Western capital, warmonger Putin and the climate policy disaster

By Simon Pirani

Russia’s monthly revenues from oil exports rose by $1.7 billion to $15 billion in April, the International Energy Agency reported this week.

The combination of shipments to China and India, which are taking about 80% of Russian oil, and of sanctions-avoiding tricks by European and other shipping companies, means that the western powers’ price cap on Russian oil is causing few problems.

The IEA’s monthly Oil Market Report showed that in March, Russian oil exports were at 8.1 million barrels per day (bpd), their highest level since April 2020. In April they went up even further, to 8.3 million bpd.

School students march with Fridays for Future Germany, in a joint action with public transport workers demanding action on climate change, and collective bargaining rights and investment in public transport, on 3 March 2023. Photo from FFF Germany twitter feed

What is going on, 15 months after Russia’s murderous full-scale invasion of Ukraine?

In this article – based on a talk I gave at the Berlin School of Economics and Law last week – I look at (i) the background, (ii) oil and sanctions, (iii) gas and the Kremlin’s self-sanctioning, and (iv) what this all means in terms of cutting fossil fuel use and climate policy.

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1. Background

The character of the war

To understand the economic aspects of this biggest military conflict in Europe since the second world war, we need to understand its political character.

The primary target of the Russian military operation is Ukraine’s civilian population – and, to underline this, it’s worth summarising the main points from the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe’s Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights interim report  (December 2022).

The actions by the Russian Federation that “may amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity” included:

□ “Repeated and apparently indiscriminate strikes in densely populated areas using explosive weapons with wide area effects, resulting in widespread civilian death and injury”;

□ “Devastating and intensified attacks reportedly carried out against civilian infrastructure, […] resulting in high numbers of civilian casualties and loss of access to critical infrastructure for millions”.

Lützerath: transformative politics versus Green realism

By MARKUS WISSEN and ULRICH BRAND

Lützerath will remain.[1] Even if the coal is eventually extracted, the name of the place will continue to be a powerful symbol of the courage and ingenuity of people who resist both a powerful corporation and the power of the state.

Demonstrators versus mining machinery, Lutzerath, 2022

Lützerath is also a symbol of a policy that fails to recognise the signs of the times: the phasing-out of coal and the transition to a mode of production in which the good life for all, rather than the defence of powerful particular interests, is the central point of reference.

Responsible for the failed policy is the so-called “traffic light” coalition between the Social Democrats (SPD, red), the Liberals (FDP, yellow), and the Greens, which has been governing Germany since the end of 2021. Together with the government of North Rhine-Westphalia, formed by the Christian Democrats and the Greens, they made a deal with the German energy company RWE.

The latter would be allowed to destroy Lützerath, situated in the Rhenish brown coalfield, in order to extract the lignite stored underneath the village. In exchange, the company would abandon its plan to destroy five further villages in the region and commit to phasing out coal by 2030, i.e., eight years earlier than envisioned in the so-called “coal compromise” concluded between the German state, the federal states, and the energy companies in 2020.

Until the very last moment, a broad coalition of movements – ranging from Fridays for Future, Extinction Rebellion, the Last Generation, and “Ende Gelände” to a local protest alliance, church groups, the Left party, and the Greens’ youth organisation – tried to prevent the destruction of Lützerath. Climate activists squatted in the houses left behind after the original owners were dispossessed and relocated. With enormous creative energy, they constructed a protest infrastructure and trained people in civil disobedience.

Straight talk about climate: ‘profound’ social-economic change is needed

“Profound changes in the socio-economic structure of modern society” are needed to limit the increase in global temperature, climate scientist Kevin Anderson argued in Responsible Science journal last month.

Scientists and academics joined other demonstrators on 25 March at Eindhoven airport in the Netherlands, demanding a ban on private jets, a frequent flyer tax and an end to short-distance flights. Photo from the Scientist Rebellion NL web site

I hope that everyone who cares about climate change and social justice will read Anderson’s short, clear article, available on the Scientists for Global Responsibility site. It’s a great starting point for discussion.

Anderson, professor of energy and climate change at Manchester university, briefly summarises the “carbon budgets” that need to be stuck to, if society is to limit global warming to 1.5-2 degrees above pre-industrial levels.

He thinks it is “still do-able – just”, despite thirty years of “failures, tweaks to business-as-usual, carbon markets” and talk of the “dodgy prospect” of carbon removal technologies.

