kaepernick's social justice campaign, "deserve(s) our attention and action."

Colin Kaepernick withdrew his grievance case against the NFL in February 2019 after reaching a confidential settlement with the NFL.

Betsy Ross flag

Betsy Ross 1777, a ca. 1920 depiction by artist Jean Leon Gerome Ferris of Ross showing Gen. George Washington (seated, left), Robert Morris and George Ross how she cut the revised five-pointed stars for the flag.

In July 2019, Nike released a shoe featuring the Betsy Ross flag called the Air Max 1 Quick Strike Fourth of July trainers. The trainers were designed to celebrate Independence Day. The model was subsequently withdrawn after Colin Kaepernick told the brand he and others found the flag offensive because they associated it with slavery. Joe Scarborough decried Nike's decision as "politically correct madness", saying that the flag should be seen as a symbol of resistance against King George III.

His protests received renewed attention in 2020 amid the George Floyd protests against police brutality and racism but, as of September 2020, remains unsigned by any professional football team.

Colin Kaepernick honored by Amnesty International for peaceful protest

This video mix includes the Colin Kaepernick story timeline and the way Nike monetised his status as an activist along with sharing his values.

Capitalism rules! So no surprise there!

Taking the Knee

Is there a change coming? There seems to be! Colin Kaepernick's  protest has been vindicated, but this skilled athlete remains unsigned, as yet, by any professional team in the NFL.

As Trump rekindles NFL fight, Goodell sides with players

Cancel culture UPDATE:

'Free speech has never been freer'

This conversation between Pankaj Mishra and Viet Thanh Nguyen was published in the  print edition of the Guardian Review (Sat 25 Jul 2020). The question they consider is:

Are we living through a moment of lasting change?

Two authors discuss Black Lives Matter, the Harper’s letter and where we go from here.

Pankaj Mishra: Black Lives Matter has forced a long overdue re-examination, from the perspectives of history’s long-term losers, of everything, not only entrenched political and economic inequities but also the imbalances of intellectual and artistic life. But there is a very long way to go. Your recent article on Spike Lee’s new film about African-American soldiers in Vietnam [Da 5 Bloods] was instructive in this regard. Here is a celebrated African American film-maker, the cinematic biographer of Malcolm X, succumbing to American cliches about the Vietnamese, and non-white foreigners in general.

I am reminded, too, of a prize-winning writer who recently claimed in a tweet that African Americans were “fighting for democracy abroad”. Contrast this casual euphemising of American violence in multiple countries to Muhammad Ali’s principled refusal to join the assault on Vietnam. Such naive Americanism is striking. In the past African American leaders and artists, from WEB Du Bois to Nina Simone, simply assumed solidarity with peoples elsewhere; they could see that the plights of the long-term victims of slave society and the societies despoiled by racial-ethnic supremacism were inseparably linked. What do you think happened to sunder that connection?

Viet Thanh Nguyen: I think also of black radicals like Du Bois and Martin Luther King Jr, who are best known in the US for their critiques of racism within American society. Du Bois, of course, would go on after The Souls of Black Folk to be much more international in his life and thinking, and King delivered his speech “Beyond Vietnam” in 1967, near the end of his life. The speech connected anti-black racism with racist American warfare in Vietnam and elsewhere, and posited that these were inseparable. King’s civil rights colleagues didn’t want him to go in that direction. That strand of domestic-centred thinking is still strong.

There’s the positive pull of being American, realised in the election of Barack Obama, symbolically so important for many Americans but especially black Americans. On the negative side, there is the spectre of punishment. Ali was punished, King was murdered, the Black Panthers – who were reading Mao and saw themselves as part of a third world revolution – were violently suppressed. Finally, Obama, Beyoncé, Kanye West, Michael Jordan, and the rest of the black economic, cultural and political elite are international, but not in the radical sense. That’s racial contradiction under a global capitalist economy, when Oprah can be a billionaire and still be racially profiled in a luxury goods store. The liberal-to-moderate-left position is to guarantee that Oprah can be a billionaire without racism, even if many black Americans remain poor (because of both racism and capitalism).

In this racialised economy, Black Lives Matter is an idea, a meme, a phrase that can be commodified and contained. Now it’s relatively safe to take a knee, to wear a BLM shirt. Still, the moment feels different from anything I’ve seen in my lifetime. Quantitatively different, too, with the scale of the protests in the US and outside. I’m guardedly optimistic that there has been a shift in thinking about race in the US. And since race cannot be separated from inequality and exploitation, a shift in thinking about race might be a shift in thinking about these interrelated issues. Are you more pessimistic than I am?

PM: I think I am wary rather than pessimistic. Perhaps because I see the opposition to BLM’s demand for root-and-branch change as deeply entrenched, among liberals as well as white supremacists. Take, for instance, the insidious Harper’s letter, which complains about something usually called “cancel culture” in the midst of the most devastating global crisis since the second world war and massive protests against racism that you rightly call transformative.

You’ll remember that King identified the peddler of “moderation” as the bigger obstacle to social justice than white supremacists. The letter is an example of how elites rush to occupy the moral high ground when their authority as arbiters of intellectual and political life is challenged from both the left and the right. The letter was organised by Thomas Chatterton Williams, a writer much liked by self-proclaimed centrists and moderates as well as rightwingers for his belief that the “root problem in black life” in America is an “intangible smallness of mind” and “moral childishness and sheepish conformity”.

Shouting that “free speech” is in danger has become one way to promote yourself as a custodian of “classical liberalism”, and to accrue some moral and intellectual glamour. The problem for this rich, powerful, but deeply insecure minority is that free speech has never been freer for most people on this planet.

I can personally attest, after nearly 25 years of publishing in mainstream journals, that intellectual discourse has never been more open and diverse. Yes, Niall Ferguson threatened to sue me over a book review, and Jordan Peterson responded to an article by calling me a “prick” whom he would happily beat up; but you have to take such moderate exponents of free speech in your stride if you have a public role. The important thing is that many more people of our background are writing today in mainstream periodicals than they were in the mid-1990s, when I started out. Today we can discuss a range of subjects with a frankness that was simply taboo for decades. Moreover, the public sphere is no longer dominated by the so-called legacy media. We tend to focus on the derangements and corruptions of Twitter. But what about the contributions of historians, economists and sociologists on Twitter and in webzines and small periodicals?

