Response to flooding shows the system isn't working

The current weather crisis has shown up the illegitimacy of politicians in charge of a system that is unable and unwilling to act for the common good. They greatly fear this exposure – it's the reason for the tide of government rhetoric about "money no object" and promises of future help.

In 2010, government chief scientist Sir David King warned of the need to plan for increased floods resulting from climate change. He proposed pulling flood defences inland, sacrificing some areas to the sea, establishing flood plains at the heads of rivers, modernising weirs, widening bridges and replacing sewers to separate sewage and floodwater.

This is the current policy of the Environment Agency and it has a backlog of hundreds of measures based on this approach. It can't complete them because of cuts and a Treasury rule that they can't invest more than £400,000 in any one project. The government's fantasy was that business and the insurance industry would step up as co-funders. As a result, of course, nothing happened.

The Met Office explains that the storms have their source in south-east Asia, where warming seas are evaporating huge quantities of water into the atmosphere. This caused a weather "chain reaction" which disrupted the Pacific jet stream, diverting it over north America and causing the extremely cold conditions there. This in turn affected the Atlantic jet stream, which moved more and more rapidly, bringing storm after storm to Britain and Ireland.

But Lord Lawson, former Tory Chancellor, knows better. He berated the Met Office for suggesting climate change could be involved. Instead, the floods should spur the government to stop spending untold millions littering the countryside with pylons and solar panels. This at a time when 80,000 homes are without power and probably the only  people with electricity are those with their own solar panels or turbines!

But it isn't just the Tory fringe who deny climate change as energy and climate change Secretary Ed Davey suggests in a speech today. Cabinet member and environment secretary Owen Paterson thinks climate change has been happening for centuries and is great because farmers will get longer growing seasons! Transport secretary Philip Hammond yesterday blamed "natural solar rhythms” for the weather. Help, we’ve been transported back to the Middle Ages!

David Cameron only “very much suspects” that the flooding is linked to climate change. He is running scared of the lunatics in his own party and Ukip (remember the Ukip councillor who said the floods were God’s retribution after the passing of the gay marriage law?) His chancellor is not a denier, he's a couldn't-care-lesser, a fossil-fuel profit freak, whose response to soaring energy costs was to let the Big Six drop spending on energy saving or renewables.

The ConDems want the UK fracked to bits and Somerset – which is largely under water - is one of the areas earmarked. You don't have to imagine the effect on water quality of flooded wells and waste water ponds. It happened in Colorado last year – as the headline here says: "Flooding and Fracking - a double disaster".

When King published his report he thought the floods would come in the 2030s at the earliest, and yet here's the wild weather, two decades early, and not only in Britain but across the world. Capitalist states thought they could treat climate change like they do the electorate – blandish, fool and bully people, whilst permitting corporate business as usual. 

The only issue now is whether we are prepared to permit them to go on down this road. There is nothing in it for us to maintain the status quo. Politicians of any political stripe wading about flooded towns won't help us.

We are on our own here, and so we should put all the resources at our disposal under democratic local control and start acting co-operatively to prepare for what is ahead, including halting any plans to increase fossil fuel burning.

Penny Cole

Environment editor

Memo to Cameron: Floods are actually in charge of us

There had to be a moment when a changed climate resulting from global warming caused persistent extreme weather. With horrific storms and floods in Britain and France, the worst drought in California since records began and temperatures over 40º in Australia, that moment has arrived.

David Cameron is now "in charge of the floods" – but in reality the floods are in charge of us.  

Thousands of people are without power, roads are impassable, the sea is encroaching into town centres and breaking down sea walls. Some villages have been cut off for weeks, all normal life put on hold. Yesterday police helicopters cruised the Somerset levels, warning people to leave their homes.

Cameron announced the ConDem government will contribute an extra £100m (literally a drop in the ocean) and stated "there is no limit to what this government will do - whether it is dredging the rivers Tone and Parrett (on the Somerset levels), whether it is support for our emergency services, whether it is fresh money for flood defences, whether it is action across the board, this Government will help those families and get this issue sorted".

