By George Monbiot. Published on the Guardian’s website, 2nd February 2012

Duncan Clark’s article in the Guardian today should cause even the most determined anti-nuclear campaigner to think long and hard about the choices that confront us. He reveals that David McKay, chief scientific adviser to the government’s energy department and author of Sustainable Energy: Without the Hot Air, has endorsed a remarkable estimate. The UK’s stockpile of nuclear waste could be used to generate enough low-carbon energy to run this country for 500 years.

If the material we have seen until now as waste is instead seen as fuel, it has the potential to solve three problems at once: the UK’s contribution to climate change, possible future energy shortfalls and a significant component of the massive bill – and massive headache – associated with cleaning up the current nuclear mess.

The technology with the potential to solve these problems is the fast reactor, ideally the integral fast reactor (IFR), about which I wrote in December. It exploits the fact that conventional nuclear power plants use just 0.6% of the energy contained in the uranium that fuels them. IFRs, once loaded with nuclear waste, can, in principle, keep recycling it until only a small fraction remains, producing energy as they do so.

The remaining waste is both unusable for anyone who might hope to make a weapon from it and presents much less of a long-term management problem, as its components have half-lives of tens, not millions, of years. An IFR plant could melt down only by breaking the laws of physics: if the fuel pins begin to overheat, they expand, stopping the fission reaction.

GE Hitachi has offered to build a fast reactor to consume the plutonium stockpile at Sellafield, though not yet the whole kit (the integral fast reactor). It has offered to do it within five years, and to carry the cost if it doesn’t work out. This is the proposal the government is now considering. I would like to see it go further and examine the case for the full works: an integral fast reactor (incorporating a reprocessing plant) that generates much more energy from the waste pile.

We are confronted not just with a choice between nuclear power and gas or coal – whose consequences I have explained elsewhere – but also with a choice between different nuclear technologies. This is a choice that has to be made, because we have a monstrous pile of nuclear waste, a legacy of both the irresponsible short-termism of those who ran previous generations of nuclear power plants and of the nuclear weapons industry. We cannot wish this waste away. It exists and something must be done about it.

There are currently three serious options on the table. The first is to bury it. We get nothing from this except a bloody great hole in the ground and a bill to match. The second is currently the government’s favoured option: mixed oxide processing (Mox). This has already proved to be an expensive fiasco. It produces (when it works at all) fuel that hardly anyone wants, at great cost, and more waste plutonium than we possess already. Its contribution to the electricity supply is feeble, raising the energy extracted from nuclear fuel from 0.6% to 0.8%. Most importantly, it can deal only with plutonium waste, whereas IFRs also consume depleted uranium. Even the government admits that “the value of the fuel to reactor operators is significantly less than the cost of its manufacture”.

The third option is fast reactors, ideally integral fast reactors. This is the one I favour, and unless you can provide me with a powerful reason why it should not receive serious consideration, it is the option I will continue to promote.

Whichever of the three choices we make, we will be choosing a nuclear technology – and a major contract for a nuclear operator. We will be favouring one branch of the nuclear industry at the expense of two others. If, for example, we prevail on the government to develop IFRs, not Mox, Areva, which hopes to profit from mixed oxide processing, will be sorely disappointed. The same goes for whichever company might have secured the contract for burying the waste.

So which of these options do you support? None of the above is not an answer. Something has to be done with the waste, and unless you have invented a novel solution, one of these three options will need to be deployed (or, conceivably, a different nuclear power technology, such as thorium or travelling wave reactors). But it is a choice that opponents of nuclear power are refusing to make – and that is not good enough.

Let me give you an example. After I first wrote about integral fast reactors, Dr Ruth Balogh, the nuclear issues campaigner for West Cumbria & North Lakes Friends of the Earth, sent a furious letter to the Guardian. She accused me of “proposing a technical fix for nuclear waste.” Yes, that is exactly what I’m proposing. Does she have an alternative in mind? A non-technical fix perhaps? No fix at all?

She went on to lambast both deep disposal for nuclear waste, the design for which, she claims, has “more than 100 flaws” and the Mox plant, whose evident drawbacks she lists. She then goes on the propose … a grand total of nothing. Her solution is to attack the people suggesting an alternative to both the treatments she abhors – without suggesting one herself. That’s not just irresponsible. It’s dumb.

She then suggests that IFRs could cause a “nuclear catastrophe at Sellafield” big enough to cause the “ruination of the western Lake District”. If she can propose a mechanism which does not break the laws of physics by which an IFR plant could achieve this, I will ask the Guardian to provide space for her on this site to explain it to our readers.

But all of us, if we have a serious interest in doing something about nuclear waste, should make this choice. What do you want to see done with it and why? Simply shouting down other people’s suggestions won’t make it go away.

www.monbiot.com

By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 31st January 2012

The ancient Greeks, unlike the Jews or the Christians, invested their gods with human failings. Divine judgement, they believed, was neither flawless nor dispassionate; it was warped by lust, vengeance and self-interest. In the hands of Zeus, the thunderbolt was both an instrument of justice and a weapon of jealousy and revenge(1).

Those now dispensing judgement from on high are not gods, though they must feel like it. The people striking mortals down with drones are doubtless as capable as anyone else of self-deception, denial and cognitive illusions. More so perhaps, as the eminent fictions of the Bush years and the growing delusions of the current president suggest.

Barack Obama began last week’s State of the Union address by claiming that the troops who had fought the Iraq war had “made the United States safer and more respected around the world.”(2) Like Bush, like the gods, he has begun to create the world he wants to inhabit.

These power-damaged people have been granted the chance to fulfil one of humankind’s abiding fantasies: to vapourise their enemies, as if with a curse or a prayer, effortlessly and from a safe distance. That these powers are already being abused is suggested by the mendacity of those who are deploying them. The CIA, running the undeclared and unacknowledged drone war in Pakistan, insists that there have been no recent civilian casualties(3). So does Obama’s chief counter-terrorism adviser, John Brennan(4). It is a blatant whitewash.

As a report last year by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism showed, of some 2,300 people killed by US drone strikes in Pakistan from 2004 until August 2011, between 392 and 781 appear to have been civilians; 175 were children(5). In the period about which the CIA and Brennan made their claims, at least 45 civilians have been killed. As soon as an agency claims “we never make mistakes”, you know that it has lost its moorings, as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn suggested in his story of that title. Feeling no obligation to apologise or explain, count bodies or answer for its crimes, it becomes a danger to humanity.

It may be true, as the US air force says, that because a drone can circle and study a target for hours before it strikes, its missiles are less likely to kill civilians than those launched from a piloted plane(6). (The USAF has yet to explain how it reconciles this with its boast that drones “greatly shorten decision time”(7)). But it must also be true that the easier and less risky a deployment is, the more likely it is to happen.