When in the past you read prescriptions for wars and torture in the Atlantic and the New York Times; when the editorial pages of the Financial Times in 2014 said that there is something “thrilling” about the rise of Narendra Modi, you could do nothing except let off an internal scream of impotent despair.

Today, such moral obscenities provoke an immediate response. When Roger Cohen, a columnist at the NYT (and a signatory of the open letter), endorsed Modi’s leadership he faced a tsunami of scorn. When the Economist tells us, with its usual glibness, to deploy “Enlightenment liberalism” against racism, a lot of people can swiftly point out that Voltaire saw black people as only slightly intellectually superior to animals and that Kant thought black people were stupid by nature.

Yascha Mounk, the political scientist who ran Tony Blair’s Saudi-funded programme for “renewing the centre”, faced immediate criticism when he hailed a coup in Bolivia as a triumph of democracy. Today, people can see that petulant rearguardism is being desperately passed off as classical liberalism, that the beneficiaries and propagandists of an exclusionary system have dominated, and infantilised, political and intellectual discourse for too long.

The figures who once claimed authority and expertise find themselves challenged at last, and they won’t persuade many people by holding up their tattered copies of Voltaire and Kant; they are very likely to be told: “Read and think more broadly. Try to learn about other political, literary and philosophical traditions. And don’t forget to take a look at the world you made: it is collapsing around you.” And if they can’t embark on this self-education, they should cede their place to people who are younger, smarter and work harder. For the debacle of a bankrupt intelligentsia and political class is in plain sight. I am not pessimistic, to answer your question, but convinced that very little will change until both are renewed. Unfortunately, the political class is easier to renovate than a resourcefully self-perpetuating intelligentsia.

VTN: If you think that the political class is easier to renovate than the intelligentsia, you actually seem a bit optimistic, or maybe your pessimism about the intelligentsia is simply deeper than your pessimism about the political class. I’ve spent nearly three decades in academia and there is barely a radical left there, despite what Trump and conservatives claim. But academia, at least in the humanities and social sciences, does tilt liberal, and the mainstream liberal intelligentsia in academia is defined by the smugness of the Ivy League, so I think you are right there.

I’m new to the mainstream media world, and have been lucky to work with sympathetic editors, one of whom told me he is happy to periodically throw some of my socialism at the audience of his very mainstream publication.

I was actually invited to sign the Harper’s letter. My gut instinct was to say no, which was compounded by how the person who invited me described the letter as “liberal”. I’m not a liberal, and the refreshing-and-distressing power of social media is that it allows and encourages voices and views that are not liberal. Distressing because really hideous ideas and personalities can flourish there; refreshing because the will to speak truth to power is also strong there. Part of what you imply is that what social media allows is the amplification of non-institutional voices and the creation of whole new personalities. In the worst case, they are “influencers” and “thought leaders”, terms that make me shudder and which are completely implicated in the commodification of the idea as a marketable trend – see the TED talk as exemplary of this – parts of platforms and brands, utterly compatible with liberalism, neoliberalism, cosmopolitanism.

In the best case, these personalities are actually intellectuals. I go back to Antonio Gramsci’s concept of organic intellectuals: organic seems to be the right word to describe how some people outside of the mainstream have been able to use social media to advance ideas. Of course, Trump is organic at handling Twitter too. Contrast him with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who is definitely an organic intellectual at this moment. Whether she remains one or whether she becomes captured by power, we will have to wait and see.

What someone like Ocasio-Cortez or Black Lives Matter represents is the faint hope that the US can save itself from its contradictions. You have cited James Baldwin as a figure who called for an American reckoning with its fatal histories of conquest, war, genocide and slavery.

Not reckoning with these tragedies has, in your argument, left the UK and the US victims of their own ruthless winner-take-all forms of individual capitalism. But strong capitalist dictatorial states such as China have their own problems with the unchecked domination of civil society and minority groups. In the face of China’s rise, it might be that the US has three choices: first, to double down on its current strategy of having a multicultural military-industrial complex that emerges out of a racially and class stratified society whose inequalities pay for the complex. Second, to partly give in to BLM demands and force the nation to finally engage in truth and reconciliation, with reparations and economic redistribution drawn from higher taxes on the wealthy and a relatively small reduction in the Pentagon’s budget. Or third, to greatly reduce the military commitment and transform gracefully into a post-imperial power like Germany, one which is better at taking care of its citizens and defending its interests without seeking global domination.

The last option seems utopian in an American context. The middle option is the best we could hope for in a Biden presidency, and even that seems utopian, except that now at least the idea of reparations is legitimately being discussed by “thought leaders”. But Biden could just as easily slide back into the first option, which is the one Trump is most ferociously committed to, and which has formed the broad parameters of bipartisan consensus in the US for the past few decades. Recounting all this, I remind myself that I’m mostly just someone who finds great pleasure in writing novels, albeit novels that try to confront some of these dynamics.

PM: I suspect these dynamics today point to a treacherous period ahead. The pandemic is still out of control; more lives and livelihoods will be devastated. You cannot rule out a diversionary clash with China, only one of Trump’s likely ruses to postpone his eviction from the White House. And a Biden administration will likely consist of too many people who paved the path to Trump. One source of hope in this bleak scenario is what you call the organic intellectuals.

They have no establishment credentials, no supporting networks of self-cherishing elites or rightwing moneybags, and are consequently exposed to vicious attacks. Just look at how dementedly and relentlessly Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar, two first-time congresswomen, are persecuted today by rightwingers and centrists. But no one should doubt that they are here to stay and to fight and the emancipatory energy released by the BLM protests will fortify them. You can see it working on even older mainstream writers – take, for instance, Hilton Als’ unsparing account of his experiences as a black journalist in a white man’s world. More and more people feel empowered to raise questions they would have not dared to air in the past.

This, in itself, is an immense liberation of souls and minds, and a tremendous expansion of possibilities. I would include with the organic intellectuals those writers of fiction who have known political instability and social injustice with their mother’s milk, and cannot conceive of a literature that excludes this experience. A new book by Eddie Glaude [Begin Again] recounts how Baldwin was seen as a lesser artist after he became more explicitly political. These essentially cold war oppositions between art and politics don’t work any more. The coronavirus has broken the long imperial peace of Anglo-America, and the ideologies and assumptions spawned deep within its self-absorption – whether the end of history or an art perfectly insulated from history – can no longer persuade.

