Climate change

This drought was avoidable

At the time of writing nine out of fourteen regions across Britain have declared droughts. Thousands have seen their taps run dry. Farmers are predicting up to 50% losses on crop yields. Cattle and other livestock are likely to be slaughtered early as farmers run out of feed. We have just lived through a long dry spell culminating in the hottest, driest July since 1935. But this drought was entirely avoidable: the result of staggering mismanagement and profligacy by the UK’s privatised water companies. Since these natural monopolies were privatised in 1989 they have prioritised enriching their...

Focus on energy efficiency

It is good that campaigns such as “Don’t Pay” are promoting the need to fight energy poverty, rising bills, stagnating wages; even if we critique their strategy for doing so. Martin Thomas in “Wage rises, price curbs: where to push” ( Solidarity 641 ) is right that the “most effective working-class response to price surges [is] to push for wage and benefit rises”. However, on one point he is (and I know he recognises this) off-beam. On the serious issue of energy poverty, he adds that we “push for the labour movement to campaign for public ownership and democratic planning of the energy...

Climate change as class war

Climate politics remains overwhelmingly dominated by NGOs, journalists and scientists, observes Matt Huber in his recent Climate Change as Class War. Huber, a geography academic involved with the Democratic Socialists of America, insists that the "the climate struggle is about power" – meaning both class relations and energy. The book aims to counter the "professional middle class" politics that occupy the environmental left through a political strategy based on workers' material interests and fought through trade union struggle. Its greatest strength is an insistence that the "hidden abode"...

Winning climate-safe workplaces

Tuesday 19 July 2022 was perhaps the hottest day in the UK in over 125,000 years. It is likely that the next hottest day will be later this year or next year. It is near certain it will be within the next decade. Climate change is accelerating as capitalist-organised activity, the frenetic fossil-powered acceleration, adds ever-growing quantities of emissions to the atmosphere. By 2100, without revolutionary change to the way we organise economic life, we will experience temperatures not seen on Earth in three million years. Creatures, plants and microorganisms which evolved through slowly...

France to renationalise EDF

On 6 July the French government announced that it will take the country's primary electricity utility, EDF, back into full public ownership. This reverses the part-privatisation of 2005, from which 16% of the shares of EDF are now in private hands. The rationale of the decision is one which equally mandates public ownership of the energy industry in Britain: the need for long-term investment not vulnerable to the short-term oscillations of profit and share prices. The immediate impulse is the need to repair, renovate, and expand France's nuclear power stations, which provide a much bigger...

The North York Moors and extinction

After a two-year delay, the UN has announced that the COP15 summit on Biological Diversity will take place in Canada in December this year. The meeting was originally scheduled in China in 2020 and has been postponed four times due to Covid. Nearly 100 countries, including the UK, have formed the “High Ambition Coalition for Nature and People” (HAC N&P) with the stated aim of protecting 30% of the Earth’s land and and 30% of the Earth’s oceans from human interference by 2030. “30 by 30” is conceived as a stepping stone to the Half-Earth policy proposed by biologist E O Wilson. As habitat...

Heatwaves bring deaths, floods and more

The heatwaves have come early this year. The week starting 13 June saw wildfires in Spain, France, Portugal, Germany, and Morocco, and temperatures in continental Europe over 40ºC, breaking several records. Between March and May multiple weather stations across India and Pakistan recorded temperatures between 45 and 50ºC. Climate scientists have said that such extreme temperatures are now 30 times more likely than in pre-industrial times. It will get worse, by an additional factor of between two and twenty times, if we exceed 2ºC of global heating. Above a certain combination of heat and...

GMB: still a way to travel

A cut in branch commission — the proportion of members’ dues paid to branches — from 10% to 7.5% was the main item of controversy at this year’s GMB union Congress, 13-16 June. The cut had been approved by the union’s Central Executive Council (CEC) last October, with the backing of the newly elected General Secretary Gary Smith. Nearly 20 motions denounced the decision and the decision-makers. Technically, the motions had a point. Branch commission is fixed in the GMB Rulebook, and only GMB rule-change congresses can make a rule change. But with membership falling for nearly a decade and no...

91% tax break on fossil fuels

Hidden in the detail of the Tory windfall tax on energy companies is a 91% tax break on all new investment in fossil fuel extraction. The green capitalist thinktank E3G say the tax cut could equate to handing Big Oil a £5.7 billion subsidy over the next three years to expand production. Shell has already had £200 million cut from their windfall tax bill after they secured “final regulatory approval” on the Jackdaw oil field last week. Jackdaw will add an additional 25 million tonnes carbon dioxide equivalent (MtCO2e) to the atmosphere over the course of its lifetime and comes in addition to...

Green hydrogen? Yes, but...

Australia’s newly elected Labor government is planning the world’s largest green hydrogen plant and a hydrogen power station. Many other countries, including the UK, are also stepping up the development of hydrogen technology as an alternative to Russian oil and gas. There are bold claims for hydrogen technology. What role can it actually play in solving the climate crisis? Hydrogen is an extremely powerful fuel in that contains more energy per unit weight than fossil fuels. It has been used as a fuel for over two centuries, and powered the Apollo lunar modules. Hydrogen is similar to fossil...

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