A Very Public Sociologist: Green Issues

Showing newest posts with label Green Issues. Show older posts

Sunday, 25 July 2010

Toward a Sociology of Elite Policy Formation

One thing you'd be hard pressed to find in social science literature is the sociology of policy formation. There's plenty of material on power and the state, but there's no direct observation of political or business elites and how they make decisions. Thursday's talk at Keele's environmental politics summer school by Mike Jacobs, Gordon Brown's former special advisor on the environment, goes a little way toward plugging that gap.

His talk, titled 'The Political Economy of Government Policy Making: The View from the Inside' was a fascinating glimpse into how government operates outside the public view, and demonstrated the extent to which how incomplete present theorising about policy formation is. Traditional views in social and political theory on the state either positions it as an appendage of capital (Marxism) or the expression of successful interest groups (liberalism). Where the state is granted a certain level of autonomy against the rest of the society (however that is conceptualised), agency is usually attributed to institutions competing within the overall structure. This leaves a significant silence over the agency of the politicians: do they have no influence over the state at all? Going from his own experience, Mike said he and his colleagues certainly felt pressure but their will didn't feel anything other than free.

Using Labour's environmental/climate change policy shift from 2005 on Mike constructs the beginnings of a model that can help explain governmental action while escaping the incomplete picture painted by existing approaches.

Before 2005-6 Labour's battery of green policies were anaemic. But then there was a discernible shift. Whatever criticisms can be made of the measures the government adopted it marked a change in how seriously it took the issue.

This new package included the 2008 Climate Change Act, which was the first piece of legislation of the sort in the world. It set a target of 80% carbon emissions reduction by 2050. As a means of achieving this, it set into motion a five-yearly system of carbon budgets. The first, which was formulated in April 2009 set a 34% emissions reduction target on 2008 figures by 2020. The target is enforced by law and requires government takes the lead. For example, each department has its own budget.

Other policies Labour initiated were an ambitious nine-fold increase in the generating capacity of renewables, accounting for 18% of total energy generation by 2020; a ban on new coal-fired power stations without carbon capture and storage (there are subsidies available - but this is far from an unproblematic technology); subsidised cavity wall and lost insulation for the poor (with energy companies picking up the tab); an effort to commericalise electric cars; a low carbon industrial strategy; reform of the energy supply market; and the creation of a national green investment bank. The good news from a green point of view is the coalition government are committed to these policies too.

The big problem storing up political trouble for the future, and therefore any widespread (tacit) support is the market reform. Paying for this strategy doesn't come cheap and it could see energy prices rise by about 20% by 2015 - just in time for the scheduled election!

So how and why did Labour break with what went before, especially as the normal operation of government is characterised by what Mike called 'cautious incrementalism'? This requires an understanding of the government's psychological frame of action. Its chief characteristic, he argued, is the studied avoidance of punishment. Punishment is defined by the point at which criticism reaches a nodal point and becomes damaging, resulting in a loss of support. The 10p tax fiasco of a couple of years back is one such example. Governments do expect an everyday barrage of criticism but as long as it doesn't latch onto an issue and persistently push it damage is avoided. Mike suggests therefore that governments seek out a 'normal operating sphere' not of reward, but of non-punishment. Hence governments' preference for operating cautiously. Hence governments' tendency to compromise on policies it wishes to introduce.

This psychological sphere of non-punishment is constrained/enabled by three sectors. The first is public, or, more properly, media opinion. While rejecting hypodermic models of media consumption, nevertheless the public at large pay little attention to policy debates and everyday government business. What information they do possess comes from (and, therefore, is framed by) the media. Hence politicians' pandering to the press pack and treatment of it as if they accurately reflect public thinking. The second is the ever-present shadow cast by business. Not only is it felt via the media, business often makes direct representations to government. And third, there is the circumscribed but real sphere of politicians' agency. So how did this complex of factors convert Labour to a more radical green policy agenda?

In the public/media opinion factor, there were four developments. First, the accumulation of scientific evidence for anthropogenic climate change filtered through the liberal media and, crucially, the BBC. This built upon a public awareness already softened up by years of activity by the Green Party and environmentalist NGOs. Second, the NGOs presented a green policy agenda with concrete sets of proposals government could easily adapt. Third, as part of Cameron's campaign to detoxify the Tory brand in the wake of the 2005 defeat, he accepted the climate change agenda wholesale. Suddenly the Tories were taking NGOs seriously. This in turn created a pressure for the government to out-green the Tories, leading to a collapse of opposition to tackling climate change in mainstream politics. And lastly, by 2010 there was a significant constituency of voters who took green politics seriously. Downing Street strategists estimated there were 25-30 seats where this would make a crucial difference.

For business, a sufficient segment of capital has developed green commercial interests. The low carbon economy, the need to replace a third of Britain's energy generation capacity by 2020, and carbon trading all offer new market opportunities. The conversion of the CBI to green capitalism didn't hurt either. Second the famous Stern Report (commissioned by Mike at the government's behest) used the kind of economic language easily digestible by business. To illustrate, while business is largely blind to quality of life arguments and perspectives that argue the inherent value of biodiversity, it has o problem understanding that spending one per cent of GDP now will save an estimated 5-20% of GDP dealing with the effects of climate change later on.

Lastly, in the realm of political will, first there was a political pressure from other EU member states. The adoption of emissions targets across the bloc followed the lead of the EU's four big powers. As a result of its activism around the issue, Britain played a leading role in this thereby further locking in green policy at home. Second a new generation of politicians behind the green agenda were acquiring ministerial portfolios. Particularly key were the actions in office of the Miliband brothers. They were able to drive policy because the above constellation of forces favoured an abandonment of business-as-usual cautious incrementalism.

From this Mike drew number of conclusions. Given the present day balance of forces, a business case was absolutely crucial to securing a shifting of policy gears. Second, state activism was equally important. Capital is far from being intrinsically green and therefore requires incentives and compulsions with the force of law to behave in the desired fashion. Thirdly, public/media opinion has been partly driven by government action. Fourthly, the discourse employed by all key actors was (comparatively) easy for a lay audience to understand and was sufficiently convincing enough to marginalise the various species of climate change denialism. Fifth, these coalesced together to create even more room for government, i.e. it was able to widen the sphere of non-punishment by simultaneously tilting to the zeitgeist *and* pushing the envelope.

As well as providing a fascinating account of Labour's environmentalism, it opens the way for a sophisticated theorisation of government action. Not just because it's jolly well interesting from a sociological point of view, but also it's useful to know for anyone committed to progressive social change. The framework offered here can assist socialists and others in how we formulate strategy, particularly where struggles involve placing demands on the state. As the above political economy of state psychology demonstrates, absolutely key is to making sure government action happens (or doesn't happen) is to impinge on its perceived sphere of non-punishment.

Sunday, 18 July 2010

Speaking and Listening in Political Theory

Not the most exciting of titles ever to have appeared on this blog, but Andy Dobson's paper, 'Democracy and Nature: Speaking and Listening' (delivered at Keele's Environmental Politics Summer School) addressed a fundamental absence in political philosophy and democratic theory. For all the stresses on deliberation, dialogue, consensus-building and the like the focus has (pace Derrida) traditionally been on speaking and speech, about getting one's ideas and arguments across to an audience. Andy arrived at this lack by way of a journey through green political thinking.

Andy's paper began with a quotation from Aristotle. A key foundation stone of his political philosophy is the distinction between humans and animals. He argued the difference lies not in gregariousness, or the ability to feel pleasure or pain but in the capacity for reasoned speech. This is what makes politics possible and exclusionary: without it participation is immediately ruled out. On this basis Andy suggested progressive politics (a slippery phrase if there ever was one) could be defined as the struggle for the right to speak and be heard. This receives support from an Aristotelian perspective: seeing as politics is premised on reasoned speech, excluding anyone from participation on other grounds is supremely irrational.

