Climate chaos is also the failure of political systems

While you enjoy the warm weather, consider this. “Atmospheric Rivers” will become more frequent and intense as global temperatures rise this century in response to increasing concentrations of  carbon dioxide in the  atmosphere

You might ask what these “rivers” are. They are described as narrow regions of intense moisture flows in the lower troposphere that deliver sustained and heavy rainfall to mid-latitude regions such as the UK. And, according to a new study, they are on the increase while winter flood events will become more frequent and more severe.

This is just one of the variety of consequences arising from the burning of coal, oil and gas which fuelled the industrial revolution of the 19^th century and the globalisation of capitalist production and consumption from the last period of the 20^th century.

Globalisation and war have seen the extraction, refinement and distribution of fossil fuels concentrated into the hands of a small handful of giant corporations. Their shareholders demand ever greater efforts to extract what remains of the resources buried deep beneath the surface by millions of years of planetary evolution.

They rub their hands with increasing glee as their lobbyists for continued economic growth stir dissent and confusion ensuring that no agreement on action to slow, let alone stop or reverse global warning is reached between the governments of the world. There’s every reason to expect no better outcome from the climate treaty talks scheduled for 2015 than all those that have taken place in the last 25 years.

Even if there were agreement, the International Energy Agency is warning that any action would come too late to give even a 50% chance of keeping the global temperature increase since the start of the industrial revolution below 2 degrees centigrade.

Why? Because competition between the remaining corporate contenders under intense pressure from their customers also competing on costs in the industrial sectors, drives investment in a continuing technological revolution. This provides previously unimagined access to “new” reserves.

Ultra-deepwater drillships, subsea oil and gas infrastructure and multi-well-pad drilling to machine-to-machine networking, floating LNG facilities, new dimensions in seismic imagery and supercomputing for analogue exploration make fracking – hydraulic fracking –  look positively old-fashioned.

Investment advisers Oil and Energy Insider – one node in a network of private intelligence networks looking like an offshoot of the CIA – big up the prospects, saying these technologies put the idea of peak oil to bed for the foreseeable future.

And the IEA is looking both ways. Originally set up in the wake of the 1972 oil crisis, its mission was to ensure continuity of oil supplies. Now it claims it works to ensure reliable, affordable and clean energy – but without compromising growth.

Academic Robert Manne says a rapid, global-wide, consciously engineered transition from a fossil fuel to a clean energy civilization would involve one of the largest transformations in the history of humankind. And he’s right.

But he’s pessimistic. The post-war international “system” of nations is entirely unfitted to the kind of broad-ranging international cooperation now required, he believes. “The domestic political systems of the nation states potentially of greatest importance in the struggle against global warming – that is the advanced Western democracies — tend to paralyse the possibility of necessary emergency action.”

To put it another way, the democratic system prevailing in the global capitalist system of nation states has failed. So that means building a new system, more suited to the task of taking human society into a new not-for-profit age, one in which care for the “oikos”, Mother Earth, our home, becomes the overriding priority.

One way would be to rapidly establish a global network of local people’s assemblies, using the worldwide communications networks as the foundation for wide discussion and participation as the precursor to the takeover and redirection of the resources currently in the hands of the 1%.

Gerry Gold

Economics editor

The market recipe for cooking the planet

The economic logic of the capitalist system is obstructing the critical transition from fossil fuels to alternative energy sources.

Though nothing could be more urgent than curbing the amount of coal, oil, and gas which is burnt, the market demand for the solar photovoltaic (PV) goods is far lower than the industry’s capacity to make them.

Last year the world had 60 gigawatts of PV manufacturing capacity, but fewer than 30 gigawatts were produced.

Far from a green revolution leading to growth and jobs induced by the scent of profit, hundreds of small German installers are now closing down, with the consequent loss of thousands of jobs.

After a period of expansion, the number of new solar power installed in Europe fell sharply for the first time in a decade last year. Globally, the solar photovoltaic (PV) industry had installed a total of 102 gigawatts by the end of 2012, up from less than two in 2001.

But new installation fell dramatically in 2012, taking Europe’s share of new capacity down from 74 per cent to 55 per cent in what the solar industry said was a “turning point in the global PV market that will have profound implications in coming years”.

