UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres’s Climate Action Summit is taking place in New York today. This follows hard on the heels of Friday’s stupendous global climate strike which saw an estimated four million people take to the streets in protest – mostly young, and if the Edinburgh march was a guide, with a majority of young women.
As a connoisseur of demonstrations – I attended my first (anti-Vietnam war) demo back in 1972 – the Edinburgh event was extraordinary for its youthful energy, political commitment and inventive placards. Forget Brexit, battling climate extinction is now the front line in humanity’s battle to create a planet worth living on. As the placards say: “System change not climate change.”
Ah, but now comes the hard part. Capitalism is a global system based on accumulating ever more capital through constant economic growth. As such, it is the most successful mode of production human beings have ever invented, at least in terms sheer physical output. World income per head in the year 0 CE was around $425 per annum. This figure was actually slightly less a millennium later in the year 1000 CE, at $420 – with Europe much poorer than China. Only with the advent of Western capitalism was there a take-off, circa 1500 CE. Today, world GDP per capita is $17,300.
READ MORE: Scotland is leading by example on tackling the climate crisis READ MORE: Young people lead massive global climate change protests
Of course, this says nothing about the distribution of wealth and income. Of the world’s 7.7 billion people, around 600m subsist on under $1.90 per day. At the opposite end of the scale, there are an estimated 3000 (dollar) billionaires in world, worth around $10 trillion in total. Nobody said capitalism is fair. Yet it does spew out goods and services to sell, meaning it has raised the living standards of Americans, Europeans and South East Asians. But in doing so, runaway capitalism has turned its workforce and consumers into stress-filled, obese, opioid-consuming wrecks, while initiating a series of global conflicts that still threaten the existence of humanity (eg Trump’s tariff wars).
Top of the negatives associated with global capitalism is the fact that the compulsive growth cycle which lies at its heart will definitively wreck the biosphere sometime in the next few of decades. The consultancy firm PWC reckons the world will see 130% cumulative GDP growth between 2016 and 2050. Plus, global population is going to rise by another 1.7bn souls by 2040.
Result: the respected International Energy Agency (IEA) is predicting world energy demand will grow by a quarter by 2040, creating a 10% rise in carbon dioxide emissions. That figure assumes a giant increase in the use of solar and renewables to generate electricity, and the switch to electric vehicles.
How do we get off this merry-go-round to hell? First up, we need to realise this is a planetary life-or-death struggle and there is no room for hubris from our politicians. I am endlessly proud of the humane social democracy that our SNP government has promoted – against the odds – since 2007. I am impressed by Nicola Sturgeon’s commitment to making Scotland carbon neutral by 2045, which puts Holyrood five years ahead of Westminster. But nobody should imagine for one second that this target is anything but a modest down-payment on what is actually required.
Look at it this way. Compare greenhouse gas emissions to filling a bath with water. All the Scottish Government has committed itself to is ceasing to pump extra water into the bath 26 years from now. But the global bath has already started to overflow. The UK Met Office, which has a good record of forecasting CO2 levels, predicts the average rise this year will be 2.75 parts per million (ppm). That would be among the highest annual rises in the 62 years since official records began. Worse, natural carbon sinks, such as the Amazon rain forest, are fast disappearing – the equivalent of someone sealing the bath overflow outlet.
The First Minister was correct to welcome Friday’s climate strike, although I’d have preferred if she had closed all the schools and government offices for the day and joined the march herself. But in this global emergency, fine words, and a 26-year timetable just to get carbon neutrality, are insufficient. Nicola Sturgeon and the SNP high command cannot escape the dilemma of their current strategy to govern resolutely from the centre ground while at the same time making comforting overtures to their radical flank.
Nicola talks tough on indyref2 but has in practice subordinated the independence campaign to blocking Brexit. On climate change, she has carefully positioned the Scottish Government to the left of the Tory government and sent greetings to the young strikers – but that is hardly the same thing as challenging the “system” that is killing the planet.
If you believe climate extinction is indeed a reality, then it is not sufficient to postpone doing something radical about it until after independence or to minimise the social and economic transformation involved.
Let’s take a pertinent example. One of the biggest single emitters of CO2 in Scotland is the ExxonMobil/Shell natural gas processing plant at Mossmorran in Fife, which makes ethylene and plastics. The Mossmorran complex has recently seen very concerning incidents. Shell was fined (a miserly) £40,000 by the Scottish Environment Protection Agency (Sepa) after a “metering error” at the plant underestimated the amount of propane gas emitted into the atmosphere three years in succession.
Last month, there was another “event” when excess propane was flared into the atmosphere after two of the site’s three boilers failed. Local residents complained that “light pollution turned night into day” and that “extensive noise” kept them awake. This followed a similar flaring incident at Easter which drew 2000 complaints. The flaring sends thousands of tons of CO2 into the atmosphere.
ExxonMobil is thinking about selling its North Sea assets, which raised the obvious fear that Mossmorran was being run down. However, local concern over the recent flaring incidents has now caused ExxonMobil – the world’s largest energy company – to announce a sudden £140m upgrade to the plant. Was this move designed to keep the Scottish Environment Protection Agengy (Sepa) from taking enforcement action? If so, the ploy worked. Energy Minister Paul Wheelhouse made a statement to the Scottish Parliament, saying: “My hope is that Sepa will not be required to use its enforcement powers and that ExxonMobil will move swiftly to implement the promised improvements”.
Paul! Why do you “hope” Sepa won’t act against a repeated polluter? Why are you giving
Sepa’s pusillanimous management the political cover they need to remain comatose and compliant? Is this the Scottish Government hoping it will keep ExxonMobil happy? I’ve news for you Paul: ExxonMobil wants to expand its fracking interests back in the States, where Trump is cutting taxes.
Notoriously, ExxonMobil spent decades funding climate change denial groups. If the Scottish Government is truly serious about fighting climate change it has to begin by forcing ExxonMobil to clean up its act at Mossmorran. Better still, the complex needs to be shut. The next time we have a climate strike, let’s not parade in George Square or outside
Holyrood – let’s surround Mossmorran. We have a global system to change.
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