MPs are due to vote tomorrow on whether to ratify the UK-EU Draft Withdrawal Agreement. If they choose to ratify, the environmental implications will be huge. Yet the topic has been almost entirely absent from public political and media discussion.

This matters because it is the UK’s membership of the Common Market – and its successor organisations – since 1972 that has driven an ever-reluctant Britain out of its former role as the ‘dirty man of Europe’ into the its current state – not as good as we should be, but with some claim at least to environmental respectability.

Performance on nature conservation, air pollution, water quality, toxic chemicals, renewable energy and climate change has changed immeasurably for the better, and it’s vital to make sure that Brexit does not reverse that trend.

Detrimental divergence

Okay, Michael Gove, the environment secretary,  has made some very promising speeches on his commitment to a “green Brexit”. But who knows how long he will stay in his job?

We also face the threat of a future trade deal with the USA which would force UK farmers into competition with US producers subject to a regulatory regime much weaker on environmental and animal welfare issues than applies in the EU. This would lead to overwhelming pressure to lower standards in the UK.

One of the few ways in which the UK’s environmental performance can be assured long into the future is by incorporating binding links to EU laws and standards into a binding international treaty, complete with strong and effective enforcement mechanisms. While the Draft Agreement that will come before MPs tomorrow would be a lot better than a ‘no-deal Brexit’, it fails to provide the long term reassurance on the environment that we desperately need.

As you read the Agreement text, it appears reassuring. It says at Annex IV, Article 2 that UK environmental law must continue to comply with most EU environmental law after Brexit, based on a snapshot of the law at the end of the transition period. OK, that’s better than nothing, but it’s not as good as it looks. For a start UK and EU environmental law can diverge after that, and experience suggests that any such divergence will be detrimental.

And while the list of matters covered by Article 2 looks exhaustive, it isn’t.

Genome editing

Here’s what it does include: “access to environmental information, public participation and access to justice in environmental matters; environmental impact assessment and strategic environmental assessment; industrial emissions; air emissions and air quality targets and ceilings; nature and biodiversity conservation; waste management; the protection and preservation of the aquatic environment; the protection and preservation of the marine environment; the prevention, reduction and elimination of risks to human health or the environment arising from the production, use, release and disposal of chemical substances; and climate change.”

So what’s missing? While climate change is in there, there is nothing explicitly about energy. So goodbye renewable energy targets! The Government must be loving this, as it leaves them free to continue their disastrous ‘nuclear and fracking at all costs’ policies while rejecting the cleanest, lowest cost technologies like onshore wind and solar, and failing to deliver on energy efficiency in homes, business and industry, much of which can be achieved at negative cost.

As pointed out by Greenpeace’s Unearthed, another glaring omission is “any reference to food standards, sanitary or phytosanitary rules, beyond a general commitment to retain the precautionary principle”. And as far as Gove is concerned, he clearly thinks he has a green light to push forward with the widespread use of GMOs produced by gene-editing techniques like CRISPR.

Gove, according to The Times, told the Country Land and Business Association: “Even if there are individual lobby groups that express their legitimate concerns we will ensure those scientific tools are there for those who can improve productivity in a genuinely sustainable way. Gene editing allows us to give mother nature a helping hand, to accelerate the process of evolution in a way which can significantly increase yield and also reduce our reliance on chemicals and other input.”

The report in The Times continues: “Over the summer the European Court of Justice ruled that food resulting from genome editing would be regarded as genetically modified, which is outlawed in Europe. Mr Gove said that the agreement for leaving the European Union would allow the UK to make its own decision on the risks of gene editing.”

Independent arbitration

For the majority of the UK public who do not want to eat GMO foods, or the rising levels of herbicide residues that most of them contain, and who fear the further narrowing of the gene pool of the crops that sustain human existence, Gove’s vision of UK agriculture offers a truly terrifying prospect.

The Unearthed article adds further omissions from Article 2, which “mentions air quality targets but not limit values on the amount of pollution in a given period, which are more legally enforceable. It talks about pesticides, but not soil … “

Under the Draft Agreement the UK will no longer be subject to the European Court of Justice (ECJ) as the ultimate court of appeal. And the ECJ has been a vital protector of the UK environment over the years, most recently over the UK’s continuing failure to comply with the EU Air Quality Directive.

The ECJ’s rulings in favour of the environmental law charity ClientEarth over UK non-compliance have been essential in holding the government to account on this issue. Without the ECJ we would all be breathing much dirtier air in years to come.

Most disputes arising under the agreement are to be ruled on not by the ECJ – other than in interpreting EU law – but an independent arbitration panel (AP). In fact the AP appears to be an adequate substitute for the ECJ. But there’s a problem: most environmental disputes are specifically excluded from the AP’s jurisdiction!

Reassurance

As Article 2 states: “Articles 170 to 181 of the Withdrawal Agreement shall not apply in respect of disputes regarding the interpretation and application of this Article.”

Instead disputes over UK non-compliance on Article 2 matters are to be decided in UK courts, as set out in Article 3.1, which requires the UK to “ensure that administrative and judicial proceedings are available in order to permit effective and timely action by public authorities and members of the public against violations of its laws, regulations and practices, and provide for effective remedies, including interim measures, ensuring that any sanctions are effective, proportionate and dissuasive and have a real and deterrent effect.”

Superficially, this looks fine. But the obligations set out fall short of existing UK obligations under the Aarhus Convention, for example that environmental justice must be accessible at reasonable cost. After all, if the government raises the costs bar to an unaffordable level, that is very effective block to public access to the courts. How many of us are prepared to risk our homes to stand up for a point of environmental principle, however just?

We also know from bitter experience that UK judges cannot be relied up to uphold the law against government due to a bias in favour of the executive in some – thankfully not all – portions of the judiciary. For a recent example, see this article on Sir Ross Cranston’s counterfactual rejection of a recent High Court challenge to the legality of England’s badger cull.

And while the EU can take serious punitive actions – like fines and trade sanctions, as set out in Article 178 – following an AP judgment which has not been complied with, no such provision applies following a UK court judgment. Enforcement of Article 2 matters is therefore weak, and any reassurance the Article appears to offer is ill-founded.