Now European solar panel makers battered by a declining market have persuaded the European Union to propose import tariffs ranging as high as 68% to reduce cheaper imports from Chinese companies. This European initiative follows a similar US move last year.

Solar entrepreneur Jeremy Leggett places the blame for the developing, protectionist trade war on ‘a campaign by the companies that dominate energy markets, seeking to hold back renewables in defence of their interests’, leading to severe cuts in government support for alternative energy.

Leggett says ‘the incumbents in carbon fuels and nuclear are the root cause of the trade war. They have managed to curb soaring demand for solar, accelerating global price-cutting beyond what manufacturing economies of scale would have produced.’

A key contribution to the declining European PV market is to be found across the Atlantic in the USA where the relatively cheaper gas released by fracking has in turn reduced the demand for, and hence the price of coal.

North America’s turn to fracking pushed down US natural gas prices to 10-year lows last spring, prompting electricity generators to switch to gas from coal. Unwanted at home, US coal increasingly found its way on to European markets, where it has displaced more expensive gas as a fuel for power stations.

American coal exports to Europe increased by 29 per cent last year. The resulting oversupply, exacerbated by a slowdown in Chinese demand, sent European coal prices plummeting from $130 a tonne in March 2011 to around $86 now.

So there was a sharp increase in the level of the greenhouse gases blamed for global warming emitted by the European Union’s coal-fired power stations in 2012, as plant owners rushed to take advantage of high profits.

The rise was as high as 17 per cent according to Brian Potskowski of the Bloomberg New Energy Finance research group, while Europe’s total power plant emissions rose 3 per cent over the same period.

“I would say that the increase in power emissions is due in large part to the increased attractiveness of burning coal relative to gas in 2012,” he said.

In the capitalist dream world inside Leggett’s entrepreneurial head, the leaders of the countries where solar panel production takes place will issue ‘instructions to their ministries to think of common global energy security rather than narrow national energy insecurity.’

The rise in burning dirty fuels confirms a recent International Energy Agency’s report which showed that, “despite a boom in renewable energy over the last decade, the average unit of energy produced today is basically as dirty as it was 20 years ago”.

In the harsh reality of capitalist economics, the search for the highest profits determines the retreat to coal and accelerating climate change. The notion that market mechanisms, or indeed consumer choice, can even begin to solve the eco-crisis is a non-runner if there ever was one.

Gerry Gold

Economics editor

Climate change window closing fast

The chance to prevent runaway climate change is slipping away. Global carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from fossil-fuel combustion reached a record high in 2011 and there is nothing to suggest the trajectory will change this year or in the foreseeable future

A 6.1% increase in CO2 emissions in countries outside the economies within the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) was only marginally offset by a 0.6% reduction inside the major economies,  according to estimates from the International Energy Agency.

The rise was driven by Chinese coal burning power stations which created a 9.3% increase, or 720 million tonnes more CO2 released into the atmosphere and by increased industrialisation in India where emissions rose by 8.7%. That makes India the fourth largest emitter behind China, the United States, and the European Union, overtaking Russia.

CO2 emissions in the United States fell by 1.7% due to a switch from coal to natural gas, an exceptionally mild winter, the recession alongside higher oil prices and fewer car journeys. The Obama government's rush to create new coal-fired power stations, to facilitate cheaper-than-oil energy generation, could quickly reverse that, however.

In the EU too there was a reduction of 1.9%, due to a cut in industrial production and a relatively warm winter. However, the EU is also set to turn this small reduction back by giving up on renewables and “rebranding” gas produced by fracking as “green fuel”. This is in spite of research showing that taking the production and burning process as a whole, fracking emits as much harmful greenhouse gas as coal, including large quantities of very harmful methane.

Per capita CO2 emissions in China and India still remain just 63% and 15% of the average within the advanced capitalist economies. The argument runs that, to achieve so-called climate justice, they must be allowed to increase emissions until they reach average levels.

Per capita increases do not, however, translate into higher energy use for the poorest people, who continue to struggle with light and heat. They represent rather the transfer of emissions from the consumer economies of the West to the manufacturing base in the East. The poorest in Asia and Africa will be the greatest sufferers from the impacts of climate change, as the elites in those countries grow richer.