But it can't be "sorted" in that sense. Quick fixes are of no use here.

In the medium term, Devon and Cornwall are going to be cut out of the rail network for as long as six months and probably longer if it proves unrealistic to rebuild along the coastal route.

In the longer term, there will be a massive speed up of coastal erosion. We have seen the beginnings of that this month. Villages that have existed since medieval times may become uninhabitable.

Dredging the Somerset levels is a disastrous idea. It will force streams and rivers into unnatural gorges, where water will rush towards the sea, spilling over every time it hits a pinch point - say a bridge. Villages and farms on the levels will see a slight diminution of floods but the water will burst river banks in towns like Taunton.

There is another way, which is to accept that during winter storms some farm land will be flooded. Adding huge quantities of organic matter to the fields - that is compost - would ensure they hold the water and drain well when the storms end. This would mean turning away from chemical farming.

We need to create open space in towns and cities. We need to stop building on flood plains and where have already done it, take urgent measures to improve drainage. The environment agency wants to regulate so new housing developments must be built with a soak-away - open land to hold excess water when rainfall is too much for sewer drains. But the construction industry opposes this simple measure, because they would not be able to crush quite so many homes on to every site.

The system of capitalist economy privileges private ownership and profit above all other considerations, and our market state governments have become simply another facet of this whole. The idea the state should pay for infrastructure has been rubbished for decades. The days when they could act in opposition to business interests in the public interest have long gone.

Climate change will increasingly create chaotic social conditions and we know that governments' first response to disorder is generally to crack down on the population. But they can't crack down on the weather - it's bigger than all of us.

It has become clear during the floods that people have had to rely on their own resilience and social solidarity to get through. A hands-off state has proved incompetent and unable to prepare for what was on the cards. This is true on a regional, national and global scale as well.

The lessons are pretty stark. Society’s resources have to be marshalled in a co-operative and democratic way so we can decide how best to respond to extreme weather, which is here to stay. Weather is now first and foremost a political question of power. At the moment, it’s in the hands of incompetent politicians and their developer friends. That's what has to change.

Penny Cole

Environment editor

More of the same won't solve the food crisis

An intensifying global climate and farming emergency is threatening the security and affordability of food while leading international agencies view the crisis as an investment opportunity.

In the UK, the wettest autumn on record, followed by the coldest spring in 50 years has devastated spring wheat. Normally at this time of year UK farmers would export 2.5m tonnes - this year food processing companies will import a similar amount.

In central Europe, the state of emergency continues in the aftermath of unprecedented flooding wreaking havoc across Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Hungary, Slovakia, Poland and the Czech Republic. At least 18 people were killed, and tens of thousands evacuated.

The European Union is struggling to count the cost in lost production, but the areas affected by the floods and heavy rains are amongst some of Europe's key farming areas, including in Italy.

In the United States, wildfires are raging in drought affected south west states of Colorado, New Mexico, California and Oregon.

Every US state west of a line from Minnesota in the north to Mississippi in the south (with the exception of the far north states on the border with Canada) is now entering a second year of drought.  Some 80% of US agriculture land was affected in 2012 and there is no sign of any let up.

The US agriculture department is warning consumers of 15% price increases for meat, dairy and cereal products.

Meanwhile the eastern half of the US been swept by yet another Atlantic storm. The strength and frequency of these is being driven by climate change. A US government study warns that "for each 1°C increase in tropical sea surface temperatures, hurricane surface wind speeds will increase by 1 to 8% and core rainfall rates by 6 to 18%".

As Peter Kendall, president of the UK's National Farmers Union has said: “Climate change scientists have long predicted that agriculture will face major challenges from global warming. However 2012 has starkly demonstrated the cost that extreme weather events can wreak on farmers and the food supply chain.”

The OECD-FAO Agricultural Outlook 2013-2022 says agricultural production will grow by just 1.5% a year on average over the coming decade, compared with annual growth of 2.1% between 2003 and 2012. That's not even enough to feed the growth in population over the same period.