This danger is acknowledged in a remarkably candid assessment published by the UK’s ministry of defence, which also deploys drones, and has also used them to kill civilians(8). It maintains that the undeclared air war in Pakistan and Yemen “is totally a function of the existence of an unmanned capability – it is unlikely a similar scale of force would be used if this capability were not available.”(9) Citing Carl von Clausewitz, it warns that the brutality of war seldom escalates to its absolute form partly because of the risk faced by one’s own forces. Without risk, there’s less restraint. The unmanned craft allow governments to fight a coward’s war, a god’s war, harming only the unnamed.

The danger is likely to escalate as drone warfare becomes more automated and the lines of accountability less clear. Last week the US navy unveiled a drone that can land on an aircraft carrier without even a remote pilot. The Los Angeles Times warned that “it could usher in an era when death and destruction can be dealt by machines operating semi-independently.”(10) The British assessment suggests that within a few years drones assisted by artificial intelligence could make their own decisions about whom to kill and whom to spare(11). Sorry sir, computer says yes.

“Some would say one man’s freedom fighter is another man’s terrorist,” George HW Bush opined when he was vice-president. “I reject this notion. The philosophical differences are stark and fundamental.”(12) Perhaps they are; but no US administration has convincingly defined them or consistently recognised them. In Latin America, south east Asia, Africa and the Middle East successive presidents have thwarted freedom and assisted state terrorism. Drones grant governments new opportunities to snuff out opposition of any kind, terrorist or democrat. The US might already be making use of them.

In October last year, a 16 year-old called Tariq Aziz was travelling through North Waziristan in Pakistan with his 12 year-old cousin, Waheed Khan. Their car was hit by a missile from a US drone(13). As always, their deaths made them guilty: if we killed them, they must be terrorists. But they weren’t. Tariq was about to start work with the human rights group Reprieve, taking pictures of the aftermath of drone strikes. A mistake? Possibly. But it is also possible that he was murdered out of self-interest. If you have such powers, if you are not held to account by Congress, the media or the American people, why not use them?

The danger to democracy, not just in Pakistan but one day perhaps everywhere, should be evident. Yet, as fatalistic as the ancient Greeks, we drift into this with scarcely a murmur of debate, leaving the gods to decide.

www.monbiot.com

References:

1. http://www.theoi.com/Heros/Salmoneus.html

2. http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2012/01/24/remarks-president-state-union-address

3. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/12/world/asia/12drones.html

4. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/12/world/asia/12drones.html

5. http://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/2011/08/10/most-complete-picture-yet-of-cia-drone-strikes/

6. Colonel David M. Sullivan, cited in http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/12/world/asia/12drones.html

7. United States Air Force, 2009. Unmanned Aircraft Systems Flight Plan
2009-2047. http://www.globalsecurity.org/jhtml/jframe.html#http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/library/policy/usaf/usaf-uas-flight-plan_2009-2047.pdf

8. http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/jul/05/afghanistan-raf-drone-civilian-deaths

9. Ministry of Defence, 30th March 2011. Joint Doctrine Note 2/11. The UK Approach to Unmanned Aircraft Systems. Joint Doctrine Note 2/11 (JDN 2/11).
http://www.mod.uk/NR/rdonlyres/F9335CB2-73FC-4761-A428-DB7DF4BEC02C/0/20110505JDN_211_UAS_v2U.pdf

10. http://articles.latimes.com/2012/jan/26/business/la-fi-auto-drone-20120126

11. Ministry of Defence, as above.

12. http://bit.ly/z3WHRT

13. http://reprieve.org.uk/press/2011_11_06_Tariq_CIA_drone_Waziristan/

By George Monbiot, published on the Guardian’s website, 26th January 2012

Earlier this month, I questioned the credentials of the alternative weather forecasters being used by the Daily Mail, the Express, the Telegraph and the Sun. I suggested that their qualifications were inadequate, their methods inscrutable and their results unreliable. I highlighted the work of two of these companies: Exacta Weather and Positive Weather Solutions (PWS).

Now the story has become more interesting: do the people from Positive Weather Solutions, making its forecasts and quoted in news articles, exist?

A sharp-eyed reader has sent me a screenshot he took from the PWS website at the end of last year. As you can see, it shows eight people whom the company lists as its forecasters and experts. (Well, seven and a cup of tea, currently standing in for its chief assistant forecaster). Some of these pictures are of striking young women with, er, prominent credentials. They have, the website claims, been producing PWS’s forecasts and writing its blog posts. They have also been quoted in the Daily Mail.

So who are they? A picture search suggests an impressive range of talents. Take “Serena Skye”, for example, listed by PWS as a “contributing weather forecaster”. She also turns out to be a mail order bride, a hot Russian date and a hot Ukrainean date. How she finds time for it all we can only guess.

“Emma Pearson”, as well as working as PWS’s assistant weather forecaster, also features on 49,800 hairdressing sites, modelling the emo hairstyle. (Emo, m’lud, is said to be a form of music, popular with certain members of the younger generation).

“Kelly Smart” has a remarkably busy life: as an egg donor, a hot date, a sublet property broker in Sweden, a lawyer, an expert on snoring, eyebrow threading, safe sex, green cleaning products, spanking and air purification. Perhaps more pertinently, she’s also a model whose picture is available via a company called istockphoto.

“Charlotte Haines”, another assistant weather forecaster, has achieved rather less in life. She is listed only as a “pretty blonde woman”. But she does have a qualification that might have appealed to Positive Weather Solutions: her photo is labelled “royalty free”.

As well as their pictures, I have looked up the names of these people, alongside search terms such as “weather” and “forecasting”. Beyond the material generated by Positive Weather Solutions, I have so far found no further evidence of their existence. Yet PWS uses them to make its forecasts and write its blog posts. Charlotte Haines PBW, RF* writes a blog for the company called Charlotte’s Web. In it she predicts the weather, talks about her children and discusses her golfing skills. At the bottom of these posts is this disclaimer: “the opinions expressed by Charlotte Haines are not necessarily those of Positive Weather Solutions.” So whose are they?

(*Pretty Blonde Woman, Royalty Free)

Emma Pearson EMO also writes forecasts, using a similar style. Intriguingly, in August last year she claimed that she would be appearing at the Eisteddfod in Wrexham. “Come and say hello! Look for the young lady, that’s me, with a Positive Weather Solutions white t-shirt on!” But look for whom, exactly? The girl with the emo haircut?

Both Charlotte and Emma have been quoted in the Daily Mail and their forecasts have formed the basis of some prominent stories. In April last year, for example, their claims were all that justified an article titled “It’s sunshine all the way as forecasters predict 21c by Grand National weekend”. Citing both women as sources at different points in the report appeared to lend it weight. But are either of them real?