This definition is problematic for environmental politics because, under Aristotle's definition, the subjects of green politics lack the facility of speech. Future generations cannot speak yet, though as reasoned beings-to-be it is possible to represent their interests in the present. But the rest is 'dumb nature': it can never speak.

Nevertheless there have been efforts to extend the range of politics. For example, animal rights philosopher Peter Singer and others participate in the Great Ape Project. This tries to argue that excluding the rest of the great ape family from politics altogether is inconsistent. They may be incapable of reasoned speech and therefore human politics, but their sapience is such that they should be afforded certain protections that sees them removed from the sphere of property to personhood. In Spain for example, the government's environmental committee granted great apes certain rights in 2008.

This project of course is limited: it only extends to certain related species who bear obvious resemblances to us. Other species who are as equally sapient but different - such as whales and dolphins - are excluded from the project. Therefore how can the rest of nature be brought into political theory?

For Andy, the work of French philosopher of science, Bruno Latour can be of use here. In his influential The Politics of Nature (2004) he argued the intermeshing of social and the natural world means we cannot but help be involved in 'political ecology'. Therefore we should, epistemologically speaking, treat politics and nature as a single, unified case. In his book, Latour argues we can make a metaphorical distinction between the house of nature and the house of humans. The former possesses certainty and objectivity and is therefore a realm of 'authority'. In contrast, the latter is an abode of doubt, uncertainty and value judgement. Nature lacks speech but has authority. Humans have speech but lack authority, and so it's unsurprising so much political theory has put a barrier between the two.

As far as Latour is concerned this has led to a situation where some environmentalists have constructed a political theory that ignores politics. The human/nature dichotomy is collapsed entirely into nature's authority: it is the ultimate legislator of human existence, therefore we have no choice but to curb economic growth, deindustrialise, etc. etc. The question of the kind of politics appropriate to this project is left hanging, hence the diversity of viewpoints that accept the premise of nature's unimpeachable authority, from anarcho-primitivism to eco-dictatorship.

This is a dead end for Latour, as are the interminable debates over what bits of dumb nature should be included in politics. If we start from his premise that politics and nature are intertwined and accept that the outcome of various postmodern/post-structuralist debates has been to philosophically problematise statements of fact, the politics appropriate to this is not one based on speech but on uncertainty. This 'new collective' moves away from subjects to propositions, from people who can speak to things that need to be taken into account. To use a current example, the concern with the decline of Bees and other pollinating insects is a political problem in that it impacts on agri-business, food supply, raises questions about pollution and climate change, etc. It is a political problem, even though the apparent subjects - insects - cannot speak.

Andy argued this view breaks with Aristotle. Using his terms, Latour's new collective endows everything with the capacity to "speak". Non-humans have become beings of concern that provoke discussion and political action. But because they lack speech in the Aristotelian sense, they can only become political propositions if we listen. This however is far from straightforward because, as a category of political thought, listening has been virtually ignored. For all the ink spilt on shared speech, mutual recognition, toleration and collaboration listening is, at best, only implied. By way of a demonstration, searching for speech in democratic theory returns millions of links off tens of thousands of articles. Doing the same for listening yielded just three. This means there's an absence in urgent need of working on.

By way of exploring a listening category, Andy briefly drew on two pieces. The first was the absence in Iris Marion Young's 2002 book, Inclusion and Democracy. Considering the title, it does not consider how deficiencies in the capacity to listen reduces the quality of democracy. This isn't the flipside of Aristotle - that some people lack the ability of political listening - instead it is an effect of power. As John Dryzek argues in his book, Deliberative Democracy and Beyond (2000), the refusal to listen is a property of the privileged and therefore an exercise of their power.

I found Andy's paper fascinating, but there are two points I would like to make - the first on humanity/nature and the second on listening. Latour's replacement of the society/nature divide by a messy but unified collective subject isn't really new. The seeds of conceiving the intertwining of the two are present in Marx, as amply demonstrated by John Bellamy Foster's investigation, Marx's Ecology (2000). The relationship human society has with nature is akin to a dialectical interpenetration of opposites. It is not analogous to a transaction between two discrete independent entities. What historical materialism describes is human history's gradual estrangement and alienation from nature. As the productive forces have grown we are less immediately abound by the vagaries of natural necessity . The problem is this human-nature 'metabolism' is unregulated: from the standpoint of capitalism as a social formation it is only dimly aware its operation undermines the natural supports that make it possible. Protecting the long-term interests of the beings that animate the system is low down on the list of priorities.

Of course, this isn't to say Marxism has applied Marx's insights systematically. Academics and other political opponents can get away with writing nonsense about Marx's 'Prometheanism' because Marxists themselves have often gone along with technocratic understandings of (economic) development - not helped by Marx's occasional lapses into phraseology that endorses this view. But sometimes you have to use Marx against Marx to extract the historical materialist kernel from the hyperbolic shell.

On listening, it seems to me this property is present but repressed in social democratic/labourist and socialist politics. In his concluding remarks, Andy suggested feminist and green politics are predisposed to listening because of their concern with identifying and exploring conflicts marginalised and ignored by mainstream political thinking. At least where the current rhetoric of Labour is concerned, the emphasis is on listening. But the listening it has in mind is that consistent with the previous 13 years in government. It is rather the *appearance* of listening. For example, for all the hand wringing about the so-called core vote, at least three of the leadership candidates thinks reconnecting with the working class base means bashing benefit claimants and immigrants. This is not hearing: it's telling people what the candidates think they want to hear, which perfectly sums up the New Labour attitude to listening. It is an example of what Dryzek argues above. This wilful hard-of-hearing extends to the party organisation too. The gutting of member-led democracy in the party from the late 80s on has seen a decomposition of what political science calls the linkage function, the idea members and the party organisation keep political elites aware of what's going on 'on the ground' by feeding up information, policy ideas and feedback. This isn't surprising: Labour and social democratic traditions, for all their positives over conservative and liberal traditions, are fundamentally paternalist. From the outset, listening (at best) is about representing working class interests within the system. It is not listening aimed at making workers politically active themselves.

Marxist political thought is (theoretically) different. Regardless of whether you see yourself as some sort of Leninist or not, if Marxism is about encouraging the working class to organise in its own interests for the winning of political power. Such a project is premised on listening. i.e. If Marxists do not listen to the working class, how can it ever be won over to socialist politics? There seems to me to be two ways in which the Marxist tradition has dealt with listening. The first is with reference to the revolutionary organisation. In Lukacs's History and Class Consciousness essay on the party ('Towards a Methodology of the Problem of Organisation' (my commentary here), while the individual is subject to party discipline the health of the organisation is absolutely dependent on the free flow of critical discussion. Without it the formulation of tactics and strategy is impossible. In other words, the communist leadership has to listen to its members: listening is crucial for the linkage function to operate. A similar albeit less democratic point was made by Mao in relation to the 'mass line'. Here the party listens to the masses. The information is relayed upwards to cadre and leaders who, on this basis, formulate the line which is then transmitted back down and is agitated for among the masses. Here listening is absolutely crucial to the party becoming a concretisation of the masses' interests.

