Second, in regards to the blog. Seems simple to merely apply anarchist rhetoric to something because it has ‘capitalism’ in its title. Perhaps instead of railing against all the things wrong with the world we should promote solutions. Your solutions are: “Yes to food sovereignty, yes to degrowth, yes to radical democracy and to leaving the resources in the ground.” So why can’t capital be used to produce these solutions? Greenling is an example of a localized organic food distribution company in Texas that is doing great. Instead of degrowth, redefine growth to mean more biodiversity. Use the ‘triple bottom line’ so that corporations become resource stewards instead of resource thieves. And ‘leave the resources in the ground’ is just dumb…whatcha gonna eat?

Your blog is an example of why people don’t listen to anarchist rhetoric. You jump to far too quickly. We need to move from where we are to where we want to be. We can’t just ’smash it up’ and hope things fall nicely into place.

However, I find that instead of making me feel empowered and excited, the idea of taking on both corporations and the government is rather daunting. However, you’re right, I don’t want to give the government more surveillance power. Is there no opportunity for a compromise? As I see it, governments and corporations are currently pretty much working hand in hand on the capitalism mission. Could we not celebrate what is good in democratic governments, whilst condemning the corporate influence? Can we seperate government from corporations? Then the government would be able to be a powerful, democratically mandated body which could regulate corporations. Is this possible?

this is mine…

great article. Wish i had found it a few weeks ago. Just wondering how you found the summit itself and what you thought about the outcomes?

- anthony

I’m not sure about a lock-in action strategy – I feel like it won’t have much coherency politically or even in mass media coverage: reformist/COP supporters join anarchists for a better deal? It looks like people are intend to make decisions as they go along, depending on how the COP progresses – which would be confusing for those there and confusing in what messages filter out.

My concerns around a lock in strategy & giving the illusion a good decision could be made are:

* Governments, like the Australian Government, no matter what happens at Copenhagen, including complete failure – will say during and after Copenhagen that they provided ‘leadership on key issues’ and are leading the world on climate change, the biggest challenge we face, etc.
* Big International Environment NGOs with vested interests in the COPs will say governments were weak, but that the eNGOs had massive wins and were really effective at COP15
* The media will parrot them and be crap
* The voices criticising COP15: radicals, Indigenous peoples,even Greenpeace – won’t be heard.

I don’t think the ‘failure’ of Copenhagen will be as obvious as the breakdown of WTO talks (and even those failures are glossed over, avoided, and most people are completely oblivious). I don’t think the meeting could ‘deligitimise itself’, as this article suggests.

The COPs are presented by states and NGOs as “world leaders aiming to reach consensus on the biggest problem humanity has ever faced” but are more like “nation states prolonging action on climate change, forcing oppressive authoritarian market mechanisms on peoples, and preventing emissions reduction and climate justice”. ;-) How to begin to avoid this?

This article was written prior to Australia’s Climate Action Summit, critiquing the proposed campaigns, objectives and policies.

there should be more coordinated local mobilisations on certain issues that take place at the same time globally (such as the anti-surveillance activities last october, http://www.freedom-not-fear.eu – only as an example, that could be done much more effective).

leave the politicians in their summit banquets they won’t be impressed anyway.

thanks for the 20 theses, well done.

bye, nbo

This is not just about production and supply, or their control, it is about reducing wasted consumption. My local golf course is still flood-lit through the night. Carbon-trading is a fraud, we need carbon rationing. This is a class issue, it is always the poorer classes that will suffer most while the rich young jet off to foriegn eco-projects.

If you care for the future then then breed less, travel less and most importantly eat less meat. And that means everyone not just the poor.

I was at Climate Camp to take a workshop on peak oil, as well as to protest against Kingsnorth power station, which is not using clean coal technology and it’s still not clear whether carbon capture and storage will be used there but I’ll come on to that later. I have been campaigning on energy issues for over 10 years, starting when opencast coal mining was rampaging across Scotland in the 1990s. David says that environmentalists don’t care about coal workers but some might say that coal workers don’t care about the children in opencast communities who develop respiratory problems due to the dust. I am not meaning to apportion blame – that is pointless. I am trying to explain that there are two sides (at least!) to every story.

David mentions carbon capture and storage (CCS) and hydrogen as solutions to our future energy needs but these both have problems, which many just gloss over. Firstly, CCS is unproven and unlikely to be viable for decades. A hearing of the US Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee last year heard from the director of the U.S. Geological Survey, Dr. Mark Myers, that the timeline for commercialisation is as follows: workable sequestration after 2012, the first commercial deployment by 2020, and widespread use of CCS in the “2045 time frame.” (http://tinyurl.com/5wfw9f). Given that we will be into runaway climate change before 2020 if we haven’t changed our current path, and given that CCS is now widely being used as the justification for Business As Usual, I do not see CCS as an option.

