Green New Deals (GNDs), of various kinds, are increasingly a feature of the global climate and ecological struggle. They are not new but today they have greater significance, writes Alan Thornett. The most important such deal to-date is one submitted to the US Congress – entitled ‘Recognizing the duty of the Federal Government to create a Green New Deal’ – by the new Democratic Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez from New York, along with the veteran Senator Ed Markey from Massachusetts. The proposal originated with the Sunrise Movement – a group of environmentally motivated young people in the Democratic Party – and adopted by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (also known as AOC).

In Canada a ‘Pact for a Green New Deal’ has been launched and is getting wide support. There are calls for a European-wide GND and an Australian GND. In the British Labour Party a campaign for the adoption of a GND at its forthcoming conference has gained mass support and is likely be adopted though possibly in an amended form.

These initiatives are a response to the frightening pace of ecological destruction. As I write the Brazilian rain forest, the lungs of the world, its greatest a biodiversity treasure house, and is the home of indigenous peoples, is in flames. Climate records are broken at ever greater regularity. Crucial resources are running out, including fresh water and arable land. Pollution is choking the eco-systems of the planet. The oceans are now 30 per cent more acidic than in pre-industrial times. Coral reefs are dying off at an unprecedented rate. There will soon be more plastic in the oceans than fish and species are becoming extinct at a disastrous rate.

They are also a response to increasing public awareness of the ecological issues and new developments in the struggle itself, in particular the emergence of the Greta Thunberg and the (inspirational) international school students strikes she has generated, and of Extinction Rebellion, a none-violent direct-action movement that has placed the biodiversity crisis at the heart of its activities.

The AOC Deal in the US

The AOC Deal – or more precisely ‘Resolution’ because it is in the form of a resolution to Congress – has added significance because of its location in the USA, where it is a beacon of hope in the bleakest landscapes. A stark alternative to the ecocide emanating from a White House that presides over ever rising US carbon emissions whilst rolling back climate regulations enacted by the Obama administration. The Resolution has already redrawn the boundaries of the debate on the ecological crisis in the USA, prompting Trump (unsurprisingly) has branded as ‘socialist and therefore un-American’.

The Resolution was publicly launched it in Washington in February with the support of 60 members of the House, nine Senators, and several presidential candidates. The headline message stressed at the meeting was to make the USA “net carbon-neutral in ten years”, which would require huge strides in reducing the USA’s reliance on oil, gas and coal and its replacement by clean, renewable and zero-emission energy sources.

Its first point of principle is that human activity is the dominant cause of global warming over the past century, causing the sea level to rise, more severe wildfires and storms, droughts, and other extreme weather events that threaten human life, healthy communities, and national infrastructure.

Its second is (crucially) that global warming above 1.5°C pre-industrial level will have catastrophic consequences. The result, it says, will be mass migration driven by climate change. Wildfires, by 2050, will burn twice as much forest area in the Western United States than was burned in the years preceding 2019. Ninety nine percent of all coral reefs on Earth will be lost. More than 350,000,000 extra people will be exposed globally to deadly heat stress by 2050. There is a risk of $1,000,000,000,000 damage to public infrastructure and coastal real estate in the United States.

These principles directly reflect the conclusions of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Special Report on Global Warming, published in October last year. It was compiled by climate scientists from around the world following the failure of the Paris climate summit to fully adopt 1.5°C concluded that the previous UN target of 2°C above preindustrial levels is indeed now out of date and should be superseded by a new maximum of a 1.5°C increase – after which key elements of the crisis start to run out of control.

Cutting carbon emissions

The Resolution makes a number of proposals in terms of cutting carbon emissions including the following:
• Meeting 100 percent of the power demand in the United States through clean, renewable, and zero-emission energy sources;
• To achieve zero Green House Gas (GHG) emissions through fair and just transition for all communities and workers.
• Building or upgrading to energy-efficient, distributed, and ‘‘smart’’ power grids, and working to ensure affordable access to electricity;
• Upgrading all existing buildings in the United States and building new buildings to achieve maximal energy efficiency;
• Working collaboratively with farmers and ranchers in the United States to eliminate pollution and greenhouse gas emissions from the agricultural sector;
• Overhauling transportation systems to eliminate pollution and greenhouse gas emissions from the transportation sector as much as is technologically feasible, including through investment in zero-emission vehicle infrastructure and manufacturing; with clean, affordable, and accessible public transport.
• Removing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere, including by restoring natural ecosystems and low-tech solutions that increase soil carbon storage, and afforestation.
• Restoring fragile ecosystems through locally appropriate and science-based projects that enhance biodiversity and support climate resiliency.