The Mail also used Emma Pearson to predict “a 20 per cent chance of rain for Prince William and Kate Middleton’s wedding at the end of the month.”

I phoned Jonathan Powell, who runs PWS, and asked him who these people are. He told me that a lot of contributors had been assisting his service. The photos

“were put up there just for holding or were avatars of people who were contributing. Or people who wanted to contribute. They came and went.”

He said he removed them from the site in mid-December.

“There was no intention of being misleading. We’re sorry if that was the case. But we’re trying to clean our act up.”

“But using other people’s pictures is a deception isn’t it?”, I asked.

“OK, you’ve got me on that.”

“Does Charlotte Haines exist?”

“Charlotte did.”

“Can I have her contact number?”

“I can fish that out for you no trouble at all. I’ll have to go back to the office to get it.”

“Could I have the other people’s numbers too?”

“OK I’ll get you all the details. No problem.”

Two hours later he sent me an email.

“Quite frankly, the filing system I have is a mess and I cannot put my hands of the information you require. … Your column which was understandably critical of us at Christmas made me face a few things about the company and where it was going, and now as I can’t find anything to back anyone up then quite frankly PWS is now more trouble than its worth and in debt. Therefore, I have taken the decision after 6 years to close the business forthwith.”

I wrote back:

“Thanks for letting me know. You never did use people with those names though, did you? And I’m guessing you wrote Charlotte’s blog and Emma’s forecasts yourself?”

I have not yet heard back from him.

Twenty minutes after Jonathan Powell sent me his email, the following statement appeared on its website:

“It is with regret that because of illness and the current economic climate, PWS has ceased trading.”

Will this make the Daily Mail, the Daily Express and other papers less inclined to use poorly qualified forecasters in the future? If I were Charlotte Haines or Emma Pearson, I might be able to make a firm prediction. But the most I can say is that I doubt it.

www.monbiot.com

By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 24th January 2012

The successful bank robber no longer covers his face and leaps over the counter with a sawn-off shotgun. He arrives in a chauffeur-driven car, glides into the lift then saunters into an office at the top of the building. No one stops him. No one, even when the scale of the heist is revealed, issues a warrant for his arrest. The modern robber obtains prior approval from the institution he is fleecing.

The income of corporate executives, which the business secretary Vince Cable has just failed to address(1), is a form of institutionalised theft, arranged by a kleptocratic class for the benefit of its members. The wealth which was once spread more evenly among the staff of a company, or distributed as lower prices or higher taxes, is now siphoned off by people who have neither earned nor generated it.

Over the past ten years, chief executives’ pay has risen nine times faster than that of the median earner(2). Some bosses (British Gas, Xstrata and Barclays for example) are now being paid over 1000 times the national median wage(3). The share of national income captured by the top 0.1% rose from 1.3% in 1979 to 6.5% by 2007(4).

These rewards bear no relationship to risk. The bosses of big companies, though they call themselves risk-takers, are 13 times less likely to be sacked than the lowest paid workers(5). Even if they lose their jobs and never work again, they will have invested so much and secured such generous pensions and severance packages that they’ll live in luxury for the rest of their lives(6). The risks are carried by other people.

The problem of executive pay is characterised by Cable and many others as a gap between reward and performance. But it runs deeper than that, for three reasons.

As the writer Dan Pink has shown, high pay actually reduces performance(7). Material rewards incentivise simple mechanistic jobs, such as working on an assembly line. But they lead to the poorer execution of tasks which require problem solving and cognitive skills. As studies for the US Federal Reserve and other such bolsheviks show(8), cash incentives narrow people’s focus and restrict the range of their thinking. By contrast, intrinsic motivators — such as a sense of autonomy, of enhancing your skills and pursuing a higher purpose — tend to improve performance.

Even the 0.1% concede that money is not what drives them. Bernie Ecclestone says “I doubt if any successful business person works for money … money is a by-product of success. It’s not the main aim.”(9) Jeroen van der Veer, formerly the chief executive of Shell, recalls, “if I had been paid 50 per cent more, I would not have done it better. If I had been paid 50 per cent less, then I would not have done it worse”(10). High pay is both counterproductive and unnecessary.

The second reason is that, as the psychologist Daniel Kahneman has shown, performance in the financial sector is random, and the belief of traders and fund managers that they are using skill to beat the market is a cognitive illusion(11). A link between pay and results is a reward for blind luck.

Most importantly, the wider consequences of grotesque inequality bear no relationship to entitlement. Obscene rewards for success are as socially corrosive as obscene rewards for failure. They reduce social mobility, enhance plutocratic power and allow the elite to inflict astonishing levels of damage on the environment(12). They create resentment and reduce the motivation of other workers, who see the greedy bosses as the personification of the company(13).

Vince Cable has announced four main policies: more transparency, a requirement that companies should “report” on boardroom diversity, a mechanism for clawing back pay settlements not justified by the company’s performance, and granting shareholders binding powers to block excessive rewards. They are likely to be almost useless – or worse. Pay transparency, while of general interest, can create the perverse result that executives discover how much their rivals are getting, and use the information to demand more. The clawback mechanism will be inserted into the corporate governance code(14). This is voluntary, and its existing provisions are widely ignored.

Shareholder power is likely to be illusory. As Prem Sikka has shown, the proportion of stock owned by individuals fell from 47% in 1969 to 10% in 2008, while the percentage in foreign hands has risen from 7% to 42%(15). Why should oil shiekhs care about social justice in the UK? And most traders hold shares too briefly to take an interest in the inner workings of a company. As Rob Taylor, formerly the chief executive of Kleinwort Benson, points out, if shareholders don’t like the way a company is run, they don’t hang around to change it; they sell up and move on(16).

Labour’s policies seem designed to sound tough but change little. Like Cable, its spokesman Chuka Umunna talks of transparency and simplicity (which are both worthy aims) but not of holding down pay. Labour has based its policy on the findings of the High Pay Commission, which have been widely hailed as revolutionary. I’ve read the commission’s final report, and can find no justification for this description(17). Its recommendations are, to be frank, pathetic. With the possible exception of employee representation on pay committees, the twelve measures it proposes are likely to make only a marginal difference. Nowhere does it suggest anything resembling the obvious means of capping executive pay: namely, er, capping executive pay.

So what should be done? The UK government imposes a minimum wage, and even the neoliberal coalition appears to accept that this is a necessary intervention in the market. So why should it not impose a maximum wage?

I’m not talking about ratios or relative earnings. Various bodies have proposed that there should be a fixed ratio of the top earnings within a company to either the median or lowest salaries. But as a report on this issue by the New Economics Foundation shows, the first measurement quickly becomes complex and opaque, the second creates an incentive to contract out the lowest paid work(18). I’m talking about an absolute maximum, applied nationwide.