Less powerful

The UK’s environment will also no longer enjoy the protection of the European Commission as ‘policeman’ and prosecutor for breaches of EU law. Instead Article 3.2 says the UK has to create its own environmental watchdog, which must be independent and adequately resourced, and to which the public can make complaints. But again, the language is weaker than it appears.

For example, the watchdog may only have the power to “request” information, not to demand it. Other requirements are vague, weak and hard to enforce: the body should have “all powers necessary to carry out its functions” and “shall have the right to bring a legal action before a competent court or tribunal in the United Kingdom in an appropriate judicial procedure, with a view to seeking an adequate remedy”. Which adds up, as Boris Johnson might put it, to “two thirds of diddly-squat”.

But most worrying is the brevity of the text and its lack of detail. Compare this to the July 2018 report by the House of Commons Environmental Audit Committee (EAC) critiquing the Government’s ‘25 Year Plan for the Environment’, with its exhaustive list of the qualities that would make the new environmental watchdog powerful, independent and effective, importantly including the requirement that if should be accountable to Parliament, not government.

Among the absences are the clear EAC requirements that the UK should:

• replace the one third of EU environmental legislation (air, waste, water, chemicals) that cannot be copied and pasted into UK law through the EU (Withdrawal) Act;
• Put into UK law the environmental principles that the UK has signed up to in international law and which are embodied in the European Treaties and include provisions for all public bodies to act in accordance with the principles;
• Put into UK law the commitments the UK signed up to at the 2015 Paris Climate Change Conference;

 

Future generations

This leaves the government free, at least as far as the Draft Agreement is concerned, to create an environmental regulator which is much less powerful, independent and well-resourced than we need for the vital job of holding government to account.

The fact that the government’s promised Environment Bill, which is intended to create the regulator, is already running seriously late, does little to engender confidence. In May we were promised that the Bill “will be published in the autumn”. Well it’s already mid-December, and there’s no sign of it yet.

It looks like the biggest block to Parliament’s ratification of the Draft Agreement tomorrow is the ‘Northern Ireland backstop’ which would see a long list of EU environmental and other laws (listed in Annex 5 of the Protocol on Ireland) remain in force in the Province, that would no longer apply elsewhere in the UK.

To the Brexiteers this is unfair on Northern Ireland. But from an environmental perspective, it’s unfair on the rest of us to be stripped of key protections that Northern Ireland will continue to enjoy.

One thing is for sure – the Draft Withdrawal Agreement is disappointingly weak on the environment and if it goes through we, future generations and the precious environment we inhabit will suffer as a result.

This Author

Oliver Tickell is an environmental journalist and campaigner, and a former editor of The Ecologist.

There has been much analysis of what Theresa May’s deal will mean for the economy – but virtually none on what it means for tackling our climate emergency.

With delegates meeting in Katowice for the COP24 climate conference, now seems like a good time to put this under the spotlight.

There is well documented evidence of the close links between climate denial and the Brexit campaign. Many of the individuals and organisations pushing climate scepticism are based at or around 55 Tufton Street in London – which has become synonymous with bogus charities and so-called think tanks pushing an extreme free market agenda.

Inconvenient regulations

Part of this agenda includes tearing up inconvenient regulations that protect the environment and workers’ rights and that tax the polluter. Key amongst these dodgy outfits is the Global Warming Policy Foundation, fronted by leading Brexiter Nigel Lawson.

But with the Brexit headbangers apparently losing out to a softer form of Brexit offered by Theresa May’s deal, do we need to worry about how the Withdrawal Agreement and Political Declaration will impact on climate policy?

Well, to the delight of hard Brexit climate sceptics, May’s deal presents an open goal for climate deregulation.

While the UK would have to comply with EU climate regulations during the transition period, the Political Declaration, which is supposed to guide our relationship with the EU beyond 2020, is effectively a blank canvass with no legal authority.

Clause 78 of the declaration states: “The future relationship should reaffirm the Parties’ commitments to international agreements to tackle climate change, including those which implement the UNFCCs on Climate Change, such as the Paris Agreement.”

Climate commitments

However, it seems perfectly feasible that the UK could backslide on other climate commitments made whilst we have been a member of the EU. This means, to the undoubted delight of regulation burning Brexiteers, that many climate and environmental rules could be revoked after Brexit.

Climate and environmental policies would be enforced by the UK’s own ‘green watchdog’. Under current government plans, this body would have no powers relating to climate change. Without any legal authority to impose its own sanctions it would merely be able to issue “advisory notices”.

The government has argued that climate change is already covered by the Climate Change Act 2008. But the UK is on track to miss its own targets under this Act, which is in any case outdated, as 80 percent reduction in greenhouse gases by 2050 will fail to meet the Paris Agreement ambition of 1.5C maximum warming.

The UK is also one of the worst offenders in the EU for flouting environmental rules. The European Court of Justice has ruled against the UK government 30 times. If the government are no longer accountable to the EU, and the new watchdog has no legal powers, who exactly will hold them to account?

But perhaps we need not fear; our knight in green armour, Michael Gove, will rush in to rescue climate policy as part of his green Brexit. As a leading Brexiter, Gove is compromised from the outset. He is part of the Tory Global Britain brigade; siding with those in 55 Tufton Street who believe in unfettered free trade.

Roulette wheel

The idea that deregulated turbo capitalism is in any way compatible with high environmental standards is a lie.

It seems clear that climate action for Gove amounts to vague talk of mitigation measures including flood defences, plans for agriculture, planting more trees and restoring peatlands. All worthy, but meanwhile the frackers and road and runway builders can continue with fossil fuel business as usual. 

But what else can we expect anyway from the Conservatives who received £2.5m in donations from the energy sector between 2010 and 2015, and who continue to throw money at the fossil fuel industry in the form of tax breaks for oil and gas exploration?

For the UK to leave the EU’s strong climate regulations with such limited knowledge of what the future regime might look like represents a huge risk.

The stakes are too high. The IPCC has made clear we have a small window of opportunity to tackle the biggest threat facing the future of life on earth. We cannot afford to gamble our climate on the Brexit roulette wheel. Which is exactly why a People’s Vote is not just a vote to save the country from a damaging Brexit, but also the planet from climate chaos. 

This Author 

Molly Scott Cato is a Green MEP for the South West of England. 

The Extinction Rebellion (XR) has rapidly made a name for itself – by way of unleashing an unprecedented scale of non-violent direct-action (NVDA) in London.

