http://www.guardian.co.uk/climatechange/story/0,,1700301,00.html

It's capitalism or a habitable planet - you can't have both

Our economic system is unsustainable by its very nature. The only response 
to climate chaos and peak oil is major social change

Robert Newman
Thursday February 2, 2006
The Guardian

There is no meaningful response to climate change without massive social 
change. A cap on this and a quota on the other won't do it. Tinker at the 
edges as we may, we cannot sustain earth's life-support systems within the 
present economic system.

Capitalism is not sustainable by its very nature. It is predicated on 
infinitely expanding markets, faster consumption and bigger production in a 
finite planet. And yet this ideological model remains the central organising 
principle of our lives, and as long as it continues to be so it will 
automatically undo (with its invisible hand) every single green initiative 
anybody cares to come up with.

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Much discussion of energy, with never a word about power, leads to the 
fallacy of a low-impact, green capitalism somehow put at the service of 
environmentalism. In reality, power concentrates around wealth. Private 
ownership of trade and industry means that the decisive political force in 
the world is private power. The corporation will outflank every puny law and 
regulation that seeks to constrain its profitability. It therefore stands in 
the way of the functioning democracy needed to tackle climate change. Only 
by breaking up corporate power and bringing it under social control will we 
be able to overcome the global environmental crisis.

On these pages we have been called on to admire capital's ability to take 
robust action while governments dither. All hail Wal-Mart for imposing a 20% 
reduction in its own carbon emissions. But the point is that supermarkets 
are over. We cannot have such long supply lines between us and our food. Not 
any more. The very model of the supermarket is unsustainable, what with the 
packaging, food miles and destruction of British farming. Small, independent 
suppliers, processors and retailers or community-owned shops selling locally 
produced food provide a social glue and reduce carbon emissions. The same is 
true of food co-ops such as Manchester's bulk-distribution scheme serving 
former "food deserts".

All hail BP and Shell for having got beyond petroleum to become non-profit 
eco-networks supplying green energy. But fail to cheer the Fortune 500 
corporations that will save us all and ecologists are denounced as 
anti-business. Many career environmentalists fear that an anti-capitalist 
position is what's alienating the mainstream from their irresistible 
arguments. But is it not more likely that people are stunned into inaction 
by the bizarre discrepancy between how extreme the crisis described and how 
insipid the solutions proposed? Go on a march to the House of Commons. Write 
a letter to your MP. And what system does your MP hold with? Name one that 
isn't pro-capitalist. Oh, all right then, smartarse. But name five.

We are caught between the Scylla and Charybdis of climate change and peak 
oil. Once we pass the planetary oil production spike (when oil begins 
rapidly to deplete and demand outstrips supply), there will be less and less 
net energy available to humankind. Petroleum geologists reckon we will pass 
the world oil spike sometime between 2006 and 2010. It will take, argues 
peak-oil expert Richard Heinberg, a second world war effort if many of us 
are to come through this epoch. Not least because modern agribusiness puts 
hundreds of calories of fossil-fuel energy into the fields for each calorie 
of food energy produced.

Catch-22, of course, is that the very worst fate that could befall our 
species is the discovery of huge new reserves of oil, or even the burning 
into the sky of all the oil that's already known about, because the climate 
chaos that would unleash would make the mere collapse of industrial society 
a sideshow bagatelle. Therefore, since we've got to make the switch from oil 
anyway, why not do it now?

Solutions need to come from people themselves. But once set up, local 
autonomous groups need to be supported by technology transfers from state to 
community level. Otherwise it's too expensive to get solar panels on your 
roof, let alone set up a local energy grid. Far from utopian, this has a 
precedent: back in the 1920s the London boroughs of Wandsworth and Battersea 
had their own electricity-generating grid for their residents. So long as 
energy corporations exist, however, they will fight tooth and nail to stop 
whole postal districts seceding from the national grid. Nor will the banks 
and the CBI be neutral bystanders, happy to observe the inroads 
participatory democracy makes in reducing carbon emissions, or a trade union 
striking for carbon quotas.

There are many organisational projects we can learn from. The Just 
Transition Alliance, for example, was set up by black and Latino groups in 
the US working with labour unions to negotiate alliances between "frontline 
workers and fenceline communities", that is to say between union members who 
work in polluting industries and stand to lose their jobs if the plant is 
shut down, and those who live next to the same plant and stand to lose their 
health if it's not.

We have to start planning seriously not just a system of personal carbon 
rationing but at what limit to set our national carbon ration. Given a fixed 
UK carbon allowance, what do we spend it on? What kinds of infrastructure do 
we wish to build, retool or demolish? What kinds of organisational 
structures will work as climate change makes pretty much all communities 
more or less "fenceline" and almost all jobs more or less "frontline"? (Most 
of our carbon emissions come when we're at work).

To get from here to there we must talk about climate chaos in terms of what 
needs to be done for the survival of the species rather than where the 
debate is at now or what people are likely to countenance tomorrow morning.

If we are all still in denial about the radical changes coming - and all of 
us still are - there are sound geological reasons for our denial. We have 
lived in an era of cheap, abundant energy. There never has and never will 
again be consumption like we have known. The petroleum interval, this 
one-off historical blip, this freakish bonanza, has led us to believe that 
the impossible is possible, that people in northern industrial cities can 
have suntans in winter and eat apples in summer. But much as the petroleum 
bubble has got us out of the habit of accepting the existence of zero-sum 
physical realities, it's wise to remember that they never went away. You can 
either have capitalism or a habitable planet. One or the other, not both.

· Robert Newman's History of Oil will be broadcast on More4 next month

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