The weblog of Christiaan Briggs
How many anti-capitalist climate change deniers do you know? Do they even exist? I presume there are at least some out there but the only deniers I personally know are also ardent advocates of market economics. Go through a list of prominent sceptics and you also invariably find within it a little club of market economy advocates.
Maybe they subconsciously realise what many don’t want to talk about; that climate change has happened under the market economy’s watch.
No Right Turn on the NZ National Party’s plans to gut the Resource Management Act, and take NZ back to the Muldoon years:
How would National change this? Firstly, they would amend the definition of “environment” to include only “natural and physical resources” - so existing rights to amenity values such as peace and quiet, clean air, clean water, or an unimpeded view would cease to exist, while local bodies could no longer seek to protect their social environment by considering e.g. the effects of traffic, or the effects of visual pollution from excessive advertising. Secondly, they would aim to prevent “vexatious and frivolous” objections by allowing the Environment Court to require security for costs before considering any appeal (so no appeals unless you are rich like them). Thirdly, they would replace the existing call in power with a more regularly used “priority consenting” regime, which would see decisions made by a government body rather than an independent board. There’s some other nastiness - removing the Ministerial veto over coastal permits (so effectively the crown won’t own the coast anymore in any practical sense), and establishing an “Environmental Protection Agency” as cover for purging MfE (who National doesn’t trust) - but the driving principle is to shut local communities out of decision making, and prevent anyone - unless they are rich, of course - from mounting any challenge. And the net result will be open slather for developers, and large projects foisted on local communities, just like they were under Muldoon.
A rather unsettling story from the Independent today:
The first evidence that millions of tons of a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide is being released into the atmosphere from beneath the Arctic seabed has been discovered by scientists.
The Independent has been passed details of preliminary findings suggesting that massive deposits of sub-sea methane are bubbling to the surface as the Arctic region becomes warmer and its ice retreats.
Underground stores of methane are important because scientists believe their sudden release has in the past been responsible for rapid increases in global temperatures, dramatic changes to the climate, and even the mass extinction of species.
I find it incredible that we’ve allowed ourselves to get to this point while continuing to use the same bankrupt ideas, the same leadership and the same greed-fueled economic system that got us here in the first place.
I nearly ran an energy conference and did I ton of reading and learning for it. Loved the Dog and Lemon Guide guy. His final comment was fucking brilliant, and I think he was closest to my opinion on the whole subject.
Offsets are easy to explain: you shit and it goes into your septic tank, but your backyard can’t take it all the years of your turds. So you pay someone to truck your turds away and empty out the tank. You burn fuel (releasing greenhouse gases) or make things that rot (releasing greenhouse gases) or have some other chemical process that releases greenhouse gases like CO2. The Earth can’t take it all so you pay someone to take your carbon away and empty out the atmosphere. The only way to do this that we’ve got at the moment is to plant trees. (If someone develops a “sequestration” system, aka burying the carbon back in the earth and thus out of the atmosphere, it’ll qualify as an offset too)
Polluting = shitting. Atmosphere = your back yard septic tank. Offset = paying someone to truck it away.
Trading is also easy. It’s like fish. Fish quota is really a license to catch a percentage of the fish in the water—if the Minister finds more fish or less fish in the ocean, your quota goes up or down. If you take a break from fishing, you can lease your fish quota to other fishermen. Companies can emit a certain amount of CO2, and as the government’s obligations under treaties force the country to let out less total CO2 emission, each company gets its quota dialled back. But some companies will be supergreen and emit less than their quota permits them to. They get to sell their surplus polluting capacity to other companies in NZ, or overseas.
What offsets don’t cover is the fact that trees rot. Releasing greenhouse gases. So they’re a temporary measure. At best we should be replanting old growth forests, intending them to be around “forever”. If we try to build offsets out of pine trees, we’re just pushing the snooze button on our CO2. The sequestration is the hallelujah option—turn the crap in the atmosphere back into crap in the ground. But nobody’s there yet.
Clean energy is all about not shitting in the atmosphere in the first place. If you didn’t release CO2, you don’t need to offset or sequester it. That’s hard though, because the fuel we’re addicted to is really convenient—oil is a beautiful storage system for energy. Wind power and solar produce electricity, which doesn’t lend itself to such convenient storage—batteries are quite inefficient, even in their flash new forms. I’m not sure what that in the septic tank analogy: fuel = slow release porridge for energy, batteries = cheap carbohydrates like McD’s, that give you shits. Hmm, maybe not.
I think my metaphors just exploded.
That human beings, therefore, are to blame for a massive and ongoing decrease in biodiversity is the most incriminating piece of evidence to reveal just how badly out of sync human institutions are with their values, and, of course, how out of sync they are with life itself.
The Gaia hypothesis indicates that one way or another humans will stop being the cause of this decrease in biodiversity. Whether that means the end of our civilisation or its adaptation remains to be seen.
One disturbing practice of humans, at least since we turned to agriculture, has been to seek our and destroy other species that compete with us for food and territory. The following video of Joshua Klein at TED touches on this topic in an inspiring way.
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