Then there is Gramsci. Hegemony is absolutely key to the bourgeoisie's rule. While it is, in the classical sense, guaranteed by the "armed bodies of men" organised by (and synonymous with) the capitalist state their rule is sustained by systems of cross class alliances who have been won over not just thanks to material privileges, but also (and interrelatedly) on the basis of consent. The assimilation of the outlook of these classes and class fractions to the common sense of capital is only possible because their historic bloc listens to their aspirations and demands. If this is not met it can result into a section splitting away and forming a sectional political party, or can be more serious and call the whole basis of their collective will into question. For Gramsci the job of the modern prince - the revolutionary socialist party - is to construct a counter hegemony. Everywhere this means winning the working class over to its political programme, which is a process of consent-building that cannot proceed on any other base than listening to the class. But elsewhere where the working class do not comprise the overwhelming majority of the populace its own historic bloc of allied classes has to be forged. Such class alliances are premised on not only organising among the other classes but listening to them and finding room for their expression in the counter-hegemonic bloc. The relationship between the workers and the peasantry in Russia was, for instance, the condition of the Bolshevik's success in 1917 and the subsequent civil war. And it was the break down of this relationship - the refusal of the bureaucratising leadership to listen - that contributed to the crises of the 1920s.

So while listening is present in Marxist political thought, there has been a tendency for it to be buried by the stress on what constitutes the correct political leadership.

In sum, following Latour's lead Andy is right that green politics (or, for that matter, any radical politics) must treat the human and the natural world as a continuum, and that this calls for a certain recasting of political theory in terms of listening. I agree. But while there may only be pregnant implications in mainstream democratic philosophy in this direction, I argue that of the 'old' traditions listening reaches its clearest, albeit slightly suppressed expression in Marxist thinking about politics.

Saturday, 29 May 2010

Crop Trashing and Social Movement Theory

In a working paper given at Keele on Tuesday, Brian Doherty and Graeme Hayes presented an analysis of the apparently similar crop trashing movements in Britain and France. While the actions undertaken are the same - the destruction of genetically modified crops - their justifications are very different and pose a number of questions for the sociology of social movements.

In the theoretical literature, the dominant perspective on social movement mobilisation remains the political process school. Closely associated with the output of the late Charles Tilly, Sid Tarrow and several other leading scholars in the field political process theory places emphasis on the social structures that determine, condition and facilitate social action. For example, analyses that stress the importance of resource mobilisation and political opportunity structures are examples of the political process school.

For Tarrow and Tilly the structure and character of the state plays a major role in determining the sorts of protest activities social movements engage in. As Britain and France are 'high capacity democracies' it is reasonable to assume that not only are the kinds of opposition they engender are similar, but should they manifest contemporaneously there must be a connection between them, even if it's merely the case of one observing the protest actions of another via news bulletins. The problem for Doherty and Hayes is Tilly and Tarrow overemphasise structure. It's as if the presence of certain structures call forth certain actions, allowing one to assume the roots and character of apparently similar social movements are identical. This is a faulty assumption. In the case of crop trashing it cannot explain why the French movement justifies itself in terms of a civic republicanism, while the British as a distinctly anarchist flavour. This isn't to say Tilly's and Tarrow's privileging of the state and social structure is fundamentally faulty and has nothing to contribute to understanding social movements, but it does suggest it requires significant modification by an account that allows for difference at the macro, meso and micro levels to come into play.

There is a lot of work in social movement theory on protest tactics, but very little explaining why some groups of activists choose some tactics over others. Tilly's chief contribution here is the repertoire of contention, the idea that certain social movements have a toolbox of tactics open to them. For example, the criticism of the SWP's gatecrashing of ACAS last weekend was partly coloured by this form of direct action sitting outside the traditional Trotskyist/far left activist repertoire. Related to this but not reducible to it is that types of protest actions are modular. i.e. Successful tactics are diffused and transferable between different movements. For instance, practically every form of oppositional politics favours demonstrations, leafleting, etc. Hence for Tilly concurrent crop trashing in Britain and France would be an example of choosing a modular action from an environmentalist repertoire of contention that fits similar structural-political circumstances in the two countries.

In France crop trashing is the hallmark of Les Faucheurs Volontaires (The Voluntary Reapers), a formalised organisation of some 7,000 members dedicated to destroying GM crops. Founded in 2003, LVF defines itself as a citizens' insurrection defending French public space, countryside and culture against the encroachment of (American-led) biological neoliberalism. LVF's activists welcome (and sometimes demand) arrest as a means of using the courts to attract media coverage. To maximise its impact crop trashing usually takes place over the summer to take advantage of the French media's silly season.

The British movement is very different. At the head of crop trashing here are the overlapping anarchistic frameworks of GenetiX Snowball and Earth First!. Both are located in the non-violent direct action tradition and are quite prepared to destroy property to achieve its aims. If there are differences between the two networks, GenetiX would prefer arrest and exposure a la LVF, but as a whole both go in for covert actions. The majority considers their numbers are too small to make the publicity tactic effective and as anarchists they see submitting to arrest by a state whose authority they don't recognise as a negation of their principles. So rather than undertaking mass crop trashing, their actions tend to be sporadic and often in the dead of night.

Both movements' actions are facilitated by GM site locations being subject to freedom of information laws, and the 'topographical opportunity' of the difficulty of securing fields.

There are three key differences of interest from the standpoint of social movement theory that problematise the political process approach. First is a paradox between the positions the two movements find themselves in. In UK courts there has been a tendency by juries not to find activists who've destroyed property guilty. In France the price publicity frequently pays is conviction. Hence, at least from the standpoint of rational choice (an ontology that quietly underpins political process theory), both movements are organising in an irrational manner.

Second, opportunities are important for explaining action but unlike Tilly and Tarrow (for whom political opportunities are treated as macro-level phenomena) these exist at the next level down a set of 'sectoral opportunities'. Doherty and Hayes point out that Britain and France have reached an agricultural settlement between farmers and the state. In France this was pluralised after 1986 when a number of groups were allowed to represent farmers as opposed to one big union. For example, the radical anti-GM organisation Confédération Paysanne founded by José Bové contests elections to agricultural bodies, which in turn confers the wider anti-GM movement a legitimacy of coming from within the farmers themselves. Such a sectoral opportunity just isn't open to British activists and there is no practical alliance between farmers' interests and the activists.

Third the difference in how the two movements frame their activities owes a certain something to national peculiarities, in particular the different ways Britain and France has traditionally narrated its relationship to the countryside and food. In France the countryside is conceived as the location of rural (food) culture and is therefore 'peopled' and humanised. In Britain the country is often elided with nature, as a wild place devoid of industry. Could this help explain why the LVF's civic republicanism and the deep(ish) green of GS/EF! is 'appropriate' for crop trashing?

By way of a conclusion these findings cannot be assimilated by the kind of structural analysis Tilly and Tarrow favour. While Britain and France are mature liberal democracies this designation cannot explain the deep differences between the movements hidden by the superficial similarities of both engaging in crop trashing. Nor are they, strictly speaking, acting in an instrumentalist fashion. Without falling into the assumptions associated with identity politics, their actions are as much conditioned by their respective identities as movements.

Wednesday, 16 December 2009

Questioning Carbon Capture and Storage

With all eyes turned to the Copenhagen summit, means of reducing Carbon Dioxide emissions and/or storing it will be exercising the minds of policy makers the world over. One technocratic solution that is receiving serious attention among scientists, politicians and environmentalists is carbon capture and storage (CCS). This technology entails either drawing C02 out of the atmosphere or capturing it at point of release, and then storing it so it cannot contribute toward global warming. However, CCS is not an just an engineering challenge that will allegedly solve the problem of climate change mitigation - there are a whole host of political questions bound up with it too. It was some of these issues James Meadowcroft addressed at Keele last Tuesday in his paper 'CCS: Promoting the Transition to Sustainable Energy or Enhanced Carbon Lock-In?' This was to promote his recent co-edited book, Caching the Carbon, which looks at CCS politics and policy in the USA, Australia, Canada, Britain, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway and the wider EU.

