Labour embraces Saudi Arabia’s dystopian ‘energy transition’

The Labour government is helping to dress up Saudi Arabia’s criminal fossil fuel expansion drive in “green” colours.

As the prime minister flew to Riyadh, the Saudi capital, this month, his office told stories about hydrogen and carbon capture – technologies used by the Kingdom to pose as a friend of the “energy transition”.

Protest in Australia. Photo by Matt Hrkac. See “The top photo” at the end

Keir Starmer and his colleagues hope that, in return for this “green” PR, Saudi Arabia will invest some of its vast oil wealth in the UK’s own technofixes.

Simultaneously, the government made a guarantee worth billions of pounds to the oil companies BP and Equinor, to stifle a legal challenge to Net Zero Teesside, their risky carbon capture project, and the expansion of gas production that goes with it.

The government’s dystopian friendship with Riyadh is underpinned by policies that will add substantially to Saudi fossil fuel exports, and to the billions of tonnes of carbon dioxide pumped into the atmosphere when they are burned.

Saudi policy provides for a 60% increase in gas production by 2030, a 25% expansion of its fossil-fuelled power generation capacity and a doubling of its oil-to-chemicals processing capacity. There are no plans to cut the Kingdom’s oil production, the third highest in the world behind the US and Russia[1] – and no signs that it intends to abandon its decades-long obstruction of intergovernmental climate agreements.

Silvertown Tunnel enforcer Heidi Alexander takes over as transport secretary. Let’s adjust our battle plans

By Simon Pirani

The danger that big road and aviation projects will trash climate targets looms larger, with the appointment of Heidi Alexander as transport secretary.

Alexander was London’s deputy mayor for transport between 2018 and 2021: her biggest “achievement” was to help force through the carbon-heavy Silvertown Tunnel project, in the teeth of local opposition.

June 2021: 600 people marched through Canning Town to oppose the Silvertown Tunnel – the biggest street protest there for decades. Photo from the Stop the Silvertown Tunnel coalition

The tunnel, a four-lane motorway under the Thames a few metres east of the Blackwall tunnel, is due to open next year.

More roads produce more traffic – and so the tunnel will push London still further away from its own inadequate climate targets, let alone targets proposed by climate scientists. And it will exacerbate lethal air pollution, especially in Newham, which is among the city’s most poverty-stricken boroughs.

Here is a cautionary tale about the cynical greenwashing used by Alexander, and the Mayor, Sadiq Khan, to justify the tunnel. I can tell it first-hand, as I was active in the Stop the Silvertown Tunnel coalition, which sought to unify, and give voice to, local opposition to the project.

The key chapter of the story starts in 2018, when a “climate emergency” was declared by the Greater London Authority, along with the UK parliament and many other local government bodies.

Russian anti-war prisoner Igor Paskar: ‘I acted according to my conscience’

Solidarity Zone, which supports people arrested in Russia for anti-war actions, tells the story of political prisoner Igor Paskar. Reposted from Solidarity Zone’s web site.

Igor Paskar has been sentenced to eight-and-a-half years’ imprisonment for two anti-war actions.

In June 2022, in the centre of Krasnodar, Igor set fire to a “Z” banner [a symbol of support for the Russian military].

Two days later, he protested at the local office of the Federal Security Service (FSB), by throwing a Molotov cocktail at the stone porch of the building, while his face was painted with the colours of the Ukrainian flag. The FSB and the courts defined this as “vandalism” and an “act of terrorism”.

Igor Paskar in court, June 2023. Photo from Solidarity Zone

Igor Paskar was born in Nikolaevsky village, a working-class community in the northern part of Volgograd region. He went to school there. After doing national service on building sites in Samara, he worked as a courier, and for haulage and construction companies.

Igor Paskar had three previous convictions. The first time he went to court, at the age of 22, was for possession of a few grams of cannabis: he was given a five-year suspended sentence.

“In the milieu in which I grew up, half of the people I knew – if not more than half – smoked cannabis. It was not considered to be asocial or objectionable. But the motherland has decided that, in contrast to drinking alcohol, that’s serious criminal behaviour”, Igor said.

‘Paskar’s action was driven by anti-war ideals’

The human rights organisation Memorial has recognised Igor Paskar as a political prisoner. This is the legal reasoning set out on the Memorial / Support Political Prisoners site. Read Igor Paskar’s story here.

The investigators considered Igor Paskar’s arson an act of terrorism due to the following attributes:

□ intimidation of the population;

□ causing danger to the lives of persons; and

□ causing danger of significant harm to property or of other serious consequences.

But the court’s decision states that “in court, the state prosecutor Khanenya … altered the prosecution case, removing from the case against the defendant, Paskar, under Article 205.1 of the Criminal Code, the allegation that he had “caused the danger of significant harm to property or of other serious consequences”.