Fresh accounts of how we got here and what we can do are needed. Everywhere you see a young and deeply engaged generation ready to provide them, and what stands in their way are the still formidable forces of a discredited status quo.

VTN: Instead of one step forward, two steps back, I hope what we are seeing now is two steps forward, one step back. Because there will be a step back, a push back. But at the same time, what is crucial about BLM and the massive protests in the streets worldwide is a change in the imagination. We can’t overestimate the power of symbols, ideas, and words, in enabling people to imagine what was once seemingly impossible. Movements drive politicians, intellectuals and writers, but politicians, intellectuals and writers can drive movements, too. Look at the return of Baldwin as a perfect example of this dynamic process between movements and thinkers, someone compelled to action by the civil rights movement and someone whose words now help us understand our present and justify our struggle for the future. No one worries about whether he is a lesser artist now.

For the moment, I choose to hope.

Reparations ecology . . .

Picking up, and running with the notion of "reparations" prompts Re:LODE Radio to refer to this essay by Jason W. Moore and Raj Patel, the much quoted authors in the Re:LODE project of the book: A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet.

Unearthing the Capitalocene: Towards a Reparations Ecology

Settled agriculture, cities, nation-states, information technology and every other facet of the modern world have unfolded within a long era of climatic good fortune. Those days are gone. Sea levels are rising; climate is becoming less stable; average temperatures are increasing. Civilization emerged in a geological era known as the Holocene. Some have called our new climate era the Anthropocene. Future intelligent life will know we were here because some humans have filled the fossil record with such marvels as radiation from atomic bombs, plastics from the oil industry and chicken bones.

What happens next is unpredictable at one level and entirely predictable at another. Regardless of what humans decide to do, the twenty-first century will be a time of “abrupt and irreversible” changes in the web of life.

Earth system scientists have a rather dry term for such a fundamental turning point in the life of a biospheric system: state shift.

Unfortunately, the ecology from which this geological change has emerged has also produced humans who are ill-equipped to receive news of this state shift. Nietzsche’s madman announcing the death of god was met in a similar fashion: although industrial Europe had reduced divine influence to the semi-compulsory Sunday-morning church attendance, nineteenth-century society couldn’t imagine a world without god.

The twenty-first century has an analogue: it’s easier for most people to imagine the end of the planet than to imagine the end of capitalism.

We need an intellectual state shift to accompany our new epoch. The first task is one of conceptual rigor, to note a problem in naming our new geological epoch the Anthropocene. The root, anthropos (Greek for “human”), suggests that it’s just humans being humans, in the way that kids will be kids or snakes will be snakes, that has caused climate change and the planet’s sixth mass extinction. It’s true that humans have been changing the planet since the end of the last ice age. A hunting rate slightly higher than the replenishment rate over centuries, together with shifting climate and grasslands, spelled the end for the Columbian Plains mammoth in North America, the orangutan’s overstuffed relative the Gigantopithecus in east Asia, and the giant Irish elk Megaloceros giganteus in Europe. Humans may even have been partly responsible for tempering a global cooling phase 12,000 years ago through agriculture-related greenhouse gas emissions.

Hunting large mammals to extinction is one thing, but the speed and scale of destruction today can’t be extrapolated from the activities of our knuckle-dragging forebears. Today’s human activity isn’t exterminating mammoths through centuries of overhunting. Some humans are currently killing everything, from megafauna to microbiota, at speeds one hundred times higher than the background rate. We argue that what changed is capitalism, that modern history has, since the 1400s, unfolded in what is better termed the Capitalocene.

Using this name means taking capitalism seriously, understanding it not just as an economic system but as a way of organizing the relations between humans and the rest of nature.

Seven Cheap Things
In our new book, A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things (University of California Press), we show how the modern world has been made through seven cheap things: nature, money, work, care, food, energy and lives. Every word in that sentence is difficult. Cheap is the opposite of a bargain — cheapening is a set of strategies to control a wider web of life that includes humans.

“Things” become things through armies and clerics and accountants and print.

Most centrally, humans and nature don’t exist as giant seventeenth-century billiard balls crashing into each other. The pulse of life-making is messy, contentious and mutually sustaining. Our book introduces a way to think about the complex relationships between humans and the web of life that helps make sense of the world we’re in and suggests what it might become.

As a teaser, let’s return to those chicken bones in the geological record, a capitalist trace of the relation between humans and the world’s most common bird, Gallus gallus domesticus. The chickens we eat today are very different from those consumed a century ago. Today’s birds are the result of intensive post-World War II efforts drawing on genetic material sourced freely from Asian jungles, which humans decided to recombine to produce the most profitable fowl. That bird can barely walk, reaches maturity in weeks, has an oversize breast, and is reared and slaughtered in geologically significant quantities (more than 60 billion birds a year). Think of this relationship as a sign of Cheap Nature.

Already the most popular meat in the United States, chicken is projected to be the planet’s most popular flesh for human consumption by 2020. That will require a great deal of labor. Poultry workers are paid very little: in the United States, two cents for every dollar spent on a fast-food chicken goes to workers, and some chicken operators use prison labor, paid twenty-five cents per hour. Think of this as Cheap Work.

In the US poultry industry, 86 percent of workers who cut wings are in pain because of the repetitive hacking and twisting on the line. Some employers mock their workers for reporting injury, and the denial of injury claims is common. The result for workers is a 15 percent decline in income for the ten years after injury. While recovering, workers will depend on their families and support networks, a factor outside the circuits of production but central to their continued participation in the workforce. Think of this as Cheap Care.

The food produced by this industry ends up keeping bellies full and discontent down through low prices at the checkout and drive-through. That’s a strategy of Cheap Food.

Chickens themselves are relatively minor contributors to climate change — they have only one stomach each and don’t burp out methane like cows do — but they’re bred in large lots that use a great deal of fuel to keep warm. This is the biggest contributor to the US poultry industry’s carbon footprint. You can’t have low-cost chicken without abundant propane: Cheap Energy.

There is some risk in the commercial sale of these processed birds, but through franchising and subsidies, everything from easy financial and physical access to the land on which the soy feed for chickens is grown — mainly in China, Brazil and the United States — to small business loans, that risk is mitigated through public expense for private profit. This is one aspect of Cheap Money.