The first phase of protests came to a head with ‘Rebellion Day 2’, in which we marched on Downing Street and Buckingham Palace. The movement is internationalising. But what next for XR in the UK?

XR is starting to facilitate actions everywhere. Of course, the thing about the climate is that it is under threat by all manner of human activities. Most obviously, the way we grow our food, what industry does, and the way we travel.

Common future

The rebellion challenges oligarchy and neoliberal capitalism for their rank excess, and the political class for its deep lack of sincerity. But the changes that will be needed to arrest the collapse of our climate and biodiversity are now so huge that this movement is concerned with nothing less than changing our whole way of life. 

I live in Norwich. I’m a Reader in Philosophy at the University of East Anglia and I have thrown myself headfirst into this movement nationally – and also locally.

Our long-term aim is to create a situation in which the government can no longer ignore the determination of an increasingly large number of people to shift the world from a direct course towards climate calamity. That will only happen if the movement causes trouble everywhere, not just in London.

So, in places like Norwich – and I predict you will soon see the same happening across the country – some of us have started putting our bodies on the line for the sake of our common future.

Sham consultation

Last week, Norwich XR undertook its first NVDA. The Councils in Norfolk are determined to build a truly appalling new road, across a river that is a Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) and a Special Area of Conservation.

This road would of course be a contribution to increasing our nation’s carbon emissions at the very time we need to slash them. And it would threaten to help extinguish the area’s biodiversity.

Norfolk County Council is running a sham consultation, trying to get the public to fixate on which route should be built across the Wensum, rather than on whether the road should be built at all. It is quite obvious that building a new road like this is the height of absurdity, even insanity, at a time when the UN – which is actually highly conservative in such matters – is telling us that we need to halve our carbon emissions within a decade.

We occupied the consultation exhibition space in the centre of Norwich. We presented passers-by with genuine information instead, explaining why this road is the worst of all the dreadful road projects that have been proposed/built in Norfolk, and in particular why its climate-irresponsibility is absolute and unacceptable.

We effectively shut down the ‘consultation’ for three and a half hours. There were about 50 of us. Too many to easily deal with or intimidate. So, although the managers of the space threatened to call the police on us to force us to leave, in the end they appeared not to have done so. We were able to blockade the ‘consultation’ for the whole time.

Legitimate tactics

I was pleasantly surprised by the positive reaction we garnered from the vast majority of passers-by. I think that one reason is that we were not inconveniencing them (apart from a tiny handful who actually wanted to see the Council’s rubbish materials about the road ‘options’ – but we let them through). We were inconveniencing the powers that be.

I’d like to draw a general moral from that. I believe that XR actions ought to target politicians (local and national), civil servants, the authorities, big business, the very rich – not ordinary people.

Sure, shutting down roads is a perfectly legitimate tactic, because transport emissions are killing us, and still rising. But it is often not a very effective tactic – because it often annoys ordinary people. 

If we close down government departments, local Councils and parliament, executive offices, carbon-polluting factories and the like, we are far more likely to keep the broad mass of the public with us, while we civilly disobey.

Those who took part in this NVDA in Norwich, especially the many newbies to this game, were emboldened.

Next actions

On 15 December, there will be a day of XR action across the UK. Norwich XR will without doubt be playing a part in that.

We already have a plan in mind to up the ante against this awesomely-terrible road-building plan whose absurdity we’ve put on the map. 

XR is already beyond expectations – and certainly beyond London. If we are strategically and tactically smart, and keep many people on side, we will radically subvert the powers that be and the fossil economy. We might even win…

This Author 

Rupert Read is a reader in Philosophy at the University of East Anglia.

We have twenty-two years until the modern world finally eats itself alive – according to the IPCC report released earlier this fall. 

This world has roots in the nineteenth century: the Age of Coal. It was in this era, after all, that our extractive economies were first naturalised. It was then that a globally-scaled imperialism laboured to ensure that a certain notion of freedom – unthinkable without the despoliation of nature and the subjection of vast swathes of humanity – became universal.

It will be in 2040, the IPCC authors state, that this world’s “crisis” will definitively arrive: reefs gone, coastlines swamped, starvation, mass drought, and calamitous migration rendering “national borders” – in the words one commentator – “irrelevant”. 

Industrial advancement 

This prospective vision of catastrophe imagines that disaster is always waiting in the future. In doing so, it obscures the fact that, in the words of Potawatomi scholar Kyle Powys Whyte, “the hardships many non-Indigenous people dread most of the climate crisis are ones that Indigenous peoples have endured already due to different forms of colonialism”. 

For the societies exploded, reorganised and even erased by fossil powered bourgeois modernity – the indigenous and colonised, the wretched of the earth – life unfolds already in disaster’s aftermath. It is already after the end of the world. For the rest of us, collapse is now.

As someone who thinks and writes about the nineteenth century and its most powerful empire, it struck me that – in the IPCC report – the pivot between “preindustrial” time and the period it understands as contemporary, “the industrial era,” is 1850. 

The shift into this suicidal modernity fell just one year before the Great Exhibition, or the “Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations”. This event showcased for a rapt world the splendors of steam-driven industrial advancement. It took place in a building made of plate glass, then a novelty, and designed by a builder of greenhouses: it was the “Crystal Palace.” 

In his speech opening the event, Prince Albert, Victoria’s husband, could look out on this moment with perfect confidence: “Nobody…who has paid any attention to the peculiar features of our present era, will doubt for a moment that we are living at a period of most wonderful transition, which tends rapidly to accomplish that great end to which, indeed, all history points – the realisation of the unity of mankind.”

Methodological shift

Albert was right about his moment being one of transition. But the unity he believed would necessarily result from the benefits of steam-driven capitalism has, to put it mildly, not arrived. 

In its stead, we have seen enormous enrichment for some, coupled with permanent warfare, human immiseration, mass extinction, and disruptions to the biosphere resulting in what the IPCC report summarizes as “extreme weather, rising sea levels, and diminishing Arctic sea ice, among other changes”. 

In my scholarly work, I have wondered how my subfield of Victorian Studies might use its intimacy with the early, and then maturing period of bourgeois confidence typified in Albert’s breathless speech. Ours is the epoch of universalised extraction, when the world was put on course to be reorganised for profit, fenced off, and set to fire. 

