Category Archives: climate debt

What’s Radical Now

Posted on by

Fifteen months ago, OWS launched the meme of the 99% against the one per cent. We identified the agents of the crash as “Wall Street” and its primary consequence for the 99% as debt. In 2013 the agenda has to move forward. The new agents of exploitation are the mining and energy companies. The consequences are all too visible in the climate disasters.

As 2012 closes, the first billion dollar fine has been levied against HSBC bank. It’s a good symbolic moment but it amounts to 5% of HSBC’s annual profits. Directors are “deferring” their bonuses, meaning they get them in five years time. Today, it was UBS’s turn to step up for a billion dollar hit in the LIBOR case. The banks are happy because they did not get prosecuted. The financial markets let it be known that if big banks were prosecuted and declared ineligible to trade, it would engender another financial crisis. Governments don’t want that and caved. Still, the banksters have been sufficiently cowed to stop pretending they can’t afford a small increase in their US taxes.

None of this has helped the endebted very much. Admittances to British universities are down 14% this year, thanks to new tuition fees, for example. If debt suicides got as much coverage as royal-related prank call suicides, there would be nothing else in the media at all. Personal debt can’t be fixed, it can only be abolished.

And the reason for that is all around us. Abnormally cold temperatures in Northern Europe suggest that the slowing of the Gulf stream may have begun as predicted. No IPCC prediction, it should be noted, is behind predicted pace: they are all ahead. Arctic ice melt is so far ahead of presumed pace that it’s freaking out even those inside the climate change field. Floods, typhoons, hurricanes. You know the drill. We can’t grow our way out of the debt because it just adds to the planetary emergency.

So today Britain decided to approve its “dash for gas” and endorse the expansion of fracking in the UK. Never mind that the last time they tried, it set off earthquakes–yes, really. Now all they are doing is shattering carbon emission targets and polluting the British water table. Even the British government’s own climate change commission says that the planned 40 new gas-fueled power stations are not compatible with its own goals on carbon.

And it turns out that even in the neoliberal market-driven terms it makes no sense: gas will add £600 ($1000) to energy bills per year. But the same energy from renewables would only cost £100 ($160).

So welcome to your new one per cent: the energy moguls, who are driving us to extinction in the name of sustainability.

Francis-Egan

Here’s Francis Egan, head of Cuadrilla, the UK fracking mob. He was brought in from a company called BHP Billiton. You’ve never heard of them: here’s what they do:

We are a leading global resources company. Our purpose is to create long-term shareholder value through the discovery, acquisition, development and marketing of natural resources.

We are among the world’s largest producers of major commodities, including aluminium, copper, energy coal, iron ore, manganese, metallurgical coal, nickel, silver and uranium along with substantial interests in oil and gas.

What does this mean? it means they mess things up massively all over the world. Below is their own publicity photograph, demonstrating just that.

BHP Billiton

They have revenues of $72 billion annually and make pre-tax profits of $27 billion–nice returns there of 30% profit. Where do we get this information? On the debt investors page. In other words, we have to fry the planet so BHP Billiton can pay its debts. We don’t know as much about Cuadrilla because it’s a private equity company like Monsanto. But let’s have a wild guess that it’s profile is very similar. Debt, energy and climate disaster are mutually reinforcing and catalyzing. We have to get off the roundabout.

What’s radical now: demanding an end to growth, no new fossil fuel exploitation, debt abolition and a living wage. Can’t happen? Ask HSBC and UBS.

 

Swamped

Posted on by
New Orleans After Katrina

New Orleans After Katrina

In an article in the current New Scientist, it is reported that 85% of the world’s river deltas now regularly flood in ways that are catastrophic. Guess where most of the world’s population also live. I ran by the River Thames on a cold, dry day in London today and the water was four inches from the riverbank. There’s a higher wall on the north side of the river, but still. We’re swamped.

We’re swamped in debt. The banks are paying fines, finally. But they will write them off in some way and continue to make profits. No one went to jail.

In New York, students at Cooper Union are occupying a room at the top of their building in protest at the absurd practices of their administration. Having constructed an expensive new Engineering building without thinking how to pay for it, Cooper now wants to end its proud tradition of free education to pay some bank. A year ago Cooper tried to close down St Mark’s Books, the last great bookstore in New York for a few more dollars in rent that could be squeezed out of a nail salon or a pharmacy.

Thank heavens the students have principles because the administration tried to buy them off with an insipid deal whereby current students would not pay fees. As we saw in Quebec this past year, resistance is as moral protest against the principle of tuition fees. Or you end up where UK students are with fees having gone from £300 ($500) a year to £9000 ($15000) in five years.

All of these details were brought home to me today in long conversations with people struggling to deal with the way that the crisis has shaped their own lives. An editor confronting mediocre manuscripts atrociously copy-edited but knowing her own job depends on achieving her target. A couple wanting to develop careers and raise their children facing insuperable practical issues and deciding to separate. And so on. We all know far too many examples of this kind, where the professional and the personal collide to the loss of the people involved.

Which is why I keep insisting that the climate disaster is the piece that ties the case for the 99% together. We can’t go on like this or we’ll all be swamped.

 

The Climate Needs a Jubilee

Posted on by

I’m on sabbatical. This is an academic practice giving faculty time to research, free from teaching and administration, every seventh year. It’s a Biblical injunction, commanding that the land should lie fallow every seventh year, transferred to the labor of learning. Every seventh sabbatical was a Jubilee.

According to Jubilee USA, who campaign for debt abolition, the Biblical text is wide-reaching:

In the Jubilee, there is release for those enslaved because of debts, a Sabbath rest for land and people, redistribution of lands lost because of debt, and a reordering of prices for land and labor based on proximity to the next Jubilee.