Finally, persistent and frequent acts of chauvinism against categories of human life — such as women, the colonized, the poor, people of color and immigrants — have made each of these six cheap things possible. Fixing this ecology in place requires a final element — the rule of Cheap Lives.

Yet at every step of this process, humans resist — from the Indigenous peoples whose flocks provide the source of genetic material for breeding through poultry and care workers demanding recognition and relief to those fighting against climate change and Wall Street.

The social struggles over nature, money, work, care, food, energy and lives that attend the Capitalocene’s poultry bones amount to a case for why the most iconic symbol of the modern era isn’t the automobile or the smartphone but the Chicken McNugget.

All this is forgotten in the act of dipping the chicken-and-soy product into a plastic pot of barbeque sauce. Yet the fossilized trace of a trillion birds will outlast — and mark the passage of — the humans who made them. That’s why we present the story of humans, nature and the system that changed the planet as a short history of the modern world: as an antidote to forgetting.

Civilizational Collapse
It’s not some genetic code — or some human impulse to procreate — that has brought us to this point. It’s a specific set of relationships between humans and the biological and physical world. Civilizations don’t collapse because humans reproduce too fast and starve, as Robert Malthus warned in his Essay on the Principles of Population. Since 1970, the number of malnourished people has remained above 800 million, yet few talk of the end of civilization. Instead, great historical transitions occur because “business as usual” no longer works. The powerful have a way of sticking to time-honored strategies even when the reality is radically changing. So it was with feudal Europe. The Black Death was not simply a demographic catastrophe. It also tilted the balance of forces in European society.

Feudalism depended on a growing population, not only to produce food but also to reproduce lordly power. The aristocracy wanted a relatively high peasant population, to maintain its bargaining position: many peasants competing for land was better than many lords competing for peasants. But feudalism was a system born of an earlier climate. Historians call this the Medieval Warm Period — it was so balmy that vineyards reached Norway. That changed at the dawn of the fourteenth century. Climate may not be destiny, but if there is a historical lesson from climate history, it’s that ruling classes don’t survive climate transitions. Feudalism’s class-enforced monocultures crumbled in the face of the Little Ice Age: famine and disease quickly followed.

As a result, with the onset of the Black Death, webs of commerce and exchange didn’t just transmit disease — they became vectors of mass insurrection. Almost overnight, peasant revolts ceased being local affairs and became large-scale threats to the feudal order. After 1347 these uprisings were synchronized — they were system-wide responses to an epochal crisis, a fundamental breakdown in feudalism’s logic of power, production and nature.

The Black Death precipitated an unbearable strain on a system already stretched to the breaking point. Europe after the plague was a place of unrelenting class war, from the Baltics to Iberia, London to Florence. Peasant demands for tax relief and the restoration of customary rights were calls that feudalism’s rulers could not tolerate. If Europe’s crowns, banks and aristocracies could not suffer such demands, neither could they restore the status quo ante, despite their best efforts. Repressive legislation to keep labor cheap, through wage controls or outright re-enserfment, came in reaction to the Black Death. Among the earliest was England’s Ordinance and Statute of Labourers, enacted in the teeth of the plague’s first onslaught (1349–51). The equivalent today would be to respond to an Ebola epidemic by making unionization harder.

The labor effects of climate change were abundantly clear to Europe’s aristocrats, who exhausted themselves trying to keep business very much as usual. They failed almost entirely. Nowhere in western or central Europe was serfdom reestablished. Wages and living standards for peasants and urban workers improved substantially, enough to compensate for a decline in the overall size of the economy. Although this was a boon for most people, Europe’s 1 percent found their share of the economic surplus contracting. The old order was broken and could not be fixed.

Capitalism emerged from this broken state of affairs. Ruling classes tried not just to restore the surplus but to expand it. That was easier said than done, however. East Asia was wealthier, so although its rulers also experienced socio-ecological tribulations, they found ways to accommodate upheaval, deforestation and resource shortages in their own tributary terms. One solution that reinvented humans’ relation to the web of life was stumbled upon by the Iberian aristocracy — in Portugal and Castile above all. By the end of the fifteenth century, these kingdoms and their societies had made war through the Reconquista, the centuries-long conflict with Muslim powers on the peninsula, and were so deeply dependent on Italian financiers to fund their military campaigns that Portugal and Castile had in turn been remade by war and debt.

The mix of war debt and the promise of wealth through conquest spurred the earliest invasions of the Atlantic. The solution to war debt was more war, with the payoff being colonial profit on new, great frontiers.

The modern world emerged from systematic attempts to fix crises at this frontier.

What followed was an epochal transition: one that reinvented the surplus around a cocktail of banking, slaving, and killing.

The Perspective of World-Ecology

Our view of capitalism is part of a perspective that we call world-ecology.

World-ecology has emerged in recent years as a way to think through human history in the web of life. Rather than begin with the separation of humans from the web of life, we ask questions about how humans — and human arrangements of power and violence, work and inequality — fit within nature. Capitalism is not just part of an ecology but is an ecology — a set of relationships integrating power, capital and nature.

So when we write — and hyphenate — world-ecology, we draw on older traditions of “world-systems” to say that capitalism creates an ecology that expands over the planet through its frontiers, driven by forces of endless accumulation.

To say world-ecology is not, therefore, to invoke the “ecology of the world” but to suggest an analysis that shows how relations of power, production and reproduction work through the web of life. The idea of world-ecology allows us to see how the modern world’s violent and exploitative relationships are rooted in five centuries of capitalism and also how these unequal arrangements — even those that appear timeless and necessary today — are contingent and in the midst of unprecedented crisis. World-ecology, then, offers something more than a different view of capitalism, nature and possible futures. It offers a way of seeing how humans make environments and environments make humans through the long sweep of modern history.

This opens space for us to reconsider how the ways that we have been schooled to think of change — ecological, economic, and all the rest — are themselves implicated in today’s crises. That space is crucial if we are to understand the relationship between naming and acting on the world. Movements for social justice have long insisted on “naming the system” because the relationships among thought, language and emancipation are intimate and fundamental to power. World-ecology allows us to see how concepts we take for granted — like Nature and Society — are problems not just because they obscure actual life and history but because they emerged out of the violence of colonial and capitalist practice.