What would count as “serious climate action”, in Anderson’s view? A “roll-out of low and zero-carbon technologies”, in the style of the Marshall Plan – an international, state-directed reconstruction programme for Europe after world war two.

These technologies cover retrofitting our houses, public transport and massive electrification. It’s much more this “far from sexy” end of technology that’s important: the everyday technologies that allow us to live sustainable and fulfilling lives, rather than dreams of big and powerful electric vehicles (EVs), electric planes and lots of future carbon dioxide removal.

But, Anderson continues, rapid deployment of these technologies will no longer be enough. “We also need profound changes in the socio-economic structure of modern society. That is to say, a rapid shift in the labour and resources that disproportionately furnish the luxuries of the relative few – not just the billionaires, but also people like me.”

Society’s productive capacity, its labour and resources, need to be mobilised to “deliver a public good for all – a stable climate with minimal detrimental impacts”.

Stop spending public funds on carbon capture failure – researchers

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Forests, grassland and other biomass remove carbon dioxide from the air now – and, properly looked after, could do much more. Mechanical methods of removing carbon dioxide, such as carbon capture and storage (CCS) and direct air capture (DAC), are ineffective and may never work at scale.

So public funds poured into mechanical carbon capture projects, often operated by oil companies, should be redirected to proven biological methods, and to monitoring technologies that can check how effective they are.

These are the conclusions of a new paper by a US-based research team of scientists, economists and policy analysts, headed by June Sekera of the New School for Social Research in New York.

Forests in the Serra do Mar, on Brazil’s Atlantic coast. Photo: Deyvid Setti and Eloy Olindo Setti / creative commons

To avert dangerous global warming, the volume of CO2 and other greenhouse gases pumped into the atmosphere, mainly from burning fossil fuels, needs to fall to zero. CO2 removal could help compensate for emissions that are harder to stop.

The amounts of CO2 that could be removed from the atmosphere by biological methods will never come close to the amounts being poured in by fossil fuel burning. But, over time, they could help – and will definitely go farther than the mechanical carbon capture methods beloved of some politicians, journalists and other techno-optimists. (See “Quick technological catch up”, below.)

In the US, the total amount of CO2 now being removed from the air by mechanical methods is zero, Sekera and her colleagues found – while biological methods are removing about 0.9 billion tonnes per year (Gt/year).

That amount could be more than doubled by the preservation and restoration of forests, grasslands and wetlands, amplified urban tree cover and accelerated regenerative agriculture practices.

An additional 1 billion Gt/year of CO2 captured would equate to around one-fifth of current US emissions. So it is no substitute for rapid decarbonisation. But the research team’s results provide good reasons to cut off the billions of dollars of funding going to mechanical carbon capture projects – or “a taxpayer-financed sewer system for the fossil fuel industry”, as Kert Davies, director of the Climate Investigations Centre, called it.

In the US, mechanical methods of carbon capture (CCS and DAC) received $10.7 billion in subsidies from Congress in 2010-2021; $1 billion in tax credits in 2010-2019; and $12 billion in the 2021 infrastructure spending package – 66 times more than the $180 million included for new programmes related, only indirectly, to biological sequestration.

India: ‘Hydrogen Mission’ must not become expensive greenwash

By Pritam Singh and Simon Pirani

The National Green Hydrogen Mission adopted by the Indian government in January is a major policy initiative, and it is a sign of the poverty of Indian politics that it remains so election-obsessed that has not been subjected to the public debate it deserves.

The absence of any critical evaluation by India’s opposition parties of this initiative, which has major implications for India’s development path, is staggering.

Student climate protesters in Delhi, 2019. Photo by Vikas Choudhary

The Indian government is poised to offer energy companies subsidies to set up hydrogen “hubs” – but  how this fits with climate policy and social justice goals remains unexplained.

As part of the  Hydrogen Mission, companies such as Reliance and Indian Oil will be invited to bid for cash from a 20,000 crore rupee ($2.4 billion) fund.

There will also be money for manufacturing electrolysers, needed to make “green” hydrogen, and subsidies for fertiliser and steel makers to buy it.

But the Hydrogen Mission has been surrounded by hype that raises unjustified expectations.

Prabhat Kumar, an external affairs ministry official, claimed recently that hydrogen could be “our main source of energy in future”. But that will never happen.

Even if the government meets its ambitious target of producing 10 million tonnes of “green” hydrogen each year, that would still only provide about one-fifteenth of the energy that India gets from coal.