Let’s say £500,000 a year, a figure that includes bonuses, share options, pensions and benefits. It will rise with inflation, but no faster than that. If you want to make more, you can invest in a risky venture of your own or someone else’s. If you want to make more money as a salaried worker – in other words while other people carry the risks – you can go abroad, and good riddance to you. Another country, incautious enough to set no cap, can deal with the consequences of your destructive greed.

The feeble measures proposed by the government will do nothing to prevent the great pay robbery. Vince Cable knows who his masters are, and the policies he has announced are intended to create only a semblance of action.

www.monbiot.com

References:

1. http://www.parliamentlive.tv/Main/Player.aspx?meetingId=9854

2. Stewart Lansley, 2010. Unfair to Middling: How Middle Income Britain’s shrinking wages fuelled the crash and threaten recovery. Trades Union Congress. http://www.tuc.org.uk/extras/unfairtomiddling.pdf

3. New Economics Foundation, 2011. The Ratio: common sense controls for executive pay and revitalising UK business. http://neweconomics.org/sites/neweconomics.org/files/The_Ratio.pdf

4. The High Pay Commission, 2011. Cheques With Balances: why tackling high pay is in the national interest. Final report. http://highpaycommission.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/HPC_final_report_WEB.pdf

5. Stewart Lansley, as above.

6. See High Pay Commission, 2011. Just deserts, or good luck? High Earners’ attitudes to pay. http://highpaycommission.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/HPC-Just.Desertspdf.pdf

7. http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_on_motivation.html

8. Dan Ariely, Uri Gneezy, George Loewenstein, and Nina Mazar, 2005. Large Stakes and Big Mistakes. Woking paper number 05‐11. Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. http://www.bos.frb.org/economic/wp/wp2005/wp0511.pdf

9. http://www.guardian.co.uk/theobserver/2011/nov/13/profile-bernie-ecclestone

10. Quoted by the New Economics Foundation, 2009. A Bit Rich: Calculating the real value to society of different professions. http://neweconomics.org/sites/neweconomics.org/files/A_Bit_Rich.pdf

11. http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2011/oct/30/daniel-kahneman-cognitive-illusion-extract

12. See http://www.monbiot.com/2009/09/29/the-population-myth/

13. See the discussion on pages 26-28 of the High Pay Commission’s final report: http://highpaycommission.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/HPC_final_report_WEB.pdf

14. http://www.frc.org.uk/documents/pagemanager/Corporate_Governance/UK%20Corp%20Gov%20Code%20June%202010.pdf

15. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/dec/06/nick-clegg-shareholders-fat-cat-pay

16. http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/blog/2012/jan/09/shareholders-revolting-excessive-boardroom-pay

17. The High Pay Commission, 2011. Cheques With Balances: why tackling high pay is in the national interest. Final report. http://highpaycommission.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/HPC_final_report_WEB.pdf

18. New Economics Foundation, 2011, as above.

By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 16th January 2012

Texas is a largely-Christian state that appears to believe in neither forgiveness nor redemption. Last week the Guardian revealed the extent to which it has criminalised its children(1). Police now patrol the schools, arresting and charging pupils as young as six for breaches of discipline.

Among the villainies for which they have been apprehended are throwing paper aeroplanes, using perfume in class, cheeking the teacher, wearing the wrong clothes and arriving late for school. A 12 year-old boy with attention deficit disorder was imprisoned for turning over a desk; six years later, he’s still inside. Children convicted of these enormities – 300,000 such tickets were issued by Texas police in 2010 – acquire a criminal record. This makes them ineligible for federal aid at university and for much subsequent employment.

Yet most of them have committed no recognised crime. As one of the judges who hears their cases explained to the Guardian, “if any adult did it it’s not going to be a violation.”(2)

On the other hand, no charges have been brought against a Texas judge called William Adams. Last year a video was released which showed him beating the living daylights out of his daughter with a leather belt(3). The attack was so savage that when I watched it I nearly threw up. Adams cannot be prosecuted because the beating took place eight years ago. But even if it had happened yesterday, he might not have been charged, as he could have claimed that he was disciplining his child(4). In both cases the law permits people to do things to children that they could not do to adults.

Before we start feeling too superior, we should remember that systematic injustice towards children is common to many nations. Consider these cases, all from the past few decades: the theft of babies and forced adoptions in Spain(5); the teenage girls pressed into slavery into Ireland’s Magdalene laundries(6); the sexual abuse in its industrial schools(7); similar institutional abuse, also by Catholic priests, in many parts of the world; buggery and beatings in Welsh children’s homes(8); the British children told, wrongly, that they were orphans and exported to Australia, Canada and other Commonwealth countries(9,10); the assaults by staff in privately-run child jails(11). It seems to me that such abuses have three common characteristics.

The first is that the countries in which they occur appear to possess a sacrificial caste of children, whose rights can be denied and whose interests can be disregarded with impunity. The second is that these countries have a powerful resistance towards confronting and addressing this injustice: discussing it often amounts to a taboo. (These two traits were chillingly dramatised in Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel Never Let Me Go). The third is that systematic abuse becomes widely acknowledged only after determined people – such as Margaret Humphreys (the child migrants) and Alison Taylor (the Welsh care homes) – spend years trying to force it into the open in the face of official denial.

So I want to try once more to begin a discussion about an issue we still refuse to examine: early boarding. It is as British as warm beer, green suburbs and pointless foreign wars. Despite or because of that we won’t talk about it. Those on the right will not defend these children, as they will not criticise private schools. Those on the left won’t defend them, as they see them as privileged and therefore undeserving of concern. But children’s needs are universal; they know no such distinctions.

The UK Boarding Schools website lists 18 schools which take boarders from the age of eight, and 38 which take them from the age of seven(12). I expect such places have improved over the past 40 years; they could scarcely have got worse. Children are likely to have more contact with home; though one school I phoned last week told me that some of its pupils still see their parents only in the holidays(13). But the nature of boarding is only one of the forces that can harm these children. The other is the fact of boarding.

In a paper published last year in the British Journal of Psychotherapy, Dr Joy Schaverien identifies a set of symptoms common among early boarders that she calls Boarding School Syndrome(14). Her research suggests that the act of separation, regardless of what might follow it, “can cause profound developmental damage”, as “early rupture with home has a lasting influence on attachment patterns.”

When a child is brought up at home, the family adapts to accomodate it: growing up involves a constant negotiation between parents and children. But an institution cannot rebuild itself around one child. Instead, the child must adapt to the system. Combined with the sudden and then repeated loss of parents, siblings, pets and toys, this causes the child to shut itself off from the need for intimacy. This can cause major problems in adulthood: depression, an inability to talk about or understand emotions, the urge to escape from or to destroy intimate relationships. These symptoms mostly affect early boarders: those who start when they are older are less likely to be harmed(15).

