Reacting to the recent guest edition of NS’s Greta Thunberg, John Gray argues that the West desires radical power responses that go beyond a faltering transition to renewable energy.
On November 7, in a grandiose audition for a populist race that the world’s elites are comfortable with, Boris Johnson introduced himself as “the spirit of Glasgow. “technocrat wading with no vision and nothing to say.
None of the delegates faced the fact that abrupt climate change is unstoppable. Global warming may, in principle, be slower, but geopolitical conflicts and rising war dangers will restrict coordinated action across major global powers. Even if existing commitments to reduce the greenhouse effect were met by 2030, there would be an increase in global warming of around 2. 5°C, a point that guarantees serious climate turbulence. Forward now is through the “rapid transformation of societies. “
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Activist Greta Thunberg agrees. In a verbal exchange with musician Björk published in the Oct. 21 issue of The New Statesman, of which Thunberg is a guest editor, she denounced police demonstrations as “a strategy” devised by politicians “to give the impression that they are doing something when they are not doing it. “At the launch of her e-book on climate at the Royal Festival Hall on October 30, Thunberg described COP27 in similar terms, as part of a “colossal scam,” and revealed that she had refused to attend one of its meetings. “Back to normal,” he said. The normality “of the system”, imposed through the “global north”, which produced the crisis in the first place.
It is true that you cannot return to the global as it was before climate change, but an accelerated shift to “clean energy” will not prevent the devastation of the environment. The green transition on which environmentalists base their hopes is a winding path that leads nowhere.
A global conversion to renewables is to move from a fossil-fuel-based type of industrialism to a metal-based type. Hundreds of millions of electric cars and countless wind farms and solar panels will be needed. nickel, cobalt and other elements. The shift to renewables demands mining on a scale unimaginable in the past. Inevitably, the party of rare fabrics is already intensifying.
The race for renewable energy has created a new “big game” of imperial rivalry for herbal resources between foreign powers. Unlike the original festival, which took place before World War I, the Global North is only one of the actors, and not in all the apparent winners. The epicenter of the festival is in Africa, which is the scene of devastating neocolonial wars over resources. Nearly six million people are estimated to have died from disease, malnutrition and other side effects of the Second Congo War. – which seized the region’s rich mineral resources between 1998 and 2003 – and two million or more were alienated through clashes and violence that continued in many spaces for years.
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The growing demand for uncooked cloth is influencing plans for deep-sea mining, with catastrophic consequences for the oceans. The melting of the Arctic ice sheet faces its own dangers. Russia has expanded its military position there and China is pushing mining on a large scale. in the region. One of the last holdouts on Earth is about to be looted and looted.
A huge disconnect with geopolitics is a chronic weakness of green thinking. Fossil fuels now account for about 80% of the world’s energy mix. fossil fuels for their income. If they failed because of falling prices, Saudi Arabia and Russia would implode. Many other people say that wouldn’t be a bad thing, but democracy is unlikely to end up in the rubble of those collapsed states. Most likely, the case will be anarchy, with conflicting ethnic and sectarian teams competing for resources that still had market value. The wars in the Congo boded well for the struggles that followed.
While the West pursues the specter of green transition, Russia perfects environmental warfare. Huge volumes of methane, a very potent greenhouse fuel, were released through Nord Stream submarine pipelines carrying fuel from Russia to Europe, no doubt caused by Russian sabotage. delayed in September of this year. Precise estimates are not available, but emissions would likely be equal to those produced during a year in a city across Paris. With the destruction of Ukrainian crops, the theft of agricultural machinery and attempts to block food supplies, Vladimir Putin has reinstated the risk of famine as a war strategy and armed the refugees who will flood Europe from the famine zones he has created.
At the same time, relief in Russian combustible materials has stimulated the use of dirtier fuels. the reopening of coal-fired power plants or the extension of their useful life. Germany’s much-vaunted shift to blank power plants was postponed until the late 2030s. Beyond Europe, India is reopening deserted coal mines, while China is upgrading existing mines throughout its significant investment. in renewables and nuclear power plants.