The talk began with the state of the technology, which can be divided into three elements. The capture itself, transporting the carbon, and storing it each represent different engineering challenges and the technology itself is uneven - this is to say nothing of integrating them together.

Of the elements of CCS, capture is the most challenging. At present three to four per cent of what comes out of a smoke stack is carbon dioxide, so how to separate it from other emissions? One possible solution is gasifying coal, which would allow for the CO2 to be extracted and burn the remaining hydrogen for fuel. The problem with this is even though being worked on in the commercial sector, the technology has yet to mature to the level of wide scale application. Another big problem with capture is the cost. At present performing carbon capture on a coal-fired power station would require a dedicated chemical plant to be built alongside it, and anywhere in the region of 15-40% of the station's output required to power it. Not surprisingly a lot of research is focusing on getting the capture cost down.

Transportation represents less of a challenge as we already have extensive experience of transporting gas over distances, be it in container ships, by road or rail or through pipelines.

More problematic is the storage. The three main options is storing it underground, pumping it into the ocean or making it react in a particular way to produce "artificial" limestone. The problem with the ocean is that it is not a store as such but rather one means by which CO2 is cycled back into the atmosphere (long-term). Pumping it into deep sea trenches is a possibility, where the pressures would liquify the gas and keep it in place - but this is to say nothing of the damage it could do to deep sea ecology, nor is there a guarantee that it would find its way back into the atmosphere. Geological storage therefore seems more practical, but this is far from problem-free. Already the US oil industry pumps CO2 into oil wells as a means of enhancing production. But thanks to fissures in the ground, one could not fill a well and then cap it - methods would have to be developed to ensure any gas pumped into them stays there. Another possibility is pumping it into deep coal seams or saline aquifers beneath the water table. But these locations have to be stable for a long period of time as it take 50,000 years for the gas to be incorporated into rock (leaving aside the disastrous consequences of a vast store of captured carbon suddenly "bursting").

There are four strategic ways of thinking about CCS, assuming the engineering problems can be resolved. The first would be attached to 'large point source emitters', such as refineries, power stations, big factories and so on. These are responsible for about half of the world's carbon emissions. The second is small and mobile sources, applicable to homes and cars. The third is biomass, which can be carbon neutral provided closed carbon-energy loops can be created. For instance, burning plant matter, growing it, burning it, etc. Lastly is the possibility of artificial trees that could extract carbon directly from the atmosphere and store it on site (eliminating the need for transport).

CCS itself is being driven by the economics of the seven countries the study addresses. Australia is particularly keen because 10% of its GNP is invested in coal, which is also its biggest export and primary source of energy. It has been particularly keen on storing carbon as rock. Norway on the other hand is 100% hydro powered, but would like to build stations so it can burn gas and export energy. Like Australia, for the UK CCS is about utilising its substantial coal reserves while still staying on course to meet its emissions target. Also, for the US, Australia and Canada CCS was offered as an alternative by them to the binding reductions made at Kyoto.

A number of narratives have emerged around CCS. The first is enthusiastic and tends to find most favour among policy makers - that seeing as renewable sources are not ready, and recognising fossil fuels will remain the foundation of energy production at least in the medium term, CCS offers a way of mitigating the effects and easing the transition later on down the line. Plus CCS opens up new business opportunities.

Secondly there is a more equivocal position. It recognises CCS has problems and therefore we shouldn't wait until they have all been sorted out. Right now governments should be prioritising conservation, promoting and investing in renewables. The danger with CCS is it might soak up resources that may be more gainfully employed elsewhere.

Lastly there is the more critical position. This holds CCS as an 'end of pipe' solution that will effectively delay the transition to a post-fossil fuels economy. It is not viable now and may be already 'too late' (whatever that means). Furthermore, even if CCS gives us a form of clean coal, other challenges regarding its polluting effects remain.

For Meadowcroft all of these arguments have some merits, but problems too. For instance the argument it is too late for CCS is a non-starter - seeing as no one knows if there even is a 'tipping point' for the Earth's climate, we should operate with the principle that anything that brings emissions down is useful. But turning to the enthusiast's love-in with carbon trading schemes, he expressed some scepticism over the speed at which markets can generalise an incentive to bring emissions down. Administrative measures and regulatory initiatives by states are much faster.

Assessing the viability of CCS itself, it has acquired a political gravity of its own and, for obvious reasons, the global oil lobby are fully supportive of it. But as it is CCS requires significant state support. He estimated 20-30 plants are needed to test it at scale, but at well over $1bn apiece oil companies are unlikely to stump up all the funds. Furthermore, assuming the technology works who administers and is held responsible for storage over the long term? Not many companies will be keen on indefinite liability.

So what we are left with, in all essentials, is a great deal of hope being invested in an unproven technology that not only has to overcome significant engineering hurdles, but also requires the kind of state financing that would have been hard to secure even during the boom times. However for Meadowcroft, whatever the difficulties the fact so many are addressing CCS will open up other as yet unexplored opportunities for tackling climate change.

Sunday, 20 September 2009

Advertising Their Hypocrisy

I recycle religiously. I use public transport all the time. I refuse to use standby buttons. I never jet off to sunnier climes. I try to minimise waste whenever I can. In all I'm the very model of the ecological citizen - most greens would kill for my dainty carbon footprint. And for this reason I'm pissed off at this example of conspicuous waste:

The first video advert inside a print title has been published inside the American magazine Entertainment Weekly. The small screen, built into a cardboard insert, contains an advert for Pepsi Max and trailers for US TV network, CBS. There are also in-built speakers, so the viewer can hear the advert too. "This is an extraordinary way to refresh how we interact with consumers," said Pepsi-Cola's chief marketing officer, Frank Cooper. (Story)

Frank Cooper is an idiot in need of a dictionary. Making a commercial extolling the virtues of Pepsi Max is not interaction. That has to be a two-way thing, duh.

But the waste of this enterprise eclipses Pepsi's moronic newspeak. It might only go out on a print run limited to a few thousand of Entertainment Weekly's subscribers, but the marketing gurus at Pepsi and CBS will be looking for a repeat once the costs have come down (at $20 per magazine, this doesn't come cheap). The raw materials, the manufacturing capacity, the pollutants and emissions, all for something completely unnecessary and useless.

Where does this leave the Pepsi Eco Challenge and CBS Cares? You know, their pledges and calls to meet "the challenge of environmental stewardship" and "help protect the environment - our children depend on it"?

Looking like corporate greenwash bollocks, that's what.

Tuesday, 15 September 2009

Fantasy Islands

This was first posted by Mark Featherstone last year on Keele's Sociology and Criminology Blog. Mark's work interrogates the ideological use and abuse of utopias, producing demanding but extremely fruitful contributions that sit within the Marxian tradition of ideology critique (examples here and here). You can follow Soc and Crim on Twitter here.

As a sociologist of utopias, currently engaged in surveying Zygmunt Bauman’s work on liquidity and globalisation, I was interested to read Oliver Burkeman’s ‘Fantasy Islands’ article in last week’s Guardian. I can only imagine that if Bauman himself had read the article he would have found further evidence of the reality of liquid modernity in Burkeman’s examples of fantastic utopias built to travel the world’s oceans. How else can we interpret tall tales of floating cities but as materialisations of the very trends that Bauman discusses in his work on the global elites who surf through life and try to avoid any contract or relationship that might tie them down for any length of time?

