“This is the new extinction and we are half way through it. We are in terrible, terrible trouble and the longer we wait to do something about it the worse it is going to get.”
Sir David Attenborough
I want to weep. The Sunak government has announced it is putting Britain on a ‘war’ footing and pledges to take defence spending up to 2.5% by 2030. What he ignores is the war such policies are waging against ourselves and on our very existence.
Sunak’s commitment to defence spending, and to an Anglo-German collaboration producing new munitions, takes no account of the effect this will have on threats of extreme heat, floods, drought and consequent famine and displacement of people. Yet these are the most profound and lasting challenges we face.
A planetary perspective
The threats we face have nothing to do with MPs being locked in a room by ‘bad people’; it is the planet that is locked up and held hostage. And odious as they are, this doesn’t just mean Putin, Netanyahu, the gangs terrorising Haiti, or the handful of tinpot dictators around the globe. It concerns countries, corporations and (yes) us citizens.
Back in 1972 a group of scientists and economists published an assessment of what continued economic and population growth would mean in a world of finite resources – it was called The Limits to Growth. Commissioned by the Club of Rome, it should have become the politicians’ bible for human survival. Instead, neoliberal zealots threw it in the bin, pretending we could just consume our way to eternity. But as climate scientists have not ceased to warn, it would be better to talk of extinction than eternity.
Deniers still dispute the reality of human induced climate change but even they have to engage with some of the realities of the current crisis. The most pressing of these is food. The most telling graph in The Limits to Growth is the ‘Business As Usual’ scenario illustrating predicted levels of industrial output, resources, population, pollution and food. It was the food crisis that they said would hit first. And so it is.
A year of wild weather events has delivered devastating floods and forest fires, extreme heatwaves and unrelenting downpours. Agriculture has been a victim of all of them.
Harvests lost
In Puglia, a third of the olive trees have died in recent years. The region used to produce half of Italy’s olive harvests but the trees are dying from disease exacerbated by heat-stress. The picture doesn’t look much better in Spain.
Meanwhile in Britain, after the wettest 12 months for 150 years, farmers are warning that many will be unable to grow food on their waterlogged fields this summer and Britain will need to import more, at greater cost. And in India rice exports have been halted because harvests cannot even meet domestic needs.
Last year’s European State of the Climate report recorded that the EU saw its warmest year on record, and an area larger than the combined size of Paris, London and Berlin lost to wildfires. Overall, some 40% of Southern Europe was hit by extreme heat events throughout July. Add this to cascading calamities across North America, South America and Africa and you get some idea of why the global food system is spiralling out of control.
Beside any of these crises, Sunak’s mock militarism looks completely absurd. All meaningful intervention measures point in the opposite direction to his political obsessions.
Reset and rearm diplomacy
Deregulating the food trade chases cheapness and cost-cutting along the supply chain, resulting in damage to soil, water security and food quality. Delaying our exit from fossil-fuel dependency just accelerates the climate roller-coaster we have created. Obsessing about ‘growth’ (rather than circularity, social inclusion or stability) humours an outdated economics that threatens human existence. We need an economic and political reset that redirects priorities from the ‘bads’ and in favour of the ‘goods’.
Internationally, the compelling case is for more diplomacy, not more weapons. An array of different policy priorities would follow.
- For Gaza, you only create space for diplomacy once you halt the supply of weapons. At the very least, if Israel can stop bombing hospitals, then medics can work with the ill and the injured.
- In answer to a former BP chief’s claim that it would cost £2.7 trillion a year to “pivot the climate crisis into correction”, we could put the current £5.6 trillion of annual fossil-fuel subsidies into energy saving and renewables.
- As the planet sinks beneath an ocean of plastic waste, Britain has delayed introduction of a deposit-return scheme. Sunak finds it too difficult to do what Norway did in 2006. Yet we know just 60 firms are responsible for half the world’s plastic waste: a 50% tax would allow countries to follow Norway and make recycling pay for itself.
- We could make dividend (and bonus) payments in the water industry conditional on the removal of sewage from our rivers and beaches.
- The electricity sector could be transformed, allowing the falling cost of renewables to set the market price rather than letting gas set ‘extortion’ prices. Driving towards decentralised and integrated energy ‘systems’ and setting annual carbon reduction duties on the sector would promote partnerships focusing as much on energy saving as on new generation.
- Tomorrow’s food security will require new partnerships between farmers and consumers. They won’t come without a cost, but nor do food riots and shoplifting. What we will see is more localised food systems (non fossil-fuel dependent) and innovative growing techniques, as likely to be urban as rural.
A different politics
It’s a far cry from the turgid menu of today’s political offerings. From the demeaning dishonesties of Netanyahu’s pursuit of genocide, to the inverted logic of sending in US troops to break up student protests about civilian slaughter, and Sunak’s absurd pretence that a war footing is our best hope of security, we are in a mess. Goodness knows what today’s first time voters will make of it.
Most will find themselves somewhere between Attenborough’s warnings and Gerry Rafferty’s great song ‘Stuck in the Middle with You’ – knowing something’s not right but faced with ‘clowns to the left of me’ and ‘jokers to the right’.
Passing almost unnoticed at the same time as the armament announcements was the fact that we were supposed to be celebrating Earth Day on 22 April. Inspired by US anti-Vietnam War protesters in 1970, this helped to bring about the US introduction of the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act and the founding of their Environmental Protection Agency. Other countries followed.
It isn’t beyond our wit, or our means, to renew the Earth-saving commitments. We can feed the world sustainably. We can put work and worth at the centre of a different economics. To do so we have to let the protesters take the lead.
It seems the rest of us have lost the path and the plot, so let’s give our kids the chance to rediscover it. Honestly Rishi, they couldn’t do much worse.
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