Modern concepts of Nature and Society were born in Europe in the sixteenth century. These master concepts were not only formed in close relation to the dispossession of peasants in the colonies and in Europe but also themselves used as instruments of dispossession and genocide.

The Nature/Society split was fundamental to a new, modern cosmology in which space was flat, time was linear and nature was external.

That we are usually unaware of this bloody history — one that includes the early-modern expulsions of most women, Indigenous Peoples and Africans from humanity — is testimony to modernity’s extraordinary capacity to make us forget.

World-ecology therefore commits not only to rethinking but to remembering. Too often we attribute capitalism’s devastation of life and environments to economic rapaciousness alone, when much of capitalism cannot be reduced to economics.

Contrary to neoliberal claptrap, businesses and markets are ineffective at doing most of what makes capitalism run.

Cultures, states and scientific complexes must work to keep humans obedient to norms of gender, race and class. New resource geographies need to be mapped and secured, mounting debts repaid, coin defended. World-ecology offers a way to recognize this, to remember — and see anew — the lives and labors of humans and other natures in the web of life.

The Afterlives of Cheap Things

There is hope in world-ecology. To recognize the webs of life-making on which capitalism depends is also to find new conceptual tools with which to face the Capitalocene. As justice movements develop strategies for confronting planetary crisis — and alternatives to our present way of organizing nature — we need to think about the creative and expanded reproduction of democratic forms of life.

A wan environmentalism is unlikely to make change if its principal theory rests on the historically bankrupt idea of immutable human separation from nature.

Unfortunately, many of today’s politics take as given the transformation of the world into cheap things. Recall the last financial crisis, made possible by the tearing down of the boundary between retail and commercial banking in the United States. The Great Depression’s Glass-Steagall Act put that barrier in place to prevent future dealing of the kind that was understood to have knocked the global economy into a tailspin in the 1930s.

American socialists and communists had been agitating for bank nationalization, and Franklin Roosevelt’s New Dealers offered the act as a compromise safeguard.

When twenty-first-century liberal protesters demanded the return of Glass-Steagall, they were asking for a compromise, not for what had been surrendered to cheap finance: housing.

Similarly, when unions demand fifteen dollars an hour for work in the United States, a demand we have supported, a grand vision for the future of work is absent. Why should the future of care and food-service workers be to receive an incremental salary increase, barely enough on which to subsist? Why, indeed, ought ideas of human dignity be linked to hard work? Might there not be space to demand not just drudgery from work but the chance to contribute to making the world better? Although the welfare state has expanded, becoming the fastest-growing share of household income in the United States and accounting for 20 percent of household income by 2000, its transfers haven’t ended the burden of women’s work. Surely the political demand that household work be reduced, rewarded and redistributed is the ultimate goal?

We see the need to dream for more radical change than contemporary politics offers. Consider, to take another example, that cheap fossil fuel has its advocates among right-wing think tanks from India to the United States. While liberals propose a photovoltaic future, they can too easily forget the suffering involved in the mineral infrastructure on which their alternative depends. The food movement has remained hospitable to those who would either raise the price of food while ignoring poverty or engineer alternatives to food that will allow poverty to persist, albeit with added vitamins. And, of course, the persistence of the politics of cheap lives can be found in the return to supremacism from Russia and South Africa to the United States and China in the name of “protecting the nation.” We aren’t sanguine about the future either, given polling data from the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago which found that 35 percent of baby boomers feel blacks are lazier/less hardworking than whites and 31 percent of millennials feel the same way.

While maintaining a healthy pessimism of the intellect, we find optimism of the will through the work of organizations that see far more mutability in social relations. Many of these groups are already tackling cheap things.

Unions want higher wages. Climate change activists want to revalue our relationship to energy, and those who’ve read Naomi Klein’s work will recognize that much more must change too.

Food campaigners want to change what we eat and how we grow it so that everyone eats well. Domestic worker organizers want society to recognize the work done in homes and care facilities. The Occupy movement wants debt to be canceled and those threatened with foreclosure and exclusion allowed to remain in their homes. Radical ecologists want to change the way we think about all life on earth.

The Movement for Black Lives, Indigenous groups and immigrant-rights activists want equality and reparation for historical injustice.

Each of these movements might provoke a moment of crisis.

Capitalism has always been shaped by resistance — from slave uprisings to mass strikes, from anticolonial revolts through abolition to the organization for women’s and Indigenous peoples’ rights — and has always managed to survive. Yet all of today’s movements are connected, and together they offer an antidote to pessimism. World-ecology can help connect the dots.
We do not offer solutions that return to the past. We agree with Alice Walker that “activism is the rent I pay for living on the planet” and that if there is to be life after capitalism, it will come through the struggles of people on the ground for which they fight. We don’t deny that if politics are to transform, they must begin where people currently find themselves. But we cannot end with the same abstractions that capitalism has made, of nature, society and economy. We must find the language and politics for new civilizations, find ways of living through the state shift that capitalism’s ecology has wrought.

Weighing the injustices of centuries of exploitation can resacralize human relations within the web of life. Redistributing care, land and work so that everyone has a chance to contribute to the improvement of their lives and to that of the ecology around them can undo the violence of abstraction that capitalism makes us perform every day. We term this vision “reparation ecology” and offer it as a way to see history as well as the future, a practice and a commitment to equality and reimagined relations for humans in the web of life.

This essay is an abridged excerpt from the introduction of Moore and Patel’s new book, A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet, published by University of California Press in the US, Verso Books in the UK and Black, Inc. in Australia and New Zealand.

Taking the knee . . .

. . . and vested interests?

Fossil fuels, including petroleum and other petrochemicals, share an entymology. The word petroleum comes from Medieval Latin petroleum (literally "rock oil"), which comes from Latin petra, "rock", (from Ancient Greek: πέτρα, romanized: petra, "rock") and Latin oleum, "oil", (from Ancient Greek: ἔλαιον, romanized: élaion, "oil").

The term was used in the treatise De Natura Fossilium, published in 1546 by the German mineralogist Georg Bauer, also known as Georgius Agricola. This treatise represents the first scientific attempt to categorize minerals, rocks and sediments since the publication of Pliny's Natural History. This text along with Agricola's other works including De Re Metallica compose the earliest comprehensive "scientific" approach to mineralogy, mining, and geological science.

In the 19th century, the term petroleum was often used to refer to mineral oils produced by distillation from mined organic solids such as cannel coal (and later oil shale) and refined oils produced from them.

