Category Archives: Economics

Carbon Emissions: Billionaires & the BBC

Leave a Reply
  • Extreme Emissions: Roman Abramovich’s super-yacht

Last summer I wrote a blog about the carbon emissions of billionaires. This week an interesting article was published in The Conversation where two economic anthropologists from Indiana University looked in more detail at the individual carbon footprints of twenty of the richest people on the planet. Their findings reveal that the individual carbon footprints varied from Michel Bloomberg’s 1,782 tons to the staggering annual emissions of Roman Abramovich at 31,199 tons. In my blog I’d estimated the carbon emissions of all, or nearly all, billionaires to be over 1,000 tons. I’d also implied that their average would be even higher than this, and some individuals would be almost unimaginably high emitters. This new data backs up my previous blog.

Global average carbon emissions are currently something around 5 tons per person. Many people have miniscule carbon emissions, of perhaps a few kilograms or even just a few grams. The vast majority of such people are small scale African or Asian subsistence farmers. Some people who are doing ecologically regenerative farming systems will have negative carbon footprints, meaning that the carbon they are sequestering in the soil is more than that they emit in other ways. I follow lots of African climate activists of Twitter and many of them are doing amazing projects setting up tree nurseries, clearing up plastic pollution, educating about ecology and setting up ecologically restorative farming systems.

Meanwhile BBC Radio 4 is broadcasting Bill Gates’ book ‘How to Avoid a Climate Disaster’. It is a pretty awful book, concentrating entirely on technological innovation and ignoring the vital aspects of social innovation and climate justice. Last week I reviewed Jason Hickel’s book which focuses on the absolute need to move to a post capitalist economy to combat the climate and ecological emergency. I could recommend dozens of other books, maybe hundreds, that are much better than Bill Gates’ one. So why are the BBC reading his one? Is it because he is a billionaire, and the BBC really has become a mouthpiece for the greedy global elite? As the figures published in The Conversation reveal Bill Gates’ personal carbon emissions are 7,408 tons. Rather than write a book his time might have been better spent looking at his own carbon footprint.

Last month I posted a blog about the people who have inspired me over the last year, and I named three young women activists from Africa who all are doing great work on climate, ecological and social justice: Patricia Kombo from Kenya, Kaossara Sani from Togo and Oladosu Adenike from the Lake Chad Region. I could have added many more names to this list. Africa is bursting with great climate activists. Why does the BBC focus on Bill Gates? Is it because he is a rich white man from America and not a poor black women from Africa?

There are many great books and ideas about how to adequately address the climate and ecological emergency. Most call for some pretty radical changes implying huge social, economic and political change as well as technological change. Why do none of them get coverage on the BBC? Is it because the BBC has become too deeply embedded in the present social, economic and political system that they cannot contemplate any challenge to this system, even when it is glaringly obvious that this needs to happen to avert climate, ecological and social breakdown?

Jason Hickel: Degrowth

2 Replies

Jason Hickel’s book ‘Less is More, How Degrowth will Save the World’ is I think the best yet critique of growth and of capitalism. He draws on ecology, economics, history and many other disciplines to chart how this pervasive and destructive ideology came into being and how it spells disaster for humanity. In the light of the Climate and Ecological Emergency the need to rapidly and radically change direction could not be more urgent. Hickel makes only general indications about what a post growth and post capitalist world might look like, but he does give us at least a glimpse of that possible future. (The book I am writing is much more detailed on that front.)

Economic growth, as measured by GDP, is the fundamental goal of nearly all governments. For most of our politicians and media it is taken as a ‘good thing’. It is the bedrock upon which capitalism as a system has been built, and without continuous growth capitalism would collapse. Because capitalism is so ubiquitous it is taken for granted without really being understood as a system and Jason Hickel is particularly strong in outlining exactly what capitalism is and why it is so destructive. People often think of capitalism as the right to trade and to use markets, but trade and markets pre-date capitalism by thousands of years. What emerged about 500 years ago was a system predicated on extracting value from trade to reinvest in ever larger scale trade. Value had to be continually extracted from the natural world and from people in order to have ever larger sums to invest in ever larger enterprises. Profit acquisition for investment replaced the earlier system of trade to acquire things for their usefulness. Stock markets grew and they depended upon profits to pay interest and attract investors in an endless cycle of continuous growth.

