THAT OTHER CRUNCH


Cormac McCarthy's The Road seems to haunt everyone who reads it, so bleak is the picture it paints of a world of depleted resources and a truly broken society. Here, George Monbiot and Paul Kingsnorth debate eco-collapse and whether industrial civilisation is worth saving. Timely, prophetic stuff - well worth a look.

In Monbiot's words "... the survivors of this collapse will be subject to the will of people seeking to monopolise remaining resources. This will is likely to be imposed through violence. Political accountability will be a distant memory. The chances of conserving any resource in these circumstances are approximately zero. The human and ecological consequences of the first global collapse are likely to persist for many generations, perhaps for our species’ remaining time on earth."

CHANGEABLE


When I was a kid I used to play at being Doctor Who, and that entertained me even in the playground, or walking to school. In particular, his abilty to regenerate fascinated me. Being transplanted very suddenly, as I have been this month, sets off the same kind of dislocated feelings I imagine would happen were you to wake up in a new body. My whole adult life has been like this. When you measure it in eras, life seems long, even though you know it isn't really.

I’m here in Nottingham, to all intents and purposes alone, and surrounded by relics that are like the memorabilia of my past lives. Where did I find time to read all those books in my 20s, for example? I only have the sketchiest memories of them, and it took me a whole day to clean 12 years of dust from the spines. I’ve also unpacked my CD collection, the soundtrack of very different days. My old clothes don’t fit, for some reason – and here are a couple of cardigans (cardigans?) and jackets I can hardly remember wearing.

The place like a new planet. People seem very different from Hungary – mostly because I can understand what everyone is saying in public places. I have to mention this example, overheard at a bus stop – a son, in his late 40s, to his mother (thick midlands accent): “You’re the age Gran was when she pegged it and I’m the age you were when Gran pegged it!”

The climatic conditions are (what else?) changeable. I seem to remember the wind blowing the clouds across the sun in some other waning summer, and being caught in the rain. Have I been here before?

There are some continuities too: I still have an appetite for red wine, and now my console is reconnected, I’m in magical touch with everyone I knew from other time streams. This is a good thing when you’ve got that exiled feeling.

MPs ARE TOO EXPENSIVE


There is no justification for these ludicrous expenses claims (see below) by people who have also regularly voted to hike their salaries well above the average rise, and who recently called for a 66% pay rise. They ought to be removed forthwith.

full report in The Guardian 08.05.09

• Hazel Blears, the communities secretary, who allegedly claimed money on three different properties in one year alone. She also spent £5,000 on furniture in the space of four months after she bought the third property.

• Jack Straw, the justice secretary, who claimed back the full cost of council tax, even though he received a 50% discount from his local authority. Straw repaid the money last summer after a high court ruling requiring the receipts to be published.

• Lord Mandelson, who claimed thousands of pounds to repair his constituency home in Hartlepool after announcing his resignation as an MP in 2004.

• David Miliband, who spent hundreds of pounds on gardening at his constituency home.

• Alistair Darling, who changed his official "second home" designation four times in four years.

• Geoff Hoon who switched his second home to allow him to improve his family home in Derbyshire at taxpayers' expense before buying a London home.

“If present trends continue, 1.8 billion people will be living in countries or regions with absolute water scarcity by 2025, and two thirds of the world population could be subject to water stress.”

UN Environment Programme report, 2007

A GENERATION AGO....

It's thirty years since Maggie Thatcher first came to power in the UK and in a future history the chapter about her era may well be subtitled (1979 - 2008). Whatever the main title (I'd go for Thatcherism And The Age Of Waste), its theme will be an ironic one - that her policies ultimately hastened the death, or at least the containment, of the very free markets she revered.

Free market capitalism is emphatically not the greatest system that we can devise for running the world. It distributes goods and services, true, but what a failure it's been in terms of maintaining social cohesion, and even economic stability. What a rejection of human expertise it now seems, after a century of progress in the understanding of how to (and how not to) manage a balance of growth, relative economic stability and social justice. (Remember the "social market"?) What an abdication of planetary responsibility it turns out to have been. And in its old age, what a festival of consumer overspend, fantasy and political corruption.

The party's over. Soon Thatcher's admirers won't have a leg to stand on, and the dear leader will be gone. Not the end of history, then.

LESS MAD WORLD


The world is a less mad place to be now. Listening to Jarvis Cocker's guest editor slot on the Today programme this morning, it slowly dawned on me that we're both part of the new orthodoxy. I found myself agreeing with everything he said - many were things I have thought again and again over the past twenty years. The urgent need to push the environment to the top of the political agenda can now be delivered in a flat monotone rather than screamed in panic - because everyone apart from career contrarians (Jeremy Clarkson et al) believes it, at some level. It all seemed a bit dull, however, even though Jarvis was doing his best, just like the mournful progress of a hymn tune which makes its weary way to its final utterly predictable conclusion.

So we had to fight hard for the boring mainstream. And so it came to pass - the UK government and Barack Obama both committed to 80% reductions in carbon emissions by 2050, and I am going into 2009 with a spring in my step and feeling more at home in our strange civilisation. Not only this; the progress of history and ideas is at last resuming. (See September 18th, below) It's not a bad time for the new President to be taking office. The timing is uncannily perfect.

What I'd most like to do in 2009 is get reinspired.

A GREEN NEW DEAL

"As long as the basic tenet of unlimited hoarding of wealth remains fundamental to our economy, economic disparity and environmental degradation will continue. We will continue to accept as fair and inevitable that economic growth creates concentration of wealth, on the one hand, and unemployment, displacement of people and poverty, on the other. Without a fundamental rethinking of the current economic dogma of private property rights above all other values, and that human progress is best measured in increased material consumption, we cannot create an environmentally sustainable and poverty-free society."
Roar Bjonnes, a Proutist thinker.


It is much easier to diagnose the problem than to propose solutions for it, especially solutions that don't contain the kind of dynamic which moves inevitably to some kind of old-style state-controlled economy. I think that, even in the context of a free market economy, certain restrictions would be practicable, and without removing incentives for motivated and successful people. For example:

1. The prohibition of dealing in certain kinds of "junk" stocks, however they are defined: hedge funds, short selling, etc
2. Fixing currency exchange rates, or otherwise prohibiting large-scale currency speculation.
3. An end to corporate lobbying to restore democratic control of parliaments, and the payment of MPs at a more moderate level to attract people who are genuinely interested in public service.
4. Increasing taxation on multinational corporations as part of a co-ordinated reining in of the supranational freedoms which they have accumulated and abused. The money would be used to fund green technologies and training for work in a more environmentally sustainable economy.
5. Repossessed property should be taken into the public domain to replenish the public housing stock, and rented in the first place to the defaulting occupant(s), at a subsidised rate. Over time, there should be a gradual restriction in the number of properties one individual/family is allowed to own.
6. A substantial increase in the minimum wage, which would be paid (including flexible increments) to people working for publicly-funded sustainable projects. This would be paid for by a drastic reduction in military expenditure, as well as far heavier taxation on higher earners.