They go on to warn that a repeat of the drought of 2012 could raise world food prices by between 15-40%.

But they can only offer more of the same market-driven solutions, and in fact present the crisis as an investment opportunity for cash-strapped governments:

"Agriculture is an increasingly market-driven sector, as opposed to policy-driven as it was in the past, thus offering developing countries important investment opportunities and economic benefits, given their growing food demand, potential for production expansion and comparative advantages in many global markets."

They do not explain how this approach will feed the world's people, since all the land grabbing and intensive application of chemicals of recent years have totally failed to deliver more food.

There is no room here to set out an alternative agriculture policy, but suffice it to say that growing close to the point of consumption, using organic methods and shifting away from high meat and high processed diets can succeed where industrial farming has failed.

And doesn't that describe pretty accurately the kind of agriculture pursued by those who are currently being driven off their land to make way for the agri-businesses? No profit in there for Monsanto or Walmart though.

The food “plateau” is just another example of how capitalism is incapable of moving forward a single step to meet society's needs, and is actually in reverse. It is time we opted for a very different diet.

Penny Cole

Environment editor

Unsold goods pile up as crash takes its toll

In the wake of the Olympics, countless millions of pairs of trainers lie unsold in warehouses. Thousands of Chinese companies from property developers to car manufacturers sit atop mountains of products surplus to a hoped-for demand that never materialised.

China became the low-wage manufacturing centre of choice for corporations during the credit-induced 30-year frenzy of growth that preceded the crash. The belief that its burgeoning internal market would absorb an ever increasing volume of production added multiple stories to the house of cards that now lies in ruins.

With the global slump worsening and austerity economics stalking the globe, real incomes are dropping fast, so few are spending and consumers are hard to find. The unsold mountains of electronics and white goods are Himalayan in scale.

Earlier this month, China’s main retailers descended into a competitive price war, when online trader 360buy.com announced that it would sell home appliances at a zero profit margin. For capitalist companies zero profit is the end of the line. Clearly only the strongest will survive.

The global economy is spinning out of control tearing apart political and social relations with an unstoppable power that is only equalled by the severe climatic events that are devastating the Midwest and Gulf of America, Myanmar, the Niger, Japan and Korea.

These may appear as random acts of nature but they too are intimately connected to the frenzy of commodity production that has been the feature of the intense, carbon-driven globalisation of the world economy.

Meanwhile, weak demand in the United States and Europe has hit exports of IT services and manufactured goods from India. The credit ratings agencies Fitch and Standard & Poor's have threatened to downgrade the country’s sovereign debt to junk

The European Union, formed as an economic defence against American and Asian competition is now wracked with multiple crises that are tearing it apart. The collapse of unsustainable debt has set a centrifugal force at work between the central richer countries with Germany in the forefront and the poorer peripheral neighbours including Greece, Spain and Portugal and Ireland. 

It is also at work within the sovereign countries themselves. Catalonia is the second of the 17 autonomous communities calling for a bail-out from the central government. Spain’s economy is shrinking fast – at an annual rate of 3.9% in the second quarter. Its banks are seeing a flight of capital, losing €1 out of every €20 deposited with them in July alone as savers see the writing on the wall..

Whilst the countries bankrupted by bailing out the banks are forced to borrow from the money markets at impossibly high rates, cash rich are investors moving their money to the relatively safe havens of Germany, Finland, Denmark, Switzerland, Austria and the Netherlands. But they have to accept negative interest rates and watch the value of their investments fall.

The retreating tide of the global capitalist economy reveals not just mountains of unsellable products, but millions upon millions of workers, now also surplus to requirements.

Employment in Spain rose 4.6% percent over the 12 months that ended June 30, representing the loss of more than 800,000 jobs, taking unemployment to 25%; the speed at which jobs are being destroyed quickened in the second quarter.

As the economic conditions become impossible, many in the country are turning to alternative, social-money projects according to Peter North, a senior lecturer at the University of Liverpool.

“Instead of just being a desperate way for people to survive a horrible economic crisis, this is part of the cooperatives, credit unions, community banks, organic farms and recovering factories — the alternate economy — that the Occupy movement is groping towards.”