My colleagues and I are students of the moment when the world’s undoing began. What will we do about it? 

In Ecological Form: System and Aesthetics in the Age of Empire, Philip Steer and I convened a group of scholars to imagine how our methods might shift in light of this shared catastrophe: our usual objects of analysis and tactics for understanding them, we found, must change under the pressure of a damaged and seemingly diminished present. 

How does the past change from the vantage of our diminished present? And more importantly, how might that past help us imagine a different future? 

Being otherwise

Our focus was literature. Aesthetic artifacts like the novel might seem tangential to existential concerns about the future shape of life on this planet: such serious matters are typically imagined to be the province of policy wonks, economists, and so-called hard sciences. 

But compared to these applied and indeed instrumental modes of thinking, art imagines otherwise. Aesthetic artifacts show thought at its most distilled. For that reason they help us see the contours of imaginative possibility at a given moment. 

Artworks in this way act as a kind of photonegative of their present: they distill an era’s values, presumptions, and dreams with a complexity and amplitude other modes of recording them cannot match, and rarely try to. But artworks are also maps for thinking at a slant, blueprints for ways of being that might run counter to, and even unwind from within, the established grooves of thought that economics, public policy, and even much science exclusively run within. 

In this case, my colleagues and I were interested in looking for aesthetic forms that might undercut the will-to-capture that has always defined western reason. By “western reason”, I mean something like the instrumental rationality and impulse to mastery that drive the modernity project, a centuries-long effort to subdue the earth whose dark fate the IPCC report charts.

These are the relations between subject and object that the Bible named “dominion” and that Karl Marx, only inheriting that idiom, called “the subjection of nature’s forces to man”. 

Looking out from the podium at the supporters gathered to celebrate the power of steam, Prince Albert himself referred to man’s newly victorious “reason”. This had been, he said, provided by God so that man could replace Him. Man was now poised, Albert announced, “to discover the laws by which the Almighty governs His creation, and, by making these laws his standard of action, to conquer nature to his use”. 

“Glorious liberty”

The divine instrumentality Albert celebrated led some to luxury and many more to wage slavery, social abjection, and early death. But the human and nonhuman cost of an extractive imperialism is glaringly absent from Albert’s calculus.

The Victorian novel plots a different, more complicated set of tabulations. It was in October of 1847, just three years before the start of the IPCC’s “industrial time”, when readers would have first overheard Rochester – the leading man of Charlotte Brontë’s most famous novel – tell Jane Eyre of the monstrous femininity he encountered in Spanishtown, Jamaica circa 1793. 

Reminiscing of a Miss Mason, Rochester tells Jane of “a wind fresh from Europe”, which — in the oppressive night, buzzing with mosquitoes and redolent, he says, of hurricanes — “blew over the ocean and rushed through the open casement: the storm broke, streamed, thundered, blazed, and the air grew pure”. He goes on: “The sweet wind from Europe was still whispering in the refreshed leaves, and the Atlantic was thundering in glorious liberty.” 

The liberty Rochester breathes in via the Atlantic tradewinds is not unlike the freedom Jane herself feels, when “the mood of the revolted slave was still bracing [her] with its bitter vigour.” 

This liberty structures John Stuart Mill’s treatise of 1859, still taught in high school civics classes, and animates even contemporary political discourse as the unspoken value, differently inflected, for Republicans and Democrats alike: the concept of a seemingly unfettered personal autonomy, what Mill called an individual’s “sovereignty over himself, over his own mind and body,” drives all decision making. 

Conscripts of modernity

But if Jane finds release in what she calls “mutiny,” freedom for Rochester blows in on the same sticky Caribbean air that pushed black bodies from West Africa to the island at a rate of no fewer than 8,000 per year in the 1790s. 

There, in Jamaica, freshly kidnapped conscripts of modernity would harvest sugar cane until they died, impressed into an obscene industrial scheme defined by cane-pressing, whips, malnourishment, and human attrition. 

These scenes of subjection do not figure in the marriage plot readers continue to care about most. But the Enlightenment-era atmospherics of Jane Eyre suggest how a romanticised vocabulary for freedom, woven through the language of self-affirmation spoken by these white characters, comes at the cost of, for example, the shambling animal locked on the fourth floor of Thornfield Hall. 

This is Rochester’s first wife, who – as fans of the novel well know – will soon be sacrificed for the sake of the marriage plot. The fire that incinerates this colonial subject banishes the memory of the colony and leaves only a ruin while clearing the way for romance in the present: what remains are “shattered walls” and a “devastated interior”, Jane says; evidence of “calamity”.

It is Bertha Mason, then, who comes to function as the residue of what the novel, almost accidentally, describes as the calamitous project of bourgeois freedom. As scholarship in my field has long known, she is the trace, ghost, or unbanishable reminder of the broken and immiserated humanity that the white marriage plot cannot assimilate. 

In this way, Bertha should be understood as a kind of burned effigy to the world-ending that has always shadowed such dreams of freedom and progress as have been voiced by history’s Prince Alberts or Edward Rochesters. But as the IPCC report now confirms, the agony that has walked alongside bourgeois freedom from the beginning is now felt not just by precarious human beings but the earth itself. 

The world’s agony

“The world’s agony raised to a concept”: this is the phrase Theodor Adorno used to define dialectical thought, in Negative Dialectics, of 1966. There, this most pessimistic member of the Frankfurt School meant to coordinate conceptual procedure with the material facts of a broken world. 

What form of thinking, Adorno asked, might be capable of unwinding from the inside a situation – theoretical and material at once – in which bourgeois modernity has set itself on fire? Out of the ruins of Enlightenment reason, what Adorno aimed to build was a broken or wounded knowledge: a form of thinking, aesthetic at its core, that might be adequate to the misery of the modernity project and what he called its “unspeakable suffering”.

Adorno aimed to use the fallen language of modernity to build a world beyond and outside it. This experiment in immanent critique opens up new ways of thinking about nineteenth century novels like Jane Eyre, Our Mutual Friend, or Tess of the D’Urbervilles, which Philip and I discuss in the introduction to Ecological Form. 

That is because those documents of extractive Victorianism know more, and can do more, than even they seem to let on: they inhabit contradictions rather than resolve them, radicalise problems instead of purporting (falsely) to put them right. 