Burkeman’s article tells the story of the fantastic freedom ship, and of Norman Nixon, the CEO of Freedom Ship Inc, the company which proposes to build this floating city capable of housing 60,000 people. If we bracket out knowledge of Bauman’s old socialist critique of the liquid society for a moment, the obvious utopianism of the freedom ship resides in the way in which it engages with fears of climate change, flooding, and the watery world that may await us in the 21st century. Imagine if climate change caused various global cities, such as New York and London, to flood. For the rich inhabitants of these now no-man’s lands, freedom ship style utopias would offer the perfect escape route. What is more, the inhabitants of these new utopias would never have to worry about further floods, since the point of the freedom ship is that it is water-born. Although this catastrophic scenario cannot fail to put one in mind of various cinematic dystopias, such as Kevin Costner’s Mad Max update Waterworld, it is too easy to fall into the trap of thinking that the freedom ship simply trades off mythological fears of biblical floods. On the contrary, the idea of the freedom ship as eco-topia speaks to the very real fear of flood present in the post-Katrina world. In the case of the New Orleans catastrophe what separated the haves from the have nots was the ability to flee to higher ground. Is this not exactly what the freedom ship promises those rich enough to buy a residential unit on board?

Burkeman suggests that this is the case because he relates his discussion of Nixon’s freedom ship to the case of Harvard School students Kiduck Kim and Christian Stayner who proposed a similar solution to possible future flooding of New Orleans. According to the Harvard Grads, the best way to prevent a future Katrina-style catastrophe would be to transform New Orleans into a floating city. Although we should, of course, support such utopian schemes, regardless of how unlikely they are to ever materialise, we have to wonder who exactly would make it on-board the floating city, since it is unlikely that the new construction would be able to carry the entire population of the landed city, even though that population has decreased by almost 60% since the deluge in August 2005. Again, we approach the other side of the floating eco-topias or fantasy islands Burkeman discusses, which is that these places are also libertarian utopias, where the rich have no social responsibility for the poor, and do not have to bother thinking about their neighbours. Moreover, it is not only that the new eco-topias have no need for taxation, but that they also avoid the messy side effects of leaving the poor to rot which continue to plague landed cities – think rising crime, enormous incarceration rates, and neighbourhoods characterised by fear and insecurity - by simply barring the poor access to the ship in the first place. A world without the poor – the rich man’s dream, even if it is probably the capitalist’s worst nightmare.

But before rightists leap to the conclusion that the new eco-topias could potentially kill two birds with one stone by offering to solve the problem of eco-catastrophe and social dis-order, let us consider Burkeman’s final example, New Utopia, which resides somewhere in the Caribbean, but has its head office in Florida. According to Burkeman this fantasy islands, ruled over by self-proclaimed aristocrat Prince Lazarus Long, has been investigated by the American Security and Exchange Commission and declared a fraudulent internet scheme set on exploiting those rich and stupid enough to think they can buy their way out of the messy reality of human society.

However, regardless of whether the various fantasy islands Burkeman discusses are fraudulent schemes or honest fantasies, they rely on the naivety of their potential inhabitants in the important respect that it is not possible for anybody to escape responsibility for other people in the age of globalisation where we are all so completely inter-connected. Bauman makes this point in many of his books – the radical inter-relatedness of everybody under conditions of globalisation means that we are all responsible for everybody else and that this enormous responsibility is precisely what generates the fantasy of escape in not only the world’s selfish individuals, but also everybody else who cannot but be responsible for the miseries of the global poor. This is why, even if Burkeman’s utopias become material reality, concrete examples of the selfish individualism Bauman talks about in his books on the liquid society, they will always remain nothing more than fantasy islands.

Tuesday, 28 July 2009

Support the Vestas Occupation!

My slow blogging status has meant not passing comment on news items and struggles I would have otherwise blogged on. One of those has been the magnificent struggle of workers at the Vestas wind turbine factory on the Isle of Wight. Having taken a leaf out of recent industrial occupations 20 or so workers occupied their workplace when it became clear their bosses wanted to close the factory and throw over 600 employees onto the dole. And it has proved an astute move. It has very steadily been accumulating wider media coverage and has slowly but methodically been working its way up the news agenda - not least because of its potential to embarrass the government on its green credentials.

This in itself demonstrates the efficacy of workplace occupations as a tactic at the present time. Had the workers not taken the initiative, it would have been a footnote in the news as just another unfortunate victim of the recession (despite Vestas posting record profits this last financial year!). The workers were also wise enough to take a wireless connection into the offices with them, and have been regularly updating their blog throughout. Another significant aspect of the dispute so far is how for the first time in many years the labour movement and environmental movement has come together over common interests - definitely an alliance we need to see more of.

But back to the specifics of the struggle. Right now it looks like the struggle could be heading toward its denouement. 11 of the occupying workers identified by management were sacked earlier today. And tomorrow Vestas bosses will be seeking a court order to have the protesting workers forcibly removed ... with government acquiescence.

Ed Miliband, the minister for energy and climate change in his reply to LabourList's Alex Smith (who supports the Vestas workers) has indicated the government will do nothing to support the workers, instead hiding behind the company's arguments concerning the slow growth of the UK market and blaming Tory councils for setting their noses against wind farms.

I don't think anyone was expecting anything else. Aside from once more demonstrating the utter bankruptcy of New Labour to the world, it shows how the market cannot be trusted to develop renewable energy sources.

See the RMT's Vestas page here amd here for solidarity actions and protests tomorrow.

Edit: Also see the Ryde TUC blog for more comment and analysis.

Wed edit: Case has been adjourned because Vestas incorrectly filed their papers! Recommences on August 4th!

Wednesday, 22 April 2009

The Budget '09: A Socialist Response

Tony Blair once boasted of feeling the hand of history on his shoulder. For Alistair Darling and the government, it's less a hand and more a bucket of bricks. Forget smeargate and the drip-drip of expenses scandals, the decisions the government made today not only bear upon their electoral fortunes over the next 12 months, they will decisively influence how history remembers New Labour. This in mind, was it an epoch-making budget? No, of course it wasn't. But does it constitute a final break with neoliberalism? Are they determined to make the working class pay for the crisis? Does it offer political openings for the left?

If there was a surprise in this year's budget, it lay in Darling's forecasts.

They are:

* The economy to shrink by 3.5% by the end of this year.
* A return to growth by the final quarter of 2009(!)
* The economy will grow by 1.25% in 2010.
* From 2011 growth will accelerate to around 3.5% and remain at that level.
* Inflation will continue to decrease - 1% by the end of this year.
* Thanks to projected economic growth, the yawning chasm of the budget deficit will fall by half by 2013.

Very optimistic to say the least.

So what were the measures announced?

* Unemployment Darling claimed the money already gone in has halved the turn around time between jobs compared with the previous recession. He therefore announced a further £1.7bn for Jobcentre Plus. Also, keen to avoid the persistent youth unemployment that was a chronic feature of the Tory recessions, under 25s unemployed for a year or more will have to choose between a job or further training. For this the government will work with business to create an extra 250,00 jobs. They will also make available £260m of training/subsidy money for sectors with "strong future demand". £250m this year and £400m next year will go to secure extra places in further education.

* Housing The chancellor pledged to work with the banks to make an extra £20bn of mortgages available. This would be secured by a government-backed mortgage guarantee scheme, but there was no mention of projected cost. To try and revive the housing market (mortgage lending may have risen 16% last month, but it is still around half the figures of this time last year), the holiday on stamp duty on properties worth up to £175,000 remains until the end of 2009. £500m is to be made available to restart stalled housing projects, and £100m will go to local authorities to build energy efficient homes.