There are now more than 325 time banks and alternative currency systems in Spain involving tens of thousands of citizens. Collectively, these projects represent one of the largest experiments in social money in modern times. Harnessing their power and momentum to speed a democratic transformation of political economy along not-for-profit lines would be a tremendous, revolutionary step forward, and not only for Spain.

Gerry Gold
Economics editor

Extreme weather set to get worse

The UK has just experienced record rainfall in June – double the average. Until now, scientists would only go so far as to say that this is consistent with weather patterns that can be expected from climate change.

But with extreme weather affecting large areas of the United States, the scientific case against continuing with the capitalist system of production for profit is mounting.

Massive forest fires, heat waves and droughts are devastating much of the country. This comes just a week after Tropical Storm Debby flooded Florida. Some 113 million Americans are now in the excessive heat advisory zone. That’s more than a third of the entire US population.

A relentless heat wave has gripped the eastern United States. More than 2,000 heat records have been broken over the past week. Thousands more were set in June. Even more striking, the first day of July also broke records for the highest-ever recorded temperatures on any date at spots in Georgia, Kentucky, North Carolina and South Carolina.

Nashville broke its all-time record, hitting F109 degrees . Authorities urged people to stay indoors and cancelled outdoor events this weekend. A violent thunderstorm known as a "derecho" left a more than 700-mile trail of destruction across the Midwest and Mid-Atlantic Friday, cutting power to millions, killing at least 23 people. Fast-moving fires have destroyed hundreds of homes in Colorado and are threatening thousands more. The fires have grown so large you can see the effect from space.

Whilst many scientists remain cagey about the direct attribution of these extreme weather events to global warming induced by “human activity” - more precisely 150 years of capitalist industry - they are all agreed that the chances of such events are already much higher as a result of the effects of polluting emissions.  According to Dr Clare Goodess, senior researcher at the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit:

Over the last five years or so, a growing number of peer-reviewed studies have provided convincing evidence of a detectable human influence on the increases in high temperature extremes which have been observed over the last few decades over the globe as a whole and over large-scale regions such as Europe. It has been demonstrated that human influence has more than doubled the risk of a hot European summer like that of 2003 occurring, and substantially increased the risk of flooding which occurred in England and Wales in autumn 2000.

Kevin Trenberth heads climate research at the National Centre for Atmospheric Research in Colorado. "We are certainly seeing climate change in action," he said. "This year has been exceptionally unusual throughout the United States."

So what does the future hold if the current capitalist mode of production is allowed to continue spewing its waste products into the environment? 

Michael F. Wehner, staff scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory sums it up: “It is important to know that the amount of climate change that we have experienced so far is very small to what is projected to occur by the middle and end of this century. By 2100, today's most extreme weather events will seem relatively normal.”

The present system is clearly not sustainable, whichever way you look at it. The good news is that mounting worldwide revolt against the effects of attempts to solve the financial and economic crisis provides the best chance for the convergence of a global movement against the out-of-control capitalist machine. Waiting for something to turn up is simply not an option.

Gerry Gold

Economics editor

Food production for profit and climate change

Capitalism has succeeded in replacing the virtuous circle of growth and fertilisation, which is the unalterable premise of agriculture, with a vicious cycle of degradation of soil, drought, floods and famine.

The “green revolution “techniques adopted by profit-driven agribusiness since the 1960s, including the switch to manufactured fertilisers, have ravaged the soil and increased pressure to bring new land into use, driving deforestation.

More than a quarter of the CO2 currently trapped in the earth’s atmosphere, which is driving climate change, has come from the destruction of soil resulting from this period of the growth in intensive, industrialised agriculture.

To the emissions produced by farming itself, must be added the emissions from all the other aspects of the changes in food production - the growing distance from the farm to the consumer and the domination of sale and distribution by supermarkets whose profits rely on chemical processing of food crops, to the detriment of people’s health.