In light of this, it’s useful to recall that, as Susan Buck-Morss has shown, the very architecture of Hegel’s philosophy of freedom, source code and inspiration for Adorno’s, and a distant interlocutor, I think, of Jane Eyre’s, was generated in catastrophe.

Double vision

This Enlightenment logical system, Buck Morss shows, relies on a “double vision” by which “liberty” could be raised to a rallying cry even when half the world sat in chains. Specifically, she argues in “Hegel and Haiti,” Hegel’s system derived from tropes of bondage and liberty emerging from the world-historical uprising on Saint Domingue. 

There, in the Haitian Revolution, Toussaint L’Overture renovated the world in order to strike out an Enlightenment project of freedom worthy of that term. (“You are like a slave-driver!” Jane says to John Reed, before she rushes him.)

As we take stock of our collapsed world at the broken end of the bourgeois century, and imagine the place of our intellectual work in and for it, I think some tasks will be, of course, practical: to slash carbon use, generate green infrastructure, and radically reorient our fossil-fueled, neo-imperial lifeways. 

These measures must be taken if we are to avert, if we can, the direst outcomes predicted in the IPCC’s report on the ultimate costs of Victorian freedom. 

Speculative knowledge 

Another, and I think, yet more urgent task is more basic. It will be to generate new models of thought, or build them from old ones. To call into being, I mean, concept-forms able to bear witness to, but also to displace or at least performatively to interrupt the instrumental reason and mental capture that structure our minds no less than Jane Eyre’s. 

What forms of reason might be adequate to our damaged world, strewn now with the wreckage of our mastery, “radiant” – in Adorno’s 1947 phrase – “with triumphant calamity”? 

To scan the Victorian archives for these broken, half-finished, and speculative knowledge forms would be to lay a hand to the relics of our shared catastrophe – but also to the tools we might use to build something new from its ruins. Time is short.

This Author 

Nathan  K Hensley is Associate Professor of English at Georgetown University. He is author of Forms of Empire: The Poetics of Victorian Sovereignty (2016) and editor, with Philip Steer, of Ecological Form: System and Aesthetics in the Age of Empire, released in December.

The Conference of the Parties 24 (COP24) climate negotiations in Katowice, Poland, are well underway. Major themes recur each year at these talks, such as equity among people and social justice.

One theme that has gained global traction is recognising the degraded environmental landscape that we are leaving to future generations. 

Intergenerational justice

Many older people in developed countries are realising that the consequences of a high carbon lifestyle, that has been enjoyed throughout their lifetimes, now represent a threat to the viability of any kind of similar life for their descendants.

This realisation has spurred a wave of actions from divesting from fossil fuel related investments, to buying shares in the companies that pollute in order to have a say at shareholder meetings.

The ways and means of objecting to the destruction of the global commons is growing and with it the unity of purpose between people of all ages who want to turn the tide of human behaviour.

YOUNGO: Young people at COP are seen but not heard

It is worth noting that the COP process is in its 24th year and though there is progress, it is slow. Many observers and commentators here agree that, overall, the adults in the room have failed to protect the health of the planet. 

I have been attending the press conferences and events held by the UN’s Youth Climate Delegates (YOUNGO) for the past few years and am very impressed with the level of organisation, the depth of knowledge, the clarity of message regarding what needs to happen, and the required determination to achieve a set of global goals.

YOUNGO host a series of side events that take place before and during the COP but are largely kept at arms length from the negotiations. 

Unbalanced influence

I caught up with Saffran Mihnar, a Sri Lankan YOUNGO delegate whose role is to facilitate the communication team and policy operation on how young people see the negotiations at COP24. 

When I asked Saffran about the limitations of the access given to youth delegates, he replied:

“The open doors are open and the closed doors are shut. It is at the discretion of the parties to decide whether observers should be allowed in or not. So far we have been allowed in [at COP24] but of course, we are also close to issues that parties do not want us to be involved with.”

This means that the power brokers negotiating for safer global climate goals allow observers, which includes YOUNGO delegates, in when it suits them to listen, but if they consider the subject  too delicate, they have the power of exclusion.

Despite this, the views of the fossil fuel industry are permitted into many of the talks and bring with them a very real influence, in terms of shaping what comes out. In this respect, it is not unfair to say that the wolves are allowed to guard the chickens.

Access should be broader

Frustrated by the lack of real power given to them, Saffran makes the following point:

“Everyone here is facing the climate change issue and government alone cannot achieve the Paris Agreement. [The parties] need to understand that 3rd Party involvement is really really essential, and the Paris Agreement cannot be achieved without young people.

Access [to the negotiations] should also be broader, so that young people can be involved with their respective delegations.”

When I asked Saffran if the youth delegates really have the capability and understanding to take part in these high-level talks, he doesn’t hesitate to point out that YOUNGO delegates are trained to understand how the working groups operate and what is being discussed. 

This point was reiterated to me at COP23 when I sat in on a press conference where nearly twenty young people delivered insightful reports on areas of the negotiations that met their expertise, ranging from impacts on food, water, sea-level rise, social justice, health, biodiversity and more.

They have the enthusiasm, but they need the power of the incumbents

With 24 years of climate negotiations behind us and the situation currently at a very critical stage, there is no conceivable downside to allowing expert young people into the party negotiations.

They represent the conscience of each nation and come with the moral license to kick much harder than those who are veterans in this struggle.

To achieve real impact, the status of youth observers needs to be upgraded to ‘Negotiator’ – we’ve wasted too much time and new energy is required to exponentiate the changes we need.

This Author

Nick Breeze is a climate change interviewer, also publishing on Envisionation.co.uk and a co-founder of the Cambridge Climate Lecture Series. 

The horrific cruelty that fish experience in factory farms and at slaughter across Europe has been documented in an undercover investigation by Compassion in World Farming.

The investigation also highlights how fish are often killed inhumanely and many suffer slow, painful deaths by asphyxiation, crushing or even being gutted alive.

The investigation was featured on  BBC Countryfile, when Dr. Krzysztof Wojtas, Head of Fish Policy at Compassion, discussed fish welfare with presenter Tom Heap.

Appalling conditions

Wojtas explained: “Millions of fish are silently suffering, out of sight in vast underwater factory farms across the UK and Europe. Just like on land, these farms are crowded, grim places where the animals suffer immensely. Many are then being slaughtered in the most gruesome of ways.