It should be obvious that this system could also inflict wider damage. A repressed, traumatised elite, unable to connect emotionally with others, is a danger to society: look at the men who oversaw the First World War.

Over the past few days, I have phoned the education department, the Boarding Schools Association and the head teachers of several schools to ask them a simple question: how did they decide that seven or eight was an appropriate age for children to start boarding? In every case the answer was the same: they didn’t. This, they all told me, is just the way it has always been done. No inquiry, no committee, no board, no ethics council has, as far as they know, ever examined this question. Very young children are being sent away from home in a complete vacuum of professional advice. Compare this with the ethical agonising over whether or not children should be taken into care and you encounter the class prejudice common to all British governments: the upper classes require no oversight.

So yes, rage against Texas and its monstrosities, and wonder at the cruel, authoritarian system a nominal democracy can produce. But remember that this is not the only place in which governments endorse the damage done to children.

www.monbiot.com

References:

1. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/jan/09/texas-police-schools

2. as above.

3. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wl9y3SIPt7o

4. See the quotes about this towards the bottom of this article: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/nov/03/texas-judge-william-adams-beats-daugther

5. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/jan/05/spain-stolen-babies-scandal

6. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jun/08/irealnd-magdalene-laundries-scandal-un

7. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/may/20/irish-catholic-church-child-abuse1

8. http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2000/feb/16/1

9. http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2011/apr/07/child-migrants-oranges-and-sunshine-film

10. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8360150.stm

11. http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2011/nov/22/childprotection-prisons-and-probation

12. http://www.ukboardingschools.com/search/page/1

13. Howells School, Denbigh, by phone, 13th January 2012.

14. Joy Schaverien, May 2011. Boarding School Syndrome: Broken Attachments – A Hidden Trauma. British Journal of Psychotherapy. Volume 27, Issue 2, pages 138–155. DOI: 10.1111/j.1752-0118.2011.01229.x

The publishers, Wiley, will charge you $42 to read this article, in line with the disgraceful practices I discuss here: http://www.monbiot.com/2011/08/29/the-lairds-of-learning/

So if you want a copy, please email me via my website and I’ll send you one.

15. As above.

By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 10th January 2012

When governments seek to protect the rich from the poor, they act swiftly and decisively. When they undertake to protect the poor from the rich, they fanny about for years until the moment has passed.

This afternoon the House of Lords will consider a bill containing a cruel and unnecessary clause, whose purpose is to protect landlords who keep their houses empty. Under current law, if squatters move into your home (or a home you are soon to occupy) and fail to leave the moment you ask, the police can immediately remove them.

The only houses with weaker protections are those which remain empty. There are 700,000 such homes in England alone, almost half of which have been empty for a long time(1). They have long been a refuge for street sleepers and other homeless people. Landlords already possess civil powers to remove them, and the police can step in if squatters ignore the court orders(2).

Last year the government launched a consultation on criminalising all squatting in residential buildings. Ninety-six per cent of the respondents argued that no change in the law was necessary(3). But on November 1st, just five days after the consultation ended, the government jemmied an amendment into the legal aid bill, which was already halfway towards approval(4,5). This meant that the House of Commons had no chance to scrutinise it properly, and objectors had no chance to explain the issues to their MPs.

The result of this blatant insult to democracy is that people who have housed themselves at no cost to anyone are likely to be summarily evicted. Houses will fall back into disuse and the government’s housing bill will rise: by between £35m and £90m, according to the campaign group Squash(6). Worse still, the new law will help unscrupulous landlords to evict their tenants where there is no written contract, by declaring them squatters and calling the police.

Compare this rush to prosecute the poor with the government’s leisurely approach to banking reform. It will wait until 2019 to implement the mild measures proposed by John Vickers. As Robert Jenkins, who sits on the Bank of England’s financial policy committee, points out, the date is distant enough “to allow lobbyists to chip away until the proposal becomes both unrecognisable and ineffective.”(7)

David Cameron’s proposals for addressing executive pay have the same function: they are designed to be as ineffective as possible while creating an impression of action(8). Yesterday he announced that he wants to scrap the top rate of income tax, making the people who caused the economic crisis even richer and the poor poorer(9). Those who contest the destructive practices of the feral rich, by contrast, are harried by draconian laws and paranoid policing.

Last month the City of London police sent a letter to the banks titled “Terrorism/extremism update for the City of London business community”(10). It warned of the following “substantial” terrorist threats: FARC in Columbia, al-Qaida in Pakistan and Occupy London. It advised the banks to “remain vigilant” as “suspected activists” from the Occupy movement were engaging in “hostile reconnaissance”. It is the sort of language that might have been used to report German spies during the second world war. When asked to explain the letter, the police told the Guardian that it had been circulated to “key trusted partners”(11). The banks are the trusted partners of our impartial law enforcers; those who seek to hold them to account are terrorists.

The police keep ratcheting up their tactics to ensure that protest against the status quo is futile. On November 30th they introduced a new one: the pensions march through central London was sealed off with 3-metre steel walls, which ensured that no one who wasn’t marching could see what was happening or read the banners(12). The protesters were, in other words, prevented from explaining their purpose to the public.

While the government has introduced no meaningful sanctions to discourage a repetition of the crash, it has also failed to repeal the oppressive laws preventing us from challenging those who caused it. When he became deputy prime minister, Nick Clegg promised that the government would “remove limits on the rights to peaceful protest.”(13) But there is no such measure in the protection of freedoms bill, which was supposed to have been the vehicle for this reform, and which also comes before the Lords today(14).

The restrictions on assembly and peaceful protest in the 1986 Public Order Act, 1992 Trade Union Act, 1994 Criminal Justice Act, 1997 Protection from Harassment Act, 2003 Anti-Social Behaviour Act and 2005 Serious Organised Crime and Police Act remain unrepealed. Together, they permit the police to stop any protest they wish and arrest the participants. Far from reforming the law, the prime minister has hinted that he will tighten it further. Speaking to the Commons liaison committee in November, he claimed that “the right of people to protest is fundamental” but that “you shouldn’t be able to erect tents all over the place.”(15) His approach to the issue is the same as Tony Blair’s: you can protest, as long as it’s ineffective.

