The wikipedia page appears incomplete. I understood that large earth-moving machines were used to kill retreating Iraqi soldiers through burying them alive but there’s no mention of it.
Rishi Sunak has reconsidered his decision to stay away from COP27. It is a screeching U-turn, according to Labour. But is his government really changing its attitude to climate breakdown, or it simply making the best of a bad political error?
The global context is clear. UN secretary-general António Guterres has stridently repeated his message that impending climate chaos is the key issue of the age, but under current agreements temperatures will rise by around 2.5°C, well above the level at which tipping points are likely to be reached.
Every day brings more news of what is unfolding, most recently the World Meteorological Organisation’s report that Europe has warmed at twice the global average over the past 30 years. According to one summary of its findings:
The effects of this warming are already being seen, with droughts, wildfires and ice melts taking place across the continent. The European State of the Climate report… warns that as the warming trend continues, exceptional heat, wildfires, floods and other climate breakdown outcomes will affect society, economies and ecosystems.
While global political responses remain far too limited, the crisis comes at a time of impressive developments in rapid decarbonisation as the cost of electricity generated from renewables continues to plummet. As I wrote previously, one of those involved in a study of renewables has said that it even made sense for climate change sceptics to invest in these sources rather than oil and gas.
I wrote before about the potential for Keir Starmer’s Labour Party to focus on climate issues, especially with Ed Miliband’s long-term commitment. Does this still hold if Sunak’s government has really had a change of heart?
The problem for Sunak is the Tory track record on the shift to renewables, shown clearly by the party’s actions after the 2015 general election. After being in coalition with the Lib Dems for the previous five years, the Tories won a comfortable parliamentary majority in 2015, which changed everything. With the opposition in the throes of a bitter leadership election, that summer saw the dismantling of a raft of measures that had been initiated by Labour prior to 2010 and survived during the coalition thanks to Lib Dem influence.
Week after week, news of further cuts seeped out. At the time there was a burgeoning new industry around solar panel installations. The generous feed-in tariff that encouraged installations by paying householders for electricity generated was promptly savaged, and thousands of industry staff were laid off. In a gross double whammy, building onshore wind farms was frowned on and access to a subsidy scheme halted, while the development of North Sea oil was aided by £1bn in additional subsidies.
A scheme to support improved energy-efficient homes was scrapped and, most damning of all, the “zero carbon homes” plan was junked. Under this policy, all new homes built from 2016 were to have been carbon neutral. Apart from the cumulative beneficial effect of 200,000+ zero-carbon homes being built every year, the move would have had economic and psychological impacts. The whole house-building industry would have seen the writing on the wall for traditional energy-inefficient homes, with ripple effects right across the construction business. That change alone would have done much to transform public attitudes to climate change.
OPINION: After I lost my home, I realised we can’t rely on politicians. Communities must act to protect their future
Behind all this lies a market fundamentalism rooted in the neoliberal economic worldview. For convinced neoliberals, the COVID pandemic was not easy to handle because the government expenditure involved in countering its dire effects ran deeply counter to a belief system that sought a small state and was confident for month after month that markets alone could cope successfully with a pandemic.
The worry now in right-wing circles is that the government will be bumped yet again into heavy public spending, this time to prevent climate breakdown. To make matters worse in neoliberal eyes, this comes at a time when the whole free market approach is starting to take flak following the utter failure of the Truss regime. The conviction that a wholesale acceleration towards true market fundamentalist politics in Britain would work a treat came spectacularly unstuck in a matter of days.
So, in this regard, what is the chance of Sunak altering course, starting with a spectacular announcement at COP27? Why not play fantasy politics? Now that the £25bn Sizewell C nuclear plant is likely to be junked, Sunak has an easy way of doing it. A 10% wealth task [tax?] on the £750bn owned by Britain’s richest thousand people, imposed over three years so they would scarcely notice it, would raise three times the cost of Sizewell C. This would be more than enough to embark on an accelerated transition to much cheaper renewables, ensuring security of supply and falling prices. It could be combined with an intensive nationwide programme of free home insulation.
Energy security combined with much-reduced fuel poverty would mean that Sunak and his party really had experienced a Damascene conversion. Will this, or anything like it, really happen?
In your dreams. This is, after all, fantasy politics.