* Business Loss-making businesses crippled by the collapse in credit can reclaim taxes on profits for the last three years. The much-vaunted car scrappage scheme that's exercised much media commentary in recent days was announced. Hand in a car 10 years old or over and you will receive £2,000 toward the cost of a new one. This is for a limited time only and runs out in March next year. Unsurprisingly Darling remained committed to maintaining Britain's position as the centre of world finance and previewed a package of regulations. These would cover corporate governance, remuneration, accountancy rules, transparency and saver and investor support. Also more would be spent on North Sea exploration to exploit the estimated two billion barrels remaining in "uneconomical" oil fields as well as transforming it into a site for gas storage, offshore wind power, and carbon capture. Furthermore money will be used to support advanced manufacturing, green business and communications technologies.

* The Green Economy Further announcements were served up with a dose of greenwash. £1bn would be invested in green collar jobs. £525m is to be ploughed into offshore wind farms over the next couple of years, which will apparently provide enough electricity to power three million homes. A further £435m will go into energy savings in the public, private and domestic sectors. The European Investment Bank will also make £4bn of capital available for green technology projects and business. There would be tax relief on up to four demonstrative carbon capture projects.

* Benefits From next year, child tax credit will go up £20 - it will be more if the child is registered as disabled. Statutory redundancy pay will be increased and for grandparents who are of working age but care for their children's children, this care will count towards state pension entitlement. To help counteract the declining interest rate, the threshold for pension credit is raised to £10,000. The winter fuel allowance is increased to £250 for over 60s and £400 for the over 80s.

* Taxation This might warm the cockles of Old Labour hearts out there. The one per cent of the population who receive salaries of £150,000+ will now pay the new 50% top rate of income tax. For those who earn in excess of £100,000 all forms of tax allowances are now withdrawn. Income tax remains frozen for the rest of us. Darling also pledged more action on closing tax loopholes. Measures identified by the Treasury will realise an extra £1bn tax revenue over the next three years. Lastly tobacco and alcohol are hit with a two per cent rise in duty, effective from 6pm and midnight tonight. Taken together these will raise an expected £6bn by 2012.

* Public Sector Rumours and expectations abounded of an axe falling on public spending. The chancellor conceded borrowing would grow to £175bn this year, then £173bn, £140bn, £118bn and £97bn for the years after. However he was very clever to avoid the c-word: cut. Instead the emphasis is on "making savings". This kind of action, he claims, has saved some £26.5bn in "efficiencies" since 2004. He is looking to make £9bn more every year until 2013. This will be back up by £60bn in asset and property sales by 2012.

He concluded with a sharp barb for the Tories: that Britain will grow out of recession, not cut its way out.

The budget is certainly a mixed bag. There is a pale green-social democratic colouring to it. While those of us on the left would certainly agree the taxation, benefits, green industries, education and support for manufacturing do not go far enough, they could be viewed as a step in the right direction. All of these provide avenues on which the left can campaign and build upon.

But, and this is a very big but, it shows the New Labour leopard cannot change its neoliberal spots. Darling may have avoided mentioning cuts but they are there, and they're substantial. As Chris Dillow demonstrates, measures aimed at eliminating public sector waste are extremely problematic. As any civil servant will tell you, government efficiency savings have come at the price of attacks on pensions, redundancies, increasing workloads and management authoritarianism. The overall result? A lower level of service provision. And then there is the £60bn sell off of remaining assets. These will necessarily include Royal Mail, the Royal Mint, recently acquired interests in the banks, outsourcing and privatisation of more local authority services. The list goes on and on.

In short Darling has presented a Frankenstein's Monster of a budget. The twitching corpse of neoliberalism has been stitched together with the cadaverous remains of disinterred Keynesianism. The application of a weak current of traditional labourism and green wash has jolted the creature into life. And now it stands, determined to make the working class pay a massively disproportionate share for a crisis not of its making. And it will succeed, unless our movement draws on the experiences of this year's wildcat strikes and workplace occupations.

Sorry, Mr Darling. You say: we pay. We say: no way.

Edit: Press releases from various unions in the comments box.

Saturday, 28 March 2009

Live Blogging Earth Hour

Earth Hour is live!

8:30 pm - Lights are off. Sat in the dark.

9:30 pm - Lights back on.

That's that for another year. I can now ride in 4x4s and jet around the world with a clear conscience.

Monday, 2 March 2009

The Shape of Things to Come?

Future dystopias of overcrowded hive cities and post-apocalyptic wastelands could accurately anticipate the world to come, according to the latest issue of the New Scientist. Its feature, How to survive the coming century makes very grim reading indeed. Forget the climate change deniers, the real debates are around how bad it's going to get and what we can do about it.

In this article, the appropriately-named Gaia Vince reports that the IPCC predicts a global increase in temperature somewhere between 2°C and 6.4°C this century. As Peter Cox puts it, "climatologists tend to fall into two camps: there are the cautious ones who say we need to cut emissions and won't even think about high global temperatures; and there are the ones who tell us to run for the hills because we're all doomed. I prefer a middle ground. We have to accept that changes are inevitable and start to adapt now." So what would a mid-range increase - say 4°C entail?

Well, the world would look something like this - a planet where rain forests and productive agricultural land is choked out by advancing desert, coastal regions disappear beneath the waves, glaciers and ice caps shrink and vanish, and perhaps most destructively, the growth of two uninhabitable dry belts in presently densely populated regions.

The flip side of increased warming is that cold regions to the north and the south will become temperate and capable of sustaining large human populations. But how large depends on a number of things. First is the speed and depth of the changes to come - James Lovelock thinks "the number remaining at the end of the century will probably be a billion or less." Others are more hopeful, but this depends on the second key factor: social change. While governments around the world promote anaemic green washing, or prominent environmental celebrities like Al Gore blame a lack of political will for the paucity of radical action, Vince argues that dealing with the crisis means to "rethink our society not along geopolitical lines but in terms of resource distribution".

Winding the clock forward 90 years and working with a projected global population of nine billion, Vince is sure these numbers can be accommodated if everyone receives 20 square metres of space (this would, according to my very dodgy maths, require 4.5 million square kilometres - about half the size of Canada), which in turn demands packed high rise cities towards the poles to free as much land as possible for agriculture. Food production would have to be more seasonal and move away from thirsty crops. The remaining land will be too precious for large scale cattle grazing, so say goodbye to your beef burgers. And the oceans would likely suffer a massive crash of fish and other sea life thanks to increasing acidification. Biodiversity would plummet with many species eking out an existence in zoos or gene banks.

But this will also be a world of huge engineering projects. The uninhabited and uninhabitable wastes of the Americas, Africa, Asia and Australia might become home to a global belt of solar cell arrays. This in combination with nuclear, wind, wave, and geothermal power could supply the energy-hungry cities of the north and south.

Vince's thought experiment is in many ways the best possible outcome. She herself admits the massive stores of carbon and methane locked up in the world's forests, tundra, and ocean floors will either have or be in the process of escaping into the atmosphere. The temperature would not remain a static 4°C above present levels - they would climb further. Plus the world she describes is premised on global-scale planning. What character this planning would be is left open. But the scale required of juggling mass population transfers, building new metropolitan centres, constructing energy gathering facilities and so on can only be possible in a social system where at the most the market plays a marginal role. Whether this society is bureaucratic/technocratic and ruled by the descendants of today's bourgeoisie, or socialist, depends on how the class struggle plays out in the intervening years. If socialism inherits this battered planet then we are best placed to cope with the damage. If not the chaos and social dislocation of Vince's scenario would be without parallel in history. Mass migration, starvation, wars ... it almost doesn't bear thinking about.

