Progress on climate change – or just hot air?


CLIMATE CHANGE is rarely out of the news media. Socialist Party
councillor DAVE NELLIST explains that big business is the problem, not
the solution.

THE INDEPENDENT newspaper (1/9/06) had a banner front-page headline
‘The Green Revolution’: "In California" the paper said, "Governor Arnold
Schwarzenegger has defied both his President and his own party to impose
the toughest anti-pollution laws in the world… while 5000 miles away
in Yorkshire, protesters fight to close Drax Power Station, the worst
polluter in Britain and symbol of our failure to act over global
warming."

One in eight Americans lives in California. If its economy were
independent it would be the sixth biggest in the world. US president
George Bush, almost with his first stroke of the pen after being elected
in 2001, withdrew America from the Kyoto agreement (a weak international
treaty signed in 1997 designed to make cuts in greenhouse gases which
are leading to climate change).

Is California’s action any more than smoke and mirrors in the run-up
to Arnold Schwarzenegger’s campaign for re-election?

California’s new law is market-based. It requires industries in the
state to cut carbon dioxide and other heat trapping pollutants by 25%
between 2012 and 2020 – or buy the rights to cuts made by other firms.
That is designed to make California’s emissions the same in 2020 as they
were in 1990.

The details haven’t yet been announced on how the cuts would be
monitored or policed. Already business lobbyists in the state are
threatening court action, as they are currently doing over emission
regulations on vehicles which California brought in in 2002. They will
no doubt be heartened by the success German businesses have had this
summer in getting a relaxation of that country’s emission targets.

But even if California’s new rules work they are less strict than the
paltry Kyoto target of a 6%-8% cut in greenhouse gases below 1990
levels. Many senior scientists working on climate change think that
60%-80% cuts in greenhouse gases, particularly carbon dioxide, are
necessary in the next few years to avoid extreme climate change by the
middle or latter part of the century.

Changing weather patterns brought by climate change could lead to
more frequent and widespread droughts or floods, and rising sea levels
threatening tens of millions of people living by coasts.

If the ‘best’ that big business has so far to offer is woefully
inadequate, where could the pressure come from for serious action?

Green taxes

IN BRITAIN, the Tories announced at the end of August a plan to shift
taxes away from income and wealth to ‘environmentally damaging
behaviour’. Shadow Chancellor George Osborne was short on details but
described the measures as designed to promote "green growth".

Writing in the Independent on Sunday (3/9/06) Tory leader David
Cameron called for new climate change legislation designed to reduce
greenhouse gases by at least 60% by 2050. To achieve that he called for
a cross-party consensus saying "rising to the threat of climate change
will require more than conventional party politics has to offer". As if
we haven’t already got a pro-business cross-party consensus, which is
why working people need a new party of their own!

Cameron says he wants to go beyond "the battle between the green
movement and capitalism" and to enable the market "to do what it has
always done: find the most efficient and cost-effective way of doing
business". Cameron says "the business community has made it clear that
it needs a stable long-term political framework if it is to justify the
capital investment involved in delivering the change needed for a low
carbon economy".

That means that having profited out of dirty energy and climate
change pollutants, big business now wants guarantees it can make profits
out of trying to put things right!

Drax protests

Meanwhile, in Yorkshire, hundreds of protesters gathered outside
Britain’s largest coal fired power station, Drax, near Selby. The
culmination of a ten-day camp, organised by the Campaign against Climate
Change (an umbrella group that includes UNISON amongst its supporters)
was a march to Drax to close it down for a day; a symbolic act against
Britain’s carbon dioxide emissions, two thirds of which come from
coal-fired power stations. Protesters faced over 3,000 police drafted in
from 12 different forces.

Drax is a private company. The power station made £239 million in
profit last year. According to The Independent it is currently suing the
EU for the right to emit even more global warming gases.

Sharp and immediate cuts in greenhouse gas emissions are needed for
power stations, but would a symbolic one-day closure be enough in a
world where China is building and opening a new coal-fired power station
every week!

And any serious campaign to change the basis of power generation away
from fossil fuels (gas, oil and coal) towards cleaner non-greenhouse gas
emitting renewable methods, such as wind, wave, tidal and solar power,
needs to have a programme to guarantee the jobs of those in affected
industries and to prevent sabotage by big business seeking (as in
Germany and California) to limit or derail moves against climate change.

That means a rational plan of energy production and, in the wise
words of the old saying, ‘ you can’t plan what you don’t control; and
you don’t control what you don’t own’.

Big business in California or Britain can’t solve the escalating
climate change crisis because its prime directive is to make profits. A
new, socialist, world is needed and as part of that a stronger socialist
strand is needed in the climate change debate.