“Discoveries are proving that fish are sensitive, intelligent, emotional animals. They deserve both a humane life and death. It’s time for us to Rethink Fish.”

Footage obtained by the leading farm animal welfare charity reveals the appalling welfare conditions sea bass, sea bream and trout are being reared in.

Confined to concrete tanks on land or in floating ocean nets by the thousands, these fish spend their short lives swimming in cramped waters where disease and parasites can thrive. Dead fish were found floating in tanks as live ones swam around them.

The investigation also highlights the shockingly inhumane way fish are killed. Sea bass and sea bream are commonly dumped into large buckets of ice slurry, where they thrash about, fighting for their lives, as ice gets lodged in their gills and they struggle to breathe. They can remain conscious throughout this ordeal, and many are still alive when they are packaged up in Styrofoam boxes, ready to be sold.

Decisive action

Investigators witnessed trout flailing about in pools of bloody water after having their throats cut. This kind of suffering is illegal according to European law, which mandates animals should not suffer while being killed. These fish can be found on supermarket shelves across the continent. 

Matt Mellen, Compassion’s fish welfare campaign manager, said: “Currently, billions of fish are living lives of abject misery. Fish farming does not have to be intensive, industrial, cruel and unsustainable. More humane fish farming can become a reality.

“If decisive action is taken now, we can once again have a thriving fishing industry. Consumers will be able to buy fish in confidence, knowing that reasonable levels of concern for animal welfare and environmental sustainability have been taken into account.”

Compassion is now calling on the UK government to ensure that we introduce laws in compliance with the EU Slaughter Directive, giving fish the protection they deserve at their time of death. We need new laws requiring the use of humane slaughter methods for fish, and must introduce national legislation to end this suffering.

Just like other animals, fish should not suffer unnecessarily during their lives or at the time of death. Humane slaughter methods such as electric or percussive stunning do exist and these should be rolled out across the industry as soon as possible.

This Article

This article is based on a press release from Compassion in World Farming. To support Compassion in World Farming’s campaign please visit rethink.fish.

Vaca Muerta is a mega-project of shale fossil fuel exploitation through hydraulic fracturing – or fracking – in the Argentine Patagonia.

The Argentine Government predicts that gas and oil export revenues from this reservoir will surpass those from agricultural production by 2027. Meanwhile, as chair of the G20, the country promotes gas as a “bridge fuel” to other, more sustainable sources.

If government expectations are met, the project will multiply gas emissions, as recently warned by the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (CESCR).  

Gas exports

In September, Argentina resumed gas exports that had been shut down in 2007 because the country was not self-sufficient.

During a visit to the exploitation zone a few weeks ago, President Mauricio Macri said: “We won’t stop until we export 30,000 million dollars in gas and oil from Vaca Muerta, and to do that we have generated more than half a million jobs throughout the country.” Today, exports are only a distant prospect, and employment is far from the president’s wishes.

At the moment, there are about thirty exploitation projects for the Vaca Muerta formation. In addition, the national companies present in the area are BP (which owns 50 percent of Pan American Energy, the second crude producer), Total (second gas producer), Shell, Wintershall, Equinor, ExxonMobil, Chevron, CNNOC, Dow, Petronas, among many others.

Only three projects have reached the stage of massive exploitation in Vaca Muerta. Two are operated by YPF, the mixed company controlled by the State, the largest producer and the one controlling the largest area.

The third area was awarded to Tecpetrol, a subsidiary of the Techint group, which has become the star of gas production. In September, the firm produced 13 MMm3 daily — 10 percent of the country’s total volume — after a sharp rise that started this year at 5 MMm3. Tecpetrol reached these levels thanks to the massive gas-targeted subsidies guaranteed by the State: USD 3.5 per MMbtu.

Total exploitation

The increase in extraction and the resumption of gas exports are consistent with the principles of the G20 – which is chaired by Argentina this year – and will hold its annual meeting at the end of November. 

The group promotes gas as a “bridge fuel” to sustainable energy sources. This claim is contested by various experts, among other reasons, due to fugitive methane emissions, which are 80 times worse than CO2 for climate change.

Contrary to government expectations, the UN Committee on ESCR warned in October that the implementation of this project would have a negative impact on the climate: “Total exploitation, with hydraulic fracturing, of all the shale gas reserves [at Vaca Muerta] would consume a significant percentage of the world’s carbon budget for reaching the goal of a 1.5 degree Celsius warming.”

The committee recommended that the Argentine state “reconsider” the exploitation of unconventional hydrocarbons.

Estimated at 19.9 billion barrels of crude oil and 583 trillion cubic feet of gas, the resources currently buried in the ground represent around 50 billion tons of CO2 that can only be extracted through hydraulic fracturing (or fracking), a highly controversial technique that has been banned in several countries and subnational states.

In the same document, the UN also warned about the territorial effects, the lack of consultation with the local communities, and the absence of adequate regulation to address the risk entailed by hydraulic fracturing.

Unconstitutional ruling

In recent years, a series of tight gas projects – enabled by the investments made to exploit Vaca Muerta – have begun to be developed in the vicinity of one of the country’s most important water basins, in areas historically involved in fruit and vegetable production, and in urban outskirkts. 

Warned about the risk of fracking, over 60 municipalities have banned the technique. However, the justice system has declared several of these rulings unconstitutional on the grounds that they exceed communal powers.

At the national level, the energy policy is being heavily criticized, mainly due to the steep increases in tariffs for energy supply. The agreement with the IMF requires that Argentina continue on this path in order to reduce the fiscal deficit.

The peso devaluation (190 percent against the US dollar this year), coupled with dollarized tariffs, has caused energy bills to reach amounts impossible to pay for both companies and households. The average increase in gas in the last 24 months has been around 1300 percent.

Opposition to the tariff hikes has added to the general condemnation of the government and managed to unite the entire range of opposition parties around a law that brought the increases back to their November 2017 levels. However, President Macri vetoed it in May and replaced his Minister of Energy a few days later.

This Author

Fernando Cabrera is the coordinator of Observatorio Petrolero Sur (OPSur), an Argentinian civil society energy watchdog. 

The team at Ethical Consumer has researched the shopping habits and festive traditions of the nation – and has sought to find sustainable alternatives to help make this Christmas an enjoyable experience that doesn’t cost the earth.