Politicians jumping on the green bandwagon speak softly of “green expansion,” in which production and intake continue to grow based on renewables, but the economic expansion of the last two hundred years was a byproduct of hydrocarbons. Array Intensive agriculture is the extraction of food from oil. Mechanized agriculture, pesticides, herbicides and fertilizers, as well as refrigerators, battery farms and transportation systems, require massive inputs of fossil fuels. Contrary to an elegant green trope, the Industrial Revolution provided many millions of other people with greater popularity of life than the maxim had enjoyed in history. But the strong economic expansion, which depended on fossil fuels, came to an end. When rivers overflow and forests are on fire (more than 10% of Pakistan is flooded and tornadoes now hit European cities, as they did in Germany in May this year), visions of resurgent expansion are damaging illusions. Instead of expanding production and intake, technological innovation will have to serve the overriding imperative of human survival.
The Greens are right to think that the environmental crisis requires another kind of economic system. Taxes on the windfall profits of overly successful oil corporations are nothing more than demands for justice. As the climate crisis worsens, electrical infrastructure will be taken off the market and requisitioned through the state. An anti-capitalist revolution, on the other hand, will do nothing for the environment or for humanity. Some of the worst environmental crimes in history were committed in the former Soviet Union and Maoist China. birds in China are well known, while the killing of thousands of whales through Soviet ships has gone largely unnoticed until recently. Both systems were guilty of man-made famines in which tens of millions died.
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With its systematic and pragmatic method of reviewing its combined forces, China, despite its brutal repression of minorities and its incredibly nefarious “zero covid” policy, which now seems to be declining, is responding more intelligently than any other Western country. There is a stark contrast with Britain, where plans for the Sizewell C nuclear power station, which will generate 7% of the UK’s electricity, are being questioned due to cuts in public spending.
Environmental teams blocking traffic, sticking to walls, and throwing paint at artworks are archetypal expressions of the bourgeois protest culture of the Global North: the wanted, useless bureaucracy of psychotherapy rather than serious politics. Like much of the liberal left, climate activists are at the lowest point of helping their cause as evidence of popular irrationality, sinister interests and corporate money.
There is some fact in this, but the bigger picture is that radical green policies cannot be democratically legitimized. One of the effects of the U. S. midterm electionsThe agreement is a thing of the past. This program hinged on the promise that jobs lost by the closure of the oil, coal and fuel industries would be replaced through a new economy of wind and solar farms, a speculative, if not fantastic, assumption that is belied through record mining abandonment. Communities.
For those who can’t afford to protest, activists’ mental convenience is costly. A little research on Marxist elegance might be enlightening in this regard. Could it be that the social standing of many climate protesters insulates them from the economic damage that would be inflicted through the sudden blackouts they demand?
The self-absorption of the fresh Greens goes hand in hand with their anthropocentrism. Rightly convinced that today’s climate change is man-made, they are convinced that “humanity,” that is, themselves and their fellow protesters, can “save the planet. “But the planet is now the dominant player in the crisis. Growing demands from the human animal are leading to mass extinction and destruction of wildlife, weakening the biosphere’s ability to absorb greenhouse gases. In turn, the planet is becoming less hospitable to humans. The idea that a dispersion of indignant demonstrations could prevent this procedure is absurd.
A long-term habitable requires what the past James Lovelock, who is the author of the Gaia theory, in which the Earth is thought to be a self-regulating organism, called a “sustainable retreat”: a relief in the planetary human footprint achieved. through the use of complex technologies. Living with climate replacement means increasing nuclear power and hydrogen on a giant scale; reinforced coastal defences; new food production strategies, adding GM crops and vertical farms; extensive urban living, with weather-resistant architecture and infrastructure; and countless other practical adaptations.
Many of those who provide technological responses to environmental disorders deny the limits of growth. A babble of infinite naivety, they reject any concept of insurmountable limits to human expansion. For techno-futuristic maniacs like Elon Musk, the allocation of time was to escape the borders of the planet. But if their crazy plan to colonize Mars were to come to fruition, the inevitable result would be an interplanetary extension of our existing resource wars.
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Of course, this is not the most likely end result of the climate emergency. Although the global climate is presented as a single system, there is no comparable coordination in the human species. Geopolitics and war can derail any climate replacement adjustment program. In this case, the planet will impose the step back and regenerate, independent of humanity.
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This article appeared in The New Statesman’s November 16, 2022 factor, The state we are in