It's a good job this is only speculative but it is speculation solidly based on contemporary climate science. Our species will survive, but whether it will be in the billions or the millions depends on the class battles of the next few decades. The stakes could be that high, comrades.

Tuesday, 9 December 2008

Towards Effective Green Left Unity

From Neil Cafferky of the Socialist Party's national office:

The following is a statement produced by the SP following correspondence between the Lewisham SP and the Lewisham Green Party after a Green Party candidate was revealed to be on the membership list of the BNP:

ONE of the Green Party candidates who stood in Telegraph Hill ward, south London in the 2006 local elections appears on the list of alleged BNP supporters recently leaked to the media. This ward, in the London borough of Lewisham, is represented by two SP members, Ian Page and Chris Flood, who have been councillors there since 1990 and 2003 respectively.

When the list was published Lewisham SP was asked to comment. Aware that the list, leaked by disgruntled BNP members, did not necessarily imply support for the far-right party, we contacted the individual named, who informed us that he had never been a supporter of the BNP and their racist ideas.

We accepted his assurance but, as there were others on the list who have been Green Party members and who have also been BNP supporters, we also wrote to the Lewisham Greens for their views before we made any public comment.

Darren Johnson, a Lewisham Green councillor and London Assembly member, replied, saying that, “knowing him as I do”, he was convinced that the individual concerned had been “the victim of a malicious prank” and had given “no indication whatsoever that he shared the obnoxious views of the BNP”.

But Darren Johnson also conceded that their ex-candidate, who had no campaigning record in Telegraph Hill, “has had no active involvement in the Green Party for the past two years”, in other words, since the 2006 elections.

This raises a wider question: even if, as it appears, the candidate was not sympathetic to the BNP’s poisonous ideas, why did Lewisham Green Party conclude that he was a better representative of anti-cuts, anti-privatisation and pro-environment policies in Telegraph Hill than the sitting Socialist Party councillors, Ian Page and Chris Flood?

The SP has consistently approached the Green Party to discuss whether we could come to an electoral agreement, at least to not stand candidates against each other where possible. Through the Socialist Green Unity Coalition, for example, we discussed this with the Green Party’s national election officer, who confirmed that such agreements could be made by local parties.

The SP and the Green Party have important differences. The SP believes that fundamental change is necessary to save our environment, which can only be achieved by democratic public ownership of the major companies that dominate the globe.

On Lewisham council the Green councillors have not always backed the Socialist councillors’ proposals to resist the pro-market agenda of the establishment parties – New Labour, the Tories and the Liberal Democrats. But there is sufficient agreement, we believe, for us to seriously discuss possibilities for electoral agreements.

Unfortunately that has not been the approach of Lewisham’s Greens. Their strategy in the 2006 elections was to stand as widely as possible, regardless of who they were standing against or the record and commitment of their candidates.

The Greens stood three candidates in the three-seat Telegraph Hill ward in 2006, who each polled around 400 votes – well short of winning but far more than the gap between the New Labour candidate elected as the third ward councillor and the third-placed Socialist Party candidate, Jess Leech. Was it really necessary to stand in Telegraph Hill and allow New Labour to slip in? Especially as there were other, New Labour-held wards, in Lewisham where the Greens only stood one candidate?
Darren Johnson hasn’t accepted our offer to discuss what lessons from all this there may be for the future. But the SP plans to stand more widely in Lewisham in the next local elections in 2010 along with, we hope, local trade unionists and representatives of different campaign groups fighting to save council housing, defend education, and keep our NHS safe from privatisation. They too will expect that Lewisham Green Party would co-operate to maximise the electoral challenge to the establishment parties.

----statement ends----

I should emphasise at this point that this is NOT an attack on the Green Party for having an election candidate who has since appeared on the BNP membership list, although it is reasonable to seek clarification from the Greens regarding their knowledge of this person’s politics in response to quires from voters in the area. Nor is the SP trying to dictate to the Green Party who or where they can stand. That is, of course, a decision that must be taken by the members of the Green Party themselves.

What the SP is seeking from the Green Party in Lewisham, and elsewhere in the country, is clarification on their relationship with the rest of the Left on the electoral field. With the new mood of co-operation on the Left following recent setbacks in the quest for a new workers party and with the possibility of a general election in the summer it is vital that the strongest possible challenge is put up to all the establishment parties by socialist, trade unionists, community activists and environmentalists.

Hopefully this can be the beginning of a discussion between socialists and Green Party members on the best way forward to challenging the rule of profit, big business and environmental destruction.

Tuesday, 12 August 2008

WALL-E

When you can sit enraptured through the first half hour of a film without any dialogue, you know you're watching something a bit special. And WALL-E is certainly that. The quality of the animation is simply superb, containing some of the best computer-generated imagery yet seen in a movie (perhaps the Beijing Olympics organising committee ought to have enlisted Pixar's services).

In the 22nd century, one single corporate entity, Buy n Large, completely dominates the globe. But it is a company that presides over a world drowning in trash. As a quick fix BnL hatches a plan to evacuate humans to the Axiom, BnL's flagship luxury resort/starship. It pledges its robots left behind on Earth to clean up the mess within five years, allowing enough time for the biosphere recovers from the toxic shock.

Go forward 700 years and all that is left is WALL-E, a robot whose activity consists of compressing trash and stacking it in towers that loom over abandoned office blocks. This is a desolate world of flickering BnL adverts, dust storms, and decaying cities. Life consists of WALL-E's cockroach friend and a single plant he finds when he's out trash compacting. Centuries of isolation has allowed WALL-E to break his programming and become sentient. He occasionally finds interesting trinkets among the mountains of rubbish, which he takes back to his home. Among his most treasured possessions is a tape of Hello, Dolly!, which teaches him emotion, body language and social skills.

The one day when he is out foraging a spaceship lands, disgorging a new robot, EVE. Both are initially wary of the other but very soon they develop a close bond. But EVE is a probe sent from the Axiom to determine if the biosphere has recovered. When she scans a plant discovered earlier by WALL-E she stores it and deactivates until her mother ship returns. WALL-E is all alone again. He tries various means of reactivating her but to no avail, and slowly, sadly, he returns to his old routines. Then one day while compacting trash he realises her ship is back. He makes a mad dash back and reaches it just in time to see the ship's robotic arms retrieve EVE. He jumps on to the ship and hangs on for dear life as it blasts off. And so the adventure proper begins.

There's very little point recapping the entire plot - those who want to know the ins and outs can read an overview here.

WALL-E is a lovely film for all ages. But unsurprisingly, as a Disney production it spins a conservative tale. The message WALL-E ends up pushing, despite the intentions of its creators, is more than a gentle green warning. I would argue the film is a meditation on the human condition in industrial (not capitalist) society. In WALL-E's future the total corporate dominance of BnL has resulted in the smoothing out of all contradictions Marxists associates with capitalism. Society has evolved into an advanced communist system. Its human members have entered a permanent state of recline. They spend their days floating about on loungers. They communicate with others via holographic interfaces that hover just in front of their faces. And they are all obese. 700 years of BnL's benevolent direction has rendered them incapable of walking and pretty much doing anything for themselves. Robots have completely taken over the running of society, eliminating the need for human labour. Even the most high-ranking human, the Axiom's captain, is little more than a glorified tannoy announcer.