In this article we list a host of ways to celebrate a more environmentally friendly Christmas.

Reduce the plastic

From wrapped gifts to festive food, Christmas can often come with a whole lot of pointless packaging.

Consider your décor

This can be a bit of a challenge with shops filled with plastic decorations from tinsel to trees without much of it being produced in a sustainable way.
If you haven’t got a Christmas tree already buy a real one. Just make sure it comes in a pot with a root ball so you can replant it and use it again next year. If you already have a plastic tree,  re-use it rather than buying something else.  If you want to add some new decorations this year rather than dusting off the old ones, then edible home made iced-gingerbread make a great alternative to bought ones.

The dreaded wrapping paper

Last year it was reported that we will throwaway 108 million rolls of wrapping paper at Christmas time. This alarming waste statistic should be enough to stop you reaching for that brand new shiny festive roll.

Any wrapping paper that has glitter on it, or has been lined with a super thin coating of plastic can’t be recycled. A quick test to check, courtesy of Recycle Now [https://www.recyclenow.com], is ‘if it scrunches it can be recycled’.

If you haven’t already hoarded away last year’s wrapping paper in preparation, get creative with newspaper, ends of wallpaper or old fabric. However, if you can’t resist that festive print, you can find 100% recycled wrapping paper online.
But why waste materials and money on something that will be thrown away?

Get creative with your gifts

Gifts that are created with love and thought, as well as combating consumerism, are always welcome, particularly if you have a creative streak.  Biscuits, soaps and candles are easy and fun to make and there are thousands of recipes and ideas online. You have complete control over the ingredients, so you can choose Fair Trade, organic and natural products. Make sure you use recycled packaging, such as old jam jars to make your gifts as sustainable as possible.

Buy less stuff

Giving the gift of an experience is a simple way to buy a present for a loved-one without increasing the amount of physical stuff in their lives. Theatre tickets, gallery and museum passes, membership to organisations like the Woodland Trust or digital magazine subscriptions (there’s a really useful one called Ethical Consumer) all make ideal presents.

Green and ethical presents

If you are going to be buying presents this year, plan ahead and choose organic or recycled items, or new gifts that have been made in the most sustainable way. There’s detailed guides online to a whole array of gift ideas, but here are some ideas to start with.

Perfume and aftershave

Perfumers are legally allowed to keep their ingredients list a secret, which means it’s often hard to work out whether a perfume contains animal ingredients or dodgy toxic chemicals. However, our Best Buy brands are vegan, that ensures no animal ingredients and are cruelty-free. Plus they also don’t contain parabens. Our Best Buys for perfume and aftershave are Dolma, Fairypants, Neal’s Yard, and Weleda.

Clothing

Shun ‘fast fashion’ and the novelty Christmas jumper and instead choose something stylish and sustainable from a fashion brand with a conscience. We recommend Know the Origin, Brothers We Stand, and People Tree. There are also plenty more in our dedicated ethical fashion retailers guide. There’s a newly updated guide to underwear to help you find the most ethical pair of socks or undies. We recommend PICO and PACT brands.

Electronics

Electronics are often a big gift at Christmas time, and buying a new phone or laptop is often a bit of an ethical minefield and we therefore recommend that you buy second-hand or refurbished equipment wherever possible.

If you do want to buy new, we recommend: Fairphone from our Mobile Phones Guide; Sony’s PVC and BFR-free models from our Digital Cameras Guide; Apple iPad or Asus Zenpad from our Tablets Guide; and Lenovo Thinkpad from our Laptops Guide.

Books

Books are wonderful gifts for adults and children alike, but instead of buying new why not shop for a good second-hand or even vintage read? Check out Better World Books that sells new and used books online and donates a portion of profits to charity, or Hive.co.uk who donates a portion of its sales to local independent bookstores. Ebooks.com is our best buy for e-books, where you can buy gift vouchers and give recommendations.

Don’t stress – hit the high street if you’re stuck

There’s always a forgotten present to buy which means you might not have the time to spend researching the most sustainable options available. In anticipation of this happening, Ethical Consumer has selected the most ethical high street stores where you could pick up any last minute gifts.

Lush – This company refuses to test on animals and tries to use only natural ingredients. They are Fair Tax Mark certified and an accredited Living Wage employer.
 
The Co-op Group – The Co-op sells everything from food to electricals. They now have food stores in most town centres and are a leader in ethics. They recently released a new “Co-operative Way” action plan that sets out their commitment to a tackling a number of issues including climate change and waste. They are a Fair Tax Mark certified organisation.
 
Marks and Spencer – Marks and Spencer is a cornerstone of the British high street. In the Ethical Consumer recent guide to supermarkets it came second to the Co-op Group. It also came second in the supply chain ranking and score table in the Ethical Consumer clothes shops guide.
 
WH Smith – WH Smith is the only large bookseller to score a best rating in the Ethical Consumer ‘Alternatives to Amazon’ bookshops guide for both their environmental reporting and supply chain management.

John Lewis – The John Lewis’ Partnership is an employee-owned business with the workers sharing in company profits and having a say in how the business is run.

And finally, chocolate – without the palm oil

It’s everywhere, from tree decorations to advent calendars and selection boxes infact its estimated that over 50% of products in our supermarkets contain palm oil, with everything from shampoos and soaps to biscuits and pies listing the ingredient.

Unfortunately the variety there’s a really high  chance that palm oil is going to be an ingredient in your chocolate or selection box . Fillings and flavourings that are involved in creating chocolate bars and boxes of chocolates often contain the ingredient making it hard to avoid. also means that.

Until consumers can be reassured that sustainable sources of palm oil really stand up to scrutiny, more and more ethical shoppers are opting for palm oil free chocolate products.

Our Palm Oil Free list has been hugely popular. With the big brands like Cadbury, Green & Blacks and Nestle still using palm oil, our research has found that many of the smaller, independent companies that are committed to Fairtrade ingredients and a concern for workers rights, are also those that are creating chocolates without the use of palm oil.

A great chocolate brand to try this Christmas is Divine, an Ethical Consumer best buy. It’s co-owned by the 85,000 farmer members of Kuapa Kokoo, the cooperative in Ghana that supplies the cocoa. Their Fairtrade advent calendars, chocolate coins and chocolate hampers can be bought direct via their online shop, and from a range of high street stores including the Co-op, Waitrose and Oxfam. Also ranking highly in the Ethiscore table is Booja Booja who offers organic, dairy, gluten and soya free, chocolate truffles in beautiful boxes.

