Proposal to campaign for free public transport in London

Reposted, with thanks, from the Stop the Silvertown Tunnel coalition web site. Also on Labour Hub

We have discussed this proposal in the Stop the Silvertown Tunnel coalition, and now invite organisations, groups and individuals to join us in this initiative. We hope to have a get-together on this early in 2024. To indicate interest, please write to stopsilvertowntn[at]gmail.com.

Aim

Free public transport can help tackle climate change globally, and air pollution locally, while supporting households struggling with the cost-of-living crisis. Transport should be provided as a service, just as health, education and public parks are.

The Stop the Silvertown Tunnel coalition on a trade union march to keep rail ticket offices open, in September

On climate, London is falling behind its own weak targets, and even further behind targets worked out by climate scientists. The transport sector is the city’s second largest source of greenhouse gas emissions, after the built environment, and the sector that has made the least progress in cutting fossil fuel use over the last twenty years.

Drastic, demonstrative action is needed. Free public transport, implemented together with improvements to services, investment in active travel and ending subsidies to car drivers and the haulage industry, can help rapidly to cut the number of vehicles on the road. We need to make public transport Londoners’ first choice for getting around: make it enjoyable. This is the best way to reduce emissions.

Cutting down road traffic is also the best way to tackle air pollution that kills thousands of Londoners each year.

Climate change and social justice in Greenwich: why targets matter

By Simon Pirani. Reposted, with thanks, from the Greener Greenwich Community Network web site.

The Greener Greenwich Community Network aims for our borough to achieve its decarbonisation target, in a way that makes life better for us all.

Lofty ambitions! But what does it mean here and now? In this blog post I try to answer some questions about the target, and what we can all do about it.

What is the target? Who worked it out?

The borough of Greenwich declared a “climate emergency” in 2019, and adopted the policy of becoming “carbon neutral” by 2030. Like many local authorities, and even the UK parliament, Greenwich felt moved to act by a huge wave of protest about the lack of action on climate change by groups such as Fridays for Future and Extinction Rebellion.

Looking over the Thames from Shrewsbury Park, Woolwich

The reasoning in the council’s declaration was sound: climate breakdown is already causing “serious damage around the world”; “all governments (national, regional and local) have a duty to act” – and local government “should not wait for national governments to change their policies”. Greenwich would create a local partnership to face the issue, and “use its lobbying power” to campaign at London and national level.

Inaction, the declaration stated, would lead to “higher energy and food costs”, and “increases in social injustice and inequality”. A draft of the council’s Carbon Neutral Plan (CNP) warned that, globally, rising temperatures would mean “more extreme weather and rising sea levels” that would lead to “growing risks to fresh water supplies, food security, economic prosperity and biodiversity”.

All this justifies the borough’s aim of being “carbon neutral”, i.e. of cutting the amount of greenhouse gases being added to the atmosphere to zero.

Defining ecosocialism

By Simon Pirani. This article is based on a talk I gave at the Ecosocialism conference in London on Saturday (2 December).

Making ecosocialism a reality is obviously a huge, many-sided collective task and here I just highlight three aspects of it. First, the ways in which the war in Gaza, that has taken up so much of all our attention in recent weeks, is relevant to it. Second, about capitalism’s impact on the environment, specifically with respect to global warming. And third some points about how we might develop ecosocialist ideas.

1. War and climate change

The connections between war and climate change are complex and go to the heart of the way the society we live in works. Thinking about these is a collective task we need to work on over time. Here are some points for discussion.

A year on, that’s still right. London demonstration, November 2022. Photo by Steve Eason

It has been suggested that a key cause of the war in Gaza is for control over fossil fuel resources. I do not agree with this: I think it’s a related, but secondary, issue. Gaza was occupied by Israel in 1967, more than 30 years before gas was discovered in the East Mediterranean. Even in 2007, when Hamas took over in Gaza and the territory was blockaded by Israel, no exploration work had been done on the major gas fields. Although one undeveloped field is in Gazan territorial waters, the larger, producing fields are in Egyptian and Israeli waters.

The war is much more about land and water, than about gas or oil. It is driven by political factors: the Israeli government’s determination to pursue ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian population, and the western powers’ determination to use Israel as a strategic bulwark in the Middle East.

Contraction and convergence, development and urbanisation

Part 6 of Decarbonising the Built Environment: a Global Overview, by Tom Ackers

Download the whole series as a PDF here

From the perspectives of real human needs and capacities, and present forms of technology, it is perfectly possible for all the world’s peoples and societies to follow a low energy and low emissions economic path from now onwards.

The obstacles to that come from the forces of capitalist growth, and the powerful interests invested in a more destructive future.

The Kibera shanty town in Nairobi, Kenya. Source: Wikimedia / Creative Commons

The obvious rational route to decarbonisation and a more liveable environment is “contraction and convergence”, a concept pioneered by the Global Commons Institute.

It means that the world’s high consumers of materials and energy need to contract their material and energy footprints dramatically; in turn, that creates consumption space for the world’s poor to consume more per capita use-values than they do now – to converge upwards on the per capita living standards of the global north.