Petronas

Petronas derives its brand name from the name of the business as a nationalised Malaysian company  Petroliam Nasional Berhad (National Petroleum Limited), that derives from a terminology describing oil extractable from rock. The Logo concept involves a basic structure that is geometric, embodying metaphoric and alpha glyphic nuances of an oil drop and a typography 'P'.

Net-zero emissions by 2050

"Achieving net-zero emissions by 2050 is part of his vision for Petronas," a recent source said of the company's new CEO, Tengku Muhammad Taufik.

Taufik recently shared his vision for Petronas in a video message to employees after being appointed to succeed Wan Zulkiflee Wan Ariffin.

Taufik has not yet elaborated on whether his zero-emissions target would be limited to Scope 1 and 2 (emissions caused by the company's own operations) or would also include Scope 3 (emissions caused by using the company's products).

Petronas has not yet released an official statement or document because the emissions policy is still at a very early stage of development, and probably also because Taufik still needs to win the approval of the company's board.

Petronas has reiterated its pledge to cap its annual greenhouse emissions at 49.5 million tons of carbon dioxide equivalent by 2024.

This is a rather unambitious target given that Petronas has exceeded 48 million tons of CO2 equivalent only once in the past five years. 

Petronas' CO2 emissions totaled 47.9 million tons in 2019.

From Rock Oil to Rock Dust - a practical means to reduce CO2 in the atmosphere!

While Petronas and other fossil fuel companies are facing an uncertain future, the extraction of rock to produce rock dust, especially dust sourced from basaltic rocks, promises to offer a practical means to absorb huge amounts of carbon dioxide from the Earth's atmosphere.

Spreading rock dust on fields could remove vast amounts of CO2 from air

It may be best near-term way to remove CO2, say scientists, but cutting fossil fuel use remains critical

These are some of the conclusions reported in the Guardian by Damian Carrington, Environment editor (Wed 8 Jul 2020) in this potentially positive climate change mitigating strategy. He writes:

Spreading rock dust on farmland could suck billions of tonnes of carbon dioxide from the air every year, according to the first detailed global analysis of the technique.

The chemical reactions that degrade the rock particles lock the greenhouse gas into carbonates within months, and some scientists say this approach may be the best near-term way of removing CO2 from the atmosphere.

The researchers are clear that cutting the fossil fuel burning that releases CO2 is the most important action needed to tackle the climate emergency. But climate scientists also agree that, in addition, massive amounts of CO2 need to be removed from the air to meet the Paris agreement goals of keeping global temperature rise below 2C.

The rock dust approach, called enhanced rock weathering (ERW), has several advantages, the researchers say. First, many farmers already add limestone dust to soils to reduce acidification, and adding other rock dust improves fertility and crop yields, meaning application could be routine and desirable.

Basalt is the best rock for capturing CO2, and many mines already produce dust as a byproduct, so stockpiles already exist. The researchers also found that the world’s biggest polluters, China, the US and India, have the greatest potential for ERW, as they have large areas of cropland and relatively warm weather, which speeds up the chemical reactions.

The analysis, published in the journal Nature, estimates that treating about half of farmland could capture 2bn tonnes of CO2 each year, equivalent to the combined emissions of Germany and Japan. The cost depends on local labour rates and varies from $80 per tonne in India to $160 in the US, and is in line with the $100-150 carbon price forecast by the World Bank for 2050, the date by which emissions must reach net zero to avoid catastrophic climate breakdown.

“CO2 drawdown strategies that can scale up and are compatible with existing land uses are urgently required to combat climate change, alongside deep emissions cuts,” said Prof David Beerling, of the University of Sheffield, a lead author of the study. “ERW is a straightforward, practical approach.”

Prof Jim Hansen, of Columbia University in the US and one of the research team, said: “Much of this carbonate will eventually [wash into] the ocean, ending up as limestone on the ocean floor.” 

“Weathering provides a natural, permanent sink for the carbon.”

Hansen, who famously warned the US Senate about global warming in 1988, said improving soil could also underpin food security for billions of people.

Other proposed ways of pulling CO2 from the atmosphere at similar rates include using chemical solvents to capture it directly from the air, or growing energy crops, burning them to produce electricity and then burying the CO2 emissions. The new research suggests ERW will be less expensive than either and, unlike energy crops, does not compete with food for land. But the scientists said all approaches may be needed to beat the climate crisis.

Planting trees and adding charcoal to soil also remove CO2 from the air, and these approaches could potentially be used in combination with ERW to maximise the impact. “Planting trees is an excellent option for CO2 removal but is not sufficient on its own,” said the scientists.

Basalt is preferred for ERW as it contains the calcium and magnesium needed to capture CO2, as well as silica and nutrients such as potassium and iron, which are often deficient in intensively farmed soils.

Some farmers in south-east Asia already use it to boost depleted silica in rice fields, while trials in the Netherlands are using it to boost tree planting. Most importantly, ERW reduces soil acidity, which already affects about 20% of arable fields around the world.

Basalt is one of the most common rocks on Earth, and waste dust from mining could be used for ERW, as could waste from cement and steel manufacturing. This would remove the need to grind the rocks into fine particles, which requires energy. But how big these waste stockpiles are is unknown.

“We are calling on nations to make inventories,” said Beerling. He said mines in Northumberland, UK, that produce basalt aggregate for construction produced 20-30% waste dust. But he said some mining specifically to produce basalt rock dust would probably still be needed, using existing mine capacity rather than new mines.

Beerling said ERW did not require new technology, and farmers could get behind it, adding: “If you could demonstrate to farmers in China and India, for example, that they are going to get crop yield increases and get paid $100 a tonne for removing CO2, then it becomes really attractive.”

Prof Johannes Lehmann, of Cornell University, and Angela Possinger, of Virginia Tech, both in the US, who were not involved in the study, wrote in a commentary on the work in Nature: “Any carbon sequestration involving soils is a formidable challenge because the technologies must be used on vast areas of land that are operated by hundreds of millions of farmers. Farmers must be fully behind such a global effort or it will fail.”

They added: “Benefits to crop growth will need to be prioritised, as will financial incentives.” But they concluded that using ERW to “support soil health and crop production could emerge as our best near-term solution to the problem of removing CO2 from the atmosphere”.