It also recognises that a reorganisation of the economy and of society on this scale would represent a historic opportunity to virtually eliminate poverty in the United States and to make prosperity, wealth and economic security available to everyone. It goes on to call on the Federal Government to make green technology, expertise, products and services a major export of the United States, with the aim of becoming the undisputed international leader in helping other countries bringing about a global GND.
Bernie Sanders

The Resolution has already had an impact on next year’s presidential election campaign. Bernie Sanders, for example, who was the first presidential candidate to support the OAC Resolution, recently put forward his own ecological platform, which he sees as complementary it. He launched recently, and poignantly, whilst visiting the town of Paradise, California, the home to 26,000 people that was completely destroyed in December last year by the deadliest wildfire in the history of the state that was driven by climate change.

Sanders called for the creation of 20 million clean energy jobs and $16.3 trillion in green federal investment. He called for the decarbonisation of transportation and power generation, the two largest sources of emissions in the United States, by 2030, which would lower US emissions by 71 percent.

His plan, he said, would raise money from numerous sources including: $6.4 trillion from selling energy via power marketing authorities; $2.3 trillion from income taxes from the new jobs created under the plan, and $1.2 trillion from reducing the military expenses related to protecting oil shipping routes. Expenditure would include:
• $40 billion for a climate justice resiliency fund for under-resourced groups like Native Americans, people with disabilities, and the elderly to prepare for climate change
• $200 billion for the United Nations Green Climate Fund to help other countries reduce their emissions
• $1.52 trillion to deploy renewable energy and $852 billion for energy storage
• $526 billion for an underground high-voltage direct current power transmission network

The controversies

Crucial as the 1.5°C target is it is still far from universally accepted even on the left. The British Labour Party, for example, despite having greatly strengthened its overall ecological profile under the Corbyn leadership, has still not accepted it as its official position. When Red-Green Labour activists proposed its adoption at the AGM of SERA, Labour’s environmental section, last November, we lost the vote the 1.5°C. John McDonnell, however, in an interview in the Independent on June 13th this year said that Labour was strongly considering adopting the 1.5°C target ‘ in order to respond to the science’.

The strength of the Labour Party GND, which is heading for the Party conference in a few weeks-time, is that it clearly accepts the 1.5°C target and that this means achieving zero carbon emission by 2030. There were challenges to this during the debate in the branches and committees with proposals for a 2050 target date and to insert ‘net’ before zero. What will be put to conference, however, is not yet clear since there is a compositing process prior to conference where amendments will be discussed. RGL is arguing that if there is a challenge to the original there should to two options put to conference.

The AOC campaign is not clear on the 2030 deadline and ‘net’ zero either. Although a target of net-zero by 2030 had been headlined at the public launch the AOC GND the Resolution itself, as submitted to Congress, is more conservative. It says that: “Global temperatures must be kept below 1.5 °C above pre-industrialised levels to avoid the most severe impacts of a changing climate, which will require global reductions in greenhouse gas emissions from human sources of 40 to 60 percent from 2010 levels by 2030 and net-zero emissions by 2050.”
It is true that this reflects the IPCC Report. Unfortunately, however, it reflects one of its weaknesses. The Report predicts that “the global temperature is likely rise to 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels between 2030 and 2052 if warming continues to increase at the current rate.” This does not make sense. First it is predicated on warming continuing at the “current rate” – which is looking increasingly unlikely. Second it proposes action on the best case scenario rather than the worst. If 1.5 °C by 2030 is a clear possibility, as the IPCC report accepts, that should be the target date, since 2050 it could be too late.

The ‘net’ zero carbon stipulation is also problem. ‘Net’ zero means achieving carbon emissions by balancing emissions with removal or sequestration, (often through offsetting) rather than eliminating carbon emissions altogether. Whilst anthropogenic sequestration can be a valid option it also opens the door to the manipulation of data and the falsification of results. ‘Net’ zero is defended in the AOC resolution by saying that it might not be possible to fully get rid of, for example, emissions from beef production or air travel before then.

