an autodidact meets a dilettante…

Canto: Well I’ve just managed to finish reading Naomi Klein’s great big book about the politics of climate change, This changes everything, and since this more or less coincides with the recent political decisions made about tackling climate in Paris, I thought we might spend this session, or even a few sessions, on the future of clean energy, the fossil fuel industry and so forth.

Jacinta: Ah yes, the Paris conference, can you fill me in on that? All I know is that the outcome is being touted as a turning point, a watershed moment, but I presume none of it is enforceable, and I can’t really see the fossil fuel giants giving up the ghost, or considering anything much beyond business as usual…

Canto: Okay, the UN climate change conference in Paris ended on December 12 2015, having run for about 3 weeks. The principal outcome has been the Paris agreement, which was a more substantive agreement on emissions reduction than has been achieved in the past. It apparently represents a consensus drawn from some 196 national representatives.

Jacinta: And I seem to recall the figure of 2% being bandied about. What was that about?

Canto: Ummm, I think you might be referring to the plan, or hope, to limit global warming to 2 degrees, through zero net greenhouse gas emissions in the second half of the 21st century, globally.

Jacinta: Wow, that’s some hope.

Canto: Well the hope is to keep the warming to well under 2 degrees C, preferably aiming for 1.5, which would entail substantial reductions well before 2050, but of course this is all promises, promises.

Jacinta: So what about enforcement, and how is this going to be achieved nation by nation, considering that some nations are huge emitters, and some nations, like India, are still developing and industrialising?

Canto: Right so there are all these semi-commitments and promises, but crunch time starts in April 2016, from which time the relevant parties are asked to sign up to the agreement – that’s 197 parties in all, including all member nations of the UN, the European Union and some not-quite-nations like Palestine and the Cook Islands. They have a year to sign up, and the agreement will only come into force if 55 countries that produce 55% of global greenhouse emissions sign up.

Jacinta: Wait, does that mean all of the top 55 greenhouse gas emitters, or any 55 that together emit 55% of the greenhouse gases emitted by humans?

Canto: Uhhh, I’m not sure but I think it’s the latter.

Jacinta: Great, so Australia doesn’t have to sign. Quel soulagement!

Canto: Funny that, because the Wikipedia article on the Paris agreement, specifically mentions the climate change ‘skepticism’ of our conservative government…

Jacinta: Wow, what an honour.

Canto: Time to lobby our environment minister. Of course there are a lot of people protesting that this agreement doesn’t go far enough – not so much in the targets as in the voluntary nature of it all. I mean, it may not even come into voluntary force if nations don’t sign up to it, and of course there’s no enforcement mechanism. Here’s how Wikipedia describes the situation:

The Agreement will not become binding on its member states until 55 parties who produce over 55% of the world’s greenhouse gas have ratified the Agreement. There is doubt whether some countries will agree to do so. Each country that ratifies the agreement will be required to set a target for emission reduction, but the amount will be voluntary. There will be [no] mechanism to force a country to set a target by a specific date and no enforcement if a set target is not met. There will be only a “name and shame” system or as Janos Pasztor, the U.N. assistant secretary-general on climate change, told CBS News (US), a “name and encourage” plan.

Jacinta: Well I think it’s definitely a positive development, which will add pressure to the fossil fuel industries and their supporters. I notice that one of our green pollies was castigating the government the other day about the expansion of the Abbott Point coal terminal, citing the Paris agreement. That’s going to be a much repeated dagger-thrust into the future. So how does this all connect with Naomi Klein’s book?

Canto: Well I think you’re right to accentuate the positives. I mean, how can you seriously police or enforce such an agreement without interfering with the ‘national sovereignty’ that so many nations bellow about – especially when there’s a hint of criticism from the UN? So the first real positive coming from this confab is that all the parties are in agreement about the imminent threat of AGW, and they’ve actually managed to come to a broad agreement over a target and a goal. That’s a big deal. The second positive is, as you say, the impact of that consensus on the battle against the cashed-up fossil fuel industries, and the mostly conservative governments around the world that are still into science denialism, including our own government. As to This changes everything, Klein sees the AGW issue as a possible game-changer for the politics of global capitalism and free marketeering, which is rather ambitious, but she puts her faith in the protest movements, the indigenous rights movements and other grassroots movements who are, as she sees it, rising up more than ever before to create headaches for the business-as-usual model. She calls this grassroots approach ‘blockadia’, probably not an original coinage.

Jacinta: So she sees it as an issue to fight global capitalism, to replace it with… what? Surely the renewable energy industries are capitalist industries too?

Cant: Well yes, I think there’s a certain amount of idealism in her view, an old-fashioned back-to-nature ethic, and I don’t think she emphasises the solutions and the science as much as she emphasises the problems and the politics, but if you take the view that the fossil fuel industries need to be phased out, sooner rather than later, you’ll perhaps be as much inspired by the heroic and hard-working efforts to prevent mining and drilling – which, let’s face it, have caused huge devastation in many areas – as you will by the innovations and improvements in clean energy. Which brings me to the other term used a lot in Klein’s book – extractivism.