However it is achieved, the science shows that to limit global temperature rise to 2°C above pre-industrial levels (a scenario that will itself bring dramatic changes to world climate) emissions must peak in 2017. IEA Chief Economist Faith Birol said the 2011 data provides “further evidence that the door to a 2°C trajectory is about to close".

China had made significant progress in slowing the rate of its increase, but this was not neither sufficient nor a quick enough reduction.

Coal accounted for 45% of total energy-related CO2 emissions in 2011, followed by oil (35%) and natural gas (20%).Therefore the way to achieve a rapid reduction is to cut use of ALL these fossil fuels, not only the most harmful. This could be achieved by a massive energy efficiency and energy saving programme, and by switching to renewables.  

There is no political will on the part of any governments to take the measures needed to achieve peak emissions in 2017. The drive to industrialise and ferocious competition in world markets, makes it impossible for them to co-operate to achieve it. A transformation in politics and democracy so that decisions are made on behalf of people and planet as a whole, rather than in the interests of “growth” and profits, is absolutely necessary. Without it, runaway climate change become unstoppable.  

Penny Cole

Environment editor

Peak oil is passed as renewable targets plummet

Peak oil has passed us by – it happened in 2006 according to Faith Birol, chief economist at the International Energy Agency. He made this astonishing statement in a number of interviews on television stations in the US and Australia.

Governments, said Birol, should have started thinking about all this ten years ago: “The time is running out, the oil is today our lifeline, it is everywhere in the economy, if the prices go up or if there’s a supply disruption this will be definitely very bad news.”

By 2035, three-quarters of the world’s oil production from existing fields will need to be replaced, according to the IEA’s World Energy Outlook report 2010. By then, crude oil output from fields that were in production in 2009 will have fallen from 68 million barrels per day in 2009 to 16 million per day, leaving a gap of 50 million barrels per day to be filled.

As production falls, prices increase – crude oil is currently over $100 a barrel compared to about $40 in 2009. The gap is being filled by a surge in new fossil fuels - shale gasification, extraction of oil from tar sands, and increased reliance on natural gas and coal.

The IEA’s first Clean Energy Report published in April states that surging demand for fossil fuels is “outstripping deployment of clean energy technologies”, adding:

“Coal has met 47% of the global new electricity demand over the past decade, eclipsing clean energy efforts made over the same period of time, which include improved implementation of energy efficiency measures and rapid growth in the use of renewable energy sources.”


In a hard hitting introduction to the report, the IEA states: “Less than three years after fossil fuel prices hit an all time high and the world plunged into its deepest recession since the Great Depression, geopolitical events are driving prices steadily higher.

“The short-term risks to political stability and economic activity posed by the world’s dependence on fossil fuels are again as manifest as its long-term threat to environmental sustainability. To break this dependency, the world needs a clean energy revolution.”

But no such revolution is in sight. In fact the opposite is happening. Renewable energy is being abandoned by governments, in the wake of the economic crisis.
EU Energy Chief Connie Hedegaard has spoken about ferocious lobbying by the European gas industry, representing themselves as a clean energy source. She expressed concern that when current European targets for renewable energy run out in 2020, the industry will simply stop growing.

And in any case states never could have invested, or subsidised, at levels to provide real competition to big fossil fuel interests. Only ecologically dubious bio-fuel can stand up to them to some extent, with processes that are only marginally more sustainable than fossil fuels themselves.

One estimate is that by 2030 renewables will have risen from their present 5% of the total to just 18%, and gas will be the biggest growth area. Oil and coal will fall slightly as a proportion of the whole but fossil fuels will remain the heart of the energy mix for the foreseeable future.

In 2009, the IEA set out the energy shift required to prevent dangerous climate change. By 2030, 60% of energy would need to be produced by low-carbon energy technologies – made up of renewable technologies (37%); nuclear (18%) and energy plants fitted with carbon capture and storage technology (5%).

That mix is not achievable if the current power structures – state power, corporate power and electric power – remain in place.

Penny Cole
Environment editor