The effort of both police and government is to predetermine political outcomes. They are using the law to make democracy safe for business and the super-rich: ensuring, in other words, that it isn’t really democracy.

www.monbiot.com

References:

1. http://emptyhomes.com/statistics-2/breakdown-of-statistics/

2. http://www.squashcampaign.org/docs/LASPO_Lords_Briefing_SQUASH.pdf

3. http://www.squashcampaign.org/2011/12/all-still-to-play-for/

4. Clause 130 of the amended bill.

5. http://services.parliament.uk/bills/2010-11/legalaidsentencingandpunishmentofoffenders.html

6. http://www.squashcampaign.org/docs/LASPO_Lords_Briefing_SQUASH.pdf

7. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/nov/14/bank-reform-cant-wait-until-2019

8. http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2012/jan/08/david-cameron-executive-pay-bonuses

9. http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2012/jan/09/government-committed-abolishing-50p-tax

10. http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/dec/05/occupy-london-police-terrorism-document

11. http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/dec/05/occupy-london-police-terrorism-document

12. I was sent photos of these barriers by one of the people on the march.

13. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8691753.stm

14. http://services.parliament.uk/bills/2010-11/protectionoffreedoms.html

15. http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201012/cmselect/cmliaisn/608/uc608-iv/uc608-iv.htm

By George Monbiot, published on the Guardian’s website, 6th January 2012

Over the Christmas break I read what I believe is the most important environmental essay of the past 12 months. Though it begins with a mildly unfair criticism of a column of mine, I won’t hold it against the author. In a simple and very short tract, Matt Bruenig presents a devastating challenge to those who call themselves libertarians, and explains why they have no choice but to deny climate change and other environmental problems.

Bruenig explains what is now the core argument used by conservatives and libertarians: the procedural justice account of property rights. Briefly stated, this means that if the process by which property was acquired was just, then those who have acquired it should be free to use it as they wish, without social restraints or obligations to other people.

Their property rights are absolute and cannot be intruded upon by the state or by anyone else. Any interference with or damage to the value of their property without their consent – even by taxation – is an unwarranted infringement. This, with local variations, is the basic philosophy of the Republican candidates, the Tea Party movement, the lobby groups which call themselves “free market thinktanks” and much of the new right in the UK.

It is a pitiless, one-sided, mechanical view of the world, which elevates the rights of property over everything else, meaning that those who possess the most property end up with great power over others. Dressed up as freedom, it is a formula for oppression and bondage. It does nothing to address inequality, hardship or social exclusion. A transparently self-serving vision, it seeks to justify the greedy and selfish behaviour of those with wealth and power. But for the sake of argument, Bruenig says, let us accept it.

Let us accept the idea that damage to the value of property without the owner’s consent is an unwarranted intrusion upon the owner’s freedoms. What this means is that as soon as libertarians encounter environmental issues, they’re stuffed.

Climate change, industrial pollution, ozone depletion, damage to the physical beauty of the area surrounding people’s homes (and therefore their value), all these, if the libertarians did not possess a shocking set of double standards, would be denounced by them as infringements on other people’s property.

The owners of coal-burning power stations in the UK have not obtained the consent of everyone who owns a lake or a forest in Sweden to deposit acid rain there. So their emissions, in the libertarian worldview, should be regarded as a form of trespass on the property of Swedish landowners. Nor have they received the consent of the people of this country to allow mercury and other heavy metals to enter our bloodstreams, which means that they are intruding upon our property in the form of our bodies.

Nor have they – or airports, oil companies or car manufacturers – obtained the consent of all those it will affect to release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, altering global temperatures and – through rising sea levels, droughts, storms and other impacts – damaging the property of many people. As Bruenig says,

“Almost all uses of land will entail some infringement on some other piece of land that is owned by someone else. So how can that ever be permitted? No story about freedom and property rights can ever justify the pollution of the air or the burning of fuels because those things affect the freedom and property rights of others. Those actions ultimately cause damage to surrounding property and people without getting any consent from those affected. They are the ethical equivalent – for honest libertarians – of punching someone in the face or breaking someone else’s window.”

So here we have a simple and coherent explanation of why libertarianism is so often associated with climate change denial and the playing down or dismissal of other environmental issues. It would be impossible for the owner of a power station, steel plant, quarry, farm or any large enterprise to obtain consent for all the trespasses he commits against other people’s property – including their bodies.

This is the point at which libertarianism smacks into the wall of gritty reality and crumples like a Coke can. Any honest and thorough application of this philosophy would run counter to its aim: which is to allow the owners of capital to expand their interests without taxation, regulation or recognition of the rights of other people. Libertarianism becomes self-defeating as soon as it recognises the existence of environmental issues. So they must be denied.

www.monbiot.com

By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 3rd January 2012

“Brrr-ace yourselves! Britain to shiver in -20C in WEEKS as councils stockpile extra grit”(1). So the Mail on Sunday warned us in October. Blizzards, snowdrifts, locusts with the faces of men and the teeth of lions: we would become, it cheerfully assured us, prey to every nightmare nature could devise.

Last week the story flipped. “December has sprung! Spring blooms arrive early and autumn blossom lingers… so what happened to our winter?”(2) I scoured the text but could find no mention that the Mail had forecast the polar opposite.

This is the newspaper group which led the crowing about the barbecue summer that never was. In April 2009 the Meteorological Office announced that “summer temperatures across the UK are likely to be warmer than average and rainfall near or below average for the three months of summer.”(3) In the event, the waters prevailed exceedingly upon the earth. From its offices on Mt Ararat, the Daily Mail called down the wrath of God on the weathermen, who had been proven “hopelessly wrong” and were now “left red-faced”(4).

There are plenty of red faces in the newspaper industry, but they are not the result of embarrassment: an emotion as rare in this business as summer snowflakes. Most of the papers that basted and grilled the Met Office for its barbeque summer forecast predicted a sleighbell winter. The Sun, for example, announced that “Britain will shiver through a ‘Siberian December’”(5). The Express foresaw “a big freeze”, beginning at the end of October, which would be “as severe and sustained as last winter’s” and bring “record low temperatures”(6).

Ours was, as it turned out, the second warmest autumn on record(7), while temperatures in December were a little higher than average(8). So where did the Siberian forecasts come from? According to one of the journalists who ran this story, they originated with the secretary of state for transport. During the Conservative party conference, Philip Hammond allegedly told senior journalists that there would be a terrible winter, but that he and he alone would save us from nature’s fury by ensuring the roads remained clear. I have tried to check this story with the transport department, the defence department (where Hammond now resides) and his constituency office. Despite repeated promises, my questions remain unanswered.

The newspapers then asked the Met Office to confirm Hammond’s prediction. It refused to do so (in 2010 it decided to stop issuing long-range forecasts). They then turned to people who would.

They chose to rely on two alternative forecasting companies, called Exacta Weather and Positive Weather Solutions (PWS). PWS boasts that it “has made the front page of the Daily Express thirteen times; the Daily Telegraph seven times; and the Daily Mail and The Sun once.”(9) Between September 26th and October 1st, it says, it “was quoted every single day in the Daily Express”. It told the papers that late October and November “are looking colder than average with freezing temperatures, severe frosts and the chance of snow.”(10) Exacta, upon which the Mail relied for its predictions of icy doom, warned us to expect a “severely cold and snowy winter”(11). “It is likely that temperature and snowfall records will be broken”(12).