All of that needs to happen across all sectors of the economy. It also needs to happen within a shrinking material consumption budget globally – and in the context of steep rises in forecast population.

There is plainly a tension between the extent of “permissible” material consumption, and the enormous needs for social development internationally. At least half the world’s population lives in material poverty.

Quantifying Material Use, Emissions, and the Scale of Decarbonisation

Part 5 of Decarbonising the Built Environment: a Global Overview, by Tom Ackers

Download the whole series as a PDF here

Globally, the built environment’s greenhouse gas emissions comprise those from construction, and those from the operational use of buildings (for electricity, heating and cooling, cooking, etc).

By weight, building and infrastructure construction creates by far the largest “stock” of materials, globally.

The Heidelberg cement factory, Germany. Source: Heritage calling / Creative Commons

In this part, I look at the historical growth in material stocks (section 5.1); the maintenance and replacement of these stocks (section 5.2); how these stocks have accumulated in different countries (section 5.3); and then the impact of land use on emissions (section 5.4). After that I then turn to the present state of man-made emissions in the built environment (section 5.5). Finally, I outline what I see as the big issues raised by decarbonisation (section 5.6).

5.1. A history of material stocks

Much of the greenhouse gases emitted in the history of the fossil economy is embedded in material stocks of metals, building materials and waste. To quantify the emissions, we need to quantify the scale of these material stocks and the flows that produced them. To do so I will draw on work by a team of researchers mostly based at the Vienna Institute of Social Ecology.

A series of studies shows that, globally, about 1000 billion tonnes (1000 Gt) of physical materials are embedded in buildings and infrastructure. One such study, published in Nature in 2020, was reported with the headline: “Human-made materials now outweigh Earth’s entire biomass”.[1]

The China shock

Part 4 of Decarbonising the Built Environment: a Global Overview, by Tom Ackers

Download the whole series as a PDF here

The most dramatic example in history of production-based expansions in the built environment have taken place in China.

Since 1978, the Chinese economy has grown at around 10% per annum, as measured in terms of gross domestic product (GDP). Under Deng Xiaoping, the opening of the economy, and market reforms, coupled with massive state interventions, have brought large foreign capital inflows.

Construction workers in Beijing in 2013. Photo: Joe Tymczyszyn at Flickr / Creative Commons

With its build-out in industrial and manufacturing capacity, rising incomes have drawn people to cities, spurring urban enlargement. Economic growth has therefore been the carrot for mass rural-urban migration; forced ejections by private enclosures of the countryside have been the stick – such that China’s rate of urban population growth has outpaced that of its population as a whole.

There has also been considerable urbanisation of the countryside “in situ”, either through the explosive growth of small towns, or the growth of whole cities from scratch. China has escaped both the “shock therapy” experienced by Russia in the 1990s, and other forms of structural adjustment that pushed poor regions to the wall.

China’s coal economy today is several orders of magnitude larger than the UK’s was in the 19th century. On a production basis, the UK’s annual CO₂ emissions in 1900 were around 420 million tonnes; in 2020, China’s were 10.67 billion tonnes. Per capita, China’s production-based emissions have overtaken the EU-27. China’s consumption-based emissions have been rising towards Western footprint sizes, and today they are close to those of the EU-27.

How to do away with fossil fuel consumption

By Simon Pirani

Fossil fuels are used in most of the economic processes that go on every day. Most of the technological systems all around us – electricity networks, transport systems, urban built environments, industrial and agricultural production, military systems – depend on fossil fuels.

To understand why fossil fuel consumption is frightfully high and rising, we need to understand these technological systems and the way they are embedded in social and economic systems. This understanding is a weapon in the fight to move away from fossil fuels, changing all these systems in the process.

In this article, I will (1) offer an overview of the processes through which fossil fuels are consumed, and how researchers analyse these; (2) discuss how Karl Marx’s theoretical approach might help us develop this analysis; (3) suggest ways to envisage the transition away from fossil fuels; and (4) comment on the strategies needed to hasten the transition.

The article is based on a talk I gave at the Rosa Luxemburg foundation in Berlin[1] and sets out arguments made in my book Burning Up: a global history of fossil fuel consumption (Pluto Press, 2018), which may be downloaded free here.

The Rosa Luxemburg foundation have published this article in German here.

–

1. How consumption happens  

Putting an end to fossil fuel burning in the coming decades is one of the most pressing tasks facing humanity. Of the greenhouse gas emissions that are the main cause of global heating, at least three quarters result from fossil fuel use.

Steelmaking in the US

A growing cohort of young people understand all this only too well, turning out in their tens of thousands to block the coal mine development at Lutzerath and other fossil fuel projects. 

To have any chance of keeping global heating to 1.5°C above pre-industrial temperatures, fossil fuel use needs to go down to zero, or near zero, by 2050. Much faster would be better. Governments’ current performance is taking us into extreme danger – warming of between 2.2°C and 3.4°C – according to scientists who monitor it. 

But this is not just about the mining of coal, oil and gas. It is also about their use – that is, about the whole economy.

