The future of the Paris Agreement is unclear – with President Trump’s stance uncertain. Molly Scott Chatto and Jacube Dalunde MEPs proposed in The Ecologist the need for a European Climate Law – but law making is a slow and arduous process.

Meanwhile, far from the madding crowds of Washington, Brussels and other capital cities, a quiet revolution is underway.

A Spanish province – the Balearic Islands of Mallorca, Ibiza, Menorca and Formentera – operate as an autonomous community. Like other islands, they are especially vulnerable to climate change. But their government has devised a way to use the islands’ insularity to advantage.

Solar panels

Engineer Joan Groizard Payeras is Mallorquin by birth. He graduated from Cambridge University before working in renewables in the UK, where he gained knowledge and experience on the climate change act, carbon emissions and more.

Groizard was called home in 2015 to be the Balearics’ Director General for Climate Change and Energy. As he told The Ecologist: “They wanted people who could focus on the technical side and bring new points of view to the islands.”

The Balearics’ new climate law brings the global commitments of the Paris Agreement into local legislation, drawing a path towards the islands’ vision for 2050.

It commits them to zero emissions from energy or transport and 100 percent sustainable energy, using the islands’ natural resources of sun, waves and wind through specific graduated targets.

“As an island, it’s hard to find where to put renewable energy sources. The big car parks now have to incorporate solar panels as do all public buildings, enabling them to generate most of their own energy,” Groizard said.

Great destination

From 2020, car hire companies must incorporate a quota of electric cars within their acquisitions.

By 2035 every car they buy will be electric. From the same year, all new cars bought for the islands will also be electric or hydrogen and the government is working with petrol stations to incorporate charging points and repair shops to retrain their mechanics accordingly.

Mallorca’s public transport will be revamped by the close of 2018, offering 50% more including new buses and train lines with the three major tourist lines electrified and others using natural gas as the first stage of transition.

Residents in the same municipality as wind farms are entitled to buy shares, making them financially and socially invested – echoing Denmark. From 2020, large and medium companies will have to calculate their carbon footprint with an obligation to reduce it from 2025 onwards.

“Tourism is central to our economy,” Groizard tells us. “We don’t want to be a cheap destination. We want to be a great destination, which means being sustainable too.

Electric boats

“That’s good for the environment and provides a strong economic advantage. Being an island, we can do things that Madrid and Barcelona can’t. We know when tourists and cars come in and out. Hopefully we can soon put up a big banner saying come to the Balearics, it’s a nice place that’s sustainable too.”

Sometimes up to eight cruise ships dock simultaneously in Palma, each carrying the equivalent of a small town and using its own power source for lights, air con, etc.

Measurements at Palma’s Bellver Forest record the significant impact this has on the city’s air quality. In response, Palma’s tourism department is negotiating with the cruise companies to stagger arrivals. Cold Ioning will provide a massive plug in the harbour connected to the local energy grid and many cruise ships are converting to natural gas too.

Palma hosts Europe’s largest marina. To protect posidonia, the algae that grow around Mallorca, the Biodiversity and Natural Spaces departments are working on legislation to ensure that boats don’t anchor where they may pull up these plants, which support the environment by trapping carbon dioxide and returning it to the soil.

Around the island, other boats help yachts find buoys so that they can avoid using anchors completely. Beginning with ferries, the government is working to introduce electric boats.

Economists, scientists, engineers

Currently the only way into Formentera is by ferry from Ibiza, which is very polluting but the government is working with the port to make the ferry electric as soon as possible.

For decades, the islands have suffered from poor housing construction with speed taking precedence over quality and sustainability even though the climate is ideal for sustainable housing.

On Formentera, architect Carlos Oliver created a social housing scheme for fourteen houses prioritizing local materials including recycled wood and tiles created from sea plants that are manufactured by a company founded over a hundred years ago.

Only five percent more expensive than conventional building methods, these are A class, A grade energy efficient homes. As Groizard says, the scheme dignifies social housing while freeing residents from most utility bills. Unusually for a housing project, the EU funded the scheme due to its sustainable nature.

Vocational courses for sustainable practices are now so successful that it’s difficult to persuade trainees to complete their training, as companies are keen to hire them.

Global community

“Historically the Balearics have an employment problem with economists, scientists, engineers and others waiting tables as their only means of making a living,” Groizard said. 

“Once people see the advantages of these new jobs, both they and their families become invested in the environmental benefits too. Not only are the islands becoming less dependent on tourism, but those who retrain have greater opportunities for work elsewhere.”

In addition, there is a commitment to sustain, revive and encourage traditional crafts such as using local carpenters to make wooden windows rather than importing PVC ones from China. In preference to a carbon tax, the new law makes it compulsory to incorporate locally sourced materials with certification used to ensure this happens.

Important elements of this law are its focus on creating a just or fair transition with easy to understand guidelines and a graduated process of change that ensures that private citizens, businesses or other entities are not left behind.

The Govern Iles Balears wants civil society, citizens and the media to shine a light on what’s happening in the Balearics. Hopefully the islanders will recognize how they are as much a part of Europe and the global community as anywhere else and fortunate to be so well known internationally due to their many residents and visitors from around the world, which is both a privilege and a responsibility to be used intelligently.

Younger generation

It’s clear how ambitious a task the government has set itself.  Still only twenty-eight today, it was a brave move to chose Groizard to lead their commitment to the Paris Agreement.

With over a hundred companies and a great many initiatives in the sustainable sector on Mallorca and more on the other islands, there are grounds to be hopeful.

Like Catalonia, the Balearics have experienced conflict with Madrid. On occasion, it has taken considerable courage to stand against the national government over issues such as closing the coal-fired power station at Alcudia, but the message is clear. 

“We don’t want conflict. We’re Spanish islands, please use us as a window and example to the world. Madrid can now go to Europe and say look what we’re doing. It’s still controversial but hopefully that will change,” Groizard tells us.

Led largely by the younger generation, 1968 was an iconic moment in the struggle for civil rights, racial and gender equality, the anti war movement, the sexual revolution and student power but the UN International Year of Human Rights also cost the world the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert F Kennedy.

An inspiration

Fifty years later, the biggest and most constant threat to our planet is climate change. While the world continues to focus on economic growth not the climate, Groizard reminds us that, “Just as the Balearic Islands are finite with   finite resources, so is the planet. Hopefully the similarity is clear.”

Young, handsome and charming, it’s easy to compare Groizard to those who led the cultural changes of the 1960s but each of those movements targeted the rights of specific groups.

Here in the Balearics, perhaps what is most exciting of all is the very inclusive nature of what is happening. Not only those living on the islands but by default, the world at large will benefit.

This is no Don Quixote moment for the Balearic Islands, but a tangible opportunity to be both an inspiration and an example of how together we can move towards a better future for each and every one of us and Planet Earth herself.

This Author

Rosalinda Much’s career spans film production, creative consultancy, writing, radio presenting, the charitable sector, television, publishing, festivals and advertising.  Work has taken her to every continent except Antarctica. She first visited Mallorca on a production for actor/producer Michael Douglas. She is now based in Palma, the capital of the Balearic Islands.

The UK has long been a welcoming habitat for a number of white elephants. Normally, these rare and massive beasts roam freely, grazing on political expediency. However, now and again their existence is threatened by outbreaks of political honesty and economic necessity.

This week saw calls for the humane culling of one species of white elephant in particular, namely our political obsession with nuclear energy.

This is an obsession that continues despite the industry’s inability to reduce the risks of construction, costs of production and – most importantly – find a sustainable and morally acceptable way to deal with long-term storage of radioactive waste.

Wind and solar energy

What makes this especially worrying for our nuclear white elephants is that these calls didn’t come from environmental lobbyists but from a select body of experts charged with coming up with a plan for the future of the UK’s infrastructure.