Jacinta: Which presumably stands not just for the fossil fuel industry but the whole mentality of ‘what can we extract from this entity?’, be it animal vegetable or mineral.

Canto: The ancient Greeks did it with their slaves, the British did it with their colonies…

Jacinta: And their slaves..

Canto: The tobacco industry are doing it with the resource of willing smokers in non-western countries, poachers are doing it with elephants in Africa, the porn industry is doing it with pretty and mostly impoverished girls in the US and Europe, multinational companies are doing it with cheap labour worldwide. Extractivism has always been with us…

Jacinta: Point taken but I think we’re getting a bit carried away here. I presume Klein was using the term in a more limited sense, though perhaps with a nod to broader extractivist tendencies. And I have to say, quite apart from the devastation caused by tailings and disasters like Deepwater Horizon, I’ve always felt there’s something not quite right about our recent cavalier exploitation of a process of incredibly slow transformation of once-living and evolving entities – our ancestors in a sense – into coal and oil. Doesn’t it seem somehow sacrilegious?

Canto: Well perhaps, but I’m not sure if ‘exploitation’ is the right word. People get exploited. Okay animals can get exploited. But dead matter turning into coal? All species do what they can to survive and thrive, and they don’t worry about the cost to others or to historical processes. Right now parrots are feasting on my neighbour’s fruit trees. They’re extracting what they can in one go, and they’ll be back for more unless someone stops them. My neighbours might consider the parrots a pest, but that’s only because they want to extract as much as they can from those trees, to make jam, or to add fibre and other nutritional elements to their diet. As to the fossil fuels I’m all for keeping them in the ground, but more because of the damage they do to our atmosphere than because it’s ‘nice’ and ‘respectful’ not to extract them.

Jacinta: Spoken like a true instrumental scientist, but I can’t help feeling there’s more to it than you say. But what do you think about the view that this is a game-changer for global politics? Klein subtitles her book ‘capitalism v the climate’, as if one or the other has to come out on top. Do you think that’s really the choice?

Canto: No I don’t, but I doubt that Klein really imagines, or even wants this to spell the end of capitalism. I’m no anti-capitalist of course, but then I see capitalism in much broader terms. Those parrots are capitalising on a resource previously unavailable to them, and they’ll continue to do so unless prevented, by netting or something worse. Fossil fuel companies have learned to capitalise on a resource previously unavailable to them, before we learned how to process and extract energy from such material, and they’ll continue to do so unless they’re prevented, by legislation, by blockadia, or by the availability of more attractive alternatives, such as the more effective exploitation of the sun. Or capitalising on the solar resource.

Jacinta: So you believe that all humans, or rather, all creatures are capitalists? Isn’t that a bit of a narrow view?

                                                                                  the capitalist menace

Canto: Well no, as I say, I think it’s a broad view of the capitalist concept. But of course you might say that this hardly accounts for blockadia. If we’re all capitalists at heart, how do we account for the amount of energy so many citizens put into blocking capitalist exploitation? But that’s easily explained by the parrots and fruit example. The parrots’ gain is the neighbours’ loss. The neighbours have gone to a lot of trouble cultivating the ground, planting the trees, watering and fertilising, and these pesky parrots have come along without so much as a by your leave, and devastated the crop. Similarly farmers who have put a lot of time and energy into cultivating their land, and indigenous people who have learned over generations how to fish and hunt in an area in such a way that stocks can still be replenished rather than devastated, are naturally outraged that these fossil fuel companies have come along and ‘poisoned the well’. The farmers and the indigenes are also capitalists, very effective capitalists for their own needs, but they’re faced with different types of capitalists with different needs. So, to me, it’s a matter of resources, needs, diversity and negotiation.

Jacinta: Hmmm, well I’m inclined to agree with you. Of course indigenous people, such as our Aborigines, like to talk of spiritual connections to the land and its bird and animal life, but I’m not much into spirituality. But I like the idea that even though they’re into hunting and killing those creatures in order to survive, they tell stories about them, and exhibit a great deal of respect and fondness for them. That seems healthy to me.

Canto: I agree completely. I’m not trying to say ‘all is capitalism’. There’s much more to life than that. The beauty of that story-telling and that affection for the land and its inhabitants and their ways is that it’s not a kind of master-race view. The Judeo-Christian view has been that all things, including all creatures, have been put here for our benefit. Of course modern Christianity has largely re-interpreted this as custodianship, which is an improvement, but I prefer the perspective that we’re all in this together, and we should look out for each other. Birds have to eat, and they like to eat fruit, and birds are fantastic creatures. They deserve our consideration.

Jacinta: Well that’s a nice note to end on. And what about the fossil fuel industry?

Canto: I think it’s had its day. It’s time to move beyond it.