The very idea that India will become a major exporter of hydrogen, which runs through all the government’s documents, is questionable.

India may need 6 million tonnes/year of “green” hydrogen to displace the “grey” hydrogen it uses now, for fertiliser manufacture and in oil refineries.

Our climate strategy must combat the technofixes-plus-markets fraud

LES LEVIDOW analyses the predominant political narrative on climate, and ways for social movements to oppose it

As embraced by the world’s most powerful governments, the predominant approach to climate change has three main elements: market mechanisms, technological fixes, and delay. Market-type policy instruments are meant eventually to stimulate novel techno-solutions which can decarbonise or replace high-carbon systems. 

This techno-market framework has maintained a societal hegemony through a seductive narrative, namely: that a smooth low-carbon transition will become more feasible sometime in the future, as grounds to delay climate action for now. 

Carbon Capture & Storage (CCS) remains elusive, meanwhile justifying lucrative fossil fuels. Cartoon by Cathy Wilcox

These climate-delay narratives warrant scrutiny for their strategies, broad appeal and role in system continuity. Focusing on them, this article ends with ideas for counter-strategies towards system change.

Climate-delay narratives

As climate-change denial has become marginal, climate-delay has become a more important obstacle.  Having initiated the US agenda for a Green New Deal, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez deploys the epithet “climate delayer” against politicians who promote excuses for delaying effective action, especially the Democratic Party leadership.

Climate-delay narratives encompass a broad range of obstructors, excuses and delays. In the guise of sharpening debate, they raise questions that divert attention from decarbonisation solutions. Their strategies variously redirect responsibility, promote non-transformative solutions, emphasise disadvantages of climate action, and/or encourage a fatalistic surrender to climate change, according to an academic analysis published in the journal Global Sustainability. 

Its authors argue that a prevalent strategy has been to divert the focus away from stringent decarbonisation measures, towards “technology and market-based measures with minimal interventions, even if these are ultimately insufficient to address the scale of the problem”. 

This strategy has many variations, e.g. emphasising recent progress in renewable energy deployment, promoting techno-optimistic solutions (always falling short of the promised timeframe), and recurrently substituting new future solutions, e.g., zero-carbon airplanes, fusion power and direct air capture of greenhouse gases.  

Climate protests are being criminalised, but we will not stop

By MARY ADAMS, writer and Just Stop Oil climate activist

I boarded a prison van along with five others and took my place in the locked metal box allocated to each prisoner. It was 27 September 2022, and we were headed for trial at the Birmingham High court. Our crime – climate protest.

A Just Stop Oil demonstration in London, 10 December. Photo by Steve Eason

As we pulled out of the gates of the notorious HMP Foston Hall – ranked lowest of women’s prisons in a government Inspectorate Report, September 2022 – I thought of the women left behind on the remand wing, languishing in cramped, drab cells for twenty-three and a half hours a day. No wonder Foston Hall has the highest rate of violence and self-harm amongst its inmate population.

We were locked in narrow single cells converted to double occupancy by way of bunk beds, and our meals were eaten in our cells. Requests for basic amenities such as repairing a blocked sink were dealt with slowly, if not ignored altogether. Hot water was hard to come by.

With broken, cheap shelving and scuffed, peeling paint, a sense of hopelessness was baked into those featureless grey walls.

It was in Foston Hall that I tasted the overwhelming darkness that loss of agency in prison can evoke.

Like everyone on the remand wing, I quickly adjusted to the continuous “beep” of expended smoke alarm batteries. But for two evenings the smoke alarm, itself, emitted a high-pitched shriek every fifteen minutes. After several attempts to get help from a surly prison guard, she terminated any further discussion on the subject.

Slamming shut the narrow aperture on our door, her parting words underscored the desolation of such institutions. “This is prison life…Get used to it!”.

Greenwash and techno-babble take us towards catastrophe. We need to turn the great power of social movements against them

This interview with Simon Pirani, first published on the Transnational Social Strike platform, is part of the Climate Class Conflict initiative which the platform is promoting, to provide a space for transnational discussion on climate struggles.

Q. In the last years, the climate movement – brought about mainly by young people – has used the strike as its main political tool to claim for a just transition and for climate justice on a global level. Which impact do you think this movement is having, in particular on social movements? Which are the main challenges do you think the climate movement have to face now?