The National Infrastructure Commission (NIC) is a group of eminent, independent experts whose long-term plan for developing UK infrastructure looks beyond short-term political concerns and provides a clear policy direction for government and investors about what the country needs to thrive and compete sustainably in the 21st century.

Professor David Fisk CB, one of the commissioners, summed it up, “Falls in the prices of renewable technologies have made them increasingly viable as one of this country’s main sources of electrical power.

“Nuclear power stations will not be coming onstream before the 2030s– so we need to continue encouraging development of wind and solar energy sources to meet our legally binding climate change targets.

“By investing now in built infrastructure, and finding the best low-carbon sources for heating our homes and businesses, costs will be kept down, helped by savings from the switch to low carbon electric vehicles.”

Nuclear is dead

In other words, the sums on nuclear no longer add up when faced with the progress made in the economics of renewables – and the future potential for those trends to continue.

A potentially fatal dose of economic logic that trumps the politics of so-called ‘strategic industries’; we can’t have it both ways, either markets dictate how we deal with our society’s problems or they don’t.

By contrast the Green industry has spent its time getting its economic house in order. This goes well beyond discussions around the Swansea Bay Tidal Lagoon.

There has been a quiet revolution taking place at the grass roots which has turned the tide of evidence – so to speak – towards renewables as a viable option for delivering the lion’s share of the energy mix – a phrase that was itself invented by the nuclear industry to justify the huge costs of building and decommissioning a nuclear reactor.

That is not to say that nuclear is dead as an option, but it forces what has been a relatively protected industry sector to assess whether it can compete in the real world.

Ethical choice

The analogy here for me is the UK finance sector. High street banks enjoyed a relatively privileged and protected existence until the economics of that political strategy began to backfire on the health of the economy from which the banks drew their profits, and inflicted their losses when the system fell into crisis.

A thriving alternative finance sector – which Abundance is part of – is now forcing banks to innovate and change.

We need the same spirit of competition in the energy market. Onshore wind and solar in particular need to be rewarded for their success in bringing down costs and reducing the impact on energy bills of transitioning to a clean growth economy.

This means opening auctions for long-term capacity provision to all technologies, not just selecting a few winners. Rumours of such a policy shift have been blowing through the industry for some time now. It can’t come soon enough.

The environment debate is often characterised as purely an ethical choice held back by the regressive politics of nimbyism and protectionism.

Just transition

Now an independent body of experts is making the case for renewable energy to government which highlights the bigger political concern of rising energy bills in a time of relatively flat wage growth.

Importantly the NIC doesn’t stop there. It also recommends a massive public investment in the energy efficiency of social housing.

The wider economic and political agenda recognises the impact that the transition to green has on a key driver of inequality: exposure to above inflation rises in the cost of fossil fuels and global volatility in energy prices fuelling economic shocks.

For once the experts are aligned with the people. As the government’s own surveys show, support for the growth of renewables as a source of energy for the UK is at an all time high.

For the sake of a few white elephants we can start the process of a just transition to a low carbon economy.

This Author

Bruce Davis is managing director of Abundance Investment, which advertises with The Ecologist.

As post-war Britain escaped from rationing in the 1950s a new ingredient arrived from the rainforests in Malaysia. This versatile, solid fat would provide an alternative to more expensive butter.

It was high-yielding, cheap to produce and it provided both the crunch and creaminess needed for a variety of manufactured foodstuffs.

But this miracle ingredient – palm oil – was set to ignite one of the most environmentally damaging practices of the 21st Century: deforestation.

Through deforestation, we have seen the loss of unique habitats for endangered species, premature death rates for local populations due to air pollution and a major contribution to climate change.

But with new certification schemes and corporate sustainability policies in place, palm oil is no longer linked to deforestation, right?

Wrong.

A football pitch every 25 seconds

At Ethical Consumer, we’ve been tracking the palm oil problem for over 20 years. But, as highlighted in our recent report, despite involvement from governments, the World Bank, environmental groups and certification bodies, the rate of deforestation due to the production of palm oil is increasing.

A football pitch sized patch of rainforest is lost every 25 seconds and 24 million hectares were destroyed in Indonesia alone between 1990 and 20152.

A growing global demand for palm oil and lack of control in the supply chain is allowing this deforestation to continue unchecked and it is crucial that we take action to stop it – now.

Where does the power lie?

Undoubtedly, a huge amount of the power to change this situation lies with global food manufacturers. Together they hold the purchasing power to transform the supply chain but they simply aren’t doing enough to bring about this change.

On paper, they look to be buying from certified palm oil sources and meeting their commitments to the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) and other certification schemes, but this is obscuring an underlying problem.

Some of the palm oil used by the most popular brands is still being sourced from new plantations seeded after deforestation.

Spotlight on Mondelēz

We’ve put the spotlight on one of the major manufacturers known to be using this palm oil, in order to understand how deforestation palm oil is still entering the supply chain.

But they are by no means the worst offender on the issue – they score a middle ethical consumer rating. The way they report and present their palm oil usage does raise some interesting questions.

Mondelēz is a US company who owns many snack brands popular here in the UK – including Cadbury, Green & Blacks, Barny, Bel Vita, Tuc and Oreo. According to a recent WWF report into palm oil usage, they used 289,255 tonnes of palm oil in 2015 of which 96 percent was certified sustainable palm oil (CSPO).

Our investigation into Mondelēz’s 2017 RSPO filing and company policy shows that only 1.2 percent of their overall figure was segregated supply (down from 11 percent in 2016), meaning that the palm oil was kept separate from other supplies and could be fully traced back to the mills who processed it and the producers who grew it.

The vast majority of its CSPO was certified under the book and claim scheme, meaning that they bought credits through RSPO-certified suppliers.

By relying on third-party traders to take care of their supply, they have removed themselves from the checking process and therefore don’t fully understand their supply chain from producer to the factory.

We know that this book and claim process is often ineffective. Just last month Wilmar, a major trader for Mondelēz was investigated for its close family ties to Gama, a producer who was reported by Greenpeace to have destroyed more than 50,000 hectares of rainforest and tropical peatland in Indonesia in the past five years4.

By devolving their role in the supply chain to a third party, Mondelēz is able to tick the CSPO box, without ensuring that the palm oil is from a deforestation-free supply.

Sadly they are not alone in doing this, and many of the companies we investigated in our recent guides to chocolate, bread, biscuits and margarine used this same method.

The clock is ticking

Mondelēz and other major brands made a commitment in 2010 under the Consumer Goods Forum (CGF) to clean up the supply chain within a decade, having faced pressure from environmental groups

With less than two years to effect these changes, Greenpeace unearthed evidence in March 2018, that none of the big food brands has yet to clean up their supply chains other than to release policies and join certification schemes.

Of the 16 global brands approached, eight refused to share the names of their traders and mills and of the other eight, including Mondelēz, there was proven evidence of palm oil sourced from producers linked to deforestation.

Mondelēz is not operating in isolation here. In truth, certification schemes are weaker than they could be and some of the palm oil in our food is still coming from land that was recently covered in virgin rainforest.

So, what needs to change?
Along with Greenpeace and other environmental action groups, we’re calling for global brands such as Mondelēz to take responsibility for their supply chains, to stop hiding behind traders and certification labels and meet their commitment to using only deforestation-free palm oil by 2020.

The power to make the biggest change sits with these brands and they must act now.   

You can help drive this change:
    • Share this article on social media and make more people aware of the issues.
    • Take a look at the red category companies in our reports, avoid their products and get in touch to tell them what you think of their palm oil policies.
    • Join campaigns and boycotts led by the likes of Greenpeace and Sum of Us to force big brands to meet their 2020 commitments.