And we have to remember that the oil industry has been injecting CO2 into oil oilfields for years – it’s called Enhanced Oil Recovery. I wrote to BERR (was DTI) and the Environmental Audit Committee recently about CCS and have been told that, “The possibility that CCS could contribute to enhanced oil recovery is certainly readily acknowledged, and has been cited as an advantage of CCS (depending on your view of whether accessing more oil is a good or bad thing!). Indeed, most of the trials of CO2 storage in geological sites have been related to enhanced oil recovery”. I do not believe that anyone has done the sums over whether more CO2 would be stored than would be released when the extra oil recovered is burned, but it’s another reason why I fail to get excited about CCS.

Hydrogen may well play some role in our future but the generating process is too is energy intensive for hydrogen to replace oil for transport fuel. The clean way to make hydrogen is to ‘crack’ it off of water molecules but this is very energy intensive and in many cases, gives out less energy than it took to generate the hydrogen in the first place. An easier way is to crack hydrogen off of methane (natural gas) molecules but that leaves us reliant on fossil fuels.

Whether you believe in climate change or not, I think most people believe that fossil fuels are finite resources and everyone is aware of the rising prices. We have been avoiding the obvious for too long now. We have to ‘powerdown’ – we have to develop our society so that it uses much less energy. Full stop. It’s easy to be convinced by stories we want to believe but how stupid will we seem in retrospect? And let’s not forget that if we are using less energy from fossil fuels, we will have to use more from our own endeavours – more work, more jobs. Yes, I’m aware I am wandering into “you environmentalists want us all to go back to living in caves” territory but preparing for the inevitable future NOW is exactly the opposite – it’s trying to prevent us from all living in caves!

David also says, “Coal is not the biggest producer of CO2 its about the fourth…”. I’m not sure what this is in relation to. Burning coal produces more CO2 per unit of energy produced than burning oil (conventional) or gas. But we have to remember that deforestation and land use changes (agriculture, biofuels etc) are also a huge part of the climate problem. According to a testimony made by the CEO of The Nature Conservancy, at a hearing held by the US Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming in February, emissions from deforestation and land-use change exceed those from every car, truck, train, ship and plane in the world combined (http://www.nature.org/initiatives/climatechange/features/art23881.html?src=home). Tackling climate change is not just an issue for the energy sector.

I agree with David on nuclear. It is interesting to remember this from Tony Blair, in 1989 when he was Neil Kinnock’s shadow energy secretary (just when the Tories were pushing electricity privatisation through the
Commons):
“What is unbelievably depressing about the [Conservative] government’s response is that they see, in the evidence about greenhouse gases, not an opportunity to promote environmental concern but a chance to make the case for nuclear power”

Blair went on to say:
“It will be the consumer who will pay, along with the taxpayer, as we shall see later. The irony … is that, whereas the profit from the electricity industry moves to the private sector, much of the risk and liability stays in the public sector.” And that was way back when the cleanup from nuclear power was estimated at less than £10bn. It’s now £70bn+.

And here’s more from that same speech to the Commons (which can be viewed at http://tinyurl.com/3azeuo):
“Having made a big issue of the greenhouse effect, it became clear that energy efficiency was the best way to deal with it, but . . . the government’s position has been characterised by a malign reluctance to have anything to do with the notion of energy conservation.”

So we can see that nothing changes. Those in opposition wax lyrical about how bad those in power are but when they gain power, they change their tune. I have no reason to believe that Cameron’s Tories will be any different. Politicians don’t run the show, powerful corporate interests do. As Abe Lincoln said, “Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power”. Ain’t it the truth!

Workers have been used and abused since humans started storing food! We have millennia of human rights abuses to deal with. Coal miners are not the only people who will suffer in the low-energy future. Whether you believe in climate change or not, I think most people believe that fossil fuels are a one-off. We have squandered a totally unique energy resource in 200 years or so. We have used the energy within fossil fuels to build a society so complex that it will collapse when that energy supply ceases to be cheaply available. There will always be some oil, coal and gas out there, but what matters is a) can it be got out of the ground (i.e. is extraction economically feasible) and b) can it be got to those with money to buy it?

We little people don’t matter, whether coal workers or environmentalists. We are workers and consumers, fulfilling our little roles in this crazy world which only serves to make the few richer and the many poorer. I sympathise with anyone who has too little money to provide for their families. But what everyone must do now is look to the future, not try to retain the past. The fossil fuel industry is over, as are most high-energy industries. Yes, we may spend a decade or two ignoring the inevitable – then we really are screwed.

But I hope, I really hope, that we can get together and really discuss and anticipate a future where the masses get off of their collective backsides and start to make their future for themselves (I don’t know if David did make it to Climate Camp and if there was a debate. If there was, I hope it was amicable and respectful). No, it’s not going to be easy but one thing I have learned from the direct action movement is how much can be achieved if the will is there. Maybe David would invite me/some of us to debate this at the NUM? I too fear going into the lions’ den but whether we are speaking different languages or not, we are all in this together and we are all human beings – people, not enemies.

David ends his post with “The World For The Workers” – how about making that “The Workers For The World”? Then we would be speaking the same language.