“We have not been defeated”: African climate protesters at COP 27. Photo from Cop27 coalition twitter feed

A. Thank you for these questions. First, it is worth thinking about the way that the meaning of “strike” has changed. As far as I know, for at least two centuries, “strike” had a fairly narrow meaning: a collective refusal to do paid work. It was the most basic weapon of working-class struggle against employers. But under the impact of feminist and other movements, “strike” has come to cover a wider range of actions. The school students’ “Fridays for Future” movement is one such action.

I wish I could answer your question about what impact this is having on social movements! I think, time will tell. There was a moment when the new movements that emerged in 2018 – in the UK, around “Fridays for Future” and Extinction Rebellion – seemed to have the potential to change social movements more broadly. Then came the pandemic and the whole process was disrupted. It really did make organising more difficult.

This year, with the worst of the pandemic over, I have noticed two trends. The first is the growth of protest around climate issues in Africa, and a recognition of that by groups in the global north. The Niger Delta has decades of history of organising against the oil companies whose extractivism trashed the local environment and impoverished the population: that is not new. But some new movements – especially against the renewed push to exploit gas reserves – appear to be broader. Coalitions such as Don’t Gas Africa and Stop EACOP (the East African Crude Oil Pipeline) are significant. And many groups in Europe have made solidarity with the global south a basic building-block of all that they do on climate issues.

Oil companies, dictators and greenwashers captured COP27. Hope lies in movements outside the talks

This assessment of COP27 was published by Truthout on Friday, and the agreement struck yesterday doesn’t change the main points. Headlines yesterday welcomed the fund for loss and damage – but so far it is just an “empty bucket”, as Mohamed Adow of Power Shift Africa pointed out.

Demonstrators outside the talks in Egypt. Photo from Omar Elmawi’s twitter feed

In other ways the deal reached was ruinous. There was no clear commitment to phase out fossil fuels. “The fact that the outcome only talks about ‘phasedown of unabated coal power’ is a disaster for Africa and for the climate”, as Babawale Obayanju, of Friends of the Earth Africa, said. Oil and gas are not mentioned, and “one small word, ‘unabated’, creates a huge loophole, opening the door to new fossil-based hydrogen and carbon capture and storage projects, which will allow emissions to continue.” Simon Pirani, 21 November 2022.

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The international climate talks in Egypt – the 27th Conference of  Parties to the 1992 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, or COP27 – have become a dystopian nightmare: oil companies, dictators and greenwashers captured the process more effectively than ever. 

But there is hope: alliances are taking shape – between civil society, scientists and labor – that aim to break the fossil fuel companies’ deathly grip on climate policy.

Corporate capture  

This year’s United Nations climate summit, which ends on Friday at the luxury Sharm el-Sheikh resort, is the first to which oil and gas companies were invited to participate in the official program of events. Rachel Rose Jackson of Corporate Accountability commented that “COP27 looks like a fossil fuel industry trade show.”  

What cutting greenhouse gas emissions actually means in practice

“We have to do things very differently”, transport researcher Jillian Anable told the Royal Meteorological Society’s Climate Change Forum in London last week. “It’s not about celebrating electric vehicles.”

Cars are “getting bigger and heavier”, Anable warned, meaning that “it will take longer to decarbonise the system”. Of new car sales globally, 46% are SUVs.

Architects for Climate Action and Architects Declare joined Fridays for Future to march through London on 23 September. Photo from Architects Declare twitter feed

For every electric car sold, 10-15 large vehicles are sold: they “negate the effect of that electric vehicle many times over”. Moreover, half the electric cars sold are plug-in hybrids, which use “a great deal” of petrol and diesel.

No country has “achieved the speed and scale of reductions [in greenhouse gas emissions] that we now need”, Anable, professor of Transport and Energy at the University of Leeds, said. And no country has “achieved deep and long-term reductions [in transport emissions] without restricting car use.”

Anable was one of several researchers at the Forum who addressed the yawning gap between government declarations about climate change, and the snail’s pace of action – the gap that has infuriated, and motivated, the new generation of protesters from Greta Thunberg to Just Stop Oil.

Transport, the built environment and the food chain – three areas of gigantic fuel consumption – were covered in detail. Adaptation (coping with the effects of climate change) was considered along with mitigation (how to minimise the level of global heating).

Built environment researcher Alice Moncaster launched a broadside against the culture of demolish-and-build, as opposed to retrofitting existing buildings.