Beerling said that while the model used for the analysis was sophisticated, it would be important to compare its estimates with real-world experiments under way on 4ha plots in the UK, US, Australia and Malaysian Borneo, and that more research was needed on the detailed soil chemistry. “It is quite a young science,” he said.

Financial incentives . . .

. . . require political and state sponsored interventions. Right now the political classes across the world are, in one way or another, heavily invested in the capitalist "business as usual" way of disorganising things, so that everything becomes cheapened in ways that maximise short term profits. In China the political class endorses a "communist" ideology, but this appears to be used as a highly functional justification for social, political and economic interventions that sustain the capitalist "business as usual" model. The use of labels in the current climate of identity politics, be they, nationalist, Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, communist, socialist, anarchist or terrorist, are used, positively and negatively in political discourse.  Whether in India, or the United States, these labels are calibrated by those who wield the actual power, and used in an ideological information war to maintain this model, as the only way to do "business as usual".

Fossil fuel subsidies . . .

. . . are and have been, and for many decades since, a major form of state sponsored intervention into the "market place", or "free market" as most neoliberal climate deniers would have us believe.

Q. What is a fossil fuel subsidy?

OILCHANGE INTERNATIONAL have the answer to this question:

A fossil fuel subsidy is any government action that lowers the cost of fossil fuel energy production, raises the price received by energy producers, or lowers the price paid by energy consumers. Essentially, it’s anything that rigs the game in favor of fossil fuels compared to other energy sources.

The most obvious subsidies are direct funding and tax giveaways, but there are many activities that count as subsidies – loans and guarantees at favorable rates, price controls, governments providing resources like land and water to fossil fuel companies at below-market rates, research and development funding, and more.

What’s Wrong with Fossil Fuel Subsidies?

One of the most urgent reasons to eliminate fossil fuel subsidies is the rapidly dwindling carbon budget – the remaining amount of greenhouse gases we are able to emit while having a hope of staying below the temperature warming limits agreed to by world leaders. But, there is enough carbon in the fossil fuel resources already under development, globally, to surpass those limits. Simply put, we can not develop any new oil, gas, and coal resources and hope to stay on target. In this context, putting public money towards finding and burning more fossil fuels just doesn’t make sense.

Support for fossil fuel production also adds to the risks of “carbon lock-in”. Carbon- and capital-intensive infrastructure can last for decades, and investment in this infrastructure can mean that fossil fuel dependence – and the carbon emissions that come with it – get “locked in.” This makes the urgently-needed transition to climate-compatible energy pathways much more difficult.

Subsidies to fossil fuels support an industry that drives negative public health impacts, local environmental pollution from fossil fuel extraction and infrastructure, and climate change impacts and costs.

Fossil fuel subsidies essentially function as a negative carbon price, reducing the cost of developing fossil fuels – so not only are their true costs being shifted onto the poor via climate and health impacts, but the fossil fuel industry is actually being paid for this privilege.

Fossil fuel subsidies also take public money away from other uses. Public money going to fossil fuels could instead go to social spending, health and development, clean energy, energy access for the poor, or other areas important to the public.

How Much Money Do Governments Provide to Support the Oil, Gas, and Coal Industries Internationally?

Internationally, governments provide at least $775 billion to $1 trillion annually in subsidies, not including other costs of fossil fuels related to climate change, environmental impacts, military conflicts and spending, and health impacts. This figure varies each year based on oil prices, but it is consistently in the hundreds of billions of dollars. Greater transparency in reporting would allow for more precise figures.

When externalities are included, as in a 2015 study by the International Monetary Fund, the unpaid costs of fossil fuels are upward of $5.3 trillion annually – which works out to a staggering $10 million per minute.

Oil Change International’s most recent reporting looks at money for fossil fuel production only (including exploration, and extraction, and development) in the G20 governments – which includes many of the world’s most developed countries. These governments are providing support to oil, gas, and coal companies to the tune of $444 billion per year, between direct national subsidies, domestic and international finance, and state-owned enterprise investment.

You can find more information on the breakdown of global subsidies and international finance at our interactive website: 

ShiftTheSubsidies.org

More Info: The Worst of the Worst

Direct subsidies and public finance for the production and exploration of fossil fuels are particularly heinous because they prop up failing corporations, subsidize carbon which can never be burned, and actively undermine efforts to combat global warming and its deadly impacts.

Production Subsidies: Actively Undermining Commitments to Act on Climate

Productions subsidies are government support for fossil fuel production, including exploration, development, extraction, and transportation. We define support for fossil fuel production to include national subsidies, investment by state-owned enterprises, and public finance specifically for fossil fuel production.

G20 governments are publicly financing a bailout for some of the world’s largest, most carbon-intensive and polluting companies, to the tune of more than $444 billion per year, as highlighted in our 2015 report, Empty Promises. The United States and Russia lead the way with more than $20 billion in domestic production subsidies handed out each year, while other countries subsidize at higher levels through state-owned enterprises.

In effect, governments are propping up one of the richest industries in the history of the world: the production of oil, gas, and coal. Most of these fossil fuels can never be used if the world is to avoid dangerous climate change, so this support is tantamount to governments allowing fossil fuel producers to undermine national climate commitments, while paying them for the privilege.

As the world escapes the crushing grip of the oil industry, it is imperative that we transition away from all subsidies to oil, gas, and coal. However, not all subsidies are created equal – the intent of consumption subsidies in developing countries is often simply to help make access to energy and transport more affordable – even if they do not often accomplish this goal efficiently. While consumption subsidies must be phased out as part of the global transition away from an extraction-based, fossil fuel-powered economic system, a great deal of care needs to be taken in removing these subsidies so as not to harm the populations that rely on them for affordable energy. Production subsidies that support industry should be the first to go.

Exploration Subsidies: Subsidizing Dirty Fuels that Can Never Be Burned

Exploration subsidies are government handouts specifically for the purpose of discovering and reaching new fossil fuel reserves, including support for extraction that includes an exploration component. It has become increasingly clear that we cannot afford to burn more than a small portion of the fossil fuel reserves we have already found, meaning exploration for even more reserves – and wasting public money doing so – is the height of irresponsibility.