Basically, the human race has gone soft. Their complete dependence on machines for virtutally everything has infantilised them. Life on a lilo is inauthentic. It is only WALL-E and EVE's struggles against the Axiom's autopilot's attempt to suppress evidence of the plant that sets the human race back on to the path of authenticity. When they return to Earth their first steps on the home world are literally their first steps as functioning human beings. They plant WALL-E's sapling and set about reclaiming the Earth from its polluted state. The credits continue the story through a set of "drawings". We see humans and robots working together to plant seeds, rear crops and animals, drill wells and reconstructing buildings. Gradually the humans in these scenes start losing weight. And the Axiom itself, the symbol of BnL's hypermodernity, comes to be overtaken by vines and creepers as it is left to go derelict, symbolising the turning of humanity's back on its high tech past. People have found themselves again, through the simplicity of going back to the land.

This doesn't prevent WALL-E from being an enjoyable film. But a critical eye is required to see past the soft environmentalism.

Friday, 18 July 2008

German Greens: Results and Prospects

Thomas Poguntke was the final speaker for the Keele environmental Summer School I've been dipping in and out of these last two weeks. The title of his paper was 'The German Greens: From Protest to Power to Nowhere?' Poguntke's account began with a trip down memory lane to 1976, when the West German 'two-and-a-half' party system saw 99% of votes cast go to the Social Democrats (SPD), Christian Democrats (CDU/CSU) and the smaller Liberals (FDP). It could be argued that was the point where the party system was its most stable and legitimate. However the consensus contained the seeds of its own break up. Bubbling beneath the surface from the late 70s on were a series of alternative green lists contesting seats at the local and regional levels on issues ignored by the mainstream - pollution, nuclear energy and peace. They quickly gained ground - they were able to contest and win seats at the 1979 European Elections and won 27 seats in the 1983 federal elections after clearing the 5% threshold.

The Greens emerged from a fortuitous confluence of long term processes and reaction to dominant policies. As a result of the post-war boom, citizens' movements could draw on more material, cultural and knowledge resources that could be mobilised for extra-parliamentary action. As far as Poguntke was concerned, the greater this diffusion the more likely elite-challenging behaviour will take place. Second, drawing on the work of Ronald Inglehart, Poguntke agreed there was a shift in the value structure of affluent societies away from popular engagement with 'economistic' issues such as wages, workplace conditions and public services to a growth in so-called 'post-materialist' concerns like environmentalism and sexual equality. New Social Movements already organised around post-materialist objectives provided the backbone for the struggle against the expansion of nuclear power and NATO's decision to deploy intermediate-range ballistic missiles on West German soil. The support for these struggles and values meant there was a gap in the political agenda, which NSM/Green/Alternative activists tried to exploit electorally.

This was initially successful. The 27 seats won in 1983 expanded to 42 in 1987, backed by solid performances at lower levels of representation. The new movements plus growing awareness of environmental issues sustained their popularity, but came unstuck in the 'unity' elections of 1990. In a year when reunification was by far and away the main, if not the only political issue, the Greens were incapable of putting forward a coherent unified position, and were punished by losing all of their seats in the West. The only consolation was their partners from the East, the Alliance '90 grouping won eight seats, ensuring on paper a continuity of green representation. But the party was able to bounce back in 1994 and scoop up 49 seats, thanks to the continued respectable votes at the local and state level.

Parliamentary representation exposed the Greens to moderating pressures. Throughout the 80s the party was wracked with the realist/fundamentalist debate which, in many ways, paralleled the reform vs revolution controversy of social democracy. The 'realists' won out and enabled the Greens to compete successfully within the liberal democratic rules of the federal system. But the price was heavy. Organisationally, the party's commitment to internal participatory democracy - rotation of MPs, salary limits, and grassroots control over MPs were gradually reformed out of existence or abandoned. They were also seen as potential coalition partners by the SPD, which furnished the realists with the weapon of being able to enact policy. However, without exception this meant a watering down of the programme. However, in exchange for adapting to the system the system adapted to them, to an extent. For example, Green ideas gained a respectability and currency they hitherto lacked, forcing the mainstream parties had to take them seriously. The Greens were the first to introduce gender balanced lists, which was picked up by other parties. Environmental portfolios were created in state and federal governments, and the strength of opposition to nuclear weapons pressured the SPD into adopting a unilateralist stance for a time.

The experience of the 80s and 90s culminated in the 1998-2005 governing coalition with the SPD. The Green's most popular figure, Joschka Fischer was made vice chancellor and foreign secretary and two other colleagues secured cabinet posts. The price of the alliance with the SPD were early crises around the German participation in the Kosovo War and the realisation that shutting down nuclear power stations would take 30 years. Achievements of the first term were mainly confined to "low cost" concessions on increased citizenship rights, consumer protection, gay marriage and renewable energy investment. Luckily the crises came early in the government and were able to increase their representation in the 2002 poll and maintain the coalition. In the second period it was their SPD partner that suffered most flak as it tried to implement neoliberal welfare cuts that hammered its core constituency. Interestingly in the 2005 election the Greens were not similarly punished for acquiescing to the cuts.

What of today? Since the establishment of the CDU/CSU-SPD grand coalition Green fortunes have been mixed as the party system has again been thrown into flux with the founding and electoral success of Die Linke (The Left). The thousands of activists and millions of workers alienated from the SPD's (continued) neoliberal turn have managed to find a political home outside. The saliency of unemployment, wages and prices has created an opportunity structure Die Linke can capitalise on and has enabled it to overtake the Greens in the Bundestag and the polls. While there is little evidence of overlapping constituencies - as the coalition period seemed to confirm - the Greens have been under pressure to adopt radical policies again. The party is discussing introducing basic citizen's incomes and increased accountability over its representatives. But sitting uneasily with an apparent resurgence of Green radicalism is discussion about other potential coalition partners. At present they're "experimenting" with the Christian Democrats in Hamburg, without any undue ructions within the party. If this doesn't underline the distance travelled by the Greens, I don't know what does.

In the questions and answers there were two that are likely to be of interest to AVPS readers. I asked about the extent of Green/DIe Linke overlap and if there is evidence of the latter taking some votes off the Greens. He replied that as the Greens once formerly drew energies from the NSMs, Die Linke has a similar relationship to the vibrant German global justice movement - the latter has avoided the Greens like the plague. But also it seems both parties are seeking to expand their base at the expense of others. Die Linke is targeting disgruntled SPD supporters and the Greens seemingly everywhere else.

The second question asked about the possibility of a left-green coalition that we have seen in several other European countries. Poguntke replied there was little common ground between the parties partly because of their respective electorates, and that the Greens had long accommodated themselves to the system whereas Die Linke was "unrealistic" enough to campaign against neoliberal cuts.

At the beginning of the question session Poguntke noted new radical formations are faced with an either/or choice. Does the party pursue what he called 'policy maximisation' or influence through government participation. What is clear from Poguntke's paper is the rapid journey of the German Greens from radicalism to the mainstream at almost indecent haste. Some positive environmental reforms have been enacted thanks to this strategy, but accepting the logic of the system has seen them lapse into the kinds of green liberalism and politics of unsustainability theorised by Dobson and Bluhdorn respectively. In practice they have become the green conscience of the German bourgeoisie. By way of contrast, the British Green parties are much smaller but tend to be more radical. There is a tendency by some on the left and in the Greens to treat each other as potential allies who should avoid electoral conflicts, particularly those Greens on the left of their party and are more oriented toward the labour movement. The left should do what we can to assist these comrades, who in turn will make it difficult for "realists" to adapt their party to the neoliberal consensus. So in many ways the German Greens are a warning to their party. But the same lesson can be drawn by our comrades in Die Linke. Socialists inside need to fight against any drift to accepting the logics of the system. If this struggle fails, the co-opted watered-down fate of the Greens will befall this project too.