It should also be said that both of these deals are vague as to what constitutes fossil fuel energy and either explicitly or implicitly accept the use of nuclear power.

Both also fail to address the issue of economic growth. With the AOC Resolution this is compounded by the name ‘New Deal’ with its reference to Franklin Roosevelt’s response to the Great Depression – which was based entirely around growth. Growth, however, is not an option when it comes to saving the planet. At the average rate on economic growth of 3 per cent per year over the past 60 years the global economic would grow by a factor of sixteen in the course of a century and 250 over the course of this century and the next.

Making the polluters pay

They have another commonality as well. Whilst they both make excellent demands that point in the right direction, they both lack a high impact centralising demand capable of stopping the global temperature going above the1.5°C maximum temperature increase in the time-scale available to us and generating a mass movement around it – for example making the polluters pay for the pollution.

Fossil fuel is hard-wired into the global energy system, with massive financial, corporate and ideological resources behind it. As long as it remains the most profitable way to generate energy this strangle-hold will continue to be used. In my view an important part of breaking this stranglehold is carbon pricing – making fossil energy dramatically more expensive than renewables by heavy (and increasing) taxes on carbon based products within the framework of a socially just progressive taxation system that transfers of wealth from the rich to the poor and generates mass support in the process.

(Carbon taxes should not be confused with carbon trading as promoted by Kyoto and the UN: schemes such as the Clean Development Mechanism, the Joint Implementation Mechanism, and the EU Emissions Trading Scheme. They are at best window-dressing and at worst licenses to pollute.)

The omission of carbon taxes from these proposals is unsurprising, since carbon taxes are widely opposed on the radical left. This is often on the basis that they are a market mechanism, which indeed they are, but so is taxing the rich which has long (and rightly) been supported by the radical left. The issue is not whether a tax is a market mechanism but whether, in a given circumstance, it is progressive or reactionary.

This is an important discussion. Peter Hudis, for example, in a recent article on the Red Green Labour site on June 15, argues that the most important attribute of the AOC Resolution is precisely that it has nothing to say on carbon taxes. He references, in justification, to the opposition of the Yellow Vests to Macron’s fuel tax in France, who saw it as an additional burden on the poorest in society.

Macron’s carbon tax was indeed regressive, and the reaction of the Yellow Vests was entirely predictable. This was not because carbon taxes per se are regressive, but because this one was introduced in the framework of Macron’s right-wing agenda including tax breaks for the rich and cuts to social programs. The fact that nothing had been done on the left in France to promote the idea of progressive carbon taxes did not help.

There are many ways in which carbon pricing can be used to bring down emissions rapidly and democratically. A proposal worth looking at, in my view, is the one proposed by James Hansen, the climate scientist who has done more to tackle climate change over the past 30 years than anyone else. He famously made a high profile intervention in the US Senate in 1988, which catapulted global warming and climate change into the public arena, making it an important turning point in public awareness.

Hansen proposes a fee-and-dividend system which involves placing a uniform fee (or levy) on the fossil fuel production, at the pithead, the wellhead or at the port of entry, for each ton of carbon produced. The revenue generated would be distributed, on a heavily redistributive basis towards the poor, as dividends to the population as a whole on an individual (per capita) basis – with half shares for children up to two children per family (though restricting this to two children seems problematic). Those who reduce their carbon footprint the most would stand to benefit the most.

Carbon pricing can also tackle pollution. According to Britain’s Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) the 5p charge introduced in Britain in 2016 on single-use plastic bags resulted in an immediate 83 per cent reduction in plastic bag usage. More than 7 billion bags were handed out by seven main supermarkets in the year before the 5p charge but this plummeted to slightly more than 500 million in the first six months after the charge was introduced. This was also a market mechanism.

The objection often made that taxing the polluters in this way is not revolutionary enough. This is a big mistake. It is true that this does not propose global socialist revolution as the immediate answer to the ecological crisis with the time scale we have – because such a call would be meaningless. What it does propose, however, that the forces that can in the end challenge the logic of capitalism are assembled in the course of a practical struggle to defend the planet in the here and now whilst capitalism still exists.