G20 governments dump more than $78 billion of public money per year into subsidizing exploration for fossil fuels, as Oil Change International revealed in a 2014 report, Fossil Fuel Bailout. This continuing public support is a triple-lose situation:

• At least 75% – and possibly more – of known fossil fuel reserves must stay in the ground if humanity is to avoid the worst impacts of climate change, yet giving out exploration subsidies is dumping money into finding even more fossil fuels that can’t be burned.

• Exploration subsidies sap investment in alternatives like solar and wind power, undermining their competitiveness by giving handouts to some of the world’s richest oil, gas and coal companies.

• The hypocrisy of exploration subsidies undermines countries’ collective and individual commitments to act to limit climate change and its deadly impacts at the landmark international climate negotiations in Paris in 2015.

International Fossil Fuel Finance: Bailing Out the World’s Dirtiest Industries

G20 countries spent an average of $88 billion annually in finance for oil, gas and coal production in 2013 and 2014. These are government controlled investments that could instead be used to drive a clean energy transition.

Oil Change International tracks fossil fuel finance from multilateral development banks and bilateral financial institutions in G20 countries in its Shift the Subsidies database. Multilateral development banks (MDBs) – backed by governments – still provide billions of dollars each year in subsidies to oil, gas, and coal production.

Coal – one of the dirtiest fossil fuels – benefitted from at least $73 billion in public support over the past 8 years, as revealed in our 2015 report, Under the Rug. That’s over $9 billion each year. Much of that support came from a handful of the world’s richest countries, aimed at boosting their large corporations that produce and export coal technology.

In 2015, governments took small steps to rein in this public support for coal, but much work remains. OECD countries, including longtime holdouts Japan, Australia, and Korea, agreed to establish some limits to international coal finance. Yet these countries continue to approve multibillion-dollar deals for coal power plants, including Japan’s recent contribution of $2 billion to back the proposed Batang power plant in Indonesia.

Over the past 8 years, Japan has provided the largest amount of coal financing of any country – over $20 billion, with Korea coming second among OECD countries. Governments need to move beyond the OECD agreement – they need to stop using public money to fund coal plants now.

Coal combustion is responsible for nearly half of global emissions that cause climate change, and health damage caused by coal is estimated at as much as $500 billion per year in the United States alone, with damages in China many times that figure.

Accountabilty? Democracy? Liberty? Equality? Fraternity/Sorority?

When it comes to petroleum, and the subsidizing by the state of fossil fuel vested interests worldwide, just look at the map to see where responsibility for radical change to fossil fuel consumption is most urgently required.

Oil consumption per capita . . .

The solution is within our grasp . . .

. . . according to the World Economic Forum

A photo of the roof garden of Warsaw University Library, Poland, graces this World News Story for the Guardian covered by Damian Carrington Environment editor for the Guardian. The global market for urban green roofs is already worth $9bn

Nature-led coronavirus recovery could create $10tn a year, says WEF

Report says 400m jobs could be created, and warns there will be ‘no jobs on a dead planet’

Damian Carrington Environment editor for the Guardian reports (Wed 15 Jul 2020) on the World Economic Forum's New Nature Economy project. He writes:

Tackling the global nature crisis could create 400m jobs and $10tn (£8tn) in business value each year by 2030, according to a report published by the World Economic Forum.

The report warns that when the world recovers from the coronavirus pandemic there can be no business-as-usual, with today’s destruction of the natural world threatening over half of global GDP. In 2019 scientists warned that human society was in jeopardy from the accelerating decline of the Earth’s natural life-support systems.

The report, from the New Nature Economy project, published by the WEF, says a nature-first approach from business and political leaders will be a jobs-first solution.

“There will be no jobs or prosperity on a dead planet,” said Alan Jope, chief executive of Unilever and a WEF partner.

WEF, which brings together leaders and hosts the annual Davos summit, said three sectors were responsible for endangering 80% of threatened species – food and land use, infrastructure and building, and energy and mining. But it said these sectors also had the most to gain from a nature-led recovery.

The report says: “We are reaching irreversible tipping points for nature and climate. If recovery efforts do not address the looming planetary crises, a critical window of opportunity to avoid their worst impact will be irreversibly lost. Decisions on how to deploy the post-Covid crisis stimulus packages will likely shape societies and economies for decades.”

Akanksha Khatri, head of WEF’s Nature Action Agenda, said: “Nature can provide the jobs our economies need. There is nothing stopping businesses and governments from implementing these plans today, at scale, to re-employ millions.”

Carlos Alvarado Quesada, president of Costa Rica, said: “We must use the coronavirus crisis as an opportunity to reset humanity’s relationship with nature. [My country] has shown that the transition to a carbon-neutral, nature-positive, economy brings greater prosperity and jobs. It’s time to mainstream this model.”

Many high-level observers, including economists, health professionals, climate experts, and developing countries, have urged governments and business to pursue a green recovery but largely focused on tackling the climate emergency.

Another report in July concluded that almost a third of the world’s land and oceans could be protected while bolstering the economy. The UN has also warned that the world is currently only treating the health and economic symptoms of the pandemic, not the cause – the environmental destruction.

The WEF report proposes a range of measures for boosting jobs and economies, such as cutting food waste by providing metal silos and crates to keep food from rotting. Better management of wild fish too could boost catches and add 14m jobs and $170bn in value, it says. It is also vital to end the $2bn subsidies given daily to agriculture which damage the planet, the WEF report says.

“This expenditure of public money is actually creating harmful effects on the public good,” said Khatri. “Something is significantly broken in our system.”

In cities, retrofitting to increase energy efficiency could save $825bn by 2030, the report says, while the market for urban green roofs is already worth $9bn and could grow rapidly.

Renewable energy is also a huge investment opportunity and already matches the cost of fossil fuels in 30 countries, while the use of human sewage as an energy source is rising.

WEF acknowledged that some workers would lose their jobs in unsustainable industries and urged governments to ensure people were retrained and that the transition to a green economy was fair to all. It estimates that $2.7tn of annual investment is required to fund all the opportunities identified in the report, a sum similar to the stimulus package announced by the US in March.

Jennifer Morris, head of The Nature Conservancy, a US based organisation, said: “Nature simply cannot afford for us to waste any more time. None of this will be easy, system change at this scale never is. But WEF’s report underlines that it is our collective responsibility to transform the ways in which we eat, live, grow, build, and power our lives.”

The problem goes one step further than acknowledging "our collective responsibility", and that is ensuring by democratic means the accountability of politicians and the capitalist power networks they serve.