ALB
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It looks as if we might be heading for a yes/no referendum on the government’s deal with the EU. At least that wouldn’t be as bad, in terms of being an occasion for a festival of xenophobia, as a re-run of the 2016 one. It is pathetic, though, that workers up and down the country in pubs and on social medias are arguing with each other about what terms “we”, i.e. the capitalists, should trade: WTO, Norway, Single Market, etc. Who cares if there’s a regulatory border in the Irish Sea? What difference is it going to make to anybody’s ordinary life? Perhaps we should republish our 1911 pamphlet on “Socialism or Tariff Reform”.
It looks as if the far-right as well as the usual leftist suspects have been trying to jump on this bandwagon. Tuesday’s Times reported:
The far-right agenda was laid out in a brochure distributed to protesters by another group National Synthesis. The brochure blames immigrants for the violence and says: “The nationalists … have come to inform the yellow vests that they should engage in a veritable combat to save our nation and our civilisation.” It calls for an end to capitalism, globalisation and France’s membership of the EU. The group’s website is more explicit, calling for a “national, social, popular and identitarian revolution”.
That sounds like leftwing Nazism, as propounded by Strasser before Hitler, once in power, had him eliminated.
The anecdote I like is:
On Saturday Mr Benedetti and his ultra-right followers encountered a group of antifas during the protest in Paris. Both sides were wearing yellow vests, but that did not prevent them from having a punch-up.
Who says that a government in Britain can govern without the support of a majority in the House of Commons and that parliament is just a talking shop that has to accept what the government decides?
As the author of that article says:
Look, I get it. Poland mines a lot of coal. It gets 78 percent of its power from coal. It has a vested interest in keeping coal alive from an economic and political standpoint, and this conference gives the government a chance to lay that vision out.
Today’s Times reports the President of Poland as saying that
his country had no plans to stop burning coal, which produces 80 per cent of its electricity. He said that coal guaranteed Poland’s energy security and sovereignty and “it would be hard not to use it”.
This illustrates the point that the differing economic interests of the various states, in the context of the competitive world of capitalism, is going to mean that any agreement won’t, in fact can’t, go much beyond the lowest common denominator as it would be something that will either disadvantage no state or disadvantage all states equally.
If there were a world state that could enforce something in the longer term overall capitalist interest perhaps something more could be done, but there isn’t. Certainly neither street demonstrations (or stunts) or a Green Party government in one country won’t be able to enforce this.
After all, if you were the government of Poland would you agree to anything that put capitalist business there at a disadvantage? Would you agree to become dependent on gas from Russia just because it’s less polluting? Other coal (and oil) producing countries will be taking up the same position for the same economic and strategic reasons. In fact, no state is going to agree to anything that puts its capitalist businesses at a disadvantage compared to their competitors from other states or its energy security at risk..
I hadn’t realised that the riots in France had some connection with CO2 emissions but it’s obvious when you think about it that any demonstration against petrol or diesel prices would have some implications for this, even if not specifically against a carbon tax.
I see that some leftwing reformists have jumped on the bandwagon and added a list of other demands:
But the driving force is obviously lorry drivers and other drivers of diesel vehicles and that if the government can placate these then the movement will die out. They won’t need to take any account of the other demands.
I would have thought that Attenborough’s speech would have raised the issue and expressed the concerns more than any demonstration or stunt. It has certainly got more ordinary, non-political people talking about it. Whether it will be any more effective is another matter, but something however timid and hesitating will be done if it’s only the lowest common denominator of the conflicting capitalist interests of the various states.
There are obvious limits to the effectiveness of appeals to capitalist governments and calls on world leaders to lead, due to the constraints placed on them both by the workings of the capitalist economy and by their remit to defend the interests of the national capitalist class they represent. Socialism, as a world in which the Earth’s natural and industrial resources will have become the common heritage of all humanity, is quite literally the only framework in which the problem can be rationally tackled by the necessary co-ordinated global action..
I see from today’s papers that the incoming President of Mexico, Lopez Obrador, has pledged in his inauguration speech that under him the poor will come first:
“We are going to govern for everyone but he are going to give preference to the most impoverished and vulnerable,” he said. “For the good of all, the poor come first.”
I wonder how long it will take him to find out that under capitalism profits have to come first and be forced to implement this.
The Green Party are hopeless reformists. They are also currency cranks with it, as in the passage from their manifesto he quotes shows:
The existing banking system has failed and is no longer fit for purpose. The Green Party believes that the power to create money must be removed from private banks. The supply of our national currency must be fully restored to democratic and public control so that it can be issued free of debt and directed to environmentally and socially beneficial areas such as renewable energy, social housing, or support for community businesses…
Most Green Party candidates let alone members don’t understand what this means. I remember listening to one during the 2015 general election as she valiantly tried to explain this — basically the government simply printing more money to finance the reforms they propose. Hello, raging inflation. And of course if you try to put spending on social or environmental reforms before profit-making you’ll just provoke an economic downturn.