Sustainable farming campaigners GRAIN have produced a new report that finds that the emissions produced by farming itself is between 11%-15% of the global total. But to that must be added

• emissions from deforestation and change of land use for livestock feed production, 15-18%

• processing, transport, packaging and retail, 15-20%

• waste of food left rotting in landfill, 2-4% .

That gives a total of between a bottom estimate of 44% to a highest estimate of 57% of the total contribution of food production to greenhouse gas emissions.

Therefore, the total of global CO2 emissions can only be reduced to the extent that we succeed in cutting emissions from food production. GRAIN proposes that we must “turn the food system upside down”, but in reality what we would be doing is putting it back on its feet!

Scientific reports show that cultivated soils have lost from 30 to 75% of their organic matter in the 20th century. Reversing this process could by itself make a massive contribution to cutting emissions:

“The CO2 we have sent into the atmosphere by depleting the world’s soils, can be put back into the soil. All that is required is a change of agricultural practices. We have to move away from practices that destroy organic matter to practices that build up organic matter.”

This could be achieved by transforming agriculture to operate on the two key practices that require absolutely no scientific advance to introduce. These are first, diversified cropping instead of monoculture and better integration between arable, vegetable and livestock farming. And second, universal composting in order to return organic matter to the soil.

Added to these simple practices, GRAIN proposes:

• a shift to local markets, reducing transportation costs

• an end to intensive meat and dairy production, reducing the use of chemical fertilisers for feed crops and the methane emissions from unprocessed manure.

• halting land clearance, the use of marginal land for intensive agriculture and deforestation.

With farming now ravaged by extreme weather in many countries, the food revolution is urgently needed now and the measures proposed by GRAIN seem so simple.

But then again not so simple. These changes may not require much scientific advance, but they do require a complete transformation of land ownership and an end to production of food for profit. These may be exactly the same methods used by small farmers now, but small farmers alone cannot provide food for the planet’s growing population. We must transform agribusiness too.

The supermarkets, transport firms and food processing companies would need to become worker-owned, in order to overcome the alienation of people living in cities from the food they eat.

The agribusiness giants could then be switched from profit-driven experimentation to research into how to support natural farming methods. But this democratisation of food can only be brought about by democratisation of society and a shift to common ownership and shared responsibility.

Human society – all its individual members collectively wherever they live, have to be actively involved in bringing about this change in how we produce and consume food. It is after all, our primary need along with clean water and shelter.

Penny Cole

Environment editor

Extreme weather is all about climate change

This week serious floods in Cornwall, and in September, floods in Ayrshire and Aberdeenshire. Last year, unprecedented rains and flooding in Cumbria; in 2008 Wales and the Midlands; in 2007 Humber, Yorkshire and Gloucestershire and in 2006, Norfolk and Suffolk. Extreme rain and flooding are becoming more frequent events in the UK.

The floods come as one of the climate change deniers’ key myths has been exploded by a report by US and British meteorologists. It confirms that not only is the earth’s surface warming, but the troposphere – the area where weather happens – is warming too.

This is entirely in line with climate science predictions of what happens as greenhouse gases build up in the upper atmosphere. And it means more extreme weather – both drought and floods – and not in the future, but now.

This year, terrible floods in Pakistan affected 15 million people, 300,000 homes were destroyed or damaged and two million left homeless. Public infrastructure of health, education, governance, roads and rail were destroyed in some areas.

There have also been heat waves and wildfires in Russia and Ukraine. Ten million people are currently facing starvation in Chad and Niger after years of drought followed by flash floods. More than a thousand people were killed in landslides triggered by torrential rain in China’s Gansu province. Deforestation, reckless development and political neglect all play a part in these tragedies, but the weather is the major cause.

This year’s hurricane season brought 19 major storms to Mexico and Central America. Weeks of heavy rains triggered landslides in Central America, killing hundreds of people and destroying infrastructure. In Mexico, swollen rivers washed away fields and coastal towns were submerged when tropical storms surged ashore. This wet weather followed a year of severe drought, with the lowest rainfall in 68 years. Cattle and crops all died in some of the driest parts of Mexico.