About the authors 

Mackenzie Denyer is a writer and researcher at Ethical Consumer. Tim Hunt is co-editor and director of Ethical Consumer. Ethical Consumer has developed the most sophisticated and simple to use, personal ethical rating system, based on detailed research of over 40,000 companies, brands and products. Ethical Consumer gives consumers the information they need to make ethical purchasing decisions.  

President Trump has again demonstrated that he is a major source of fake news about climate change. During an interview broadcast on 28 January on ITV in the UK, Piers Morgan asked Mr Trump for his views both on the Paris Agreement and on whether he believes in climate change.

The President’s answers revealed the very deep level of his ignorance. Towards the end of the interview – from about 36 minutes – the following exchange occurred:

Piers Morgan: “Quick fire. Climate change. For you is it about the science or is it about the money? The Paris Accord.”

President Trump: “I think it’s about everything, and I’m a believer in clean air and clean water. The Paris Accord for us would have been a disaster.”

Piers Morgan: “Are you completely out of that?”

President Trump: “I’m completely out of it.”

Piers Morgan: “No way back?”

President Trump: “Er, there could be a way back. First of all it was a terrible deal for the United States. If they made a good deal, like if they made a good deal with TPP [Trans-Pacific Partnership], you know with having to do with trade, there’s always a chance we’d get back. But it was a terrible deal for the United States. It was unfair to the United States.”

Having to withdraw

This exposed President Trump’s longstanding lack of understanding about the Paris Agreement. The United States Government ratified the Agreement on 3 September 2016.

The Agreement came into force on 4 November 2016. Article 28 of the Agreement (PDF) states that any country that wishes to withdraw could not start the procedure until three years after it came into force, and that the process would take a year.

Hence the earliest that the Trump Administration could complete withdrawal would be 4 November 2020, the day after the next election for the President of the United States.

President Trump’s claim that the Paris Agreement is “a terrible deal for” and “unfair to” the United States is also completely false. The Agreement does not commit the United States to any specific actions to tackle climate change.

Instead, the Obama Administration submitted a voluntary “nationally determined contribution” (PDF) to the Agreement. Like other countries, the United States can review this contribution over the next two years, and the Trump Administration could submit in 2020 a new statement that the President considers to be ‘fairer’ for the United States, without having to withdraw from the Paris Agreement.

Classic experiments

However, it was the next exchange during the interview that showed President Trump does not have a grasp of the science of climate change:

Piers Morgan: “Do you believe in climate change? Do you think it exists?”

President Trump: “Er, there is a cooling, there’s a heating. Look it used to not be climate change, it used to be global warming, right?”

Piers Morgan: “Right.”

President Trump: “That wasn’t working too well because it was getting too cold all over the place. Ah, the ice caps were going to melt, they were going to be gone by now, but now they’re setting records, ok, they’re at a record level. There were so many things happening, Piers.”

In this case, Mr Trump appeared to show that he relies on the propaganda of climate change deniers instead of the advice of scientists. His suggestion that the term ‘climate change’ has only been introduced recently because the Earth is “getting too cold all over the place” is hopelessly wrong.

‘Climate change’ and its variants have been used for more than half a century. For instance, the magazine ‘Weather’ published an article called ‘Can Carbon Dioxide Influence Climate?’ by Guy Callendar in October 1949.

The opening sentence is: “An interpretation of climatic change in terms of the variable carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere was first proposed some sixty years ago by the famous Swedish physicist, Sevante [sic] Arrhenius, who made some of the classic experiments on the absorption of heat radiation by gases”.

In the United States, the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences published a report on ‘Understanding Climatic Change’ (TXT) in 1975.

The term ‘global warming’ started to receive increased use during the 1980s, particularly after The New York Times reported on its front page the Congressional testimony of James Hansen, under the headline ‘Global Warming Has Begun, Expert Tells Senate’.

Billion tonnes

But another report published by the National Academy (PDF) in 2005 noted: “The phrase “climate change” is growing in preferred use to “global warming” because it helps convey that there are changes in addition to rising temperatures”.

And as Jason Samenow pointed out in ‘The Washington Post’, it was pollster Frank Luntz who advised Republican activists in a memo in 2002 (PDF) that “It’s time for us to start talking about ‘climate change’ instead of global warming and ‘conservation’ instead of preservation”, pointing out: “While global warming has catastrophic connotations attached to it, climate change suggests a more controllable and less emotional challenge”.

Of course, the main reason President Trump was wrong is because the Earth has been warming, not cooling, over almost all of its surface during the past century, as this map produced by NASAclearly illustrates.

President Trump also implied that the polar ice caps are not melting and are at “record levels”. In fact, the opposite is true. According to the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Colorado, the Arctic sea ice extent on 28 January was at its lowest ever level for this time of year since satellite measurements began in 1979. Record lows were set in 2016 and 2017 for the annual winter maximum of Arctic sea ice extent.

Similarly, the mass of the Greenland ice sheet has been declining markedly at a rate of about 270 billion tonnes each year, according to the latest ‘Arctic Report Card’ (PDF) by the United States National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Horrible emails

And while the situation in Antarctica is more complicated, the most recent study concluded that the ice sheet is losing mass overall despite an increase in snowfall on the eastern side of the continent.

However, this was not the first time since his election that President Trump has demonstrated that he does not understand the science, economics and politics of climate change.

In November 2016, Mr Trump was interviewed at length by staff at The New York Times about his views on a wide variety of topics. When asked about climate change, President-Elect Trump said: “You know the hottest day ever was in 1890-something, 98.

“You know, you can make lots of cases for different views. I have a totally open mind. My uncle was for 35 years a professor at M.I.T. He was a great engineer, scientist. He was a great guy. And he was … a long time ago, he had feelings — this was a long time ago — he had feelings on this subject.

“It’s a very complex subject. I’m not sure anybody is ever going to really know. I know we have, they say they have science on one side but then they also have those horrible emails that were sent between the scientists.

Propaganda

“Where was that, in Geneva or wherever five years ago? Terrible. Where they got caught, you know, so you see that and you say, what’s this all about. I absolutely have an open mind. I will tell you this: Clean air is vitally important. Clean water, crystal clean water is vitally important. Safety is vitally important.”

Mr Trump’s answer showed how poorly briefed he was about climate change. According to the World Meteorological Organisation, the hottest daytime temperature was 56.7°C, recorded in Death Valley, California, in 1913.

But this information is irrelevant to the question of whether climate change is happening. It is possible that Mr Trump was trying to remember 1998 which, at the time of the interview, was the warmest year according to one controversial satellite record of the temperature of the lower atmosphere.

However, the World Meteorological Organisation had already indicated that 2016 was likely to surpass 2015 as the hottest year based on surface temperature records, and was part of a clear warming trend.

Mr Trump’s reference to “horrible emails” was an apparent attempt to recall propaganda spread by climate change deniers about the hacking of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia.

Ladybird book

In fact, nine independent investigations were conducted into the content of the stolen emails and documents by the Independent Climate Change Email Review (PDF), the International Panel set up by the University of East Anglia to examine the research of the Climatic Research Unit (PDF), the House of Commons Select Committee on Science and Technology (PDF), Pennsylvania State University (PDF), the United States Environmental Protection Agency, the Inspector General of the United States Department of Commerce(PDF) (Word) and the United States National Science Foundation (PDF). None of these inquiries concluded that the hacked emails showed serious misconduct by any climate scientists.

And President Trump’s speech in June last year in the Rose Garden of the White House, during which he announced that the United States would withdraw from the Paris Agreement, contained many false statements both about the Agreement itself and of the potential economic consequences of remaining part of it.

It is time that Mr Trump educated himself about climate change. He should steer clear of sources of laughable propaganda about the issue, such as Fox News, Breitbart and The Wall Street Journal.

