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Carbon
Discussion continues on http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ExeterSocialists/ : CM 9/5/07 Hi comrades, DD’s advice re green lifestyle seems sincere (if maybe a bit patronising? ;-) ) and by the precautionary principle, given that we cannot know for sure whether manmade climate change is really happening *and* that reducing our use of fossil fuel energy will make a difference, we should all do our bit. I’ve been doing so for many years, made a ‘no fly’ pledge five years ago, and keep to a very strict food miles ration, as well as doing all the switching off, low-energy lightbulbs, using public transport and whatever else. HOWEVER, a crucial characteristic of socialists – other than the vaguely left-of-Blair, reformist kind – is a deep scepticism of ‘what we are being told’, even when it seems convincing – perhaps especially then. A case in point is the widely accepted connection between smoking and cancer. (Btw, I’ve never smoked.) A couple of years ago, The Ecologist magazine brought out a special issue tackling this, exposing the ‘blame the victim’ agenda on the part of the powers-that-be, and highlighting the health effects of atmospheric pollution in the workplace and on the streets, whereby the highest cancer risk correlates with smoking plus exposure to other pollutants and lifestyle factors. On this green lifestyle stuff, socialists should bear in mind that far and away the biggest responsibility for fossil fuel consumption and CO2 release is with industry and transportation, and how convenient for the beneficiaries of capitalism to blame the poor old worker and consumer-by-necessity for any catastrophic consequences! YFS, Chris
Hi All, A very interesting number of points have been made in the recent posts. Certainly technological awareness can make it easier for people to understand what proposals are being made. It will mean a change in people’s lifestyle but only in those aspects which are on the peripheral of a comfortable life style. Its not just reducing excess, like maybe only two DVDs, and switching off devices which are on standby but also consuming less. The old mantra of “reduce reuse and recycle” are as important now as when they were first coined some 20 years ago. Individually we can make a difference and collectively it would be possible to turnaround the destructive nature of our impact on the planet.
Best Wishes DD
At first I thought that Geoff was suggesting that my views were odd. That might still be the case, of course. > That is why when green taxes appear we hear about how much money they will make not how much pollution they will stop<
Carbon quotas are not a green tax as such. The allowance is given to the citizen, free of charge. The flow of capital is from higher consumers to lower consumers (and if the ‘poor’ wanted to really piss the rich off, they wouldn’t sell them their excess carbon at all, they’d ‘retire’ their excess allowance – thereby preventing the rich from flying to their holiday homes wherever every weekend). I understand that this only works if the overall allowance is not excessively constrained – if no one has enough then clearly the problem bears on the poor since the rich will have driven the price of what is available out of their reach. I’m not suggesting that is would be a workable solution. Interestingly, I got a leaflet with the free paper this week saying that for anyone on income-related benefits, there’s a 100% grant for home insulation. In our prefered future state this would be just one plank in whole raft of ideas to protect the poor but it’s obviously not possible to develop a detailed policy in jusy a few hundred words of email.
Regarding the Lib Dem leaflet – I don’t think it’s very fair to beat me with one of their policies! Of course, they’re only responding to what they see as consumer pressure and so clearly our education process has some way to go yet (or we can hope that Keith manages to hand out more of his A3, 8pt missives).
>The idea that many already poor people will be worse off because they live in cold areas is unacceptable.<
Along with the question, “yes or no – have you stopped beating your wife?” I think that’s missing the point. I think the idea of a society that tolerates the existence of ‘poor’ people is unacceptable. How much do we have to tax the rich 10% to solve the poverty of the poor 10%? Let’s do it.
>A drastic slash in living standards would make real people suffer<
What are we proposing to stop people doing? Having a DVD player and TV in every room? I’m not suggesting that we stop people from heating their houses. However, I would like people to stop whingeing that they can’t replace their incandescent light bulbs with low-energy equivalents because they can’t wait the 3 seconds it takes for them to come to full brightness.
>The civil liberties argument matters<
It does, but I don’t see that it applies here. All the government sees is the flow of carbon in and out of your account, not what that carbon has been used for. If you want to be ultra careful then maybe you could buy certificates that could be handed over in person – I’ve just made up the term “CarbonCash (tm)” for those.