For many years, a small band of us “voices of decline” and “enemies of enterprise” who “don’t understand aspiration” have been trying to point out that increments in gross domestic product do not equate to increments in happiness. We have argued that no one wins the human race. We have sought to explain that what mainstream economists call progress is what ecologists call planetary ruin. We’ve contended that infinite growth on a finite planet is a recipe for catastrophe. I hope Liz Truss is right to claim that so many people now accept our arguments.
Even if this coalition is not yet as broad as she suggests, she seems determined to widen it. Her plans to rip down planning controls, to cut public services, deregulate business, crush protests, unleash exploitation and destroy economic security, all in the name of boosting the rate of economic growth, could scarcely be better calculated to reveal the difference between GDP and prosperity.
Is our prosperity enhanced by increasing the volume of sewage in our rivers and on our beaches? No. It may boost the profits of the water companies and the remuneration of their directors, very little of which – unlike the effluent they release – will trickle down into our lives. Will a new roadbuilding programme enhance our lives? Not if, as new roads always do, it pushes congestion to the next bottleneck, while increasing noise, pollution and the destruction of landscapes. Will we be happier if the regulations protecting workers and consumers are stripped away? No. We will find that our health, wealth and wellbeing decline, even as the companies exploiting us become richer. Our lives do not grow in these circumstances. They are shrunk by poverty, pollution, poor health and exploitation.
…
dizzy: As a blogger, I should only quote small excerpts of copyrighted works and as a rule of thumb I tend to go for 3 paragraphs of newspaper articles. I recommend the rest of Monbiot’s article.
You’re on course for a serious clash. We need climate action immediately, we need no new oil and gas now. We don’t have time to feck about, the World is burning.
We can’t tolerate you having a bonkers, insane totally divorced from reality leader who has the infantile approach that things will happen simply by wishing them to be true. Put reins on her.
Keir Starmer commits to play the caretaker role for Capitalism through the “hard times”.
11/9/24 Image added 10/9/24. This article has proved to be prophetic. It may continue to be prophetic in 20 or 30 years.
[Responding to applause] Thank you, thank you, thank you.
Here we are at the Labour Party conference 2022 - and thanks to the Tory party appointing simple maths misunderstanding incompetents - on the cusp of being elected the UK's government.
I'll let you into a secret conference. I am the Establishement's man (more on that later). What I want to tell you right now is that I will govern, WE will have a Labour govenment looking after the Capitalists' interests through the hard times ahead until the Conservatives can take over again, after the hard times ahead, with an almost sane leader.
Yes, I promise to you conference that you can depend on me to look after the rich and powerful just as the Tories do while they take a break and duck out of the total chaos that they've caused. And I say clearly to you conference, that I am proud to do this work for the rich and powerful, to be their servant, to keep them safe while I perform my caretaking role for Capitalism.
It has been a long road for me to achieve power and I want to thank those that have helped me. I particularly want to thank the Labour officials who were so hostile to and totally undermined the previous leader. And I particularly want to thank the Zionists.
I know that all of you in this hall, in this party can't say that word Zionist - that ist forbidden - but I can because I'm leader. So thanks to all the Zionists that hounded out the previous Labour leader and his supporters so that I was able to expell them for being opposed to Zionist apartheid, for being Socialists and anti-racist.(2) We can't have any of them in this party, this is a new era, we are at the centre of UK politics, we are New Labour, the New Red Tories.
We are in a new era conference. You will be aware that I thanked the Zionists by installing a former Israeli spy into the centre of Labour Party activities, actually a member of 8200 Unit, to spy on you members and pursue the interests of Israel.(1)
I am in thrall to Israel - but don't you dare call me a Zionist - dat is forbidden. As I said I am an Establishment man but unfortunately, what I have yet to realise is that the Establishment moves very slowly but ever so occasionally has seismic shifts. I still have yet to realise that the UK establishment may not be too pleased with me being so in thrall to a foreign state and installing a former Israeli spy in my office.
As I finish this sermon, I ask you all to join me in singing the National Anthem ...
(1) Also responsible for rapid rebuttal according to the job description.
(2) This is all well documented by al Jazeera in their 2 investigative reports 'The Lobby' and 'The Labour Files'.