Wishing you all the best for a happy, healthy and sustainable Christmas!

This Author

Tim Hunt is a director at Ethical Consumer magazine.

Polish leaders delivered a clear message on Monday: climate change must be tackled, but not at the expense of the coal workers who built the industrial city that is hosting this year’s Cop24 summit. 

By holding this year’s UN climate negotiations in Katowice, a city in the coal mining region of Upper Silesia, the Polish government put the spotlight on its call for a “just transition” for industrial workers who risk losing their jobs with the shift to cleaner energy and operations.

“‘Solidarity’ and ‘just transition’ – the language is key to making acceptable [climate policy],” Polish president Andrzej Duda said in a speech to the plenary on Monday.

Intensive negotiations

“One of the challenges we have to face and continue to face is how to reconcile economic growth with taking care of the environment,” he added later. “The choice we are making is not between jobs and the natural environment but whether we are going to keep both or none of them.”

The Polish government also launched a European Union-backed declaration on Monday calling to support regions and cities like Katowice that will be affected by the shift away from fossil fuels. International union groups welcomed the message.

The new summit presidency’s comments stood in sharp contrast to speeches from the small island countries, whose leaders stressed that their people are already suffering – not from climate action, but inaction.

“We should not only have a just transition for those workers, regions and economies affected by the move from dirty energy to clean energy, we must have a just transition for all – and especially the most climate vulnerable,” said Fijian prime minister Frank Bainimarama, who presided over last year’s Cop23 summit in Bonn, Germany.

The leaders’ speeches kicked off two weeks of intensive negotiations over rules to make sure countries meet their pledges under the 2015 Paris climate agreement. The strength of the rules will largely determine how the political goals set in Paris are actually implemented – making Katowice the perfect setting to highlight the challenge of maintaining economic growth while shifting away from old, polluting industries.

Take stock

Katowice was home to as many as 14 coal mines in the 1980s, and two now. The Cop24 conference centre sits next door to one of the shuttered mines, which has been converted into a museum.

But Katowice is also “one of the greenest cities in Poland”, with forests covering more than 40% of its area, Duda said. The modernisation of plants is leading to “environmental improvements”, without disrupting energy security.

The city’s remaining coal workers “need reassurance they are along for the transition”, said Michał Kurtyka, Poland’s Cop24 president. “They need rules – transparent, implementable – and a system of support for the role they are asked to take.”

While the rulebook will be crucial to monitoring progress towards the Paris goals, some countries want the Cop24 to also set the scene for all parties to raise their commitments by 2020. Current pledges would only limit global warming by 3-4C by 2100; the Paris accord calls for well below 2C, and ideally 1.5C.

Duda made little mention of the discussions due to be held in Katowice, although Polish environment minister Henryk Kowalczyk said the summit will “take stock of all the wealth of views, expectations and proposals for action”.

But it was the small island countries that put the strongest emphasis on increasing efforts.

“It is essential that the contributions presented in 2020 significantly raise the bar of ambition,” said Baron Divavesi Waqa, president of Nauru, in Micronesia. “After a quarter century of negotiations we are further away from our goal of stabilising greenhouse gas emissions than we have ever been. I will resist the temptation to brand our efforts a dramatic failure.”

This Article

This Article first appeared on Climate Home News.

Indonesian and Malaysian officials tried to push the UK government to lean on the supermarket Iceland after it announced it would cut palm oil from its own-brand products earlier this year.

The retailer made the move on 10 April, citing concerns about rainforest destruction and environmental damage.

Six days after the announcement, British diplomats wrote to colleagues stationed in both countries: “the Indonesians and Malaysians need to recognise that these developments are being driven by (legitimate) concerns about the environmental impact of palm oil production, which they have not adequately addressed. It is not for us to argue the case for palm oil.”

Private company

The comments are included in emails released to Unearthed under the Freedom of Information act.

The email was sent at a time when both countries – which produce about 90% of the world’s palm oil – were engaged in an intense lobbying effort in both the UK and Brussels, as EU decision-makers considered a proposal to phase out palm oil from biofuels.

Emails between officials at the Foreign Office, Department for International Trade (DIT) and the Department for International Development (Dfid) from this spring suggest that diplomats had been urged by the Malaysian and Indonesian governments to intervene with Iceland over its opposition to palm oil.

“[The Malaysians and Indonesians] need to recognise that Iceland is a private company; HMG [UK government] has not encouraged them to take this decision, but neither would it be appropriate for us to attempt to dissuade or criticise them,” wrote one Foreign Office official.

The Foreign Office declined to comment on the record for this article.

Unearthed reported in May that British officials wrote in emails the palm oil issue “has the potential to impact on bilateral trade, particularly defence sales” with Malaysia. Both governments threatened to retaliate against EU member states if the EU palm oil phase-out went ahead.

In June, EU negotiators agreed a deal to phase out palm oil from transport fuels by 2030, nine years later than initially proposed.

‘Nasty advertisements’

In public, officials in Indonesia and Malaysia have reacted angrily to Iceland’s campaigning on palm oil.

Last month, the supermarket attracted international attention after its Christmas advertising campaign, Rang-tan, which was produced by Greenpeace, was banned from UK television for being too political.

Teresa Kok, Malaysia’s primary industries minister, took the unusual step last week of celebrating the decision by UK regulator Clearcast to ban the advert.

“We will not be cowed or stand by idly, when nasty advertisements by Iceland mislead people in markets that are crucial to us. We will fight back with facts from scientifically researched data,” she said.

As of last month, Rang-tan had been watched over 30 million times on social media.

The Times reported in April that Richard Walker, the managing director of Iceland, was attacked in a social media campaign funded by the Malaysian government and palm oil interests.

Human Faces of Palm Oil, a self-described “advocate on behalf of Malaysian small farmers” dismissed Walker as “trust fund Richard” in videos posted online. The Times later reportedthat two western lobbyists with links to pro-Brexit campaigns and big oil were behind the campaign.  

The Indonesian government told Unearthed that it is in dialogue with the UK government and Iceland on palm oil.

This Article

This article first appeared at Unearthed, from Greenpeace.