Reordering, redistribution and rest. The planet’s climate needs such a Jubilee.

Midland Beach, Staten Island, 11-25-12

So, lest we forget do some of the victims of its most recent episode, Hurricane Sandy. Astra, occupier and Rolling Jubilee member, describes how in Midland, Staten Island:

Electric and heat are back on, sure, but many homes are totally uninhabitable and mold a growing public health crisis, one that’s damaging the repairs people have managed to do. People’s stories of dealing with FEMA and other government agencies and insurance companies were devastating, each household trapped in a different bureaucratic tangle. You can only get a grant if you can’t qualify for a loan, and many can’t get either. People in tears recounting being reduced to sleeping in their cars, not having access to their meds, talking about what it is like to have lost everything, and the insult of being given a $1300 check, as if that could cover damages, and no other aid.

Debt as the solution to climate disaster is so mindless it would make you laugh if it wasn’t so stupid. Because when the debt has to be repaid, that will require financial growth and more carbon emissions, worsening the climate crisis. It’s apparent that real estate developers already have their eye on a disaster capitalism opportunity on the East Coast.

There’s a new calculus at work in neoliberal climate politics. The developed nations have decided to make the issue the responsibility of the climate-threatened world. Lord Stern, the British banker whose 2006 climate report suggested that maybe the Copenhagen conference in 2009 might take action, has changed his tune. Now he is saying:

Developing countries must take on the lion’s share of cuts in greenhouse gas emissions, because of the “brutal arithmetic” of climate change.

That is to say, developing countries do now account for about half of global emissions. So the arithmetic of neo-liberal brutes like Stern means they must do most of the cutting. Per capita, nations like the US still claim far more than their fair share, however.

Furthermore, there’s a climate crisis because of the cumulative effect of two hundred and fifty years of emissions, not those of the last five. This is where the climate jubilee comes in. After five times fifty years without taking a rest from ruining land, running up debt and corroding the atmosphere, it’s past time.

Slowly even mainstream commentators are starting to realize that governments and representatives are not going to be the agents of the change, as here George Monbiot in the Guardian:

the struggle against climate change – and all the crises that now beset both human beings and the natural world – cannot be won without a wider political fight: a democratic mobilisation against plutocracy.

Yes, indeed. Disappointingly, though, the call in the article is for campaign finance reform, the change-free change that everyone pretends to agree on.

A climate jubilee would mean turning things off, reducing the work day, creating a living wage, debt abolition, land redistribution and sustainable agriculture. It’s not going to happen, you say. The same thing was said about the Rolling Jubilee. Let’s start to ask the more interesting question: how do we make it happen, 99% to 99%?

 

Three Years to the Spanish Revolution

Posted on by

So today I made a major mistake. I left Barcelona. I am aware that I am romanticizing the city, but romanticism has a radical genealogy and is not to be confused with sentimentality. This morning I wandered around the city streets and headed for the site of the CNT headquarters during the Spanish Civil War. It’s now a bookshop, which in properly anarchist fashion, was not open when I visited in contradiction to its posted hours.

Barcelona still has the small bars and restaurants that are so enticing to those of us who grew up in dull Northern cities. Paris feels like a museum these days but Barca has the feel of a place that matters. To be involved in the movement in New York has often felt like a marginal activity. In Barcelona, I found my most radical utterances were received as mainstream, not just by activists but by the academics, artists and journalists that I met. Last night one activist said to me that she expected there would be a revolution in Spain within three years. I  believed her.

Whether it wins, that’s another matter, but the reasons for the left shift are not hard to find. Today the European Union yet again bailed out the banks with a 

payment of €37 billion from the euro zone bailout fund to four Spanish banks on the condition that they lay off thousands of employees and close offices as part of their restructuring.

The chief culprit Bankia will lay off 6000 people, and some of the other banks are merging so there will be over 10,000 redundancies to prop up the banks. Needless to say, the chance of any economic recovery took another backwards step today.

“No to Unemployment, No to Evictions”

And the mortgage crisis has got so bad that even the austerity dedicated government has decreed a stop to foreclosures, following a rash of foreclosure-induced suicides. Foreclosures were running at an incredible 500 a day, with a backlog of some 350,000 reported. There were at least eight reported suicides by debt in October and early November, causing angry street protests.

At the same time, Spain is feeling the effects of climate change. I was talking to someone from Seville yesterday, who told me that the summer temperature is regularly 48 degrees C/118F. The entire city becomes nocturnal to compensate. Yesterday in Barcelona, there was a tropical downpour that followed months of drought in the summer. Desertification is an issue across the country. While six per cent of fertile land has already become desert, up to a third of the country is considered under threat.

Fires, floods and beach erosion are all serious issues and long-term measurements indicate that there is a visible trend. For example,

Spain has lost 90% of its glaciers in the past century, with the remaining ice expected to disappear completely within a few decades, according to the environment ministry. While the Pyrenees were covered by 3,300 hectares of glacier when records began at the end of the 19th century, now only 390 hectares remain.

So Spain exemplifies the climate/debt conundrum. Austerity is causing the economy to shrink. Debt repayment is still demanded from banks, government and private citizens alike. If the economy were to grow sufficiently to make this possible, the climate disaster could only accelerate.

This is a contradiction so acute that the revolution being openly discussed in Spain might seem like the only sensible solution. Perhaps that accounts for the resilience and optimism of the Barcelona activists, despite all the tensions, splits and hardships that exist. Or perhaps it’s harder to break a great city than the neo-liberals think.