Perhaps when the President visited the United Kingdom, he should have popped into Clarence House for a chat and to pick up a signed copy of the excellent Ladybird book on climate change.

This Author

Bob Ward is policy and communications director at the ESRC Centre for Climate Change Economics and Policy and the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics and Political Science. The views expressed in this commentary are those of the author and not necessarily those of the Grantham Research Institute. This is a very lightly edited and updated version of a blog post published last year.

The climate crisis today demands nothing less than a worldwide social and political transformation.

Piecemeal reforms, technocratic schemes, and state-driven ‘climate resilience’ have proven not only ineffective at stymying the effects of climate change, but also utterly incapable of combating its underlying cause: a capitalist global order.

This order systematically shreds the social and ecological fabric which enables complex life on this planet. The cynical mantra that ‘humans are to blame for global warming’ is a deception – a logic of domination and an ideology of endless ‘growth’ are the real culprits.

Fortunately, human beings can overcome our present condition. All over the world, alternative technologies, social movements, and schools of thought are contesting the exploitative practices and institutions of capitalism.

However, these alternatives will remain little more than scattered, unfulfilled promises unless they are united within a coherent institutional framework of freedom and democracy.

Widely misunderstood

The planet needs far more than a ‘just’ or ‘sustainable’ ‘transition’; it needs a fundamentally new social order that enhances our humanity alongside the well-being of the natural world.

And this requires both deep changes to our cultural sensibilities, as well as a serious confrontation with the seemingly impenetrable institutions that govern global society. In a word: revolution.

Given this situation, it’s no surprise that people all over the world are beginning to speak the language of revolution.

From the USA, where during the 2016 presidential election social democrat Bernie Sanders promised a progressive ‘political revolution’, to Northern Syria, where women-led defense forces advance cultural pluralism and freedom against Turkish invasion, Baath authoritarianism, and fascist Islamism, revolution is reentering the global imagination.

However, outside the left, revolution is a widely misunderstood and mistrusted concept. When many people hear the word ‘revolution’, images of violence, confusion, and disorder come to mind.

Ecological process

These popular impressions, as American Marxian theorists James and Grace Lee Boggs observed in 1974 [1], confuse the momentary firestorms of rebellions and insurrections with revolution, which is an ongoing, cumulative process.

This confusion of course is cultured and encourage by mass media that is controlled by ruling elites. Indeed, if people cannot even conceive of fundamental social change, how can they ever hope to bring it about?

Being human means being bound up in processes of biological, psychological, social, cultural, and material development. In this way, revolution can be seen as an inextricable part of our development as a species. As the Boggs write, [1] (page 13):

Man/womankind’s revolutions have been an essential part of their evolution, and their evolution an essential part of their revolutions. What we are today is the result of a long and continuing process of evolution and this process of evolution is still going on and will go on as long as there are men and women on this planet.

Today, the entanglement of ecological and political crisis has twisted into a veritable Gordian knot; one cannot be resolved without the other. This circumstance invites us to collectively reflect and redefine the meaning revolution as an ecological process. And to do so, we must examine the origin and historical totality of revolution as a concept.

The history of revolution

Although we do not often think of ‘revolution’ as having a history, it is actually a very young concept. Prior to 1805, ‘revolution’ denoted the movement of objects around an axis of rotation, such as in the orbit of planets or the turning of wheels.

Revolutions were the concern of natural philosophers and astronomers, not idealists. However, at the twilight of the French Revolution, political upheaval gave way to conservative backlash. In 1805, as the Directory regime assumed control of the state, participants and partisans of events from 1789-1805 began to identify as revolutionaries [2].  

While the events of the French Revolution were spontaneous and unpredictable, after it ended its witnesses came to understand the process as a goal that can be imagined, sought, and achieved.

Like the physicist’s definition of revolution, modernity’s politicised reinterpretation signifies an action that is at once novel and a repetition.

French revolutionaries saw themselves as courageously forging a new social order, yet destruction of the French monarchy also represented something like a return to a Rousseauian ‘state of nature’ [3], that is, before the development of aristocratic hierarchies.  In the struggle for a fundamentally more free and equal society, humanity retraces many of it’s steps.

Sense of reality

Of course, the French Revolution was just one crashing wave in a typhoon of revolutionary activity during the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Popular revolts demanding equality, fraternity, and liberty sprang up all along the global routes of mercantile colonisation.

In the French colony of Saint-Dominique, former slaves outmaneuvered the newborn French regime in what became the world’s first and to-date only ‘successful’ slave revolt: the Haitian Revolution.

Yet the Caribbean also experienced uprisings in Cuba and Trinidad. Europe, meanwhile, witnessed serious attempts to overthrow aristocracies in Belgium, Denmark, Switzerland, and Poland.

In South America, colonial planters and traders overthrew the Spanish and Portuguese monarchies, yet soon saw their fledgling nation-states facing fierce peasant and indigenous resistance.

Revolutionaries across the ‘new’ and ‘old’ world alike proved that human beings can alter our shared sense of reality and transform the institutions which govern everyday life.

Powerful forces

The late 19th and early 20th century witnessed the ascendance of elite-driven ‘liberalism’ as the prevailing order. Revolution as a concept once again developed and expanded.

Socialists like Karl Marx and Mikhail Bakunin recognised that revolution took place not only through the replacement of political regimes, but also through the production of goods and the provisioning of basic needs. Socialism rejected bourgeois ‘representation’, wage labor, and nation-state territorialism in favour of internationalism, cooperative labor, and solidarity.

International socialism refined the meaning of revolution as part of a long-term process of social development. Here, themes of evolution and return appear once again.

Socialists referred to indigenous, small-scale, and peasant societies as ‘primitive communism’ which in many ways prefigured the principles of a socialist society. Socialist revolution would represent both a step forward for human development, as well as a return to communitarian sensibilities and social ties.

Unfortunately, 19th century mechanistic ways of thinking contributed to revolution’s undoing during this era. Fatally, so-called ‘scientific’ socialism presumed that if one could only discover the “laws” of revolution, one could predict and even control it.

Lenin took this deterministic outlook to a disastrous extreme; the Russian Revolution collapsing into dogmatic, tyrannical state rule. Although the classic revolutionary Left advanced powerful forces against capitalism, it ultimately failed to realise its noble aim by robbing revolutionary philosophy of creativity, relationality, and open-endedness.  

Ecologising revolution

Fortunately, social movements of the 21st century are bringing about a new paradigm of social change. And this paradigm brings some of ecology’s best qualities to the table. It’s important to reflect on these qualities because they can help everyday people grasp the great importance of revolutionary transformation.

First, an ecological revolution will mobilise holistic and mutualistic ways of thinking about society and nature. Nature is not a static entity, but rather a history of organic phenomena that is ever-developing in a cumulative and interdependent way.

Nature as such cannot be dominated. It is no accident that indigenous, peasant, and women-centered ways of thinking share a mutualistic outlook toward the natural world.

For most of human history, people have realised the interdependent nature of people and our environment. In fact, the idea that ‘man’ might aspire to one day control nature became widespread only very recently with emergence of 19th century industrialism.

As libertarian socialist Murray Bookchin puts it, the very idea of humans dominating nature stems from the real domination of human by human.

Attention to scale

For this reason, an ecological revolution means foregrounding humanity’s recovery of mutualistic and communal bonds—beginning with our ourselves and extending up to the level of global solidarity.

While environmental and ecology movements of the 20th century largely focused on redefining how humans relate to nature, the 21st century’s plunge into climate crisis means we must really focus on how humans relate to each other.

People are coming to recognise that systems of social exploitation such as sexism, colonization, and class share the same sensibility, logic, and organisational structure of the forces that profess to ‘rationalise’ and discipline the natural world.