Pushing the boundaries

Whilst the various GNDs being proposed are diverse in their scope and objectives, what is clear is that they must push the boundaries of the situation they are in. We are in an evolving and radicalising situation and GNDs need to be at the cutting edge of it.

They need to be a part of the broadest possible alliance in defence of the planet. This means reaching out to the trade unions with policies based on a just transition from carbon-based jobs to jobs based on renewable energy and an environmental perspective. It means a new energy system based on solar, wind, tidal, hydro and geothermal. It means developing green production and rejecting the throwaway society. It means demanding the public ownership of industry and land as the basis for the kind of fundamental restructuring of society that is urgently needed. It means rejecting policies that stand in the way of all this such as airport and aviation expansion, the dash for gas, fracking for more gas, nuclear energy, the use of biofuels and, importantly, industrialised agriculture with its dependency on artificial fertilisers, pesticides, herbicides, and anti-biotics.

All this means major changes not only to our energy superstructure but to how society is organised and to how people live their lives. Such strategic choices involved cannot just be left to governments, even a Corbyn government. Attempting to carry them through without mass support could be disastrous. These issues have to discussed by the whole movement since they will have to be implemented by the whole movement.

Alan Thornett is the author of Facing the Apocalypse – Arguments for Ecosocialism, published by Resistance Books 2019.

We as human beings — homo sapiens – have only been on this planet for 200,000 years, which is a blip in its 4.5-billion-year history. Yet we have had a far greater impact on its ecology and ecosystems systems than any other species, writes Alan Thornett. Moreover, it continues apace. Around the globe, we continue to cut down the forests, use too much water from rivers, pollute the land, choke our oceans with plastic, destroy habitats, and push other species into to extinction at an ever increasing rate.

It is this disastrous situation that is addressed by a new Report published in Paris on May 6th 2019 by the UN’s Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), entitled Nature’s Dangerous Decline; ‘unprecedented’ Species Extinction Rates Accelerating.

The Report is the most comprehensive ever completed. It is the first intergovernmental Report of its kind and builds on the landmark Millennium Ecosystem Assessment of 2005, introducing innovative ways of evaluating evidence. It was compiled by 145 expert authors from 50 countries over the past three years, with inputs from another 310 contributing authors, the Report assesses changes over the past five decades, providing a comprehensive picture of the relationship between economic development pathways and their impacts on nature. It also offers a range of possible scenarios for the coming decades.

Based on the systematic review of about 15,000 scientific and government sources, the Report also draws, for the first time ever at this scale, on indigenous and local knowledge, particularly addressing issues relevant to Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities. It puts it this way:

“Biodiversity and nature’s contributions to people are our common heritage and humanity’s most important life-supporting ‘safety net’. But our safety net is stretched almost to breaking point,” said Prof. Sandra Díaz (Argentina), who co-chaired the Assessment with Prof. Josef Settele (Germany) and Prof. Eduardo S. Brondízio (Brazil and USA). The diversity within species, between species and of ecosystems, as well as many fundamental contributions we derive from nature, are declining fast, although we still have the means to ensure a sustainable future for people and the planet.”

The Reports central massage is that disastrous as climate change is, with its melting ice sheets, rising sea level, and expanding deserts, and extreme weather events, the biodiversity crisis poses an equally catastrophic threat to the life support systems of the planet. It confirms, once again, that what we are witnessing during our life-times is the greatest extinction event since the event that brought about the demise of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.

It puts it this way: ‘Despite the profound threat of biodiversity loss, it is climate change that has long been considered the most pressing environmental concern. That changed this week in Paris, when representatives from 130 nations approved the most comprehensive assessment of global biodiversity ever undertaken.’

We have entered, the report stresses, an era of rapidly accelerating species extinction, and are facing the irreversible loss of plant and animal species, habitats and vital crops, while coming face to face with the horrific impacts of global climate change’. It goes on: ‘One million species are currently threatened with extinction and we are undermining the entire natural infrastructure on which our modern world depends.’

The number of wild mammals on the planet has fallen by 82%, natural ecosystems have lost about half their area and a million species are at risk of extinction – the vast majority as a result of human impact.

