Climate change

By the time of Rishi Sunak’s spring statement even BP’s ex-CEO John Browne was arguing for windfall tax on energy firms. But instead of a windfall tax, government ministers negotiated a “tacit agreement” from Big Oil that they would… “step up gas and oil exploration”. As Sunak was organising homegrown climate catastrophe, Johnson travelled to Riyadh to beg Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman for more oil. The Saudi monarchy, who chose to bookend Johnson’s visit with mass executions of their political opponents, are in no hurry to pump more oil. Spiralling prices mean all the OPEC+ nations are...

Paul Vernadsky’s critiques of Andreas Malm — Malm’s politics and wider writings — have much to agree with and of value. Yet Paul writes as if he has a major and profound disagreement with me on this — which is false. My article reviewed Fossil Capital, which I felt — as I wrote — contained interesting and useful historical exposition and analysis, but little wider value: “ Fossil Capital is a stimulating and gripping read. It valuably reveals how the burning of fossil fuels has been deeply entwined with capital since capitalism's birth, remaining central to it… He has much less to offer on the...

On 28 February 2022, for the first time ever, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) called out the “vested economic and political interests” that had “generated rhetoric and misinformation that undermines climate science and disregards risk and urgency”, resulting in “public misperception of climate risks and polarised public support for climate actions”. Capitalist society is saturated in denialism. As Michael Mann documents in The New Climate Wars, many of the for-hire scientists who have led the charge on rubbishing climate science honed their trade on the misinformation...

Manchester Labour MP Graham Stringer is a climate change-denier. That is long-established. Stringer, once seen as being on the Labour left, is a trustee of the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF). GWPF is a climate change-denying lobby group which has very few members and hides its funders, but is known to received a lot of money from at least one major Tory donor, hedge fund boss Michael Hintze. That in itself is or should be a scandal. But Stringer's climate denialism has jumped into the news because he has agreed to speak at the Bolton launch, on 26 March, of the “Vote Power Not Poverty...

In The Housing Question Engels mocks the French millionaires of his day for pouring their money into Germany, thus financing a hostile military power. The actions of the French capitalists were rational as an investment decision. But their unrestrained profit-seeking undermined France’s imperialist interests. A similar dynamic has played out between Europe and the Putin war machine. Europe gets 40% of its gas, 27% of its oil and 46% of its coal from Russia. Over many decades, trillions of dollars of European money has flowed into Russia’s state-owned fossil giants. The European capitalist...

Official opening of the Power of Siberia pipeline Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has revealed the geopolitical and ecological insanity of a European capitalist class addicted to fossil fuels. Russia is the world’s largest petro-state, controlling one third of Earth’s oil and gas reserves and producing 68% of the world’s domestic gas supply. Fossil fuels constitute around 60% of Russian exports and around 40% of government income. The overwhelming majority of those fossil fuels are bought by European and other NATO countries. The fossil fuel revenue has allowed Putin to amass the third largest...

Stuart Jordan is correct to critique the deceitful nature of “carbon offsetting” and of many claims to “net zero” ( Solidarity 623). Yet he stops far short of a much needed fundamental critique of carbon markets. Blockchain has no special power to verify that purported “carbon drawdown initiatives” actually do draw down net carbon. To verify this happening, we would need clear and rigorous standards with independent inspections and evaluation. Capitalist markets have repeatedly demonstrated a failure to regulate themselves and enforce quality control in a decentralised way. Why would it be...

On 17 February, the Office for National Statistics published figures showing that the number of green jobs in the UK is stagnating; in Scotland, host to the COP26 summit in November 2021, it is falling. The lack of progress toward meaningful climate action was one of the issues addressed on 19 February at a day-long meeting of local representatives of the COP26 Coalition. The gathering had been planned to take place in-person in Birmingham together with a local climate festival (which went ahead), but it moved online after Storm Eunice disrupted travel. About 50-60 people joined the ten...

I am extremely sceptical about blockchain (mentioned tentatively by Stuart Jordan in Solidarity 623) being the solution to the problems with carbon credits. Let’s put aside the fact that blockchains require immense amounts of energy, and that they are wasteful by design, as this still might be offset by the carbon drawdown. Blockchain enthusiasts’ claim about democratisation is all smoke and mirrors. The company behind the particular blockchain project, the core developers, the “whales” (holders of large amounts of tokens, coins, or what have you) are ultimately much, much more powerful than...

“Climate struggle is class struggle... the working class is used as tools to build the very system that is destroying them.” This is from the rallying call of Fridays for Future, the first organisation to coordinate international mass strikes for the climate. The next climate strike has been called for 25 March. School students’ action to date has surpassed anything achieved by all previous climate activism and reached a level of international coordination far exceeding anything achieved by the workers’ movement. The high point of the climate strikes was 20 September 2019. Four million school...