Questioning growth as a goal goes back decades, certainly to the early 1970’s, with Herman Daly’s ideas of a ‘Steady State Economy’, Donella Meadow’s ‘Limits to Growth’, ‘Blueprint for Survival’ and many others. Where Jason Hickel is particularly strong is on the insanity of constant growth projected very far into the future, given the impossibility to completely decouple growth from the material through-put of the economy and the associated waste and pollution. He is also very good in his connecting capitalism’s need for growth with its never ending need to colonize and exploit ever more aspects of people’s lives and of the natural world.

I wholeheartedly recommend this book. It is one of the best books I’ve read in years. The hardback edition came out last August and a paperback version is due to be published in a week or so, on 25th February.

There are writers such as Mark E Thomas, of the 99% organisation, who are still in favour of growth as an overall objective, but who distinguish between good growth, growth that is irredeemably bad and growth that can be transformed from bad to good. Other writers, such as Kate Raworth, author of Donut Economics, describe themselves as growth agnostic. What I’d love to see, and to participate in, is a debate between them. I think we would all agree on what sectors of the economy need to contract, which ones still need to grow and which ones can be transformed. The trouble is any discussion of radical economic contraction of any sectors of the economy is still taboo for most politicians and the media. That needs to change, as a matter of extreme urgency. As Greta Thunberg keeps reminding us, we are in a crisis, and it is about time we started treating it as a crisis. The obsession with endless economic growth on a finite and fragile planet is perhaps the greatest challenge, and the greatest opportunity. If you are not convinced then do read this excellent book by Jason Hickel and judge for yourself.

Life After Fossil Fuels

Leave a Reply

Oil: do we need it to keep modern civilization running?

Oil: do we need it to keep modern civilization running?

A decade or so ago I started running evening classes called ‘Global Problems: Global Solutions’. We tried to envisage solving multiple mega problems simultaneously, from climate change to hunger and poverty. It still seems to me the possibilities of creating a better future are almost limitless.

One of the key concerns of people coming to these events was how life might look without fossil fuels. Some people were most worried from a resource scarcity angle. They saw Peak Oil as a big problem. Others were more worried from a planetary pollution perspective, and for them Climate Change was the biggest worry. Many people seemed to think that as oil is the basis of so much of our global economy we would have to do without many of the oil derived products, and much of the productivity and prosperity that oil has made possible. Many of these people thought that it would be the horse and cart that replaced the car, that global food supplies would massively decrease and that cities would collapse due to lack of food and energy.

I tended to put forward the case that the transition to virtually 100% renewable energy for all humanity’s electricity, transport, heating and cooling would be possible, and that recycling and resource substitution would be possible for most types of industrial production. We could at least in theory move to a circular economy where pollution was minimized and efficiency maximized, and for it all to be based on renewable forms of energy.

Looking back over the last decade it seems to me that the improved technology has led to falling costs of renewables to such an extent that this transition should be even easier than even I predicted. What we didn’t see coming a decade ago was the re-emergence of overt racism, ultra-nationalism and fascism. The likes of Trump, Orban and the Brexiteers care not a jot about climate change, the plight of the poor or any of the other problems we considered in our evening classes. They represent a denial of scientific reality, and simple human compassion, on a scale I’d never have envisaged seeing in any democratic state. They act to protect the ultra rich and the fossil fuel industries.

Now we have the rather bizarre situation of much of the global financial community understanding the risks associated with climate change and backing a lot of ideas put forward by Green activists and environmentalists, most of whom are quite critical of the concepts like capitalism and endless economic growth. Opposing them are a lot of right wing politicians who in theory support capitalism and growth, but who now endlessly have to intervene in the market to protect the economic interests of those who profit from the pollution.