In his review of the Report the Guardian environment editor, Jonathan Watts, points out that two in every five amphibian species are at risk of extinction, as are one-third of reef-forming corals, while other marine animals by down by close to one-third. The picture for insects – which are crucial to plant pollination – is less clear, but conservative estimates suggest at least one in 10 are threatened with extinction and, in some regions, populations have crashed. In economic terms, the losses are jaw-dropping. Pollinator loss has put up to $577bn (£440bn) of crop output at risk, while land degradation has reduced the productivity of 23% of global land. The knock-on impacts on humankind, he says, including freshwater shortages and climate instability, are already ominous.

He quotes Sir Robert Watson, the chair of IPBES, as saying: “The health of the ecosystems on which we and other species depend is deteriorating more rapidly than ever. We are eroding the very foundations of economies, livelihoods, food security, health and quality of life worldwide. “We have lost time. We must act now.”

The Report tells us that whilst we still have time to do something about it, it won’t be easy. It will require massive changes, from removing subsidies that lead to the destruction of nature and future warming of the Earth, to enacting laws that encourage the protection of nature; from reducing our growing addiction to fossil-fuel energy and natural resource consumption, to rethinking the definition of a rewarding life. Our current agricultural system is broken.

It builds on the important work that had been carried out by the World Wild-life Fund with their Living Planet Reports. Its 2018 Report warned us that “we are the first generation to have a clear picture of the values of nature and the enormous impact we are having on it. We may also be the last that can act to reverse it”.

It stresses that we simply cannot afford the cost of inaction. Change of the magnitude required will mean a different life for everyone, but the costs of doing nothing will be much higher.

The world, it argues, needs to recognise that loss of biodiversity and human-induced climate change are not only environmental issues, but development, economic, social, security, equity and moral issues as well. The future of humanity depends on action now. If we do not act, our children and all future generations will never forgive us.

Fortunately, important new things are happening in terms of the fightback. Both the humbling global eco-strikes by school children and the inspirational actions by Extinction Rebellion have widened the struggle beyond climate change to embrace, in particular the issue of the extinction of species and the protection of wildlife. These are the movements that can give us confidence that serious change is indeed possible and the silent spring Rachel Carson wrote about so stunningly in the 1960 can still be avoided.

As the US Ambassador tells Britain that a post-Brexit trade deal would have to allow chlorinated chicken and hormone beef into the country, Alan Thornett reviews Farming, Food and Nature: Respecting Animals, People and the Environment, edited by Joyce D’Silva and Carol McKenna (Routledge 2018)

This book brings together 35 individual contributions that were made, or planned, at a conference entitled Extinction and Livestock organised by Compassion in World Farming (CWF) and the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) in London in 2017 in order to discuss farming and food production and its impact on the biodiversity on the planet.

It is a book that should be strongly welcomed. It looks not just at the problem of feeding the planet’s current 7.5 billion people but on the disastrous impact this is having on the biodiversity of the planet. It reflects an emerging wider debate on how to feed the population of the planet without destroying its biosphere in the process

Scale of problem

The scale of the problems we face is outlined in the Foreword:
‘Huge areas of habitat have already been devastated for growing soya and grain to feed billions of imprisoned farm animals. Vast quantities of water is wasted in transforming vegetable to animal protein and the methane gas produced during digestion is contributing to the green-house gases that have led to climate change. Massive amounts of fossil fuel are burned to transport the grain to the animals. At the same time forests are being cut down and pasture land desertified by the grazing and browsing of sheep cattle and goats…’[i]

The book has a very strong first chapter written by a naturalist who has made a major contribution to this subject in recent years – Philip Lymbery. He is the author of two game-changing books on this subject: Farmageddon (in 2014) and Dead Zone – where the wild things were (in 2017). He is also the Chief Executive of CWF and one of the most influential writers on the food industry and its environmental impacts.

Several processes

Lynbery starts with an important observation. This is that there is more than one ecological process taking place that represents an existential threat to life on the planet – and the issue of food production and consumption is one of them. He puts it this way: even if climate change were to be resolved there is another major challenge facing humanity ‘which is just as serious and with consequences that are far more permanent; and it’s on our plate’.[ii] In other words the industrialised production of and, current consumption patterns of, food. It is a situation, he argues, that is completely unsustainable.