“This is our new life with climate change," said Gabino Cue, governor of Mexico's southern state of Oaxaca. One of Mexico's poorest states, it faces a $163-million bill for repairing roads, bridges and public buildings damaged by the floods. The cost of extreme weather to Latin America and the Caribbean could equal 137 percent of the region's current economic output by 2100, according to a United Nations report.

So when officials gather in Cancun later this month to try to negotiate a follow-on treaty to the Kyoto Protocol, the evidence of the impact of climate change will be all around them. Climate change models show the situation can only get worse as temperatures rise.

In spite of all that, the officials are not planning to sign any agreement, and people across the globe will pay the price. The sole result of the last round of climate talks in Copenhagen was a commitment to funding for climate change mitigation in the form of aid from richer to poorer countries. In advance of the Cancun meeting, the European Union published claims to have fulfilled a pledge of 2.2 billion euros ($3 billion) to be delivered on a ‘fast track’. But Oxfam challenges this, suggesting that money from existing pledges is simply being rebranded.

The whole UN process, which started with high hopes of success in 1992, has become a process specifically aimed at avoiding action and channelling people’s anger and fears into a bureaucratic dead end. To escape this impasse we need an urgent action plan for climate change, thinking globally and acting locally. For example, People’s Assemblies in flood-affected areas would plan to mitigate the effects. In Britain, they would reverse the government cuts in spending on flood defences which has been reduced from £335m a year to £261m a year for the next four years.

Penny Cole
Environment editor

No arguing with the profit motive

Extreme weather events throughout the world mark the impact of profit-driven capitalist growth on a changing climate brought about by burning fossil fuel. Wildfires are sweeping across swathes of Southern Europe and Canada, Turkey is hit by floods, and mid-summer torrential rain is lashing the UK.

Yet the logic that motivates capitalist producers abounds. As it shuts the only UK wind turbine facility, Danish manufacturer Vestas has issued dismissal notices to 11 of the workers occupying its Isle of Wight factory and is seeking a possession order today. Vestas prefers to concentrate on its cheap labour venture in China competing with local producers in a less regulated economy, while the New Labour government is totally deaf to pleas to nationalise the firm.

Meanwhile BP, the third largest private energy company in the world is forging ahead with its plans to extract more profit from more oil whilst riding out the global economic storms. With the price of oil down to $52 a barrel during the second quarter– less than a half of last year’s price, and a more than 50% drop in profits – BP actually increased production by 4%. No sign of any concessions to the green agenda there.

Between March and June, BP generated $6.8bn of operational cash flow. Against that it spent $5.2bn on capital expenditure and paid out $2.6bn in dividends. That totals a $7.8bn outflow. In other words, after excluding changes in working capital, BP spent $1bn more than it brought in.

With no sign of a recovery in demand, the global squeeze on profits makes the drive to cut costs all the more urgent. BP says it has already reduced its costs by $2bn in the first half compared with the equivalent period of 2008, and hopes to be more than $3bn lower for the year as a whole. How does it do it? 5,000 jobs have already gone and many more are certain to be lost. That’s how capitalism deals with a slump in demand.

Longer term consequences of the impact of oil extraction and the chase for profit can be found in Nigeria where, in the 1950s, BP became the first to bring the black gold to the surface. As one commentator puts it: Nigeria is now “a country whose electricity grid has totally collapsed, whose ruling elites are almost uniformly corrupt and heedless, whose citizens have often appeared to accept that it is their cursed fate to live in such wretchedness, and whose government, with some happy exceptions, is clueless and dysfunctional.”

So where that leave us? We have BP pumping up production – it’s just won a new contract in Iraq – and slashing jobs, while renewable energy production in the shape of Vestas is shutting up shop on the Isle of Wight. There is a logic to all this – it’s the quest for profit, regardless of human and environmental costs. Arguing with the likes of BP and Vestas is a waste of time. Their primary obligations are to shareholders – not communities or the workforce. Replacing shareholders with forms of co-ownership has to become our obligation.

Gerry Gold
Economics editor