Thus, hierarchical arrangements like the boss-worker, patriarch-family, buyer-seller relationship must be replaced with relationships that are voluntary, participatory, and mutually enriching.

Ecology’s attention to scale is essential to this process. Today, top-down systems of domination create social worlds that are flat, monolithic, and gargantuan.

Historically remarkable

A free society, on the other hand, would strive toward the creation of cultural and economic nodes and networks that differentiate incrementally. Just like natural ecosystems, social diversity creates stability and balance.

But it is important to remember that people and institutions which constitute and defend capitalism are not going to hand over the keys to the future willingly.

An ecological revolution requires not only a world without capitalism, but also a world without states. In fact, for millennia, states have been enforcing depletion of natural ecosystems in the service of aristocrats and elites.

The ecological degradation of ancient times so often blamed on ‘agriculture’ more accurately can be seen as product of states which abused agriculture to support their expansion.

Although it may seem that states are natural or inevitable, nothing could be further from the truth. They are fragile entities. Not so long ago, even in Europe states had relatively little control over their subjects. What’s historically remarkable is that the state—and capitalism as its progeny—are now embedding themselves so deeply in the realm of everyday life.

In this way, a truly ecological transformation requires the redefinition politics at the local, grassroots level. Social movements around the world are already taking up this task.

Groups like Coalizione Civica in Bologna, Italy, Barcelona en Comu and La CUP in Catalonia, Cooperation Jackson and Olympia Assembly in the United States, the Democratic Federation of Northern Syria, and Reclaim the City, in Capetown, South Africa, and many more today are effectively laboratories where people are collectively experimenting with directly-democratic and participatory decision-making that empowers society’s most marginalized.

Conclusion  

In every era, the definition of revolution changes and expands. And these changes are part of human beings deepening our self-knowledge as a species.

Today, we are coming to understand —really understand— that neither humans nor nature thrive under systems based on domination and hierarchy. The climate crisis, a product of capitalist exploitation and nation-state domination, is a painful testament to this.

Revolution toward a directly democratic society represents both a return to humanity’s communal roots, as well as a progressive step into realms of scientific, philosophical, and cultural discovery beyond our current conceptual horizons.

Just as the Enlightenment revolutions were closely tied to the development of secular sciences like optics and astronomy, the gradational and relational logic of ecology today provides the conceptual basis of a truly democratic transformation.

Revolution in the 21st century advances natural evolution not only in content, but in form. Our time is now.

This Author

This article was written by Eleanor Finley (@EleanorFinley16).

[1] James and Grace Lee Boggs. 1974. Notes on Revolution and Evolution. Monthly Review Press.

[2] Baker and Edelstein. 2015. Scripting Revolution: A Historical Approach to the Comparative Study of Revolutions. Stanford University Press.  

[3] To read more about the definition and development of hierarchy, read Symbiosis Research Collective’s second installment “Hierarchy, climate change and the state of nature”  by Katie Horvath, Mason Herson-Hord and Aaron Vansintjan.

The UK should be prepared to relax EU rules on food standards and chemical safety as part of a new trading relationship with India, according to an unreleased report by the British and Indian governments.

The official joint trade review – obtained by Unearthed despite the UK government’s refusal to release it  – spotlights a range of non-tariff barriers to trade identified by Indian businesses, including limits on fungicides in basmati rice, the enforcement of food hygiene standards for milk and dairy products such as paneer and the use of hormone-disrupting chemicals across a range of non-food products.

The list – drafted by the Indian ministry of commerce – stops short of demanding the rules be removed after Brexit, instead suggesting flexibility in how and when they are applied to meet the needs of exporters.

Trade links

The review, which also focused on life sciences and information technology, was described by the British government as a key text for the new UK-India trade partnership announced in April at the Commonwealth summit.

Speaking at the event, international trade secretary Liam Fox claimed that “removing barriers to trade is a key way the UK can capitalise on the predicted growth in world markets”. He repeated the claim when speaking in India last month.

Despite numerous public references to the review by Fox, the British government refused to provide the document following an Unearthed freedom of information request.

The Indian government, however, complied with a parallel right to information request.

A spokesperson for British department of international trade said: “As we leave the EU, we will forge new and ambitious trade links around the world, while also maintaining our high standards on animal welfare and food safety.

“The joint trade review’s findings underline the continued strength of the bilateral relationship between the UK and India, and we are committed to driving forward this mutually beneficial trading arrangement. This includes in the food and drink sector where we are working together on a sector-based roadmap to reduce trade barriers.”

The Indian government failed to respond to a request for comment

White paper

The UK would be unable to address India’s key complaints in the trade review under the terms of its proposed Brexit white paper, experts have told Unearthed.

“Theresa May’s Chequers’ proposal would prevent the UK from making concessions to India in all areas related to plant and animal health, as it would continue to be bound to the application of the EU’s regime,” according to Sam Lowe, trade analyst for the Centre for European Reform.

“The UK would not be able to take a different approach on REACH [Europe’s chemical regulation regime] or on endocrine disrupting chemicals. It would still be required to perform physical inspections on 50% of imported Indian shrimp.”

The report

The first part of the 52-page review is effectively a statistics-driven overview of the countries’ current and potential trading relationship, but the second section lists ‘issues faced’ by British and Indian businesses in their ‘sectors of interest.’

The UK is not allowed to begin negotiating trade agreements with countries until it has formally left the EU in 2019, and the language of the report is not explicit about a post-Brexit agreement nor about the EU laws the UK could cease to follow.

The report’s conclusion notes, “the UK’s existing framework as an EU member state means that many issues remains within EU competence”. But it devotes pages upon pages to complaints concerning trade barriers that stem from European law.

The final recommendations are far from concrete, and instead amount to repeated suggestions to increased dialogue on how the issues can be addressed.

Out of REACH

According to the chapter on non-tariff trade barriers written by Indian policymakers, the main issues concern the EU’s limits on the trace amounts of pesticides in food products, its restrictions on hormone-disrupting chemicals, and the burden of its complex REACH chemical regulations.

The EU’s limits on the amount of chemical residue found in food products is clearly a source of aggravation to Indian businesses, who describe complications complying with rules on a range of exports:

• Trace amounts of of fungicide in basmati rice
• Growth retarding chemicals in grapes
• Aflatoxins in chillies and spices
• Antibiotics in fish products
• Food hygiene standards at processing plants involved in milk products such as paneer

Another key complaint relates to the EU’s attempts to regulate hormone-altering chemicals known as endocrine disruptors in non-food products such as toys, with 34 of the 69 products impacted said to have a direct effect on India.

And then there’s REACH, the EU’s vast and complex regulatory regime for chemicals, that India has frequently challenged at the World Trade Organisation.

The report states that: “Indian exporters experience various difficulties in complying with REACH” and then goes on to list its long-held bugbears.

Michael Warhurst, executive director at the ChemTrust, told Unearthed: “The difficulty that Indian exporters face in complying with EU rules on imported products should not be grounds for the UK to reduce standards of protection of human health and the environment.”

The report cites an assortment of other complaints with a range of EU rules, such as lead limits in jewellery.

Political turmoil

The release of the report comes at a pivotal moment in the UK’s separation from the European Union, as the British government officialises the type of Brexit it will pursue in its long-awaited white paper.

The current proposal, which would see alignment with EU standards on goods and agri-food but not services, has triggered an uproar from the pro-Brexit press and key figures, leading to the resignation of David Davis and Boris Johnson and several less-known ministers.

But other key ministers – including Fox – remain in place, with the UK still nominally committed to a policy of signing trade deals with countries around the world.

The report will lead to an increased focus on how much flexibility the UK will now have to meet demands from India and other nations regarding chemical and food import standards.