Who are they, and what are their credentials? I have been trying to obtain answers from Exacta since December 20th, without success. Among other questions, I asked whether it is true that the company consists of one undergraduate student and a computer.

PWS was more forthcoming. It admitted that its forecasting record had not been independently audited, and agreed that this was a failing. It also admitted that it does not keep a record of its prior forecasts on its website, which means that the public has no means of assessing its hit rate. But it failed to provide the qualifications or identities of the “independent meteorologists” it uses.

Both companies appear to publish only their positive results. Exacta, for example, tells us that it correctly forecast strong winds this winter(13). It forgot to add that it also forecast severe cold and snow.

Unlike the Met Office, the alternative forecasters are neither roasted nor frozen out when they get it wrong. In 2010, for example, the Daily Mail announced that “the country really is on course for a barbecue summer.”(14) This time, it told its readers, the prediction “comes from a forecaster with a somewhat better record on the subject than the poor old Met Office.” This was PWS – which has no published record at all. PWS told the Mail that “there will be stifling temperatures, making it possibly the warmest UK summer on record”. In fact it was an unremarkable summer(15), but there were no “red faces” at PWS. Nor has Philip Hammond been denounced as “hopelessly wrong”.

There is a subtext at work. The Met Office, like the BBC, is the subject of intense tabloid hostility, because it refuses to accept the consensus in the rightwing press that manmade climate change is a myth. Perversely, it prefers to rely on data. The incompetence of the Met Office and the superior skills of other forecasters is now part of the litany of climate change denial. Weather forecasting, in the hands of the press, has become a political science.

www.monbiot.com

References:

1. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2046766/UK-winter-weather-warning–20C-weeks-councils-stockpile-extra-grit.html

2. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2079155/December-sprung-Spring-blooms-arrive-early-autumn-blossom-lingers–happened-winter.html

3. http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/news/releases/archive/2009/summer2009

4. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1202982/Met-Office-left-red-faced-Britains-forecast-barbecue-summer-turns-washout.html

5. No author given, 18th October 2011. Big Chill ‘on way’. The Sun.

6. Laura Caroe, 10th October 2011. Britain Faces a Mini ‘Ice Age’; This winter will see start of DECADES of big freezes. The Daily Express.

7. http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/climate/uk/2011/autumn.html

8. http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/news/releases/archive/2011/december-and-annual-statistics

9. http://www.positiveweathersolutions.co.uk/PWS—The-Company.php

10. Laura Caroe, as above.

11. As above.

12. Nathan Rao, 8th October 2011. -20ºC to hit us in weeks; Grit stockpiled already. The Daily Express.

13. http://www.exactaweather.com/UK_Long_Range_Forecast.html

14. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1259685/UK-hottest-summer-predicts-Positive-Weather-Solutions.html

15. http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/climate/uk/2010/summer.html

By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 20th December 2011

Freedom: who could object? Yet this word is now used to justify a thousand forms of exploitation. Throughout the rightwing press and blogosphere, among thinktanks and governments, the word excuses every assault on the lives of the poor, every form of inequality and intrusion to which the 1% subject us. How did libertarianism, once a noble impulse, become synonymous with injustice?

In the name of freedom – freedom from regulation – the banks were permitted to wreck the economy. In the name of freedom, taxes for the super-rich are cut. In the name of freedom, companies lobby to drop the minimum wage and raise working hours. In the same cause, US insurers lobby Congress to thwart effective public healthcare; the government rips up our planning laws(1); big business trashes the biosphere. This is the freedom of the powerful to exploit the weak, the rich to exploit the poor.

Right-wing libertarianism recognises few legitimate constraints on the power to act, regardless of the impact on the lives of others. In the UK it is forcefully promoted by groups like the TaxPayers’ Alliance, the Adam Smith Institute, the Institute of Economic Affairs and Policy Exchange(2). Their conception of freedom looks to me like nothing but a justification for greed.

So why have we been been so slow to challenge this concept of liberty? I believe that one of the reasons is as follows. The great political conflict of our age – between neocons and the millionaires and corporations they support on one side and social justice campaigners and environmentalists on the other – has been mischaracterised as a clash between negative and positive freedoms.

These freedoms were most clearly defined by Isaiah Berlin in his essay of 1958, Two Concepts of Liberty(3). It is a work of beauty: reading it is like listening to a gloriously crafted piece of music. I will try not to mangle it too badly.

Put briefly and crudely, negative freedom is the freedom to be or to act without interference from other people. Positive freedom is freedom from inhibition: it’s the power gained by transcending social or psychological constraints. Berlin explained how positive freedom had been abused by tyrannies, particularly by the Soviet Union. It portrayed its brutal governance as the empowerment of the people, who could achieve a higher freedom by subordinating themselves to a collective single will.

Rightwing libertarians claim that greens and social justice campaigners are closet communists trying to resurrect Soviet conceptions of positive freedom. In reality the battle mostly consists of a clash between negative freedoms.

As Berlin noted, “no man’s activity is so completely private as never to obstruct the lives of others in any way. ‘Freedom for the pike is death for the minnows’”. So, he argued, some people’s freedom must sometimes be curtailed “to secure the freedom of others.” In other words, your freedom to swing your fist ends where my nose begins. The negative freedom not to have our noses punched is the freedom that green and social justice campaigns, exemplified by the Occupy movement, exist to defend.

Berlin also shows that freedom can intrude upon other values, such as justice, equality or human happiness. “If the liberty of myself or my class or nation depends on the misery of a number of other human beings, the system which promotes this is unjust and immoral.” It follows that the state should impose legal restraints upon freedoms which interfere with other people’s freedoms – or on freedoms which conflict with justice and humanity.

These conflicts of negative freedom were summarised in one of the greatest poems of the 19th Century, which could be seen as the founding document of British environmentalism. In The Fallen Elm, John Clare describes the felling of the tree he loved, presumably by his landlord, that grew beside his home(4).

“Self-interest saw thee stand in freedom’s ways
So thy old shadow must a tyrant be.
Thou’st heard the knave, abusing those in power,
Bawl freedom loud and then oppress the free.”

The landlord was exercising his freedom to cut the tree down. In doing so, he was intruding upon Clare’s freedom to delight in the tree, whose existence enhanced his life. The landlord justifies this destruction by characterising the tree as an impediment to freedom: his freedom, which he conflates with the general liberty of humankind. Without the involvement of the state (which today might take the form of a tree preservation order) the powerful man could trample the pleasures of the powerless man. Clare then compares the felling of the tree with further intrusions on his liberty.

“Such was thy ruin, music-making elm;
The right of freedom was to injure thine:
As thou wert served, so would they overwhelm
In freedom’s name the little that is mine.”