Reducing fossil fuel consumption will require huge technological, social and political changes.

Understanding more clearly how consumption happens, analysing and measuring it, will help us to understand more clearly what changes are needed. But the analysis and measurement involves political judgment about the way society and the economy works.

Ukraine: war makes just energy transition more urgent

By Simon Pirani

Even in the midst of war, there is a struggle for Ukraine’s energy future.

It’s one that international allies of Ukraine’s social movements need to pay attention to, because states like the US and UK, and international organisations like the European Union, will be influential in how that tussle turns out.

War has taken its toll on energy infrastructure. Photo from Ecoaction

In almost every country in the world there is a battle for influence between partisans of renewable, decentralised energy production, and those of legacy nuclear or carbon-intensive methods, who often have deeper pockets and stronger political connections.

But in Ukraine, that struggle is intensified by the unprecedented catastrophe inflicted on its energy sector by the Russian military, and the resultant urgency to invest.

“No European power system has ever suffered, endured and withstood such large-scale destruction, including during the first and second world wars”, a report by the Energy Charter Secretariat, an inter-governmental body, stated last month.

In May this year, more than half of Ukraine’s pre-invasion electricity generation capacity (27 gigawatts or GW), was occupied or damaged. That was before the disastrous destruction of the Kakhovka dam on 6 June, likely from within. Fears of sabotage at the Zaporizhya nuclear plant, Ukraine and Europe’s largest, remain.

We need social change – not miracles

Review of No Miracles Needed: how today’s technology can save our climate and clean our air, by Mark Jacobson (Cambridge University Press, 2023). First published in the Ecologist

The main barriers to reaching 100% clean, renewable energy provision the world over “are neither technical nor economic; instead they are social and political”, Mark Jacobson finally declares, more than four-fifths of the way through this book.

Before seeing that, readers should have ploughed through 13 of the 15 chapters, which describe the physical and technical properties of fossil-fuel-dominated energy provision, and contrast to it Jacobson’s proposal for a system powered 100% by wind, water and solar sources (WWS).

Reyajudin Ansari cleans the solar panels on his rooftop in Jharkand, India. Photo: Karishma Mehrotra/ Scroll.in

The proposal is based on computer modelling by Jacobson and his colleagues at Stanford university in California, showing that wind farms, solar panels, hydro, tidal energy and other renewable resources could produce sufficient energy to replace all fossil fuels.

The modelling is controversial: other researchers have questioned the assumptions made, especially about how electricity could be stored and transported.

Some of Jacobson’s arguments about technologies make a refreshing change from most narratives associated with the world’s “green new deals”, though: he argues against using gas, direct air capture, carbon capture, nuclear fuels and biofuels for electricity generation – all beloved of, and hyped by, oil companies, politicians and technomodernists.

But his exclusive, even wooden, focus on technologies is combined with a stubborn lack of attention to the social and political transformations needed for society to dump fossil fuels. Even when he acknowledges social and political obstructions to change, his comments on them are brief and superficial.

Governments are reinforcing fossil fuels’ power. We need to build alliances against it

In Part One of this article, I comment on the “energy crisis” and suggest some principles around which we might bring together wider sections of society, to push forward the transition away from fossil fuels. These are practical suggestions and feedback is welcome. In Part Two, I offer a view of the relationship between the climate crisis and Russia’s war in Ukraine, as I don’t think these two shocking events can be understood separately from each other.

The article is based on an on-line talk I gave on 4 July at the Humanitas Unisinos Institute (IHU) of the University of Vale do Rio dos Sinos, Brazil, and I thank my friends there for inviting me. (Update, 2 August: the article has now been published in Portuguese, in the institute’s on-line journal here. A video of the talk, in Portuguese only, is here.) Simon Pirani.

Part One. “Energy crisis” and the transition

The combined effect of western sanctions, Russian “self sanctions” and market volatility last year produced a sharp spike in gas prices and an increase in oil prices. There were fears that the shortage of gas supplies to Europe would result in some rationing in the winter, but these were not realised. The same problems could be replicated this coming winter.

For the longer term, the western powers stated their determination to reduce their dependence on Russian oil and gas supplies. Most, but not all, of the large western oil companies said that they would sell or close down their oil producing operations in Russia.

Demonstration in London in April. Photo from Extinction Rebellion Lincolnshire

Politicians and company executives presented this to the public as an “energy crisis”. And although the disruption to oil and gas markets is real enough, this “crisis” is also in some respects a mirage that serves corporate power. We need to question this way of looking at things, for at least these four reasons.

First. The most serious effects of the war were not only about energy, but – apart from the horrendous destruction in Ukraine itself – (a) the human cost to millions of people who have fled Ukraine as refugees, and (b) the impact on food markets in north Africa especially, due to the constraints on Russian and Ukrainian exports of agricultural products.

Second. The increase in retail prices of gas and electricity for households, especially in Europe, resulted from decisions by large energy corporations, working in liberalised markets, and from decisions of governments who regulate those markets. The war’s influence was only indirect. Some governments decided to protect households from these impacts, and all governments could have done so.