Greta Thunberg was arrested in Sweden on Friday after allegedly disobeying police orders during a climate protest. Quintin Bignell reports on what happened and the plans for this week.
The estimated several hundred climate activists who blocked the A12 highway in The Hague on Saturday have been removed from the road by the police.
Several hundred climate activists are blocking the A12 highway in The Hague on Saturday for the eighth day in a row. They are protesting against government measures that support the fossil fuel industry. The Police used water cannons after some time.
dizzy: Extinction Rebellion NL have blocked the A12 at the Hague on previous occasions. The current programme of ongoing protests is to demand that the Dutch government stops it’s huge fossil fuel subsidies. They have blocked the A12 daily since last Saturday with the police using water cannon to clear them and reporting minors to the Dutch equivalent of Social Services for protesting. The following video is at least a day old and so does not cover today’s protest.
Even more subsidies and tax breaks are flowing into the fossil sector than previously assumed. According to a calculation by the Ministry of Economy and Climate, these amount to 39.7 to 46.4 billion euros annually. This is stated in the documents that will be released on Budget Day, September 19.
Insiders confirm corresponding reports from NOS. This is only a sum of all the benefits of the use of fossil energy and raw materials. It does not include, however, the cost to consumers. The report also states that a large part of the benefits (about 17 billion) is specified in international treaties or European Union directives.
A recent research report by SOMO, Oil Change International, and Milieudefensie already came to a total of 37.5 billion euros. Outgoing Minister Rob Jetten (Climate and Energy) said at the time that this amount sounded familiar. In general, Jetten wants to eliminate fossil fuel rebates.
According to NOS, this affects large steel companies, coal-fired power plants, greenhouse nurseries, inland shipping and oil refineries. Airlines, for example, do not have to pay kerosene tax in the Netherlands, which earns them more than 2 billion euros per year.
In recent years, fossil benefits have also disappeared. According to Jetten, phasing out fossil fuel perks can’t be done in one swoop. There has to be a phase-out plan for that, he says. “In this way we say goodbye to the old economy and create space for new jobs and prosperity,” he posted on X. For a long time, it was unclear how many subsidies and tax breaks went to the fossil fuel sector.
Ik zei het afgelopen weekend en ik zeg het opnieuw: fossiele subsidies moeten worden afgebouwd.
Financial meltdown, environmental disaster and even the rise of Donald Trump – neoliberalism has played its part in them all.
Thatcher dances with Ronald Reagan. Public domain image.
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So pervasive has neoliberalism become that we seldom even recognise it as an ideology. We appear to accept the proposition that this utopian, millenarian faith describes a neutral force; a kind of biological law, like Darwin’s theory of evolution. But the philosophy arose as a conscious attempt to reshape human life and shift the locus of power.
Neoliberalism sees competition as the defining characteristic of human relations. It redefines citizens as consumers, whose democratic choices are best exercised by buying and selling, a process that rewards merit and punishes inefficiency. It maintains that “the market” delivers benefits that could never be achieved by planning.
Attempts to limit competition are treated as inimical to liberty. Tax and regulation should be minimised, public services should be privatised. The organisation of labour and collective bargaining by trade unions are portrayed as market distortions that impede the formation of a natural hierarchy of winners and losers. Inequality is recast as virtuous: a reward for utility and a generator of wealth, which trickles down to enrich everyone. Efforts to create a more equal society are both counterproductive and morally corrosive. The market ensures that everyone gets what they deserve.
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As Naomi Klein documents in The Shock Doctrine, neoliberal theorists advocated the use of crises to impose unpopular policies while people were distracted: for example, in the aftermath of Pinochet’s coup, the Iraq war and Hurricane Katrina, which Friedman described as “an opportunity to radically reform the educational system” in New Orleans.
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The privatisation or marketisation of public services such as energy, water, trains, health, education, roads and prisons has enabled corporations to set up tollbooths in front of essential assets and charge rent, either to citizens or to government, for their use. Rent is another term for unearned income. When you pay an inflated price for a train ticket, only part of the fare compensates the operators for the money they spend on fuel, wages, rolling stock and other outlays. The rest reflects the fact that they have you over a barrel.
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Neoliberal policies are everywhere beset by market failures. Not only are the banks too big to fail, but so are the corporations now charged with delivering public services. As Tony Judt pointed out in Ill Fares the Land, Hayek forgot that vital national services cannot be allowed to collapse, which means that competition cannot run its course. Business takes the profits, the state keeps the risk.