Where I live at the local elections in May the Greens did a deal with the Liberals and got 4 councillors elected. This seems to be the Green Party’s current strategy — get councillors elected. There’s not much else they can do now that Labour under Corbyn has taken back the programme of social reforms that the Greens stole from them when Blair & Co were in charge.
Trump officials are minimizing warnings from scientists by arguing they are exaggerated and based on the worst-case scenario. They say the National Climate Assessment (NCA) – an expansive federal government report on the dangers of climate change in the US – considers only the highest possible levels of greenhouse gas emissions.
“If you take the extreme case, you’re right, it’s dire,” Trump’s interior secretary, Ryan Zinke, said on Fox News. “If you take the best case, it’s not much.”
The officials are either being disingenuous or stupid or maybe responding to overenthusiastic environmentalists or sensational news headlines which have highlighted the NCA’s worst-case scenario as what will happen (as we know this sort of thing happens here in the UK).
The NCA report clearly sets out two scenarios and explains what they are, the higher one being if nothing is done to reduce CO2 emissions and they continue at their present rate. The lower one is based on significant reductions being achieved:
By late this century, increases of 2.3°–6.7°F (1.3° -3.7°C) are expected under a lower scenario and 5.4°–11.0°F (3.0° -6.7°C) under a higher scenario relative to 1986–2015. (…) With significant reductions in emissions, global temperature increase could be limited to 3.6°F (2°C) or less compared to preindustrial temperatures. Without significant reductions, annual average global temperatures could increase by 9°F (5°C) or more by the end of this century compared to preindustrial temperatures.
And when they set out the dire economic consequences, they explicitly state that this is the worst case scenario as it is introduced by
Without more significant global greenhouse gas mitigation and regional adaptation efforts,….
The point is that the worst case scenario is not likely to be achieved because something more will be done to reduce emissions. On the other hand, it is not likely too that the lower scenario will be what will happen either because not enough will be done. So, what will happen? Probably something in between, but that’s anybody’s guestimate. But whatever it is it will have negative consequences on millions of people.
Ah, the dangers of cutting and pasting ! What you need to do is, after submitting, check what will appear and if the formatting stuff does, press edit and delete it, and submit again.
I think I am beginning to understand what the statement that “In the first two decades after its release, methane is around 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide” means.
It doesn’t mean that methane lasts decades in the atmosphere after it is emitted. It is a measure of how much more heating a given amount of methane creates compared to the same amount of CO2. For various chemical reasons CH4 absorbs more heat than CO2 and so is a more “potent” greenhouse gas. How much more depends on over what period you measure the extra warming effect.
If one considers a long time frame, then the longer-lived gases will appear stronger, and vice-versa if one considers a short time frame. This is why the values for methane appear to be all over the map. Methane sticks around for only about a dozen years, so it does its warming early on. Carbon dioxide, in contrast, can persist for thousands of years, steadily warming that whole time. As a result, methane’s potency is much higher if evaluated over 20 years rather than 100. (https://www.factcheck.org/2018/09/how-potent-is-methane/ )
The figure of 80 times more is based on a 20-year period (hence the “first two decades” in the quote). Over a 100-year period it’s about 30 times more. The measure is called “Global Warming Potential” (GWP). (As the standard, CO2’s GWP is 1 over any time period.)
For all this focus on methane’s potency, though, it’s useful to remember that methane is still a smaller overall contributor to climate change than CO2. As we’ve written before, CO2 is the main driver. Other gases, such as methane, are important, but they’re far less abundant. According to the IPCC, “carbon dioxide is the largest single contributor to radiative forcing over 1750–2011 and its trend since 1970.” By itself, CO2 accounted for 76 percent of all human-made greenhouse gases in 2010. Methane ranks as the second-largest single contributor, responsible for 16 percent of the same total if using the older GWP100 values, or 20 percent if using the newer ones. Go ahead, and take your pick.
To complete the picture:
in the U.S., 31 percent of methane emissions due to human activity come from the oil and gas industry; 26 percent come from livestock, such as cows; and another 16 percent come from landfills. Methane also has many natural sources, including wetlands and termites.
Natural gas, which when burned releases CO2, is methane. Also, as the last post from Alan points out, global warming results in more methane being released from natural sources.
By the time this discussion is over we’ll all be experts in global warming, hopefully inoculated against accepting claims without checking them !