Oil’s history: dissecting the many-headed hydra

Review by SIMON PIRANI of Crude Capitalism: oil, corporate power and the making of the world market by Adam Hanieh (Verso 2024)

Witnessing genocide can be paralysing. The horror of Israel’s onslaught on the civilian population of Gaza seeps in to the spaces in our heads, interrupting and disrupting attempts to think.

My memory keeps connecting Gaza to the Vietnam war, news about which filtered through to me as a young teenager. My sheltered world was shattered by the cruelty with which innocent people were slaughtered and tortured, on the orders of governments I had vaguely assumed should protect people. I see teenagers going through analogous thought processes now. 

The destruction of Gaza. Photo from Wikimedia commons

How can it be that, half a century on, the grotesque “civilisation” that stalked Vietnamese villages has evolved, to produce the monstrous Netanyahu regime? What does this tell us about the many-headed hydra we are fighting, and humanity’s attempts to resist it?

Adam Hanieh’s book Crude Capitalism dissects one of the hydra’s heads – oil, and the corporations and states that use it to reinforce their wealth and power – and offers us a view on the part it plays in the whole organism. Reading it helped me to think of the horror of Gaza not as an aberration, but as a logical outcome of capital’s dominance in the twenty-first century.

Crude Capitalism tackles its big, difficult themes with precision and attention to detail. It is beautifully presented and organised.

The first part of the story Hanieh tells, of oil’s initial growth, plays out in the early twentieth century, in the US, and to a lesser extent in Iran, Azerbaijan and in Latin America. In the second part, from the mid twentieth century onwards, Middle Eastern oil resources and the battles for control of them loom large. And this is part of the background to the deluge of war crimes now being committed against Palestinians.

Overshoot: breaking through capital’s barriers to wind and solar

PETER SOMERVILLE reviews Overshoot: How the World Surrendered to Climate Breakdown, by Andreas Malm and Wim Carton (Verso 2024)

Overshoot is a brilliant book in many ways. Andreas Malm and Wim Carton aim to show that the transition from a fossil-fuel-based energy system to one based on renewables – specifically, wind and solar – cannot be achieved within a capitalist system based on the production and realisation of capital value.

Overshoot’s authors argue that, under capitalism, fossil fuel companies will continue to find ways to justify their extraction and burning of fossil fuels for so long as it is profitable to do so, even if this includes being required to capture and store the greenhouse gases that they emit in the process.

Broken Hill solar plant in Australia. Photo by Jeremy Buckingham / creative commons

Indeed, the potential for such abatement (as it is called) has long been used – including by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) – precisely to justify the continued extraction and burning of fossil fuels. The book focuses particularly on the phenomenon of “overshoot”, according to which the agreed global temperature limit of 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels is on course to be exceeded, and in future is likely to be further raised to 1.7 and then 2 degrees.

Up until recent years, it was naively assumed by many people that, as the cost of renewables fell, so that they became cheaper to trade than fossil fuels, wind and solar would correspondingly take over from fossil fuels in electricity generation in particular, and in the electrification of economic activity generally. However, this has not happened: renewable energy capacity has increased, but not to the extent envisaged.

Let’s challenge Labour’s dirty energy technofix

By LES LEVIDOW and SIMON PIRANI. Reposted with thanks from the Greener Jobs Alliance web site

The Labour government is making empty promises of jobs in “Great British industry”, to justify its harmful decision to base its climate policy on Carbon Capture, Use and Storage (CCUS).

In October Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced a £21.7 billion investment in CCUS.  Much of this is an effective subsidy to oil companies seeking to expand production for much longer by falsely portraying CCUS as a decarbonisation measure.

A protest against false solutions in Malaysia. Photo: Friends of the Earth Malaysia

The government combines a modest promise of 4000 jobs from this scheme with a vague claim that it will “support [??!] 50,000 jobs in the long term”.   That figure is tame, as jobs promises go, especially compared with the enormous investment.

Nevertheless Starmer lambasted anyone who questioned the scheme as “drum-banging, finger-wagging extremists” – in the Sun, Rupert Murdoch’s hate-filled rag.

Starmer’s promises versus CCUS realities

In reality, CCUS has been plagued by technical problems throughout its 40-year history.  It has only ever worked at scale when combined with enhanced oil recovery (EOR), a technique for squeezing more oil out of underground deposits.

Nevertheless Starmer described the scheme as “a game-changer in our efforts to fulfil our legal obligations to reach Net Zero by 2050 in a sensible way, while supporting jobs and industry’, as well as attracting foreign investment. 

Lithuania: ‘for us, the fear of being occupied is more real’

Trade union organiser and activist Jurgis Valiukevičius talks to Simon Pirani about the new workers’ movements in Lithuania, emigration and immigration, and about how sympathy for Ukrainian resistance has opened up space for discussions about the meanings of nationalism and anti-imperialism

Simon: Please tell us about the labour movement in Lithuania. What are its strengths and weaknesses? What form does it take (trade unions? workplace organisations? and so on). Are there links between the labour movement and other social movements?