But rightwing libertarians do not recognise this conflict. They speak, like Clare’s landlord, as if the same freedom affects everybody in the same way. They assert their freedom to pollute, exploit, even – among the gun nuts – to kill, as if these were fundamental human rights. They characterise any attempt to restrain them as tyranny. They refuse to see that there is a clash between the freedom of the pike and the freedom of the minnow.

Last week, on an internet radio channel called The Fifth Column(5), I debated climate change with Claire Fox of the Institute of Ideas, one of the right-wing libertarian groups which rose from the ashes of the Revolutionary Communist Party(6). Claire Fox is a feared interrogator on the BBC show The Moral Maze. Yet when I asked her a simple question – “do you accept that some people’s freedoms intrude upon other people’s freedoms?” – I saw an ideology shatter like a windscreen. I used the example of a Romanian lead smelting plant I had visited in 2000, whose freedom to pollute is shortening the lives of its neighbours(7). Surely the plant should be regulated in order to enhance the negative freedoms – freedom from pollution, freedom from poisoning – of its neighbours? She tried several times to answer it, but nothing coherent emerged which would not send her crashing through the mirror of her philosophy.

Modern libertarianism is the disguise adopted by those who wish to exploit without restraint. It pretends that only the state intrudes on our liberties. It ignores the role of banks, corporations and the rich in making us less free. It denies the need for the state to curb them in order to protect the freedoms of weaker people. This bastardised, one-eyed philosophy is a con trick, whose promoters attempt to wrongfoot justice by pitching it against liberty. By this means they have turned “freedom” into an instrument of oppression.

www.monbiot.com

References:

1. http://www.monbiot.com/2011/09/06/making-a-mockery-of-localism/

2. http://www.monbiot.com/2011/09/12/think-of-a-tank/

3. http://www.wiso.uni-hamburg.de/fileadmin/wiso_vwl/johannes/Ankuendigungen/Berlin_twoconceptsofliberty.pdf

4. http://www.poemhunter.com/best-poems/john-clare/the-fallen-elm/

5. http://www.thefifthcolumn.co.uk/the-interrogator/global-warming-does-it-matter/

6. http://www.monbiot.com/2003/12/09/invasion-of-the-entryists/

7. http://www.monbiot.com/2000/05/19/the-most-polluted-place-in-europe/

By George Monbiot, published on the Guardian’s website 16th December 2011

They bailed out the banks in days. But even deciding to bail out the planet is taking decades.

Lord Stern estimated that capping climate change would cost around 1% of global GDP, while sitting back and letting it hit us would cost between 5 and 20%. One per cent of GDP is, at the moment, $630bn. By March 2009, Bloomberg has revealed, the US Federal Reserve had committed $7.77 trillion to the banks. That is just one government’s contribution: yet it amounts to 12 times the annual global climate change bill. Add the bailouts in other countries, and it rises by several more multiples.

This support was issued on demand: as soon as the banks said they wanted help, they got it. On just one day the Federal Reserve made $1.2tn available – more than the world has committed to tackling climate change in 20 years.

Much of this was done both unconditionally and secretly: it took journalists two years to winkle out the detail. The banks shouted “help” and the government just opened its wallet. This all took place, remember, under George W Bush, whose administration claimed to be fiscally conservative.

But getting the US government to commit to any form of bailout for the planet – even a couple of billion – is like pulling teeth. “Unaffordable!” the Republicans (and many of the Democrats) shriek. It will wreck the economy! We’ll go back to living in caves!

I’m often struck by the wildly inflated rhetoric of those who accuse environmentalists of scaremongering. “If those scaremongers have their way they’ll destroy the entire economy” is the kind of claim uttered almost daily, without any apparent irony.

No legislator, as far as I know, has yet been able to explain why making $7.7tn available to the banks is affordable, while investing far smaller sums in new technologies and energy saving is not.

The US and other nations began talking seriously about tackling climate change in 1988. Yet we still don’t have a legally-binding global agreement, and we are unlikely to get one until 2020, if at all. Agreements to help the banks are struck at economic summits without breaking sweat, yet making progress at climate summits looks like using a donkey to tow a 44-tonne truck.

So saying, the outcome at Durban, after some superhuman feats of traction, was better than most environmentalists feared. After Copenhagen and Cancun, it seemed implausible that rich and poor nations would ever agree that they would one day strike a legally-binding treaty, but they have. That doesn’t mean that the outcome was good: even if everything happens as planned, we are still likely to end up with more than two degrees of warming, which threatens great harm to many of the world’s people and places.

The clearest account of the negotiations and the outcome of the Durban meeting that I have read so far has been written by Mark Lynas, who attended as an adviser to the president of the Maldives. The Byzantine complexity he documents is the result of twenty years of foot-dragging and obstruction. When powerful countries want to do something, they do it swiftly and simply. When they don’t, their agreements with other nations turn into a cat’s cradle.

Here are some of the key points:

- The most important negotiations boiled down to a battle between two groups: the European Union, least developed countries and small island states on one side, which pressed for steeper, faster cuts, and the US, Brazil, South Africa, India and China on the other side, seeking to resist that pressure.

- The first group (EU + LDCs) succeeded in one respect: the other nations agreed to work towards a legally binding deal “applicable to all parties”. In other words, unlike the Kyoto Protocol, which governs only the greenhouse gas emissions of a group of rich nations, this will apply to everyone. (It doesn’t necessarily mean that all nations will have to reduce their emissions however).

- The first group failed in its attempt to get this done quickly. The poorest nations wanted a legally binding outcome by the end of next year. But the US-China group held out for 2020, and got it. Unless this changes, it makes limiting the global temperature rise to two degrees or less much harder – perhaps impossible.

- The Kyoto Protocol, though it will remain in force until either 2017 or 2020, is now a dead letter. In fact, Lynas suggests, unless the loopholes it contains are closed it could be worse than useless, as they could undermine the voluntary commitments that its signatory nations have made.

- The countries agreed to create a Green Climate Fund to help developing nations limit their greenhouse gas emissions and adapt to the impacts of global warming. But, with three exceptions – South Korea, Germany and Denmark – they didn’t agree to put any money into it. The fund is supposed to receive $100bn a year: a lot of money, until you compare it to what the banks got.

- Between now and 2020, all we have to rely on are countries’ voluntary commitments. According to a UN study, these fall short of the cuts required to prevent more than 2 degrees of global warming – by some 6 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide.

- But as the Durban agreement conceded, two degrees is still too high. It raised the possibility of pledging to keep the rise to no more than 1.5 degrees. This would require a much faster programme of cuts than it envisages.

So why is it so easy to save the banks and so hard to save biosphere? If ever you needed evidence that our governments operate in the interests of the elite, rather than the world as a whole, here it is.

www.monbiot.com