I’ve been reading more about renewable energy. (What follows might only be of interest to Derrick but for once I think that I have a good understanding of the issues and so I’ll carry on). I’ve not read Heat yet but I was wondering about the suggestion that given 100% renewable energy we would need half a dozen or more pumped storage schemes to cope with network surges during cup final half-times. (A simpler solution from my point of view would be to get rid of football). According to the national grid website, the greatest instantaneous surge was in 1990, during the West Germany v England world cup semi and accounted for 2.8GW – that’s about 150% of Dinorwig pumped storage capacity. So maybe we’d only need another one, not half a dozen. And I’m more than happy to suggest using direct taxation to build publicly-owned wind farms up to 100% of the UK’s needs which would then remove much of the carbon burden on the poor. If we didn’t want to go to the trouble of building another Dinorwig (I read that one was proposed on Exmoor, so could be built although with inevitable environmental impact) I was also reading about another idea which is not quite swords into ploughshares but more DVD players into load sensing switches. There’s 20 million homes in the UK, with a combined average power demand of about 20GW (ie about 10 times the peak surge). A device which would sense the surge condition and then switch off a deferable load (say a fridge or a freezer – this would account for about half the average load) for up to 20 minutes could be made for less than £30 – £600m total cost but small beer when compared with, say, Trident. So for not a lot of money we could potentially automatically cope with surges 4 or five times greater than anything seen to date.
Ok, enough of the technology for now.
PH
Some odd comments:
Paul’s points:
James’ comments:
PH 6/5/07 I could see this turning into a proper flame war!
>a parlour game for the right-on<
I'll take that as a compliment. And I hadn't even mentioned that I knit my own muesli. I think it's fairly obvious that I'm really a light weight socialist. My involvement with Exeter Socialists has much more to do with the people than the purity of the argument. No doubt my argument can be shot full of holes if looked at from an absolute Marxist's view point. What I'm talking about here are pragmatic solutions to a problem (if indeed we feel that it is) in the world as it is at the moment.
>but we are not obliged to try and suggest a nice capitalist solution to the problem<
Agreed on the capitalist angle, but not on the obligation. I'm reminded of a time when I was more involved with animal rights and hunt sabbing(now there's a _proper_ parlour game for the right-on) - we'd stand in the town centre (remember when Bedford Square was available for that? - happy days) handing out leaflets in much the same way that we used to do with ESA, not really making much difference to anyone but occasionally having someone come up to us and say that they thought we should be concentrating on 'more important' things - say child cruelty. So we'd reply that presumably the questionner was extremely involved in that themselves and so how could we help them - to which of course the inevitable reply was that they weren't... you can guess the rest. My point is that, at risk of sounding like George W, you're either happy with the current level of carbon emissions, or you're not. If the latter, then what's the best way of addressing the issue?
>the ruling class is the one driving the planet to a nice, toasty death<
I'm not convinced that this isn't just hiding behind rhetoric. It seems to me that the lumpen proletariat (and that's the first time I've ever written that) is just as culpable. It's always dangerous to make generalisations but I think sometimes we confuse "working class" with "poor". Fuel poverty is a real problem for too many people in this country and it's a horrible, life-limiting condition. But then, so is an overdependence on nutrionally-questionable slop such as KFC and we're not addressing that here either. I would suggest that most people who drink in pubs with patio-heated terraces in the autumn or with air-conditioned air spilling out of open windows in the summer are probably working class and probably not suffering from fuel poverty. The point is that for most people, the embodied carbon in their lives is a complete unknown and having a personal carbon quota would change that.
I'm not trying to solve all the world's problems here. I was encouraged by some of the views expressed at the meeting that waiting for socialism to arrive might be too late for us to reduce carbon. I don't think that carbon quotas are going to happen overnight. But, with such a system in place the environmental catastrophe of stag nights in Talin (or if you'd prefer a more middle-class example, air-freighted mange tout from Thailand) is going to be much reduced - and I can't see how that would not be a good thing (except for the owners of pubs in Talin).
What I don't consider to be a huge problem is the technological issues in administering this in the west (ok, another huge area for discussion - but I'm concentrating on where the biggest gains can be made. Don't be confused by the China argument - not only are their emissions are way down the scale, per capita, but are also significantly influenced by their manufacture of goods for the west). The idea of embodied energy is not new and is actually pretty easy to work out - for instance, within 1 tonne of water delivered by SWW there is embodied about 1kWh or in other terms, 430g of CO2. That's a five minute calculation. You'll all be aware of the nutritional information panel on food - I don't see that it would be anything but trivial to extend this to give a carbon rating too, and to extend this to non-food items.