Jurgis: The labour movement in Lithuania has been weak, but we have seen some positive tendencies during the last 10 years: there have been more strikes and a bit more militancy.

The teachers’ trade union “strike march”, October 2023. Photo from the trade union’s facebook page

Union membership has been low: around 8-10 % of the workforce are union members. Since the economic transformations that were implemented after Lithuania assumed independence from Soviet Union in 1990, union membership steadily decreased. Most of the factories closed down, and there were no more large industrial sites where traditional union activity could take place.

In the Soviet Union, unions tended to function as welfare providers, distributing social welfare such as housing and vacations. When there were problems with the workers’ rights, they were used to writing complaints to the Communist party branch in their workplace, or solving matters directly with the factory directors through paperwork and official negotiations.

Once the state control of the production process disappeared, there was no official that the union reps could complain to, which left the unions defenceless. At the same time, most of the union leaders were not equipped with organising skills. And the new business class that was emerging at that time, came out of shady mafia-style groups with connections to the central government.

Climate crisis: nuclear power is not the answer

Review by NAGRAJ ADVE of Nuclear Is Not the Solution: the Folly of Atomic Power in the Age of Climate Change, by M.V. Ramana (Verso Books, 2024). Republished with thanks from the India Forum

Growing concern about global warming and its accelerating impacts worldwide have catalysed support for nuclear power in many places. Carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from nuclear power, while not zero as is often claimed, are much lower than those from fossil fuel combustion.

People protesting against the proposed Chutka Nuclear Power plant in Mandala district, Madhya Pradesh, in 2021. Photo by India Water Portal / Creative commons

Bituminous coal, for instance, which India uses a lot, emits 93 kilograms of carbon dioxide per million British thermal units (Btu) of heat produced. Nuclear reactors, on the other hand, do not emit carbon dioxide while running. However, there are many embodied emissions in the mining and processing of uranium, the concrete and metals used in building reactors, and in their decommissioning.

Nuclear power has become part of energy transition plans in numerous countries, but support for it has also surfaced in less likely places. For instance, in a recent issue of the leftist US journal Catalyst, Matthew Huber wrote that a socialist approach to the electricity sector “points towards the importance of centralised, large-scale reliable power generation like hydroelectric dams and nuclear power.”

James Hansen, one of the world’s most respected climate scientists, has supported nuclear power for years. In a group email, Hansen wrote in May, “Young people today have been denied the option of ready, low-cost, modern nuclear power to complement intermittent renewable energies.”

In their support for nuclear power, Huber and Hansen have had allies in political worthies such as (former Indian prime minister) Manmohan Singh, (current prime minister) Narendra Modi, and Ram Madhav (a senior member of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), parent body of the right wing Bharatiya Janata Party).

In Nuclear Is Not the Solution, M.V. Ramana, a physicist and member of the International Nuclear Risk Assessment Group, demonstrates emphatically why such faith in nuclear power as a solution to climate change is hugely misplaced, and why expanding nuclear power “is neither a desirable nor a feasible solution to climate change.”

Nigeria: meeting the need for housing

This is the first of three linked blog posts about housing in Nigeria by TOM ACKERS. This post is based on chapters 3, 4 and 5 of Tom’s pamphlet, Making Homes and Energy Transition in Nigeria, published today as a free, downloadable PDF on People & Nature. The other posts are here and here.

These posts provide an overview of the growing need for homes and the widespread slum dwelling forced on to Nigerians by gaping social inequalities. Tom also looks at the potential for housing needs to be met in sustainable ways that do not aggravate the climate crisis or other ruptures of society’s relationship with nature. He pays attention, as he did in his pamphlet on Decarbonising the Built Environment, published here last year, to the technologies that can allow us to live in harmony with our natural surroundings, and the obstacles put in front of those technologies by capital and the political structures that serve it.

Housing needs

One of the most basic human needs is the need for habitation. We need to think of decent housing as a universal human right.

Protest against forced evictions at Otodo Gbame, Lagos State, 2016. Photo: Justice & Empowerment Initiatives

Homes the world over should effectively protect people from the elements outside: from the cold and the heat – and they should do so with a minimal outlay of supplemental energy. Homes also need to be adequately and safely serviced in terms of essential amenities – people need safe sources of heat for cooking, and they need clean electricity for appliances. People need spaces of privacy.

Moreover, the homes in which we live help us to establish meaning in the world. Part of that sense in which we experience inhabitation consists of our relationship to the materials used – be it stone, clay or wood; steel, glass or plastic.

The sheer variety of housing forms around the world and in history, writes Arjun Appadurai, “underscores the intimate connections between family life, design, cosmology and the social imagination”. What is more, “these connections do not require wealth, stability or security to achieve their force”.