This Article

This article first appeared at Unearthed.

The oil company Shell remained remarkably static in its proposed solutions to climate change even as its understanding of the science developed, according to a DeSmog UK analysis of internal documents and other sources recently discovered.  

DeSmog UK has previously reported on a tranche of documents first unearthed by Jelmer Mommers of De Correspondent published on Climate Files, that reveal Shell knew about the causes and impacts of climate change since at least the 1980s.

The sources also reveal how Shell uses trade associations to gain privileged access to the annual UNFCCC climate negotiations, despite the organisations’ professed independence.

Newly uncovered

It called for governments to work out a system of “tradeable emissions permits” — a reference a carbon market where companies can buy permits to emit if they go over their allowance and sell any permits they may have spare if they emit under their allowance.

While a carbon price and wide-reaching carbon markets could help cut emissions, analysis from campaigners at NGO Corporate Accountability International suggests they currently just “displace attention from real solutions”.

They argue that while the markets could work in principle, in practice they consistently failed – preserving the status quo, with the EU’s much maligned emissions trading scheme is an oft-cited example.

More recently, the calls for carbon pricing and markets have been combined with pleas for greater investment in carbon capture and storage technology (CCS), which sucks emissions out the air and locks them away. The technology theoretically allows fossil fuels to be burned without harming the climate, but it remains unproven at scale.

In a document newly uncovered by DeSmog UK, a Shell analyst, Wolf Heidug, presented the case for CCS at a panel during the UN’s annual climate meeting in Montreal in 2005.

Energy demand

In his presentation, he expressed concern that CCS was considered “less desirable” than solutions that didn’t fit with Shell’s business model — including “energy efficiency improvements” and “use of non-fossil energy sources”.

Heidug made his presentation at an event to introduce the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s new special report on CCS, on which he was an author, and which counted three Shell employees among the reviewers.

This approach — calling for the roll out of carbon pricing and markets, while investing in CCS, and continuing to burn fossil fuels in the name of ‘development’ — persisted for another decade.

In a 2014 presentation by David Hone, Shell’s chief climate change advisor, newly uncovered by DeSmog UK, one slide points out that CCS is necessary because without it the world will have to “stop using fossil fuels”.

“But what about growing energy demand”, it pointedly asks.

Alleviate poverty

Another presentation in 2014, by Tim Bertels, Shell’s Head of CCS, has a slide echoing many of the concerns Heidug had raised almost a decade before. “Public Support Must Be Addressed”.

It suggests this could be done through “transparency on the options available to reduce GHG emissions, and their costs” — possibly a reference to a need to talk about the costs of renewable technologies.

Shell’s lobbying for this approach was in full force ahead of the landmarket Paris climate change conference in 2015.

In a letter from Shell and five other fossil fuel companies to the UN Climate chief and president of Paris meeting, the companies called for “a price on carbon” to be a “key element” of the eventual Paris Agreement.  The letter also promoted “increased investment in carbon capture and storage”:

The company’s call for such schemes is normally accompanied by the assertion that fossil fuels will remain a crucial part of the energy system for decades to come, mainly as a means to alleviate poverty.

As Mark Moody-Stuart, Managing Director of Shell Transport and Trading Company told the Society of Petroleum Engineers in 1994: “Renewable energy sources, even under the most favourable scenario, cannot offer a realistic, economic alternative to fossil fuels for at least several decades. Nor, of course, are renewables by any means universally environmentally benign.”

This attitude persisted for more than a decade, with a newly uncovered internal magazine framing the climate change problem ahead of the landmark Copenhagen climate conference in 2009 as one of providing “affordable energy” and cutting emissions. And Shell persists with this approach today.

Greatest potential

The company denies that it had any special knowledge about climate science that meant it should have changed its behaviour earlier. And it continues to assert that fossil fuels are justified as a means to alleviate energy poverty.

A spokesperson for Shell told DeSmog UK: “We have long recognised the climate challenge and the essential role of energy in driving the world’s economy, raising living standards and improving lives. Yet there are still over 1 billion people in the world without safe, reliable access to energy or the basic benefits it provides.

“Society therefore faces a dual challenge of meeting growing demand for energy, while at the same time transitioning to a lower carbon world”.

Why is Shell continuing to lobby the international negotiations to adopt this solution today, despite 20 years of failure?

Corporate Accountability’s reports say that even in 2018, fossil fuel company’s emphasis on carbon markets and CCS at the negotiations distracts from “the meaningful, real solutions that harbor the greatest potential to justly curb the climate crisis.”

Trade Associations as Front Groups

Despite Shell and other fossil fuel companies’ clear economic incentive to slow the progress of action on climate change, they continue to get privileged access to the talks through trade associations.

As early as 1996, Shell was tracking the international negotiations and research from the scientific advisors to the process, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), closely. In a document summarising the IPCC’s major second assessment report, the company pledged to continue to have its say in the international climate negotiations using trade associations.

Futhermore, in a 1998 document titled, “Climate change: What does Shell think and do about it?”, it points to the “positive contribution” the company had on international negotiations through such groups. The groups named by Shell in the 1990s are still participating in the UN Climate conferences today.

Both the International Petroleum Industry Environmental Conservation Association (IPIECA) and the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) are “official observers” to the UN Climate conferences, meaning they are allowed inside the main negotiating area.

IPIECA’s website claims it “does not lobby on behalf of the industry, but aims to increase understanding and provide timely information to members and key stakeholders”. But Shell’s decades-long commitment to having its voice heard through the organisation — as revealed in the documents — would appear to contradict this.

Entirely illegitimate

WBCSD is less cautious. Its website says: “We aim to be the global voice of forward-thinking business in influential international forums, particularly in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).” This includes providing resources for policy makers, including a guide on ‘Why Carbon Pricing Matters’.

Both organisations have been on campaigners’ radar for years. Corporate has long asserted that such groups allow fossil fuel companies to become “deeply embedded in the treaty process”.

Jesse Bragg, media director for Corporate Accountability, told DeSmog UK: “Unfortunately, these findings just reinforce what the movement to kick Big Polluters out has been pointing out for years: these trade association are just doing the bidding of the world’s dirtiest polluters.

“It also bolsters the call from governments to initiate a process within the UNFCCC to finally address the undue influence of groups like IPIECA and WBCSD in climate policy.

Such findings give governments all the proof they need to show IPIECA, WBCSD and other trade associations representing Big Polluters the door. Their participation in the UNFCCC is entirely illegitimate and is at odds with the objectives of both the IPCCand the UNFCCC.”

The documents show Shell knew about the dangers of climate change for decades, and has had privileged access to the UNClimate negotiations from their inception outset. Yet, the company has continued to push an unworkable solution for more than 20 years— all while continuing to extract and sell the fossil fuels driving the climate crisis.

This Author

Mat Hope is editor of DeSmog UK, where this article first appeared with extracts from the documents cited.

When people argue against taking action to fight climate change, they usually cite the economic impacts of such measures. Yes, fighting climate change does cost money, but the financial implications of letting it go unchecked could eventually be much worse.

Recent research found that for every degree Fahrenheit that global temperatures rise, the US could loss around 0.7 percent of its Gross Domestic Product. Part of what makes this situation complicated is that much of these costs won’t be visible for many years and won’t be distributed evenly among geographical regions and sectors of society.

It also might not be obvious that climate change caused some of these costs. Natural disasters, for example, will be a prominent cause of economic damage due to rising global temperatures. Let’s take a look at just how much these catastrophic natural events may cost.

Large-Scale Storms

In recent times, billion-dollar hurricanes such as Harvey, Irma and Sandy have devastated various parts of the US. These kinds of events have been increasing in frequency, and if climate change continues to progress, they’re only going to become more common.