He points out that industrialised agriculture ‘has swept the landscape in the UK, Europe, the US and beyond, leading to widespread declines in wildlife and the diversity of nature. It has also been exported across the world, not least to Asia and South America’.

Damage

The damage done, he argues, reflects two sides of factory farming. On the one hand farm animals are taken out of the fields and put into vast sheds and other forms of industrialised confinement. On the other hand feeding them is then hugely destructive. Vast tracts of land, often obtained by deforestation, along with chemical pesticides and fertilisers, are then necessary to grow the grain to feed them – grain that could be eaten directly by human beings. The green-house gasses produced by all this is one of the biggest sources of global emissions.

The most extreme consequence of this, Lynbery points out, is the creation of oceanic dead zones when these chemicals reach the oceans via the rivers – which is the subject of his book mentioned above: Dead Zone – where the wild things were.

Population

Tony Juniper, in chapter 4, adds another dimension into the mix. This is the issue of growth – both economic growth and population growth – which he rightly agues, are both major drivers behind the ecological crisis. He points out that in the early 19th century the world population was about one billion. By the late 1920s it had doubled to two billion and then three billion by 1960. By April 2017 it went past seven and a half billion. At the same time, he adds, people on average became richer and their consumption expectations rose accordingly, including in Asia. He also points to the rapid urbanisation that is taking place across the globe often creating populations with more disposable incomes which leads to increasingly meat-based diets.

Juniper offers no solutions to either economic or population growth (on population I would argue for the empowerment of women to control their own lives and fertility) but argues (rightly in my view) that the industrialised model of food production is now ‘literally unsustainable’.[iii]

Fish farming

Nor is it just the land. Chapter 8 (by Krzyztof Wotjas and Natasha Boyland) takes up the growing demand for fish – both wild fish and farmed – which is no less devastating on the environment, although less obvious. Global fish consumption, they point out, has reached record levels.

Aquaculture, these writers point out, is currently growing faster than the meat production sector, with output increasing from 5 to 63 million tonnes in 30 years overtaking wild fisheries as the main source of fish for human consumption. The average consumption of fish reached 20 kg per person in 2014, which is double that of 1960 and is set to rise further. Consumption on this scale, they argue, is unsustainable and is having a heavy impact on oceanic eco-systems.

Fish farming, they point out is a very dubious alternative. Overcrowded fish are vulnerable to disease and stress. Fish are crammed into sea cages with no consideration for their need for natural behaviour. Atlantic salmon, for example is a species that travels long distances at sea and lives a solitary life as an adult.

Weak on solutions

The book is unsurprisingly strong on critique and weak on solutions, not least because it is addressing a vast problem: how to feed 7.5 billion people without destroying the planet in the process. It is clear that feeding vast quantities of grain unnecessarily to cattle when it could be eaten directly by human beings makes no sense – but what is the alternative with billions of people globally existing at starvation level or beyond? The book looks at the marketisation of food and the massive waste that is taking place as a result if it – and there is no doubt that big improvements could and must be made – but is that ultimately a solution?

Bruce Friedrich in chapter 35 on plant-based food argues that: ‘There is no reason for anyone to go to bed hungry or worry about their next meal. We can feed the whole world, but to do it we must replace the current inefficient and destructive means of producing meat. Plant-based clean meat can give everyone what they want, whilst improving our health, environment and future.’

Food sovereignty

This goes some way but is limited. There does indeed have to be a big reduction in meat consumption, without which a solution is probably not possible. And indeed, we do have to bring an end to destructive forms of food production – most importantly industrialised farming methods. But this needs a more radical approach than is taken in the book – which lacks a radical edge.

There is no mention for example of the struggle for food sovereignty or the struggles for it conducted by mass organisation such as La Via Campesina. There is no mention of land redistribution or the struggles in the global South for the right of small farmers, who still produce a half of the world’s foods, to control their own farms and be protected against the multinational companies that supply the seeds and seek to control them.

The book, however, remains a contribution to a long neglected debate and should be widely read for the contribution it makes.

[i] Page xxi.

[ii] Page 15.

[iii] Page 37.