>I felt that there were problems about how each person’s use of carbon could be measured without an excessively intrusive system<
Presumably anyone suggesting privacy as a problem doesn't use a loyalty or a debit card, ever, anywhere. If that's not the case, then I think that the privacy argument has already been lost. Anyway, the idea of an electronic wallet has been around for a while. I think that Exeter Uni has/had such a system and there's also visa prepay - this can be an anonymous system and so gets over the anti-intrusive arguments*. The existing visa/mastercard network could be extended to operate a carbon allowance - it's just software changes. Hardliners will want to nationalise the network first and I'm happy with that. People and systems easily cope with top ups on pay as you go mobile phones and what I'm suggesting here is no different.
I think what socialists find most distasteful about this whole thing is the idea of a market for carbon, so that over-consumers can buy 'excess' carbon off under-consumers. However: (a) your basic allowance is given to you, free. Hardline capitalists would want an auction system. I don't. (b) you can't accumulate it in the same way as cash - each allowance is only valid for a year and can't be carried forward. I know that this doesn't stop a futures market from evolving but I think that has more to do with human nature than we would like to admit and will probably need legislation to stop it. (c) I take the point about the poor selling their 'essential' carbon so they can eat, or pay the rent. Without wanting to sound flippant, this argument could be applied to _anything_ that is owned (and in our society of inequalities, sometimes is).
One subject that we didn't touch on is the idea of an abatement curve. At some price point, the marginal consumer who needs some extra carbon will find it cheaper to undertake energy management (thereby freeing up their existing carbon) rather than buying more carbon in the open market. I think that this is a very promising area.
>Could it be made fair for the wide variety of people living in different situations? <
I've got no answer for this at the moment - how do we deal with peoples' varying need for carbon because if where they live (for instance, hotter or colder climates)? But, this is also true of rent or mortgage payments, fuel purchases, excessive commuting as a result of being priced out of the area where you work because of second home ownership, etc - all of these have first-order (cash) implications and are not confined to the carbon allowance and so this can't really be used as a counter argument in itself. Interestingly, 'degree-days' - how much each day has been hotter or colder than a nominal temperature - are published regionally and there are accepted methods for relating these to actual fuel use. Given that much of the population find 'maths' difficult I think that we should be cautious about how we apply this, but the solutions are there if we want them.
PH
*(Anyone doubting the absolute anonymity of the visa prepay system will be interested in this scam, that is reported to have worked in the US: (a) get a visa prepay card (b) using the default PIN numbers published on the internet, reprogram one of those paid-for cash machines in shops to believe that the £20 drawer contains £5 notes (c) make a cash withdrawal of £100 and walk away with £400)
JT 5/5/07 Well, obviously to any Marxist the State is not a neutral much of anything but a fundamental reflection and enforcing mechanism for the power of the ruling class. In this case, the ruling class is the one driving the planet to a nice, toasty death - although things like the Factory Acts have happened before, and may happen again, their gains often simply transform the laws of motion into a different vector, so to speak - eg, the factory acts signalled a transfer of focus from extending the hours of labour to improving productivity, but did not significantly trouble accumulation as such.
The point is, if we accept that capitalist relations have driven us into this hole, it would be rather naive to think that a wing of the ruling class like the state might be able to dig us back out again. Obviously, in a socialist society, any measures to counterbalance environmental destruction would be put in place via the State - but it would have to be a different sort of state, under the democratic control of the producers themselves - that is, the great masses who have the most to fear from Armageddon and the least to gain from dicing with it.
As for proposing alternatives, I want to say that it's not always a good idea to run before you can walk; people love to scoff at anybody who dares talk about having a socialist revolution for these sorts of reasons, but we are not obliged to try and suggest a nice capitalist solution to the problem. Before we get to the nitty gritty of what to do, we need to be in a position re social relations where we can actually put any such solutions in place. Until then, talking about grand and complex schemes amounts to not much more than a parlour game for the right-on.
JT
As I came away from Last night’s meeting a few random thoughts struck me. The meeting was particularly interesting because it seemed to raise more questions than it answered.
Towards the end of the meeting I asked Paul if he could explain a bit more about the idea of carbon quotas for all.
In particular, I felt that there were problems about how each person’s use of carbon could be measured without an excessively intrusive system. I think several people were worried that even if it could work it would be unfair. Could it be made fair for the wide variety of people living in different situations?
I think that behind this is a bigger issue – can the state be seen as a neutral, fair body able to represent the whole of society’s interests. I felt that most people’s answer to this question was no.
The clear weakness of Paul’s critics (including me) seemed to be that we had nothing better to offer.
The other lurking issue for me was what changes would be made to our lives if the suggested target for 2015 or 2030 are to be met? What would carbon neutral life be like?
Best wishes
GB |