While hurricanes are not expected to become more frequent overall, scientists do believe they will become more intense and will last longer in the future.

Other storms, such as tornados, hailstorms and thunderstorms, may follow similar patterns, further adding to the economic damage.

Warmer ocean temperatures lead to stronger hurricanes, so as ocean temperatures continue to rise, the formation of stronger storms becomes more likely. Increasing water vapor in the air due to increased air temperatures also gives hurricanes additional fuel.

The rising sea levels could also make hurricanes more destructive, as the storms will have a higher starting point, enabling them to reach further inland.

Heat Waves

In some areas, the frequency of heat waves has been increasing. The US set twice as many record highs over the last decade than record lows. In the past, the ratio was about one to one.

Some of these heat waves have led to costly droughts. At the peak of the drought in 2012, 81 percent of the contiguous US was experiencing unusually dry conditions. In 2011, Texas had its driest 12 months ever.

Heat waves cause significant human health risks, especially to the elderly. They also increase demand for energy, which exacerbates the rise of global temperatures if energy is generated using fossil fuels.

Droughts and heat waves can harm various industries, especially agriculture. In extreme droughts, crops wither. Livestock may also experience heat stress, which, in cattle, decreases milk production.

When droughts occur, the electricity sector may have an especially hard time meeting the increased demand caused by heat waves, as many plants require cooling water, and hydroelectric generation may run dry.

Massive Floods

Conversely, flooding may increase in other regions, even if total precipitation declines there.

Floods can be both costly and deadly. Damage to property and crops in the US averaged around eight billion dollars per year from 1981 to 2011. From 1959 to 2005, floods caused 4,586 deaths in the U.S.

Rather than increasing total rainfall, climate change may increase the frequency of instances of very heavy precipitation. In the Northeastern United States, for example, the heaviest storms produce 67 percent more rain than they did 50 years ago.

The reason for this change is that warmer air holds more moisture, so as global temperatures increase, so does heavy rainfall during precipitation events.

If emissions remain at current levels, scientists predict that precipitation during the heaviest events will increase by around 40 percent by the end of the century.

Winter Storms

Skeptics sometimes use the occurrence of extreme winter storms to question whether climate change is real, but scientists say that it could actually be causing more extreme winter storms.

Like with rain, weather like snowfall, hail and other forms of winter precipitation rely on moisture in the air, which climate change is increasing.

Another factor that could be contributing to the growing number of severe winter storms is the North American winter temperature dipole, a winter weather pattern that causes temperatures in the West to be abnormally warm and those in the East to be abnormally cold.

Research suggests that, as greenhouse gas emission increase, the dipole is becoming more common. Over time, though, global warming is expected to reduce the contrast between east and west and temper the effects of winter weather overall.

A warmer, moister atmosphere in the winter could also increase the strength of cyclones. Scientists emphasise, though, that changes in weather do not necessarily mean changes in climate and that the link between winter storms and climate change is especially tricky to decipher.

Devastating Wildfires

Wildfires have become more common in the Western United States. Today, US wildfires burn twice as much area as they did in 1970, and the average wildfire season has extended by 78 days.

Scientists project that this trend will continue if global temperatures continue to rise. For every one degree Celsius of temperature increase, the median areas burned each year could increase by 600 percent for some forest types. The hot and dry conditions caused by rising temperatures increase wildfire risk and make it easier for fires to spread.

Increases in the area burned would increase the already-high costs of forest fires. Since 2000, the US has experienced 11 billion-dollars in fires. As forests cover about a quarter of the land in North America, or about 500 million hectares, the potential for damage from wildfires is immense.

These fires have heavy consequences, from the destruction of homes, other facilities and infrastructure to the costs of fighting the fire. Wildfires can also cause substantial injury and loss of life.

Climate change can cost us in many different ways. One prominent way is through the increasing frequency and intensity of natural disasters. To protect against this damage from natural disasters, we need to take steps to mitigate and stop climate change today.

This Author

Emily Folk is a conservation and sustainability writer and the editor of Conservation Folks.

There is a rhythm in everything. All our attempts to understand systems are, in a way, attempts to experience the rhythm through which they change and develop.

Nothing exists in isolation. A system must, as Ilya Prigogine pointed out, be  ‘open’ to its environment, which it exchanges matter and energy – for example, a local ecosystem is part of the earth system – and this enables it to build its structures.

Once you’ve managed to build a structure which is stable, that’s pleasing and reassuring … but only up to a point, because if your system becomes too stable, it will be ossified and die. 

Forest ecosystem

Hence the importance of criticality, the capacity to access, when required, the creative edge of chaos. This makes it possible to undertake phase transition: once you’ve exhausted the potential of one phase, you must be bold enough to embark on a new one.

To tell the story of a system’s history is therefore a bit like scripting a TV drama series across several episodes: each episode follows a similar pattern (tension-resolution etc.), so in this sense our series is cyclical and repetitive.

But there’s an overall story-arc … and, crucially, not a deterministic one. Each episode is similar in structure, different in content!

For this reason, development tends to proceed through waves or cycles … moving from order, through disorder, then back to a new order.

For a natural ecology – e.g. a forest ecosystem – this was nicely depicted by C.S. Holling: each cycle comprises four episodes, “exploitation, conservation, release and reorganisation”.

Beginnings of imperialism

In a similar way, human systems have historically built their structures, nourishing these through a relationship of exchange with the wider earth-system, and developing through cycles.

What about capitalism? Its relationship to the environment is peculiar, because the structures it builds are fuelled by depleting it, thus undermining the basis of future development.

Hence, the periodic regeneration of nature – highlighted in Holling’s cycles – is blocked by the regeneration – reproduction – of capitalism.

Capitalism is nonetheless a real system, so it shouldn’t surprise us to encounter a cyclical pattern. 

In particular, since roughly the beginnings of imperialism (around 1900), several commentators have identified ‘long cycles’ – each lasting maybe three decades or so).

Social exploitation

Attempts to classify these are somewhat scholastic, and we needn’t enter into details, but the ‘wave’ theories developed in the 1920s by Russian economist Nikolai Kondratiev provide a good example.

I was fascinated to notice that, like Holling, Kondratiev divides each wave into four parts: “recovery, prosperity, recession, depression”.

While this terminology differs from Holling’s, the basic idea is surely similar: systems flourish, then get stuck, break apart and eventually regenerate.  Joseph Schumpeter’s term ‘creative destruction’ strikingly captures this.

But of course what’s being ‘destroyed’ is not merely the structures of the previous phase, but the environment itself.  Capitalist phase-transitions are funded by an unrestricted degradation of energy/materials and ejection of waste; each successive cycle simply found new ways of doing this.

The structures fuelled by environmental degradation also serve to degrade society … this, I would say, is a clue to the deep connection between ecological and social exploitation.

Deeper re-alignment

To correct the technological determinism of some ‘wave’ theories,  I earlier explored  the following representation.

Here, the ‘high’ episodes are ones where the system runs smoothly (good for capitalism but bad for the environment!); the down phases are ones of crisis … when both environment and society somehow assert their resistance:

That diagram was drawn up three years ago, but a lot has changed since. So, in the continuum of cycles, where do we stand today?

A new cycle fuelled (like previous ones) from environmental destruction would be unthinkable. So there’s an argument that we are approaching a new, green Kondratiev .

But this fudges the key question: can it be a form of capitalism? Lovins and others believed so, but  I would rather say the new phase must signify a deeper re-alignment of human society, a kind of ‘creative destruction’ of capitalism itself.

Death throes

The fuelling for this would no longer be environmental degradation, but rather the free energies unleashed by human creativity and social networks, as we explore the vocabulary of a new, sustainable exchange with the ecosystem.

Nonetheless, precursors of a post-capitalist order would necessarily emerge while the old one is still in place … and may in many cases initially occur under the guise of adjustments within capitalism.

Let’s consider one key parameter of a green future: energy. As Prigogine and Isabel Stengers say, systems approaching phase change “seem to ‘hesitate’ among various possible directions of evolution …”.

And indeed our system has seemed, very recently, to oscillate in its attitude to energy.

When oil prices are high this is conducive to renewables, whereas when they are low, this dis-incentivises the costly and dodgy techniques (fracking, tarsands) invented to stave off peak oil. This has lead Fred Pearce to remark: “Maybe we are seeing the death throes of our addiction to fossil fuels”.

Movement of communities

Could this fluctuation resolve itself into a post-carbon order? Arguably, 2015 marked a turning point, and since then, the renewables transition may have acquired an intrinsic momentum, which no longer depends upon policy intervention (i.e. Trump can’t stop it).

While this is encouraging, I would still say an explicit critique of capitalism is needed. Otherwise we’d lose the window of opportunity to push for a more profound phase-change.

The impetus for this must come from a deep mobilisation of society, which can’t happen if the vast majority is marginalised. So we must find a way to ensure that the renewables transition directly contributes to social equity.

For example, in California , the solar transition creates many jobs – even in some instances strengthening trade unionism – while revenues from renewables can be invested in communities which historically suffered environmental degradation.

At the same time, it’s important to treat solar not just in a top-down, technocentric way, but as a movement of communities. 

This was already demonstrated in an interesting project in India, the Barefoot College, which has spread its influence globally, notably by inspiring similar projects in London.

These are examples of what’s beginning to be spoken of as ‘just transition’.  The concept is important. But crucially, environmental justice is not about being charitably ‘kind’ to deprived communities: it’s about recognising and respecting them as the driving force for radical phase-change.

This Author

Dr Robert Biel teaches political ecology at University College London and is the author of The New Imperialism and The Entropy of Capitalism. He specialises in international political economy, systems theory, sustainable development and urban agriculture.

There is a rhythm in everything. All our attempts to understand systems are, in a way, attempts to experience the rhythm through which they change and develop.

Nothing exists in isolation. A system must, as Ilya Prigogine pointed out, be  ‘open’ to its environment, which it exchanges matter and energy – for example, a local ecosystem is part of the earth system – and this enables it to build its structures.

Once you’ve managed to build a structure which is stable, that’s pleasing and reassuring … but only up to a point, because if your system becomes too stable, it will be ossified and die. 

Forest ecosystem

Hence the importance of criticality, the capacity to access, when required, the creative edge of chaos. This makes it possible to undertake phase transition: once you’ve exhausted the potential of one phase, you must be bold enough to embark on a new one.

To tell the story of a system’s history is therefore a bit like scripting a TV drama series across several episodes: each episode follows a similar pattern (tension-resolution etc.), so in this sense our series is cyclical and repetitive.

But there’s an overall story-arc … and, crucially, not a deterministic one. Each episode is similar in structure, different in content!

For this reason, development tends to proceed through waves or cycles … moving from order, through disorder, then back to a new order.

For a natural ecology – e.g. a forest ecosystem – this was nicely depicted by C.S. Holling: each cycle comprises four episodes, “exploitation, conservation, release and reorganisation”.

Beginnings of imperialism

In a similar way, human systems have historically built their structures, nourishing these through a relationship of exchange with the wider earth-system, and developing through cycles.

What about capitalism? Its relationship to the environment is peculiar, because the structures it builds are fuelled by depleting it, thus undermining the basis of future development.

Hence, the periodic regeneration of nature – highlighted in Holling’s cycles – is blocked by the regeneration – reproduction – of capitalism.

Capitalism is nonetheless a real system, so it shouldn’t surprise us to encounter a cyclical pattern. 

In particular, since roughly the beginnings of imperialism (around 1900), several commentators have identified ‘long cycles’ – each lasting maybe three decades or so).

Social exploitation

Attempts to classify these are somewhat scholastic, and we needn’t enter into details, but the ‘wave’ theories developed in the 1920s by Russian economist Nikolai Kondratiev provide a good example.

I was fascinated to notice that, like Holling, Kondratiev divides each wave into four parts: “recovery, prosperity, recession, depression”.

While this terminology differs from Holling’s, the basic idea is surely similar: systems flourish, then get stuck, break apart and eventually regenerate.  Joseph Schumpeter’s term ‘creative destruction’ strikingly captures this.

But of course what’s being ‘destroyed’ is not merely the structures of the previous phase, but the environment itself.  Capitalist phase-transitions are funded by an unrestricted degradation of energy/materials and ejection of waste; each successive cycle simply found new ways of doing this.

The structures fuelled by environmental degradation also serve to degrade society … this, I would say, is a clue to the deep connection between ecological and social exploitation.

Deeper re-alignment

To correct the technological determinism of some ‘wave’ theories,  I earlier explored  the following representation.

Here, the ‘high’ episodes are ones where the system runs smoothly (good for capitalism but bad for the environment!); the down phases are ones of crisis … when both environment and society somehow assert their resistance:

That diagram was drawn up three years ago, but a lot has changed since. So, in the continuum of cycles, where do we stand today?

A new cycle fuelled (like previous ones) from environmental destruction would be unthinkable. So there’s an argument that we are approaching a new, green Kondratiev .

But this fudges the key question: can it be a form of capitalism? Lovins and others believed so, but  I would rather say the new phase must signify a deeper re-alignment of human society, a kind of ‘creative destruction’ of capitalism itself.

Death throes

The fuelling for this would no longer be environmental degradation, but rather the free energies unleashed by human creativity and social networks, as we explore the vocabulary of a new, sustainable exchange with the ecosystem.

Nonetheless, precursors of a post-capitalist order would necessarily emerge while the old one is still in place … and may in many cases initially occur under the guise of adjustments within capitalism.

Let’s consider one key parameter of a green future: energy. As Prigogine and Isabel Stengers say, systems approaching phase change “seem to ‘hesitate’ among various possible directions of evolution …”.

And indeed our system has seemed, very recently, to oscillate in its attitude to energy.

When oil prices are high this is conducive to renewables, whereas when they are low, this dis-incentivises the costly and dodgy techniques (fracking, tarsands) invented to stave off peak oil. This has lead Fred Pearce to remark: “Maybe we are seeing the death throes of our addiction to fossil fuels”.

Movement of communities

Could this fluctuation resolve itself into a post-carbon order? Arguably, 2015 marked a turning point, and since then, the renewables transition may have acquired an intrinsic momentum, which no longer depends upon policy intervention (i.e. Trump can’t stop it).

While this is encouraging, I would still say an explicit critique of capitalism is needed. Otherwise we’d lose the window of opportunity to push for a more profound phase-change.

The impetus for this must come from a deep mobilisation of society, which can’t happen if the vast majority is marginalised. So we must find a way to ensure that the renewables transition directly contributes to social equity.

For example, in California , the solar transition creates many jobs – even in some instances strengthening trade unionism – while revenues from renewables can be invested in communities which historically suffered environmental degradation.

At the same time, it’s important to treat solar not just in a top-down, technocentric way, but as a movement of communities. 

This was already demonstrated in an interesting project in India, the Barefoot College, which has spread its influence globally, notably by inspiring similar projects in London.

These are examples of what’s beginning to be spoken of as ‘just transition’.  The concept is important. But crucially, environmental justice is not about being charitably ‘kind’ to deprived communities: it’s about recognising and respecting them as the driving force for radical phase-change.

This Author

Dr Robert Biel teaches political ecology at University College London and is the author of The New Imperialism and The Entropy of Capitalism. He specialises in international political economy, systems theory, sustainable development and urban agriculture.